The Memory of Fire Trilogy: Genesis, Faces and Masks, and Century of the Wind

by Eduardo Galeano

  He comes from the White House. He came to it promising agrarian reform and protection for industry, and proclaiming that anyone depriving another of his freedom is not worthy of enjoying it himself. He entered the White House swearing he would govern in such a way as still to have a friend inside himself when he no longer had friends. He governs in wartime and in wartime fulfills all his promises. At dawn, he can be seen in slippers, standing at the White House door, waiting for the newspaper.

  He comes unhurriedly. Abraham Lincoln is never in a hurry. He walks like a duck, setting his enormous feet down flat, and juts out like a tower from the multitude that acclaim him. He enters the theater and slowly mounts the stairs into the presidential box. In the box, over flowers and flags, his bony, long-necked head cuts a profile in the shadows, and in the shadows shine the sweetest eyes and most melancholy smile in America.

  He comes from victory and from dream. Today is Good Friday and five days ago General Lee surrendered. Last night, Lincoln dreamed of a sea of mystery and a strange ship that sailed toward misty shores.

  Lincoln comes from his whole life, walking unhurriedly toward this appointment in the box of the comedy theater in the city of Washington.

  Now comes toward him the bullet that splits open his head.

  (81 and 188)

  1865: Washington

  Homage

  How many blacks have been hanged for stealing a pair of pants or looking into the eyes of a white woman? What were the names of the slaves who set fire to New York over a century ago? How many whites have followed in the footsteps of Elijah Lovejoy, whose printing press was twice thrown in the river and who was assassinated in Illinois, without anyone being sought or punished for it? The history of the abolition of slavery in the United States has had infinite protagonists, black and white. Such as:

  •

  John Russwurm and Samuel Cornish, who made the first news paper for blacks; and Theodore Weld, who founded the first higher education center that admitted women and blacks.

  •

  Daniel Payne, who managed to keep open for six years his school for blacks in Charleston; and Prudence Crandall, Quaker teacher in Connecticut, who for taking a black girl into her school lost her white students and was insulted, stoned, and jailed; and where her school had stood only cinders remained.

  •

  Gabriel Prosser, who sought freedom for his brothers in Virginia and found a gallows for himself; and David Walker, for whose head the Georgia authorities paid ten thousand dollars, and who went about announcing that killing a man who is tearing out your life is like drinking water when you are thirsty, and kept on saying it until he disappeared or was disappeared.

  •

  Nat Turner, who during a solar eclipse saw written in the sky the sign that the last should be first and went mad with murderous fury; and John Brown, hunter’s beard, eyes aflame, who attacked a Virginia armory and from a railway roundhouse launched a battle against the marines and then refused to let his lawyer plead insanity and walked with dignity to the scaffold.

  •

  William Lloyd Garrison, fanatical enemy of the robbers of men, who was paraded through the streets of Boston with a rope around his neck; and Henry Garnet, who preached in church that the resigned slave sins against God; and Henry Ward Beecher, the Brooklyn minister who said that in certain cases a rifle can be more useful than the Bible, so that arms sent to the slaves of the South came to be called “Beecher’s Bibles.”

  •

  Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose Uncle Tom’s Cabin won many whites to the cause; and Frances Harper, the poet who found the right words to curse power and money; and Solomon Northrup, Louisiana slave who could bear witness to cotton plantation life—from the sound of the horn before sunrise to the dead of night.

  •

  Frederick Douglass, fugitive slave from Maryland, who in New York turned the Independence Day proclamation into an indictment and declared that freedom and equality sounded like a hollow parody.

  •

  Harriet Tubman, illiterate peasant who organized the escape of more than three hundred slaves by the Pole Star Road to Canada.

  (12 and 210)

  1865: Buenos Aires

  Triple Infamy

  While in North America history wins a war, in South America a war begins which history will lose. Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, and Montevideo, the three ports that wiped out José Artigas half a century ago, get set to devastate Paraguay.

  Under the successive dictatorships of Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, Carlos Antonio López and his son Francisco Solano, wielders of very absolute power, Paraguay has become a dangerous example, offering grave risk of contagion to its neighbors. In Paraguay landlords do not govern, nor do merchants speculate, nor do usurers asphyxiate. Blockaded from outside, the country has grown inward, and continues growing, without obeying the world market or foreign capital. While the others dangle from the noose of their debts, Paraguay owes no one a centavo and walks on its own legs.

  The British ambassador in Buenos Aires, Edward Thornton, is high priest of this ferocious ceremony of exorcism. Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay will exorcise the devil by sticking bayonets in these arrogant bellies.

  (47, 60, and 83)

  1865: Buenos Aires

  The Alliance Woven of Spider-Spittle

  Like a grotesque crown on a little tree, Chacho Peñaloza’s head, stuck on the pike—a mane of hair held by a headband—adorns the center of a plaza. Chacho and his horse had been one single muscle. They caught him without his horse and treacherously beheaded him. To keep the rabble quiet they exhibited the head of the gaucho warrior of the Rioja prairie. Domingo Faustino Sarmiento congratulated the executioners.

  The war against Paraguay prolongs another war which has continued for half a century: the war of Buenos Aires, the vampire port, against the provinces. The Uruguayan Venancio Flores has collaborated with Mitre and Sarmiento in exterminating rebel gauchos. As reward he gets the presidency of Uruguay. Brazilian ships and Argentine arms impose Flores on the government. The invasion of Uruguay opens up with a bombardment of the unprotected city of Paysandú. Paysandú resists for a month, until the chief of the defense, Leandro Gómez, is executed amid the flaming ruins.

  Thus the double alliance has become triple. With English blessings and English credits the governments of Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay undertake the redemption of Paraguay. They sign a treaty. They are making war, says the treaty, in the name of peace. Paraguay will have to pay the expenses of its own extermination and the victors will provide an appropriate government. In the name of respect for Paraguay’s territorial integrity, the treaty guarantees Brazil one-third of its land area and assigns to Argentina all of Misiones and the vast Chaco. The war is also waged in the name of freedom. Brazil, which has two million slaves, promises freedom to Paraguay, which has none.

  (47, 244, and 291)

  1865: San José

  Urquiza

  He kisses a woman’s hand, they say, and leaves her pregnant. He collects children and acreage. Of children, he has a hundred and fifty, without counting the doubtfuls, and of lands, who knows? He adores mirrors, Brazilian medals, French porcelain, and the clink of silver coins.

  Justo José de Urquiza, venerable boss of the Argentine coast, the man who years ago defeated Juan Manuel de Rosas, has his doubts about the Paraguay war. He resolves them by selling thirty thousand horses from his estancias to the Brazilian army, at an excellent price, and contracting to supply bully beef to the allied armies. Freed of his doubts, he orders the death of anyone who refuses to kill Paraguayans.

  (271 and 291)

  1866: Curupaytí

  Mitre

  Splinters that once were ships drift in the waters. The Paraguayan navy is dead, but the allied fleet cannot press the invasion upriver. The guns of Curupaytí and Humaitá stop it, and between the two forts floats a line of demijohns, perhaps mines, stretched from shore to shore.

  Under the command of Barto
lomé Mitre, Argentine president and generalissimo of the Triple Alliance, soldiers storm the ramparts of Curupaytí with naked bayonets. The bugle looses successive waves of soldiers to the assault. Few reach the moat and none the palisade. The Paraguayans take target practice against an enemy who persists in showing himself in open country, in broad daylight. The roar of cannons, rumble of drums, is followed by the rattle of rifle fire. The Paraguayan fort spits tongues of fire; and when the smoke clears, slow-drifting mist, thousands of dead, shot down like rabbits, wallow in the swamps. At a prudent distance, telescope in hand, in black frock coat and chambergo hat, Bartolomé Mitre contemplates the results of his military genius.

  Lying with admirable sincerity, he had promised the invading troops that in three months they would reach Asuncion.

  (61 and 272)

  1866: Curupaytí

  The Paintbrush of War

  Cándido López, one Mitre’s soldiers, will paint this disaster of Curupaytí and the earlier battles he has fought in, and also daily life in the camps. He will paint with the left hand, because at Curupaytí a grenade blew off his right one.

  He will paint without imitating anyone and no one will imitate him. During the week, he will sell shoes in a Buenos Aires shop and on Sundays will make pictures that say: “The war was like this.” The stupid left hand will become wise, by love of memory, but no artist will pay him the slightest attention, nor will any critic take him seriously, nor will anyone be interested in buying his remembrances of a rank and file soldier.

  “I am a paintbrush chronicler.”

  The solitary Cándido López will paint multitudes. In his works, there will be no foregrounds of flashing swords and dashing steeds, nor dying heroes pronouncing last words with hands on bleeding breasts, nor allegories of Glory with bared breats. Through his childlike eyes will march innumerable tin soldiers and merry-go-round horses playing in ordered formation the horrendous game of war.

  (100)

  1867: Catamarca Plains

  Felipe Varela

  The mounted hillsmen of five Argentine provinces rise in rebellion. The shearing knife tied to a spear challenges the cannon of the line regiments, seeking a hand-to-hand fight; and out of the dust storm of these encounters the cry goes up: Long live Paraguay!

  Down from the Andes comes Felipe Varela, arousing the peasantry of the Catamarca plains against Buenos Aires, the port that usurps Argentina and negates America. He denounces the bankruptcy of the nation, embroiled in enormous loans for the purpose of annihilating a sister nation. In their heads, his mountaineers carry into battle the watchword American Union, and in their hearts an old rage: A provincial is a beggar without a country.

  A lanky gaucho, nothing but cheekbone and chin, born and raised on horseback, Varela is the harsh voice of the poor at the end of their tether. Provincial “volunteers” are being taken in shackles to the marshes of Paraguay, shut up in corrals, and shot when they rebel or desert.

  (239)

  1867: Plains of La Rioja

  Torture

  Colonel Pablo Irrazábal takes testimony from the rebel plainsmen of La Rioja. He takes testimony, that is, he puts them in the pillory, or makes them walk with flayed feet, or slits their throats little by little with a blunt knife.

  The port of Buenos Aires uses various instruments of persuasion against the rebellious provinces. One of the most effective is called the “Colombian pillory.” The prisoner is doubled up in the pillory and tied with moist leather strips between two rifles so that, when the strips dry out, the spine cracks and breaks in pieces.

  (214)

  1867: La Paz

  On Diplomacy, the Science of International Relations

  Mounted on Holofernes, his horse in war and fiesta, President Melgarejo arrives at the cathedral of La Paz. Seated under a canopy on a velvet chair, he hears the solemn Mass. He wears the uniform of a Chilean army general and on his breast gleams the grand ribbon of the Imperial Order of Brazil.

  After so many comings and goings and killings, Melgarejo has learned not to trust even his own shirt. They say that sometimes he tears it off and riddles it with bullets.

  “The commander commands, with his finger on the trigger.”

  There are two beings in the world, just two, at whom the iron general does not look askance: the horse Holofernes and the lovely Juana Sánchez. The Chilean ambassador raises his glass and joins Holofernes in a toast, when the black horse appears at the presidential table to drink beer among the ministers, bishops, and generals. The Brazilian ambassador covers the body of Juana Sànchez with such necklaces, diadems, and bracelets as Melgarejo’s woman has not seen in her wildest dreams.

  His breast covered with Brazilian decorations, Melgarejo cedes to Brazil sixty-five thousand square kilometers of Bolivian forest in Amazonia. Transformed into a general of the Chilean army, Melgarejo presents to Chile half of the Atacama coastal desert, very rich in nitrates. There, Chilean and British capitalists are exploiting the fertilizer most coveted by Europe’s exhausted lands. With the amputation of the Atacama desert, Bolivia begins to lose its outlet to the sea.

  (85, 107, and 172)

  Inscriptions on a Rock in the Atacama Desert

  Antonia, for you I die.

  You know who.

  THE CHAÑARCILLO JUDGE IS STEALING.

  Pay me my three ounces, Ramón.

  The Administrator is a lout.

  Don T.P. says he isn’t a mulatto.

  (256)

  1867: Bogotá

  A Novel Called María

  Ladies sway in their hammocks, ringlets fluttering behind their ivory necks, rocked by gentlemen dressed like the dead with faces like boiled chickens. A caravan of blacks, baskets on heads, passes silently in the distance, as if begging pardon for existing and being a nuisance. In the plantation garden, aroma of coffee, fragrance of gardenias, Jorge Isaacs moistens his pen with tears.

  All Colombia sobs. Efraín didn’t arrive in time. While he plowed the seas, his cousin María, victim of a hereditary and incurable disease, drew her last breath and went to Heaven a virgin. At the grave, Efraín presses to his breast the inheritance of his love. María has left him a kerchief (embroidered by herself and wetted by herself), some white lily petals, so like herself and as withered as herself, a ring slipped from the rigid hand which had been an elegant rose of Castile, and a lock of her long hair in the locket that her lily lips managed to kiss while death was freezing them.

  (167 and 208)

  1867: Querétaro

  Maximilian

  The army of Juárez and the thousand guerrilla bands of the Mexican people run the Frenchmen out. Maximilian, the emperor, topples into the mud crying Long live Mexico.

  At the end, Napoleon III pulls out his army, the pope hates Maximilian, and the conservatives call him Empoorer. Napoleon had ordered him to administer the new French colony, but Maximilian did not obey. The pope expected to get his earthly properties back, and the conservatives thought he would exorcise Mexico of the liberal demon; but Maximilian, while making war on Juárez, issued laws quite like those of Juárez.

  A black carriage arrives in Querétaro in the rain. President Juárez, conqueror of the intruders, goes up to the open and flowerless coffin, where lies the prince with the languid blue eyes, who liked to stroll down the Alameda dressed as a Mexican cowboy with broad-brimmed sombrero and sequins.

  (94 and 143)

  1867: Paris

  To Be or to Copy, That Is the Question

  To Paris’s Universal Exhibition come oil-on-cloth paintings sent from Ecuador. All the paintings are exact copies of the most famous works of European artists. The catalog praises the Ecuadoran artists who, if they, have no great originality, at least have the merit of reproducing, with noteworthy faithfulness, masterworks of the Italian, Spanish, French, and Flemish schools.

  Meanwhile another art flourishes in the Indian markets and poor outskirts of Ecuador. It is the despised work of hands able to create beauty out of clay and w
ood and straw, bird-feathers, sea shells, bread crumbs. This art, as if begging pardon, is called artisanship. Academicians don’t do it, only poor folk who eat flea hearts or mosquito tripe.

  (37)

  Song of the Poor in Ecuador

  “Hungry, ducks?”

  “Yes.”

  “Eat the pain in your guts.

  Stab a mosquito,

  suck blood from the cuts,

  keep the tripe for a treat or

  tomorrow’s cold cuts.”

  (65)

  1869: Mexico City

  Juárez

  The face of this Mexican Indian, who defeated the pope of Rome and the third Napoleon, has been carved out of Oaxaca stone. Without smile or speech, always in frock coat and high collar, always in black, Benito Juárez is a rock surrounded by a chorus of doctors who whirl around him discoursing and declaiming and reciting, learned pedants blessed with golden beaks and gilded plumes.

  Mexico has more priests than teachers, and the Church owns half of everything, when Juárez comes to power and the liberals prescribe their civilizing potion for a country sick from ignorance and backwardness. The therapy of modernization calls for peace and order. It is necessary to do away with wars that kill more people than malaria or tuberculosis, but the plague of war harasses Juárez without mercy. First, the war against the French invaders; and since then, the war against the military hero-bosses who decline to retire, and against Indians who decline to lose their community lands.

  Mexican liberals profess blind faith in universal suffrage and freedom of expression, although the vote is the privilege of few and few express themselves. They believe in salvation by education, although the few schools are all in the cities, because liberals, after all, get along better with muses than with Indians. As big estates get bigger, they dream about pioneer farmers fertilizing uncultivated lands, and they dream about magical rails, smoke of locomotives, smoking chimneys, ideas and people and capital that will bring progress from Europe.