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

by Eduardo Galeano

  Juárez himself, son of Zapotec Indians, is convinced that if Mexico copies North American laws, it will grow like the United States, and if it consumes English products it will become as industrious a nation as England. By importing French ideas, thinks the defeater of France, Mexico will become an erudite nation.

  (142, 143, and 316)

  1869: San Cristóbal de Las Casas

  Neither Earth nor Time Is Dumb

  The earth vibrates from all the talk among the dead below. The graveyard hums like a plaza on market day. The Mayas who fell in the old Chiapas rebellions are celebrating the latest news. Here they have fought with spear and ax since the remote day when the first usurper, son of woman and dog, swooped down upon the community lands. The dead chat happily among themselves, and through dreams congratulate the living and tell them truths that the ear does not know.

  Again the Indians hereabouts have risen in rebellion. The Indians, debt-slaves, destroy haciendas and burn prisons and defend the last of their communal lands, which they work as a community despite the Juárez government.

  The gods of the mountain also celebrate. They are the ones who deflect the gale when it carries disease or greed.

  (155 and 274)

  1869: Mexico City

  Juárez and the Indians

  For being a rebel, a bandit, a rabid socialist, Julio López was shot a year ago. At the head of Indians of the Chalco region, Julio López had vowed war on the rich and had rebelled to reclaim the stolen lands.

  They have put soldiers’ uniforms on Indian prisoners in Chalco and forced them to fight against the rebel Indians of Yucatán. Those “pacified” in each war become “pacifiers” in the next, rebels defeated and made to kill rebels; and thus the government of President Juárez keeps sending troops against the Mayas of Yucatán and the Mayas of Chiapas, the Coras of Nayarit and the Tarascans of Michoacán, the Yaquis of Sonora and the Apaches of the north.

  To recover the lands of their communities, the Indians turn around hacienda signposts: the first dead fall and the air becomes nothing but gunsmoke. Juárez’s Constitution seeks to turn the Indians into small proprietors and free workers. Juárez’s laws ban the pillory and shackles, enslavement for debt and hunger wages. Reality, mean while, seizes lands the Indians still possess in common and makes them slaves of big estates or beggars in the cities.

  Benito Juárez was born in the mountains, amid the rocks that resemble him, on the shores of Lake Guelatao. He learned to name the world in one of the hundred Indian languages of Mexico. Later, under the patronage of a pious man, he became a man of letters.

  (142 and 274)

  1869: London

  Lafargue

  When Paul Lafargue began laying siege to Laura Marx, the founder of scientific socialism was finishing the correction of the first volume of Capital. Karl Marx took a dim view of the Cuban’s ardent assaults, and told him to court his green-eyed daughter with quieter English manners. He also asked him for economic guarantees. Ousted from Germany, France, and Belgium, Marx has gone through hard times in London, devoured by debt, sometimes without a penny to buy a newspaper. The miseries of exile have killed three of his children.

  But he cannot scare off Lafargue. He always knew he couldn’t. Lafargue was very young when he and Marx began to fight and to love each other. And now Marx’s first grandson is born of the Cuban mestizo, great-grandson of a Haitian mulatta and an Indian from Jamaica.

  (177 and 279)

  1869: Acosta Ñu

  Paraguay Falls, Trampled Under Horses’ Hooves

  and, fallen, fights on. The last cannons are made of church bells and fire stones and sand, while the Triple Alliance armies press on to the north. The wounded tear off their bandages, because it is better to bleed to death than serve in the enemy army or march off to Brazilian coffee plantations with the brand of slavery.

  Not even graves are spared in the sacking of Asunción. In Piribebuy, the invaders overrun trenches defended by women, the mutilated, and old people, and set fire to the hospital filled with wounded. In Acosta Ñú, the offensive is resisted by battalions of children disguised with beards of wool or grass.

  And the butchery goes on. Those not killed by bullets are killed by plague. And every death hurts. Every death seems like the last, but is the first.

  (61 and 254)

  1870: Mount Corá

  Solano López

  This is a caravan of dead people who breathe. Paraguay’s last soldiers tramp behind Marshal Francisco Solano López. No boots or harnesses are to be seen, because they have been eaten, but no sores or rags either: of mud and bone are these soldiers, wandering through the woods, masks of mud, carapaces of mud, pottery flesh that the sun has cooked with the mud of the swamps and the red dust of the deserts.

  Marshal López does not surrender. Hallucinating, sword borne high, he heads this last march to nowhere. He discovers plots, or imagines them, and for the crime of treason or weakness has his brother and all his in-laws executed, and also the bishop and a minister and a general … For lack of powder, the executions are performed with a spear. Many die by López’s order, many more from exhaustion, and they are left behind on the road. The earth recovers its own and bones mark the trail for the pursuer.

  Enormous enemy hosts close the circle at Mount Corá. They bring López down on the banks of the River Aquidabán, wound him with a spear, kill him with a sword, and with one shot finish him off, because he still howls.

  (291)

  1870: Mount Corá

  Elisa Lynch

  Surrounded by the conquerors, Elisa digs with her nails a grave for Solano López.

  Bugles no longer sound, nor do bullets whistle, nor grenades explode. Flies cover the marshal’s face and attack his gashed body, but Elisa sees only a red mist. As her hands tear the ground open, she insults this accursed day; and the sun hesitates on the horizon because the day dares not withdraw before she finished cursing it.

  This Irishwoman with golden hair, who has fought at the head of columns of women armed with hoes and sticks, has been López’s most implacable adviser. Last night, after sixteen years and four children, he told her for the first time that he loved her.

  (25)

  Guaraní

  Of annihilated Paraguay, the language survives.

  Mysterious powers has Guaraní, language of Indians, language of the conquered which the conquerors made their own. In spite of bans and slights, Guaraní is still the national language of this land in ruins, and will be so although the law wills otherwise. Here the mosquito will continue to be called “Devil’s fingernail” and the dragonfly, “Devil’s little horse”; the stars, “fires of the moon,” and dusk, “the mouth of night.”

  Paraguayan soldiers gave passwords and pep talks in Guaraní, while the war lasted, and in Guaraní they sang. Now the dead fall silent, in Guaraní.

  (152)

  1870: Buenos Aires

  Sarmiento

  Argentina’s president, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, receives the military communiqué of the victory in Paraguay. He orders the band to play serenades, and writes: Providence decreed that a tyrant should cause the death of that Guaraní people. It was necessary to purge the earth of all that human excrescence.

  Sarmiento, founder of the Animal Protection Society, preaches pure unabashed racism and practices it with untrembling hand. He admires the North Americans, free from any mixture of inferior races, but from Mexico southward he sees only barbarism, dirt, superstitions, chaos, and madness. Those dark shadows terrify and fascinate him. He goes for them with sword in one hand and lamp in the other. As governor and president, he multiplies cemeteries and schools, and fosters the noble virtues of throat-cutting, saving, and reading. As a writer, he publishes prose works of great talent in favor of the extermination of gauchos, Indians, and blacks and their replacement by white laborers from northern Europe, and in defense of the frock coat and the English-style haircut.

  (310 and 311)

  1870: Rio de Ja
neiro

  A Thousand Candelabra Proliferate in the Mirrors

  and silken shoes draw waltz circles on the lustrous floor of Baron de Itamaraty’s palace. Through clouds of guests pass the imperial couple, from salon to salon, endless hand-kissing and tinkling of glass, and as they go, martial trumpetings and thunderous cheers interrupt the ball. The gentlemen look like penguins and the ladies like butterflies, tightly enclosed in their crinolines, unfurling laces; and more than one wear European breasts, imported by Mademoiselle Arthémise, which ripple in perfect accompaniment to their breathing. With champagne and music in the French fashion, Brazil celebrates the devastation of Paraguay.

  Carriages rolling up to the fiesta cross paths with caravans of blacks toting fetid pots and barrels. Clouds of flies pursue the procession to the beaches of Rio de Janeiro. Every evening, slaves throw the masters’ shit into the waters of the lovely bay.

  (204)

  1870: Rio de Janeiro

  Mauá

  While they celebrate the annihilation of Paraguay, the conquering countries fight over who will get the biggest bite of the conquered.

  In Rio de Janeiro, someone observes the effervescent celebrations with furrowed brow and shrugs his shoulders at talk of new frontiers. Irineo Evangelista de Souza, baron of Mauá by grace of Emperor Pedro II, never wanted this war. From the start he had presentiments that it would be long and bloody, and also that whoever won it would lose it. Laurels for the empire of Brazil? Peace illuminated by glory? The empire prospering as if the war had never been? Baron de Mauá, Brazilian partner of the Rothschilds of London, knows that the exterminators now owe British banks twice as much as they did before. Mauá, owner of great plantations, knows that the coffee estates have lost many thousands of black slaves on the battlefields. Accustomed to financing the victorious countries’ budgets and issuing their banknotes, Mauá also knows that they have papered themselves with valueless vouchers. And perhaps he knows—who knows?—that this just-ended war is the beginning of his personal ruin, that creditors will end up seizing even his gold eyeglasses and that, in his last years, he will again be that lonesome child some sailor had abandoned on the docks of Rio.

  (109)

  1870: Vassouras

  The Coffee Barons

  The southern Paraíba River valley produces most of the coffee the world consumes, and also produces the largest number of viscounts, barons, and marquises per square foot.

  From the throne of Brazil, Emperor Pedro II now rewards with new titles of nobility the coffee slavers who have contributed so much money to the war against Paraguay.

  No plantation has fewer than a hundred slaves. When it is still night, at the toll of the iron bell the slaves wash in the tank, offer loud thanks to Our Lord Jesus Christ, and march to work up the mountain, inspired by the cat-o’-nine-tails.

  The masters’ sons are brought into the world by black midwives, and black wet nurses suckle them. Black nurses teach them songs, legends, and tastes in food. With black children they learn to play and with black girls they discover love. But from early on they know who is proprietor and who is property. Marriage to a cousin or niece will fortify family unity and perpetuate the nobility of the lineage.

  (327)

  1870: Sāo Paulo

  Nabuco

  Everyone eats off the black slave. Not only the coffee barons and the sugar lords, but every free Brazilian, no matter how poor, has at least one slave working for him.

  Joaquim Nabuco denounces this deep infection in fiery speeches. Born of landowners and professional politicians, Nabuco proclaims that Brazil will not enter the modern world as long as land and politics belong to a handful of families, and as long as the whole country rests on the backs of slaves.

  The poet José Bonifácio heads up a group of abolitionists from São Paulo University. Working with him in addition to Nabuco are other brilliant orators such as Castro Alves, Rui Barbosa, and Luis Gama, who was sold by his own father in Bahia and managed to escape slavery to denounce it.

  (74)

  1870: Buenos Aires

  The North Barrio

  A blue-bloused horseman blows the bugle that warns of danger. Clatter of hooves, hubbub of bells, stampede of pedestrians: the new streetcar comes dashing on rails at the mad speed of six miles per hour. A Buenos Aires newspaper promises to reserve a column every day for the victims.

  The streetcar manages a death or two to avoid disappointment, but in a short while no one talks of its homicidal furies. Yellow fever has invaded Buenos Aires and is killing off three hundred a day.

  Because there is no place to bury so many paupers, the Chacarita cemetery is born of this plague, as is the North Barrio, because the rich flee from their traditional bastion. The ten blocks south of the Plaza de Mayo have always decided the fate of all Argentina, and have always prospered at its expense. There, until now, have lived the gentlemen who make politics and business in the Cafe de Paris and the ladies who shop at the London Store. Now they are chased out by the yellow fever, which feeds cruelly on the low district surrounded by garbage dumps and swamps, cradle of mosquitos, broth of plagues; and the mansions emptied by the exodus become tenements. Where one family lived before, two hundred will crowd in as best they can.

  This city scattered over river banks has grown prodigiously. A couple of centuries ago, Buenos Aires was a sad, lost village. Today a hundred and eighty thousand people live here, half of them foreigners: masons, washerwomen, shoemakers, day laborers, cooks, night watchmen, carpenters, and other newcomers whom the trade winds have blown in from the Mediterranean.

  (312)

  1870: Paris

  Lautréamont at Twenty-Four

  He had speech impediments and got tired from nothing at all. He spent nights at the piano, spinning chords and words, and at dawn his eyes were pitifully feverish.

  Isidoro Ducasse, the imaginary Count of Lautréamont, has died. The child born and raised in the Montevideo war, that child who asked questions of the river-sea, has died in a hotel in Paris. His publisher dared not send his “Cantos” to the bookshops.

  Lautréamont had written hymns to the louse and to the pederast. He had sung to the red light of the brothels and to the insects that prefer blood to wine. He had scolded the drunken god who created us, and proclaimed it better to be born from the womb of a female shark. He had flung himself into the abyss, human scrapmeat capable of beauty and madness, and on his way down had discovered ferocious images and astounding words. Every page he wrote screams when you tear it.

  (181)

  1871: Lima

  Juana Sánchez

  Melgarejo the destroyer has fallen. Stoned by the Indians, he has fled from Bolivia, and suffers out his exile in a hovel in the Lima slums. All the power he has left is in his blood-red poncho. The Indians killed his horse Holofernes and cut off its ears.

  He spends his nights howling before the home of the Sánchez family. Melgarejo’s sad, booming voice sets Lima atremble. Juana doesn’t open the door.

  Juana was eighteen when she arrived at the palace. Melgarejo shut himself in with her for three days and three nights. His guards heard screams, blows, snorts, groans, never a word. On the fourth day Melgarejo emerged.

  “I love her as much as my army!”

  The banquet table was turned into an altar. In the center, surrounded by candles, reigned a nude Juana. Ministers, bishops, and generals paid homage to her beauty, falling to their knees when Melgarejo raised a glass of flaming cognac and sang verses of devotion. She, an erect marble statue, with no more clothes than her hair, looked down and away.

  And she said nothing. Juana said nothing. When Melgarejo went on a military campaign, he left her shut up in a La Paz convent. He returned to the palace with her in his arms and she said nothing, a virgin woman every night, every night born for him. Juana said nothing when Melgarejo seized the Indians’ communal lands and gave her eighty properties and an entire province for her family.

  Now, too, Juana says nothing. With
the door of her mansion in Lima stoutly barricaded, she does not show herself or answer the desperate roarings of Melgarejo. She does not even say to him, “You never had me. I wasn’t there.”

  Melgarejo weeps and bellows, his fists thundering on the door. In this shadow, shouting the name of this woman, he dies of two bullets.

  (85)

  1873: Camp Tempú

  The Mambises

  The blacks, lustrous from torches and other lights, undulate and spin and jump and talk to the gods howling with pain and pleasure. For the New York Herald correspondent this commotion is as incomprehensible as the seasons, which in Cuba come all at once within an endless summer. The journalist blinks hard when he discovers that the same tree has at the same time one branch bursting in full verdure and another yellowing in its death throes.

  This is the land of the Mambí, in the forest of eastern Cuba. Mambí meant “bandit” or “rebel” back there in the Congo, but on this island Mambí is the slave who fights to become a person again.

  Before joining the patriot army, the Mambises had been fugitive slaves in the mountains. The Herald correspondent calculates that in five years the colonial war has taken eighty thousand Spanish lives. Many soldiers have been felled by disease or bullet; and many more by Mambí machete. The war has turned sugar mills into fortresses armed against attacks by blacks from the outside and escapes by blacks inside.