No one mentions the Antillean, Chinese, and East Indian workers whom yellow fever and malaria have exterminated at the rate of seven hundred dead per kilometer of canal opened through the mountains.
(102, 201, and 324)
1892: San Jose, Costa Rica
Prophesy of a Young Nicaraguan Poet Named Rubén Darío
The coming century will see the greatest of the revolutions that have bloodied the earth. Big fish eat little fish? So be it, but soon we will have our own back. Pauperism reigns, and the worker carries on his shoulders a mountainous curse. Nothing matters now but miserable gold. The disinherited are the eternal flock for the eternal slaughterhouse …
No force will be able to contain the torrent of fatal vengeance. We will have to sing a new Marseillaise which, like the trumpets of Jericho, will bring down the dwellings of the wicked …The heavens will see with fearful joy, amid the thunder of the redemptive catastrophe, the castigation of arrogant evildoers, the supreme and terrible vengeance of drunken poverty.
(308)
1893: Canudos
Antonio Conselheiro
For a long time prophets have roamed the burning lands of northeast Brazil. They announce that King Sebastian will return from the island of Las Brumas and punish the rich and turn blacks into whites and old into young. When the century ends, they say, the desert will be sea and the sea, desert; and fire will destroy the coastal cities, frenetic worshipers of money and sin. On the ashes of Recife, Bahia, Rio, and São Paulo will rise a new Jerusalem and in it Christ will reign for a thousand years. The hour of the poor is approaching, announce the prophets. In seven years’ time the heavens will descend to earth. Then there will be no disease or death; and in the new terrestrial and celestial reign every injustice will be corrected.
The pious Antonio Conselheiro wanders from town to town, squalid and dusty phantom, followed by a chorus of litanies. His skin is a jaded armor of leather; his beard, a thicket of brambles; his tunic, a ragged shroud. He does not eat or sleep. He distributes among the unfortunate the alms he receives. He talks to women with his back turned. He refuses obedience to the impious government of the republic and in the plaza of the town of Bom Conselho throws the tax edicts on a fire.
Pursued by the police, he flees into the desert. With two hundred pilgrims he founds the community of Canudos beside the bed of an ephemeral river. Here, heat does not permit rain to touch the soil. From bald hillsides rise the first huts of mud and straw. In the middle of this sullen land, promised land, first stair up to heaven, Antonio Conselheiro triumphantly raises the image of Christ and announces the apocalypse: The rich, the unbelieving, and the fickle will be wiped out. The waters will be dyed with blood. There will be only one shepherd and one flock. Many hats and few heads …
(80 and 252)
1895: Key West
Freedom Travels in a Cigar
He never sleeps, eats little. José Martí collects people and money, writes articles and letters, gives speeches, poetry readings, and lectures; discusses, organizes, buys weapons. More than twenty years of exile have not been able to put out his light.
He always knew that Cuba could not be itself without a revolution. Three years ago he founded the Cuban Revolutionary Party on three Florida coasts. The party was born in the tobacco workshops of Tampa and Key West, under the aegis of exiled Cuban workers who have heard Martí in person and from the printed page.
The workshops are like labor universities. It is the tradition that someone reads books or articles while the others work in silence, and thus the tobacco workers daily receive ideas and news, and daily travel through the world and history and the wonderful regions of the imagination. Through the mouth of the “reader” the human word shoots out and penetrates the women who strip tobacco and the men who twist the leaves and shape cigars on thigh or table.
By agreement with generals Máximo Gómez and Antonio Maceo, Martí gives the order to rise. The order travels from these Florida workshops and reaches Cuba concealed within a Havana cigar.
(165, 200, and 242)
1895: Playitas
The Landing
Forty years from now, Marcos del Rosario will recall: “General Gómez didn’t like me at first sight. He asked me, ‘What are you going to Cuba for? Did you lose something there?’”
Marcos will clap his hands, knocking the dirt off them. “General Gómez was a fabulous little old guy, strong, strong, and very agile, and talked very loud and sometimes would rear up and try to swallow you …”
He will cross the orchard looking for shade. “Finally we found a ship that put us close to the coast of Cuba.”
He will show off the iron rings of his hammock. “These are from that ship.”
Lying in the hammock, he will light a cigar. “The ship left us in the sea and there was a terrific swell …”
Two Dominicans and four Cubans in a boat. The storm plays with them. They have sworn that Cuba will be free.
“A dark night, you couldn’t see a thing …”
A red moon rises, fights with the clouds. The boat fights with the hungry sea.
“The old guy was up in the prow. He was holding the wheel and Martí had the boat’s compass. A big wave tore the wheel from the general … We were fighting the sea that wanted to swallow us and didn’t want to let us reach land in Cuba …”
By some magic the boat does not shatter against the cliffs. The boat flies and plunges and surges back. Suddenly, it tacks about, the waves open up, and a little beach appears, a tiny horseshoe of sand.
“And General Gómez jumped onto the beach and when he stood on terra firma, he kissed the ground straight off and crowed like a rooster.”
(258 and 286)
1895: Arroyo Hondo
In the Sierra
Not sadly but radiantly, festively, Marcos del Rosario will speak of Martí. “When I saw him, I thought he was too weak. And then I saw he was a little live wire, who would jump here and land over there …”
Martí teaches him to write. Martí puts his hand on Marcos’s while he draws the letter A. “He had gone to school and was a superb man.”
Marcos looks after Martí. He makes him good mattresses of dry leaves; he brings him coconut water to drink. The six men who landed at Playitas become a hundred, a thousand … Martí marches, knapsack on back, rifle over shoulder, climbing the sierra and stirring up people.
“When we were climbing the mountains, all loaded up, sometimes he’d fall. And I’d go to pick him up and right away he’d say, ‘No, thanks, no.’ He had a ring made out of the shackles the Spaniards put on him when he was still a child.”
(286)
1895: Dos Rios Camp
Martí’s Testament
In the camp, in his shirtsleeves, Martí writes a letter to the Mexican Manuel Mercado, his intimate friend. He tells him that his life is in danger every day, and that it is well worthwhile to give it for his country, and for my duty to prevent, in time, with the independence of Cuba, the United States from extending itself into the Antilles and from falling, with that extra force, upon our American lands. All I have done until now, and all I will do, is for that. It has had to be done in silence … Shedding blood, writes Martí, the Cubans are preventing the annexation of the peoples of our America by the turbulent and brutal North which despises them … I lived within the monster and I know its entrails—and my sling is the sling of David. And further on: This is death or life, and there is no room for error.
Later his tone changes. He has other things to tell about. And now, I will talk to you about myself. But the night stops him, or maybe modesty, as soon as he starts to offer his friend those depths of his soul. There is an affection of such delicate honesty … he writes, and that is the last thing he writes.
At noon the next day, a bullet tumbles him from his horse.
(199)
1895: Niquinohomo
His Name Will Be Sandino
At the doors of this adobe house people gather, drawn by the cry. Li
ke an upside-down spider the newborn baby moves his arms and legs. No Magi Kings come from afar to welcome him, but a farm laborer, a carpenter, and a passing market woman leave gifts.
The godmother offers lavender water to the mother and to the child a pinch of honey, which is his first taste of the world.
Later the godmother buries the placenta, which looks so like a root, in a corner of the garden. She buries it in a good spot, where there is plenty of sun, so that it will become soil here in Niquinohomo.
Within a few years, the child that just came from that placenta will become soil too, the rebellious soil of all Nicaragua.
(8 and 317)
1896: Port-au-Prince
Disguises
According to the Constitution of Haiti, the republic of free blacks speaks French and professes the Christian religion. The doctors are mortified because, despite laws and punishments, “Creole” continues as the language of nearly all Haitians and nearly all continue believing in the voodoo gods who wander at large through woods and bodies.
The government demands that peasants publicly swear an oath: “I swear to destroy all fetishes and objects of superstition, if I carry them with me or have them in my house or on my land. I swear never to lower myself to any superstitious practice …”
(68)
1896: Boca de Dos Rios
Requiem
“Was it here?”
A year has passed, and Máximo Gómez is telling the story to Calixto García. The old warriors for Cuba’s independence lead the way from the Contramaestre River. Behind come their armies. General Gómez tells, that midday, how Martí had eaten with a good appetite and afterwards recited some verses, as was his custom, and how they then heard some shots. Everyone ran looking for a horse.
“Was it here?”
They come to a thicket, at the entrance to the road to Palo Picado.
“Here,” someone says.
Machete wielders clear the little patch of ground.
“I never heard him complain or saw him give in,” says Gómez. Grumbling and getting angry, he adds, “I ordered him … I advised him to stay behind.”
A patch of ground the size of his body.
General Maximo Gómez drops a stone. General Calixto García another stone. And officers and soldiers keep filing past, and one after another stones fall with a sharp click, stones on top of stones, as Martí’s memorial mound rears toward the sky, and only those clicks can be heard in the immense silence of Cuba.
(105)
1896: Papeete
Flora Tristán
The canvas, bare and immense, offers itself challengingly. Paul Gauguin paints, hunts around, throws on color as if bidding farewell to the world; and his desperate hand writes: Where do we come from, what are we, where are we going?
Over half a century ago, Gauguin’s grandmother asked the same question in one of her books, and died finding out. The Peruvian family of Flora Tristán never mentioned it, as if it were bad luck or as if she were crazy or a ghost. When Paul asked about his grandmother, in the remote years of his childhood in Lima, they answered him:
“Time to go to bed, it’s late.”
Flora Tristán had burned up her short life preaching revolution, the proletarian revolution and the revolution of women enslaved by father, employer, and husband. Illness and the police finished her off. She died in France. The workers of Bordeaux paid for her coffin and carried her on a bier to the cemetery.
(21)
1896: Bogotá
José Asunción Silva
He loves his sister Elvira, aroma of lavender, balsam incense, furtive kisses of the palest sylph in Bogotá, and for her he writes his best verses. Night after night he goes to visit her in the cemetery. At the foot of her grave he feels better than in literary coteries.
José Asunción Silva had been born dressed in black, with a flower in his buttonhole. Thus has he lived for thirty years, through blow after blow, this languid founder of modernism in Colombia. The bankruptcy of his father, a silk and perfume merchant, has taken the bread from his mouth; and his complete works have been lost at sea in a shipwreck.
Far into the night he discusses, for the last time, the cadence of an alexandrine verse. From the door, lamp in hand, he bids goodnight to his guests. Then he smokes his last Turkish cigarette and for the last time pities himself before the mirror. No letter arrives from Paris to save him. Tormented by his creditors and by the spiteful who call him Chaste Susan, the poet unbuttons his shirt and presses the revolver against the ink cross that a doctor friend has drawn over his heart.
(319)
1896: Manaos
The Tree That Weeps Milk
The Indians call it “caucho.” They slash it and the milk flows. In plantain leaves folded like bowls, the milk is collected and hardens in the heat of sun or smoke, while the human hand gives it shape. Since very ancient times the Indians have made from this wild milk long-lasting torches, pots that don’t break, roofs that laugh at the rain, and balls that bounce and fly.
Over a century ago, the king of Portugal received from Brazil syringes without plungers and waterproof clothing; and before that the French sage La Condamine had studied the virtues of the scandalous gum that paid no attention to the law of gravity.
Thousands and thousands of shoes traveled from the Amazonian jungle to the port of Boston, until Charles Goodyear and Thomas Hancock, half a century ago, discovered how to keep the gum from breaking and softening. Then the United States started producing five million shoes a year, shoes invulnerable to cold, damp, and snow; and great factories arose in England, Germany, and France.
And not only shoes. The gum multiplies products and creates needs. Modern life turns giddily about the immense tree that weeps milk when you wound it. Eight years ago, in Belfast, the son of John Dunlop won a tricycle race using the pneumatic tires his father had invented to replace solid wheels; and last year Michelin created removable pneumatic tires for automobiles racing from Paris to Bordeaux.
Amazonia, fantastic jungle that seemed to be a reserve for monkeys, Indians, and lunatics, is now a game preserve for the United States Rubber Company, the Amazon Rubber Company, and other distant enterprises that suck its milk.
(334)
1896: Manaos
The Golden Age of Rubber
The curtain rises, parsimoniously, as the first chords of Ponchielli’s opera La Gioconda are struck up. It is a night of great pomp and gala and mosquitos in the city of Manaos. Italian opera stars are inaugurating the Amazonas Theater, an immense nave of marble brought, like them, from Europe to the heart of the jungle.
Manaos and Belem do Pará are the rubber capitals of Brazil. Along with Iquitos in the Peruvian thickets, the three Amazonian cities lay out their streets with European paving stones and enliven their nights with horizontal girls from Paris, Budapest, Baghdad, or the local jungle. Gold batons conduct orchestras and ingots serve as paperweights; a hen’s egg costs an arm and a leg. Extremely important people drink extremely imported drinks, recuperate in the thermal baths of Vichy, and send their children to study in Lisbon or Geneva on Booth Line ships which ply the muddy waters of the Amazon.
Who does the work in the rubber forests? In Brazil, victims of the droughts in the northeast. From those deserts peasants come to these swamps where one would be better off as a fish. This green prison shuts them in under contract; and soon death comes to rescue them from slavery and appalling solitude. In Peru, the hands are Indian. Many tribes are annihilated in this age of rubber which seems so eternal.
(299, 325, and 334)
1897: Canudos
Euclides da Cunha
During the day the earth smokes, flames, expands. When night falls, ax of ice, the earth shivers and contracts; by dawn, it has split apart.
Debris of earthquakes, Euclides da Cunha writes in his notebook. Landscape that seems made to run away, he notes. He observes the wrinkles of the earth and the curves of the river, a twisting strip of dried mud that the Indians
call “Red Honey,” and vainly seeks shade among the rachitic bushes. Here, the air turns all it touches to stone. A soldier lies face up with arms outstretched. A black scab disfigures his forehead. They killed him three months ago in hand-to-hand fighting, and now he is his own statue.
From afar, from the sacred village of Canudos, shots ring out. The monotonous staccato lasts for days, months, varied at times by cannon fire and machine-gun bursts, and Euclides would like to understand what kind of strength enables these mystical peasants to resist so fearlessly the assault of thirty battalions. Many thousands of them are letting themselves be killed out of devotion to the Messiah Antonio Conselheiro. The chronicler of this holy war asks himself how they can confuse these barren plains with heaven and this visionary, who only escaped the madhouse because it had no room for him, with Jesus Christ.
Hesitating between disgust and admiration, Euclides da Cunha describes what he sees, from bewilderment to bewilderment, for the readers of a Sāo Paulo newspaper. A European-style socialist, mestizo who despises mestizos, Brazilian ashamed of Brazil, Euclides is among the most brilliant intellectuals of the republic that displays on its newly born flag the motto “Order and Progress.” While the slaughter lasts, he strives to comprehend the mystery of the northeastern hinterland, land of fanatics where animosities and loyalties are inherited, where the “melancholia” of squalid cattle is cured with prayers and the deaths of children are celebrated with guitars.
The Memory of Fire Trilogy: Genesis, Faces and Masks, and Century of the Wind Page 63