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

by Eduardo Galeano

  (80)

  1897: Canudos

  The Dead Contain More Bullets Than Bones

  but the last defenders of Canudos sing behind an enormous wooden cross, still expecting the arrival of archangels.

  The commander of the first column has the horrifying corpse of Antonio Conselheiro photographed, so that his death may be confirmed. He too needs to be sure. Out of the corner of his eye the commander glances at that handful of rags and little bones.

  Wretched peasants of all ages and colors had raised a rampart of bodies around this battered Methuselah, enemy of the republic and of the sinful cities. Five military expeditions have been necessary: five thousand soldiers surrounding Canudos, twenty cannons bombarding from the hillsides, incredible war of blunderbuss against Nordenfeldt machine gun.

  The trenches have been reduced to graves of dust, and still the Canudos community does not surrender, this Utopia without property or law where the poor shared the miserly land, the paltry bread, and faith in the immensity of heaven.

  They fight house by house, inch by inch.

  The four last survivors fall. Three men, one child.

  (80)

  1897: Rio de Janeiro

  Machado de Assís

  Brazilian writers, divided into sects that loathe each other, celebrate communions and consecrations at the Colombo and other cafes and bookshops. There they bid farewell, in the odor of sanctity, to colleagues journeying to lay flowers on Maupassant’s grave in Paris; and in those temples, to the clink of glasses blessed by sacred liquors, is born the Brazilian Academy of Letters. Its first president is Machado de Assís.

  He is the great Latin American novelist of this century. His books lovingly and humorously unmask the high society of drones that he, son of a mulatto father, has conquered and knows better than anyone. Machado de Assís tears off the fancy wrapping, false frames of false windows with a European view, and winks at the reader as he strips the mud wall.

  (62 and 190)

  1898: Coasts of Cuba

  This Fruit Is Ready to Fall

  The three hundred and twenty-five pounds of General William Shafter land on the eastern coast of Cuba. They come from cold northern climes where the general was busy killing Indians, and here they melt inside his overpowering wool uniform. Shafter sends his body up some steps to the back of a horse, and from there scans the horizon with a telescope.

  He has come to command. As one of his officers, General Young, puts it, the insurgents are a lot of degenerates, no more capable of self-government than the savages of Africa. When the Spanish army begins to collapse before the patriots’ implacable assault, the United States decides to take charge of the freedom of Cuba. If they come in, no one will be able to get them out, Martí and Maceo had warned. And they come in.

  Spain had declined to sell this island for a reasonable price, and the North American intervention found its pretext in the opportune explosion of the battleship Maine, sunk in Havana harbor with its many guns and crewmen.

  The invading army invokes the protection of North American citizens and the rescue of their interests threatened by devastating war and economic disaster. But in private, the officers explain that they must prevent the emergence of a black republic off the coasts of Florida.

  (114)

  1898: Washington

  Ten Thousand Lynchings

  In the name of the Negroes of the United States, Ida Wells protests to President McKinley that ten thousand lynchings have occurred in the past twenty years. If the government does not protect North American citizens within its borders, asks Ida Wells, by what right does it invoke that protection to invade other countries? Are not Negroes citizens? Or does the Constitution only guarantee them the right to be burned to death?

  Mobs of fanatics, stirred up by press and pulpit, drag blacks from jails, tie them to trees, and burn them alive. Then the executioners celebrate in bars and broadcast their feats through the streets.

  As a pretext, nigger-hunters use the rape of white women, in a country where a black woman’s violation by a white is considered normal, but in the great majority of cases the burned blacks are guilty of no greater crime than a bad reputation, suspicion of robbery, or insolence.

  President McKinley promises to look into the matter

  (12)

  1898: San Juan Hill

  Teddy Roosevelt

  Brandishing his Stetson, Teddy Roosevelt gallops at the head of his “Rough Riders”; and when he descends San Juan Hill he carries, crumpled in his hand, a Spanish flag. He will take all the glory for this battle which opens the way to Santiago de Cuba. Of the Cubans who also fought, no journalist will write a word.

  Teddy believes in the grandeur of imperial destiny and in the power of his fists. He learned to box in New York, to save himself from beatings and humiliations he suffered as a sickly, asthmatic, and very myopic child. As an adult, he puts on the gloves with champions, hunts lions, lassos bulls, writes books, and roars speeches. On the printed page and from platforms he exalts the virtues of the strong races, born to rule, warlike races like his own, and proclaims that in nine out of ten cases there is no better Indian than a dead Indian (and the tenth, he says, must be more closely examined). A volunteer in all wars, he adores the supreme qualities of the soldier, who in the euphoria of battle feels himself in his heart to be a wolf, and despises soft generals who anguish over the loss of a couple of thousand men.

  To make a quick end to the Cuban war, Teddy has proposed that a North American squadron should flatten Cadiz and Barcelona with its guns; but Spain, exhausted from so much warfare against the Cubans, surrenders in less than four months. From San Juan Hill, the victorious Teddy Roosevelt gallops at top speed to the governorship of New York State and on to the presidency of the United States. This fanatical devotee of a God who prefers gunpowder to incense takes a deep breath and writes: No triumph of peace is quite so great as the supreme triumph of war.

  Within a few years, he will receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

  (114 and 161)

  1898: Coasts of Puerto Rico

  This Fruit Is Falling

  Ramón Emeterio Betances, long white beard, eyes of melancholy, is dying in Paris, in exile.

  “I do not want a colony,” he says. “Not with Spain, nor with the United States.”

  While the patriarch of Puerto Rico’s independence approaches death, General Miles’s soldiers sing as they land on the Guánica coast. With guns slung from shoulders and toothbrushes stuck in hats, the soldiers march before the impassive gaze of the peasants of sugarcane and coffee.

  And Eugenio María de Hostos, who also wanted a fatherland, contemplates the hills of Puerto Rico from the deck of a ship, and feels sad and ashamed to see them pass from one master to another.

  (141 and 192)

  1898: Washington

  President McKinley Explains That the United States Should Keep the Philippines by Direct Order of God

  I walked the floor of the White House night after night until midnight; and I am not ashamed to tell you, gentlemen, that I went down on my knees and prayed Almighty God for light and guidance more than one night. And one night late it came to me this way—I don’t know how it was but it came; first, that we could not give [the Philippines] back to Spain—that would be cowardly and dishonorable; second, that we could not turn them over to France or Germany—our commercial rivals in the Orient—that would be bad business and discreditable; third, we could not leave them to themselves—they were unfit for self-government, and they would soon have anarchy and misrule over there worse than Spain’s was; and fourth, that there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God’s grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellow men for whom Christ also died. And then I went to bed, and went to sleep and slept soundly.

  (168)

  1899: New York

  Mark Twain Proposes Changing the Flag

  I lift my la
mp beside the golden door. The Statue of Liberty welcomes innumerable pilgrims, Europeans in search of the Promised Land, while it is announced that the center of the world, which took millennia to shift from the Euphrates to the Thames, is now the Hudson River.

  In full imperial euphoria, the United States celebrates the conquest of the Hawaiian islands, Samoa and the Philippines, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and some little islands eloquently named the Ladrones (Thieves).* Now the Pacific and Caribbean are North American lakes, and the United Fruit Company is coming to birth; but novelist Mark Twain, the old spoilsport, proposes changing the national flag: the white stripes should be black, he says, and the stars should be skulls and crossbones.

  Trade union leader Samuel Gompers demands recognition of Cuba’s independence and denounces those who throw freedom to the dogs at the moment of choosing between freedom and profit. For the great newspapers, on the other hand, the Cubans wanting independence are ingrates. Cuba is an occupied country. The United States flag, without black bars or skulls, flies in place of the Spanish flag. The invading forces have doubled in a year. The schools are teaching English; and the new history books speak of Washington and Jefferson and do not mention Maceo or Martí. There is no slavery any more; but in Havana cafes signs appear that warn: “Whites Only.” The market is opened without conditions to capital hungry for sugar and tobacco.

  (114 and 224)

  * Former name of the Marianas in the Western Pacific.

  1899: Rome

  Calamity Jane

  They say she sleeps with her revolvers hung from the bedpost and that she still beats the men at poker, drinking, and blasphemy. She has felled many men, they say, with a hook to the jaw, since the time when she is said to have fought with General Custer in Wyoming, and killed Indians to protect miners in the Black Hills of the Sioux. They say that they say that she rode a bull down the main street of Rapid City, and that she held up trains, and that in Fort Laramie she got the handsome sheriff Wild Bill Hickok to fall for her, and that he gave her a daughter and a horse named Satan that knelt to help her dismount. She always wore pants, they say, and often took them off, and there was no more generous woman in the saloons, nor more barefaced in loving and lying.

  They say. Maybe she never was. Maybe, tonight, she isn’t really in the arena of the Wild West Show, and old Buffalo Bill is having us on again. If it were not for the applause of the audience, not even the real Calamity Jane would be sure that she is this woman of forty-four, overweight and plain, who sends her Stetson flying and turns it into a colander.

  (169)

  1899: Rome

  The Nascent Empire Flexes Its Muscles

  In an ostentatious ceremony Buffalo Bill receives a gold watch encrusted with diamonds from the hands of the king of Italy. The Wild West Show is touring Europe. The conquest of the West has ended and the conquest of the world has begun. Buffalo Bill has under his orders a multinational army of five hundred men. Not only cowboys work in his circus; but also authentic lancers of the Prince of Wales, light cavalrymen of the French republican guard, cuirassiers of the emperor of Germany, Russian Cossacks, Arab horsemen, Mexican charros, and gauchos from the River Plata. Soldiers of the Fifth Cavalry act out their role as conquerors and conquered Indians, torn from the reservations, appear as extras repeating their defeats on the sands of the arena. A herd of buffalos, rare museum pieces, add realism to the blue uniforms and plumed helmets. Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders dramatize for the audience their recent conquest of Cuba and squads of Cubans, Hawaiians, and Filipinos pay servile homage to the victorious flag.

  The program of the spectacle explains the winning of the West with Darwin’s words: It is the inevitable law of survival of the fittest. In epic phrases, Buffalo Bill exalts the civic and military virtues of his nation, which has digested half of Mexico and numerous islands and now enters the twentieth century striding the world with the strut of a great power.

  (157)

  1899: Saint Louis

  Far Away

  Fire sprouts from mouths and rabbits from top hats; from the magic horn come little glass horses. A car runs over a prostrate woman, who gets up with one jump; another dances with a sword stuck in her belly. An enormous bear obeys complicated orders given in English.

  Geronimo is invited to enter a little house with four windows. Suddenly the house moves and rises into the air. Startled, Geronimo leans out: down there the people look the size of ants. The keepers laugh. They give him some binoculars, like those he took from officers fallen in battle. Through the binoculars the far away comes close. Geronimo aims at the sun and the violent light hurts his eyes. The keepers laugh; and since they laugh, he laughs too.

  Geronimo, prisoner of war of the United States, is one of the attractions at the Saint Louis fair. Crowds come to see the tamed beast. The chief of the Apaches of Arizona sells bows and arrows, and for a few cents poses for snapshots, or prints as best he can the letters of his name.

  (24)

  1899: Rio de Janeiro

  How to Cure by Killing

  Sorcerous hands play with the price of coffee, and Brazil cannot pay the London and River Plate Bank and other very important creditors.

  It is the hour of sacrifice, announces Finance Minister Joaquim Murtinho. The minister believes in the natural laws of economics, which by natural selection condemn the weak, that is to say the poor, that is to say almost everyone. Should the State take the coffee business out of the speculators’ hands? That, says an indignant Murtinho, would be a violation of natural laws and a dangerous step toward socialism, that fearsome plague that European workers are bringing to Brazil: socialism, he says, denies freedom and turns man into an ant.

  National industry, Murtinho believes, is not natural. Small as it is, national industry is taking labor from the plantations and raising the price of hands. Murtinho, guardian angel of the great-estate order, will see to it that the crisis is not paid for by the owners of men and lands, who have survived intact the abolition of slavery and the proclamation of the republic. To pay off the English banks and balance the books, the minister burns in an oven any banknote that comes his way, suppresses any public service that is handy, and lets loose a hail of taxes on the poor.

  Economist by vocation and physician by profession, Murtinho also makes interesting experiments in the field of physiology. In his laboratory he extracts the encephalic mass of rats and rabbits and decapitates frogs to study the convulsions of the body, which continues moving as if it had a head.

  (75)

  1900: Huanuni

  Patiño

  The horseman comes from desolation and rides across desolation, through icy winds, at a slow gait over the nakedness of the planet. A mule loaded with rocks follows him.

  The horseman has spent much time boring into rocks and opening up caves with dynamite charges. He has never seen the sea, nor known even the city of La Paz, but suspects that the world is living an industrial era and that industry eats hitherto disdained minerals. He has not gone into the mountains after silver, as so many have. Searching for tin, as no one else is, he has penetrated to the heart of the mountain, to its very soul, and has found it.

  Simón Patiño, the horseman stung through with cold, the miner mortified by solitude and debt, reaches the town of Huanuni. In his mule’s saddlebags he has pieces of the world’s richest vein of tin. These rocks will make him king of Bolivia.

  (132)

  1900: Mexico City

  Posada

  He illustrates verses and news. His broadsheets sell in the markets and at the doors of churches and wherever a balladeer sings the prophesies of Nostradamus, the horrifying details of the train derailment at Temamatla, the last appearance of the Virgin of Cuadalupe, or the tragedy of the woman who gave birth to four lizards in a barrio of this city.

  By the magical hand of José Guadalupe Posada, corrido ballads never lose their spontaneity, topicality, and popularity. In his drawings, the knives of loudmouths and tongues of gossips will always be
sharp, the Devil will keep dancing and flaming, Death laughing, pulque moistening mustaches, the unhappy Eleuterio Mirafuentes crushing with an enormous stone the cranium of the ancient author of his days. This year, a Posada drawing celebrated the appearance of the first electric streetcar in the streets of Mexico. Now, another shows the streetcar crashing into a funeral procession in front of the cemetery, with a tremendous scattering of skeletons. They sell for one centavo a copy, printed on brown paper, with verses for anyone who knows how to read and weep.

  His workshop is a mess of rolls and receptacles and zinc plates and wooden wedges, all piled around the press and beneath a rain of newly printed papers hung up to dry. Posada works from morning till night, engraving marvels. “Little drawings,” he says. From time to time he goes to the door to smoke a restful cigar, not forgetting to cover his head with a derby and his great belly with a dark woolen vest.

  Every day, past Posada’s workshop door go the professors of the neighboring Fine Arts Academy. They never look in or greet him.

  (263 and 357)

  1900: Mexico City

  Porfirio Díaz

  He grew up in the shadow of Juárez. The man who weeps as he kills, Juárez called him.

  “Weeping, weeping, he’ll kill me if I’m not careful.”

  Porfirio Díaz has been ruling Mexico for a quarter of a century. The official biographers record for posterity his yawns and his aphorisms. They do not note it down when he says:

  “The best Indian is six feet underground.”