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

by Eduardo Galeano

  The campesino generals have triumphed, but they don’t know what to do with their victory: “This shack is pretty big for us.”

  Power is something for doctors, a threatening mystery that can only be deciphered by the cultured, those who understand the high art of politics, those who sleep on downy pillows.

  When night falls, Zapata goes to a seedy hotel just a step away from the railway that leads to his country, and Villa to a military train. After a few days, they bid farewell to Mexico City.

  The hacienda peons, the Indians of the communities, the pariahs of the countryside, have discovered the center of power and occupied it for a moment, as if on a visit, on tiptoe, anxious to end as soon as possible this trip to the moon. Strangers to the glory of victory, they end up going home to the lands where they know how to move around without getting lost.

  No better news could be imagined by Huerta’s successor, General Venustiano Carranza, whose battered troops are recovering with the aid of the United States.

  (47, 194, 246, and 260)

  1915: Tlaltizapán

  Agrarian Reform

  In an old mill in the village of Tlaltizapán, Zapata installs his headquarters. Here, in his native district, far from the sideburned lords and their feathered ladies, far from the flashy, deceitful city, the Morelos rebel chief liquidates the great estates, nationalizes sugar-mills and distilleries without paying a centavo, and restores to the communities lands stolen through the centuries. Free villages are reborn, the conscience and memory of Indian traditions, and with them local democracy. Here neither bureaucrats nor generals make the decisions, but the assembled community in open forum. Selling or renting land is forbidden. Covetousness is forbidden.

  In the shade of the laurels, in the village plaza, the talk is of more than fighting cocks, horses, and rain. Zapata’s army, a league of armed communities, watches over the recovered land; they oil their guns and reload them with old Mauser and .30-.30 cartridges.

  Young technicians are arriving in Morelos with tripods and other strange instruments to help the agrarian reform. The campesinos receive these budding engineers from Cuernavaca with a rain of flowers; but the dogs bark at the mounted messengers who gallop in from the north with the grim news that Pancho Villa’s army is being wiped out.

  (468)

  1915: El Paso

  Azuela

  Exiled in Texas, a medic from Pancho Villa’s army treats the Mexican revolution as a pointless outburst. According to Mariano Azuela’s novel The Underdogs, this is a tale of drunken blind men who shoot without knowing why or against whom, who lash out like animals seeking things to steal or women to tumble on the ground in a land that stinks of gunpowder and frying grease.

  (33)

  1916: Tlaltizapán

  Carranza

  The clink of Villa’s horsemen’s spurs can still be heard in the mountains, but it is no longer an army. From trenches defended by barbed wire, machineguns have made a clean sweep in four long battles of Villa’s fiery cavalry, ground to dust in stubbornly repeated suicide charges.

  Venustiano Carranza, president in spite of Villa and Zapata, launches the war in the south: “This business of dividing up the land is crazy,” he says. One decree announces that lands distributed by Zapata will be returned to their old owners; another promises to shoot anyone who is, or looks like, a Zapatista.

  Shooting and burning with rifles and torches, government forces swoop down on the flourishing fields of Morelos. They kill five hundred people in Tlaltizapán, and many more elsewhere. The prisoners are sold in Yucatan as slave labor for the henequén plantations, as in the days of Porfirio Díaz; and crops, herds, all war booty is taken to the markets of the capital.

  In the mountains, Zapata resists. When the rainy season approaches, the revolution is suspended for planting; but later, stubbornly, incredibly, it goes on.

  (246, 260, and 468)

  1916: Buenos Aires

  Isadora

  Barefoot, naked, scantily draped in the Argentine flag, Isadora Duncan dances to the national anthem in a students’ café in Buenos Aires, and the next morning the whole world knows of it. The impresario breaks his contract, good families cancel their reservations at the Colón Theater, and the press demands the immediate expulsion of this disgraceful North American who has come to Argentina to sully patriotic symbols.

  Isadora cannot understand it. No Frenchman protested when she danced the Marseillaise in nothing but a red shawl. If one can dance an emotion, if one can dance an idea, why not an anthem?

  Liberty offends. This woman with shining eyes is the declared enemy of schools, matrimony, classical dance, and everything that cages the wind. She dances for the joy of dancing; dances what she wants, when she wants, how she wants; and orchestras hush before the music that is born of her body.

  (145)

  1916: New Orleans

  Jazz

  From the slaves comes the freest of all music, jazz, which flies without asking permission. Its grandparents are the blacks who sang at their work on their owners’ plantations in the southern United States, and its parents are the musicians of black New Orleans brothels. The whorehouse bands play all night without stopping, on balconies that keep them safe above the brawling in the street. From their improvisations is born the new music.

  With his savings from delivering newspapers, milk, and coal, a short, timid lad has just bought his own trumpet for ten dollars. He blows and the music stretches out, out, greeting the day. Louis Armstrong, like jazz, is the grandson of slaves, and has been raised, like jazz, in the whorehouse.

  (105)

  1916: Columbus

  Latin America Invades the United States

  Rain falls upward. Hen bites fox and hare shoots hunter. For the first and only time in history, Mexican soldiers invade the United States.

  With the tattered force remaining, five hundred men out of the many thousands he once had, Pancho Villa crosses the border and, crying Viva Mexico! showers bullets on the city of Columbus, Texas.

  (206 and 260)

  1916: León

  Darío

  In Nicaragua, occupied land, humiliated land, Rubén Darío dies.

  The doctor kills him, fatally puncturing his liver. The embalmer, the hairdresser, the makeup man, and the tailor torment his remains.

  A sumptuous funeral is inflicted upon him. The warm February air in the city of León smells of incense and myrrh. The most distinguished señoritas, festooned in lilies and heron feathers, serve as Canephoras and Virgins of Minerva strewing flowers along the route of the funeral procession.

  Surrounded by candles and admirers, the corpse of Darío wears a Greek tunic and laurel crown by day, by night a formal black frock coat and gloves to match. For a whole week, day and night, night and day, he is scourged with never-ending recitals of shoddy verses, and regaled with speeches proclaiming him Immortal Swan, Messiah of the Spanish Lyre, and Samson of the Metaphor.

  Guns roar. The government contributes to the martyrdom by piling War Ministry honors on the poet who preached peace. Bishops brandish crosses; steeple bells ring out. In the culminating moment of this flagellation, the poet who believed in divorce and lay education is dropped into the hole converted, a prince of the Church.

  (129, 229, and 454)

  1917: The Fields of Chihuahua and Durango

  Eagles into Hens

  A punitive expedition, ten thousand soldiers with plentiful artillery enter Mexico to make Pancho Villa pay for his impudent attack on the North American city of Columbus.

  “We’ll bring back that assassin in an iron cage,” proclaims General John Pershing, and the thunder of his guns echoes the words.

  Across the drought-stricken immensities of northern Mexico, General Pershing finds various graves—Here lies Pancho Villa—without a Villa in any of them. He finds snakes and lizards and silent stones, and campesinos who murmur false leads when beaten, threatened, or offered all the gold in the world.

  After some month
s, almost a year, Pershing returns to the United States. He brings back a long caravan of soldiers fed up with breathing dust, with the people throwing stones, with the lies in each little village in that gravelly desert. Two young lieutenants march at the head of the humbled procession. Both have had in Mexico their baptism of fire. For Dwight Eisenhower, newly graduated from West Point, it is an unlucky start on the road to military glory. George Patton spits as he leaves this ignorant and half-savage country.

  From the crest of a hill, Pancho Villa looks down and comments: “They came like eagles and they leave like wet hens.”

  (206 and 260)

  1918: Córdoba

  Moldy Scholars

  At the Argentine university of Cordoba degrees are no longer denied to those unable to prove their white lineage as was the case a few years ago, but Duties toward Servants is still a subject studied in the Philosophy of Law course, and students of medicine still graduate without having set eyes on a sick person.

  The professors, venerable specters, copy a Europe several centuries gone, a lost world of gentlemen and pious ladies, the sinister beauty of a colonial past. The merits of the parrot and the virtues of the monkey are rewarded with trimmings and tassels.

  The Córdoba students, fed up, explode with disgust. They go on strike against these jailers of the spirit, calling on students and workers throughout Latin America to fight for a culture of their own. From Mexico to Chile come mighty echoes.

  (164)

  1918: Córdoba

  “The Pains That Linger Are the Liberties We Lack,” Proclaims the Student Manifesto

  … We have resolved to call all things by their right names. Córdoba is redeeming itself. From today we count for our country one shame less and one freedom more. The pains that linger are the liberties we lack. We believe we are not wrong, the resonances of the heart tell us so: we are treading on the skirts of the revolution, we are living an American hour …

  The unversities have till now been a secular refuge for the mediocre, income of the ignorant, secure hospital for the invalid, and—which is even worse—the place where all forms of tyranny and insensitivity have found a professor to teach them. The universities thus faithfully reflect those decadent societies which offer the sad spectacle of senile immobility. For that reason, science, confronting these mute and shut-in establishments, passes by in silence or enters into bureaucratic service, mutilated and grotesque …

  (164)

  1918: Ilopango

  Miguel at Thirteen

  He arrives at the Ilopango barracks driven by a hunger that has sunk his eyes into the depths of his head.

  In the barracks, in exchange for food, Miguel begins running errands and shining lieutenants’ boots. He learns fast to split coconuts with one blow of the machete as if they were necks, and to fire a carbine without wasting cartridges. Thus he becomes a soldier.

  At the end of a year of barracks life, the wretched boy gives out. After putting up for so long with drunken officers who beat him for no reason, Miguel escapes. And that night, the night of his flight, is the night of the Ilopango earthquake. Miguel hears it from far away.

  For a whole day and the next day too, the earth shakes El Salvador, this little country of warm people, until between tremor and tremor the real quake comes, the super-earthquake that bursts and shatters everything. It brings down the barracks to the last stone, crushing officers and soldiers alike—but not Miguel.

  And so occurs the third birth of Miguel Mármol, at thirteen years of age.

  (126)

  1918: The Mountains of Morelos

  Ravaged Land, Living Land

  The hogs, the cows, the chickens, are they Zapatistas? And the jugs, the pans, the stewpots, what of them? Government troops have exterminated half the population of Morelos in these years of stubborn peasant war, and taken away everything. Only stones and charred stalks remain in the fields; the wreckage of a house, a woman heaving a plow. Of the men, any not dead or exiled have become outlaws.

  But the war continues. The war will continue as long as corn sprouts in secret mountain crannies, as long as Zapata’s eyes flash.

  (468)

  1918: Mexico City

  The New Bourgeoisie Is Born Lying

  “We fight for the land,” says Zapata, “and not for illusions that give us nothing to eat… With or without elections, the people are chewing the cud of bitterness.”

  While taking the land from the campesinos of Morelos and wrecking their villages, President Carranza talks about agrarian reform. While applying state terror against the poor, he grants them the right to vote for the rich and offers illiterates freedom of the press.

  The new Mexican bourgeoisie, voracious child of war and plunder, sings hymns of praise to the Revolution while gobbling it down with knife and fork from an embroidered tablecloth.

  (468)

  1919: Cuautla

  This Man Taught Them That Life Is Not Only Fear of Suffering and Hope for Death

  It had to be done by treachery. Shamming friendship, a government officer leads him into the trap. A thousand soldiers are waiting, a thousand rifles tumble him from his horse.

  Afterward they haul him to Cuautla and exhibit him face up.

  Campesinos from everywhere flock there for the silent march-past, which lasts several days. Approaching the body, they remove their sombreros, look attentively, and shake their heads. No one believes it. There’s a wart missing, a scar too many; that suit isn’t his; this face swollen by so many bullets could be anybody’s.

  The campesinos talk in slow whispers, peeling off words like grains of corn:

  “They say he went with a compadre to Arabia.”

  “Hell, Zapata doesn’t chicken out.”

  “He’s been seen on the Quilamula heights.”

  “I know he’s sleeping in a cave in Cerro Prieto.”

  “Last night his horse was drinking in the river.”

  The Morelos campesinos don’t now believe, nor will they ever believe, that Emiliano Zapata could have committed the infamy of dying and leaving them all alone.

  (468)

  Ballad of the Death of Zapata

  Little star in the night

  that rides the sky like a witch,

  where is our chief Zapata

  who was the scourge of the rich?

  Little flower of the fields

  and valleys of Morelos,

  if they ask for Zapata,

  say he’s gone to try on halos.

  Little bubbling brook,

  what did that carnation say to you?

  It says our chief didn’t die.

  that Zapata’s on his way to you.

  (293)

  1919: Hollywood

  Chaplin

  In the beginning were rags.

  From the rag bag of the Keystone studios, Charles Chaplin chose the most useless garments, the too big, too small, too ugly, and put them together, as if picking through a garbage can. Some outsized pants, a dwarf’s jacket, a bowler hat, and some huge dilapidated shoes. To that he added a prop mustache and cane. Then this little heap of rejected rags stood up, saluted its author with a ridiculous bow, and set off walking like a duck. After a few steps he collided with a tree and asked its pardon, doffing his hat.

  And so came to life Charlie the Tramp, outcast and poet.

  (121 and 383)

  1919: Hollywood

  Keaton

  The man who never laughs creates laughter.

  Like Chaplin, Buster Keaton is a Hollywood magician. His outcast hero—straw hat, stone face, cat’s body—in no way resembles Charlie the Tramp, but is caught in the same absurd war with cops, bullies, and machines. Always impassive, icy outside, burning inside, he walks with great dignity on walls, on air, on the bottom of the sea.

  Keaton is not as popular as Chaplin. His films entertain, but with too much mystery, too much melancholy.

  (128 and 382)

  1919: Memphis

  Thousands of People Flock t
o the Show,

  and many are women with babies in their arms. The family performance reaches its high point when Ell Persons, tied to a stake, is baptized with gasoline and the flames draw his first howls.

  Not long afterward, the audience departs in an orderly fashion, complaining of the brevity of these things. Some stir the cinders seeking a bone as a souvenir.

  Ell Persons is one of the seventy-seven blacks who have been roasted alive or hanged by white crowds this year in the southern United States for committing a murder or a rape—that is to say, for looking at a white woman, possibly with a lascivious gleam; or for saying “Yes” instead of “Yes, ma’am”; or for not removing his hat before speaking.

  Among these lynched “niggers,” some have worn the military uniform of the United States of America and hunted Pancho Villa through Mexico’s northern deserts, or are newly returned from the world war.

  (51, 113, and 242)

  1921: Rio de Janeiro

  Rice Powder

  President Epitácio Pessoa makes a recommendation to the managers of Brazilian football. For reasons of patriotic prestige, he suggests that no player with black skin be sent to the coming South American soccer championships.

  It happens, however, that Brazil won last year thanks to the mulatto Artur Friedenreich, who scored the winning goal and whose boots, grimed with mud, are still on display in a jeweler’s window. Friedenreich, born of a German and a black, is Brazil’s best player. He always arrives on the field last. It takes him at least half an hour in the dressingroom to iron out his frizz, so that during the game not a hair will move, even when he heads the ball.