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

by Eduardo Galeano

  Football, that elegant after-Mass diversion, is something for whites.

  “Rice powder! Rice powder!” yell the fans at Carlos Alberto, another mulatto player on the Fluminense club who whitens his face with it.

  (279)

  1921: Rio de Janeiro

  Pixinguinha

  It is announced that the Batons will soon be appearing on the Paris stage, and indignation mounts in the Brazilian press. What will Europeans think? Will they imagine Brazil is an African colony? The Batons’ repertory contains no operatic arias or waltzes, only maxixes, lundús, cortajacas, batuques, cateretês, modinhas, and the newborn samba. It is an orchestra of blacks who play black music. Articles exhort the government to head off the disgrace. The foreign ministry promptly explains that the Batons are not on an official mission.

  Pixinguinha, one of the blacks in the ensemble, is the best musician in Brazil. He doesn’t know it, nor does it interest him. He is too busy seeking on his flute, with devilish joy, sounds stolen from the birds.

  (75)

  1921: Rio de Janeiro

  Brazil’s Fashionable Author

  inaugurates a swimming pool in a sports club. Coelho Neto’s speech exalting the virtues of the pool draws tears and applause. Coelho Neto invokes the powers of sea, sky, and earth on this solemn occasion of such magnitude that we cannot evaluate it without tracing, through the Shadows of Time, its projection into the Future.

  Sweets for the rich, denounces Lima Barreto, an author not in vogue and accursed both as a mulatto and a rebel, who, cursing back, dies in some godforsaken hospital.

  Lima Barreto mocks the pomposities of writers who parrot the literature of ornamental culture. They sing the glories of a happy Brazil, without blacks, workers, or the poor; a Brazil populated with sage economists whose most original idea is to impose more taxes on the people, a Brazil with two hundred and sixty-two generals whose job is to design new uniforms for next year’s parade.

  (36)

  1922: Toronto

  This Reprieve

  saves thousands condemned to early death. Neither royal nor presidential, it has been extended by a Canadian doctor who a week ago, with seven cents in his pocket, was looking for a job.

  On a hunch that deprived him of sleep, and after much error and discouragement, Fred Banting discovers that insulin, secreted by the pancreas, reduces sugar in the blood; and thus he commutes the many death sentences imposed by diabetes.

  (54)

  1922: Leavenworth

  For Continuing to Believe That All Belongs to All

  Ricardo, most talented and dangerous of the Flores Magón brothers, has been absent from the revolution he did so much to start. While Mexico’s fate was played out on its battlefields, he was breaking stones, shackled in a North American prison.

  A United States court had sentenced him to twenty years’ hard labor for signing an anarchist manifesto against private property. He was many times offered a pardon, if only he would ask for it. He never asked.

  “When I die, perhaps my friends will write on my grave: ‘Here Lies a Dreamer,’ and my enemies: ‘Here Lies a Madman.’ But no one will dare write: ‘Here Lies a Coward and Traitor to his Ideas.’”

  In his cell, far from his land, they strangle him. Heart failure, says the medical report.

  (44 and 391)

  1922: The Fields of Patagonia

  The Worker-Shoot

  Three years ago young aristocrats of the Argentine Patriotic League went hunting in the barrios of Buenos Aires. The safari was a success. The rich kids killed workers and Jews for a whole week without a license, and no one went to jail.

  Now it’s the army that is using workers for target practice in the frozen lands of the south. The boys of the Tenth Cavalry under Lieutenant Colonel Héctor Benigno Varela roam the great estates of Patagonia shooting peons on strike. Fervent Patriotic League volunteers accompany them. No one is executed without a trial. Each trial lasts less time than it takes to smoke a cigarette.

  Estancia owners and officers act as judges. The condemned are buried by the heap in common graves they dig themselves.

  President Hipólito Yrigoyen in general doesn’t approve of this method of finishing off anarchists and reds, but lifts not a finger against the murderers.

  (38 and 365)

  1923: Guayas River

  Crosses Float in the River,

  hundreds of crosses crowned with mountain blossoms, flowery squadrons of tiny ships cruising on the swell of waves and memory. Each cross recalls a murdered worker. People have thrown these floating crosses into the water so that the workers lying in the riverbed may rest in peace.

  It happened a year ago, in the port of Guayaquil, which for several hours was in the hands of the workers. Fed up with eating hunger, they had called the first general strike in Ecuador’s history—not even government officials were able to circulate without a pass from the unions. The women—washerwomen, tobacco workers, cooks, peddlers—had formed the Rosa Luxemburg Committee; they were the most defiant.

  “Today the rabble got up laughing. Tomorrow they’ll go to bed crying,” announced Carlos Arroyo, president of the Chamber of Deputies. And the president of the republic, José Luis Tamayo, ordered General Enrique Barriga to take care of the matter: “At any cost.”

  At the first shots, many workers tried to escape, scattering like ants from an anthill squashed by a foot. These were the first to fall.

  No one knows how many were thrown into the Guayas river to sink, their bellies slashed with bayonets.

  (192, 332, and 472)

  1923: Acapulco

  The Function of the Forces of Order in the Democratic Process

  As soon as the Tom Mix film ends, Juan Escudero surprises the audience by stepping in front of the screen of Acapulco’s only cinema and delivering a harangue against bloodsucking merchants. By the time the boys in uniform pile on him, the Workers’ Party of Acapulco has already been born, baptized by acclamation.

  In no time at all, the Workers’ Party has grown and won the elections and stuck its black-and-red flag over city hall. Juan Escudero—tall, thick sideburns, pointed mustache—is the new mayor, the socialist mayor. In the blink of an eye he turns the palace into a headquarters for cooperatives and unions, launches a lîteracy campaign, and defies the power of the three companies that own the water, air, ground, and grime of this filthy Mexican port abandoned by God and the federal government. Then the owners of everything organize new elections, so that the people may correct their error, but the Workers’ Party of Acapulco wins again. So there’s no way out but to call in the army, which promptly normalizes the situation. The victorious Juan Escudero receives two bullets, one in the arm and the other in the forehead, a mercy-shot from close range, while the soldiers set fire to city hall.

  But Escudero survives, and continues winning elections. In a wheelchair, mutilated, hardly able to talk, Escudero conducts a victorious new campaign for deputy by dictating speeches to a youngster who deciphers his mumblings and repeats them aloud on campaign platforms.

  The owners of Acapulco decide to pay thirty thousand pesos so that this time the military patrol will shoot properly. In the company ledgers these outlays are duly entered, but not their purpose. And finally Juan Escudero falls, very much shot, dead of total death you might say, thank you, gentlemen.

  (441)

  1923: Azángaro

  Urviola

  His family wanted him to be a doctor. Instead he became an Indian, as if his double-humped back and dwarf stature were not curse enough. Ezequiel Urviola quit his law career in Puno vowing to follow in the footsteps of Túpac Amaru. Since then he speaks Quechua, wears sandals, chews coca, and plays the quena flute. Day and night he comes and goes, inciting revolt in the Peruvian sierra, where the Indians have proprietors like the mules and the trees.

  The police dream of catching the hunchback Urviola; the landlords pledge it; but the little shrimp turns into an eagle flying over the mountains.

&nb
sp; (370)

  1923: Callao

  Mariátegui

  A ship brings José Carlos Mariátegui back to Peru after some years in Europe. When he left he was a bohemian nighthawk from Lima who wrote about horses, a mystical poet who felt deeply and understood little. Over in Europe he discovered America. Mariátegui found Marxism and found Mariátegui, and this was how he learned to see from afar the Peru he couldn’t see close up.

  Mariátegui believes that Marxism means human progress as indisputably as smallpox vaccine or the theory of relativity, but to Peruvianize Peru one has to start by Peruvianizing Marxism, which is not a catechism or the tracing of some master plan, but a key to enter deep into this country. And the clues to the depths of his country are in the Indian communities, dispossessed by the sterile landowner system but unconquered in their socialist traditions of work and life.

  (321, 277, and 355)

  1923: Buenos Aires

  Snapshot of a Worker-Hunter

  He peruses the firearms catalogs lasciviously, as if they were pornography. For him the uniform of the Argentine army is as beautiful as the smoothest of human skin. He likes skinning alive the foxes that fall into his traps, but prefers making target practice of fleeing workers, the more so if they are reds, and more yet if they are foreign reds.

  Jorge Ernesto Pérez Millán Temperley enlisted as a volunteer in the troop of Lieutenant Colonel Varela, and last year marched to Patagonia for the sport of liquidating any strikers who came within range. Later, when the German anarchist Kurt Wilckens threw the bomb that blew up Lieutenant Colonel Varela, this hunter of workers swore loudly to avenge his superior.

  And avenge him he does. In the name of the Argentine Patriotic League, Jorge Ernesto Pérez Millán Temperley fires a Mauser bullet into the chest of Wilckens as he sleeps in his cell, then has himself immediately photographed for posterity, gun in hand, striking a martial pose of duty done.

  (38).

  1923: Tampico

  Traven

  A phantom ship, an old hulk destined to be wrecked, arrives off the coast of Mexico. Among its crew, vagabonds without name or nation, is a survivor of the suppressed revolution in Germany.

  This comrade of Rosa Luxemburg, fugitive from hunger and the police, writes his first novel in Tampico and signs it B. Traven. With that name he will become famous without anyone ever knowing which face or voice or footstep is his. Traven decides to be a mystery, so that no bureaucracy can label him. All the better to mock a world where the marriage contract and inheritance matter more than love and death.

  (398)

  1923: The Fields of Durango

  Pancho Villa Reads the Thousand and One Nights,

  deciphering the words out loud by candlelight, because this is the book that gives him the best dreams; and afterward, he awakens early to pasture the cows with his old battle comrades.

  Villa is still the most popular man in the fields of northern Mexico, and officialdom doesn’t like it a bit. Today it is three years since his men turned the Canutillo hacienda into a cooperative, which now has a hospital and a school, and a world of people have come to celebrate.

  Villa is listening to his favorite corridos when Don Fernando, a pilgrim from Granada, mentions that John Reed has just died in Moscow.

  Pancho Villa orders the party stopped. Even the flies pause in flight.

  “So old Juan died? My old pal, Juan?”

  “Himself.”

  Villa half believes and half not.

  “I saw it in the papers,” Don Fernando says, excusing himself. “He’s buried over there with the heroes of the revolution.”

  Nobody breathes. Nobody disturbs the silence. Don Fernando murmurs: “It was typhus, not a bullet.”

  And Villa nods his head: “So old Juan died.”

  Then repeats: “So old Juan’s dead.”

  He falls silent. Looking into the distance, he finally says: “I never even heard the word ‘socialism’ until he explained it to me.”

  All at once he rises, and extending his arms, rebukes the silent guitar-players: “And the music? What happened to the music? Play!”

  (206)

  1923: Mexico City/Parral

  The People Donated a Million Dead to the Mexican Revolution

  in ten years of war so that military chieftains could finally take possession of the best lands and the most profitable businesses. These officers of the revolution share power and glory with Indian-fleecing doctors and the politicos-for-hire, brilliant banquet orators who call Obregón the Mexican Lenin.

  On this road to national reconciliation there is no problem that can’t be overcome by a public-works contract, a land concession, or the sort of favor that flows out of an open purse. Álvaro Obregón, the president, defines his style of government with a phrase soon to become a classic in Mexico: “There’s no general who can resist a salvo of fifty thousand pesos.”

  But Obregón gets it wrong with General Villa.

  Nothing can be done with him except to shoot him down.

  Villa arrives in Parral by car in the early morning. At the sight of him someone signals with a red scarf. Twelve men respond by squeezing triggers.

  Parral was his favorite city. “I like Parral so much, so much …” And the day when the women and children of Parral chased out the gringo invaders with stones, the horses inside Pancho broke free, and he let out a tremendous yell of joy: “I just love Parral to death!”

  (206, 246, and 260)

  1924: Mérida, Yucatán

  More on the Function of the Forces of Order in the Democratic Process

  Felipe Carrillo Puerto, also invulnerable to the gun from which Obregón fires pesos, faces a firing squad one damp January morning.

  “Do you want a confessor?”

  “I’m not a Catholic.”

  “How about a notary?”

  “I’ve nothing to leave.”

  He had been a colonel in Zapata’s army in Morelos before founding the Socialist Workers’ Party in Yucatán. There Carrillo Puerto delivered his speeches in Mayan, explaining that Marx was a brother of Jacinto Canek and Cecilio Chi and that socialism, the inheritor of the communitarian tradition, gave a future dimension to the glorious Indian past.

  Until yesterday he headed the socialist government of Yucatan. Innumerable frauds and private interests had not been able to keep the socialists from an easy electoral victory, nor afterward keep them from fulfilling their promises. Their sacrileges against the hallowed big estates, the slave labor system and various imperial monqpolies aroused the rage of those who ran the henequén plantations, not to speak of the International Harvester Company. The archbishop went into convulsions over lay education, free love, and red baptisms—so called because children received their names on a mattress of red Bowers, and along with those names, wishes for a long life of socialist militancy. So what could be done, but call in the army to bring the scandal to an end?

  The shooting of Felipe Carrillo Puerto repeats the history of Juan Escudero in Acapulco. The government of the humiliated has lasted a couple of years in Yucatán. The humiliated govern with the weapons of reason. The humiliators don’t have the government, but they do have the reason of weapons. And as in all of Mexico, death rides the dice of destiny.

  (330)

  1924: Mexico City

  Nationalizing the Walls

  Easel art invites confinement. The mural, on the other hand, offers itself to the passing multitude. The people may be illiterate but they are not blind; so Rivera, Orozco, and Siqueiros assault the walls of Mexico. They paint something new and different. On moist lime is born a truly national art, child of the Mexican revolution and of these days of births and funerals.

  Mexican muralism crashes head on into the dwarfed, castrated art of a country trained to deny itself. All of a sudden, still lifes and defunct landscapes spring dizzily to life, and the wretched of the earth become subjects of art and history rather than objects of use, scorn, or pity.

  Complaints pelt d
own on the muralists, but praise, not a drop. Still, mounted on their scaffoldings, they stick to their jobs. Sixteen hours without a break is the working day for Rivera, eyes and belly of a toad, teeth like a fish. He keeps a pistol at his waist.

  “To set a line for the critics,” he says.

  (80 and 387)

  1924: Mexico City

  Diego Rivera

  resurrects Felipe Carrillo Puerto, redeemer of Yucatán, with a bullet wound in his chest but uninformed of his own death, and paints Emiliano Zapata arousing his people, and paints the people, all the peoples of Mexico, united in an epic of work and war and fiesta, on sixteen hundred square meters of wall in the Ministry of Education. While he washes the world with colors, Diego amuses himself by lying. To anyone who wants to listen he tells lies as colossal as his belly, as his passion for creating, and as his woman-devouring insatiability.

  Barely three years ago he returned from Europe. Over there in Paris, Diego was a vanguard painter who got tired of the “isms”; and just as his star was fading, and he was painting just from boredom, he returned to Mexico and the lights of his country hit him in the face, setting his eyes aflame.

  (82)

  1924: Mexico City

  Orozco

  Diego Rivera rounds out, José Clemente Orozco sharpens. Rivera paints sensualities: bodies of com flesh, voluptuous fruits. Orozco paints desperations: skin-and-bone bodies, a maguey mutilated and bleeding. What is happiness in Rivera is tragedy in Orozco. In Rivera there is tenderness and radiant serenity; in Orozco, severity and contortion. Orozco’s Mexican revolution has grandeur, like Rivera’s; but where Rivera speaks to us of hope, Orozco seems to say that whoever steals the sacred fire from the gods will deny it to his fellow men.