The Memory of Fire Trilogy: Genesis, Faces and Masks, and Century of the Wind
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1924: Mexico City
Siqueiros
Surly, withdrawn, turbulent inside—that’s Orozco. Spectacular, bombastic, turbulent on the outside—that’s David Alfaro Siqueiros. Orozco practices painting as a ceremony of solitude. For Siqueiros it is an act of militant solidarity. “There is no other way except ours,” says Siqueiros. To European culture, which he considers sick, he opposes his own muscular energy. Orozco doubts, lacks faith in what he does. Siqueiros bulls ahead, sure that his patriotic brashness is no bad medicine for a country with a severe inferiority complex.
(27)
The People Are the Hero of Mexican Mural Painting, Says Diego Rivera
The true novelty of Mexican painting, in the sense that we initiated it with Orozco and Siqueiros, was to make the people the hero of mural painting. Until then the heroes of mural painting had been gods, angels, archangels, saints, war heroes, kings and emperors, prelates, and great military and political chiefs, the people appearing as the chorus around the star personalities of the tragedy …
(79)
1924: Regla
Lenin
The mayor of the Cuban community of Regla calls everybody together. From the neighboring city of Havana has come news of the death of Lenin in the Soviet Union. The mayor issues a proclamation of mourning. The proclamation says that the aforementioned Lenin won well-deserved sympathy among the proletarian and intellectual elements of this municipal district. Accordingly, at 5:00 P.M. Sunday next its residents will observe two minutes of silence and meditation, during which persons and vehicles will maintain absolute stillness.
At precisely five o’clock on Sunday afternoon, the mayor of Regla climbs up Fortín hill. Despite a heavy downpour, over a thousand people accompany him to observe the two minutes of silence and meditation. Afterward, the mayor plants an olive tree on top of the hill in homage to the man who was always planting the red flag over there, in the middle of the snow.
(215)
1916: San Albino
Sandino
is short and thin as a rake. A stray wind would blow him away were he not so firmly planted in the soil of Nicaragua.
In this land, his land, Augusto César Sandino stands tall and speaks of what the land has said to him, for when Sandino stretches out to sleep, his land whispers sorrow and sweetness to him.
Sandino speaks of the secrets of his invaded and humiliated land, and asks, How many of you love it as much as I do?
Twenty-nine San Albino miners step forward.
These are the first soldiers in Nicaragua’s army of liberation. Illiterate, they toil fifteen hours a day hacking gold out of the ground for a North American firm and sleep piled up in a shed. They blow up the mine with dynamite and follow Sandino into the mountains.
Sandino goes on a small white burro.
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1926: Puerto Cabezas
The Most Admirable Women on Earth
are the whores of Puerto Cabezas. From pillow talk they know the exact spot under water where U.S. Marines have buried forty rifles and seven thousand cartridges. Thanks to these women, who risk their lives in defiance of the foreign occupation troops, Sandino and his men rescue from the waters, by torchlight, their first weapons and first ammunition.
(361)
1926: Juazeiro do Norte
Father Cicero
Once Juazeiro was a nothing of a hamlet—four shacks God seemed to have spat into the void when, one fine day, He pointed a finger at this garbage heap and decided it was to be a Holy City. Since then, the afflicted flock here by the thousands. Every road of martyrdom and miracle leads here. Squalid pilgrims from all Brazil, long lines of rags and stumps of limbs, have turned Juazeiro into the richest city of the northeastern hinterland. In this faith-restoring new Jerusalem, memorials to the forgotten, polestar of the lost, the modest Salgadinho stream is now known as the River Jordan. Surrounded by pious women brandishing their bleeding bronze crucifixes, Father Cicero announces that Jesus Christ is on his way.
Father Cicero Romão Baptista is the master of the lands and souls. This savior of the shipwrecked in the desert, tamer of madmen and criminals, gives children to sterile women, rain to dry ground, light to the blind, and, to the poor, some crumbs from the bread he eats.
(133)
1926: Juazeiro do Norte
By Divine Miracle a Bandit Becomes a Captain
Lampião’s warriors fire off bullets and sing songs. Tolling bells and fireworks welcome them to the city of Juazeiro. The cangaceiros display a complete arsenal and a luxuriance of medals on their leather armor.
At the foot of the statue of Father Cicero, Father Cicero blesses the chief of the gang. It is well known that the bandit Lampião never touches a house containing an image of Father Cicero, or kills any devotee of the miracle-working saint.
In the name of the government of Brazil, Father Cicero confers on Lampião the rank of captain, three blue stripes on either shoulder, and hands out to his men impeccable Mausers in exchange for their old Winchester rifles. In return, Captain Lampião promises to defeat the rebels under Lieutenant Luis Carlos Prestes, who roam Brazil preaching democracy and other devilish ideas; but he has hardly left this city before he forgets about the Prestes Column and returns to his old routine.
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1926: New York
Valentino
Last night, in an Italian bar, Rudolph Valentino collapsed, struck down by a pasta banquet.
Millions of women on five continents have been widowed. They adored the elegant, feline Latin on the screen-altar of the movie theater, itself a temple for all peoples in all cities. With him they galloped to the oasis, spurred by the wind of the desert, and with him participated in tragic bullfights, entered mysterious palaces, danced on mirrored floors, and undressed in the bedrooms of Indian Prince and Son of the Sheik. Pierced by the languid gimlet of his eyes and crushed by his arms, they swooned into deep silken beds.
He didn’t even realize. Valentino, the Hollywood god who casually smoked while kissing and annihilated with a glance, he who daily received a thousand love letters, in reality slept alone and dreamed of Mother.
(443)
1917: Chicago
Louie
She lived on New Orleans’ Perdido Street—the street of the lost—where the dead were laid out with a saucer on the chest for the neighbors’ coins to pay for the funeral. When she dies, her son Louis takes pleasure in giving her a fine funeral—the deluxe funeral she would have dreamed of at the end of the dream in which God made her white and a millionaire.
Louis Armstrong, who grew up with no more to eat than leftovers and music, fled New Orleans for Chicago with only a trumpet for baggage and a fish sandwich for company. A few years have passed and he is getting fat. He eats to avenge himself. And if he returned to the South now, maybe he’d be welcomed in some of the places barred to blacks and out of bounds for the poor. He could probably walk down most any street in town. He’s the king of jazz and no one argues it. His trumpet whispers, moans, wails, howls like a wounded beast, and laughs uproariously, celebrating with euphoria and immense power the absurdity of life.
(105)
1927: New York
Bessie
This woman sings her sufferings with the voice of glory and no one can listen and pretend he doesn’t hear or he’s not moved. Lungs of deep night: Bessie Smith, immensely fat, immensely black, curses the thieves of Creation. Her blues are the hymns of poor drunk black women of the slums. They announce that the whites and the supermen and the rich who humiliate the world will be dethroned.
(165)
1927: Rapallo
Pound
It is twenty years since Ezra Pound pulled out of America. Son of poets, father of poets, Pound seeks beneath the Italian sun new images, worthy accompaniments to the bison of Altamira, unknown words for talking to gods more ancient than the fish.
Along the road, he makes the wrong friends.
1927: Charlestown
“Lovely day,”
says the governor of the state of Massachusetts.
At midnight on this August Monday, two Italian workers will occupy the electric chair of Charlestown prison’s death house. Nicola Sacco, shoemaker, and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, fish peddler, will be executed for crimes they did not commit.
The lives of Sacco and Vanzetti are in the hands of a businessman who has made forty million dollars selling Packard cars. Alvan Tufts Fuller, governor of Massachusetts, a small man behind a big desk of carved wood, declines to yield to the protests rumbling from every direction. He honestly believes in the correctness of the trial and the validity of the evidence. He also believes that all the damned anarchists and filthy foreigners who come to ruin this country deserve to die.
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1927: Araraquara
Mário de Andrade
challenges everything servile, saccharine, grandiloquent in official culture. He is a creator of words, words dying of envy for music, which nonetheless are capable of seeing and speaking everything to Brazil, and also of savoring it, Brazil the tasty hot peanut.
On holidays, for the fun of it, Mário de Andrade transcribes the sayings and deeds of one Macunaíma, a hero with no character, just as he hears them from the golden beak of a parrot. According to the parrot, Macunaíma was an ugly black man, born in the heart of the jungle, who didn’t bother saying a word until he was six—for sheer laziness, and preoccupied as he was with decapitating ants, spitting in his brothers’ faces, and fondling his female relatives. Macunaíma’s wild adventures cover all times and all spaces in Brazil, while stripping saints of their robes, and puppets of their heads.
Macunaíma is more real than his author. Like every flesh-and-blood Brazilian, Mário de Andrade is a figment of the imagination.
(23)
1927: Paris
Villa-Lobos
From behind the enormous cigar floats a cloud of smoke. Enveloped within it, happy and in love, Heitor Villa-Lobos whistles a vagabond tune.
In Brazil, hostile critics claim he composes music to be played by epileptics for an audience of paranoiacs, but in France he is received with ovations. The Paris press enthusiastically applauds his audacious harmonies and his vigorous sense of nationality. They publish articles on the maestro’s life. One newspaper recounts how Villa-Lobos was once bound to a grill and almost roasted alive by cannibal Indians while out strolling in the Amazon jungle with a Victrola in his arms playing Bach.
At one of the many parties they throw for him between concerts in Paris, a lady asks him if he has eaten people raw, and how he liked it.
(280)
2927: The Plains of Jalisco
Behind a Huge Cross of Sticks
charge the Cristeros, rebelling in Jalisco and other states of Mexico in search of martyrdom and glory. They shout Vivas! for a Christ the King crowned with jewels instead of thorns, and Vivas! for the Pope, who has not resigned himself to the loss of the few clerical privileges still remaining in Mexico.
These poor campesinos have just been dying for a revolution that promised them land. Now, condemned to a living death, they start dying for a Church that promises them heaven.
(297)
1927: San Gabriel de Jalisco
A Child Looks On
The mother covers his eyes so he cannot see his grandfather hanging by the feet. And then the mother’s hands prevent his seeing his father’s body riddled by the bandits’ bullets, or his uncle’s twisting in the wind over there on the telegraph posts.
Now the mother too has died, or perhaps has just tired of defending her child’s eyes. Sitting on the stone fence that snakes over the slopes, Juan Rulfo contemplates his harsh land with a naked eye. He sees horsemen—federal police or Cristeros, it makes no difference—emerging from smoke, and behind them, in the distance, a fire. He sees bodies hanging in a row, nothing now but ragged clothing emptied by the vultures. He sees a procession of women dressed in black.
Juan Rulfo, a child of nine, is surrounded by ghosts who look like him.
Here there is nothing alive—the only voices those of howling coyotes, the only air the black wind that rises in gusts from the plains of Jalisco, where the survivors are only dead people pretending.
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1927: El Chipote
The War of Jaguars and Birds
Fifteen years ago the Marines landed in Nicaragua for a while, to protect the lives and properties of United States citizens, and forgot to leave. Against them now loom these northern mountains. Villages are scarce here; but anyone who hasn’t actually become one of Sandino’s soldiers is his spy or messenger. Since the dynamiting of the San Albino mine and the first battle, at Muy Muy, the liberating force keeps growing.
The whole Honduran army is mobilized on the border to prevent arms from reaching Sandino from across the river, but the guerrillas, unconcerned, acquire rifles from fallen enemies and carve bullets out of the trees in which they imbed themselves; nor is there any shortage of machetes for chopping off heads, or sardine-can grenades filled with glass, nails, screws, and dynamite for scattering the enemy.
U.S. airplanes bomb haphazardly, destroying villages. And Marines roam the forests, between abysses and high peaks, roasted by the sun, drowned by the rain, asphyxiated by dust, burning and killing all they find. Even the little monkeys throw things at them.
They offer Sandino a pardon and ten dollars for every day he has been in rebellion. Captain Hatfield hints at a surrender.
From his stronghold in El Chipote, a mysterious peak wreathed in mist, comes the reply: I don’t sell out or surrender. It closes: Your obedient servant, who desires to put you in a handsome coffin with beautiful bouquets of flowers. And then Sandino’s signature.
His soldiers bite like jaguars and flit like birds. When least expected, they lash out in a single jaguar leap, and before the enemy can even react are already striking from the rear or the flanks, only to disappear with a flap of wings.
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1928: San Rafael del Norte
Crazy Little Army
Four Corsairs bombard El Chipote, already encircled and harassed by salvos from Marine artillery. For days and nights now the whole region thunders and trembles, until the invaders fix bayonets and charge the stone trenches bristling with rifles. This heroic action ends with neither dead nor wounded, because the attackers find only soldiers of straw and guns of sticks.
U.S. papers promptly report the victory without mentioning that the Marines have demolished a legion of dolls with wide-brimmed hats and black-and-red kerchiefs. They do verify, however, that Sandino himself is among the victims.
In the remote village of San Rafael del Norte, Sandino listens to his men singing by the light of campfires. There he receives word of his death.
“God and our mountains are with us. And after all is said and done, death is no more than a little moment of pain.”
Over the past months thirty-six warships and six thousand more Marines have arrived as reinforcements in Nicaragua. Yet, of seventy-five big and small battles, almost all have been lost, and the quarry has slipped through their fingers, no one knows how.
Crazy little army, the Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral calls Sandino’s battered warriors, these masters of daring and devilment.
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“It Was All Very Brotherly”
JUAN PABLO RAMRÍEZ: We made dolls of straw and stuck them there. As decoys we fixed up sticks topped by sombreros. And it was fun … They spent a week firing at them, bombing them, and I pissed in my pants laughing!
ALFONSO ALEXANDER: The invaders were like the elephant and we the snake. They were immobility, we were mobility.
PEDRO ANTONIO ARAÚZ: The Yanquis died sad deaths, the ingrates. They just didn’t know how things work in our country’s mountains.
SINFOROSO GONZÁLEZ ZELEDÓN: The campesinos helped us, they worked with us, they
felt for us.
COSME CASTRO ANDINO: We weren’t drawing any pay. When we got to a village and the campesinos gave us food, we shared it. It was all very brotherly.
(236)
1928: Washington
Newsreel
In an emotional ceremony in Washington, ten Marine officers receive the Cross of Merit for distinguished service and extraordinary heroism in the war against Sandino.
The Washington Herald and other papers devote pages to the crimes of the outlaw band who slit Marines’ throats. They also publish documents newly arrived from Mexico, with impressive numbers of spelling mistakes, proving that Mexican president Calles is sending bolshevik weapons and propaganda to Sandino through Soviet diplomats. Official State Department sources explain that Calles began revealing his communist sympathies when he raised taxes on U.S. oil companies operating in Mexico, and fully confirmed them when his government established diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union.
The U.S. government warns that it will not permit Russian and Mexican soldiers to implant the Soviet in Nicaragua. According to official State Department spokesmen, Mexico is exporting bolshevism. After Nicaragua the next target of Soviet expansion in Central America will be the Panama Canal.
Senator Shortridge declares that the citizens of the United States deserve as much protection as those of ancient Rome, and Senator Bingham says: We are obliged to accept our function as international policemen. Senator Bingham, the famous archaeologist who sixteen years ago discovered the ruins of Machu Picchu in Peru, has never concealed his admiration for the works of dead Indians.
For the opposition, Senator Borah denies his country’s right to act as the censor of Central America, and Senator Wheeler suggests that the government send Marines to Chicago, not Nicaragua, if it really wants to take on bandits. The Nation magazine, for its part, takes the view that for the U.S. president to call Sandino a bandit is like George III of England labeling George Washington a thief.