At first, few theaters dare to show Citizen Kane, the movie in which Orson Welles tells the story of a man sick with power fever, a man who too closely resembles William Randolph Hearst.
Hearst owns eighteen newspapers, nine magazines, seven castles, and quite a few people. He is expert at stirring up public opinion. In his long life he has provoked wars and bankruptcies, made and destroyed fortunes, created idols and demolished reputations. Among his best inventions are the scandal campaign and the gossip column, so good for what he likes to do best—land a solid punch well below the belt.
The most powerful fabricator of opinion in the United States thinks that the white race is the only really human race; believes in the necessary victory of the strongest; is convinced that Communists are to blame for alcohol consumption among the young; and that Japanese are born traitors.
When Japan bombs the naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hearst’s newspapers have already been beating a steady warning rhythm for half a century about the Yellow Peril. The United States enters the World War.
(130 and 441)
1942: New York
The Red Cross Doesn’t Accept Black Blood
U.S. soldiers embark for the war fronts. Many are black under the command of white officers.
Those who survive will return home. The blacks will enter by the back door, and, in the Southern states, continue to live, work, and die apart, and even then will lie in separate graves. Hooded Ku Klux Klansmen will still insure that blacks do not intrude into the white world, and above all into the bedrooms of white women.
The war accepts blacks, thousands and thousands of them, but not the Red Cross. The Red Cross bans black blood in the plasma banks, so as to avoid the possibility that races might mix by tranfusion.
The research of Charles Drew, inventor of life, has finally made it possible to save blood. Thanks to him, plasma banks are reviving thousands of dying men on the battlefields of Europe.
When the Red Cross decides to reject the blood of blacks, Drew, director of the Red Cross plasma service, resigns. Drew is black.
(51, 218, and 262)
1942: Oxford, Mississippi
Faulkner
Seated on a rocker, on the columned porch of a decaying mansion, William Faulkner smokes his pipe and listens to the whispered confidences of ghosts.
The plantation masters tell Faulkner of their glories and their dreads. Nothing horrifies them like miscegenation. A drop of black blood, even one tiny drop, curses a whole life and ensures, after death, the fires of hell. The old Southern dynasties, born of crime and condemned to crime, watch anxiously over the pale splendor of their own twilight, affronted by the shadow of blackness, the slightest hint of blackness. These gentlemen would love to believe that purity of lineage will not die out, though its memory may fade and the trumpets of the horsemen defeated by Lincoln echo no more.
(163 and 247)
1942: Hollywood
Brecht
Hollywood manufactures films to turn the frightful vigil of humanity, on the point of annihilation, into sweet dreams. Bertolt Brecht, exiled from Hitler’s Germany, is employed in this sleeping-pill industry. Founder of a theater that sought to open eyes wide, he earns his living at the United Artists studios, just one more writer who works office hours for Hollywood, competing to produce the biggest daily ration of idiocies.
On one of these days, Brecht buys a little God of Luck for forty cents in a Chinese store and puts it on his desk. Brecht has been told that the God of Luck licks his lips each time they make him take poison.
(66)
1942: Hollywood
The Good Neighbors to the South
accompany the United States into the World War. It is the time of democratic prices: Latin American countries supply cheap raw materials, cheap food, and a soldier or two.
The movies glorify the common cause. Rarely missing from a film is the South American number, sung and danced in Spanish or Portuguese. Donald Duck acquires a Brazilian sidekick, the little parrot José Carioca. On Pacific islands or in the fields of Europe, Hollywood Adonises wipe out Japanese and Germans by the heap. And how many Adonises have at their sides a simpatico, indolent, somewhat stupid Latin, who admires his blond northern brother and serves as his echo and shadow, faithful henchman, merry minstrel, messenger, and cook?
(467)
1942: María Barzola Pampa
A Latin American Method for Reducing Production Costs
Bolivia—subsisting, as ever, on hunger rations—is one of the countries that pays for the World War by selling its tin at a tenth of the normal price.
The mine workers finance this bargain price. Their wages go from almost nothing to nothing at all. And when a government decree calls for forced labor at gunpoint, the strikes begin. Another decree bans the strikes, but fails to stop them. So the president, Enrique Penarañda, orders the army to take severe and energetic action. Patiño, king of the mines, issues his own orders: Proceed without vacillation. His viceroys, Aramayo and Hochschild, approve. The machineguns spit fire for hours and leave the ground strewn with people.
Patiño Mines pays for some coffins, but saves on indemnities. Death by machinegun is not an occupational hazard.
(97 and 474)
1943: Sans-Souci
Carpentier
Alejo Carpentier discovers the kingdom of Henri Christophe. The Cuban writer roams these majestic ruins, this memorial to the delirium of a slave cook who became monarch of Haiti and killed himself with the gold bullet that always hung around his neck. Ceremonial hymns and magic drums of invocation rise up to meet Carpentier as he visits the palace that King Christophe copied from Versailles, and walks around his invulnerable fortress, an immense bulk whose stones, cemented by the blood of bulls sacrificed to the gods, have resisted lightning and earthquakes.
In Haiti, Carpentier learns that there is no magic more prodigious and delightful than the voyage that leads through experience, through the body, to the depths of America. In Europe, magicians have become bureaucrats, and wonder, exhausted, has dwindled to a conjuring trick. But in America, surrealism is as natural as rain or madness.
(85)
1943: Port-au-Prince
Hands That Don’t Lie
Dewitt Peters founds an open workshop and from it suddenly explodes Haitian art. Everybody paints everything: cloth, cardboard, cans, wooden boards, walls, whatever presents itself. They paint in a great outburst of splendor, with the seven souls of the rainbow. Everyone: the shoe repairman and fisherman, river washerwoman and market-stall holder. In America’s poorest country, wrung out by Europe, invaded by the United States, torn apart by wars and dictatorships, the people shout colors and no one can shut them up.
(122, 142, and 385)
1943: Mount Rouis
A Little Grain of Salt
In a bar, surrounded by kids with bloated bellies and skeletal dogs, Hector Hyppolite paints gods with a brush of hens’ feathers. Saint John the Baptist turns up in the evenings and helps him.
Hyppolite portrays the gods who paint through his hand. These Haitian gods, painted and painters, live simultaneously on earth and in heaven and hell: Capable of good and evil, they offer their children vengeance and solace.
Not all have come from Africa. Some were born here, like Baron Samedi, god of solemn stride, master of poisons and graves, his blackness enhanced by top hat and cane. That poison should kill and the dead rest in peace depends upon Baron Samedi. He turns many dead into zombies and condemns them to slave labor.
Zombies—dead people who walk or live ones who have lost their souls—have a look of hopeless stupidity. But in no time they can escape and recover their lost lives, their stolen souls. One little grain of salt is enough to awaken them. And how could salt be lacking in the home of the slaves who defeated Napoleon and founded freedom in America?
(146, 233, and 295)
1944: New York
Learning to See
It is noon and James Baldwin is walking with a friend through the stre
ets of downtown Manhattan. A red light stops them.
“Look,” says the friend, pointing at the ground.
Baldwin looks. He sees nothing.
“Look, look.”
Nothing. There is nothing to look at but a filthy little puddle of water against the curb.
His friend insists: “See? Are you seeing?”
And then Baldwin takes a good look and this time he sees, sees a spot of oil spreading in the puddle. Then, in the spot of oil, a rainbow, and even deeper down in the puddle, the street moving, and people moving in the street: the shipwrecked, the madmen, the magicians, the whole world moving, an astounding world full of worlds that glow in the world. Baldwin sees. For the first time in his life, he sees.
(152)
1945: The Guatemala—El Salvador Border
Miguel at Forty
He sleeps in caves and cemeteries. Condemned by hunger to constant hiccups, he competes with the magpies for scraps. His sister, who meets him from time to time, says: “God has given you many talents, but he has punished you by making you a Communist:”
Since Miguel recovered his party’s confidence, the running and suffering have only increased. Now the party has decided that its most sacrificed member must go into exile in Guatemala.
Miguel manages to cross the border after a thousand hassles and dangers. It is deepest night. He stretches out, exhausted, under a tree. At daybreak, an enormous yellow cow wakens him by licking his feet.
“Good morning,” Miguel says, and the cow, frightened, runs off at full tilt, into the forest, lowing. From the forest promptly emerge five vengeful bulls. There is no escape. Behind Miguel is an abyss and the tree at his back has a smooth trunk. The bulls charge, then stop dead and stand staring, panting, breathing fire and smoke, tossing their horns and pawing the ground, tearing up undergrowth and raising the dust.
Miguel trembles in a cold sweat. Tongue-tied with panic, he stammers an explanation. The bulls stare at him, a little man half hunger and half fear, and look at each other. He commends himself to Marx and Saint Francis of Assisi as the bulls slowly turn their backs on him and wander off, heads shaking.
And so occurs the ninth birth of Miguel Mármol, at forty years of age.
(126)
1945: Hiroshima and Nagasaki
A Sun of Fire,
a violent light never before seen in the world, rises slowly, cracks the sky open, and collapses. Three days later, a second sun of suns bursts over Japan. Beneath remain the cinders of two cities, a desert of rubble, tens of thousands dead and more thousands condemned to die little by little for years to come.
The war was nearly over, Hitler and Mussolini gone, when President Harry Truman gave the order to drop atomic bombs on the populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the United States, it is the culmination of a national clamor for the prompt annihilation of the Yellow Peril. It is high time to finish off once and for all the imperial conceits of this arrogant Asian country, never colonized by anyone. The only good one is a dead one, says the press of these treacherous little monkeys.
Now all doubt is dispelled. There is one great conqueror among the conquerors. The United States emerges from the war intact and more powerful than ever. It acts as if the whole world were its trophy.
(140 and 276)
1945: Princeton
Einstein
Albert Einstein feels as if his own hand had pressed the button. Although he didn’t make it, the atomic bomb would not have been possible without his discoveries about the liberation of energy. Now Einstein would like to have been someone else, to have devoted himself to some inoffensive task like fixing drains or building walls instead of investigating the secrets of life that others now use to destroy it.
When he was a boy, a professor said to him: “You’ll never amount to anything.”
Daydreaming, with the expression of someone on the moon, he wondered how light would look to a person able to ride on a beam. When he became a man, he found the answer in the theory of relativity, won a, Nobel Prize, and deserved many more for his answers to other questions born in his mind of the mysterious link between Mozart’s sonatas and the theorem of Pythagoras, or of the defiant arabesques that the smoke from his extra-long pipe drew in the air.
Einstein believed that science was a way of revealing the beauty of the universe. The most famous of sages has the saddest eyes in human history.
(150 and 228)
1945: Buenos Aires
Perón
General MacArthur takes charge of the Japanese, and Spruille Braden of the Argentines. To lead Argentina down the good road to Democracy, U.S. ambassador Braden brings together all the parties, Conservative to Communist, in a united front against Juan Domingo Perón. According to the State Department, Colonel Perón, the government’s minister of labor, is the chief of a gang of Nazis. Look magazine calls him a pervert who keeps photos of nude Patagonian Indian women in his desk drawer along with pictures of Hitler and Mussolini.
Nonetheless, Perón flies swiftly along the road to the presidency with Evita, the radio actress with the feverish eyes and enticing voice; and when he gets tired, or doubtful, or scared, it is she who takes the bit in her teeth. Perón now attracts more people than all the parties put together. When they call him “agitator,” he accepts the epithet as an honor. VIPs and the fashionably chic chant the name of Ambassador Braden on the street corners of Buenos Aires, waving hats and handkerchiefs; but in worker barrios, the shirtless shout the name Perón. These laboring people, exiles in their own land, dumb from so much shutting up, find both a fatherland and a voice in this unusual minister who always takes their side.
Perón’s popularity climbs and climbs as he shakes the dust off forgotten social laws or creates new ones. His is the law that compels respect for the rights of those who break their backs on estancias and plantations. The law does not merely remain on paper; thus the country peon, almost a thing, becomes a rural worker complete with a trade union.
(311 and 327)
1945: The Fields of Tucumán
The Familiar
flies into a rage over these novelties that disturb his dominions. Workers’ unions infuriate and scare him more than the hilt of a knife.
On the sugarcane plantations of northern Argentina, the Familiar is responsible for the obedience of the peons. If one answers back or acts impertinently, the Familiar devours him in a single gulp. He moves with a clank of chains and stinks of sulphur, but no one knows if he is the devil in person or just an official. Only his victims have seen him, and no one seems able to add up the accounts. It is rumored that at night the Familiar turns into an enormous snake and patrols the sheds where the peons sleep, or that he crouches in wait on the roads in the form of a dog with flaming eyes, all black, with huge teeth and claws.
(103 and 328)
A Wake for a Little Angel
In the northern provinces of Argentina, they don’t weep for the death of small children. One less mouth on earth, one more angel in heaven. Death is drunk and dances from the first cock-crow, sucking in long draughts of carob-bean liquor and chicha to the rhythm of bass drum and guitar. While the dancers whirl and stomp their feet, the child is passed from arm to arm. Once the child has been well rocked and fully celebrated, everyone breaks into song to start it on its flight to Paradise. There goes the little traveler, clothed in its Sunday best, as the song swells; and they bid it farewell, setting off fireworks, taking great care not to burn its wings.
(104)
1945: The Fields of Tucumán
Yupanqui
He has the stony face of an Indian who stares impassively at the mountain that stares back at him, but he comes from the plains of the south, from the echoless pampa that hides nothing, this gaucho singer of the mysteries of the Argentine north. He comes on a horse, stopping anyplace, with anyone, at the whim of the road. To continue his journey he sings, singing what he has traveled, Atahualpa Yupanqui. And he sings to keep history going, because the history of the poor
is either sung or lost as well he knows, he who is left-handed on the guitar and in his thinking about the world.
(202, 270, and 472)
1946: La Paz
The Rosca
At the summit there are three; at the foot of the mountain three million. The mountain is tin and is called Bolivia.
The three at the summit form the rosca: Simón Patiño in the center; on one side, Carlos Aramayo; on the other, Mauricio Hochschild. Half a century ago, Patiño was a down-and-out miner, but a fairy touched him with her magic wand and turned him into one of the world’s richest men. Now he wears a vest with a gold chain, and kings and presidents sit at his table. Aramayo comes from the local aristocracy, Hochschild, from the airplane that brought him to Bolivia. Each of them has more money than the state.
All that the tin earns remains outside Bolivia. To avoid taxes, Patiño’s headquarters are in the United States, Aramayo’s in Switzerland, and Hochschild’s in Chile. Patiño pays Bolivia fifty dollars a year in income tax, Aramayo twenty-two, Hochschild nothing. Of every two children born at the rosca’s mines, one doesn’t survive.
Each member of the rosca has at his disposal a newspaper and various ministers and legislators. It is traditional for the foreign minister to receive a monthly salary from Patiño Mines. But now that President Gualberto Villarroel suggests the rosca pay taxes and salaries that are not merely symbolic, what is there to do but hatch a plot?
(97)
1946: La Paz
Villarroel
President Villarroel does not defend himself. He abandons himself to fate—as if it were a matter of fate.
He is attacked by paid gunmen followed by a great motley crowd of godly women and students. Brandishing torches, black flags, and bloody sheets, the insurgents invade the government palace, throw Villarroel off a balcony, then hang what’s left of him, naked, from a lamppost.
The Memory of Fire Trilogy: Genesis, Faces and Masks, and Century of the Wind Page 83