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

by Eduardo Galeano

  The Chicanos are the descendants of those who came across the border river from Mexico to harvest cotton, oranges, tomatoes, and potatoes at dirt-cheap wages, and who stayed on in these southwestern and western states, which until little more than a century ago were the north of Mexico. In these lands, no longer theirs, they are used and despised.

  Of every ten North Americans killed in Vietnam, six are blacks or Hispanics. And to them they say:

  If you’re so tough and strong, you go to the front lines first.

  (182, 282, 369, and 403)

  1968: San Juan, Puerto Rico

  Albizu

  Puerto Ricans are also good at dying in Vietnam in the name of those who took away their country.

  The island of Puerto Rico, North American colony, consumes what it doesn’t produce and produces what it doesn’t consume. On its abandoned lands not even the rice and beans of the national dish are grown. Washington teaches the Puerto Ricans to breathe refrigerated air, eat canned food, drive long, well-chromed cars, sink up to the neck in debt, and lose their souls watching television.

  Pedro Albizu Campos died a while back after almost twenty years spent in U.S. jails for his unceasing activities as an agitator. To win back the fatherland, one should love it with one’s soul and one’s life, he thought, as if it were a woman; to make it breathe again, one should rescue it with bullets.

  He always wore a black tie for the lost fatherland. He was more and more alone.

  (87, 116, 199, and 275)

  1968: Mexico City

  The Students

  invade the streets. Such demonstrations have never been seen before in Mexico, so huge, so joyous, everyone linked arm in arm, singing and laughing. The students cry out against President Díaz Ordaz and his ministerial mummies, and all the others who have taken over Zapata’s and Pancho Villa’s revolution.

  In Tlatelolco, a plaza where Indians and conquistadors once fought to the death, a trap is sprung. The army blocks every exit with strategically placed tanks and machineguns. Inside the corral, readied for the sacrifice, the students are hopelessly jammed together. A continuous wall of rifles with fixed bayonets advances to seal the trap.

  Flares, one green, one red, give the signal. Hours later, a woman searches for her child, her shoes leaving bloody tracks on the ground.

  (299 and 347)

  “There was much, much blood,” says the mother of a student,

  “so much that I felt it thick on my hands. There was also blood on the walls. I think the walls of Tlatelolco have their pores full of blood; all Tlatelolco breathes blood … The bodies lay on the concrete waiting to be removed. I counted many from the window, about sixty-eight. They were piling them up in the rain. I remembered that my son Carlitos was wearing a green corduroy jacket and I thought I saw it on each body …”

  (347)

  1968: Mexico City

  Revueltas

  He has been around for half a century, but repeats daily the crime of being young. Always at the center of any uproar, José Revueltas now denounces the owners of power in Mexico, who, out of incurable hatred for all that pulses, grows, and changes, have murdered three hundred students in Tlatelolco.

  “The gentlemen of the government are dead. For that they kill us.”

  In Mexico, power assimilates or annihilates, shoots deadly lightning with a hug or a slug, consigns to grave or prison the impudent ones who will not be bought off with a sinecure. The incorrigible Revueltas rarely sleeps outside a cell; and when he does, he spends the night stretched out on some bench in a park, or on a desk at the university. Hated by the police for being a revolutionary and by dogmatists of all types for being free, he is condemned by pious leftists for his predilection for cheap bars. Not long ago, his comrades provided him with a guardian angel to save him from temptation, but the angel had to pawn his wings to pay for the sprees they enjoyed together.

  (373)

  1968: Banks of the River Yaqui

  The Mexican Revolution Isn’t There Anymore

  The Yaqui Indians, warriors for centuries, call upon Lázaro Cárdenas. They meet him on a bright sunny prairie in northern Mexico, near their ancestral river.

  Standing in the shade of a leafy breadfruit tree, the chiefs of the eight Yaqui tribes welcome him. On their heads gleam the plumes reserved for great occasions.

  “Remember, Tata?” Thirty years have passed and this is a great occasion. The top chief speaks: “Tata Lázaro, do you remember? You gave us back the lands. You gave us hospitals and schools.”

  At the end of each sentence the chiefs beat the ground with their staves, and the dry echo reverberates across the prairie.

  “You remember? We want you to know, the rich have taken back the lands. The hospitals have been turned into barracks. The schools are cantinas.”

  Cárdenas listens and says nothing.

  (45)

  1968: Mexico City

  Rulfo

  In the silence, the heartbeat of another Mexico. Juan Rulfo, teller of tales about the misadventures of the dead and the living, keeps silent. Fifteen years ago he said what he had to say, in a small novel and a few short stories, and since then he says nothing. Or rather, he made the deepest kind of love, and then went to sleep.

  1969: Lima

  Arguedas

  splits his skull with a bullet. His story is the story of Peru: Sick with Peru, he kills himself.

  The son of whites, José María Arguedas was raised by Indians and spoke Quechua throughout his childhood. At seventeen, he was torn away from the sierra and thrust into the coastal area—from the small communal towns to the proprietorial cities.

  He learned the language of the victors and spoke and wrote it. He never wrote about the vanquished, rather from them. He knew how to express them; but his feat was his curse. He felt that everything about him was treachery or failure; he felt torn apart. He couldn’t be Indian; he didn’t want to be white. He couldn’t endure both the scorning and the being scorned.

  This lonely wayfarer walked at the edge of an abyss, between two enemy worlds that divided his soul. Many an avalanche of anguish swept down on him, worse than any landslide of mud and rocks, until finally he was overwhelmed.

  (30 and 256)

  1969: Sea of Tranquillity

  The Discovery of the Earth

  The space ship from Houston, Texas, puts down its long spider legs on the Moon. Astronauts Armstrong and Aldrin see the Earth as no one has seen it before, an Earth that is not the generous breast that gives us milk and poison to suck, but a handsome frozen stone rotating in the solitude of the universe. The Earth seems to be childless, uninhabited, perhaps even indifferent, as if it didn’t feel a single tickle from the human passions that swarm on its soil.

  Via television and radio, the astronauts send us preprogrammed words about the great step that humanity is taking, while they stick the flag of the United States of America into the stony Sea of Tranquillity.

  1969: Bogotá

  The Urchins

  They have the street for a home. They are cats made for jumping and slapping, sparrows for flying, little cocks for fighting. They go about in packs, in gangs. They sleep in clusters, bunched together against the freezing dawns. They eat what they steal or the leftovers they beg or the garbage they find; they have grey teeth and faces burned by the cold.

  Arturo Dueñas, of the Twenty-second Street gang, leaves his pack, fed up with offering his bottom to be spanked just because he’s the smallest, the bedbug, the tick. He decides he’ll fare better on his own.

  One night, a night like any other, Arturo slips under a restaurant table, grabs a chicken leg, and brandishing it like a flag, scoots off down an alley. When he finds some obscure nook, he sits down to have supper. A little dog watches him and licks its chops. Several times Arturo pushes it away, but the dog returns. They examine each other: The two are equals, sons of nobody, beaten, pure bone and grime. Arturo resigns himself and shares.

  Since then they’ve gone together on
winged feet, sharing the danger, the booty, and the lice. Arturo, who has never talked to anybody, opens up, and the little dog sleeps curled up at his feet.

  One accursed day the police catch Arturo robbing buns and haul him to the Fifth Precinct for a tremendous beating. When, in time, Arturo returns to the street, all battered, the little dog is nowhere to be seen. Arturo runs back and forth, searching wildly everywhere, but it doesn’t appear. A lot of questions, and nothing. A lot of calling, and nothing. No one in the world is so alone as this child of seven who is alone on the streets of the city of Bogotá, hoarse from so much screaming.

  (68 and 342)

  1969: Any City

  Someone

  On a corner, by a red light, someone swallows fire, someone washes windshields, someone sells Kleenex, chewing gum, little flags, and dolls that make pee-pee. Someone listens to the horoscope on the radio, pleased that the stars are concerned about him. Walking between the tall buildings, someone would like to buy silence or air, but doesn’t have the cash. In a filthy barrio, amid swarms of flies above and armies of rats below, someone hires a woman for three minutes. In a whorehouse cell the raped becomes the rapist, better than making it with a donkey in the river. Someone talks to no one on the phone, after hanging up the receiver. Someone talks to no one in front of the TV set. Someone talks to no one in front of a one-armed bandit. Someone waters a pot of plastic flowers. Someone climbs on an empty bus, at dawn, and the bus stays empty.

  1969: Rio de Janeiro

  Expulsion from the Slums

  They refuse to go. They have been the poorest of the poor in the countryside and now they’re the poorest in the city, always the last in line, people with cheap hands and dancing feet. Here, at least, they live near the places where they earn their bread. The inhabitants of Praia do Pinto and the other slums covering Rio de Janeiro’s mountains have turned stubborn. But the military has long eyed these tracts, highly salable and resalable and well-suited for speculation, and so the problem will be solved by means of an opportune fire. The firemen never turn up. Dawn is the hour of tears and cinders. After fire destroys the houses made of garbage, they sweep up the people like garbage and take them far away for dumping.

  (340)

  1969: Baixo Grande

  A Castle of Garbage

  Old man Gabriel dos Santos does what his dreams tell him to do. He dreams the same crazy dreams in Brazil that Antonio Gaudí dreamed decades ago in Catalonia, in far-off Barcelona, although old Gabriel has never heard of Gaudí or seen his works.

  As soon as he awakes, old Gabriel starts modeling with his hands the marvels he sees in his dreams, before they get away from him. Thus he has built the House of the Flower. In it he lives, on the slope of a hill beaten by the ocean wind. From dream to dream, through the years, old Gabriel’s home keeps growing, this strange castle or beast of bright colors and sinuous forms, all made of garbage.

  Old Gabriel, worker in the salt mines, never went to school, never watched television, never had money. He knows no rules, has no models. He plays around, in his own free style, with whatever leftovers the nearby city of Cabo Frío throws his way: fenders, headlights, splintered windows and smashed bottles, broken dishes, bits of old iron, chair legs, wheels …

  (171)

  1969: Arque Pass

  The Last Stunt of Aviator Barrientos

  Cardinal Maurer says that President Barrientos is like Saint Paul, because he roams the Bolivian countryside handing out truths. Barrientos also hands out money and soccer balls. He comes and goes, raining banknotes by helicopter. Gulf Oil gave the helicopter to Barrientos in exchange for the two billion dollars’ worth of gas and one billion of petroleum that Barrientos gave Gulf Oil.

  On this same helicopter, Barrientos paraded with Che Guevara’s body tied to its skids through the skies of Bolivia. On this helicopter Barrientos arrives at Arque Pass on one of his incessant junkets, and as usual tosses money down on the campesinos; but on taking off, he collides with a wire fence and crashes against some rocks, burning himself alive. After burning so many pictures and books, fiery Barrientos dies cooked to a crisp in his helicopter, filled to the brim with banknotes that burn with him.

  (16, 17, and 474)

  1969: San Salvador and Tegucigalpa

  Two Turbulent Soccer Matches

  are played between Honduras and El Salvador. Ambulances remove the dead and wounded from the stands, while fans continue the stadium uproar in the streets.

  Immediately, the two countries break relations. In Tegucigalpa, automobile windshields carry stickers that say: Honduran—grab a stick, be a man, kill a Sal-va-dor-e-an. In San Salvador, the newspapers urge the army to invade Honduras to teach those barbarians a lesson. Honduras expels Salvadoran campesinos, who are mostly unaware they are foreigners, having never seen an identity document. The Honduran government forces the Salvadorans to leave with nothing but what they have on, and then burns their shacks, describing the expulsion as “agrarian reform.” The government of San Salvador considers all Hondurans who live there to be spies.

  War soon breaks out. The army of El Salvador crosses into Honduras and advances, machinegunning border villages.

  (84, 125, and 396)

  1969: San Salvador and Tegucigalpa

  The Soccer War

  pits as enemies two fragments of Central America, shreds of what was a single republic a century and a half ago.

  Honduras, a small agrarian country, is dominated by big landlords.

  El Salvador, a small agrarian country, is dominated by big landlords.

  The campesinos of Honduras have neither land nor work.

  The campesinos of El Salvador have neither land nor work.

  In Honduras there is a military dictatorship born of a coup d’état.

  In El Salvador there is a military dictatorship born of a coup d’état.

  The general who governs Honduras was trained at the School of the Americas in Panama.

  The general who governs El Salvador was trained at the School of the Americas in Panama.

  From the United States come the weapons and advisers of the dictator of Honduras.

  From the United States come the weapons and advisers of the dictator of El Salvador.

  The dictator of Honduras accuses the dictator of El Salvador of being a Communist in the pay of Fidel Castro.

  The dictator of El Salvador accuses the dictator of Honduras of being a Communist in the pay of Fidel Castro.

  The war lasts one week. While war continues, the people of Honduras think their enemy is the people of El Salvador and the people of El Salvador think their enemy is the people of Honduras. They leave four thousand dead on the battlefields.

  (84 and 125)

  1969: Port-au-Prince

  A Law Condemns to Death Anyone Who Says or Writes Red Words in Haiti

  Article One: Communist activities are declared to be crimes against the security of the state, in whatsoever form: any profession of Communist faith, verbal or written, public or private, any propagation of Communist or anarchist doctrines through lectures, speeches, conversations, readings, public or private meetings, by way of pamphlets, posters, newspapers, magazines, books, and pictures; any oral or written correspondence with local or foreign associations, or with persons dedicated to the diffusion of Communist or anarchist ideas; and furthermore, the act of receiving, collecting, or giving funds directly or indirectly destined for the propagation of said ideas.

  Article Two: The authors and accomplices of these crimes shall be sentenced to death. Their movable and immovable property shall be confiscated and sold for the benefit of the state.

  Dr. François Duvalier

  President-for-Life

  of the Republic of Haiti

  (351)

  1970: Montevideo

  Portrait of a Torture Trainer

  The Tupamaro guerrillas execute Dan Anthony Mitrione, one of the North American instructors of the Uruguayan police.

  The dead man gave his courses
to officers in a soundproof basement. For his practical lessons he used beggars and prostitutes pulled off the street. He showed his pupils the effects of various electric voltages on the most sensitive parts of the human body, and how to apply emetics and other chemical substances efficaciously. In recent months three men and a woman died during these classes in the Technique of Interrogation.

  Mitrione despised disorder and dirt. A torture chamber should be as aseptic as an operating room. And he detested incorrect language: “Not balls, commissioner. Testicles.”

  He also abominated useless expense, unnecessary movement, avoidable damage.

  “It’s an art, more than a technique,” he said. “The precise pain in the precise place, in the precise amount.”

  (225)

  1970: Managua

  Rugama

  A distinguished poet, a little man in a surplice who received Holy Communion standing up, shoots his last bullet and dies resisting a whole battalion of Somoza’s troops.

  Leonel Rugama was twenty.

  Of friends, he preferred chess players.

  Of chess players, those who lose because of the girl passing by.

  Of those who pass by, the one who stays.

  Of those who stay, the one who has yet to come.

  Of heroes, he preferred those who don’t say they are dying for their country.

  Of countries, the one born of his death.

  (399)

  1970: Santiago de Chile

  Landscape after Elections

  In a display of unpardonably bad conduct, the Chilean people elect Salvador Allende president. Another president, of the International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation, offers a million dollars to whoever can put an end to this disgrace, while the president of the United States earmarks ten million for the affair. Richard Nixon instructs the CIA to prevent Allende from sitting in the presidential chair; or, should he sit, to see that the chair doesn’t stay under him long.