Eduardo Galeano - The Memory of Fire Trilogy - Genesis, Faces and Masks, and Century of the Wind

(5)

Bolívar

An earthquake demolishes Caracas, La Guaira, San Felipe, Barquisimeto, and Mérida. They are the Venezuelan cities which have proclaimed independence. In Caracas, center of the Creole insurrection, ten thousand lie dead beneath the ruins. Nothing is heard but supplications and curses as people seek bodies among the stones.

Can God be Spanish? The earthquake has swallowed the gallows erected by the patriots and has not left standing one of the churches which had sung the Te Deum in honor of the nascent republic. In the ruined Mercedes church the column bearing Spain’s imperial coat of arms still stands. Coro, Maracaibo, Valencia and Angostura, cities loyal to the king, have not suffered a scratch.

In Caracas, the air burns. From the ruins rises a dense dust which the eye cannot penetrate. A monk harangues the people, proclaiming that God will no longer tolerate such effrontery.

“Vengeance!”

The multitude presses around him in what was the San Jacinto convent. Perched on the ruins of the altar, the monk demands punishment for those who brought on God’s wrath.

“Vengeance!” roars the scourge of Christ, and his accusing finger points at a patriot officer who, his arms crossed, contemplates the scene. The crowd turns against the officer — short, bony, in a brilliant uniform — and advances to crush him.

Simón Bolívar neither implores nor retreats: he attacks. Sword in hand he plunges through the frenzy, mounts the altar and with one blow topples the apocalyptic monk.

The people, silent, disperse.

(116)

Independence Is Revolution or a Lie

In three military campaigns Morelos has won a good part of Mexico. The Congress of the future republic, a wandering Congress, travels behind its leader. The deputies sleep on the ground and eat soldiers’ rations.

By the light of a thick tallow candle Morelos draws up the essentials of the national Constitution. He proposes a free, independent, and Catholic America; substitutes an income tax for Indian tributes and increases the wages of the poor; confiscates the goods of the enemy; establishes freedom of commerce, but with tariff barriers; suppresses slavery and torture and liquidates the caste system, which bases social differences on the color of skin, so that only vice and virtue distinguish one American from another.

The rich Creoles go from shock to shock as Morelos’s troops march along expropriating fortunes and dividing up haciendas. A war against Spain or a rising of the serfs? This is not the sort of independence they were hoping for. They will make another.

(348)

Boves

In Venezuela the word independence still does not mean much more than freedom of commerce for rich Creoles.

Blacks and browns look to the chief of the Spaniards, a Hercules with red beard and green eyes, as their leader. Slaves run away to find José Tomás Rodríguez Boves, Papa Boves. Ten thousand prairie horsemen set fire to plantations and cut masters’ throats in the name of God and the king. Boves’s flag, a skull on black ground, promises pillage and revenge, war to the death against the cacao oligarchy who want independence from Spain. On the plains of San Mateo, Boves rides his horses into the mansion of the Bolívar family and carves his name with a knife on the door of the main vestibule.

The spear does not repent; the bullet does not repent. Before killing with lead, Boves shoots salvos of gunpowder, for the pleasure of seeing the expressions on his victims’ faces. Among his bravest soldiers he divides up the young ladies of the best families. He enjoys bullfighting elegant patriots, after sticking banderillas in their necks. He cuts heads off as if it were a joke.

Before long now, a spear will pierce him. He will be buried with bound feet.

(160)

The Lake Comes for Him

On the thorny ridge of Tezmalaca the Spaniards catch José María Morelos. After so many mistakes and defeats, they hunt him down in the brambles, his clothing in shreds, without weapons or spurs.

They chain him. They insult him. Lieutenant-Colonel Eugenio Villasana asks, “What would you do if you were the winner, and I the defeated?”

“Give you two hours to confess,” says the priest Morelos, “and shoot you.”

They take him to the secret cells of the Inquisition.

They humiliate him on his knees. They shoot him in the back.

The viceroy says that the rebel died repentant. The Mexican people say that the lake heard the firing squad’s blast and overflowed to carry off the body.

(178 and 332)

Navigators of Seas and Libraries

Julien Mellet, writer and traveler, relates his adventures in South America to the European public. Among other things he describes a very lively and lascivious dance much done in Quillota, in Chile, and which was brought by the blacks from Guinea. Pretending to look the other way, Mellet copies a description of a dance of Montevideo’s blacks, as published by the traveler Anthony Helms eight years previously in London. Helms had stolen his text line by line from the book that Dom Pernetty published in Paris in 1770. Pernetty, for his part, had portrayed at first hand the dance of the Montevideo slaves with words astonishingly similar to those that Father Jean Baptiste Labat had devoted to the blacks of Haiti, in a book published half a century earlier in The Hague.

From the Caribbean to the Chilean city of Quillota, passing through Montevideo, and from The Hague to Paris, passing through London, those passages of Father Labat’s have traveled much further than their author. Without passport or disguise.

(19)

Ferdinand VII

The starched gentlemen of Yucatàn cross the Plaza de Armas in Mérida, whitened by dust and sun, and enter the cathedral in very solemn procession. From the shade of its portico, the Indian tamale and necklace vendors don’t understand why the bells ring so merrily, or know whose is that crowned head that the gentlemen carry on a banner.

The colonial aristocracy is celebrating the news from Madrid. It has been belatedly learned that the French were driven out and Ferdinand VII reigns in Spain. Messengers report that the cry being heard around the monarch is “Long live chains!” As court jesters tinkle their little bells, King Ferdinand orders the guerrillas who brought him to the throne jailed or shot, revives the Inquisition, and restores the privileges of the clergy and nobility.

(339)

The Hides Cycle on the River Plata

On the tip of a spear, the sharp-edged half-moon reaches for the fleeing animal’s legs. Just one slash: the horseman strikes with sure aim, and the calf limps and gasps and falls. The horseman dismounts. He cuts the throat and begins to skin.

He does not always kill that way. Easier to drive the maverick cattle with yells into the corrals and knife them there, thousands and thousands of wild cattle or horses stampeded to their death; easier yet to surprise the animals in the hills by night, while they sleep.

The gaucho pulls off the hide and stakes it out in the sun. Of the remainder, what the mouth doesn’t want is left for the crows.

The Robertson brothers, John and William, Scottish merchants, go around these lands with sacks that look like sausages, stuffed with gold coins. From an estancia in Curuzú-Cuatiá they send ten thousand hides to the town of Goya, in sixty carts.