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

The vice president of the United States, John Calhoun, believes that God created blacks to cut wood, pick cotton, and carry water for the chosen people. Textile factories demand more cotton and cotton demands more land and more blacks. There are powerful reasons, said Calhoun last year, for Texas to form part of the United States. At that time President Jackson, who breathes frontiers with an athlete’s lungs, had already sent his friend Sam Houston to Texas.

The rugged Houston forces his way in with his fists, makes himself an army general, and proclaims the independence of Texas. The new state, soon to be another star on the United States flag, has more land than France.

And war breaks out against Mexico.

(128 and 207)

The Free World Grows

Sam Houston offers land at four cents an acre. Battalions of North American volunteers pour in by every road and weapons arrive by the shipload from New York and New Orleans.

The comet that announced calamity in the skies over Mexico was no news to anybody. Mexico has lived in a perpetual state of calamity since the murderers of Hidalgo and Morelos declared independence in order to grab the country for themselves.

The war does not last long. Mexican General Santa Anna arrives calling for a bloodbath, and makes one at the Alamo, but at San Jacinto loses four hundred men in a quarter of an hour. Santa Anna gives up Texas in exchange for his own life and returns to Mexico City with his beaten army, his personal chef, his seven-thousand-dollar sword, his countless decorations and his wagonload of fighting cocks.

General Houston celebrates his victory by naming himself president of Texas.

Texas’s constitution assures the master perpetual rights over his slaves, as legitimately acquired property. Extend the area of liberty had been the slogan of the victorious troops.

(128)

Portraits of the Frontier Hero

At the outbreak of the Texas war, when fortune still smiles on the Mexican troops, Colonel Davy Crockett falls pierced by bayonets. He falls in the Alamo fort, together with his band of heroic outlaws, and the buzzards finish his story.

The United States, which fattens on the lands of Indians and Mexicans, has lost one of its frontier heroes. Davy Crockett had a rifle named Betsy which could kill five bears with a single bullet.

Crockett could well have been the son of Daniel Boone, the legendary pioneer of the previous century, a very macho and lonely killer, who hated civilization but earned a living by placing colonists on lands robbed from his Indian friends. And he could well have been the father of Natty Bumppo, a fictional character so famous that he now seems flesh and blood.

Since Fenimore Cooper published The Last of the Mohicans, Natty Bumppo, the crude and noble hunter, has incorporated himself into the daily life of the United States. Nature has taught him all he knows of morality and his energy comes from the mountains and the woods. He is ugly, only one tooth in his enormous mouth; but without expecting anything in return he protects beautiful white virgins, who, thanks to him, pass invincible through thicket and desire. Natty Bumppo praises silence with many words and tells no lie when he says that he doesn’t fear death, or when he admires the Indians while ruefully killing them.

(149 and 218)

The Colt

Samuel Colt, engineer, registers in Hartford, Connecticut, the patent of the “revolving pistol” he has invented. It is a pistol with a revolving cylinder of five shots, which kills five times in twenty seconds.

From Texas comes the first order.

(305)

Morazán

A storm of cassocks explodes. Rafael Carrera is the lightning flash that instills fear, and all over Guatemala roll the thunderclaps: “Long live religion! Death to the foreigners! Death to Morazán!”

No candle stays unlit. Nuns pray so fast that in nine seconds they roll off nine novenas. Choirs intone salutations to Mary and curse Morazán with the same fervor.

Francisco Morazán, president of Central America, is the heretical foreigner who has unleashed these mystical furies. Morazán, born in Honduras, has not only unified the Central American provinces into one nation, he has also reduced counts and marquesses to the category of mere citizens, and has created public schools that teach things of this world and say nothing of Heaven. According to his laws, a cross is no longer necessary for a grave nor a priest for a wedding, and he makes no distinction between a child born in the conjugal bed and a child made, without previous contract, on the straw of a stable, the one having the same inheritance rights as the other. Gravest of all, Morazán has separated Church and State, decreed freedom to believe or not to believe, suppressed the tithes and first fruits of the Lord’s officers and put their lands up for sale.

The monks blame Morazán for the plague that is devastating Guatemala. Cholera is killing people off, and from the pulpits rain fulminating accusations: Morazán has poisoned the water; the Antichrist has pacted with the Devil to sell him the souls of the dead.

The people of the mountains rise against the poisoner. Rafael Carrera, the hog farmer who leads the insurrection, is just over twenty and already has three bullets in his body. He goes about covered with scapularies and medals and with a green bough stuck in his hat.

(220 and 253)

Rosas

Great tamer of ponies and people, Juan Manuel de Rosas is the boss of the River Plata ranges. Guitarist and dancer, he tells the stories that provoke the most fear or laughter around the campfire, but he is made of marble and even his children call him “master.” He has the cook who ruins his chicken arrested; and he has himself whipped when he carelessly violates one of his own rules.

His estancias are the most prosperous; his meat-salting plants are the best organized. Rosas owns the best of the sea of grasslands that extend from the port of Buenos Aires to the Indian villages.

Rosas governs. He has decreed a customs law that protects Argentinian production of ponchos and mattresses, shoes, carriages, ships, wine and furniture, and he has closed the interior rivers to foreign merchants.

The Revue des Deux Mondes demands that France give a lesson in civilization and discipline to the degenerate sons of the Spanish conquest. The French squadron, under command of Admiral Leblanc, blockades Buenos Aires, the only Argentine port equipped for overseas commerce.

(166, 271, and 336)

The Slaughterhouse

Esteban Echeverría writes the first story of River Plata literature. In The Slaughterhouse, the Rosas dictatorship is the harassment of a defenseless Buenos Aires doctor by a knife-wielding mob.

Born in the slums and hardened by street-fights, but polished in Paris, Echeverría despises “the rabble.” A slaughterhouse in the south of the city offers a fantastic setting for the writer to describe dogs fighting over entrails with the black women eviscerators, and to tell of the “fuck-you’s” bubbling up from vulgar throats as blood flows from the beasts’ necks. The throat-cutter of the story wears a gaucho’s poncho, has his face daubed with blood, buries his knife up to the handle in a steer’s throat, and later corners the elegant black-tied gentleman who has refused him common courtesy.

(104)

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