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

Since then the missing leg hurts. Today, it hurts more than ever, hurts him excruciatingly, because the rebellious people have broken open the monument that guarded it and are dragging the leg through the streets of Mexico.

(227)

The Invasion of the Merchants

Three years ago, the British squadron humiliated the Celestial Empire. After the blockade of Canton and the rest of the coast, the English imposed opium consumption on the Chinese, in the name of Freedom of Commerce and Western Civilization.

After China, Argentina. The long years blockading the port of Buenos Aires have availed little or nothing. Juan Manuel de Rosas, who has his portrait worshipped and governs surrounded by buffoons dressed as kings, still refuses to open Argentina’s rivers. English and French bankers and merchants have for years been demanding that this insolence be punished.

Many Argentines fall defending their land, but finally the guns of the warships of the world’s most powerful countries smash the chains stretched across the Paraná River.

(271 and 336)

The Conquest

“Mexico sparkles before our eyes”: with these words President Adams had dazzled himself at the turn of the century.

At the first bite, Mexico lost Texas.

Now the United States has all Mexico on its plate.

General Santa Anna, master of retreat, flees to the south, leaving a trail of swords and corpses in the ditches. From defeat to defeat, he withdraws his army of bleeding, ill fed, never-paid soldiers, and beside them the ancient cannons hauled by mules, and behind them the caravan of women carrying children, rags, and tortillas in baskets. The army of General Santa Anna, with more officers than soldiers, is only good for killing poor compatriots.

In Chapultepec Castle, Mexican cadets, practically children, do not surrender. They resist the bombardment with an obstinacy not born of hope. Stones collapse over their bodies. Among the stones the victors plant the stars and stripes, which rises from the smoke over the huge valley.

The conquerors enter the capital. The city of Mexico: eight engineers, two thousand monks, two thousand five hundred lawyers, twenty thousand beggars.

The people, huddled together, growl. From the roofs, it rains stones.

(7, 127, 128, and 187)

The Conquistadors

In Washington, President Polk proclaims that his nation is now as big as all Europe. No one can halt the onslaught of this young voracious country. To the south and to the west, the United States grows, killing Indians, trampling on neighbors, or even paying. It bought Louisiana from Napoleon and now offers Spain a hundred million dollars for the island of Cuba.

But the right of conquest is more glorious and cheaper. The treaty with Mexico is signed in the Villa of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Mexico cedes to the United States, pistol at chest, half of its territory.

(128)

The Irishmen

In the main plaza of Mexico City, the conquerors mete out punishment. They scourge the rebel Mexicans. They brand with hot irons the faces of the Irish deserters and then hang them from the gallows.

The Saint Patrick Irish battalion came in with the invaders, but fought alongside the invaded. From the north to Molino del Rey, the Irish made theirs the fate, ill fate, of the Mexicans. Many died defending the Churubusco monastery without ammunition. The prisoners, their faces burned, rock to and fro on the gallows.

(128)

An Old Man in a White Poncho in a House of Red Stone

He never liked cities. His heart’s desire is a garden in Paraguay and his carriage, a wheelbarrow full of medicinal greens. A cane helps him to walk, and black Ansina, a minstrel of happy songs, helps him to work the ground and to receive without somber shadows the light of each day.

“José Artigas, at your service.”

He offers maté and respect, but few words to the visitors that sometimes come from Uruguay.

“So my name is still heard over there.”

He is past eighty years old, twenty-eight of them in exile, and he won’t go back. The ideas he created and the people he loved are still beaten. Artigas well knows the weight of the world and of memory, and prefers to be silent. There is no plant to heal the wounds inside a man.

(277)

José Artigas, According to Domingo Faustino Sarmiento

He was a highwayman, no more, no less. Thirty years of practice in murdering or robbing are indisputable qualifications for the the exercise of command over a horde of mutinous Indian peasant scum for a political revolution, and among them the fearsome name of Artigas is encrusted as bandit chief … Who obeyed him? The poor or savage Indians whom he led by right of being the most savage, the most cruel, the greatest enemy of whites … Uncouth, since he never frequented cities, foreign to all human tradition of free government; and although white, commanding natives even less educated than himself … Considering the antecedents and actions of Artigas, we feel a sort of revolt of reason, of the instincts of the man of white race, when someone tried to endow him with political thought and human sentiment.

(311)

The Lovers (I)

Dramatis Personae.

Camila O’Gorman.Born in Buenos Aires, in a house with three patios, twenty years ago. Educated in the odor of sanctity, to be successively virgin, wife, and mother in the strait and narrow path that leads to conjugal peace, the offices of the needle, evenings at the piano, and the rosary told with black mantilla on head. She has eloped with the parish priest of the Socorro Church. The idea was hers.

Ladislao Gutiérrez.Minister of God. Age twenty-five. Nephew of the governor of Tucumán. He could not sleep after placing the Host on the tongue of that woman kneeling by the light of candles. Ended by dropping missal and cassock, setting loose a stampede of little angels and campanile pigeons.

Adolfo O’Gorman.Begins each meal reciting the ten commandments, from the head of a long mahogany table. From a chaste woman, he has engendered a priest son, a policeman son, and a fugitive daughter. An exemplary father, he is the first to ask exemplary punishment for the horrendous scandal which shames his family. In a letter to Juan Manuel de Rosas, he pleads for a firm hand against the most atrocious and unheard-of act in the country.

Felipe Elortondo Y Palacio.Secretary of the Curia. Also writes to Rosas asking the capture of the lovers and their inflexible punishment, to prevent similar crimes in the future. Explains in his letter that he had nothing to do with the appointment of the priest Gutiérrez, which was an affair of the bishop.

Juan Manuel De Rosas.Orders the lovers hunted down. His messengers gallop from Buenos Aires. They carry a leaflet describing the fugitives. Camila: white, black eyes, pleasant expression; tall, slim body, well distributed. Ladislao: dark, thin, full beard and curly hair. Justice will be done, Rosas promises, to satisfy religion and the laws and to prevent the consequent demoralization, libertinage, and disorder. The whole country is on guard.

Also participating:

The Opposition Press.From Montevideo, Valparaíso, and La Paz, Rosas’s enemies invoke public morality. The daily newspaper El Mercurio Chileno tells its readers: To such an extreme has come the horrible corruption of the customs under the alarming tyranny of the “River Plata Caligula,” that impious and sacrilegious priests of Buenos Aires elope with the daughters of the best society, without the infamous satrap adopting any measure against these monstrous immoralities.