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

Along the Pacific shores and through the Andes, from town to town, Don Simón makes his pilgrimage. He never wanted to be a tree, but the wind. For a quarter of a century he has been raising dust on America’s roads. Since Sucre ousted him from Chuquisaca, he has founded many schools and candle factories and published two books with his own hands, letter by letter, since no typographer can cope with so many brackets and synoptic charts. This old vagabond, bald and ugly and potbellied, tanned by the sun, carries on his back a trunk of manuscripts condemned by lack of money and readers. He carries no clothing. He has only what he wears.

Bolívar used to call him, My teacher, my Socrates. He said, You have molded my heart for the great and the beautiful. People clench their teeth to keep from laughing when mad Rodríguez launches into his perorations about the tragic destiny of these Hispanic-American lands.

“We are blind! Blind!”

Almost no one listens to him, no one believes him. They take him for a Jew, because he goes about sowing children wherever he passes, and does not baptize them with Saints’ names, but calls them Corncob, Calabash, Carrot and other heresies. He has changed his surname three times and says he was born in Caracas, but also that he was born in Philadelphia and in Sanlúcar de Barrameda. It is rumored that one of his schools, in Conceptión in Chile, was destroyed by an earthquake which God sent when he learned that Don Simón taught anatomy parading himself stark naked before the students.

Each day Don Simón grows more lonely. The most audacious, most lovable of America’s thinkers, every day more lonely.

At eighty, he writes: I wanted to make the earth a paradise for all. I made it a hell for myself.

(298)

The Ideas of Simón Rodriguez: “Either We Invent or We Are Lost”

Look at the way Europe invents, and look how America imitates!

Some see prosperity in having their ports full of foreign ships, and their homes turned into warehouses for foreign effects. Every day brings a shipment of ready-made clothing, even caps for the Indians. Soon we shall see little gilded packages, with the royal coat of arms, containing earth prepared “by a new process,” for the lads accustomed to eating earth.

Women making their confessions in French! Missionarees absolveeng seens een Spaneesh!

America should not servilely imitate, but be original.

The wisdom of Europe and the prosperity of the United States are, in America, two enemies of freedom of thought. The new republics do not want to admit anything that does not carry a pass … To form their institutions, the statesmen of those nations consulted no one but reason; and this they found on their own soil. Imitate originality, since you try to imitate everything!

Where shall we go in search of models? We are independent, but not free; masters of our soil, but not of ourselves.

Let us open up history; and for that which is not yet written, let each read it in his own memory.

(285)

The Precursors

Misery is not being able to think or store in the mind any memory except pain, says Francisco Bilbao, and adds that the exploitation of man by man leaves man no time to be man. Society is divided into those who can do everything and those who do do everything. To revive Chile, giant buried under weeds, an end must be put to a system that denies shelter to those who toil to build palaces, and dresses in rags those who weave the best clothing.

The precursors of socialism in Chile are not yet thirty years old. Francisco Bilbao and Santiago Arcos, tuxedoed young men cultivated in Paris, have betrayed their class. Searching for a society of solidarity, they have in the course of this year set off various military rebellions and popular uprisings throughout the country, against the wig-wearers and the monks, and private property.

On the last day of the year the last revolutionary bastion falls, in the city of La Serena. Many reds also fall — before firing squads. Bilbao, who on another occasion escaped disguised as a woman, this time has fled over the rooftops and gone into exile with cassock and missal.

(39)

“What has independence meant to the poor?” the Chilean Santiago Arcos asks himself in jail.

Since independence the government is and has been of the rich. The poor have been soldiers, national militias, have voted as their employer told them, have worked the land, have dug ditches, have worked the mines, have carried on their backs, have cultivated the country, have kept on earning a penny and a half, have been whipped and pilloried … The poor have enjoyed glorious independence as much as the horses that charged against the king’s troops in Chacabuco and Maipú.

(306)

The People of Chile Sing to the Glory of Paradise

Saint Peter, the patron of me and of you ,

sent an acolyte out for some sausage and wine

and a nice side of bacon and pigs’ feet fine

to go in the pot for a succulent stew,

with a good heady punch, the way earth folks do;

and, not to be supercilious,

a basket of tortillas

so that little angels all

could out of heavenly boredom fall

and have themselves a genuine ball.

Saint Anthony, when the hour was tardy

swayed to his feet and said “Well, sirs,

damn all the devils in hell, sirs,

isn’t this quite a party!

To no one’s abuse

it’s time to let loose

with an innocent ruse:

I’ll go up to Saint Clara

and before she’s aware-a’

her plump little bottom I’m going to goose.”

(182)

The Lines of the Hand

Even the little altar angels wear red sashes in Argentina. To refuse challenges the fury of the dictator. Like many enemies of Rosas, Doctor Federico Mayer Arnold has suffered exile and prison.

Not long ago this young Buenos Aires professor published a book in Santiago de Chile. The book, adorned with French, English, and Latin quotations, began this way: Three cities have expelled me from their bosoms and four jails have received me to theirs. I have, however, thrown my thoughts freely in the despot’s face. Now again I launch my ideas into the world, and await without fear what Fate has in store for me.

Two months later, on turning a corner, Doctor Federico Mayer Arnold falls in a spray of blood. But not by order of the tyrant: Federico’s mother-in-law, Doña María, an ill-humored woman from Mendoza, has paid the knife-wielding thugs. She has ordered them to kill her son-in-law because he does not please her.

(14)

The Treasure of the Jesuits

She knows. That’s why the crow follows her, flies behind her every morning, on the way to Mass, and waits for her at the church door.

She has just had her hundredth birthday. She will tell the secret when she is ready to die. If not, Divine Providence would punish her.

“Three days hence,” comes the promise.

And after three days, “Next month.”

And after the month, “Tomorrow we’ll see.”

When people pester her, her eyes go blank and she pretends to be dazed, or explodes with laughter moving her little legs, as if being so old were something naughty.

The whole town of La Cruz knows that she knows. She was just a little girl when she helped the Jesuits bury the treasure in the Misiones woods, but she hasn’t forgotten.