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

(103 and 158)

Bartholomew Columbus, Christopher’s brother and lieutenant, attends an incineration of human flesh.

Six men play the leads in the grand opening of Haiti’s incinerator. The smoke makes everyone cough. The six are burning as a punishment and as a lesson: They have buried the images of Christ and the Virgin that Fray Ramon Pane left with them for protection and consolation. Fray Ramon taught them to pray on their knees, to say the Ave Maria and Paternoster and to invoke the name of Jesus in the face of temptation, injury, and death.

No one has asked them why they buried the images. They were hoping that the new gods would fertilize their fields of corn, cassava, boniato, and beans.

The fire adds warmth to the humid, sticky heat that foreshadows heavy rain.

(103)

In the evening, beside the Ozama River, Christopher Columbus writes a letter. His body creaks with rheumatism, but his heart jumps for joy. The discoverer explains to Their Catholic Majesties that which is plainly evident: Earthly Paradise is on the nipple of a woman’s breast.

He realized it two months ago, when his caravels entered the Gulf of Paria. There ships start rising gently toward the sky … Navigating upstream to where the air has no weight, Columbus has reached the farthest limit of the Orient. In these the world’s most beautiful lands, the men show cleverness, ingenuity, and valor, and the extremely beautiful women wear only their long hair and necklaces of many pearls wound around their bodies. The water, sweet and clear, awakens thirst. Winter does not punish nor summer burn, and the breeze caresses what it touches. The trees offer fresh shade and, within arm’s reach, fruits of great delectability that arouse hunger.

But beyond this greenness and this loveliness no ship can go. This is the frontier of the Orient. Here waters, lands, and islands end. Very high and far away, the Tree of Life spreads its enormous crown and the source of the four sacred rivers bubbles up. One of them is the Orinoco, which I doubt if such a great and deep river is known in the world.

The world is not round. The world is a woman’s tit. The nipple begins in the Gulf of Paria and rises to a point very close to the heavens. The tip, where the juices of Paradise flow, will never be reached by any man.

(53)

The Guaraos, who live in the suburbs of Earthly Paradise, call the rainbow snake of necklaces and the firmament overhead sea. Lightning is glow of the rain. One’s friend, my other heart. The soul, sun of the breast. The owl, lord of the dark night. A walking cane is a permanent grandson; and for “I forgive,” they say I forget.

(17)

The mosques remain open in Granada, seven years after the surrender of this last redoubt of the Moors in Spain. The advance of the cross behind the victory of the sword is slow. Archbishop Cisneros decides that Christ cannot wait.

“Moors” is the Christian Spaniards’ name for Spaniards of Islamic culture, who have been here for eight centuries. Thousands and thousands of Spaniards of Jewish culture have been condemned to exile. The Moors will likewise get the choice between baptism and exile; and for false converts burn the fires of the Inquisition. The unity of Spain, this Spain that has discovered America, will not result from the sum of its parts.

By Archbishop Cisneros’s order the Muslim sages of Granada troop off to prison. Lofty flames devour Islamic books — religion and poetry, philosophy and science — the only copies guarding the words of a culture that has irrigated these lands and flourished in them.

From on high, the carved palaces of the Alhambra are mute witnesses of the enslavement, while its fountains continue giving water to the gardens.

(64, 218, and 223)

He is just back from the market with various cages on his back. He puts them on the balcony, opens the little doors, and the birds make off. He watches the birds lose themselves in the sky, fluttering joyously, then sits down to work.

The noon sunshine warms his hand. On a wide board Leonardo da Vinci draws the world. And in the world that Leonardo draws appear the lands that Columbus has found toward the sunset. The artist invents them, as previously he has invented the airplane, the tank, the parachute, and the submarine, and he gives them form as previously he has incarnated the mystery of virgins and the passion of saints: He imagines the body of America, which still doesn’t have that name, and sketches it as new land and not as part of Asia.

Columbus, seeking the Levant, has found the West. Leonardo guesses that the world has grown.

(209)

Last night he dictated his last testament. This morning he asked if the king’s messenger had arrived. Afterward, he slept. Nonsense mutterings and groans. He still breathes, but stertorously, as if battling against the air.

At court, no one has listened to his entreaties. He returned from the third voyage in chains, and on the fourth there was no one to pay attention to his titles and dignities.

Christopher Columbus is going out knowing that there is no passion or glory that does not lead to pain. On the other hand, he does not know that within a few years the banner that he stuck for the first time into the sands of the Caribbean will be waving over the empire of the Aztecs, in lands yet unknown, and over the kingdom of the Incas, under the unknown skies of the Southern Cross. He does not know that with all his lies, promises, and ravings, he has still fallen short. The supreme admiral of the ocean sea still believes he has reached Asia from the rear.

The ocean will not be called the Sea of Columbus; nor will the new world bear his name, but that of his Florentine friend Amerigo Vespucci, navigator and pilot master. But it was Columbus who found dazzling color that didn’t exist in the European rainbow. Blind, he dies without seeing it.

(12 and 166)

Moctezuma has conquered in Teuctepec.

Fire rages in the temples. The drums beat. One after another, prisoners mount the steps toward the round, sacrificial stone. The priest plunges the obsidian dagger into each breast, lifts up the heart, and shows it to the sun, which rises above the blue volcanoes.

To what god is the blood offered? The sun demands it, to be born each day and travel from one horizon to the other. But the ostentatious death ceremonies also serve another god who does not appear in the codices nor in the chants.

If that god did not reign over the world, there would be no slaves nor masters nor vassals nor colonies. The Aztec merchants could not wrest a diamond for a bean from the defeated peoples, nor an emerald for a grain of corn, nor gold for sweetmeats, nor cacao for stones. The carriers would not be crossing the immensity of the empire in long lines with tons of tribute on their backs. The common people would dare to put on cotton tunics and would drink chocolate and audaciously wear the forbidden quetzal feathers and gold bracelets and magnolias and orchids reserved for the nobility. Then the masks hiding the warrior chiefs’ faces would fall, the eagle’s beak, the tiger’s jaws, the plumes that wave and sparkle in the air.

The steps of the great temple are stained with blood, and skulls accumulate in the center of the plaza. Not only so that the sun should move, no; also so that that secret god should decide instead of man. In homage to that god, across the sea inquisitors fry heretics on bonfires or twist them in the torture chambers. It is the God of Fear. The God of Fear, who has rat’s teeth and vulture’s wings.