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

And she said nothing. Juana said nothing. When Melgarejo went on a military campaign, he left her shut up in a La Paz convent. He returned to the palace with her in his arms and she said nothing, a virgin woman every night, every night born for him. Juana said nothing when Melgarejo seized the Indians’ communal lands and gave her eighty properties and an entire province for her family.

Now, too, Juana says nothing. With the door of her mansion in Lima stoutly barricaded, she does not show herself or answer the desperate roarings of Melgarejo. She does not even say to him, “You never had me. I wasn’t there.”

Melgarejo weeps and bellows, his fists thundering on the door. In this shadow, shouting the name of this woman, he dies of two bullets.

(85)

The Mambises

The blacks, lustrous from torches and other lights, undulate and spin and jump and talk to the gods howling with pain and pleasure. For the New York Herald correspondent this commotion is as incomprehensible as the seasons, which in Cuba come all at once within an endless summer. The journalist blinks hard when he discovers that the same tree has at the same time one branch bursting in full verdure and another yellowing in its death throes.

This is the land of the Mambí, in the forest of eastern Cuba. Mambí meant “bandit” or “rebel” back there in the Congo, but on this island Mambí is the slave who fights to become a person again.

Before joining the patriot army, the Mambises had been fugitive slaves in the mountains. The Herald correspondent calculates that in five years the colonial war has taken eighty thousand Spanish lives. Many soldiers have been felled by disease or bullet; and many more by Mambí machete. The war has turned sugar mills into fortresses armed against attacks by blacks from the outside and escapes by blacks inside.

In this camp of ragged, almost naked Mambises, everything is shared. The journalist drinks water with molasses for lack of coffee, and after a few days swears eternal hatred for sweet potatoes and hutia — a small animal that provides food for anyone who can catch it in the crannies of a tree or rock. This war could last forever, writes the journalist. Here, lianas give water when there is no nearby river, and the trees provide fruit, hammocks, sandals, and good shade for those who need to sit down and swap jokes and stories while their wounds heal.

(237)

Martí

Recently his pointed mustache got a blunting in Havana when he started two short-lived newspapers, The Lame Devil and Free Fatherland; and for wanting independence for Cuba, a Spanish colony, he was sentenced to prison and forced labor. Earlier, when he was still a very young child, he had wanted to translate Shakespeare, and had set fire to words, and sworn vengeance before a black slave hanging from the gallows. He had guessed, in his earliest verses, that he would die in and for Cuba.

From prison they sent him into exile. The marks of the shackles have not disappeared from his ankles. No more patriotic Cuban than this son of a Spanish colonial sergeant; none more childlike than this inquisitive exile, so astonished and indignant at the world.

José Martí is twenty-two when he attends in Mexico his first joint demonstration of students and workers. The hat makers have gone on strike. They have the solidarity of the Fraternal and Constancy Society of Hairdressers, the Fraternal Society of Bookbinders, the typographers, the tailors, and the intellectuals, “workers of the Idea.” At the same time, the first university strike erupts, against the expulsion of three medical students.

Martí organizes benefit recitals for the hat makers, and in his articles describes students marching with workers through the streets of Mexico City, arm-in-arm, all in their Sunday best. These enthusiastic young people, he observes, are right. But even if they were wrong, we would love them.

(129, 200, and 354)

The Last Buffalos of the South

The southern plains were carpeted with buffalos, which multiplied like the tall grasses, when the white man arrived from Kansas. Now the wind smells of decay. Skinned buffalos lie on the prairie. Millions of skins have gone to eastern Europe. The extermination of the buffalo not only brings in money, but, as General Sheridan explains, it is the only way to bring lasting peace and allow civilization to advance.

The Kiowa and Comanche Indians now find no buffalos within the Fort Sill reservation. In vain they invoke good hunting with dances to the sun god. On their federal government rations, pitiful rations, they cannot survive.

The Indians escape to far-off Palo Duro canyon, the last place with buffalos in the southern plains. There, they find food and all the rest: they use the skins for shelter, blankets, and clothing; the horns and bones for spoons, knives, and arrowheads; the nerves and tendons for ropes and nets, the bladders for water pitchers.

Soon the soldiers arrive, amid clouds of dust and gunpowder. They burn huts and provisions, kill a thousand horses and herd the Indians back into their enclosure.

A few Kiowas manage to escape. They wander the prairie until hunger defeats them. They surrender at Fort Sill. There the soldiers put them in a corral and every day throw them bits of raw meat.

(51 and 229)

Into the Beyond

The buffalos of the last southern herd hold a meeting. The discussion does not last long. Everything has been said and night continues. The buffalos know they are no longer able to protect the Indians.

When dawn rises from the river, a Kiowa woman sees the last herd passing through the mist. The leader walks with slow tread, followed by the females, the calves, and the few surviving males. Reaching the foot of Mount Scott, they pause, motionless, with their heads down. Then the mountain opens its mouth and the buffalos enter. There, inside, the world is green and fresh.

The buffalos have passed. The mountain closes.

(198)

Sitting Bull

When he speaks, no word tires or falls.

No more lies, he says. Eight years ago, the United States government guaranteed to the Sioux, by solemn treaty, that they would forever be owners of the Black Hills, the center of their world, the place where warriors talk with the gods. Two years ago, gold was discovered in these lands. Last year, the government ordered the Sioux to leave the hunting grounds where miners were seeking gold in rocks and streams.

I have said enough. No more lies. Sitting Bull, chief of chiefs, has assembled thousands of warriors of the plains, Sioux, Cheyennes, Arapahos. He has danced for three days and three nights. He has fixed his eyes on the sun. He knows.

He wakes before dawn. He wets his bare feet in the dew and receives the heartbeat of the earth.

At dawn he raises his eyes beyond the hills. There comes General Custer. There comes the Seventh Cavalry.

(51 and 206)

Black Elk

At the age of nine he heard the voices. He knew that all of us who have legs, wings, or roots are children of the same father sun and of the same mother earth, whose breasts we suck. The voices told him that he would make flowers bloom on the sacred cane, the tree of life planted in the center of the land of the Sioux, and that mounted on a storm cloud he would kill drought. They also announced wars and sufferings.

At ten, he met a white man for the first time. He thought the fellow must be ill.

At thirteen, Black Elk is bathing in Little Big Horn River when shouts warn him that soldiers are coming. He climbs a hill and from there sees an immense dust cloud full of hooves and yells, and from the cloud many horses stampeding with empty saddles.