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

In London, it is Queen Victoria’s seventieth birthday. On the banks of the River Plata, they celebrate it with their feet.

The Buenos Aires and Montevideo teams vie for the ball on the little Blanqueada field under the disdainful scrutiny of the queen. At the center of the grandstand, between flags, hangs a portrait of this mistress of the world’s seas and a good part of its lands.

Buenos Aires wins, 3–0. There are no dead to mourn, although the penalty has not yet been invented and anyone approaching the enemy goal risks his life. To get a close shot at the goal, one must penetrate an avalanche of legs that shoot out like axes; and every match is a battle requiring bones of steel.

Football is an Englishman’s game. It is played by officials of the railway, the gas companies, and the Bank of London, and by visiting sailors; but already a few Creoles, infiltrators among the blond-mustachioed marksmen, are showing that craftiness can be an efficient weapon for bringing down goalkeepers.

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Comrades

More than fifty thousand workers come each year to the River Plata, Europeans washed up by desperation on these coasts. Italian flags greet the visit of Edmundo de Amicis to the Piedmontese colonies of the Argentine coast, and at workers’ meetings in Buenos Aires or Montevideo speeches are heard in Spanish, Italian, French, or German.

Eight of every ten workers or artisans are foreigners, and among them are Italian socialists and anarchists, Frenchmen of the Commune, Spaniards of the first republic, and revolutionaries from Germany and Central Europe.

Strikes break out on both banks of the river. In Montevideo, streetcar conductors work eighteen hours a day; mill and noodle-factory workers, fifteen. There are no Sundays, and a member of the government in Buenos Aires has published his discovery that idleness is the mother of all vice.

In Buenos Aires, Latin America’s first May First is celebrated. The chief speaker, Joseph Winiger, salutes the Chicago martyrs in German and announces that the hour of socialism is approaching, while men of the gown, pen, sword or cassock clamor for the expulsion of alien enemies of order. The inspired writer Miguel Cané drafts a law to expel foreign agitators from Argentina.

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Tenements

Poor and rich pay the same price at the Colón theater at carnival time, but once past the door Hands go to their place and Brains to theirs, and no one commits the sacrilege of sitting in the wrong place. The lower-downs dance in the parterre, the higher-ups in boxes and lounges.

Buenos Aires is like its theater. High-class people sleep in two or three story French palaces in the North barrio, and alone sleep the spinsters who would rather die as virgins than mix their blood with some foreigner of indeterminate hue. The top people decorate their lineage, or manufacture it, with torrents of pearls and initials engraved on silver tea sets, and show off Saxony or Sévres or Limoges porcelains, Waterford crystal, Lyons tapestries, and Brussels table cloths. From the secluded life of the Big Village they have moved on to the frenetic exhibitionism of the Paris of America.

In the south are huddled the beaten-down of the earth. In abandoned three-patioed colonial mansions, or in specially built tenements, the workers newly arrived from Naples or Vigo or Bessarabia sleep by turns. Never cold are the scarce beds in the nonspace invaded by braziers and washbasins and chests which serve as cradles. Fights are frequent in the long queues at the door to the only latrine, and silence is an impossible luxury. But sometimes, on party nights, the accordion or mandolin or bagpipes bring back lost voices to these washerwomen and dressmakers, servants of rich bosses and husbands, and ease the loneliness of these men who from sun to sun tan hides, pack meat, saw wood, sweep streets, tote loads, raise and paint walls, roll cigarettes, grind wheat, and bake bread while their children shine shoes and call out the crime of the day.

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Man Alone

One fire less, they say in the villages of Galicia when someone emigrates.

Over there, he was excess population; and here, he doesn’t want to exceed. Like a mule, he works and resists and keeps quiet, a man of few words, and in the foreign city he takes up less room than a dog.

Here, they make fun of him and treat him with contempt, because he can’t even sign his name, and manual labor is for inferior species. On the other hand, here they worship anyone with a lot of arrogance and applaud the slicker who can deflate the most boastful swollen head with a stroke of cunning and luck.

He gets little sleep, the lonely immigrant, but no sooner does he close his eyes than some fairy or witch comes to love him on green mountains and snowy precipices. Sometimes he has nightmares. Then, he drowns in the river. Not in just any river, but a particular river over there. Whoever crosses it, they say, loses his memory.

Tangoing

The tango, wistful offspring of the gay milonga, has been born in the corrals at the city’s edge and in tenement courtyards.

On the two banks of the River Plata, it is music of ill repute. Workers and malefactors dance it on earth floors, men of the hammer or the knife, male with male if the woman is not able to follow the very daring and broken step, or if such a body-to-body embrace seems more suitable for whores: the couple slides, rocks, stretches, and flowers in coupés and filigrees.

The tango comes from gaucho tunes of the interior and comes from the sea, the chanteys of sailors. It comes from the slaves of Africa and the gypsies of Andalusia. Spain contributes its guitar, Germany its concertina, Italy its mandolin. The driver of the horse-drawn streetcar contributed his trumpet, and the immigrant worker his harmonica, comrade of lonely moments. With hesitant step the tango spans barracks and dives, midways of traveling circuses and the patios of slum brothels. Now organ grinders parade it through shore streets on the outskirts of Buenos Aires and Montevideo, heading downtown; and ships take it to drive Paris wild.

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Mark Twain

The novelist’s hands whisk Hank Morgan, an offical of the Colt arms factory, into the distant court of King Arthur. The telephone, the bicycle, and dynamite journey to the times of Merlin the magician and Sir Galahad in the vale of Camelot; there Hank Morgan publishes and sells a newspaper at the modest price of two cents, founds a West Point military academy and reveals that the world is not a dish supported on columns. Although he comes from a society that already knows monopolies, Hank brings to the feudal castles the good news of free competition, free trade, and the free ballot. In vain, he tries to replace mounted duels with baseball, hereditary monarchy with democracy, and the code of honor with the calculation of costs; and finally he burns up thirty thousand armor-and-lance English horsemen with electric wires already tried out against the Indians of the United States. The adventure speeds to a deadly climax and Hank falls, asphyxiated by the miasma of putrefaction from his victims.

Mark Twain finishes writing A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court at his home in Hartford. “It is my swan song,” he announces. He has always lived by leaps and bounds, pursuing a fugitive million dollars. He has been journalist and explorer, publicity agent, miner of gold, ship’s pilot, speculator, inventor of gadgets, director of an insurance company, and unsuccessful entrepreneur. Between bankruptcy and bankruptcy he managed to invent or recall Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, and found a way to invite us all to float on a raft down the waters of the Mississippi. And he did it for the pure joy of going, not for the urgency of arriving.