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

Lying in the hammock, he will light a cigar. “The ship left us in the sea and there was a terrific swell …”

Two Dominicans and four Cubans in a boat. The storm plays with them. They have sworn that Cuba will be free.

“A dark night, you couldn’t see a thing …”

A red moon rises, fights with the clouds. The boat fights with the hungry sea.

“The old guy was up in the prow. He was holding the wheel and Martí had the boat’s compass. A big wave tore the wheel from the general … We were fighting the sea that wanted to swallow us and didn’t want to let us reach land in Cuba …”

By some magic the boat does not shatter against the cliffs. The boat flies and plunges and surges back. Suddenly, it tacks about, the waves open up, and a little beach appears, a tiny horseshoe of sand.

“And General Gómez jumped onto the beach and when he stood on terra firma, he kissed the ground straight off and crowed like a rooster.”

(258 and 286)

In the Sierra

Not sadly but radiantly, festively, Marcos del Rosario will speak of Martí. “When I saw him, I thought he was too weak. And then I saw he was a little live wire, who would jump here and land over there …”

Martí teaches him to write. Martí puts his hand on Marcos’s while he draws the letter A. “He had gone to school and was a superb man.”

Marcos looks after Martí. He makes him good mattresses of dry leaves; he brings him coconut water to drink. The six men who landed at Playitas become a hundred, a thousand … Martí marches, knapsack on back, rifle over shoulder, climbing the sierra and stirring up people.

“When we were climbing the mountains, all loaded up, sometimes he’d fall. And I’d go to pick him up and right away he’d say, ‘No, thanks, no.’ He had a ring made out of the shackles the Spaniards put on him when he was still a child.”

(286)

Martí’s Testament

In the camp, in his shirtsleeves, Martí writes a letter to the Mexican Manuel Mercado, his intimate friend. He tells him that his life is in danger every day, and that it is well worthwhile to give it for his country, and for my duty to prevent, in time, with the independence of Cuba, the United States from extending itself into the Antilles and from falling, with that extra force, upon our American lands. All I have done until now, and all I will do, is for that. It has had to be done in silence … Shedding blood, writes Martí, the Cubans are preventing the annexation of the peoples of our America by the turbulent and brutal North which despises them … I lived within the monster and I know its entrails — and my sling is the sling of David. And further on: This is death or life, and there is no room for error.

Later his tone changes. He has other things to tell about. And now, I will talk to you about myself. But the night stops him, or maybe modesty, as soon as he starts to offer his friend those depths of his soul. There is an affection of such delicate honesty … he writes, and that is the last thing he writes.

At noon the next day, a bullet tumbles him from his horse.

(199)

His Name Will Be Sandino

At the doors of this adobe house people gather, drawn by the cry. Like an upside-down spider the newborn baby moves his arms and legs. No Magi Kings come from afar to welcome him, but a farm laborer, a carpenter, and a passing market woman leave gifts.

The godmother offers lavender water to the mother and to the child a pinch of honey, which is his first taste of the world.

Later the godmother buries the placenta, which looks so like a root, in a corner of the garden. She buries it in a good spot, where there is plenty of sun, so that it will become soil here in Niquinohomo.

Within a few years, the child that just came from that placenta will become soil too, the rebellious soil of all Nicaragua.

(8 and 317)

Disguises

According to the Constitution of Haiti, the republic of free blacks speaks French and professes the Christian religion. The doctors are mortified because, despite laws and punishments, “Creole” continues as the language of nearly all Haitians and nearly all continue believing in the voodoo gods who wander at large through woods and bodies.

The government demands that peasants publicly swear an oath: “ I swear to destroy all fetishes and objects of superstition, if I carry them with me or have them in my house or on my land. I swear never to lower myself to any superstitious practice …”

(68)

Requiem

“Was it here?”

A year has passed, and Máximo Gómez is telling the story to Calixto García. The old warriors for Cuba’s independence lead the way from the Contramaestre River. Behind come their armies. General Gómez tells, that midday, how Martí had eaten with a good appetite and afterwards recited some verses, as was his custom, and how they then heard some shots. Everyone ran looking for a horse.

“Was it here?”

They come to a thicket, at the entrance to the road to Palo Picado.

“Here,” someone says.

Machete wielders clear the little patch of ground.

“ I never heard him complain or saw him give in,” says Gómez. Grumbling and getting angry, he adds, “ I ordered him … I advised him to stay behind.”

A patch of ground the size of his body.

General Maximo Gómez drops a stone. General Calixto García another stone. And officers and soldiers keep filing past, and one after another stones fall with a sharp click, stones on top of stones, as Martí’s memorial mound rears toward the sky, and only those clicks can be heard in the immense silence of Cuba.

(105)

Flora Tristán

The canvas, bare and immense, offers itself challengingly. Paul Gauguin paints, hunts around, throws on color as if bidding farewell to the world; and his desperate hand writes: Where do we come from, what are we, where are we going?

Over half a century ago, Gauguin’s grandmother asked the same question in one of her books, and died finding out. The Peruvian family of Flora Tristán never mentioned it, as if it were bad luck or as if she were crazy or a ghost. When Paul asked about his grandmother, in the remote years of his childhood in Lima, they answered him:

“Time to go to bed, it’s late.”

Flora Tristán had burned up her short life preaching revolution, the proletarian revolution and the revolution of women enslaved by father, employer, and husband. Illness and the police finished her off. She died in France. The workers of Bordeaux paid for her coffin and carried her on a bier to the cemetery.

(21)

José Asunción Silva

He loves his sister Elvira, aroma of lavender, balsam incense, furtive kisses of the palest sylph in Bogotá, and for her he writes his best verses. Night after night he goes to visit her in the cemetery. At the foot of her grave he feels better than in literary coteries.

José Asunción Silva had been born dressed in black, with a flower in his buttonhole. Thus has he lived for thirty years, through blow after blow, this languid founder of modernism in Colombia. The bankruptcy of his father, a silk and perfume merchant, has taken the bread from his mouth; and his complete works have been lost at sea in a shipwreck.