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

The job will be completed by the executioner. He will found an enterprise of conquest, and Pedrarias will be his partner. The executioner, who came with Columbus on his last voyage, will be a marquis with twenty thousand vassals in the mysterious kingdoms to the south. His name is Francisco Pizarro.

(81 and 141)

One day long ago, the soothsayers flew to the cave of the mother of the god of war. The witch, who had not washed for eight centuries, did not smile or greet them. Without thanking them, she accepted their gifts — cloth, skins, feathers — and listened sourly to their news. Mexico, the soothsayers told her, is mistress and queen, and all cities are under her orders. The old woman grunted her sole comment: The Aztecs have defeated the others, she said, and others will come who will defeat the Aztecs.

Time passed.

For the past ten years, portents have been piling up.

A bonfire leaked flames from the middle of the sky for a whole night.

A sudden three tongued fire came up from the horizon and flew to meet the sun.

The house of the god of war committed suicide, setting fire to itself. Buckets of water were thrown on it, and the water enlivened the flames.

Another temple was burned by a flash of lightning one evening when there was no storm.

The lake in which the city is situated turning into a boiling cauldron. The waters rose, white-hot, towering with fury, carrying away houses, even tearing up foundations.

Fishermen’s nets brought up an ash-colored bird along with the fish. On the bird’s head there was a round mirror. In the mirror, Emperor Moctezuma saw advancing an army of soldiers who ran on the legs of deer, and he heard their war cries. Then the soothsayers who could neither read the mirror nor had eyes to see the two-headed monsters that implacably haunted Moctezuma’s sleeping and waking hours were punished. The emperor shut them up in cages and condemned them to die of hunger.

Every night the cries of an unseen woman startle all who sleep in Tenochtitlán and in Tlatelolco. My little children, she cries, now we have to go far from here! There is no wall that the woman’s cry does not pierce: Where shall we go, my little children?

(60 and 210)

Twilight of soaring flames on the coast of Veracruz. Eleven ships are burning up; burning, too, the rebel soldiers who hang from the yardarm of the flagship. While the sea opens its jaws to devour the bonfires, Hernán Cortes, standing on the beach, presses on the pommel of his sword and uncovers his head.

Not only the ships and the hanged have met their end; now there is no going back, no more life than what is born tomorrow, either gold and glory or the vulture of defeat. On the Veracruz beach have been sunk the dreams of those who would have liked to return to Cuba to sleep the colonial siesta in net hammocks, wrapped in women’s hair and cigar smoke: the sea leads to the past and the land to danger. Those who could afford it will go forward on horseback, the others on foot: seven hundred men into Mexico, toward the mountains and the volcanos and the mystery of Moctezuma.

Cortés adjusts his feathered headpiece and turns his back on the flames. In one gallop he makes it to the native village of Cempoala, while night is still falling. He says nothing to the men. They will find out as they go.

He drinks wine alone in his tent. Perhaps he thinks about the men he has killed without confession or the women he has bedded without marriage since those student days in Salamanca that seem so far off, or his lost years as a bureaucrat in the Antilles during the waiting time. Perhaps he thinks about Governor Diego Velázquez, who will soon be quivering with rage in Santiago de Cuba. Certainly he smiles if he thinks about that soporific fool, whose orders he will never again obey; or about the surprise that awaits the soldiers whom he hears laughing and cursing at games of dice and cards.

Something of this runs in his head, or maybe the fascination and panic of the days to come; then he looks up, sees her at the door, recognizes her against the light. Her name was Malinali or Malinche when the chief of Tabasco made her a gift to him. She has been known as Marina for a week.

Cortés speaks a few words while she waits, perfectly still. Then in a single movement the girl loosens her hair and clothing. A cascade of colored cloths falls between her bare feet, and the glow of her body silences him.

A few paces away by the light of the moon, the soldier Bernal Díaz del Castillo records the day’s events. He uses a drum as a table.

(56 and 62)

Great mountains have arrived, moving over the sea, off the coasts of Yucatan. The god Quetzalcóatl has come back. The people kiss the bows of the ships.

Emperor Moctezuma mistrusts his own shadow.

“What shall I do? Where will I hide?”

Moctezuma would like to turn into a stone or a stick. The court jesters cannot distract him. Quetzalcóatl, the bearded god, he who loaned the land and the beautiful songs, has come to demand what is his.

In olden times, Quetzalcóatl had departed for the east after burning his house of gold and his house of coral. The handsomest birds flew to open the way for him. He put out to sea on a raft of snakes and was lost to sight sailing into the dawn. Now he has returned. The bearded god, the plumed serpent has returned hungry.

The earth shakes. In the stewpots the birds dance as they boil. No one will remain, the poet had said. No one, no one, truly no one alive on the earth.

Moctezuma has sent great offerings of gold to the god Quetzalcóatl, helmets filled with gold dust, golden ducks, golden dogs, golden tigers, golden necklaces, and wands and bows and arrows, but the more gold the god eats, the more he wants; and he is advancing toward Tenochtitlán, dissatisfied. He marches between the great volcanos, and behind him come other bearded gods. The hands of the invaders send forth thunder that stuns and fire that kills.

“What shall I do? Where will I hide?”

Moctezuma lives with his head buried in his hands.

Two years ago, when there were already omens aplenty of the god’s return and vengeance, Moctezuma sent his soothsayers to the cave of Huémac, king of the dead. The soothsayers descended into the depths of Chapultepec with a retinue of dwarfs and hunchbacks and delivered to Huémac on the emperor’s behalf an offering of skins of recently flayed prisoners. Huémac sent word back to Moctezuma:

“Don’t fool yourself. Here there’s no rest or joy.”

And he told him to fast and to sleep without a woman.

Moctezuma obeyed. He made a long penitence. The eunuchs shut tight the quarters of his wives; the cooks forgot about his favorite dishes. But things got worse. The black crows of distress came in flocks. Moctezuma lost the protection of Tlazoltéotl, the goddess of love, also the goddess of shit, she who eats our nastiness so that love is possible; and thus the soul of the solitary emperor was drowned in garbage and blackness. He sent more messengers to Huémac on several occasions with entreaties and gifts, until finally the king of the dead gave him an appointment.

On the night arranged, Moctezuma went to meet him. His boat headed for Chapultepec. The emperor stood in the bow, and the mist over the lake opened up for his flamingo plume.

Shortly before reaching the foot of the mountain, Moctezuma heard the sound of oars. A canoe appeared, moving rapidly, and somebody shone out for an instant in the black mist, naked and alone, his paddle raised like a lance.