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

Three centuries later a French concern, the Universal Inter-Oceanic Canal Company, began the work in Panama, but after thirty-three kilometers crashed noisily into bankruptcy.

Now the United States has decided to complete the canal, and hang on to it, too. There is one hitch: Colombia doesn’t agree, and Panama is a province of Colombia. In Washington, Senator Hanna advises waiting it out, due to the nature of the beast we are dealing with , but President Teddy Roosevelt doesn’t believe in patience. He sends in the Marines. And so, by grace of the United States and its warships, the province becomes an independent state.

(240 and 423)

Casualties of This War: One Chinese, One Burro,

victims of the broadsides of a Colombian gunboat. There are no further misfortunes to lament. Manuel Amador, Panama’s brand-new president, parades between U.S. flags, seated in an armchair that the crowd carries on a platform. As he passes, Amador shouts vivas for his colleague Roosevelt.

Two weeks later, in Washington, in the Blue Room of the White House, a treaty is signed granting the United States in perpetuity the half-finished canal and more than fourteen hundred square kilometers of Panamanian territory. Representing the newborn republic is Philippe Bunau-Varilla, commercial magician, political acrobat, French citizen.

(240 and 423)

Huilka

The Bolivian liberals have won the war against the conservatives. More accurately, it has been won for them by the Indian army of Pablo Zárate Huilka. The feats claimed by the mustachioed generals were performed by Indians.

Colonel José Manuel Pando, leader of the liberals, had promised Huilka’s soldiers freedom from serfdom and recovery of their lands. From battle to battle, as he passed through the villages, Huilka returned stolen lands to the communities and cut the throat of anyone wearing trousers.

With the conservatives defeated, Colonel Pando appoints himself general and president, and, dotting all the i ’s, proclaims: “The Indians are inferior beings. Their elimination is not a crime.”

Then he gets on with it. Many are shot. Huilka, yesterday’s indispensable ally, he kills several times, by bullet, blade, and rope. Still, on rainy nights, Huilka awaits the president at the gate of the government palace and stares at him, saying nothing, until Pando turns away.

(110 and 475)

Vaccine

With the slaughter of rats and mosquitos, bubonic plague and yellow fever have been vanquished. Now Oswaldo Cruz declares war on smallpox.

By the thousands Brazilians die of the disease, while doctors bleed the moribund and healers scare off the plague with the smoke of smoldering cowshit. Oswaldo Cruz, in charge of public health, makes vaccination obligatory.

Senator Rui Barbosa, pigeon-chested and smooth-tongued orator, attacks vaccination using juridical weapons flowery with adjectives. In the name of liberty Rui Barbosa defends the right of every individual to be contaminated if he so desires. Torrential applause, thunderous ovations interrupt him from phrase to phrase.

The politicians oppose vaccination. And the doctors. And the journalists. Every newspaper carries choleric editorials and cruel caricatures victimizing Oswaldo Cruz. He cannot show his face on any street without drawing insults and stones.

The whole country closes ranks against vaccination. On all sides, “Down with vaccination!” is heard. Against vaccination the cadets of the military school rise in arms, and just miss overthrowing the president.

(158, 272, 378, and 425)

The Automobile,

that roaring beast, makes its first kill in Montevideo. An innocent pedestrian crossing a downtown street falls and is crushed.

Few automobiles have reached these streets, but as they pass, old ladies cross themselves and people scamper into doorways for protection.

Until not very long ago, the man who thought he was a streetcar still trotted through this motorless city. Going uphill, he would crack his invisible whip, and downhill pull reins that no one could see. At intersections he tooted a horn as imaginary as his horses, as imaginary as his passengers climbing aboard at each stop, as imaginary as the tickets he sold them and the change he received. When the manstreetcar stopped coming, never to pass again, the city found that it missed this endearing lunatic.

(413)

The Decadent Poets

Roberto de las Carreras climbs to the balcony. Pressed to his breast, a bouquet of roses and an incandescent sonnet; awaiting him, not a lovely odalisque, but a gentleman of evil character who fires five shots. Two hit the target. Roberto closes his eyes and muses: “Tonight I’ll sup with the gods.”

He sups not with the gods but with the nurses in the hospital. And a few days later this handsome Satan reappears perfidiously strolling down Sarandí Street, he who has vowed to corrupt all the married and engaged women in Montevideo. His red vest looks very chic decorated with two bulletholes. And on the title page of his latest book, Funereal Diadem , appears a drop of blood.

Another son of Byron and Aphrodite is Julio Herrera y Reissig, who calls the foul attic in which he writes and recites the Tower of Panoramas. The two have long been at odds over the theft of a metaphor, but both fight the same war against hypocritical, pre-Columbian Monte-idioto, which in the department of aphrodisiacs has progressed no further than egg yolks mixed with grape wine, and in the department of literature — the less said the better.

(284 and 389)

Miguel at One Week

Señorita Santos Mármol, unrespectably pregnant, refuses to name the author of her dishonor. Her mother, Doña Tomasa, beats her out of the house. Doña Tomasa, widow of a man who was poor but white, suspects the worst.

When the baby is born, the spurned señorita brings it in her arms: “This is your grandson, Mama.”

Doña Tomasa lets out a fearful scream at the sight of the baby, a blue spider, a thick-lipped Indian, such an ugly little thing as to arouse anger more than pity, and slams the door, boom, in her daughter’s face.

On the doorstep Señorita Santos falls in a heap. Beneath his unconscious mother the baby seems dead. But when the neighbors haul him out, the squashed newcomer raises a tremendous howl.

And so occurs the second birth of Miguel Mármol, age one week.

(126)

Santos Dumont

Five years after creating his dirigible balloon, the Brazilian Santos Dumont invents the airplane.

He has spent these five years shut up in hangars, assembling and dismantling enormous iron and bamboo Things which are born and unborn at top speed around the clock: at night they go to bed equipped with seagull wings and fish fins, and wake up transformed into dragonflies or wild ducks. On these Things Santos Dumont wants to get off the earth, which tenaciously holds him back; he collides and crashes; he has fires, tailspins, and shipwrecks; he survives by sheer stubbornness. But he fights and fights until at last he makes one of the Things into an airplane or magic carpet that soars high into the sky.

The whole world wants to meet the hero of this immense feat, king of the air, master of the winds, who is four feet tall, talks in a whisper, and weighs no more than a fly.

(144 and 424)

Lam

In the first heat of this warm morning, the little boy wakes and sees. The world is on its back and whirling; and in that vertigo a desperate bat circles, chasing its own shadow. The black shadow retreats to the wall as the bat approaches, beating at it with a wing.