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

The little boy jumps up, covering his head with his hands, and collides with a big mirror. In the mirror he sees nobody, or someone else. Turning, he recognizes in the open closet the decapitated clothes of his Chinese father and his black grandfather.

Somewhere in the morning a blank sheet of paper awaits him. But this Cuban boy, this frenzy called Wilfredo Lam, still cannot draw his own lost shadow, which revolves crazily in the hallucinating world above him, having not yet discovered his dazzling way of exorcising fear.

(319)

The Flags of Many Countries

head the march of the striking nitrate workers across the gravelly desert of northern Chile — thousands of them and their thousands of women and children — marching on the port of Iquique, chanting slogans and songs. When the workers occupy Iquique the Interior Minister sends an order to kill. The workers decide to stick it out. Not a stone is to be thrown.

José Briggs, leader of the strike, is the son of a North American, but refuses to seek protection from the U.S. consul. The consul of Peru tries to save the Peruvian workers, but they won’t abandon their Chilean comrades. The consul of Bolivia tries to lure away the Bolivian workers. The Bolivian workers say: “With the Chileans we live, and with the Chileans we die.”

General Roberto Silva Renard’s machineguns and rifles cut down the unarmed strikers and leave a blanket of bodies. Interior Minister Rafael Sotomayor justifies the carnage in the name of the most sacred things , which are, in order of importance, property, public order, and life .

(64 and 326)

Nimuendajú

Curt Unkel was not born Indian, he became one, or discovered that he was one. Years ago he left Germany for Brazil, and in Brazil, in the deepest depths of Brazil, he recognized his people. Now he accompanies the Guaraní Indians as they wander the jungle as pilgrims seeking paradise. He shares their food and shares the joy of sharing food.

High aloft rise their chants. In the dead of night a sacred ceremony is performed. They perforate the lower lip of Curt Unkel, who comes to be known as Nimuendajú: He who creates his house .

(316, 374, and 411)

Barrett

Perhaps he once lived in Paraguay, centuries or millennia ago — who knows when — and has forgotten it. Certainly four years ago, when by chance or curiosity Rafael Barrett landed here, he felt he had finally reached the place that was waiting for him: this godforsaken place was his place in the world.

Ever since then, on street corners, mounted on a soapbox, he has harangued the people, while publishing articles of revelation and denunciation. In response, the government throws him out. Bayonets shove the young anarchist to the border — deported as a foreign agitator .

Most Paraguayan of all Paraguayans, true weed of this soil, true saliva of this mouth, he was born in Asturias, of a Spanish mother and English father, and was educated in Paris.

Barrett’s gravest sin, unforgivable violation of a taboo, is to denounce slavery on the maté plantations.

Forty years ago, when the war of extermination against Paraguay ended, the victorious countries in the name of Civilization and Liberty legalized the enslavement of the survivors and the children of the survivors. Since then Argentine and Brazilian landowners count their Paraguayan peons by the head as if they were cows.

(37)

The Government Decides That Indians Don’t Exist

The governor, General Miguel Marino Torralvo, issues the order for the oil companies operating on the Colombian coast. The Indians do not exist , the governor certifies before a notary and witnesses. Three years ago, Law No. 1905/55, approved in Bogotá by the National Congress, established that Indians did not exist in San Andrés de Sotavento and other Indian communities where oil had suddenly spurted from the ground. Now the governor merely confirms the law. If the Indians existed, they would be illegal. Thus they are consigned to the cemetery or exile.

(160)

Portrait of a Master of Lives and Estates

General Miguel Marino Torralvo, glutton of lands, who tramples on Indians and women, governs these Colombian coastal regions from the back of a horse. With the butt of his whip he strikes faces and doors, and shapes destinies. Those who cross his path kiss his hand. In an impeccable white habit he canters along the roads, always followed by a page on a burro. The page carries his brandy, his boiled water, his shaving kit, and the book in which the general notes the names of the girls he devours.

His properties increase as he rides by. He started out with one cattle farm and now has six. A believer in progress, but not to the exclusion of tradition, he uses barbed wire to set limits to his lands, the stocks to set limits for his people.

(160)

Portrait of Another Master of Lives and Estates

He orders: “Tell him he’d better carry his shroud on the back of his horse.”

He punishes with five shots, for nonperformance of duty, the serf who is late with the bushels of corn he owes, or who makes trouble about delivering a daughter or a plot of land.

“Don’t hurry it,” he orders. “Only the last shot should kill.”

Not even his family is spared the wrath of Deogracias Itriago, supreme boss of the Venezuelan valley of Guanape. One night a relative borrows his best horse to go to a dance in style. The next morning Don Deogracias has him tied face down to four stakes, and skins the soles of his feet and his buttocks with a cassava grater to cure him of the urge to dance and show off on someone else’s horse.

When in an unguarded moment he is finally killed by some peons he himself had condemned to death, for nine nights the family chants the novena for the dead, and for nine nights the people of Guanape go wild celebrating. No one tires of making merry and no musician wants payment for the marathon.

(410)

Curtain Time and After

The train is already disappearing, and the president of Mexico with it. Porfirio Díaz has examined the henequén plantations in Yucatán and is taking away a most favorable impression.

“A beautiful spectacle,” he said, as he supped with the bishop and the owners of millions of hectares and thousands of Indians who produce cheap fibers for the International Harvester Company. “Here one breathes an atmosphere of general happiness.”

The locomotive smoke is scarcely dissipated when the houses of painted cardboard, with their elegant windows, collapse with the slap of a hand. Garlands and pennants become litter, swept up and burned, and the wind undoes with a puff the arches of flowers that spanned the roads. The lightning visit over, the merchants of Mérida repossess the sewing machines, the North American furniture, and the brand-new clothes the slaves have worn while the show lasted.

The slaves are Mayan Indians who until recently lived free in the kingdom of the little talking cross, and Yaqui Indians from the plains of the north, purchased for four hundred pesos a head. They sleep piled up in fortresses of stone and work to the rhythm of a moistened whip. When one of them gets surly, they bury him up to his ears and turn the horses loose on him.

(40, 44, 245, and 451)