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

Then the mutiny breaks out. In the waters of Guanabara Bay, the sailors rise up. Three officers fall, knifed to death. The warships fly the red ensign. An ordinary seaman is the squadron’s new commander. João Cándido, the Black Admiral, leans into the wind on the command tower of his flagship, and the rebel pariahs present arms to him.

At dawn two booming guns wake Rio de Janeiro. The Black Admiral issues a warning: the city is at his mercy. Unless flogging — the custom of the Brazilian fleet — is prohibited and an amnesty granted, he will bombard Rio, leaving no stone upon stone. The mouths of the warships’ cannons are pointed at Rio’s most important buildings.

“We want an answer now, right now.”

The city, in panic, obeys. The government declares the abolition of corporal punishment in the fleet and an amnesty for the rebels. João Cándido removes the red kerchief from his neck and surrenders his sword. The admiral transforms himself back into a sailor.

(303)

Portrait of Brazil’s Most Expensive Lawyer

Six years ago he opposed smallpox vaccination in the name of Liberty. An individual’s skin is as inviolable as his conscience, said Rui Barbosa. The State has no right to violate thought or body, not even in the name of public hygiene. Now, he condemns with all severity the violence and barbarity of the sailors’ rebellion. This illustrious jurist and preeminent legislator opposes flogging but denounces the methods of the flogged. The sailors, he says, did not make their just demand in a civilized way, by constitutional means, using the proper channels within the framework of prevailing juridical norms .

Rui Barbosa believes in the law, and bases his belief on erudite quotations from imperial Romans and English liberals. But he doesn’t believe in reality. The doctor shows a certain realism only when, at the end of the month, he collects his salary as lawyer for Light and Power, that foreign enterprise which in Brazil exercises more power than God.

(272 and 303)

Reality and the Law Seldom Meet

in this country of legally free slaves, and when they do they don’t shake hands. The ink is still fresh on the laws that put an end to the sailors’ revolt when the officers resume flogging and kill the recently amnestied rebels. Many sailors are shot on the high seas; others are buried alive in the catacombs of Cobra Island, called the Isle of Despair, where they are thrown quicklimed water when they complain of thirst.

The Black Admiral ends up in a lunatic asylum.

(303)

Tolstoy

Exiled for being poor and a Jew, Isaac Zimmerman ends up in Argentina. The first time he sees a maté cup he takes it for an inkpot, the straw for a pen, and that pen burns his hand. On this pampa he built his hut, not far from the huts of other pilgrims, exiles like him from the valleys of the Dniester River; and here he produces children and crops.

Isaac and his wife have very little, almost nothing, and the little they have they possess graciously. Some vegetable crates serve as a table, but the tablecloth is always starched and very white, and on it flowers lend color, and apples perfume.

One night the children come upon Isaac collapsed at this table, his head buried in his hands. By the candle’s light they see his face glistening with tears. And he tells them. By sheer accident, he says, he has just learned that over there, on the far side of the world, Leo Tolstoy has died. And he explains who this old friend of the peasants was, this man who knew how to portray his time so grandly and to foretell another.

(155)

The Cinema

Ladder on shoulder, the lamplighter goes on his way. With his long pole he lights the wicks, so that people can walk without tripping through the streets of Havana.

The messenger goes by bicycle. Under his arm he carries rolls of film from one cinema to another, so that people may walk without tripping through other worlds and other times and float high in the sky with a girl seated on a star.

This city has two halls consecrated to the greatest marvel of modern life. Both offer the same films. When the messenger dawdles with the rolls, the pianist will entertain the audience with waltzes and dance tunes, or the usher will recite selected fragments from Don Juan Tenorio . But the audience bites its nails waiting for the femme fatale with the bedroom circles under her eyes to dazzle in the darkness, or for the knights in coats of mail to gallop at epileptic speed toward the castle wreathed in mist.

The cinema robs the public of the circus. No longer does the crowd queue up to see the mustachioed lion-tamer or Lovely Geraldine, sheathed in sequins, glittering erect on the horse with enormous haunches. The puppeteers, too, abandon Havana to wander the beaches and villages, and the gypsies who read fortunes depart along with the sad bear that dances to the rhythm of the tambourine, with the goat that gyrates on a stool, with the gaunt acrobats in their checkered costumes. All quit Havana because people no longer throw them pennies of admiration, but only of pity.

No one can compete with the cinema. The cinema is more miraculous than the water of Lourdes. Stomach chills are cured by Ceylon cinnamon; colds by parsley; everything else by the cinema.

(292)

The Centennial and Love

Celebrating a hundred years of Mexico’s independence, all of the capital’s whorehouses display the portrait of President Porfirio Díaz.

In Mexico City, out of every ten young women, two engage in prostitution. Peace and Order, Order and Progress: the law regulates the practice of this crowded profession. The brothel law, promulgated by Don Porfirio himself, prohibits carnal commerce without the proper façade, or in the proximity of schools and churches. It also prohibits the mixing of social classes— In the brothels there shall only be women of the class to which the customers belong —while it imposes all sorts of sanitary controls and penalties, and even obliges the madams to prevent their pupils from going into the streets in groups that might attract attention . They are allowed to go out singly: condemned to exist between bed, hospital, and jail, the whores at least have the right to an occasional stroll through the city. In this sense, they are better off than the Indians. By order of the almost pure Mixtec Indian president, Indians may not walk on the principal avenues or sit in public plazas.

(300)

The Centennial and Food

The Centennial is inaugurated with a banquet of French haute cuisine in the salons of the National Palace. Three hundred and fifty waiters serve dishes prepared by forty chefs and sixty assistants under the direction of the renowned Sylvain Daumont.

Elegant Mexicans eat in French. They prefer the crêpe to its poor relation of native birth, the corn tortilla; oeufs en cocotte to the humble rancheros. They find béchamel sauce more worthy than guacamole, that delicious but excessively indigenous mixture of avocados, tomatoes, and chili. Faced with foreign peppers or Mexican chilies, the gentry reject the chili, although later they sneak back to the family kitchen and devour it secretly, ground or whole, side dish or main dish, stuffed or plain, unpeeled or naked.

(318)

The Centennial and Art

Mexico celebrates its national fiesta with a great exhibition of Spanish art, brought from Madrid. To give these Spanish artists the presentation they deserve, Don Porfirio has built a special pavilion for them in the city center.