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

Zapata sleeps where he likes with anyone he likes, but of them all he prefers two who are one.

(468)

Zapata and Those Two

We were twins. We were both named Luz for the day of our baptism and Gregoria for the day we were born. They called her Luz and me Gregoria and there we were, two young girls in the house, when Zapata’s boys came along, and then their chief, trying to persuade my sister to go with him .

“Look, come with me.”

And precisely one September 15 he came by and took her .

Afterward, in this continuous moving around, my sister died in Huautla of a disease that they call — what do they call it? — Saint Vitus, the Saint Vitus disease .

Three days and three nights chief Zapata was there with us, not eating or drinking a thing. We had only just lit the candles for my sister when ay, ay, ay, he took me by force. He said I belonged to him, because my sister and I were one …

(244)

The North of Mexico Celebrates War and Fiesta

The cocks crow whenever they feel like it. This land has caught fire, gone crazy. Everyone is in rebellion.

“We’re off to the war, woman.”

“But why me?”

“Do you want me to die of starvation in the war? Who’ll make my tortillas?”

Flocks of vultures follow the armed peons over plains and mountains. If life is worth nothing, what can death be worth? Men roll themselves like dice into the tumult, and find vengeance or oblivion, land to feed them or to cover them.

“Here comes Pancho Villa!” the peons exult.

“Here comes Pancho Villa!” cry the overseers, crossing themselves.

“Where, where is he?” asks General Huerta.

“In the north, south, east, and west, and also nowhere,” replies the Chihuahua garrison commander.

Confronting the enemy, Pancho Villa is always the first to charge, right into the smoking jaws of the guns. When the battle gets hot, he just horse-laughs. His heart thumps like a fish out of water.

“There’s nothing wrong with the general. He’s just a bit emotional,” his officers explain.

And so he is. With a single shot, for pure fun, he has been known to disembowel the messenger who gallops up with good news from the front.

(206 and 260)

Bullets

There are bullets with imagination, Martín Luis Guzmán discovers. Bullets which amuse themselves in afflicting the flesh. He has known serious bullets, which serve human fury, but not these bullets that play with human pain.

For being a bad marksman with a good heart, the young novelist is assigned to direct one of Pancho Villa’s hospitals. The wounded pile up in the dirt with no recourse but to clench their teeth, if they have any.

Checking the jammed wards, Guzmán confirms the improbable trajectories of these fanciful bullets, capable of emptying an eye-socket while leaving a body alive, or of sticking a piece of ear into the neck and a piece of neck into the foot. And he witnesses the sinister joy of bullets, which, having been ordered to kill a soldier, condemn him never again to sit down or never again to eat with his mouth.

(216)

One of These Mornings I Murdered Myself,

on some dusty Mexican road, and the event left a deep impression on me.

This wasn’t the first crime I committed. From the time I was born in Ohio seventy-one years ago and received the name Ambrose Bierce, until my recent death, I have played havoc with the lives of my parents and various relatives, friends, and colleagues. These touching episodes have splashed blood over my days — or my stories, which is all the same to me: the difference between the life I lived and the life I wrote is a matter for the jokers who execute human law, literary criticism, and the will of God in this world.

To put an end to my days, I joined the troops of Pancho Villa and chose one of those many stray bullets zooming through the Mexican sky these days. This method proved more practical than hanging, cheaper than poison, more convenient than firing with my own finger, and more dignified than waiting for disease or old age.

Batlle

He writes articles slandering the saints and makes speeches attacking the company that sells real estate in the Great Beyond. When he assumed the presidency of Uruguay, he had no alternative but to swear before God and the Holy Evangels, but explained immediately that he didn’t believe in any of that.

José Batlle y Ordonez governs in defiance of the powers of heaven and earth. The Church has promised him a nice place in hell; companies he nationalized, or forced to respect their workers’ unions and the eight-hour work day, will feed the fire; and the Devil will avenge his offenses against male-supremacists.

“He is legalizing licentiousness,” say his enemies when he approves a law permitting women to sue for divorce.

“He is dissolving the family,” they say, when he extends inheritance rights to illegitimate children.

“The female brain is inferior,” they say, when he creates a women’s university and announces that women will soon have the vote so that Uruguayan democracy need not walk on just one leg, and so that women will not forever be children passing from the hands of the father to those of the husband.

(35 and 271)

Quiroga

From the Paraná River jungle where he lives in voluntary exile, Horacio Quiroga applauds Batlle’s reforms and that ardent faith in noble things .

But Quiroga is indeed far from Uruguay. He left the country some years ago, fleeing the shadow of death. A curse has darkened his life since he killed his best friend while trying to defend him; or perhaps he was cursed from the beginning.

In the jungle, a step away from the ruins of the Jesuit missions, Quiroga lives surrounded by bugs and palm trees. He writes stories without detours, just as he opens paths through the thicket with his machete. He works the word with the same rugged love as he does the soil, and wood, and iron.

What Quiroga seeks he could never find away from here. Here, yes, though only very occasionally. In this house which his hands built by the river, Quiroga has at times the joy of hearing voices more powerful than the call of death: rare and fleeting certainties of life, which while they last are as absolute as the sun.

(20, 357, 358, and 390)

Delmira

In this rented room she had an appointment with the man who had been her husband. Wanting to possess her, wanting to stay with her, he made love to her, killed her, then killed himself.

The Uruguayan papers publish a photo of the body lying beside the bed: Delmira struck down by two bullets, naked like her poems, all unclothed in red.

Let’s go further in the night, let’s …

Delmira Agustini wrote in a trance. She sang to the fevers of love without shame, and was condemned by those who punish women for what they applaud in men, because chastity is a feminine duty, and desire, like reason, a male privilege. In Uruguay the laws march ahead of the people, who still separate soul from body as if they were Beauty and the Beast. Before the corpse of Delmira flow tears and phrases about this irreplaceable loss to national letters, but deep down the mourners feel some relief: the woman is dead, and better so.

But is she dead? Will not all the lovers burning in the nights of the world be the shadows of her voice and the echoes of her body? In the nights of the world won’t they make a small place where her unfettered voice can sing and her radiant feet can dance?