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

No better news could be imagined by Huerta’s successor, General Venustiano Carranza, whose battered troops are recovering with the aid of the United States.

(47, 194, 246, and 260)

Agrarian Reform

In an old mill in the village of Tlaltizapán, Zapata installs his headquarters. Here, in his native district, far from the sideburned lords and their feathered ladies, far from the flashy, deceitful city, the Morelos rebel chief liquidates the great estates, nationalizes sugar-mills and distilleries without paying a centavo, and restores to the communities lands stolen through the centuries. Free villages are reborn, the conscience and memory of Indian traditions, and with them local democracy. Here neither bureaucrats nor generals make the decisions, but the assembled community in open forum. Selling or renting land is forbidden. Covetousness is forbidden.

In the shade of the laurels, in the village plaza, the talk is of more than fighting cocks, horses, and rain. Zapata’s army, a league of armed communities, watches over the recovered land; they oil their guns and reload them with old Mauser and.30-.30 cartridges.

Young technicians are arriving in Morelos with tripods and other strange instruments to help the agrarian reform. The campesinos receive these budding engineers from Cuernavaca with a rain of flowers; but the dogs bark at the mounted messengers who gallop in from the north with the grim news that Pancho Villa’s army is being wiped out.

(468)

Azuela

Exiled in Texas, a medic from Pancho Villa’s army treats the Mexican revolution as a pointless outburst. According to Mariano Azuela’s novel The Underdogs , this is a tale of drunken blind men who shoot without knowing why or against whom, who lash out like animals seeking things to steal or women to tumble on the ground in a land that stinks of gunpowder and frying grease.

(33)

Carranza

The clink of Villa’s horsemen’s spurs can still be heard in the mountains, but it is no longer an army. From trenches defended by barbed wire, machineguns have made a clean sweep in four long battles of Villa’s fiery cavalry, ground to dust in stubbornly repeated suicide charges.

Venustiano Carranza, president in spite of Villa and Zapata, launches the war in the south: “This business of dividing up the land is crazy,” he says. One decree announces that lands distributed by Zapata will be returned to their old owners; another promises to shoot anyone who is, or looks like, a Zapatista.

Shooting and burning with rifles and torches, government forces swoop down on the flourishing fields of Morelos. They kill five hundred people in Tlaltizapán, and many more elsewhere. The prisoners are sold in Yucatan as slave labor for the henequén plantations, as in the days of Porfirio Díaz; and crops, herds, all war booty is taken to the markets of the capital.

In the mountains, Zapata resists. When the rainy season approaches, the revolution is suspended for planting; but later, stubbornly, incredibly, it goes on.

(246, 260, and 468)

Isadora

Barefoot, naked, scantily draped in the Argentine flag, Isadora Duncan dances to the national anthem in a students’ café in Buenos Aires, and the next morning the whole world knows of it. The impresario breaks his contract, good families cancel their reservations at the Colón Theater, and the press demands the immediate expulsion of this disgraceful North American who has come to Argentina to sully patriotic symbols.

Isadora cannot understand it. No Frenchman protested when she danced the Marseillaise in nothing but a red shawl. If one can dance an emotion, if one can dance an idea, why not an anthem?

Liberty offends. This woman with shining eyes is the declared enemy of schools, matrimony, classical dance, and everything that cages the wind. She dances for the joy of dancing; dances what she wants, when she wants, how she wants; and orchestras hush before the music that is born of her body.

(145)

Jazz

From the slaves comes the freest of all music, jazz, which flies without asking permission. Its grandparents are the blacks who sang at their work on their owners’ plantations in the southern United States, and its parents are the musicians of black New Orleans brothels. The whorehouse bands play all night without stopping, on balconies that keep them safe above the brawling in the street. From their improvisations is born the new music.

With his savings from delivering newspapers, milk, and coal, a short, timid lad has just bought his own trumpet for ten dollars. He blows and the music stretches out, out, greeting the day. Louis Armstrong, like jazz, is the grandson of slaves, and has been raised, like jazz, in the whorehouse.

(105)

Latin America Invades the United States

Rain falls upward. Hen bites fox and hare shoots hunter. For the first and only time in history, Mexican soldiers invade the United States.

With the tattered force remaining, five hundred men out of the many thousands he once had, Pancho Villa crosses the border and, crying Viva Mexico! showers bullets on the city of Columbus, Texas.

(206 and 260)

Darío

In Nicaragua, occupied land, humiliated land, Rubén Darío dies.

The doctor kills him, fatally puncturing his liver. The embalmer, the hairdresser, the makeup man, and the tailor torment his remains.

A sumptuous funeral is inflicted upon him. The warm February air in the city of León smells of incense and myrrh. The most distinguished señoritas, festooned in lilies and heron feathers, serve as Canephoras and Virgins of Minerva strewing flowers along the route of the funeral procession.

Surrounded by candles and admirers, the corpse of Darío wears a Greek tunic and laurel crown by day, by night a formal black frock coat and gloves to match. For a whole week, day and night, night and day, he is scourged with never-ending recitals of shoddy verses, and regaled with speeches proclaiming him Immortal Swan, Messiah of the Spanish Lyre, and Samson of the Metaphor.

Guns roar. The government contributes to the martyrdom by piling War Ministry honors on the poet who preached peace. Bishops brandish crosses; steeple bells ring out. In the culminating moment of this flagellation, the poet who believed in divorce and lay education is dropped into the hole converted, a prince of the Church.

(129, 229, and 454)

Eagles into Hens

A punitive expedition, ten thousand soldiers with plentiful artillery enter Mexico to make Pancho Villa pay for his impudent attack on the North American city of Columbus.

“We’ll bring back that assassin in an iron cage,” proclaims General John Pershing, and the thunder of his guns echoes the words.

Across the drought-stricken immensities of northern Mexico, General Pershing finds various graves— Here lies Pancho Villa —without a Villa in any of them. He finds snakes and lizards and silent stones, and campesinos who murmur false leads when beaten, threatened, or offered all the gold in the world.

After some months, almost a year, Pershing returns to the United States. He brings back a long caravan of soldiers fed up with breathing dust, with the people throwing stones, with the lies in each little village in that gravelly desert. Two young lieutenants march at the head of the humbled procession. Both have had in Mexico their baptism of fire. For Dwight Eisenhower, newly graduated from West Point, it is an unlucky start on the road to military glory. George Patton spits as he leaves this ignorant and half-savage country .