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

Thousands of People Flock to the Show,

and many are women with babies in their arms. The family performance reaches its high point when Ell Persons, tied to a stake, is baptized with gasoline and the flames draw his first howls.

Not long afterward, the audience departs in an orderly fashion, complaining of the brevity of these things. Some stir the cinders seeking a bone as a souvenir.

Ell Persons is one of the seventy-seven blacks who have been roasted alive or hanged by white crowds this year in the southern United States for committing a murder or a rape — that is to say, for looking at a white woman, possibly with a lascivious gleam; or for saying “Yes” instead of “Yes, ma’am”; or for not removing his hat before speaking.

Among these lynched “niggers,” some have worn the military uniform of the United States of America and hunted Pancho Villa through Mexico’s northern deserts, or are newly returned from the world war.

(51, 113, and 242)

Rice Powder

President Epitácio Pessoa makes a recommendation to the managers of Brazilian football. For reasons of patriotic prestige, he suggests that no player with black skin be sent to the coming South American soccer championships.

It happens, however, that Brazil won last year thanks to the mulatto Artur Friedenreich, who scored the winning goal and whose boots, grimed with mud, are still on display in a jeweler’s window. Friedenreich, born of a German and a black, is Brazil’s best player. He always arrives on the field last. It takes him at least half an hour in the dressingroom to iron out his frizz, so that during the game not a hair will move, even when he heads the ball.

Football, that elegant after-Mass diversion, is something for whites.

“Rice powder! Rice powder!” yell the fans at Carlos Alberto, another mulatto player on the Fluminense club who whitens his face with it.

(279)

Pixinguinha

It is announced that the Batons will soon be appearing on the Paris stage, and indignation mounts in the Brazilian press. What will Europeans think? Will they imagine Brazil is an African colony? The Batons’ repertory contains no operatic arias or waltzes, only maxixes, lundús, cortajacas, batuques, cateretês, modinhas , and the newborn samba . It is an orchestra of blacks who play black music. Articles exhort the government to head off the disgrace. The foreign ministry promptly explains that the Batons are not on an official mission.

Pixinguinha, one of the blacks in the ensemble, is the best musician in Brazil. He doesn’t know it, nor does it interest him. He is too busy seeking on his flute, with devilish joy, sounds stolen from the birds.

(75)

Brazil’s Fashionable Author

inaugurates a swimming pool in a sports club. Coelho Neto’s speech exalting the virtues of the pool draws tears and applause. Coelho Neto invokes the powers of sea, sky, and earth on this solemn occasion of such magnitude that we cannot evaluate it without tracing, through the Shadows of Time, its projection into the Future .

Sweets for the rich , denounces Lima Barreto, an author not in vogue and accursed both as a mulatto and a rebel, who, cursing back, dies in some godforsaken hospital.

Lima Barreto mocks the pomposities of writers who parrot the literature of ornamental culture. They sing the glories of a happy Brazil, without blacks, workers, or the poor; a Brazil populated with sage economists whose most original idea is to impose more taxes on the people, a Brazil with two hundred and sixty-two generals whose job is to design new uniforms for next year’s parade.

(36)

This Reprieve

saves thousands condemned to early death. Neither royal nor presidential, it has been extended by a Canadian doctor who a week ago, with seven cents in his pocket, was looking for a job.

On a hunch that deprived him of sleep, and after much error and discouragement, Fred Banting discovers that insulin, secreted by the pancreas, reduces sugar in the blood; and thus he commutes the many death sentences imposed by diabetes.

(54)

For Continuing to Believe That All Belongs to All

Ricardo, most talented and dangerous of the Flores Magón brothers, has been absent from the revolution he did so much to start. While Mexico’s fate was played out on its battlefields, he was breaking stones, shackled in a North American prison.

A United States court had sentenced him to twenty years’ hard labor for signing an anarchist manifesto against private property. He was many times offered a pardon, if only he would ask for it. He never asked.

“When I die, perhaps my friends will write on my grave: ‘Here Lies a Dreamer,’ and my enemies: ‘Here Lies a Madman.’ But no one will dare write: ‘Here Lies a Coward and Traitor to his Ideas.’”

In his cell, far from his land, they strangle him. Heart failure , says the medical report.

(44 and 391)

The Worker-Shoot

Three years ago young aristocrats of the Argentine Patriotic League went hunting in the barrios of Buenos Aires. The safari was a success. The rich kids killed workers and Jews for a whole week without a license, and no one went to jail.

Now it’s the army that is using workers for target practice in the frozen lands of the south. The boys of the Tenth Cavalry under Lieutenant Colonel Héctor Benigno Varela roam the great estates of Patagonia shooting peons on strike. Fervent Patriotic League volunteers accompany them. No one is executed without a trial. Each trial lasts less time than it takes to smoke a cigarette.

Estancia owners and officers act as judges. The condemned are buried by the heap in common graves they dig themselves.

President Hipólito Yrigoyen in general doesn’t approve of this method of finishing off anarchists and reds, but lifts not a finger against the murderers.

(38 and 365)

Crosses Float in the River,

hundreds of crosses crowned with mountain blossoms, flowery squadrons of tiny ships cruising on the swell of waves and memory. Each cross recalls a murdered worker. People have thrown these floating crosses into the water so that the workers lying in the riverbed may rest in peace.

It happened a year ago, in the port of Guayaquil, which for several hours was in the hands of the workers. Fed up with eating hunger, they had called the first general strike in Ecuador’s history — not even government officials were able to circulate without a pass from the unions. The women — washerwomen, tobacco workers, cooks, peddlers — had formed the Rosa Luxemburg Committee; they were the most defiant.

“Today the rabble got up laughing. Tomorrow they’ll go to bed crying,” announced Carlos Arroyo, president of the Chamber of Deputies. And the president of the republic, José Luis Tamayo, ordered General Enrique Barriga to take care of the matter: “At any cost.”

At the first shots, many workers tried to escape, scattering like ants from an anthill squashed by a foot. These were the first to fall.

No one knows how many were thrown into the Guayas river to sink, their bellies slashed with bayonets.

(192, 332, and 472)

The Function of the Forces of Order in the Democratic Process

As soon as the Tom Mix film ends, Juan Escudero surprises the audience by stepping in front of the screen of Acapulco’s only cinema and delivering a harangue against bloodsucking merchants. By the time the boys in uniform pile on him, the Workers’ Party of Acapulco has already been born, baptized by acclamation.