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

On one of these days, Brecht buys a little God of Luck for forty cents in a Chinese store and puts it on his desk. Brecht has been told that the God of Luck licks his lips each time they make him take poison.

(66)

The Good Neighbors to the South

accompany the United States into the World War. It is the time of democratic prices: Latin American countries supply cheap raw materials, cheap food, and a soldier or two.

The movies glorify the common cause. Rarely missing from a film is the South American number, sung and danced in Spanish or Portuguese. Donald Duck acquires a Brazilian sidekick, the little parrot José Carioca. On Pacific islands or in the fields of Europe, Hollywood Adonises wipe out Japanese and Germans by the heap. And how many Adonises have at their sides a simpatico, indolent, somewhat stupid Latin, who admires his blond northern brother and serves as his echo and shadow, faithful henchman, merry minstrel, messenger, and cook?

(467)

A Latin American Method for Reducing Production Costs

Bolivia — subsisting, as ever, on hunger rations — is one of the countries that pays for the World War by selling its tin at a tenth of the normal price.

The mine workers finance this bargain price. Their wages go from almost nothing to nothing at all. And when a government decree calls for forced labor at gunpoint, the strikes begin. Another decree bans the strikes, but fails to stop them. So the president, Enrique Penarañda, orders the army to take severe and energetic action. Patiño, king of the mines, issues his own orders: Proceed without vacillation . His viceroys, Aramayo and Hochschild, approve. The machineguns spit fire for hours and leave the ground strewn with people.

Patiño Mines pays for some coffins, but saves on indemnities. Death by machinegun is not an occupational hazard.

(97 and 474)

Carpentier

Alejo Carpentier discovers the kingdom of Henri Christophe. The Cuban writer roams these majestic ruins, this memorial to the delirium of a slave cook who became monarch of Haiti and killed himself with the gold bullet that always hung around his neck. Ceremonial hymns and magic drums of invocation rise up to meet Carpentier as he visits the palace that King Christophe copied from Versailles, and walks around his invulnerable fortress, an immense bulk whose stones, cemented by the blood of bulls sacrificed to the gods, have resisted lightning and earthquakes.

In Haiti, Carpentier learns that there is no magic more prodigious and delightful than the voyage that leads through experience, through the body, to the depths of America. In Europe, magicians have become bureaucrats, and wonder, exhausted, has dwindled to a conjuring trick. But in America, surrealism is as natural as rain or madness.

(85)

Hands That Don’t Lie

Dewitt Peters founds an open workshop and from it suddenly explodes Haitian art. Everybody paints everything: cloth, cardboard, cans, wooden boards, walls, whatever presents itself. They paint in a great outburst of splendor, with the seven souls of the rainbow. Everyone: the shoe repairman and fisherman, river washerwoman and market-stall holder. In America’s poorest country, wrung out by Europe, invaded by the United States, torn apart by wars and dictatorships, the people shout colors and no one can shut them up.

(122, 142, and 385)

A Little Grain of Salt

In a bar, surrounded by kids with bloated bellies and skeletal dogs, Hector Hyppolite paints gods with a brush of hens’ feathers. Saint John the Baptist turns up in the evenings and helps him.

Hyppolite portrays the gods who paint through his hand. These Haitian gods, painted and painters, live simultaneously on earth and in heaven and hell: Capable of good and evil, they offer their children vengeance and solace.

Not all have come from Africa. Some were born here, like Baron Samedi, god of solemn stride, master of poisons and graves, his blackness enhanced by top hat and cane. That poison should kill and the dead rest in peace depends upon Baron Samedi. He turns many dead into zombies and condemns them to slave labor.

Zombies — dead people who walk or live ones who have lost their souls — have a look of hopeless stupidity. But in no time they can escape and recover their lost lives, their stolen souls. One little grain of salt is enough to awaken them. And how could salt be lacking in the home of the slaves who defeated Napoleon and founded freedom in America?

(146, 233, and 295)

Learning to See

It is noon and James Baldwin is walking with a friend through the streets of downtown Manhattan. A red light stops them.

“Look,” says the friend, pointing at the ground.

Baldwin looks. He sees nothing.

“Look, look.”

Nothing. There is nothing to look at but a filthy little puddle of water against the curb.

His friend insists: “See? Are you seeing?”

And then Baldwin takes a good look and this time he sees, sees a spot of oil spreading in the puddle. Then, in the spot of oil, a rainbow, and even deeper down in the puddle, the street moving, and people moving in the street: the shipwrecked, the madmen, the magicians, the whole world moving, an astounding world full of worlds that glow in the world. Baldwin sees. For the first time in his life, he sees.

(152)

Miguel at Forty

He sleeps in caves and cemeteries. Condemned by hunger to constant hiccups, he competes with the magpies for scraps. His sister, who meets him from time to time, says: “God has given you many talents, but he has punished you by making you a Communist:”

Since Miguel recovered his party’s confidence, the running and suffering have only increased. Now the party has decided that its most sacrificed member must go into exile in Guatemala.

Miguel manages to cross the border after a thousand hassles and dangers. It is deepest night. He stretches out, exhausted, under a tree. At daybreak, an enormous yellow cow wakens him by licking his feet.

“Good morning,” Miguel says, and the cow, frightened, runs off at full tilt, into the forest, lowing. From the forest promptly emerge five vengeful bulls. There is no escape. Behind Miguel is an abyss and the tree at his back has a smooth trunk. The bulls charge, then stop dead and stand staring, panting, breathing fire and smoke, tossing their horns and pawing the ground, tearing up undergrowth and raising the dust.

Miguel trembles in a cold sweat. Tongue-tied with panic, he stammers an explanation. The bulls stare at him, a little man half hunger and half fear, and look at each other. He commends himself to Marx and Saint Francis of Assisi as the bulls slowly turn their backs on him and wander off, heads shaking.

And so occurs the ninth birth of Miguel Mármol, at forty years of age.

(126)

A Sun of Fire,

a violent light never before seen in the world, rises slowly, cracks the sky open, and collapses. Three days later, a second sun of suns bursts over Japan. Beneath remain the cinders of two cities, a desert of rubble, tens of thousands dead and more thousands condemned to die little by little for years to come.

The war was nearly over, Hitler and Mussolini gone, when President Harry Truman gave the order to drop atomic bombs on the populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the United States, it is the culmination of a national clamor for the prompt annihilation of the Yellow Peril. It is high time to finish off once and for all the imperial conceits of this arrogant Asian country, never colonized by anyone. The only good one is a dead one, says the press of these treacherous little monkeys.