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

(317)

Carlos

He criticized you to your face, praised you behind your back.

He had the myopic, fanatical gaze of an angry rooster, sharp brown eyes from which he saw farther than others, a man of all or nothing; but moments of joy made him jump like a small child, and when he gave orders he seemed to be asking favors.

Carlos Fonseca Amador, leader of the Nicaraguan revolution, has died fighting in the jungle.

A colonel brings the news to the cell where Tomás Borge lies shattered.

Together they had traveled a long road, Carlos and Tomás, since the days when Carlos sold newspapers and candy in Matagalpa. Together they founded, in Tegucigalpa, the Sandinista Front.

“He’s dead,” says the colonel.

“You’re wrong, colonel,” says Tomás.

(58)

Tomás

Bound to an iron ring, teeth chattering, drenched in shit, blood, and vomit, Tomás Borge is a pile of broken bones and stripped nerves, a scrap lying on the floor waiting for the next round of torture.

But this remnant of himself can still sail down secret rivers that take him beyond pain and madness. Letting himself go, he drifts into another Nicaragua. He sees it.

Through the hood that squeezes his face swollen by blows, he sees it: He counts the beds in each hospital, the windows in each school, the trees in each park, and sees the sleepers fluttering their eyelids, bewildered, those long dead from hunger and everything else that kills now being awakened by newly born suns.

(58)

Cardenal

The herons, looking at themselves in the shimmering mirror, lift their beaks. The fishermen’s boats are already returning, and behind them swim the turtles that come here to give birth on the beach.

In a wooden cabin, Jesus is seated at the fishermen’s table. He eats turtle eggs, fresh-caught guapote , and cassava. The forest, searching for him, slips its arms through the windows.

To the glory of this Jesus, Ernesto Cardenal, the poet-monk of Solentiname, writes. To his glory sings the trumpeter zanate , the homeless bird, always flying among the poor, that freshens its wings in the lake waters. And to his glory the fishermen paint. They paint brilliant pictures that announce Paradise — all brothers, no bosses, no peons — until one night the fishermen who paint Paradise decide to start making it, and cross the lake to attack the San Carlos barracks.

From the darkness, the owl promises trouble: “Screwed … screwed …”

The dictatorship kills many as these seekers of Paradise pass through the mountains and valleys and islands of Nicaragua. The dough rises, the big loaf swells …

(6 and 77)

Omar Cabezas Tells of the Mountain’s Mourning for the Death of a Guerrilla in Nicaragua

I never forgave Tello for being killed with one bullet, just one bullet … I felt a great fear, and it was as if the mountain, too, felt fear. The wind dropped and the trees stopped swaying, not a leaf stirred, the birds stopped singing. Everything froze, awaiting that moment when they’d come and kill the lot of us .

And we set out. When we broke into a marching pace up the ravine, it was as if we were shaking the mountain, as if we were grabbing her and telling her: Who the hell does this bitch think she is?

Tello lived with the mountain. I’m convinced he had relations with her, she bore him sons; and when Tello died she felt that all was over, her commitment was gone, that all the rest was foolishness … But when she saw the will to fight of the men marching there over her, in her heart she realized that Tello was not the beginning and end of the world. Though Tello may have been her son, though he may have been her life, her secret lover, her brother, her creature, her stone, though Tello may have been her river … he was not the end of the world, and that after him came all of us who could still light a fire in her heart .

(73)

Scissors

Over a thousand Brazilian intellectuals sign a manifesto against censorship.

In July of last year, the military dictatorship stopped the weekly Movimiento from publishing the United States Declaration of Independence, because in it is said that the people have the right and the duty to abolish despotic governments. Since then the censorship has banned: the Bolshoi Ballet, because it is Russian; the erotic prints of Pablo Picasso, because they are erotic; and the History of Surrealism , because one of its chapters has the word revolution in its title (“Revolution in Poetry”).

(371)

Walsh

He mails a letter and several copies. The original letter, to the military junta that rules Argentina. The copies, to foreign press agencies. On the first anniversary of the coup d’état, he is sending a sort of statement of grievances, a record of the infamies committed by a regime that can only stagger in its dance of death. At the bottom he puts his signature and number (Rodolfo Walsh, I.D. 2845022). He is only steps from the post office when their bullets cut him down; and he is carried off wounded, not to be seen again.

His naked words were scandalous where such fear reigns, dangerous while the great masked ball continues.

(461)

The Burned Books of Walsh and Other Authors Are Declared Nonexistent

IN VIEW OF the measure taken by the ex-Military Intervention of this National University in fulfillment of express superior orders, with respect to withdrawing from the Library Area all reading material of an antisocial nature and whose contents exuded ideologies alien to the Argentine National Being, constituting a source of extreme Marxist and subversive indoctrination, and

WHEREAS: Said literature having been opportunely incinerated, it is fitting to strike it from the patrimony of this House of Advanced Studies, the Rector of the National University of Rio Cuarto

RESOLVES: To strike from the patrimony of the National University of Río Cuarto (Library Area) all the bibliography listed below: [Long list follows of books by Rodolfo Walsh, Bertrand Russell, Wilhelm Dilthey, Maurice Dobb, Karl Marx, Paulo Freire, and others].

(452)

The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo,

women born of their children, are the Greek chorus of this tragedy. Brandishing photos of their disappeared ones, they circle round and round the obelisk, before the Pink House of the government, as obstinately as they make pilgrimages to barracks, police stations, and sacristies, dried up from so much weeping, desperate from so much waiting for those who were and are no longer, or perhaps still are … who knows?

“I wake up believing he’s alive,” says one, say all. “I begin to disbelieve as the morning goes on. He dies on me again at noon. He revives in the evening, I begin to believe he’ll come soon, and I set a place for him at the table, but he dies again and at night I fall asleep without hope. When I wake up, I feel he’s alive …”

They call them madwomen . Normally no one speaks of them. With the situation normalized, the dollar is cheap and certain people, too. Mad poets go to their deaths, and normal poets kiss the sword while praising silence. With total normality the Minister of Finance hunts lions and giraffes in Africa and the generals hunt workers in the suburbs of Buenos Aires. New language rules make it compulsory to call the military dictatorship Proceso de Reorganización National .