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

Then accountant dos Santos put the library up for sale. He offered it to cultural organizations, historical institutes, and various ministries. No one had the money. He tried universities, state and private, one after another. No takers. He left the library on loan at one university for a few months, until they started demanding rent. Then he tried private citizens. No one showed the slightest interest. The nation’s history is an enigma, a lie, or a yawn.

The unhappy accountant dos Santos feels great relief when he finally succeeds in selling his library to the Tijuca Paper Factory, which turns all these books, magazines, and pamphlets into tinted toilet paper.

(371)

Against Forgetting,

the only death that really kills, Carlos Quijano wrote what he wrote. This grouch and troublemaker was born in Montevideo as the century was born, and dies in exile, as Uruguay’s military dictatorship is falling. He dies at work, preparing a new Mexican edition of his magazine Marcha .

Quijano celebrated contradictions. Heresy for others to him was a sign of life. He condemned imperialism, humiliator of nations and multitudes, and proclaimed that Latin America is destined to create a socialism worthy of the hopes of its prophets.

(356)

The Resurrection of the Living

The Mexicans make a custom of eating death, a sugar or chocolate skeleton dripping with colored caramel. In addition to eating it, they sing it, dance it, drink it, and sleep it. Sometimes, to mock power and money, the people dress death in a monocle and frock coat, epaulettes and medals, but they prefer it stripped naked, racy, a bit drunk, their companion on festive outings.

Day of the Living, this Day of the Dead should be called, although on reflection it’s all the same, because whatever comes goes and whatever goes comes, and in the last analysis the beginning of what begins is always the end of what ends.

“My grandfather is so tiny because he was born after me,” says a child who knows what he’s talking about.

Believing

They preside over childbirth. Giving life and light is their profession. With practiced hands they straighten the child if it’s coming out wrong, and communicate strength and peace to the mother.

Today, the midwives of the Estelí villages and mountains close to Nicaragua’s border are having a party to celebrate something that truly deserves joy: For a year now not one new baby in this region has died of tetanus. The midwives no longer cut umbilical cords with a machete, or burn them with tallow, or tie them off without disinfectant; and pregnant women get vaccines that protect the child living inside. Now no one here believes that vaccines are Russian witches’ brews meant to turn Christians into Communists; and no one, or almost no one, believes that a newborn can die from the fixed stare of a drunken man or a menstruating woman.

This region, this war zone, suffers continuous harassment by the invaders.

“Here, we are in the alligator’s mouth.”

Many mothers go off to fight. The ones who stay share their breasts.

Miguel at Seventy-Nine

Since the dawn of the century, this man has gone through hell and died several times over. Now, from exile, he still energetically accompanies his people in their war.

The dawn light always finds him up, shaved and conspiring. He could just as easily keep turning in the revolving door of memory; but he doesn’t know how to be deaf when the voices of these new times and the roads he still hasn’t traveled call out to him.

And so at seventy-nine every day is a new birth for Miguel Mármol, old master of the art of constant rebirth.

The Echoes Go Searching for the Voice

While writing words that loved people, Julio Cortázar was making his own journey, a journey backward through the tunnel of time. He was traveling from the end to the beginning, from discouragement to enthusiasm, from indifference to passion, from solitariness to solidarity. At almost seventy, he was a child of all ages at once.

A bird that flew toward the egg, Cortázar went forward by going back, year after year, day after day, toward the embrace of lovers who make the love that makes them. And now he dies, now he enters the earth, like a man who, entering a woman, returns to the place he comes from.

The Eternal Embrace

They were found only recently in the wasteland that once was Zumpa beach in Ecuador. And here they are, in full sunlight, for anyone who wants to see: a man and a woman lying in embrace, sleeping lovers, out of eternity.

Excavating an Indian cemetery, an archaeologist came upon this pair of skeletons bound together by love. It was eight thousand years ago that the lovers of Zumpa committed the irreverence of dying without separating themselves, and anyone who approaches can see that death does not cause them the slightest concern.

Their splendid beauty is surprising, considering that they are such ugly bones in such an ugly desert, pure dryness and grayness; and more surprising is their modesty. These lovers, sleeping in the wind, seem not to have grasped that they have more mystery and grandeur than the pyramids of Teotihuacán or the sanctuary of Machu Picchu or the waterfalls of Iguazú.

The Stolen Name

The dictatorship of General Pinochet changes the names of twenty bone-poor communities, tin and cardboard houses, on the outskirts of Santiago de Chile. In the rebaptism, the Violeta Parra community gets the name of some military hero. But its inhabitants refuse to bear this unchosen name. They are Violeta Parra or nothing.

A while back they had decided in unanimous assembly to name themselves after the campesina singer with the raspy voice who in her songs of struggle knew how to celebrate Chile’s mysteries.

Violeta was sinful and saucy, given to guitar-strumming and long talks and falling in love, and with all her dancing and clowning around she kept burning the empanadas. Thanks to life, which has given me so much , she sang in her last song; and a turbulent love affair sent her off to her death.

(334 and 440)

The Found Name

In the mountains of Nayarit in Mexico, there was a community that had no name. For centuries this community of Huichol Indians had been looking for a name. Carlos González found one by sheer accident.

This Huichol had come to the city of Tepic to buy seeds and visit relatives. Crossing a garbage dump, he picked up a book thrown into the rubbish. It was years ago that Carlos had learned to read the Castilian language, and he could still just about manage it. Sitting in the shade of a projecting roof, he began to decipher the pages. The book spoke of a country with a strange name, which Carlos couldn’t place but which had to be far from Mexico, and told a story of recent occurrence.

On the way home, walking up the mountain, Carlos continued reading. He couldn’t tear himself away from this story of horror and bravery. The central character of the book was a man who had kept his word. Arriving at the village, Carlos announced euphorically: “At last we have a name!”

And he read the book aloud to everyone. This halting recital took him almost a week. Afterward, the hundred and fifty families voted. All in favor. Dancing and singing they performed the baptism.

So finally they have a name for themselves. This community bears the name of a worthy man who did not doubt at the moment of choice between treachery and death.