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

Why should Spaniards refuse

to use as many?

Oh, what joy

that Spain is back

on the Moorish track.

To love one is nothing,

To love two is hypocrisy,

To love three and deceive four,

That’s the glory that comes from God!

(196)

The horse, golden of hide and full of dash, decides direction and pace. If he wants to gallop, he gallops; he seeks open country and romps amid tall grasses, approaches the stream, and backs away; respectfully, without haste, he comes and goes along the dirt streets of the brand-new city.

Riding bareback with a free rein, Pedro Mariño de Lobera parades and celebrates. All the wine there was in La Imperial flows through his veins. From time to time he giggles and makes some remark. The horse turns his head, looks, and approves.

It is four years today since Pedro quit the entourage of the viceroy in Lima and took the long road to Chile.

“I’m four years old,” says Don Pedro to the horse. “Four little years. You’re older and stupider.”

During those years he has seen plenty and fought plenty. He says that these Chilean lands sprout joys and gold the way plants grow elsewhere. And when there is war, as there always is, the Virgin throws out a thick fog to blind the Indians, and the apostle Santiago contributes his lance and white horse to the conquering host. Not far from here nor long ago, when the Araucanian squadrons had their backs to the sea, a giant wave knocked them down and swallowed them up.

Don Pedro remembers and comments, and the horse nods.

Suddenly lightning snakes across the sky and thunder shakes the ground.

“It’s raining,” Don Pedro observes. “It’s raining milk!”

The horse raises his head and drinks.

(130)

With a hundred arrows in his breast, Caupolicán meets his end. The great one-eyed chief falls, defeated by treachery. The moon used to stop to contemplate his feats, and there was not a man who didn’t love him or fear him, but a traitor could do him in.

A year ago treachery also caught Lautaro by surprise.

“And you, what are you doing here?” asked the Spanish leader.

“I come to offer you Lautaro’s head,” said the traitor.

Lautaro did not enter Santiago as a conqueror at the head of his men. His head was brought in from Mount Chilipirco on the longest lance in the Spanish army.

Treachery is a weapon as devastating as typhus, smallpox, and hunger, all of which plague the Araucanians while the war destroys crops and plantings. Yet the farmers and hunters of these Chilean lands have other weapons. Now they know how to use horses, which previously struck terror into them: they attack on horseback, a whirlwind of mounted men, and protect themselves with rawhide armor. They know how to fire the arquebuses they take on the battlefield, and they tie swords to the tips of their lances. Behind moving tree branches, in the morning mist, they advance unseen. Then they feign retreat, so that the enemy horses will sink into swamps or break their legs in concealed traps. Smoke columns tell them which way the Spanish troops are heading: they bite them and disappear. They return suddenly and hurl themselves on the enemy when the sun burns brightest and the soldiers are frying in their armor plate. Horsemen are brought down with the slipknot lassos invented by Lautaro.

What is more, the Araucanians fly. Before going into battle they rub themselves with feathers of the swiftest birds.

(5 and 66)

Who is this

riding on the wind,

like the tiger,

with his phantom body?

When the oaks see him,

when people see him,

they say in a whisper

one to the other:

“Look, brother, here comes

the ghost of Caupolicán.”

(42)

They have caught and are punishing Juan Tetón, Indian preacher of the village of Michmaloyan in the Valley of Mexico, and also those who listened and paid heed to him. Juan was going about announcing the last days of an era and the proximity of a year to end all years. At that point, he said, total darkness would fall, the verdure would dry up, and there would be hunger. All who failed to wash baptism out of their hair would turn into animals. Tzitzimes, terrifying black birds, would descend from the sky and eat everyone who had not washed off the mark of the priests.

The tzitzimes had also been announced by Martín Océlotl, who was captured and beaten, dispossessed and banished from Texcoco. He, too, said that there would be no flame at the festival of new fire and the world would end because of those who had forgotten the teachings of the fathers and grandfathers and no longer knew to whom they owed birth and growth. The tzitzimes will fall upon us through the darkness, he said, and devour women and men. According to Martín Océlotl, the missionary friars are tzitzimes in disguise, enemies of all happiness, who don’t know that we are born to die and that after death we will have neither pleasure nor joy.

And the old lords who survive in Tlaxcala also have something to say about the priests: Poor things, they say. Poor things. They must be sick or crazy. At noon, at midnight, and at the dawn hour, when everyone rejoices, they shout and cry. They must have something terribly wrong with them. They are men without any sense. They seek neither pleasure nor happiness, but sadness and loneliness.

(109)

Breathing is a violent effort, and his head is on fire. His feet, swollen with gout, will no longer walk. Stretched out on the terrace, he who was monarch of half the world is in flight from his jesters and contemplates the dusk in this Estremaduran valley. The sun is departing beyond the purple mountains, and its last rays redden the shadows over the Jeronomite convent.

He has entered many a city as a conqueror. He has been acclaimed and hated. Many have given their lives for him; the lives of many more have been taken in his name. After forty years of traveling and fighting, the highest prisoner of his own empire wants to rest and be forgotten. Who am I, what have I been? In the mirror he has seen death entering. The deceiver or the deceived?

Between battles, by the light of campfires, he has signed more than four hundred loan agreements with German, Genoese, and Flemish bankers, and the galleons have never brought enough silver and gold from America. He who so loved music has heard more of the thundering of guns and horses than sacred lute melodies; and at the end of so much war his son, Philip, will inherit a bankrupt empire.

Through the fog, from the north, Charles had arrived in Spain when he was seventeen, followed by his entourage of Flemish merchants and German bankers, in an endless caravan of wagons and horses. At the time he could not even say good-morning in the language of Castile. But tomorrow he will choose it to say goodbye.

“Oh, Jesus!” will be his last words.

(41 and 116)

The eagle of the Austrias opens his golden wings against the clear sky of the Mexican plateau. On a black cloth, surrounded by flags, glitters the crown. The catafalque renders homage to Charles V and also to death, which has conquered so invincible a monarch.