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

From a corner, a puppy snores with half-open eyes.

(194)

On Don Antonio Solar’s hacienda by the Lurín River, the melons have grown as big as suns. It is the first time that this fruit, brought from Spain, has been planted around here, and the foreman sends the master ten samples for his pleasure and pride. The size of these melons is comparable with that of the Cuzapa Valley radishes, of which they say five horses can be tied to their tops.

Two Indians take the foreman’s offering to Lima in two sacks. He has given them a letter to deliver with the melons to Don Antonio Solar. “If you eat any of the melons,” he warns them, “this letter will tell him about it.”

When they are a couple of leagues from the city of the kings, the Indians sit down to rest in a ravine.

“How would this peculiar fruit taste?”

“Must be marvelous.”

“How about trying it? One melon, just one.”

“The letter will sing,” one of the Indians recalls.

They look at the letter and hate it. They look around for a prison for it. They hide it behind a rock where it can’t see anything, and devour a melon in quick bites, sweet juicy pulp, delicious beyond imagining. Then they eat another to even up the sacks. Then they pick up the letter, tuck it in their clothing, throw the sacks over their shoulders, and continue on their way.

(76)

The king’s official is awaiting the witch, skilled in deviltries, who has been summoned to come to explain herself. Face down at his feet lies the stone idol. The witch was caught communing secretly with the idol and will soon pay for her heresy. But before the punishment, the official wants to hear from her own lips her confession of talks with the Devil. While he waits for her to be brought, he amuses himself stomping on the idol and meditating on the fate of these Indians, whom God must be sorry to have made.

The soldiers throw down the witch and leave her trembling on the threshold.

Then the ugly old stone idol greets the ugly old witch in the Quechua language: “Welcome, princess,” says the hoarse voice from under the official’s foot.

The official is flabbergasted and falls sprawling on the floor.

As she fans him with a hat, the old woman clutches the fainting man’s coat and cries: “Don’t punish me, sir, don’t break it!”

The old woman wants to explain to him that divinities live in the stone and if it were not for the idol, she would not know her name, or who she is, or where she comes from and would be wandering the earth naked and lost.

(221)

Hear me,

from the sea up there where Thou livest,

from the sea down here where Thou art.

Creator of the world,

potter of man,

Lord of Lords,

to Thee,

with my eyes that despair to see Thee

or just for yearning to know Thee

if I see Thee,

know Thee,

ponder Thee,

understand Thee,

Thou wilt see me and know me.

The sun, the moon,

the day,

the night,

the summer,

the winter,

they don’t walk idly,

but in good order,

to the appointed place

and to a good end.

Everywhere Thou carriest with Thee

Thy royal scepter.

Hear me,

listen to me.

Let me not tire out,

let me not die.

(105)

The gilded tunic glints. Forty-five years after his death, Moctezuma heads the procession. The horsemen move at walking pace into the central square of Mexico City. Dancers step out to the thunder of drums and the lament of chirimía pipes. Many Indians, clad in white, hold up flowered branches; others, enormous clay cooking pots. The smoke of incense mingles with the aromas of spicy sauces.

Before Cortés’s palace, Moctezuma dismounts.

The door opens. Among his pages, armed with tall, sharpened halberds, appears Cortes.

Moctezuma bows his head, crowned with feathers and gold and precious stones. Kneeling, he offers garlands of flowers. Cortés touches his shoulder. Moctezuma rises. With a slow gesture he tears off his mask and reveals the curly hair and high-pointed mustachio of Alonso de Avila.

Alonso de Avila, lord of gallows and knife, owner of Indians, lands, and mines, enters the palace of Martín Cortés, marquis of the Valley of Oaxaca. The son of a conquistador opens his house to the nephew of another conquistador.

Today the conspiracy against the king of Spain officially commences. In the life of the colony, all is not soirees and tournaments, card and hunting parties.

(28)

Fray Bartolomé de las Casas is going over the heads of the king and of the Council of the Indies. Will he be punished for his disobedience? At ninety-two, it matters little to him. He has been fighting for half a century. Are not his exploits the key to his tragedy? They have let him win many battles, but the outcome of the war was decided in advance. He has known it for a long time.

His fingers won’t obey him anymore. He dictates the letter. Without anybody’s permission, he addresses himself directly to the Holy See. He asks Pius V to order the wars against the Indians stopped and to halt the plunder that uses the cross as an excuse. As he dictates he becomes indignant, the blood rises to his head, and the hoarse and feeble voice that remains to him trembles.

Suddenly he falls to the floor.

(70 and 90)

The lips move, speak soundless words. “Forgivest Thou me, Lord?”

Fray Bartolomé pleads for mercy at the Last Judgment for having believed that black and Moorish slaves would alleviate the fate of the Indians.

He lies stretched out, damp forehead, pallid, and the lips do not stop moving. From far off, a slow thunderclap. Fray Bartolomé, the giver of birth, the doer, closes his eyes. Although always hard of hearing, he hears rain beating on the roof of the Atocha monastery. The rain moistens his face. He smiles.

One of the priests who accompanies him murmurs something about the strange light that has illumined his face. Through the rain, free of doubt and torment, Fray Bartolomé is traveling for the last time to the green worlds where he knew happiness.

“I thank Thee,” say his lips in silence while he reads the prayers by the light of fireflies, splashed by the rain that strikes the palm-frond roof.

“I thank Thee,” he says as he celebrates Mass in sheds without walls and baptizes naked children in rivers.

The priests cross themselves. The clock’s last grains of sand have fallen. Someone turns over the hourglass so that time will not be interrupted.

(27, 70, and 90)

Never again will the river reflect his face, his panache of lofty plumes.

This time the gods did not listen to his wife, Urquía, who pleaded that neither bullets nor disease should touch him and that sleep, the brother of death, should never forget to return him to the world at the end of each night.

The invaders felled Guaicaipuro with bullets.

Since the Indians elected him chief, there was no truce in this valley nor in the Avila Mountains. In the newly born city of Caracas people crossed themselves when in a low voice they spoke his name.