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

(74, 97, and 99)

“Three cheers for the gold of the galleons! Hurrah for the silver of Potosí!”

The Dragon is coming! cried the women, and church bells pealed out the alarm. In three years Francis Drake has circumnavigated the world. He has twice crossed the equator and sacked the Spanish Main, stripping ports and ships from Chile to Mexico.

Now he is returning with only one ship and a moribund crew of eighteen, but he brings treasure that multiplies by 120 the capital invested in the expedition. Queen Elizabeth, chief shareholder and author of the plan, converts the pirate into a knight. On the waters of the Thames the ceremony is performed. On the sword that dubs him is engraved this saying of the queen’s: Who strikes you strikes me, Drake. On his knees, he offers Her Majesty an emerald brooch stolen in the Pacific.

Towering over the fog and soot, Elizabeth is at the summit of a nascent empire. She is the daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, who for having produced a daughter lost her head in the Tower of London. The virgin queen devours her lovers, uses her fists on her maids of honor, and spits on her courtiers’ clothes.

Francis Bacon will be the philosopher and chancellor of the new empire and William Shakespeare its poet. Francis Drake, captain of its ships. Scorner of storms, master of sails and winds, the pirate Drake moves at court as if climbing masts and rigging. Squat but hefty with fiery beard, he was born by the sea and has been brought up in the fear of God. The sea is his home; and he never launches an attack without a Bible pressing against the chest beneath his clothing.

(149, 187, and 198)

The lamp advances violating the darkness and pulls faces out of the murk, faces of specters, hands of specters, and nails them to the wall.

The official touches nothing, his gloved hands hidden beneath his cape, half closing his eyes as if fearing to infect them. He has come to check the implementation of the new order concerning San Lázaro Hospital. The viceroy has ordered that male patients should not mix. Whites and mestizos have to occupy one room, blacks and mulattoes another, Indians another. The females, however, are to be all together in one room whatever their color or condition.

(148)

They cross Lake Titicaca in the cattail boat. She travels by his side, dressed for a fiesta. In the city of La Paz her tunic has been gilded. When they land, he puts his cloak over her to shield her from the rain; and with her in his arms, covered up, he enters the village of Copacabana. The rain stings the crowd that has come to receive them.

Francisco Tito Yupanqui enters the sanctuary with her and uncovers her. She is taken up to the altar. From on high, the Virgin of Copacabana embraces them all. She will protect against pestilence and sorrow and the bad weather of February.

The Indian sculptor has modeled her in Potosí. He has worked for nearly two years to give her appropriate beauty. Indians may only paint or carve images that imitate European models, and Francisco Tito Yupanqui did not want to violate the ban. He had intended to make a Virgin identical to Our Lady of Candelaria, but his hands have modeled this Andean body with big lungs hungry for air, large torso, and short legs, and this broad Indian face with fleshy lips and almond eyes that stare sadly at the bruised land.

(47 and 163)

He raises himself on his hands and falls on his face. He tries to lean on an elbow and slips. He manages to bring up one knee and sinks into the mud.

Face down in the mud, beneath the rain, he weeps.

Hernando Maravilla had not wept under the two hundred lashes he received in the streets of Lima on the way to the harbor; and not a tear was seen on his face while he received another two hundred here in Santiago.

Now the rain lashes him, drawing off the dry blood and the mud.

“Wretch! That’s how you bite the hand that feeds you!” said his owner, the long-widowed Doña Antonia Nabía, when they brought the fugitive slave back to her.

Hernando Maravilla had escaped because one day he saw a woman who was pretty as a picture and couldn’t resist following her. They caught him in Lima, and the Inquisition questioned him. He was sentenced to four hundred lashes for having said that marriages were made by the Devil and that the bishop was a nothing and that he shat on the bishop.

He who was born in Africa, grandson of a medicine man, son of a hunter, twists himself around and weeps, his back raw, as the rain falls on Santiago de Chile.

(31 and 138)

Lonelyme, lonelyme, sings the ringdove.

A woman offers flowers to a stone that has been smashed to pieces. “Lord,” says the woman to the stone, “Lord, how you have suffered.”

The old native wise men offer their testimony to Fray Bernardino de Sahagún: “Let us die,” they plead, “since our gods have died.”

Fray Bernardino de Ribiera, native of Sahagún: son of St. Francis, bare feet, patched cassock, seeker of the plenitude of Paradise, seeker of the memory of these vanquished peoples. For more than forty years Sahagún has been traveling through Mexico, the seigniory of Huexotzingo, Tula of the Toltecs, the Texcoco region, to rescue the images and words of times past. In the twelve books of the General History of New Spain, Sahagún and his young assistants have saved and assembled ancient voices, the fiestas of the Indians, their rites, their gods, their way of counting the passage of years and stars, their myths, their poems, their medicines, their tales of remote ages and of the recent European invasion … History sings in this first great work of American anthropology.

Six years ago King Philip II had those manuscripts and all the native codices copied and translated by Sahagún seized so that no original or translation of them should remain. Where have they ended up, those books suspected of perpetuating and publicizing idolatries? No one knows. The Council of the Indies has not replied to any of the despairing author-copier’s pleas. What has the king done with these forty years of Sahagún’s life and so many centuries of the life of Mexico? They say in Madrid that the pages have been used as spice wrappings.

Old Sahagún does not give up. At eighty he clutches to his breast a few papers saved from the disaster and dictates to his pupils in Tlatelolco the first lines of a new work, to be called Divinatory Art. Later he will go to work on a complete Mexican calendar. When he finishes the calendar, he will begin a Náhuatl Spanish-Latin dictionary. And after the dictionary …

Outside, dogs howl, fearing rain.

(24 and 200)

Captain Antonio de Espejo, who made a fast fortune on the frontier of Mexico, has responded to the siren call of the seven cities of gold. At the head of a few warrior horsemen he has undertaken the Odyssey to the north; and instead of the fabulous kingdom of Cíbola, he has found an immense desert, very occasionally peppered with villages in the shape of fortresses. No precious stones hang from the trees, because there are no trees except in the rare valleys; and there is no more glitter of gold than what the sun draws from the rocks when it beats down hard on them.

In those villages the Spaniards hoist their flag. The Indians still do not know that they will soon be obliged to change their names and raise temples to worship another god, although the Great Spirit of the Hopis told them some time ago that a new race would arrive, a race of fork-tongued men, bringing greed and boast-fulness. The Hopis receive Captain Espejo with offerings of corn tortillas and turkeys and hides; and the Navajos of the high mountains welcome him bringing water and corn.