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

At the fiesta of the full moon, the gods dance in the body of Chief Cuchacique and lend magic to his arms. From the villages of Jeriboca and Bonda, the voices of war awaken the whole land of the Tairona Indians and shake Masinga and Masinguilla, Zaca and Mamazaca, Mendiguaca and Torama, Buritaca and Tairama, Maroma, Taironaca, Guachaca, Chonea, Cinto and Nahuanje, Mamatoco, Ciénaga, Dursino and Gairaca, Origua and Durama, Dibocaca, Daona, Chengue and Masaca, Daodama, Sacasa, Cominca, Guarinea, Mauracataca, Choquenca and Masanga.

Chief Cuchacique wears a jaguar skin. Arrows that whistle, arrows that burn, arrows that poison: The Taironas burn chapels, break crosses, and kill friars, fighting against the enemy god who prohibits their customs.

Since time immemorial in these lands, anyone got a divorce who wanted one, and siblings made love if they felt like it, and women with men or men with men or women with women. Thus it was in these lands until the men in black and the men in iron came, they who throw to their dogs anyone loving as his ancestors loved.

The Taironas celebrate their first victories. In their temples, which the enemy calls houses of the Devil, they play the flute on bones of the vanquished, drink corn wine, and dance to the lilt of drums and shell trumpets. The warriors have closed all passes and roads to Santa Marta and are preparing the final assault.

(189)

The fire takes time to catch. How slowly it burns.

Grindings of metal, armored men in motion. The assault on Santa Marta has failed and the governor has passed a sentence of annihilation. Weapons and soldiers have arrived from Cartagena in the nick of time and the Taironas, bled white by so many years of tribute and slavery, scatter in defeat.

Extermination by fire. Burning villages and plantations, cornfields and cottonfields, cassava and potato crops, fruit orchards. The irrigated plantings that delighted the eye and gave food, the farmlands where the Taironas made love in full daylight, because children made in the dark are born blind — everything burns.

How many worlds do these fires illuminate? The one that was and was seen, the one that was and was not seen …

Exiled at the end of seventy-five years of rebellions, the Taironas flee into the mountains, the most arid and remote places, where there is no fish and no corn. Far up there the invaders have expelled them, seizing their lands and uprooting their memory, so that in their remote isolation oblivion may descend upon the songs they sang when they lived together, a federation of free peoples, and were strong and wore robes of multicolored cotton and necklaces of gold and flashing stones: so that they should never again remember that their grandparents were jaguars.

Behind them they leave ruins and graves.

The wind whispers, souls in travail whisper, and fire dances in the distance.

(189)

Deep in the Amazon jungle a fisherman of the Desana tribe sits on a high rock and contemplates the river. The waters slide down, carry fish, polish stones — waters gilded by the first light of day. The fisherman looks and looks, and feels that the old river turns into the flow of blood through his veins. The fisherman will not fish until he has won the hearts of the fishes’ wives.

Nearby, in the village, the hunter gets ready. He has already vomited, and later bathed in the river, and is clean inside and out. Now he drinks infusions of plants that have the color of deer, so that their aromas may impregnate his body, and paints on his face the mask that the deer like best. After blowing tobacco smoke on his weapons, he walks softly to the spring where the deer drink. There he drops juice of the pineapple, which is the milk of the daughter of the sun.

The hunter has slept alone these last nights. He has not been with women nor dreamed of them, so that the animal he will hunt and pierce with lance or arrows should not be jealous.

(189)

Caravans of llamas and mules carry to the port of Arica the silver that the Potosí mountain bleeds from each of its mouths. At the end of a long voyage the ingots arrive in Europe to finance war, peace, and progress there.

In exchange, from Seville or by contraband, Potosí receives the wines of Spain, the hats and silks of France, the lace, mirrors, and tapestry of Flanders, German swords, Genoese paper, Neapolitan stockings, Venetian glass, Cypriot wax, Ceylonese diamonds, East Indian marbles, the perfumes of Arabia, Malacca, and Goa, Persian carpets and Chinese porcelain, black slaves from Cape Verde and Angola, and dashing steeds from Chile.

Everything is very dear in this city, the dearest in the world. Only chicha corn liquor and coca leaves are cheap. The Indians, forcibly seized from the communities of all Peru, spend Sundays in the corrals dancing to their drums and drinking chicha till they roll on the ground. On Monday mornings they are herded into the mountain and, chewing coca and beaten with iron bars, they pursue the veins of silver, greenish-white serpents that appear and take flight through the entrails of this immense paunch, no light, no air. There the Indians toil all week, prisoners, breathing dust that kills the lungs, and chewing coca that deceives hunger and masks exhaustion, never knowing when night falls or day breaks, until Saturday ends and the bell rings for prayer and release. Then they move forward, holding lighted candles, to emerge on Sunday at dawn, so deep are the diggings and the infinite tunnels and galleries.

A priest newly come to Potosi sees them arriving in the city’s suburbs, a long procession of squalid ghosts, their backs scarred by the lash, and remarks: “I don’t want to see this portrait of hell.”

“So shut your eyes,” someone suggests.

“I can’t,” he says. “With my eyes shut I see more.”

(21 and 157)

Last night they were married, before the fire as tradition demands, and heard the sacred words:

To her: “When he ignites with the fire of love, do not be icy.”

And to him: “When she ignites with the fire of love, do not be icy.”

By the glow of the fire they awaken, embrace, congratulate themselves with their eyes, and tell their dreams.

During sleep the soul travels outside the body and gets to know, in an eternity or the blink of an eye, what is going to happen. Beautiful dreams are to be shared; and to share them, couples awaken very early. Bad dreams, however, are to be thrown to the dogs.

Bad dreams, nightmares about abysses or vultures or monsters, may portend the worst. And the worst, here, is being forced to go to the Huancavélica mercury mines or to the far-off silver mountain of Potosí.

(150 and 151)

A llama wished

to have golden hair,

brilliant as the sun,

strong as love

and soft as the mist

that the dawn dissolves,

to weave a braid

on which to mark,

knot by knot,

the moons that pass,

the flowers that die.

(202)

Carriages have returned to the broad streets of Mexico. More than twenty years ago the ascetic Philip II banned them. The decree said that use of a carriage turns men into idlers and accustoms them to a pampered and lazy life; and that this costs them muscle for the arts of war.

Now that Philip II is dead, carriages reign again in this city. Inside them, silks and mirrors; outside, gold and tortoise shell and coats of arms on the door. They exude an aroma of fine woods, roll smoothly as a gondola, rock like a cradle; behind the curtains the colonial nobility wave and smile. On his lofty perch, amid silken fringes and tassels, sits the disdainful coachman, almost like a king; and the horses are shod with silver.