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

“That right?”

“They chucked him out like a dog. Now he ain’t porter at the courthouse, nor nothing.”

Breadbeggar, feeling avenged, smiles. He stretches his bare toes.

“Must’ve been because of his misdeeds.”

“It wasn’t that.”

“Because he was too stupid, then?”

“No, no. Because he’s the son of a mulatto and grandson of a nigger. Too bloody dark.”

(31)

Thanks to the corpse of St. Isidro, which slept beside him for the past few nights, King Philip III feels better. This noon he ate and drank without choking. His favorite dishes lit up his eyes, and he emptied the wineglass at a gulp.

Now he moistens his fingers in the bowl offered by a kneeling page. The pantryman reaches out the napkin to the majordomo of the week. The majordomo of the week passes it to the chief majordomo. The chief majordomo bows to the duke of Uceda. The duke takes the napkin. Bowing his head, he holds it out to the king. While the king dries his hands, the trencherman brushes crumbs from his clothes, and the priest offers God a prayer of thanks.

Philip yawns, loosens his high lace collar, asks what is the news.

The duke reports that the Hospital Board people have come to the palace. They complain that the public refuses to go to the theater since the king banned dances; and the hospitals live from the takings of the comedies. “Sir,” the board people have told the duke, “since there have been no dances there have been no takings. The sick are dying. We have nothing to pay for bandages and doctors.” Actors recite verses by Lope de Vega extolling the American Indian:

Taquitán mitanacuní ,

Spaniard from here to there.

… In Spain there is no love

so it seems to me:

there selfishness is king

here love’s the thing.

But what the public wants from America are the kind of salty songs and dances that set the most respectable folk on fire. No use for the actors to make the stones weep and the dead laugh, nor for proscenium arts to draw lightning out of cardboard clouds. “If the theaters stay empty,” say the board people, groaning, “the hospitals will have to close.”

“I told them,” says the duke, “Your Highness would decide.”

Philip scratches his chin, investigates his nails.

“If Your Majesty has not changed his mind … What is banned is banned and well banned.”

The saraband and chaconne dances make sex shine in the dark. Father Mariana has denounced these dances, inventions of negroes and American savages, infernal in words and in movements. Even in processions their couplets eulogizing sin are heard; and when their lascivious tambourine and castanet rhythms burst forth, the very nuns in the convents can no longer control their feet and the Devil’s ticklings galvanize their hips and bellies.

The king’s eyes are following the flight of a big, lazy fly among the remains of the banquet. “You — what do you think?” the king asks the fly.

The duke thinks he is being addressed: “These clownish dances are music for a witches’ sabbath, as Your Majesty has well said, and the place for witches is in the bonfires in the central plaza.”

The goodies have disappeared from the table, but the smell sticks in the air.

Babbling, the king orders the fly: “You decide.”

“Your Majesty’s worst enemy couldn’t accuse you of intolerance,” insists the duke. “Your Majesty has been indulgent. In the time of the king your father, whom God keeps in glory …”

“Aren’t you the one in command?” babbles Philip.

“… anyone who dared to dance the saraband got a different reward. Two hundred lashes and a dose of the galleys!”

“You, I say,” whispers the king and closes his eyes.

“You”—and a gob of foam, saliva that his mouth always produces to excess, appears on his lips.

The duke smells a protest and immediately shuts up and withdraws on tiptoe.

Drowsiness overtakes Philip, heavy eyelids, and he dreams of a plump, nude woman who devours playing cards.

(186)

Father Antonio Vázquez de Espinosa, newly arrived from America, is the guest of honor.

While the servants serve slices of turkey with sauce, foamy waves break in the air; a high, white sea maddened by storm; and when the stuffed chickens come on, tropical rains explode over the table. Father Antonio relates that on the Caribbean coast it rains so hard that women become pregnant and their children are born waiting for it to stop; by the time it clears, they are already grown up.

The other guests, captives of the story and the banquet, eat and are silent; the priest has his mouth full of words and forgets the dishes. From the floor, seated on hassocks, children and women listen as if at Mass.

The crossing from the Honduran port of Trujillo to Sanlúcar de Barrameda has been quite a feat. The ships proceeded bump by bump, tormented by squalls; several ships were swallowed by the angry sea, and many sailors by sharks. But nothing was worse, and Father Antonio’s voice lowers, nothing was worse than the rats.

In punishment for the many sins committed in America, and because no one bothers with confession and Communion as they should before going aboard, God filled the ships with rats. He put them in the storage holds among the victuals, and beneath the quarterdeck; in the stern saloon, in the cabins, and even on the pilot’s seat; so many rats, and such big ones, that they aroused fear and admiration. Four quintals of bread the rats stole from the cabin where the priest slept, plus the biscuits that were under the hatchway. They wolfed the hams and the sides of bacon in the stern storechest. When thirsty passengers went looking for water, they found drowned rats floating in the containers. When hungry ones went to the hen coop, all they found were bones and feathers and perhaps one sprawling chicken with its feet gnawed off. Not even the parrots in their cages escaped. Sailors kept watch over the remaining water and food night and day, armed with clubs and knives, and the rats attacked them and bit their hands and ate each other.

Between olive and fruit courses, the rats have arrived. The desserts are intact. No one touches a drop of wine.

“Would you like to hear the new prayers I composed? Since old ones just didn’t placate the wrath of the Lord …”

No one answers.

The men cough, raising napkins to mouths. The women who were on their feet giving orders to the servants have all disappeared. Those listening from the floor are cross-eyed and open-mouthed. The children see Father Antonio with long snout, enormous teeth, and mustachio and twist their necks looking for his tail under the table.

(201)

“Walk!”

“Run!”

“Sing!”

“What blemishes does he have?”

“Open that mouth!”

“Is he drunk, or just cantankerous?”

“How much do you offer, sir?”

“And diseases?”

“He’s worth twice that!”

“Run!”

“Better not cheat me, or I’ll bring him back.”

“Jump, you dog!”

“You don’t get goods like that for nothing.”

“Make him lift up his arms!”

“Make him sing good and loud!”

“This woman, with kids or without?”

“Let’s see her teeth!”

They pull them by one ear. The buyer’s name will be marked on the cheeks or forehead, and they will be work tools on the plantations, fisheries, and mines, or weapons of war on the battle-fields. They will be midwives and wet nurses, giving life, and executioners and gravediggers taking it. They will be minstrels and bed-flesh.