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

In the forest, kneeling before a cross of arrayán branches, Francisco says prayers of gratitude. Tonight he will be hitting the trail for Nacimiento fort. There he will be exchanged for three captive Araucanian chiefs. He will make the journey protected by a hundred lances.

Now he walks toward the settlement. Beneath a brush arbor a circle of threadbare ponchos and muddy faces awaits him. The strawberry or apple chicha passes from mouth to mouth.

The venerable Tereupillán receives the cinnamon-tree branch, which is the word, and raising it, he makes a long speech of praise for each of the chiefs present. Then he eulogizes Maulicán, the brave warrior, who won such a valuable prisoner in battle and knew how to take him alive.

“It is not for generous hearts,” says Tereupillán, “to take life in cold blood. When we took up arms against the Spanish tyrants who held us under persecution and humiliation, only in battle I felt no compassion for them. But afterward, when I saw them as captives, it gave me great sadness and pain, and it hurt my soul to perceive that truly we did not hate them as persons. Their greed, yes. Their cruelties, their arrogance, yes.”

Turning to Francisco, he says: “And you, Captain, friend and comrade, who are going away and leaving us hurt, sad, and without consolation, do not forget us.”

Tereupillán drops the cinnamon branch in the center of the circle and the Araucanians shake the ground awake, stamping their feet.

(26)

They Won’t Betray Their Dead

For nearly two years Fray Francisco Bravo had been preaching in this village of Motocintle. One day he told the Indians he had been called back to Spain. He wanted to return to Guatemala, he said, and stay here forever with his beloved flock, but his superiors over there in Spain would not let him.

“Only gold could convince them,” said Fray Francisco.

“Gold we don’t have,” said the Indians.

“Yes, you do,” corrected the priest. “I know there’s a seam of it hidden in Motocintle.”

“That gold doesn’t belong to us,” they explained. “That gold belongs to our ancestors. We’re just looking after it. If any were missing, what would we say to them when they return to the world?”

“I only know what my superiors in Spain will say. They’ll say: ‘If the Indians of that village where you want to stay love you so much, how come you’re so poor?’”

The Indians got together to discuss the matter.

One Sunday after Mass, they blindfolded Fray Francisco and made him turn around until he was dizzy. Everybody went along behind him, from the oldest to children at the breast. When they reached the back of a cave, they took off the blindfold. The priest blinked, his eyes hurting from the glitter of gold, more gold than all the treasures of the Thousand and One Nights, and his trembling hands did not know where to start. He made a bag of his cassock and loaded up what he could. Afterward he swore by God and the holy gospels that he would never reveal the secret, and he received a mule and tortillas for his journey.

In the course of time the royal audiencia of Guatemala received a letter from Fray Francisco Bravo from the port of Veracruz. With great pain to his soul the priest was fulfilling his duty, as an act of service to the king in an important and outstanding matter of business. He described the possible location of the gold: “I think I went only a short distance from the village. There was a stream running to the left …” He enclosed some sample nuggets and promised to use the rest for devotions to a saint in Malaga.

Now mounted judge and soldiers descend upon Motocintle. Dressed in red tunic and with a white wand hanging from his breast, Judge Juan Maldonado exhorts the Indians to surrender the gold.

He promises and guarantees them good treatment.

He threatens them with severities and punishments.

He puts a few in prison.

Others he puts in the stocks and tortures.

Others he forces up the steps of the scaffold.

And nothing.

(71)

María, Queen of the Boards

“Every day more problems and less husband!” says María del Castillo with a sigh. At her feet, the stagehand, the prompter, and the star actress offer consolation and breezes from their fans.

In the heavy dusk, the guards of the Inquisition took Juan from Maria’s arms and threw him in jail because poisoned tongues said that he said, while listening to the Gospel: “Hey! All there is is living and dying!”

A few hours earlier, in the central plaza and along the four streets giving onto the merchants’ corner, the Negro Lázaro had announced the viceroy’s new orders concerning comedy playhouses.

The viceroy, Count Chinchón, orders that an adobe wall must separate women from men in the theater, under pain of imprisonment and fine for anyone invading the territory of the other sex. Also that comedies must ring down the curtain earlier, when the bells toll for prayers, and that men and women must leave by different doors so that the grave offenses being committed against God Our Father should not continue in the darkness of the alleyways. And as if that were not enough, the viceroy has decided that the price of tickets must come down.

“He’ll never have me!” cries María. “No matter how much he lays siege to me, he’ll never have me!”

María del Castillo, great chief of Lima’s comedy stage, has kept intact the poise and beauty that made her famous, and after sixty long years she still laughs at the covered ones who wear their shawls over one eye; since both of hers are handsome, she looks, seduces, and frightens with open face. She was almost a child when she chose this magical profession, and she has been bewitching people from the Lima stage for half a century. Even if she wanted to, she explains, she could not now change theater for convent, for God would not want her for wife after three such thoroughly enjoyed marriages.

Although the inquisitors have left her husbandless and the government’s decrees seek to scare the public, María swears she won’t get into bed with the viceroy.

“Never, never!”

Against hell and high water, alone and by herself, she will continue presenting cape-and-sword works in her comedy playhouse behind the San Augustín monastery. Shortly she will be reviving The Nun Lieutenant by the well-known Spanish wit Juan Pérez de Montalbán and will produce two new and very salty plays so that everyone may dance and sing and thrill with emotion in this city where nothing ever happens, so boring that two aunts can die on you in the time it takes to yawn.

(122)

A Musical Evening at the Concepción Convent

In the convent garden Juana sings and plays the lute. Green light, green trees, green breeze: The air was dead until she touched it with her words and music.

Juana is the daughter of Judge Maldonado, who apportions Indians in Guatemala among farms, mines, and workshops. The dowry for her marriage to Jesus was a thousand ducats, and six black slaves serve her in the convent. While Juana sings her own or others’ words, the slaves, standing at a distance, listen and wait.

The bishop, seated before the nun, cannot keep his face under control. He looks at Juana’s head bent over the neck of the lute, throat bare, mouth glowingly open, and orders himself to calm down. He is famous for never changing his expression when bestowing a kiss or a condolence, but now this immutable face wears a frown: His mouth twists and his eyelids flutter. His normally firm pulse seems foreign to this hand that tremblingly holds a wineglass.