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

But this time, a surprise awaits the invaders. The king of Spain, scared by the fragility of these frontiers, has ordered firearms issued to the Guaranís. The mamelukes flee in disorder.

From the houses rise plumes of smoke and songs of praise to God. The smoke, which is not from arson but from chimneys, celebrates victory.

(143)

Eternity Against History

The count-duke of Olivares gnaws his fists and mutters curses. He commands much, after twenty years of doings and undoings at court, but God has a stronger tread.

The Board of Theologians has just turned down his project of channeling the Tagus and Manzanares rivers, which would be so welcomed by the plains of Castile. The rivers will remain as God made them, and the plans of engineers Carducci and Martelli will end up in the files.

In France, it is announced that the great Languedoc canal will soon be opened, to join the Mediterranean with the Garonne Valley. Meanwhile, in this Spain that has conquered America, the Board of Theologians decides that he sins against Divine Providence who tries to improve what she, for inscrutable motives, has wished to be imperfect. If God had desired that the rivers should be navigable, he would have made them navigable.

(128)

Opechancanough

Before an English soldier shoots him in the back, Chief Opechancanough asks himself: “Where is the invisible guardian of my footsteps? Who has stolen my shadow?”

At the age of one hundred, he has been defeated. He had come to the battlefield on a litter.

Over eighty years ago, Admiral Pedro Menéndez de Avilés took him to Cádiz. He presented him at the court of Philip II: Here is a fine Indian prince of Florida. They dressed him in breeches, doublet, and ruff. In a Dominican monastery in Seville they taught him the language and religion of Castile. Then in Mexico, the viceroy gave him his name, and Opechancanough became Luis de Velasco. Later he returned to the land of his fathers as interpreter and guide to the Jesuits. His people thought he was returning from the dead. He preached Christianity and then took off their clothes and cut the Jesuits’ throats and went back to his old name.

Since then he has killed many and seen much. He has seen villages and fields devoured by flames and his brothers sold to the highest bidder, in this region that the English baptized Virginia in memory of a spiritually virginal queen. He has seen men swallowed up by smallpox and lands devoured by enslaving tobacco. He has seen seventeen of the twenty-eight communities that were here wiped off the map and the others given a choice between diaspora and war. Thirty thousand Indians welcomed the English navigators who arrived at Chesapeake Bay one fresh morning in 1607. Three thousand survive.

(36 and 207)

Mariana de Jesús

Year of catastrophes for the city. A black bow hangs on every door. The invisible armies of measles and diphtheria have invaded and are destroying. Night has closed in right after dawn and the volcano Pichincha, king of snow, has exploded: a great vomit of lava and fire has fallen on the fields, and a hurricane of ash has swept the city.

“Sinners, sinners!”

Like the volcano, Father Alonso de Rojas hurls flame from his mouth. In the gleaming pulpit of the church of the Jesuits, a church of gold, Father Alonso beats his breast, which echoes as he weeps, cries, clamors: “Accept, O Lord, the sacrifice of the humblest of Your servants! Let my blood and my flesh expiate the sins of Quito!”

Then a young woman rises at the foot of the pulpit and says serenely: “I.”

Before the people who overflow the church, Mariana announces that she is the chosen one. She will calm the wrath of God. She will take all the castigations that her city deserves.

Mariana has never played at being happy, nor dreamed that she was, nor ever slept for more than four hours. The only time a man ever brushed her hand, she was ill with a fever for a week after. As a child she decided to be the bride of God and gave Him her love, not in the convent but in the streets and fields: not embroidering or making sweets and jellies in the peace of the cloisters, but praying with her knees on thorns and stones and seeking bread for the poor, remedy for the sick, and light for those in the darkness of ignorance of divine law.

Sometimes Mariana feels called by the patter of rain or the crackle of fire, but always the thunder of God sounds louder: that God of anger with beard of serpents and eyes of lightning, who appears nude in her dreams to test her.

Mariana returns home, stretches out on her bed, and readies herself to die in place of all. She pays for God’s forgiveness. She offers her body for Him to eat and her blood and her tears for Him to drink until he gets dizzy and forgets.

That way the plague will cease, the volcano will calm down, and the earth will stop trembling.

(176)

Story of Estefanía, Sinful Woman of Potosí (Abbreviation of Chronicle by Bartolomé Arzáns de Orsúa y Vela)

Estefanía was born in this imperial Town and grew up in beauty beyond the power of nature to enhance.

At fourteen, the lovely damsel left home, advised by other lost women; and her mother, seeing the abominable determination with which this daughter broke away, gave up the ghost within a few days.

This did not cause the daughter to mend her ways. Having already lost the priceless treasure of virginity, she dressed profanely and became a public and scandalous sinner.

Seeing so much discredit and ill fame, her brother called her to his house and said: “Hurt you as it may, you must hear me. While you continue in mortal sin you are an enemy of God and a slave of the Devil, and furthermore you debase your nobility and dishonor all your lineage. Consider, sister, what you are doing, get out of that muck, fear God, and do penance.” To which Estefanía replied: “What do you want of me, you bloody hypocrite?” And while the brother reproved her, she seized in a flash the dagger that hung on the wall and set on him with diabolical ferocity, saying: “This is the only answer your arguments deserve.” She left him dead in a lake of blood and afterward disguised that misdeed by a pretense of sentiment, dressing herself in mourning and making much of her grief.

Also her aged father, sorrowing for the death of the good son and the scandal of the bad daughter, succeeded in confronting her with good arguments, to which the heartless girl listened against her will. Instead of mending her ways, she ended up loathing the venerable gentleman and at midnight she set fire to the roof of his house. The anguished old man sprang from his bed shouting at the top of his voice: “Fire, fire!” But the beams supporting the roof collapsed, and there and then the terrible element consumed him.

Seeing herself free, Estefanía gave herself with more wantonness to greater vices and sins.

In those days there came to Potosí a man of the realms of Spain, one of the most opulent merchants who came in those galleons to Peru, and the beauty and grace of that public sinner came to his attention. He solicited her, and when they were most enjoying their obscenities a former lover of the lady, armed with every weapon and with two thirsty pistols, turned up determined to avenge the affront.

The former lover found the woman alone, but she restrained his angry spirit with deceitful words, and when she had mitigated his fury she took a knife from her sleeve with great promptness and the wretch fell to the ground dead.