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

Estefanía mentioned the event to the rich merchant. After some months, being much tormented by jealousy, he threatened to bring her to justice for the homicide. In those days they went together to bathe in Tarapaya Lake. She threw off her rich clothing, revealing the snow of her body dotted with loveliest crimson, and threw herself naked into the water. The carefree merchant followed her, and when they were together in the middle of the lake, she pushed the luckless man’s head into the water with all the strength of her arms.

Let it not be thought that her abominations stopped there. With one blow of a sword she ended the life of a gentleman of illustrious blood; and she killed two others with poison she inserted in a lunch. Her intrigues ended the days of others with sword-thrusts in the breast, while Estefanía remained full of joy that blood should be shed on her account.

So it went up to the year 1645, when the sinful woman heard a sermon by Father Francisco Patiño, a servant of God whose admirable virtues Potosí was enjoying at the time, and God came to her aid with a ray of his divine grace. And so great was Estefanía’s sorrow that she began to weep streams of tears, with great sighs and sobs that seemed to tear out her soul, and when the sermon ended she threw herself at the priest’s feet pleading for confession.

The priest exhorted her to penitence and absolved her, it being well known with what felicity women surrender themselves into the serpent’s hands, due to flaws inherited from her who tempted Adam. Estefanía rose from the confessor’s feet like another Magdalene and when she was on her way home — oh, happy sinner! — she earned the appearance of Most Holy Mary, who said to her: “Daughter, thou art forgiven. I have pleaded for you to my Son, because in your childhood you prayed with my rosary.”

(21)

Chilean Indians’ Game Banned

The captain general, Don Martín de Mujica, proclaims the prohibition of the game of chueca, which the Araucanians play according to their tradition, hitting a hall with curved sticks on a court surrounded by green boughs.

One hundred lashes for Indians who do not comply; and fines for others, because the infamous chueca has spread widely among the Creole soldiery.

The captain general’s edict says that the ban is imposed so that sins so contrary to the honor of God Our Father may be avoided and because chasing the ball trains Indians for war: The game gives rise to disturbances and thus afterward the arrow flies among them. It is indecent, it says, that men and women foregather for the chueca almost naked, clad in nothing but feathers and skins of animals on which they base their hopes of winning. At the start of the game they invoke the gods to favor their prowess and speed their feet, and at the end, all in a big embrace, they drink oceans of chicha.

(173)

Prime Cannon Fodder

He was a boy when they took him from his African village, shipped him out from Luanda, and sold him in Recife. He was a man when he fled from the canefields and took refuge in one of the black bastions of Palmares.

As soon as the Dutch entered Brazil, the Portuguese promised freedom to slaves who would fight the invaders. The runaways of Palmares decided that the war was not theirs; it mattered little whether those who held the lash in canefields and sugarmills were Portuguese or Dutch. But he, Henrique Dias, went to volunteer. Since then he commands a regiment of blacks who fight for the Portuguese Crown in northeastern Brazil. The Portuguese have ennobled him.

From Olinda, Captain Henrique Dias sends an intimidating letter to the Dutch army quartered in Recife. He says that his regiment, the Legion of the Henriques, consists of four nations: Minas, Ardas, Angolans, and Creoles: These are so malevolent that they have and should have no fear; the Minas so wild that their reputation can subdue what they cannot reach with their arms; the Ardas so fiery that they want to cut everybody with a single blow; and the Angolans so tough that no work tires them. Consider, now, if men who have broken everything are not destined to break all Holland.

(69 and 217)

The Language of Dreams

“Poor things,” thinks Father Ragueneau, watching the Huron Indians surround with gifts and rituals a man who, last night, dreamed a mysterious dream. The community puts food in his mouth and dances for him; the young girls stroke him, rub him with ashes. Afterward, all seated in a circle, they set about interpreting the dream. They pursue the dream with flashed images or words and he keeps saying, “No, no” until someone says “river,” and then among them all they succeed in capturing it: the river, a furious current, a woman alone in a canoe, she has lost the paddle, the river sweeps her away, the woman doesn’t cry out, she smiles, looks happy. “Is it I?” asks one of the women. “Is it I?” asks another. The community invites the woman whose eyes penetrate the most obscure desires to interpret the symbols of the dream. While drinking herb tea, the clairvoyant invokes her guardian spirit and deciphers the message.

Like all the Iroquois peoples, the Hurons believe that dreams transfigure the most trivial things and convert them into symbols when touched by the fingers of desire. They believe that dreams are the language of unfulfilled desires and have a word, ondinnonk, for the secret desires of the soul that wakefulness does not recognize. Ondinnonks come forward in the journeys made by the soul while the body sleeps.

“Poor things,” thinks Father Ragueneau.

For the Hurons, one who does not respect what dreams say commits a great crime. The dream gives orders. If the dreamer does not carry them out, the soul gets angry and makes the body sick or kills it. All the peoples of the Iroquois family know that sickness can come from war or accident, or from the witch who inserts bear teeth or bone splinters in the body, but also comes from the soul when it wants something that it is not given.

Father Ragueneau talks it over with other French Jesuits who preach in the area. He defends the Indians of Canada: It’s easy to call irreligion what is merely stupidity …

Some priests see Satan’s horns protruding from these superstitions and are scandalized because at the drop of a hat the Indians will dream against the Sixth Commandment and the next day plunge into therapeutic orgies. The Indians go about practically naked, looking at and touching each other in devilish liberty, and marry and unmarry whenever they want; and an order from a dream is all it takes to let loose the andacwandat fiesta, which is always the occasion for frenetic sinning. Father Ragueneau can’t deny that the Devil can find fertile ground in this society without judges, or policemen, or jails, or property, where the women share command with the men and together they worship false gods, but he insists on the basic innocence of these primitive souls, still ignorant of God’s law.

And when the other Jesuits tremble with panic because some Iroquois may dream one of these nights of killing a priest, Ragueneau recalls that that has already happened several times and that when it did, all that was necessary was to let the dreamer rip up a cassock while dancing his dream in an inoffensive pantomime.

“These are stupid customs,” says Father Ragueneau, “but not criminal customs.”

(153 and 222)

An Iroquois Story

It is snowing outside and in the center of the big house the old storyteller is talking, his face to the fire. Seated on animal skins, all listen as they sew clothing and repair weapons.