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

“The most splendid tree had grown in the sky,” says the old man. “It had four big white roots, which extended in four directions. From this tree all things were born …”

The old man relates that one day wind completely uprooted the tree. Through the hole that opened in the sky fell the wife of the great chief, carrying a handful of seeds. A tortoise brought her soil on its shell so that she could plant the seeds, and thus sprouted the first plants that gave us food. Later that woman had a daughter, who grew and became the wife of the west wind. The east wind blew certain words in her ear …

The good storyteller tells his story and makes it happen. The west wind is now blowing on the big house; it comes down the chimney, and smoke veils all the faces.

Brother wolf, who taught the Iroquois to get together and listen, howls from the mountains. It is time to sleep.

One of these mornings, the old storyteller will not wake up. But someone of those who heard his stories will tell them to others. And later this someone will also die, and the stories will stay alive as long as there are big houses and people gathered around the fire.

(37)

Song About the Song of the Iroquois

When I sing

it can help her .

Yeah, it can, yeah!

It’s so strong!

When I sing

it can raise her .

Yeah, it can, yeah!

It’s so strong!

When I sing

her arms get straighter .

Yeah, it can, yeah!

It’s so strong!

When I sing

her body gets straighter .

Yeah, it can, yeah!

It’s so strong!

(197)

The Conquerors and the Conquered

The family crest rears itself pompously in the ornamented iron over the gate, as if over an altar. The master of the house rolls up in a mahogany carriage, with his retinue of liveried attendants and horses. Within, someone stops playing the clavichord; rustlings of silks and tissues are heard, voices of marriageable daughters, steps on soft, yielding carpets. Then the tinkle of engraved silver spoons on porcelain.

This city of Mexico, city of palaces, is one of the largest in the world. Although it is very far from the sea, Spanish and Chinese ships bring their merchandise and silver shipments from the north end up here. The powerful Chamber of Commerce rivals that of Seville. From here merchandise flows to Peru, Manila, and the Far East.

The Indians, who built this city for the conquerors on the ruins of their Tenochtitlán, bring food in canoes. They may work here during the day, but at nightfall they are removed on pain of the lash to their slums outside the walls.

Some Indians wear stockings and shoes and speak Spanish in hope of being allowed to remain and thereby escape tribute and forced labor.

(148)

From the Náhuatl Song on the Transience of Life

We have but one turn at life.

In a day we go, in a night we descend

to the region of mystery.

We came here only to get to know each other.

We are here only in passing.

In peace and pleasure let us spend life.

Come and let’s enjoy it!

Not those who live in anger:

broad is the earth.

How good to live forever,

never to have to die!

While we live, our spirit broken,

Here they harass us, here they spy on us.

But for all the misfortunes,

for all the wounds in the soul,

we must not live in vain!

How good to live forever,

never to have to die!

(77)

Medicine and Witchcraft

The Zapotec Indians, who before falling to earth were brightly colored songbirds, told a few secrets to Gonzalo de Balsalobre. After living among them for a time and after investigating the mysteries of religion and medicine, Don Gonzalo is writing in Oaxaca a detailed report that he will send to Mexico City. The report denounces the Indians to the Holy Inquisition and asks for punishment of the quackeries that monks and ordinary justice have been unable to suppress. A while back, Alarcón left the university to share for nine years the life of the Cohuixco Indian community. He got to know the sacred herbs that cure the sick; and later he denounced the Indians for devilish practices.

In the first period of the conquest, however, indigenous medicine aroused great curiosity in Europe, and marvels were attributed to America’s plants. Fray Bernardino de Sahagún collected and published the wisdom of eight Aztec doctors, and King Philip II sent his personal physician, Francisco Hernández, to Mexico to make a thorough study of native medicine.

For the Indians, herbs speak, have sex, and cure. It is little plants, aided by the human word, that pull sickness from the body, reveal mysteries, straighten out destinies, and provoke love or forgetfulness. These voices of earth sound like voices of hell to seventeenth-century Spain, busy with inquisitions and exorcisms, which relies for cures on the magic of prayer, conjurations, and talismans even more than on syrups, purges, and bleedings.

(4)

Juana at Four

Juana goes about constantly chatting with her soul, which is her internal companion as she walks on the bank of the stream. She feels all the happier because she has the hiccups, and Juana grows when she has the hiccups. She stops and looks at her shadow, which grows with her, and measures it with a branch after each little jump of her tummy. The volcanos also grew with the hiccups when they were alive, before their own fire burned them up. Two of the volcanos are still smoking, but they don’t have the hiccups now. They don’t grow anymore. Juana has the hiccups and grows. She gets bigger.

Crying, on the other hand, makes you smaller. For that reason old women and the mourners at funerals are the size of cockroaches. That isn’t in her grandfather’s books, which Juana reads, but she knows. These are things she knows from talking so much to her soul. Juana also talks to the clouds. To talk to the clouds you have to climb the hills or to the top branches of the trees.

“I am a cloud. We clouds have faces and hands. No feet.”

(16 and 75)

Gage

In a hammock stretched between two palms, the Anglican clergyman Thomas Gage dies in Jamaica.

Since the old days when he roamed the lands of America in a Catholic friar’s cassock, preaching and spying and enjoying the chocolate and guava desserts, he dreamed of being the first English viceroy of Mexico. Back in London he switched sects and convinced Lord Cromwell that it was necessary and possible to fit out a good fleet to conquer the Spanish colonies.

Last year, Admiral William Penn’s troops invaded the island of Jamaica. England seized from Spain the first bit of its American empire, and the inheritors of Columbus, marquises of Jamaica, lost the best of their revenues. Then the Reverend Thomas Gage delivered a patriotic Protestant sermon from the pulpit of the largest church in Santiago de la Vega, while the Spanish governor came in the arms of his slaves to surrender his sword.

(145)

Juana at Seven

She sees her mother coming in the mirror and drops the sword, which falls with a bang like a gunshot, and Juana gives such a start that her whole face disappears beneath the broad-brimmed hat.