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

According to the Comanches, since then the bear walks with a lurch.

(132)

The sun of the Macusi people was worried. Every day there were fewer fish in their ponds.

He put the crocodile in charge of security. The ponds got emptier. The crocodile, security guard and thief, invented a good story about invisible assailants, but the sun didn’t believe it, took a machete, and left the crocodile’s body all crisscrossed with cuts.

To calm him down, the crocodile offered his beautiful daughter in marriage.

“I’ll be expecting her,” said the sun.

As the crocodile had no daughter, he sculpted a woman in the trunk of a wild plum tree.

“Here she is,” he said, and plunged into the water, looking out of the corner of his eye, the way he always looks.

It was the woodpecker who saved his life. Before the sun arrived, the woodpecker pecked at the wooden girl below the belly. Thus she, who was incomplete, was open for the sun to enter.

(112)

A big fiesta was announced on Lake Titicaca, and the armadillo, who was a very superior creature, wanted to dazzle everybody.

Long beforehand, he set to weaving a cloak of such elegance that it would knock all eyes out.

The fox noticed him at work. “Are you in a bad mood?”

“Don’t distract me. I’m busy.”

“What’s that for?”

The armadillo explained.

“Ah,” said the fox, savoring the words, “for the fiesta tonight?”

“What do you mean, tonight?”

The armadillo’s heart sank. He had never been more sure of his time calculations. “And me with my cloak only half finished!”

While the fox took off with a smothered laugh, the armadillo finished the cloak in a hurry. As time was flying, he had to use coarser threads, and the weave ended up too big. For this reason the armadillo’s shell is tight-warped around the neck and very open at the back.

(174)

The rabbit wanted to grow.

God promised to increase his size if he would bring him the skins of a tiger, of a monkey, of a lizard, and of a snake.

The rabbit went to visit the tiger. “God has let me into a secret,” he said confidentially.

The tiger wanted to know it, and the rabbit announced an impending hurricane. “I’ll save myself because I’m small. I’ll hide in some hole. But what’ll you do? The hurricane won’t spare you.”

A tear rolled down between the tiger’s mustaches.

“I can think of only one way to save you,” said the rabbit. “We’ll look for a tree with a very strong trunk. I’ll tie you to the trunk by the neck and paws, and the hurricane won’t carry you off.”

The grateful tiger let himself be tied. Then the rabbit killed him with one blow, stripped him, and went on his way into the woods of the Zapotec country.

He stopped under a tree in which a monkey was eating. Taking a knife, the rabbit began striking his own neck with the blunt side of it. With each blow of the knife, a chuckle. After much hitting and chuckling, he left the knife on the ground and hopped away.

He hid among the branches, on the watch. The monkey soon climbed down. He examined the object that made one laugh, and he scratched his head. He seized the knife and at the first blow fell with his throat cut.

Two skins to go. The rabbit invited the lizard to play ball. The ball was of stone. He hit the lizard at the base of the tail and left him dead.

Near the snake, the rabbit pretended to be asleep. Just as the snake was tensing up, before it could jump, the rabbit plunged his claws into its eyes.

He went to the sky with the four skins.

“Now make me grow,” he demanded.

And God thought, “The rabbit is so small, yet he did all this. If I make him bigger, what won’t he do? If the rabbit were big, maybe I wouldn’t be God.”

The rabbit waited. God came up softly, stroked his back, and suddenly caught him by the ears, whirled him about, and threw him to the ground.

Since then the rabbit has had big ears, short front feet from having stretching them out to break his fall, and pink eyes from panic.

(92)

God said to him, “Three canoes will pass down the river. In two of them, death will be traveling. If you guess which one is without death, I’ll liberate you from the shortness of life.”

The snake let pass the first canoe, which was laden with baskets of putrid meat. Nor did he pay attention to the second, which was full of people. The third looked empty, but when it arrived, he welcomed it.

For this reason the snake is immortal in the region of the Shipaiás.

Every time he begins to get old, God presents him with a new skin.

(111)

From a cave in Haiti came the first Taíno Indians.

The sun had no mercy on them. Suddenly, without warning, he would kidnap and transform them. He turned the one who mounted guard by night into a stone; of the fisherman he made trees, and the one who went out for herbs he caught on the road and turned into a bird that sings in the morning.

One of the men fled from the sun. When he took off, he took all the women with him.

There is no laughter in the song of the little frogs in the Caribbean islands. They are the Taíno children of those days. They say, “Toa, toa,” which is their way of calling to their mothers.

(126 and 168)

When time was yet in the cradle, there was no uglier creature in the world than the bat.

The bat went up to heaven to look for God. He didn’t say, “I’m bored with being hideous. Give me colored feathers.” No. He said, “Please give me feathers, I’m dying of cold.”

But God had not a single feather left over.

“Each bird will give you a feather,” he decided.

Thus the bat got the white feather of the dove and the green one of the parrot, the iridescent one of the hummingbird, the pink one of the flamingo, the red of the cardinal’s tuft and the blue of the kingfisher’s back, the clayey one of the eagle’s wing, and the sun feather that burns in the breast of the toucan.

The bat, luxuriant with colors and softness, moved between earth and clouds. Wherever he went, the air became pleasant and the birds dumb with admiration. According to the Zapotec peoples, the rainbow was born of the echo of his flight.

Vanity puffed out his chest. He acquired a disdainful look and made insulting remarks.

The birds called a meeting. Together they flew up to God. “The bat makes fun of us,” they complained. “And what’s more, we feel cold for lack of the feathers he took.”

Next day, when the bat shook his feathers in full flight, he suddenly became naked. A rain of feathers fell to earth.

He is still searching for them. Blind and ugly, enemy of the light, he lives hidden in caves. He goes out in pursuit of the lost feathers after night has fallen and flies very fast, never stopping because it shames him to be seen.

(92)