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

Between divine love and human love, between the fifteen mysteries of the rosary that hangs about her neck and the enigmas of the world, Sor Juana has set up a debate; and she passes many nights without sleep, praying, writing, when the endless war starts up again inside her between passion and reason. At the end of each battle, the first light of dawn enters her cell in the Jeronimite convent and helps Sor Juana remember what Lupercio Leonardo said, that one can both philosophize and cook supper. She creates poems on the table and puff pastry in the kitchen; letters and delicacies to give away, David’s-harp music soothing to Saul as well as to David, joys of soul and mouth condemned by the advocates of pain.

“Only suffering will make you worthy of God,” says the confessor, and orders her to burn what she writes, ignore what she knows, and not see what she looks at.

(49, 58, and 190)

Sigüenza y Góngora

Since the end of last year, a comet has lit up the sky of Mexico. What evils does the angry prophet announce? What troubles will it bring? Will the sun like the great fist of God crash into the earth? Will the oceans dry up and no drop of water remain in the rivers?

“There is no reason why comets should be unlucky,” says the wise man to the terrified people.

Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora publishes his Philosophical Manifesto Against the Stray Comets That the Empire Holds Over the Heads of the Timid, a formidable indictment of superstition and fear. A polemic breaks out between astronomy and astrology, between human curiosity and divine revelation. The German Jesuit Eusebio Francisco Kino, who is visiting these regions, cites six biblical foundations for his affirmation that nearly all comets are precursors of sinister, sad, and calamitous events.

Kino disdainfully seeks to amend the theory of Sigüenza y Góngora, son of Copernicus, Galileo, and other heretics; and the learned Creole replies: “Would you at least concede that there are also mathematicians outside of Germany, stuck though they may be among the reeds and bulrushes of a Mexican lake?”

The Academy’s leading cosmographer, Sigüenza y Góngora has intuited the law of gravity and believes that other stars must have, like the sun, planets flying around them. Calculating from eclipses and comets, he has fixed the dates of Mexico’s indigenous history; and earth as well as sky being his business, he has also exactly fixed the longitude of this city (283° 23’ west of Santa Cruz de Tenerife), drawn the first complete map of the region, and told it all in verse and prose works with the extravagant titles typical of his time.

(83)

All Europe Is Selling Human Flesh

Not far from the English and Danish forts, a pistol shot away, rises the Prussian trading post. A new flag flies on these coasts, over the tree-trunk roofs of the slave depots and on the masts of ships that sail with full cargoes.

With their Africa Company the Germans have joined in the juiciest business of the period. The Portuguese hunt and sell blacks through their Company of Guinea. The Royal Africa Company operates for the English Crown. The French flag waves from ships of the Company of Senegal. Holland’s Company of the West Indies is doing nicely. Denmark’s enterprise specializing in the slave traffic is also called Company of the West Indies; and the Company of the South Sea lines the pockets of the Swedes.

Spain has no slave business. But a century ago, in Seville, the Chamber of Commerce sent the king a documented report explaining that slaves were the most lucrative of all merchandise going to America; and so they continue to be. For the right to sell slaves in the Spanish colonies, foreign concerns pay fortunes into the royal coffers. With these funds have been built, among other things, the Alcazars of Madrid and Toledo. The Negro Committee meets in the main hall of the Council of the Indies.

(127, 129, 160, and 224)

By Order of Satan

He trembles, twists, howls, dribbles. He makes the stones of the church vibrate. All around steams the red earth of Cuba.

“Satan, dog! Drunken dog! Talk or I’ll piss on you!” threatens inquisitor José González de la Cruz, parish priest of Remedios, as he knocks down and kicks the black woman Leonarda before the main altar. Bartolomé del Castillo, notary public, waits without breathing. He clutches a thick bundle of papers in one hand, and with the other he waves a bird’s quill in the air.

The Devil romps contentedly in the charming body of black Leonarda.

The inquisitor swings the slave around with a blow and she falls on her face, eats the dust, and bounces. She raises herself up, and turns, blazing and bleeding, handsome, on the checkerboard tiles.

“Satan! Lucifer! Nigger! Start talking, stinking shit!”

From Leonarda’s mouth come flames and froth. Also noises that no one understands except Father José, who translates and dictates to the notary:

“She says she is Lucifer! She says there are eight hundred thousand devils in Remedios!”

More noises come from the black woman.

“What else? What else, dog?” demands the priest and lifts Leonarda by the hair.

“Talk, you shit!” He does not insult her mother because the Devil has none.

Before the slave faints, the priest shouts and the notary writes; “She says Remedios will collapse! She is confessing everything! I have him by the neck! She says the earth will swallow us up!”

And he howls: “A mouth of hell! She says Remedios is a mouth of hell!”

Everyone cries out. All the residents of Remedios jump about, screaming and shouting. More than one falls in a faint.

The priest, bathed in sweat, his skin transparent, and his lips trembling, loosens his grip on Leonarda’s neck. The black woman collapses.

No one fans her.

(161)

But They Stay On

Eight hundred thousand devils. So there are more devils in the air of Remedios than mosquitos: 1,305 devils tormenting each inhabitant.

The devils are lame, ever since the Fall that all the world knows about. They have goats’ beards and horns, bats’ wings, rats’ tails, and black skin. Circulating in Leonarda’s body is more enjoyable to them because they are black.

Leonarda weeps and refuses to eat.

“If God wants to cleanse you,” Father Jose tells her, “He will whiten your skin.”

The plaintive song of cicadas and grasshoppers is that of souls in torment. Crabs are sinners condemned to walk crookedly. In the swamps and rivers live child-robbing goblins. When it rains, the scuffling of devils is heard from caves and crannies, furious because the flashes and sparks they have set off to burn down the skies are getting wet. And the harsh, nasal croak of frogs in the Boquerón fissure: is it foretelling rain, or is it cursing? Does the light that shines in the darkness come from the firefly? Those eyes, are they really the owl’s? Against whom does the snake hiss?

The buzz of the blind nocturnal bat: if it brushes you with its wing, you will go straight to hell, which is down there beneath Remedios; there the flames burn but give no light, and eternal ice chatters the teeth of those who on earth sinned with randy heat.

“Stay back!”

At the smallest alarm, the priest makes one jump into the font of holy water.

“Satan, stay back!”

With holy water lettuces are washed. People yawn with their mouths shut.

“Jesus! Jesus!” the parishioners cross themselves.

There is no house unadorned by strings of garlic, no air that the smoke of sweet basil does not impregnate.