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

For the colonial troops, the reconquest has not been easy. Each pueblo of New Mexico is a huge, tightly shut fortress, with board walls of stone and adobe several stories high. In the Rio Grande Valley live men not accustomed to obedience or servile labor.

(88)

Song of the New Mexican Indians to the Portrait That Escapes from the Sand

So I might cure myself ,

the wizard painted ,

in the desert, your portrait:

your eyes are of golden sand ,

of red sand now your mouth,

of blue sand your hair

and my tears are of white sand.

All day he painted.

You grew like a goddess

on the immensity of the yellow canvas.

The wind of the night will scatter your shadow

and the colors of your shadow.

By ancient law nothing will remain for me.

Nothing, except the rest of my tears,

the silver sands.

(63)

The Last Expedition Against Palmares

The great Indian-hunter, killer of Indians over many leagues, was born of an Indian mother. He speaks Guaraní, very little Portuguese. Domingos Jorge Velho is captain of the mamelukes of Sao Paulo, mestizos who have sown terror over half of Brazil in the name of their colonial lords and in ferocious exorcism of one half of their blood.

In the past six years, Captain Domingos has hired out his services to the Portuguese Crown against the Janduim Indians, rebelling in the hinterlands of Pernambuco and in Rio Grande do Norte. After a long campaign of carnage he arrives victorious at Recife, and there is contracted to demolish Palmares. They offer him fat booty in lands and blacks to sell in Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires and also promise him infinite amnesties, four religious orders’ habits, and thirty military grades to distribute among his men.

With telescope slung over his naked chest, his greasy jacket open, Captain Domingos parades on horseback through the streets of Recife at the head of his mestizo officers and his rank-and-file Indian cutters of Indian throats. They ride amid clouds of dust and whiffs of gunpowder and rum, to applause and the fluttering of white handkerchiefs: this Messiah will save us from the rebellious blacks, the people believe or hope, convinced that the runaways are to blame for the lack of hands in the sugarmills as well as for the diseases and droughts that are devastating the Northeast, since God will not send health or rain while the Palmares scandal endures.

And the great crusade is organized. From all directions come volunteers, impelled by hunger, seeking sure rations. The prisons empty out, as even the jailbirds join the biggest army yet mobilized in Brazil.

The Indian scouts march ahead and the black porters bring up the rear. Nine thousand men cross the jungle, reach the mountains, and climb toward the summit, where the Macacos fortifications stand. This time they bring cannons.

The siege lasts several days. The cannons wreck the triple bulwark of wood and stone. They fight man to man on the edge of the abyss. There are so many dead that there is no place left to fall down, and the slaughter continues in the scrub. Many blacks try to flee, and slip down the precipice into the void; many choose the precipice and throw themselves off it.

Flames devour the capital of Palmares. From the distant city of Porto Calvo, the huge bonfire can be seen burning throughout the night. Burn even the memory of it. Hunting horns unceasingly proclaim the victory.

Chief Zumbí, wounded, has managed to escape. From the lofty peaks he reaches the jungle. He wanders through green tunnels, seeking his people in the thickets.

(38, 43, and 69)

Lament of the Azande People

The child is dead;

let us cover our faces

with white earth .

Four sons I have borne

in the hut of my husband .

Only the fourth lives.

I want to weep ,

but in this village

sadness is forbidden.

(134)

Zumbí

Jungle landscape, jungle of the soul. Zumbí smokes his pipe, his eyes locked on the high red rocks and caves open like wounds, and does not see that day is breaking with an enemy light, nor that the birds are flocking off in terrified flight.

He does not see the traitor approaching. He sees his comrade Antonio Soares and rises to embrace him. Antonio Soares buries a dagger several times in his back.

The soldiers fix the head on a lance point and take it to Recife, to putrefy in the plaza and teach the slaves that Zumbí was not immortal.

Palmares no longer breathes. This broad space of liberty opened up in colonial America has lasted for a century and resisted more than forty invasions. The wind has blown away the ashes of the black bastions of Macacos and Subupira, Dambrabanga and Obenga, Tabocas and Arotirene. For the conquerors, the Palmares century whittles down to the instant when the dagger polished off Zumbí. Night will fall and nothing will remain beneath the cold stars. Yet what does the wakeful know compared with what the dreamer knows?

The vanquished dream about Zumbí; and the dream knows that while one man remains owner of another man in these lands, his ghost will walk. He will walk with a limp, because Zumbí had been lamed by a bullet; he will walk up and down time and, limping, will fight in these jungles of palms and in all the lands of Brazil. The chiefs of all the unceasing black rebellions will be called Zumbí.

(69)

The Capital of Brazil

In this radiant city, there is a church for every day of the year, and every day a saint’s day. A glow of towers and bells and tall palms, of bodies and of air sticky with dendê oil: today a saint is celebrated, tomorrow a lover, in the Bahia of All Saints and of the not-so-saintly. São Salvador de Bahia, seat of the viceroy and the archbishop, is the most populated of all Portuguese cities after Lisbon, and it envies Lisbon its monumental monasteries and golden churches, its incendiary women and its fiestas and masquerades and processions. Here strut mulatto prostitutes decked out like queens, and slaves parade their masters on litters down leafy avenues amid palaces of delirious grandeur. Gregorio de Matos, born in Bahia, thus portrays the noble gentry of the sugar plantations:

In Brazil the gentlefolk

are not all that gentle;

their good manners, not all that good:

So where do they belong?

In a pile of money.

Black slaves are the brick and mortar of these castles. From the cathedral pulpit Father Antonio Vieira insists on gratitude toward Angola, because without Angola there would be no Brazil, and without Brazil there would be no Portugal, so that it could be very justly said that Brazil has its body in America and its soul in Africa: Angola, which sells Bantu slaves and elephants tusks; Angola, as the father’s sermon proclaims, with whose unhappy blood and black but happy souls Brazil is nourished, animated, sustained, served, and preserved.

At almost ninety this Jesuit priest remains the worst enemy of the Inquisition, advocate of enslaved Indians and Jews, and most persistent accuser of the colonial lords, who believe that work is for animals and spit on the hand that feeds them.

(33 and 226)

Black Virgin, Black Goddess

To the docks of Regla, poor relation of Havana, comes the Virgin, and she comes to stay. The cedar carving has come from Madrid, wrapped in a sack, in the arms of her devotee Pedro Aranda. Today, September 8, is fiesta day in this little town of artisans and sailors, always redolent of shellfish and tar; the people eat meat and corn and beans and manioc, Cuban dishes, and African dishes, ecó, olelé, ecrú, quimbombó, fufú, while rivers of rum and earthquakes of drums welcome the black Virgin, the little black one, patron protector of Havana Bay.