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

Fire of the sorcerers, Spirit

of the waters below and the air above.

Fire that shinest, glowworm that lightest up

the swamp.

Bird without wings, thing without body, Spirit

of the Force of Fire.

Hear my voice:

a man invokes thee

without fear.

(134)

Penumbra of Autumn

He could never dress himself alone, or read fluently, or stand up by himself. At forty, a little old man without descendants, he lies dying surrounded by confessors, exorcists, courtiers, and ambassadors who dispute the throne.

The doctors, defeated, have removed the newly dead doves and the sheep’s entrails from on top of him. Leeches no longer cover his body. They are not giving him rum to drink or the water of life brought from Malaga, because nothing is left but to wait for the convulsion that will tear him from the world. By the light of torches a bleeding Christ at the head of the bed presides over the final ceremony. The cardinal sprinkles holy water from the hyssop. The bedchamber smells of wax, of incense, of filth. The wind beats at the shutters of the palace, badly fastened with cord.

They will take him to the Escorial morgue, where the marble coffin with his name on it has awaited him for years. That was his favorite journey, but it is some time since he visited his own tomb or even stuck his nose outside. Madrid is full of potholes and garbage and armed vagabonds; and the soldiers, who keep alive on the thin soup of the monasteries, do not put themselves out to defend the king. The last times that he dared to go out, the Manzanares washerwomen and the street urchins ran after the carriage and hurled insults and stones at it.

Charles II, his bulging eyes red, trembles and raves. He is a small piece of yellow flesh that runs out beneath the sheets as the century also runs out, and so ends the dynasty that conquered America.

(201 and 211)

(End of the first volume of Memory of Fire )

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