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

The ladies of Lima avenge themselves by calling her Perricholi. The viceroy himself had so baptized her, trying to say perra chola (mestizo bitch) with his toothless mouth. They say he put this curse on her, as a sort of exorcism, while carrying her up the steps to his lofty bed, because she stirred in him dangerous panics and burnings and wet and dry sensations that took him back trembling to his early years.

(95, 245, and 304)

The Snack Clock

With the milkwoman at seven o’clock begins the bustle of Lima. Behind her, in an odor of sanctity, comes the vendor of herb teas.

At eight the curds-seller passes.

At nine, a voice offers cinnamon candies.

At ten, tamales seek mouths to delight.

Eleven is the hour of melons and coconut candies and toasted corn.

At noon, bananas and passion fruit, pineapples, milky chirimoyas of green velvet, and avocados promising soft pulp promenade through the streets.

At one, come the cakes of hot honey.

At two, a hawker offers picarones, buns that invite choking; and behind her come the corn sugarcakes steeped in cinnamon that no tongue can forget.

At three, appears the vendor of anticuchos, roasted broken hearts, followed by the peddlers of honey and sugar.

At four, the chili-vendor sells spice and fire.

Cebiche, raw fish steeped in lime, marks five o’clock.

At six, nuts.

At seven, mazamorra pastries baked to a T on open tile roofs.

At eight, ice creams of many flavors and colors, fresh gusts of wind, push the doors of night wide open.

(93 and 245)

Royal Summit

Big crates arrive at the palace from the incandescent deserts of Peru. The Spanish monarch reads the report of the official who sends them: this is the complete tomb of a Mochica chief, much older than the Incas; the descendants of the Mochicas and of the Chimús now live in dire penury and there are ever fewer of them; their valleys are in the hands of a few greedy Spaniards.

The cases are opened. A seventeen hundred-year-old king appears at the feet of Charles III. He has teeth, nails and hair still intact, and flesh of parchment stuck to his bones, and his majestic raiment gleams with gold and feathers. His scepter, a god of corn garlanded with plants, accompanies the remote visitor; and the vases that were buried with him have also made the journey to Madrid.

The king of Spain, dumbfounded, contemplates the ceramics that surround his defunct colleague. The king of the Mochicas lies amid pleasures. The ceramics represent pairs of lovers embracing and entering each other in a thousand ways, ignorant of original sin, enjoying themselves without knowing that for this act of disobedience we have been condemned to live on the earth.

(355)

The Age of Enlightenment

In Europe the venerable walls of cathedrals and palaces are cracking. The bourgeoisie is on the offensive, armed with steam engines and volumes of the Encyclopedia and other unstoppable battering rams of the industrial revolution.

Budding from Paris are defiant ideas which, flying over the heads of hoi polloi, set their seal on the century. A time of the fury to learn and the fever of intelligence, the Age of Enlightenment raises up human reason, the reason of the minority who think, against the dogmas of the Church and the privileges of the nobility. Condemnations, persecution, and exile only stimulate the learned sons of the English philosophers and of prolific Descartes, he who started by doubting everything.

No subject is out of bounds for the philosophers of the Enlightenment, from the law of gravity to ecclesiastical celibacy. The institution of slavery merits their constant attack. Slavery contradicts nature, says Denis Diderot, director of the Encyclopedia, Reasoned Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts, and Professions: a man cannot be the property of his master for the same reason that a child cannot be his father’s property, nor a woman her husbands, nor a servant his employer’s, nor a subject his king’s, and anyone thinking the opposite is confusing persons with things. Helvetius has said that no barrel of sugar reached Europe that is not stained with blood; and Candide, Voltaire’s character, meets in Surinam a slave missing a hand devoured by a sugar mill, and a leg cut off for trying to escape:

“At this price you eat sugar in Europe.”

If we admit that blacks are human beings, we admit how little Christian we are, says Montesquieu. All religion that hallows slavery deserves to be prohibited, says the Abbé Raynal. For Jean-Jacques Rousseau, slavery makes him ashamed to be a man.

(95 and 98)

The Physiocrats

More than a crime, slavery is an economic error, say the physiocrats. In the last issue of the Citizen’s Ephemerides Pierre Dupont de Nemours explains that slavery perpetuates archaic methods of agriculture and slows the development of France’s colonies in the Antilles and on the mainland of America. Despite continuous replacement of the spent labor force, slavery means waste and a depreciation of invested capital. Dupont de Nemours proposes that calculations should take into account losses incurred by the early death of slaves, fires set by runaways and the cost of the constant war against them, the appallingly bad preparation of harvests, and tools ruined by ignorance or ill will. Ill will and laziness, he says, are weapons that the slave uses to recover a part of his personality stolen by the master; and his ineptitude results from the absolute lack of incentive to develop his intelligence. It is slavery, not nature, that makes the slave.

Only a free labor force proves efficiently productive, according to the economist-philosophers of the Physiocrat school. They believe that property is sacred, but only in freedom can it fully achieve the production of value.

(98)

The Minister of Colonies Explains Why Mulattos Should Not Be Freed from Their Congenital “State of Humiliation”

His Majesty has considered that such a favor would tend to destroy the differences that nature has placed between whites and blacks, and that political prejudice has been careful to maintain as a distance which people of color and their descendants will never be able to bridge; finally, that it is in the interest of good order not to weaken the state of humiliation congenital to the species, in whatever degree it may perpetuate itself; a prejudice all the more useful for being in the very heart of the slaves and contributing in a major way to the due peace of the colonies …

(139)

France’s Richest Colony

The monks have denied last rites to the diva of the Cape Comedy, Mademoiselle Morange, whose irreparable loss to Haiti is mourned in six theaters and more than six bedrooms. No dead artiste deserves to be prayed for, the theater being an infamous occupation eternally condemned; but one of the actors, bell in hand and crucifix on breast, in black cassock and shining tonsure, marches singing psalms in Latin at the head of the dead virtuosa’s cortege.

Before it reaches the cemetery, the police are already chasing off the baritone and his accomplices, who vanish in a split second. But the people protect and hide them. Who does not feel sympathy for these show folk who fan the insufferable languors of Haiti with breezes of cultural madness?

On the stages of this colony, France’s richest, plays just opened in Paris are applauded, and the theaters are like Paris’s — or, at least, would like to be. Here, though, the public is seated according to color of skin: in the center, ivory; on the right, copper; and on the left, ebony, a few free blacks.