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

The affluent sail into the theaters in a flutter of fans, the heat releasing floods beneath their powdered wigs. Each white woman resembles a jewelry store: gold, pearls, and diamonds make a dazzling frame for damp breasts leaping out of silk, demanding obedience and desire.

Haiti’s most powerful colonists live on guard against the sun and the cuckold’s horns. They do not leave home until after dusk, when the heat is less punishing, and only then dare to show themselves in litters or carriages drawn by many horses. The ladies are notorious for indulging in much love and much widowhood.

(115 and 136)

Zabeth

Ever since she learned to walk she was in flight. They tied a heavy chain to her ankles, and chained, she grew up; but a thousand times she jumped over the fence and a thousand times the dogs caught her in the mountains of Haiti.

They stamped the fleur-de-lis on her cheek with a hot iron. They put an iron collar and iron shackles on her and shut her up in the sugar mill, where she stuck her fingers into the grinder and later bit off the bandages. So that she might die of iron they tied her up again, and now she expires, chanting curses.

Zabeth, this woman of iron, belongs to Madame Galbaud du Fort, who lives in Nantes.

(90)

The Strength of Things

The church of this village is a sorry wreck. The priest, newly arrived from Spain, decides that God cannot go on living in such a miserable and broken-down house, and sets to work. To raise solid walls, he orders the Indians to bring stones from some nearby ruins from the times of idolatry.

No threat or punishment can make them obey. The Indians refuse to move those stones that still lie where the grandfathers of their grandfathers worshiped the gods. Those stones promise nothing, but they prevent forgetting.

(132 and 322)

Dominus Vobiscum

The Indians are forced to spit every time they mention one of their gods. They are forced to dance new dances, the Dance of the Conquest and the Dance of Moors and Christians, which celebrate the invasion of America and the humiliation of the infidels.

They are forced to cover up their bodies, because the struggle against idolatry is also a struggle against nudity, a dangerous nudity that, according to the archbishop of Guatemala, produces in anyone seeing it much lesion in the brain.

They are forced to repeat from memory the Praise Be to God, the Hail Mary, and the Our Father.

Have Guatemala’s Indians become Christians?

The doctrinal friar of San Andrés Itzapan is not very sure. He says he has explained the mystery of the Holy Trinity by folding a cloth and showing it to the Indians: Look, a single cloth folded into three. In the same way God is one in three. And he says this convinced the Indians that God is made of cloth.

The Indians parade the Virgin on feathered platforms. Calling her Grandmother of the Light, they ask her each night that tomorrow may bring the sun; but they venerate more devoutly the serpent that she grinds underfoot. They offer incense to the serpent, the old god who gives a good corn crop and good deer hunting and helps them to kill enemies. More than Saint George they worship the dragon, covering it with flowers; and the flowers at the feet of the horseman Santiago pay homage to the horse, not to the apostle. They recognize themselves in Jesus, who was condemned without proof, as they are; but they adore the cross not as a symbol of his immolation, but because the cross has the shape of the fruitful meeting of rain and soil.

(322)

Sacraments

The Indians only perform Easter rites if they coincide with days of rain, harvesting, or planting. The archbishop of Guatemala, Pedro Coréts Larraz, issues a new decree warning that forgetfulness may imperil salvation of the soul.

Nor do the Indians come to Mass. They do not respond to announcements or to the bell. They have to be sought out on horseback in villages and fields and dragged in by force. Absence is punished with eight lashes, but the Mass offends the Mayan gods and that has more power than fear of the thong. Fifty times a year, the Mass interrupts work in the fields, the daily ceremony of communion with the earth. For the Indians, accompanying step by step the corn’s cycle of death and resurrection is a way of praying; and the earth, that immense temple, is their day-to-day testimony to the miracle of life being reborn. For them all earth is a church, all woods a sanctuary.

To escape the punishment of the pillory in the plaza, some Indians come to the confessional, where they learn to sin, and kneel before the altar, where they eat the god of corn by way of communion. But they only bring their children to the baptismal font after having offered them, deep in the forest, to the old gods. Before them they celebrate the joys of resurrection. All that is born, is born again.

(322)

Trees that Know, Bleed, Talk

The monk enters Huehuetenango through mists of incense. He thinks the infidels are paying homage in this way to the true God. But the mothers cover their new babies with cloths, so that the priest may not make them sick by looking at them. The clouds of incense are not for gratitude or welcome, but for exorcism. The copal resin burns and the smoke drifts up in supplication to the ancient Maya gods to halt the plagues that the Christians have brought.

The copal, which bleeds incense, is a sacred tree. Sacred are the ceiba, which by night becomes a woman, and the cedar, and all the trees that know how to listen to human woes.

(322)

Bonny

A hail of bullets opens the way for the eight hundred soldiers from Holland. The maroon village of Gado-Saby crackles and falls. Behind a curtain of smoke and fire, the traces of blood disappear at the edge of the forest.

Swiss colonel Fourgeaud, veteran of the European wars, decides to camp among the ruins. At dusk mysterious voices sound from the brush, and a whistling of shots obliges the soldiers to throw themselves on the ground.

The troop spends the night surrounded by shots, insults, and chants of defiance and victory. The maroons, invisible, burst out laughing when Colonel Fourgeaud, from the ground, promises freedom and food in return for surrender.

“Hungry dog!” cry a thousand voices from the foliage. “Scarecrow!”

The voices call the Dutch soldiers white slaves, and announce that chief Bonny will very soon be master of this whole land of Surinam.

When dawn breaks the siege, Colonel Fourgeaud discovers that his men have been wounded not by bullets but by little stones and buttons and coins. He also discovers that the maroons have spent the night carting into the forest sacks of rice, cassava, and yams, while the volleys of projectiles and words kept the Dutchmen immobilized.

Bonny has been responsible for the maneuver. Bonny, leader of the maroons, does not have the branding iron’s mark on his body. His mother, a slave, fled from the master’s bed and gave him free birth in the forest.

(264)

Alchemists of the African Slave Trade

Captain Pegleg Clarke has spent a long time bargaining on the coast of Africa. The ship stinks. The captain orders his sailors to bring the already purchased slaves up on deck and give them a bath; but hardly have their chains been removed when the blacks jump into the sea and swim toward their land. The current devours them.