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

Where they had been sitting, the ground was all littered with teeth.

(192)

In remote times women sat in the bow of the canoe and men in the stern. It was the women who hunted and fished. They left the villages and returned when they could or wanted. The men built the huts, prepared the meals, kept the fires burning against the cold, minded the children, and tanned skins for clothes.

Such was life for the Ona and Yagan Indians in Tierra del Fuego, until one day the men killed all the women and put on the masks that the women had invented to scare them.

Only newly born girls were spared extermination. While they grew up, the murderers kept repeating to them that serving men was their destiny. They believed it. Their daughters believed it, too, likewise the daughters of their daughters.

(91 and 178)

In the lands where the Juruá River is born, Old Meanie was lord of the corn. He gave out the grains roasted, so that no one could plant them.

The lizard succeeded in stealing a raw grain from him. Old Meanie caught her and ripped off her jaw and fingers and toes; but she had managed to conceal the grain behind her back molar. The lizard afterward spat out the raw grain on the common land. Her jaw was too big and her fingers and toes too long to be completely torn off.

Old Meanie was also lord of the fire. The parrot sneaked up close to it and started screeching her lungs out. Old Meanie threw at her everything that was handy, and the little parrot dodged the projectiles until she saw a lighted stick flying her way. Then she picked it up with her beak, which was an enormous as a toucan’s, and fled. A trail of sparks followed her. The embers, fanned by the wind, burned her beak, but she had already reached the trees when Old Meanie beat his drum and let loose a rainstorm.

The parrot managed to leave the burning stick in the hollow of a tree under the care of the other birds and flew back into the downpour. The water relieved her burns, but her beak, shortened and curved, still shows a white scar from the fire.

The birds protected the stolen fire with their bodies.

(59)

At dawn, the trumpet call announced from the mountain that it was time for crossbows and blowguns.

At nightfall, nothing remained of the village except smoke.

A man lay among the dead without moving. He smeared his body with blood and waited. He was the only survivor of the Palawiyang people.

When the enemy moved off, that man got up. He contemplated his destroyed world. He walked among the people who had shared hunger and food with him. He sought in vain some person or thing that hadn’t been wiped out. The terrifying silence dazed him. The smell of fire and blood sickened him. He felt disgusted to be alive, and he threw himself back down among his own.

With the first light came the vultures. There was nothing left in that man except fog and a yearning to sleep and let himself be devoured.

But the condor’s daughter opened a path through the circling birds of prey. She beat her wings hard and dived. He grabbed onto her feet, and the condor’s daughter took him far away.

(54)

An Inuit, bow in hand, was out hunting reindeer when an eagle unexpectedly appeared behind him.

“I killed your two brothers,” said the eagle. “If you want to save yourself you must give a party in your village so everyone can sing and dance.”

“A party? Sing, what’s that? What’s dance?”

“Come with me.”

The eagle showed him a party. There was a lot of good food and drink. The drum beat as hard as the heart of the eagle’s old mother, its rhythm guiding her children from her house across the vast expanses of ice and mountain. Wolves, foxes, and other guests danced and sang until sunup.

The hunter returned to his village.

A long time afterward he learned that the eagle’s old mother and all the oldsters of the eagle world were strong and handsome and swift. Human beings had finally learned to sing and dance, and had sent them, from afar, from their own parties, gaieties that warmed the blood.

(174)

When the waters of the Orinoco lowered, canoes brought the Caribs with their battle-axes.

No one had a chance against the sons of the jaguar. They leveled villages and made flutes from their victims’ bones. They feared nobody. The only thing that struck panic into them was a phantom born in their own hearts.

The phantom lay in wait for them behind the trees. He broke their bridges and placed in their paths tangled lianas. He traveled by night. To throw them off the track, he walked backward. He was on the slope from which rocks broke off, in the mud that sank beneath their feet, in the leaf of the poisonous plant, in the touch of the spider. He knocked them down with a breath, injected fever through their ears, and robbed them of shade.

He was not pain, but he hurt. He was not death, but he killed. His name was Kanaima, and he was born among the conquerors to avenge the conquered.

(54)’

Wiracocha, who had fled from the darkness, ordered the sun to send a daughter and a son to earth to light the way for the blind.

The sun’s children arrived on the banks of Lake Titicaca and set out through the Andean ravines. They carried a golden staff. Wherever it sank in at the first blow, they would there found a new kingdom. From the throne they would act like their father, who gives light, clarity, and warmth, sheds rain and dew, promotes harvests, multiplies flocks, and never lets a day pass without visiting the world.

They tried everywhere to stick in the golden staff, but the earth bounced it back. They scaled heights and crossed cataracts and plateaus. Whatever their feet touched was transformed; arid ground became fertile, swamps dried, and rivers returned to their beds. At dawn, wild geese escorted them; in the evening, condors.

Finally, beside Mount Wanakauri, the sun’s children stuck in the staff. When the earth swallowed it, a rainbow rose in the sky.

Then the first of the Incas said to his sister and wife:

“Let us call the people together.”

Between the mountains and the prairie, the valley was covered with scrub. No one had a house. The people lived in holes or in the shelter of rocks, eating roots, and didn’t know how to weave cotton or wool to keep out the cold.

Everyone followed the sun’s children. Everyone believed in them. Everyone knew, by the brilliance of their words and eyes, that the sun’s children were not lying, and accompanied them to the place where the great city of Cuzco, still unborn, awaited them.

(76)

The Maya-Quichés came from the east.

When they first reached the new lands, carrying their gods on their backs, they were scared that there would be no dawn. They had left happiness back in Tulán and arrived out of breath after a long and painful trek. They waited at the edge of the Izmachí forest, silent, huddled together, without anybody sitting down or stretching out to rest. But time passed and it went on being dark.