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

(352)

The Pulque Saloon

When the viceroy expelled pulque from Mexico City, the outcast found shelter in the suburbs.

Liquor of the green plants … In taverns on the outskirts, the barman never stops coming and going between the big vats and the eager mugs, you stun me, you kill me, you make me walk on all fours, while a newborn child cries disconsolately in one corner and an old man sleeps off the effects in another.

Horses, donkeys, and fighting cocks, tethered to iron rings, grow old waiting outside. Inside, the bright colored vats bear defiant names: “Don’t stretch me out,” “The stuff for the strong,” “The brave one” … Inside, law does not exist, nor the time of day. Dice roll on the earth floor and flowery gambling cards are flung down on a barrel-top. Some fool sings to the sound of a merry harp, others pair off to kick up dust in a dance, a monk chats with a soldier and the soldier promises to get tough with a muleteer, I am plenty tough, I’m too tough, and the potbellied barman chimes in: What about another?

(153 and 266)

Pulque

Perhaps pulque brings their old gods back to the Indians. They offer it to them, sprinkling it on the ground or in the fire or raising a mug to the stars. Perhaps the gods are always thirsty for the pulque they sucked from the four hundred teats of mother Mayahuel.

Perhaps, too, the Indians drink to fortify themselves and to get even; certainly they drink to forget and to be forgotten.

According to the bishops, pulque is to blame for laziness and poverty and brings idolatry and rebellion. Barbarous vice of a barbarous people, says one of the king’s officers. Under the effect of the maguey’s heavy wine, he says, the child denies the father and the vassal his lord.

(153 and 331)

The Maguey

Armed with green swords, the maguey stands up to drought and hail, the icy nights and furious suns of the deserts of Mexico.

Pulque comes from the maguey, the tree that gives suck, and from the maguey come forage for animals, beams and tiles for roofing, fencing posts and fuel for fires. Its fleshy leaves provide rope, pouches, matting, soap, and paper, the paper of the ancient codices; and its thorns make good pins and needles.

The maguey only flowers when it is going to die. It opens and flowers as if saying farewell. A lofty stalk, perhaps a mast, perhaps a penis, shoots from the heart of the maguey toward the clouds in a burst of yellow flowers. Then the great stalk falls and with it falls the maguey, torn out by the root.

It is unusual to find a flowering maguey in the arid Mezquital valley. Hardly has it begun to shoot up when the Indian castrates it and turns the wound downward, and thus the maguey yields up its pulque, which quenches thirst, feeds, and consoles.

(32 and 153)

The Mug

The Mexican potter has a long history. Three thousand years before Hernán Córtes, his hands were converting clay into receptacles or human figures which fire hardened against time. Much later on, the Aztecs explained that a good potter gives being to clay and makes things live.

This ancient tradition still flourishes in a daily multiplication of bottles, jars, pots, and, above all, drinking mugs: the ivorylike mugs of Tonalá, the tough mugs of Metepec, the bulging shiny ones of Oaxaca, the humble little ones of Chilililco; the reddish mugs of Toluca, dripping black tears … The mug of cooked clay presides over fiestas and kitchens and accompanies prisoner and beggar. It receives the pulque, scorned by the crystal glass, and it is the gift of lovers:

When I die, old lady, take my clay if you can

And fashion a mug with this refrain:

If you thirst for me, drink;

And if it stops at the brink,

That will be kisses from your old man.

(18, 153, and 294)

Fiction in the Colonial Era

The viceroy of Mexico, Matías de Gálvez, signs a new edict in favor of Indian workers. The Indians are to receive fair wages, good food, and medical attention; and they will have two rest hours at noon, and be able to change employers whenever they like.

(146)

The Wind Blows Where It Wants

An abyss of light opens in the clear air and between the black walls of the sierra shines the desert. In the desert, a glitter of domes and towers, rise Mexico’s mining towns. Guanajuato, as densely populated as the viceroy’s capital, is the most distinguished. Its owners go to Mass in sedan chairs followed by swarms of beggars through a labyrinth of lanes and alleys, Kiss Lane, Slide Lane, Four Winds Lane; and between the cobblestones polished by the feet of time grow grasses and phantoms.

In Guanajuato church bells organize life; and chance governs it. Some mysterious slippery-fingered joker deals the cards. They say that here one treads on gold and silver wherever one goes, but everything depends on the veins that snake underground and offer and deny themselves at their whim. Yesterday, a fortunate gentleman celebrated his stroke of luck, and toasted everybody in the best wine, and paid for flute and guitar serenades, and bought fine Cambray lace and velvet trousers and silk lamé jackets and camisoles from Holland; and today the thread of silver that made him knight for a day disappears without trace.

The life of the Indians, on the other hand, does not hang on chance. Breathing mercury in the alloy factories leaves them forever with the shakes and toothless, and their chests burst from breathing murderous dust and pestilent vapors in the mines. Sometimes exploding dust blows them to bits, and sometimes they slip into the void when they go down carrying stones or when they come up carrying on their backs the foremen who call Indians their “little horses.”

(6, 261, and 349)

Silver Portrait

Using the language of fluttering fans, ladies chat in the leafy gardens. Somebody pees against the wall of a church and on one side of the plaza two beggars, sitting in the sun, pick at each other’s lice. Beneath a stone archway a distinguished doctor in a huge cloak talks of the Rights of Man, and a monk moves down the lane muttering eternal condemnations against the drunks, whores, and rowdies who cross in front of him. Not far from the city, collectors hunt Indians with lassos.

Guanajuato has long since dethroned Potosí. The world queen of silver is hungry for labor. The workers, free wage earners, don’t see a coin in all their lives, but are prisoners of debt. Their children will inherit the debts and also the fear of pain and prison and hunger, and of the old gods and the new.

(261 and 349)

The Colonial Function

The Portuguese crown orders Brazil’s textile workshops closed down; in the future they must only produce rustic clothing for slaves. In the name of the queen, Minister Melo e Castro issues the orders. The minister observes that in most of the captaincies of Brazil have been set up, and are spreading ever more wildly, various factories and manufactories of cloth of differing qualities, including even gold and silver braid. These, he says, are pernicious transgressions. If they continue, the result will be that all the utilities and wealth of these most important colonies will end up as the patrimony of their inhabitants. Brazil being such a fertile land, so abundant in fruits, said inhabitants will become totally independent of their dominant metropolis: consequently it is indispensably necessary to abolish said factories and manufactories.