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

Colonel Quarrell gets what he wants in Cuba, thanks to the good offices of Doña María Ignacia de Contreras y Justíz, marchioness of San Felipe and Santiago, countess of Castile, and owner and mistress of the Bejucal. Men and dogs embark in the schooner Mercury.

Mists of dusk in Montego Bay. The beasts arrive in Jamaica. In a flash the streets empty out, doors are shut tight. Forty Cuban rangers fall into line to the light of torches. Each leads three enormous dogs, tied to his belt by straining chains.

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Did the Gallilean Rebel Imagine He Would Be a Slave Overseer?

On Cuba’s sugar plantations, the slaves do not suffer from neglect. The master redeems them by labor and shortens their stay in this vale of tears; and the monks save them from hell. The Church receives five percent of sugar production for teaching the slaves that God made them slaves, that the body is enslaved but the soul is free, that the pure soul is like white sugar, cleansed of brown taint in purgatory, and that Jesus Christ is the great overseer who watches, awards merits, punishes, and recompenses.

At times Jesus Christ is not only the overseer, but the master in person. The count of Casa Bayona washes the feet of twelve blacks, on Holy Thursday night, sits them down at his table and shares his supper with them. The slaves express their gratitude by setting fire to his sugar mill, and twelve heads end up on a row of lances beside the cane fields.

(222)

El Aleijadinho

El Aleijadinho, the Little Cripple, creator of abundances, sculpts with his stump. This sculptor of the loftiest beauties in Brazil’s mining region is repugnantly ugly. One of the slaves he bought tried to kill himself to escape from serving such a horrendous master. His sickness, leprosy or syphilis or some mysterious curse, is devouring him bite by bite. For each bit of flesh that it tears from him, he gives the world new marvels of wood or stone.

In Congonhas do Campo they are awaiting him. Can he make it? Will he have the strength left to carve the twelve prophets and raise them against the sky of bluest blue? Will those who prophesied the love and anger of God dance their tormented dance of wounded animals?

No one believes he has life enough left for so much. Slaves carry him through the streets of Ouro Prêto, always hidden beneath his hood, and tie the chisel to what remains of his hand. Only they see the ravages of his face and body. Only they draw close to this monstrosity. Antonio Francisco Lisboa, El Aleijadinho, is falling to pieces; and no urchin dreams of hitting him with a spitball.

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Ataíde

Manuel da Costa Ataíde puts gold and colors on the figures that El Aleijadinho carves in wood. And he is a painter famous in his own right. In churches, Ataíde creates heavens of this earth. Using the pigments of flowers and plants, he paints the Virgin with the face of María do Carmo, a woman born here, brown madonna from whom spring the sun and the stars; and he paints little angel musicians and singers with very fleshy eyelids and lips, nappy hair and startled or mischievous eyes. The mulatto angels are his children and the Virgin his children’s mother.

In the San Francisco church in Mariana, African features mark the patron saint of Assisi who turned wolves into lambs. Next to him live white saints with real hair and the faces of madwomen.

(123)

Night and Snow

The mulatta lover offers a sexual spree, the white wife social prestige. To achieve a white wife, the mulatto has to whiten himself. If he has plenty of money, he buys some document that erases the stigma of the slave grandmother and permits him to wear sword and hat, leather buskins and silk parasol. He also has a portrait painted which his grandchildren can display without a blush in the living room. Artists have arrived in Brazil who know how to give a European appearance to any tropical model. Oval gold frames surround the head of the patriarch, a man with pink skin and straight hair and a grave and watchful expression.

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White Skin For Sale

The Spanish crown no longer considers Indian lineage vile; black blood, on the other hand, darkens births for many generations. Rich mulattos can buy certificates of whiteness for five hundred silver coins.

To remove the stain that greatly afflicts him, the king pronounces Diego Mejías Bejarano, mulatto of Caracas, to be white so that his sad and inferior condition should not be an impediment to his use, treatment, alternatives and mode of dress vis-à-vis other subjects.

In Caracas, only whites can attend Mass in the cathedral or kneel on carpets in any church. The master race are known as Mantuans because the mantilla is the privilege of white ladies. No mulatto may be a priest or a doctor.

Mejías Bejarano has paid up the five hundred coins, but the local authorities decline to obey. An uncle of Simón Bolívar and the other Mantuans of the town council declare that the royal warrant is frightening for the inhabitants and Creoles of America. The town council asks the king: How is it possible for the white inhabitants and natives of this province to admit at their side a mulatto descended from their own slaves, or from the slaves of their fathers?

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Simón Rodríguez

A mouse’s ears, bourbon nose, mouth like a mailbox. A red tassel straggles from the cap that covers his premature baldness. The spectacles, wedged above the eyebrows, rarely help the blue, avid, darting eyes. Simón Carreño, Rodríguez by chosen name, wanders about preaching strange doctrines.

This reader of Rousseau claims that schools should be opened to the people, to those of mixed blood; that girls and boys should share the same classrooms, and that it would be more useful for the country to raise masons, blacksmiths, and carpenters than gentlemen and monks.

Simón the teacher and Simón the pupil. Simón Rodríguez is twenty-five years old and Simon Bolivar, the richest orphan in Venezuela, inheritor of mansions and plantations, owner of a thousand black slaves, is thirteen.

Far from Caracas, the teacher initiates the boy into the secrets of the universe and speaks to him of liberty, equality, fraternity; he reveals to him the hard life of the slaves who work for him, and tells him that the forget-me-not is also called myosotis palustris. He shows him how the foal is born of the belly of the mare, and cacao and coffee complete their cycles. Bolívar becomes a swimmer, a hiker, and a horseman; he learns to sow, to build a chair, and to name the stars in the sky of Aragua. Master and pupil cross Venezuela, camping wherever they may be, and together get to know the land that made them. By the light of a lantern they read and discuss Robinson Crusoe and Plutarch’s Lives.

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The Compass and the Square

The flight of his teacher interrupts Bolívar’s education. Simón Rodríguez, suspected of plotting against the king, changes his name to Simon Robinson. From the port of La Guaira he sails to Jamaica and exile.

The plotters wanted an independent and republican America, without native tribute or black slavery, free from king and pope, where people of all races would be brothers and sisters in reason and in Jesus Christ.

Creole Masons, of the lodge founded by Francisco de Miranda in London, headed up the movement. Also accused are three Spanish Masons, exiled in Caracas. Frenchmen, schooled in revolutions and guillotines, are said to be in the conspiracy as well. Raids bring to light more banned books than dangerous weapons.