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

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Mutis

The old monk talks as he peels oranges and an unending shower of gold spirals down into a pan between his feet.

To see him, to listen to him, Humboldt and Bonpland have detoured from their southward route and have gone upriver for forty days. José Celestino Mutis, patriarch of America’s botanists, is put to sleep by speeches but enjoys intimate chats as much as anyone.

The three men, sages ever astonished by the beauty and mystery of the universe, exchange plants, ideas, doubts, discoveries. Mutis is excited by talk of Lake Guatavita, the salt mines of Zipaquirá, and the Tequendama waterfall. He praises the map of the Magdalena River which Humboldt has just drawn, and discreetly suggests some changes with the sureness of one who has traveled much and knows much, and knows very deep inside himself that something of him will remain in the world.

And he shows everything and tells everything. While he eats and offers oranges, Mutis speaks of the letters that Linnaeus wrote him, and of how much those letters taught him, and of the problems he had with the Inquisition. And he recalls and shares his discoveries about the curative powers of quinine bark, and the influence of the moon on the barometer, and the cycles of flowers, which sleep as we do and stretch and wake up little by little, unfurling their petals.

(148)

Napoleon Restores Slavery

Squadrons of wild ducks escort the French army. The fish take flight. Through a turquoise sea, bristling with coral, the ships head for the blue mountains of Haiti. Soon the land of victorious slaves will appear on the horizon. General Leclerc stands tall at the head of the fleet. Like a ship’s figurehead, his shadow is first to part the waves. Astern, other islands disappear, castles of rock, splendors of deepest green, sentinels of the new world found three centuries ago by people who were not looking for it.

“Which has been the most prosperous regime for the colonies?”

“The previous one.”

“Well, then, put it back,” Napoleon decided.

No man, born red, black, or white can be his neighbor’s property, Toussaint L’Ouverture had said. Now the French fleet returns slavery to the Caribbean. More than fifty ships, more than twenty thousand soldiers, come from France to bring back the past with guns.

In the cabin of the flagship, a female slave fans Pauline Bonaparte and another gently scratches her head.

(71)

They Were Indignant

On the island of Guadeloupe, as in all French colonies, free blacks become slaves again. Black citizens reappear in their owners’ inventories and wills as saleable goods; once more they form part of the tool inventories of plantations, the equipment of ships, and the arsenal of the army. The colonial government summons whites who have left the island and guarantees them the return of their property. Blacks unclaimed by their owners are sold off for the public treasury.

The hunt becomes a butchery. The authorities of Guadeloupe pay forty-four francs for each rebel head. The hanged rot in perpetuity on top of Constantine Hill. In Pointe-à-Pitre’s Place Victoria, the bonfire of blacks never goes out and the flames rise higher than the houses.

Three whites protest. For their dignity, for their indignation, they are condemned. Millet de La Girardière, a several-times-decorated French army officer, is sentenced to death in an iron cage, exposed to the public, sitting naked on a spiny leaf. The other two, Barse and Barbet, will have their bones broken before being burned alive.

(180)

On the Roofs of the World

They climb over clouds, amid abysses of snow, clinging to the rough body of Chimborazo, tearing their hands against the naked rock.

They have left the mules half-way up. Humboldt carries on his shoulder a bag full of stones that speak of the origin of the Andean cordillera, born of an unusual vomiting from the earth’s incandescent belly. At seventeen thousand feet Bonpland has caught a butterfly, and higher up an incredible fly, and they have continued climbing, despite the bitter cold and vertigo and slippings and the blood that spurts from their eyes and gums and parted lips. Mist envelops them as they climb blindly up the volcano, until a shaft of light breaks through and strips bare the summit, that high white tower, before the astounded travelers. Is it real, could it be? Never has any man climbed so close to the sky, and it is said that on the roofs of the world appear horses flying to the clouds and colored stars at noon. Is it a hallucination, this cathedral of snow rearing up between north and south skies? Are not their bruised eyes deceiving them?

Humboldt feels an abundance of light more intense than any delirium: we are made of light, Humboldt feels, of light ourselves, and of light the earth and time, and he feels a tremendous urge to tell it right away to brother Goethe, over there at his home in Weimar.

(338)

The Island Burned Again

Toussaint L’Ouverture, chief of the free blacks, died a prisoner in a castle in France. When the jailer opened the padlock at dawn and slid back the bolt, he found Toussaint frozen in his chair.

But life in Haiti moved on, and without Toussaint the black army has beaten Napoleon Bonaparte. Twenty thousand French soldiers have been slaughtered or died of fevers. Vomiting black blood, dead blood, General Leclerc has collapsed. The land he sought to enslave proves his shroud.

Haiti has lost half its population. Shots are still heard, and hammers nailing down coffins, and funeral drums, in the vast ash-heap carpeted with corpses that the vultures spurn. This island, burned two centuries ago by an exterminating angel, has been newly eaten by the fire of men at war.

Over the smoking earth those who were slaves proclaim independence. France will not forgive the humiliation.

On the coast, palms, bent over against the wind, form ranks of spears.

(71)

Spain’s Richest Colony

Theology professors still earn five times more than their colleagues in surgery or astronomy, but Humboldt finds in Mexico City an astonishing nursery of young scientists. This is the heritage of some Jesuit priests, friends of experimental physics, the new chemistry, and certain theories of Descartes, who despite the Inquisition taught and contaminated here; and it is also the work of the viceroy Revillagigedo, a man open to the winds of time, defier of dogmas, who a few years ago governed these lands with anguished concern about the lack of machines and laboratories and modern books to read.

Humboldt discovers and praises the School of Mining and its learned professors, while Mexico produces more silver than all the rest of the world, a river of silver flowing to Europe through the port of Veracruz. At the same time, Humboldt warns that cultivated land is little and badly worked, and that the colonial monopoly of commerce and the poverty of the people block the development of manufacturing. Mexico is the land of inequality, he notes. The monstrous inequality of rights and fortunes hits one in the face. Counts and marquesses paint newly purchased coats-of-arms on their carriages, and the people live in a misery that is the enemy of all industry. The Indians suffer atrocious penury. As in all of America, here too, more or less white skin decides what class a man occupies in society.

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