1968: Banks of the River Yaqui The Mexican Revolution Isn’t There Anymore
1968: Mexico City Rulfo
1969: Lima Arguedas
1969: Sea of Tranquillity The Discovery of the Earth
1969: Bogotá The Urchins
1969: Any City Someone
1969: Rio de Janeiro Expulsion from the Slums
1969: Baixo Grande A Castle of Garbage
1969: Arque Pass The Last Stunt of Aviator Barrientos
1960: San Salvador and Tegucigalpa Two Turbulent Soccer Matches
1969: San Salvador and Tegucigalpa The Soccer War
1969: Port-au-Prince A Law Condemns to Death Anyone Who Says or Writes Red Words in Haiti
1970: Montevideo Portrait of a Torture Trainer
1970: Managua Rugama
1970: Santiago de Chile Landscape after Elections
1971: Santiago de Chile Donald Duck
1971: Santiago de Chile “Shoot at Fidel,”
1972: Managua Nicaragua, Inc.
1972: Managua Somoza’s Other Son
Tachito Somoza’s Pearl of Wisdom
1972: Santiago de Chile Chile Trying to Be Born
1972: Santiago de Chile Portrait of a Multinational Company
1973: Santiago de Chile The Trap
1973: Santiago de Chile Allende
1973: Santiago de Chile Great Avenues Will Open Up, Announces Salvador Allende in His Final Message
1973: Santiago de Chile The Reconquest of Chile
1973: Santiago de Chile The Home of Allende
1973: Santiago de Chile The Home of Neruda
1973: Miami Sacred Consumerism Against the Dragon of Communism
1973: Recife Eulogy of Humiliation
1974: Brasília Ten Years after the Reconquest of Brazil
1974: Rio de Janeiro Chico
1974: Guatemala City Twenty Years after the Reconquest of Guatemala
1974: Forests of Guatemala The Quetzal
1974: Ixcán A Political Education Class in Guatemala
1974: Yoro Rain
1975: San Salvador Miguel at Seventy
1975: San Salvador Roque
1975: Amazon River Tropical Landscape
1975: Amazon River This Is the Father of All Rivers,
1975: Ribeirão Bonito A Day of Justice
1975: Huayanay Another Day of Justice
1975: Cuzco Condori Measures Time by Bread
1975: Lima Velasco
1975: Lima The Altarpieces of Huamanga
The Molas of San Blas
The Bark Paintings of the Balsas River
The Arpilleras of Santiago
The Little Devils of Ocumicho
On Private Property and the Right of Creation
1975: Cabimas Vargas
1975: Salta Happy Colors of Change
1975: Buenos Aires Against the Children of Evita and Marx
1976: Madrid Onetti
1976: San José A Country Stripped of Words
A Uruguayan Political Prisoner, Mauricio Rosencof, Says His Piece
1976: Liberty Forbidden Birds
1976: Montevideo Seventy-Five Methods of Torture,
1976: Montevideo “One Must Obey,” the New Official Texts Teach Uruguayan Students
1976: Montevideo The Head Shrinkers
1976: La Perla The Third World War
1976: Buenos Aires The Choice
1976: La Plata Bent over the Ruins, a Woman Looks
1976: Forest of Zinica Carlos
1977: Managua Tomás
1977: Solentiname Archipelago Cardenal
Omar Cabezas Tells of the Mountain’s Mourning for the Death of a Guerrilla in Nicaragua
1977: Brasília Scissors
1977: Buenos Aires Walsh
1977: Río Cuarto The Burned Books of Walsh and Other Authors Are Declared Nonexistent
1977: Buenos Aires The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo,
1977: Buenos Aires Alicia Moreau
1977: Buenos Aires Portrait of a Croupier
1977: Caracas The Exodus of the Intruders
María Laonza
José Gregorio
1977: Graceland Elvis
1978: San Salvador Romero
1978: La Paz Five Women
1978: Managua “The Pigsty”
Tachito Somoza’s Pearl of Wisdom
1978: Panama City: Torrijos
1979: Madrid Intruders Disturb the Quiet Ingestion of the Body of God
1979: New York Banker Rockefeller Congratulates Dictator Videla
1979: Siuna Portrait of a Nicaraguan Worker
1979: In All Nicaragua The Earth Buckles
1979: In All Nicaragua Get It Together, Everyone,
From The Datebook of Tachito Somoza
1979: Managua “Tourism must be stimulated,”
1979: Managua Somoza’s Grandson
1979: Granada The Comandantes
1979: In All Nicaragua Birth
1979: Paris Darcy
1979: Santiago de Chile Stubborn Faith
1979: Chajul Another Kind of Political Education in Guatemala
The Mayas Plant Each Child That Is Born
1980: La Paz The Cococracy
1980: Santa Ana de Yacuma Portrait of a Modern Businessman
The White Goddess
1980: Santa Marta Marijuana
1980: Santa Marta Saint Agatón
1980: Guatemala City Newsreel
1980: Uspantán Rigoberta
1980: San Salvador The Offering
1980: Montevideo A People Who Say No
1980: In All Nicaragua On Its Way
1980: Asunción Stroessner
1980: New York The Statue of Liberty Seems Pitted with Smallpox
1980: New York Lennon
1981: Surahammar Exile
1981: Celica Canton “Bad Luck, Human Error, Bad Weather”
1982: South Georgia Islands Portrait of a Brave Fellow
1982: Malvinas Islands The Malvinas War,
1982: The Roads of La Mancha Master Globetrotter
1982: Stockholm Novelist García Márquez Receives the Nobel Prize and Speaks of Our Lands Condemned to One Hundred Years of Solitude
1983: St. George’s The Reconquest of the Island of Grenada
1983: La Bermuda Marianela
1983: Santiago de Chile Ten Years after the Reconquest of Chile
1983: A Ravine between Cabildo and Petorca Television
1983: Buenos Aires The Granny Detectives
1983: Lima Tamara Flies Twice
1983: Buenos Aires What If the Desert Were Ocean and the Earth Were Sky?
1983: Plateau of Petitions The Mexican Theater of Dreams
1983: Tuma River Realization
1983: Managua Defiance
1983: Mérida The People Set God on His Feet,
1983: Managua Newsreel
1984: The Vatican The Holy Office of the Inquisition
1984: London Gold and Frankincense
A Circular Symphony for Poor Countries, in Six Successive Movements
1984: Washington 1984
1984: Washington We Are All Hostages
1984: São Paulo Twenty Years after the Reconquest of Brazil
1984: Guatemala City Thirty Years after the Reconquest of Guatemala,
1984: Rio de Janeiro Mishaps of Collective Memory in Latin America
1984: Mexico City Against Forgetting,
1984: Mexico City The Resurrection of the Living
1984: Estelí Believing
1984: Havana Miguel at Seventy-Nine
1984: Paris The Echoes Go Searching for the Voice
1984: Punta Santa Elena The Eternal Embrace
1984: Violeta Parra Community The Stolen Name
1984: Tepic The Found Name
1984: Bluefields Flying
1986: Montevideo A Letter
The Sources
Index
Preface
This Book
is the last volume of the trilogy Memory of Fire. It is not an anthology but a literary creation, based on solid documentation but moving with complete freedom. The author does not know to what literary form the book belongs: narrative, essay, epic poem, chronicle, testimony … Perhaps it belongs to all or to none. The author relates what has happened, the history of America, and above all, the history of Latin America; and he has sought to do it in such a way that the reader should feel that what has happened happens again when the author tells it.
At the head of each text is given the year and place of each episode, except in certain texts which cannot be situated in any specific moment or place. At the foot, the numbers show the chief works the author has consulted in search of information and reference points. The absence of numbers shows that in that particular case the author has consulted no written source, or that he obtained his raw material from general information in periodicals or from the mouths of protagonists or witnesses. The sources consulted are listed at the end of the book.
Literal transcriptions are italicized.
and clawing ourselves out of the wind with our fingernails
—Juan Rulfo
1900: San José de Gracia
The World Goes On
There were some who spent the savings of several generations on one last spree. Many insulted those they couldn’t afford to insult and kissed those they shouldn’t have kissed. No one wanted to end up without confession. The parish priest gave preference to the pregnant and to new mothers. This self-denying cleric lasted three days and three nights in the confessional before fainting from an indigestion of sins.
When midnight came on the last day of the century, all the inhabitants of San José de Gracia prepared to die clean. God had accumulated much wrath since the creation of the world, and no one doubted that the time had come for the final blowout. Breath held, eyes closed, teeth clenched, the people listened to the twelve chimes of the church clock, one after the other, deeply convinced that there would be no afterwards.
But there was. For quite a while the twentieth century has been on its way; it forges ahead as if nothing had happened. The inhabitants of San José de Gracia continue in the same houses, living and surviving among the same mountains of central Mexico—to the disenchantment of the devout who were expecting Paradise, and to the relief of sinners, who find that this little village isn’t so bad after all, if one makes comparisons.
* The numbers at the foot of each item refer to the documentary sources consulted by the author, listed on pages 281–301.
1900: West Orange, New Jersey
Edison
Through his inventions the new century receives light and music.
Everyday life bears the seal of Thomas Alva Edison. His electric lamp illumines the nights and his phonograph preserves and diffuses the voices of the world, no longer to be lost. People talk by telephone thanks to the microphone he has added to Bell’s invention, and pictures move by virtue of the projecting apparatus with which he completed the work of the Lumière brothers.
In the patent office they clutch their heads when they see him coming. Not for a single moment has this multiplier of human powers stopped inventing, a tireless creator ever since that distant time when he sold newspapers on trains, and one fine day decided he could make them as well as sell them—then set his hand to the task.
(99 and 148)
1900: Montevideo
Rodó
The Master, the talking statue, sends forth his sermon to the youth of America.
José Enrique Rodó vindicates ethereal Ariel, the pure spirit against savage Caliban, the brute who wants to eat. The century being born is the time of anybodies. The people want democracy and trade unions; and Rodó warns that the barbarous multitude can scale the heights of the kingdom of the spirit where superior beings dwell. The intellectual chosen by the gods, the great immortal man, fights in defense of private property in culture.
Rodó also attacks North American civilization, rooted in vulgarity and utilitarianism. To it he opposes the Spanish aristocratic tradition which scorns practical sense, manual labor, technology, and other mediocrities.
(273, 360, and 386)
1901: New York
This is America, to the South There’s Nothing
For 250 million dollars Andrew Carnegie sells the steel monopoly to banker John Pierpont Morgan, master of General Electric, who thereupon founds the United States Steel Corporation. A fever of consumption, a vertigo of money cascading from the tops of skyscrapers: the United States belongs to the monopolies, and the monopolies to a handful of men; but multitudes of workers flock here from Europe, year after year, lured by the factory sirens, and sleeping on deck they dream of becoming millionaires as soon as they jump onto the New York piers. In the industrial era, El Dorado is the United States; and the United States is America.
To the south, the other America hasn’t yet managed to mumble its own name. A recently published report states that all the countries of this sub-America have commercial treaties with the United States, England, France, and Germany—but none has any with its neighbors. Latin America is an archipelago of idiot countries, organized for separation, and trained to dislike each other.
(113 and 289)
1901: In All Latin America
Processions Greet the Birth of the Century
In the villages and cities south of the Rio Grande, Jesus Christ marches to the cemeteries, a dying beast lustrous with blood, and behind him with torches and hymns comes the crowd, tattered, battered people afflicted with a thousand ills that no doctor or faith-healer would know how to cure, but deserving a fate that no prophet or fortuneteller could possibly divine.
1901: Amiens
Verne
Twenty years ago Alberto Santos Dumont read Jules Verne. Reading him, he had fled from his house, from Brazil, and from the world, until, sailing through the sky from cloud to cloud, he decided to live entirely on air.
Now Santos Dumont defies wind and the law of gravity. The Brazilian aeronaut invents a dirigible balloon, master of its own course, that does not drift, that will not get lost in the high seas or over the Russian Steppe or at the North Pole. Equipped with motor, propeller, and rudder, Santos Dumont rises into the air, makes a complete circuit of the Eiffel Tower, and lands at the announced spot, against the wind, before an applauding crowd.
Then he journeys to Amiens, to shake the hand of the man who taught him to fly.
Settled in his rocking chair, Jules Verne smooths his big white beard. He takes a shine to this child badly disguised as a gentleman, who calls him my Captain and looks at him without blinking.
(144 and 424)
1902: Quetzaltenango
The Government Decides That Reality Doesn’t Exist
Drums and trumpets blast in the main plaza of Quetzaltenango, calling the citizenry; but all anyone can hear is the terrifying thunder of the Santa María volcano in full eruption.
At the top of his voice the town crier reads the proclamation of the sovereign government. More than a hundred towns in this section of Guatemala are being destroyed by avalanches of lava and mud and an endless rain of ashes while the town crier, protecting himself as best he can, performs his duty. The Santa María volcano shakes the ground beneath his feet and bombards his head with stones. At noon there is total night. In the blackout nothing can be seen but the volcano’s vomit of fire. The town crier yells desperately, reading the proclamation by the shaky light of a lantern.
The proclamation, signed by President Manuel Estrada Cabrera, informs the populace that the Santa María volcano is quiet, that all of Guatemala’s volcanos are quiet, that the earthquake is occurring far from here in some part of Mexico, and that, the situation being normal, there is no reason not to celebrate the feast of the goddess Minerva, which will take place today in the capital despite the nasty rumors being spread by the enemies of order.
(28)
1902: Guatemala City
Estrada Cabrera
In the city of Quetzaltenango, Manuel Estrada Cabrera had for many years exercised the august priesthood of the Law in the majestic temple of Justice upon the immovable rock of Truth. When he got through stripping the province, the doctor came to the capital, where he brought his political career to a happy culmination, pistol in hand, assaulting the presidency of Guatemala.
Since then he has reestablished throughout the country the use of stocks, whips, and gallows. Now Indians pick plantations’ coffee for nothing, and for nothing bricklayers build jails and barracks.
Almost daily, in a solemn ceremony, President Estrada Cabrera lays the foundation stone of a new school that will never be built. He has conferred on himself the title Educator of Peoples and Protector of Studious Youth, and in homage to himself celebrates each year the colossal feast of the goddess Minerva. In his Parthenon here, a full-scale replica of the Greek original, poets pluck their lyres as they announce that Guatemala City, the Athens of the New World, has a Pericles.
(28)
1902: Saint Pierre
Only the Condemned Is Saved
On the island of Martinique, too, a volcano explodes. As if splitting the world in two, the mountain Pelée coughs up a huge red cloud that covers the sky and falls, glowing, over the earth. In a wink the city of Saint Pierre is annihilated. Its thirty-four thousand inhabitants disappear—except one.
The survivor is Ludger Sylbaris, the only prisoner in the city. The walls of the jail had been made escape-proof.
(188)
1903: Panama City
The Panama Canal
The passage between the oceans had obsessed the conquistadors. Furiously they sought and finally found it, too far south, down by remote, glacial Tierra del Fuego. But when someone suggested opening the narrow waist of Central America, King Philip II quickly squelched it: he forbade excavation of a canal on pain of death, because what God hath joined let no man put asunder.
Three centuries later a French concern, the Universal Inter-Oceanic Canal Company, began the work in Panama, but after thirty-three kilometers crashed noisily into bankruptcy.
Now the United States has decided to complete the canal, and hang on to it, too. There is one hitch: Colombia doesn’t agree, and Panama is a province of Colombia. In Washington, Senator Hanna advises waiting it out, due to the nature of the beast we are dealing with, but President Teddy Roosevelt doesn’t believe in patience. He sends in the Marines. And so, by grace of the United States and its warships, the province becomes an independent state.