Century of the Wind Read online

  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: In All Nicaragua Discovering

  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.

  (200)*

  * 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.