(227 and 309)
1844: Mexico City
Santa Anna
frowns, stares off into space. He is thinking about some cock fallen in combat or about his own leg, which he lost, a venerated token of military glory.
Six years ago, during a small war against the king of France, a gun salvo tore off the leg. From his bed of pain, the mutilated president dictated to his secretaries a laconic fifteen-page message of farewell to the fatherland; but he came back to life and power, as was his habit.
An enormous cortege accompanied the leg from Veracruz to the capital. The leg arrived under a canopy, escorted by Santa Anna, who waved his white-plumed hat out of the carriage window; and behind, in full regalia, came bishops and ministers and ambassadors and an army of hussars, dragoons, and cuirassiers. The leg passed beneath a thousand rows of banners, and at its passing received prayers for the dead and speeches, odes, hymns, gun salutes, and the tolling of bells. On arriving at the cemetery, the president pronounced before the pantheon a final homage to that piece of himself death had taken by way of an advance.
Since then the missing leg hurts. Today, it hurts more than ever, hurts him excruciatingly, because the rebellious people have broken open the monument that guarded it and are dragging the leg through the streets of Mexico.
(227)
1845: Vuelta de Obligado
The Invasion of the Merchants
Three years ago, the British squadron humiliated the Celestial Empire. After the blockade of Canton and the rest of the coast, the English imposed opium consumption on the Chinese, in the name of Freedom of Commerce and Western Civilization.
After China, Argentina. The long years blockading the port of Buenos Aires have availed little or nothing. Juan Manuel de Rosas, who has his portrait worshipped and governs surrounded by buffoons dressed as kings, still refuses to open Argentina’s rivers. English and French bankers and merchants have for years been demanding that this insolence be punished.
Many Argentines fall defending their land, but finally the guns of the warships of the world’s most powerful countries smash the chains stretched across the Paraná River.
(271 and 336)
1847: Mexico City
The Conquest
“Mexico sparkles before our eyes”: with these words President Adams had dazzled himself at the turn of the century.
At the first bite, Mexico lost Texas.
Now the United States has all Mexico on its plate.
General Santa Anna, master of retreat, flees to the south, leaving a trail of swords and corpses in the ditches. From defeat to defeat, he withdraws his army of bleeding, ill fed, never-paid soldiers, and beside them the ancient cannons hauled by mules, and behind them the caravan of women carrying children, rags, and tortillas in baskets. The army of General Santa Anna, with more officers than soldiers, is only good for killing poor compatriots.
In Chapultepec Castle, Mexican cadets, practically children, do not surrender. They resist the bombardment with an obstinacy not born of hope. Stones collapse over their bodies. Among the stones the victors plant the stars and stripes, which rises from the smoke over the huge valley.
The conquerors enter the capital. The city of Mexico: eight engineers, two thousand monks, two thousand five hundred lawyers, twenty thousand beggars.
The people, huddled together, growl. From the roofs, it rains stones.
(7, 127, 128, and 187)
1848: Villa of Guadalupe Hidalgo
The Conquistadors
In Washington, President Polk proclaims that his nation is now as big as all Europe. No one can halt the onslaught of this young voracious country. To the south and to the west, the United States grows, killing Indians, trampling on neighbors, or even paying. It bought Louisiana from Napoleon and now offers Spain a hundred million dollars for the island of Cuba.
But the right of conquest is more glorious and cheaper. The treaty with Mexico is signed in the Villa of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Mexico cedes to the United States, pistol at chest, half of its territory.
(128)
1848: Mexico City
The Irishmen
In the main plaza of Mexico City, the conquerors mete out punishment. They scourge the rebel Mexicans. They brand with hot irons the faces of the Irish deserters and then hang them from the gallows.
The Saint Patrick Irish battalion came in with the invaders, but fought alongside the invaded. From the north to Molino del Rey, the Irish made theirs the fate, ill fate, of the Mexicans. Many died defending the Churubusco monastery without ammunition. The prisoners, their faces burned, rock to and fro on the gallows.
(128)
1848: Ibiray
An Old Man in a White Poncho in a House of Red Stone
He never liked cities. His heart’s desire is a garden in Paraguay and his carriage, a wheelbarrow full of medicinal greens. A cane helps him to walk, and black Ansina, a minstrel of happy songs, helps him to work the ground and to receive without somber shadows the light of each day.
“José Artigas, at your service.”
He offers maté and respect, but few words to the visitors that sometimes come from Uruguay.
“So my name is still heard over there.”
He is past eighty years old, twenty-eight of them in exile, and he won’t go back. The ideas he created and the people he loved are still beaten. Artigas well knows the weight of the world and of memory, and prefers to be silent. There is no plant to heal the wounds inside a man.
(277)
José Artigas, According to Domingo Faustino Sarmiento
He was a highwayman, no more, no less. Thirty years of practice in murdering or robbing are indisputable qualifications for the the exercise of command over a horde of mutinous Indian peasant scum for a political revolution, and among them the fearsome name of Artigas is encrusted as bandit chief … Who obeyed him? The poor or savage Indians whom he led by right of being the most savage, the most cruel, the greatest enemy of whites … Uncouth, since he never frequented cities, foreign to all human tradition of free government; and although white, commanding natives even less educated than himself … Considering the antecedents and actions of Artigas, we feel a sort of revolt of reason, of the instincts of the man of white race, when someone tried to endow him with political thought and human sentiment.
(311)
1848: Buenos Aires
The Lovers (I)
Dramatis Personae.
Camila O’Gorman. Born in Buenos Aires, in a house with three patios, twenty years ago. Educated in the odor of sanctity, to be successively virgin, wife, and mother in the strait and narrow path that leads to conjugal peace, the offices of the needle, evenings at the piano, and the rosary told with black mantilla on head. She has eloped with the parish priest of the Socorro Church. The idea was hers.
Ladislao Gutiérrez. Minister of God. Age twenty-five. Nephew of the governor of Tucumán. He could not sleep after placing the Host on the tongue of that woman kneeling by the light of candles. Ended by dropping missal and cassock, setting loose a stampede of little angels and campanile pigeons.
Adolfo O’Gorman. Begins each meal reciting the ten commandments, from the head of a long mahogany table. From a chaste woman, he has engendered a priest son, a policeman son, and a fugitive daughter. An exemplary father, he is the first to ask exemplary punishment for the horrendous scandal which shames his family. In a letter to Juan Manuel de Rosas, he pleads for a firm hand against the most atrocious and unheard-of act in the country.
Felipe Elortondo Y Palacio. Secretary of the Curia. Also writes to Rosas asking the capture of the lovers and their inflexible punishment, to prevent similar crimes in the future. Explains in his letter that he had nothing to do with the appointment of the priest Gutiérrez, which was an affair of the bishop.
Juan Manuel De Rosas. Orders the lovers hunted down. His messengers gallop from Buenos Aires. They carry a leaflet describing the fugitives. Camila: white, black eyes, pleasant expression; tall, slim body, we
ll distributed. Ladislao: dark, thin, full beard and curly hair. Justice will be done, Rosas promises, to satisfy religion and the laws and to prevent the consequent demoralization, libertinage, and disorder. The whole country is on guard.
Also participating:
The Opposition Press. From Montevideo, Valparaíso, and La Paz, Rosas’s enemies invoke public morality. The daily newspaper El Mercurio Chileno tells its readers: To such an extreme has come the horrible corruption of the customs under the alarming tyranny of the “River Plata Caligula,” that impious and sacrilegious priests of Buenos Aires elope with the daughters of the best society, without the infamous satrap adopting any measure against these monstrous immoralities.
The Horses. They take the lovers to the north across open country, avoiding cities. Ladislao’s had a golden hide and long legs. Camila’s is grayish, fat, and bobtailed. They sleep, like their riders, outdoors. They do not tire.
Baggage. His: a woolen poncho, some clothes, a couple of penknives and a pair of pistols, a pouch, a silk tie, and a glass inkpot. Hers: a silk shawl, several dresses, four linen petticoats, a fan, a pair of gloves, a comb, and a gold wedding ring, broken.
(166 and 219)
The Lovers (II)
They are two by an error that the night corrects.
1848: Holy Places
The Lovers (III)
In the summer they elope. They spend the autumn at the port of Goya, on the shores of the Paraná. There they go by other names. In the winter they are discovered, betrayed, and caught.
They are taken south in separate carts. The wheels leave scars on the road.
They are shut up in separate dungeons in the Holy Places prison.
If they beg pardon, they will be pardoned. Camila, pregnant, does not repent. Nor does Ladislao. Irons are fixed on their feet. A priest sprinkles the shackles with holy water.
They are shot in the patio, with their eyes blindfolded.
(219)
1848: Bacalar
Cecilio Chi
The ears of corn have spoken, warning of hunger. Huge sugar plantations are devouring the Maya communities’ cornfields in the Yucatán region of Mexico. Men are purchased, as in Africa, and paid for with rum. The Indians hear with their backs, says the lash.
And war breaks out. Sick of contributing dead to other people’s wars, the Mayas answer the call of the hollow trunk drum. They erupt from the brush, from the night, from nothing, machete in one hand, torch in the other: haciendas burn along with their owners and the sons of their owners, and the documents that make debt-slaves of Indians and sons of Indians burn too.
The Maya tornado whirls and destroys. Cecilio Chi fights with fifteen thousand Indians against guns that kill en masse, and so falls the proud city of Valladolid de Yucatán which thinks itself so noble, so Castilian; and Bacalar, and many other towns and garrisons, one after the other.
Cecilio Chi exterminates enemies invoking the old-time rebel Jacinto Canek and the even earlier prophet Chilam Balam. He proclaims that blood will flood the Mérida plaza up to the people’s ankles. He offers firewater and fireworks to the patron saints of each town he occupies: If the saints refuse to change sides, and continue at the masters’ service, Cecilio Chi cuts their throats with his machete and throws them on the fire.
(144 and 263)
1849: Shores of the Platte River
A Horseman Called Smallpox
Of every four Pawnee Indians, one has died this year of smallpox or cholera. The Kiowas, their eternal enemies, have saved themselves thanks to Old Uncle Saynday.
The old ruffian wandered these plains from heartache to heartache. My world is finished, he muttered over and over while vainly seeking deer and buffalo, and the Washita River offered him red mud instead of clear water. Soon my Kiowa people will be surrounded like cows.
Old Uncle Saynday was walking along buried in these sad thoughts when he saw over in the east, instead of the sun, a blackness, a great dark stain spreading across the prairie. As it drew closer, he saw that the stain was a horseman dressed in black, with a high black hat and a black horse. The horseman had ferocious scars on his face.
“My name is Smallpox,” he introduced himself.
“I never heard …” said Saynday.
“I come from far away, the other side of the sea,” the stranger explained. “I bring death.”
He asked for the Kiowas. Old Uncle Saynday knew how to turn him around. He explained to him that the Kiowas weren’t worth his trouble, a small and starveling people, and instead recommended the Pawnees, who are many, handsome and powerful, and showed him the rivers where they live.
(198)
1849: San Francisco
The Gold of California
From Valparaiso, Chileans stream in. They bring a pair of boots and a knife, a lamp and a shovel.
The entry to San Francisco Bay is now known as “the golden gate.” Until yesterday, San Francisco was the Mexican town of Yerbas Buenas. In these lands, usurped from Mexico in the war of conquest, there are three-kilo nuggets of pure gold.
The bay has no room for so many ships. An anchor touches bottom, and adventurers scatter across the mountains. No one wastes time on hellos. The cardsharp buries his patent leather boots in the mud:
“Long live my loaded dice! Long live my jack!”
Simply landing on this soil turns the bum into a king and the beauty who had scorned him dies of remorse. Vicente Pérez Rosales, newly arrived, listens to the thoughts of his compatriots: “Now I have talent! Because in Chile, who’s an ass once he has cash?” Here losing time is losing money. Endless thunder of hammers, a world on the boil, birth-pang screams. Out of nothing rise the awnings under which are offered tools and liquor and dried meat in exchange for leather bags filled with gold dust. Crows and men squawk, flocks of men from all lands, and night and day eddies the whirlwind of frock coats and seamen’s caps, Oregon furs and Maule bonnets, French daggers, Chinese hats, Russian boots, and shiny bullets at the waists of cowboys.
Under her lace sunshade, a good-looking Chilean woman smiles as best she can, squeezed by her corset and by the multitude that sweeps her over the sea of mud paved with broken bottles. In this port she is Rosarito Améstica. She was born Rosarito Izquierdo more years ago than she’ll tell, became Rosarito Villaseca in Talcahuano, Rosarito Toro in Talca, and Rosarito Montalva in Valparaíso.
From the stern of a ship, the auctioneer offers ladies to the crowd. He exhibits them and sings their praises, one by one, look gentlemen what a waist what youth what beauty what …
“Who’ll give more?” says the auctioneer. “Who’ll give more for this incomparable flower?”
(256)
1849: El Molino
They Were Here
Man calls and gold falls from the sands and rocks. Sparks of gold jump on the winds; gold comes docilely to the hand of man, from the bottom of California’s rivers and ravines.
El Molino is one of many camps that have sprung up on these golden shores. One day the miners of El Molino notice columns of smoke rising from the distant cypress forests. At night they see a line of fires mocking the wind. Someone recognizes the signals: the telegraph of the Indians is calling for war against the intruders.
In a flash, the miners form a detail of a hundred and seventy rifles and attack by surprise. They bring in a hundred prisoners and shoot fifteen to teach them a lesson.
(256)
Ashes
Since he had the dream of the White Rabbit, the old man talked of nothing else, though he had trouble talking at all, and for a long time had been unable to stand. The years made his eyes watery and bent him irremediably. He lived in a basket, his face hidden behind his pointy knees, poised for the return to the belly of the earth. Stuck in the basket, he traveled on the back of some son or grandson and told his dream to everybody: White Rabbit gonna devour us, he babbled. Gonna devour our seed, our grass, our living. He said the White Rabbit would come mounted on an animal bigger than a deer, an animal with ro
und feet and hair on its neck.
The old man did not live to see the gold fever in these Californian lands. Before the miners arrived on horseback, he announced: “Can’t feed my children no more. Like old root, just ready for growing now. Speak no more.”
They burned him in his basket, on firewood that he had selected.
(229)
1849: Baltimore
Poe
At the door of a tavern in Baltimore the dying man lies face up, strangling in his vomit. Some pious hand drags him to the hospital, at dawn; and nothing more, nevermore.
Edgar Allan Poe, son of ragged itinerant comedians, vagabond poet, convicted and confessed guilty of disobedience and delirium, had been condemned by invisible tribunals and crushed by invisible pincers.
He got lost looking for himself. Not looking for gold in California; no, looking for himself.
(99 and 260)
1849: San Francisco
Levi’s Pants
The flashes of violence and miracles do not blind Levi Strauss, who arrives from far-off Bavaria and realizes at one blink that here the beggar becomes a millionaire and the millionaire a beggar or corpse in a click of cards or triggers. In another blink he discovers that pants become tatters in these mines of California, and decides to provide a better fate for the strong cloths he has brought along. He won’t sell awnings or tents. He will sell pants, tough pants for tough men in the tough work of digging up rivers and mines. So the seams won’t burst, he reinforces them with copper riveting. Behind, under the waist, Levi stamps his name on a leather label.
Soon the cowboys of the whole West will claim as their own these pants of blue Nîmes twill which neither sun nor years wear out.