Faces and Masks

  (211 and 328)

  1855: Washington Territory

  “You people will suffocate in your own waste,” warns Indian Chief Seattle.

  The earth is not the white man’s brother, but his enemy, and when he has conquered it, he moves on. But all things are connected. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of the earth …

  The clatter of cities only seems to insult the ears …

  The air is precious to the red man. For all things share the same breath—beasts, trees, man. Like a man dying for many days, he is numb to the stench …

  It matters little where we pass the rest of our days; they are not many. A few more hours, a few more winters … The whites, too, shall pass— perhaps sooner than other tribes. Continue to contaminate your bed, and you will one night suffocate in your own waste …

  (229)

  The Far West

  Is anyone really listening to old Chief Seattle? The Indians are condemned, like the buffalo and the moose. The one that does not die by the bullet dies of hunger or sorrow. From the reservation where he languishes, old Chief Seattle talks in solitude about usurpations and exterminations and says who knows what things about the memory of his people flowing in the sap of the trees.

  The Colt barks. Like the sun, the white pioneers march westward. A diamond light from the mountains guides them. The promised land rejuvenates anyone sticking a plow in it to make it fertile. In a flash cities and streets spring up in the solitude so recently inhabited by cacti, Indians, and snakes. The climate, they say, is so very healthy that the only way to inaugurate cemeteries is to shoot someone down.

  Adolescent capitalism, stampeding and gluttonous, transfigures what it touches. The forest exists for the ax to chop down and the desert for the train to cross; the river is worth bothering about if it contains gold, and the mountain if it shelters coal or iron. No one walks. All run, in a hurry, it’s urgent, after the nomad shadow of wealth and power. Space exists for time to defeat, and time for progress to sacrifice on its altars.

  (218)

  1856: Granada

  Walker

  The son of Tennessee shoots from the hip and buries without epitaph. He has eyes of cinders. He neither laughs nor drinks. He eats as a duty. No woman has been seen with him since his deaf and dumb fiancée died; and God is his only friend worthy of trust. He calls himself the Predestined. He dresses in black. He hates anyone touching him.

  William Walker, Southern gentleman, proclaims himself President of Nicaragua. Red carpets cover the main square of Granada. Trumpets flash in the sun. The band plays North American military marches as Walker kneels and takes the oath with one hand on the Bible. Twenty one salutes are fired. He makes his speech in English and then raises a glass of water and toasts the president of the United States, his compatriot and esteemed colleague. The North American ambassador, John Wheeler, compares Walker with Christopher Columbus.

  Walker arrived in Nicaragua a year ago, at the head of the Phalanx of Immortals. I will order the death of anyone who opposes the imperial march of my forces. Like a knife into meat came the adventurers recruited on the wharves of San Francisco and New Orleans.

  The new president of Nicaragua restores slavery, abolished in Central America over thirty years ago, and re-implants the slave trade, serfdom, and forced labor. He decrees that English is Nicaragua’s official language and offers lands and hands to any white North Americans who care to come.

  (154, 253, and 314)

  1856: Granada

  Stood

  Five or none. Nicaragua wasn’t much. William Walker wanted to conquer all of Central America.

  The five pieces of Morazan’s fatherland, united against the pirate, chop his force to bits. The people’s war kills many North Americans; morbus cholera, which turns you wrinkled and gray and suddenly finishes you off, kills more.

  The Messiah of slavery, roundly defeated, crosses Lake Nicaragua. Flocks of ducks and swarms of plague-infected flies pursue him. Before returning to the United States, Walker decides to punish the city of Granada. Nothing should remain alive there. Neither its people, nor its tile-roofed houses, nor its sandy streets lined with orange trees.

  Flames rise to the sky.

  At the foot of the ruined wharves a lance is stuck into the ground. A strip of leather hangs from the lance like a dejected flag. In red letters it says, in English: Here stood Granada.

  (154 and 314)

  Walker: “In Defense of Slavery”

  The enemies of American civilization—for such are the enemies of slavery—seem to be more on the alert than its friends.

  Something is due from the South to the memory of the brave dead who repose in the soil of Nicaragua. In defense of slavery these men left their homes, met with calmness and constancy the perils of a tropical climate, and finally yielded up their lives …

  If there, then, be yet vigor in the South—and who can doubt that there is—for the further contest with the soldiers of anti-slavery, let her cast off the lethargy which enthrals her, and prepare anew for the conflict … The true field for the exertion of slavery is in tropical America; there it finds the natural seat of its empire and thither it can spread if it will but make the effort …

  (356)

  1858: Source of the Gila River

  The Sacred Lands of the Apaches

  Here, in the valley where the river is born, among the rocky heights of Arizona, is the tree that sheltered Geronimo thirty years ago. He had just sprouted from his mother’s belly and was wrapped in a cloth. They hung the cloth from a branch. The wind rocked the baby while an old voice entreated the tree: “Let him live and grow to see you give fruit many times.”

  This tree is at the center of the world. Standing in its shade, Geronimo will never confuse north with south, nor evil with good.

  All around spreads the vast country of the Apaches. In these rugged lands they have lived ever since the first of them, Son of the Storm, donned the feathers of the eagle who defeated the enemies of light. Here, animals to hunt have never been lacking, nor herbs to cure the sick, nor rocky caves to lie in after death.

  Some strange men have arrived on horseback, carrying long ropes and many stakes. Their skin looks as if it had been drained of blood, and they speak a language never before heard. They stick bright-colored signals into the ground and ask questions of a white medal which replies by moving a needle.

  Geronimo does not know that these men have come to measure the Apaches’ lands, to sell them.

  (24 and 91)

  1858: Kaskiyeh

  Geronimo

  The Apaches had gone unarmed to the market of Kaskiyeh in the southern lands betweeen Sonora and Casas Grandes to exchange buffalo and deerskins for food. Mexican soldiers demolished their camps and took their horses. Among the dead lie the mother and the wife of Geronimo, and his three children.

  Geronimo says nothing while his comrades meet and sadly vote. They are surrounded, unarmed, and have no choice but to leave.

  Sitting by the river, motionless, he watches his people march off behind Chief Mangas Colorado. Here the dead remain. Finally, Geronimo leaves as well, looking over his shoulder. He follows his people at the right distance to hear the soft padding of the Apaches’ feet in retreat.

  During the long trek to the north, he does not open his mouth. Upon arriving home, he burns his house of skins and his mother’s house and all of his things and his wife’s and his mother’s things, and burns his children’s toys. Then, his back to the fire, he raises his head and sings a war chant.

  (24)

  1858: San Borja

  Let Death Die

  His sore body is aching to mix itself with the American earth. Aimé Bonpland knew this was where he would end up and linger on, ever since that distant day when he landed with Humboldt on the Caribbean coast.

  Bonpland dies of his death, in a mud and straw hut, serenely, knowing that the stars do not die; that ants and people will not stop being born; that there will be new cloverleave
s, and new oranges or suns on the branches; and that foals, newly upright on their mosquito legs, will be stretching out their necks in search of a teat. The old man bids farewell to the world as a child does to the day at bedtime.

  Afterwards, a drunk stabs the body; but this sinister imbecility of mankind is a detail of no importance.

  1860: Chan Santa Cruz

  The Ceremonial Center of the Yucatán Rebels

  “My father didn’t put me among the rich. He didn’t put me with the generals or with those who have money, or with those who claim to have it.” The Mother of Crosses, she who sprouted from the mahogany tree beside the spring, had announced this in Yucatan. And when soldiers ax down the mahogany and burn the little cross dressed by the Indians, she has already had daughters. From cross to cross the word has survived: “My father put me with the poor, because I am poor.”

  Around the cross, around the crosses, has grown Chan Santa Cruz, the great sanctuary of Maya rebels in the Yucatàn jungle.

  The soldiers of Colonel Acereto’s expedition go in without resistance. They find no Indians and are left open-mouthed. The Mayas have built an immense church of sturdy walls with a lofty dome, the House of God, the House of the Jaguar God, and in the tower hang the bells taken from Bacalar.

  In the sacred city, empty of people, everything is scary. There is little water in the canteens, but Colonel Acereto forbids drinking from the wells. Six years ago other soldiers drank and vomited and died while from the thickets Indians asked them if the water was fresh.

  From patience to impatience the soldiers pass the days. Mean while, Indians flock from a hundred villages and a thousand corn patches. They bring a rifle or a machete and a little sack of corn flour. They mass in the brush; and when Colonel Acereto decides to withdraw, they mop up his troop in one sweep.

  The band, which has been captured intact, will teach music to the children and play polkas in the church, where the cross lives and talks, surrounded by Maya gods. There, in the church, the people celebrate communion with corn tortillas and honey, and once a year elect interpreters for the cross and warrior-chiefs, who wear a gold earring but work in the cornfields like anyone else.

  (273 and 274)

  1860: Havana

  Poet in Crisis

  At a cost of thirteen deaths per kilometer, Cuba has constructed the railway that takes sugar from the Güines cane fields to the port of Havana: dead Africans, Irishmen, Canary Islanders and Chinese from Macao, slaves or wretched day laborers brought by traffickers from afar—and the sugar boom demands more and more.

  Ten years ago the first shipment of Maya slaves reached Cuba from Yucatán. A hundred and forty Indians, prisoners of war, were sold at twenty-five pesos a head; children, gratis. Later Mexican President Santa Anna granted a monopoly on the traffic to Colonel Manuel María Jiménez and the price rose to a hundred and sixty pesos per man, a hundred and twenty per woman and eighty per child. The Maya war has gone on and on, and with it more and more Cuban loans of money and rifles. The Yucatán government collects a tax on each slave sold, and thus pays with Indians for the war against the Indians.

  The Spanish poet José Zorrilla has purchased in the port of Campeche a shipment of Indians to sell in Cuba. He was all set to embark when yellow fever killed his capitalist partner Cipriano de las Cagigas in Havana, and now the author of “Don Juan Tenorio” consoles himself writing verses on a coffee plantation.

  (222 and 273)

  1861: Havana

  Sugar Hands

  Soon the city of Havana will be staging its floral games. The intellectuals of the Literary Society propose a great central motif. They want the literary competition to be on the theme of asking Spain for sixty thousand new slaves. The poets will thus support the black importation project, which already enjoys the patronage of the newspaper Diario de La Marina and the legal blessing of the attorney general.

  Hands are needed for sugar. Blacks smuggled in via the Mariel, Cojímar, and Batabanó beaches are scarce and expensive. Three sugar mill owners have drawn up the project, because Cuba lies exhausted and desolate, imploring the Spanish authorities to hear her cries of woe and provide her with blacks, meek and loyal slaves to whom Cuba owes her economic prosperity. It will be easy, they insist, to bring them from Africa. They will run joyfully to the Spanish ships, when they see them arriving.

  (222 and 240)

  Sugar Language

  The window grills of Havana homes are adorned with iron spirals and the columns with plaster curlicues; the doorways with lacy woodwork; the stained-glass windows with peacock feathers. The talk of doctors and monks gleams with arabesques. Poets reach for unheard-of rhymes and prose writers for the most reverberant adjectives. Orators strive to make their points, their restless and fugitive points; a point peeks out from behind an adverb or a parenthesis and the orator throws more and more words at it; the speech stretches out trying to catch it, but the point keeps fleeing; and the chase continues ad infinitum.

  Account books, on the other hand, speak the rough language of reality. In sugar mills throughout Cuba, they register the birth or purchase of every black slave as the acquisition of merchandise, calculating depreciation at three percent annually. A man’s illness is equivalent to the faultiness of a valve and the end of a life is like the loss of a head of cattle: The killed cattle are bulls. We lost the ceiba sow. The Negro Domingo Mondongo has died.

  (222)

  1861: Bull Run

  Grays Against Blues

  Near the city of Washington the first battle of the Civil War is fought. A big audience has turned out, in carriages or on horseback, to see the show. The blood hardly begins to flow when horses bolt and the crowd stampedes, howling with panic. Soon the capital’s streets are filled with the mutilated and dying.

  Two opposing countries had previously shared the map, the flag, and the name of the United States. A Southern newspaper reported the election of Abraham Lincoln in its “News from Abroad” section. Within months the Southern states formed a separate nation and war broke out.

  Lincoln, the new president, embodies the ideals of the North. He has proclaimed in his campaign that it is impossible to continue half slave and half free, and has promised farms instead of plantations and higher tariffs against the competition of European industry.

  North and South: two spaces, two periods. In the North, factories that already produce more than fields; tireless inventors creating the electric telegraph, the sewing machine, and the reaper; new cities sprouting on all sides, a million inhabitants in New York and wharves too small for the ships filled with desperate Europeans seeking a new country. In the South, pride of ancestry and nostalgia, fields of tobacco, enormous cotton plantations: four million black slaves producing raw materials for Lancashire textile mills; gentlemen fighting duels over the tainted honor of a sister or the fair name of a family; ladies airing themselves in carriages through the flowering country-side and fainting on the verandahs of their palaces at dusk.

  (70)

  1862: Fredericksburg

  The Pencil of War

  His back against a wall, legs crossed on the ground, a young soldier looks without seeing. Several months’ growth of beard flattens the open collar of his tunic. A soldier’s hand strokes the head of a dog sleeping on his knees.

  John Geyser, recruit from Pennsylvania, sketches himself and his comrades while the war kills. His pencil freezes them for an instant on the way to the ditch excavated by cannon fire. Soldiers load rifles, or clean them, or eat the ration of army biscuit and bacon, or stare with sad eyes. Sadly, they look without seeing, or perhaps see beyond what they look at.

  (69)

  1863: Mexico City

  “The American Algeria”

  is the new name for Mexico according to the Paris press. The army of Napoleon III attacks and conquers the capital and the chief cities.

  In Rome, the pope jumps for joy. The government of Benito Juárez, dislodged by the invaders, was guilty of blasphemy against God and h
is properties in Mexico. Juárez had stripped the Church naked, despoiling it of its sacred tithes, of its estates vast as the sky, and of the State’s loving protection.

  The Conservatives join the new conquistadors. Twenty thousand Mexican soldiers help the thirty thousand from France, who have just finished storming the Crimea, Algeria, and Senegal. Napoleon III takes over Mexico invoking the Latin spirit, Latin culture, and the Latin race, and in passing demands repayment of an immense and phantasmal loan.

  Taking charge of the new colony is Maximilian of Austria, one of Europe’s many unemployed princes, accompanied by his stunning wife.

  (15)

  1863: London

  Marx

  “Napoleon III will break his head on Mexico, if they don’t hang him first,” announces a wise and penurious prophet, who lives on what he can borrow in London.

  While he corrects and polishes the drafts of a work that is going to change the world, Karl Marx does not miss a detail of what is happening in the world. In letters and articles he calls the third Napoleon an imperial Lazarillo de Tormes* and the invasion of Mexico an infamous enterprise. He also denounces England and Spain, who would like to share with France the territory of Mexico as war booty, and all the nation-thieving nations, accustomed to sending thousands and thousands of people to the slaughterhouse so that usurers and traders may extend the scope of their business.

  Marx no longer believes that the imperial expansion of the most developed countries is a victory for progress over backwardness. Fifteen years ago, however, he did not disagree when Engels applauded the invasion of Mexico by the United States, believing that this would turn Mexican campesinos into proletarians and bring the bishops and feudal lords down from their pedestal.