(214)
1867: La Paz
On Diplomacy, the Science of International Relations
Mounted on Holofernes, his horse in war and fiesta, President Melgarejo arrives at the cathedral of La Paz. Seated under a canopy on a velvet chair, he hears the solemn Mass. He wears the uniform of a Chilean army general and on his breast gleams the grand ribbon of the Imperial Order of Brazil.
After so many comings and goings and killings, Melgarejo has learned not to trust even his own shirt. They say that sometimes he tears it off and riddles it with bullets.
“The commander commands, with his finger on the trigger.”
There are two beings in the world, just two, at whom the iron general does not look askance: the horse Holofernes and the lovely Juana Sánchez. The Chilean ambassador raises his glass and joins Holofernes in a toast, when the black horse appears at the presidential table to drink beer among the ministers, bishops, and generals. The Brazilian ambassador covers the body of Juana Sànchez with such necklaces, diadems, and bracelets as Melgarejo’s woman has not seen in her wildest dreams.
His breast covered with Brazilian decorations, Melgarejo cedes to Brazil sixty-five thousand square kilometers of Bolivian forest in Amazonia. Transformed into a general of the Chilean army, Melgarejo presents to Chile half of the Atacama coastal desert, very rich in nitrates. There, Chilean and British capitalists are exploiting the fertilizer most coveted by Europe’s exhausted lands. With the amputation of the Atacama desert, Bolivia begins to lose its outlet to the sea.
(85, 107, and 172)
Inscriptions on a Rock in the Atacama Desert
Antonia, for you I die.
You know who.
THE CHAÑARCILLO JUDGE IS STEALING.
Pay me my three ounces, Ramón.
The Administrator is a lout.
Don T.P. says he isn’t a mulatto.
(256)
1867: Bogotá
A Novel Called María
Ladies sway in their hammocks, ringlets fluttering behind their ivory necks, rocked by gentlemen dressed like the dead with faces like boiled chickens. A caravan of blacks, baskets on heads, passes silently in the distance, as if begging pardon for existing and being a nuisance. In the plantation garden, aroma of coffee, fragrance of gardenias, Jorge Isaacs moistens his pen with tears.
All Colombia sobs. Efraín didn’t arrive in time. While he plowed the seas, his cousin María, victim of a hereditary and incurable disease, drew her last breath and went to Heaven a virgin. At the grave, Efraín presses to his breast the inheritance of his love. María has left him a kerchief (embroidered by herself and wetted by herself), some white lily petals, so like herself and as withered as herself, a ring slipped from the rigid hand which had been an elegant rose of Castile, and a lock of her long hair in the locket that her lily lips managed to kiss while death was freezing them.
(167 and 208)
1867: Querétaro
Maximilian
The army of Juárez and the thousand guerrilla bands of the Mexican people run the Frenchmen out. Maximilian, the emperor, topples into the mud crying Long live Mexico.
At the end, Napoleon III pulls out his army, the pope hates Maximilian, and the conservatives call him Empoorer. Napoleon had ordered him to administer the new French colony, but Maximilian did not obey. The pope expected to get his earthly properties back, and the conservatives thought he would exorcise Mexico of the liberal demon; but Maximilian, while making war on Juárez, issued laws quite like those of Juárez.
A black carriage arrives in Querétaro in the rain. President Juárez, conqueror of the intruders, goes up to the open and flowerless coffin, where lies the prince with the languid blue eyes, who liked to stroll down the Alameda dressed as a Mexican cowboy with broad-brimmed sombrero and sequins.
(94 and 143)
1867: Paris
To Be or to Copy, That Is the Question
To Paris’s Universal Exhibition come oil-on-cloth paintings sent from Ecuador. All the paintings are exact copies of the most famous works of European artists. The catalog praises the Ecuadoran artists who, if they, have no great originality, at least have the merit of reproducing, with noteworthy faithfulness, masterworks of the Italian, Spanish, French, and Flemish schools.
Meanwhile another art flourishes in the Indian markets and poor outskirts of Ecuador. It is the despised work of hands able to create beauty out of clay and wood and straw, bird-feathers, sea shells, bread crumbs. This art, as if begging pardon, is called artisanship. Academicians don’t do it, only poor folk who eat flea hearts or mosquito tripe.
(37)
Song of the Poor in Ecuador
“Hungry, ducks?”
“Yes.”
“Eat the pain in your guts.
Stab a mosquito,
suck blood from the cuts,
keep the tripe for a treat or
tomorrow’s cold cuts.”
(65)
1869: Mexico City
Juárez
The face of this Mexican Indian, who defeated the pope of Rome and the third Napoleon, has been carved out of Oaxaca stone. Without smile or speech, always in frock coat and high collar, always in black, Benito Juárez is a rock surrounded by a chorus of doctors who whirl around him discoursing and declaiming and reciting, learned pedants blessed with golden beaks and gilded plumes.
Mexico has more priests than teachers, and the Church owns half of everything, when Juárez comes to power and the liberals prescribe their civilizing potion for a country sick from ignorance and backwardness. The therapy of modernization calls for peace and order. It is necessary to do away with wars that kill more people than malaria or tuberculosis, but the plague of war harasses Juárez without mercy. First, the war against the French invaders; and since then, the war against the military hero-bosses who decline to retire, and against Indians who decline to lose their community lands.
Mexican liberals profess blind faith in universal suffrage and freedom of expression, although the vote is the privilege of few and few express themselves. They believe in salvation by education, although the few schools are all in the cities, because liberals, after all, get along better with muses than with Indians. As big estates get bigger, they dream about pioneer farmers fertilizing uncultivated lands, and they dream about magical rails, smoke of locomotives, smoking chimneys, ideas and people and capital that will bring progress from Europe.
Juárez himself, son of Zapotec Indians, is convinced that if Mexico copies North American laws, it will grow like the United States, and if it consumes English products it will become as industrious a nation as England. By importing French ideas, thinks the defeater of France, Mexico will become an erudite nation.
(142, 143, and 316)
1869: San Cristóbal de Las Casas
Neither Earth nor Time Is Dumb
The earth vibrates from all the talk among the dead below. The graveyard hums like a plaza on market day. The Mayas who fell in the old Chiapas rebellions are celebrating the latest news. Here they have fought with spear and ax since the remote day when the first usurper, son of woman and dog, swooped down upon the community lands. The dead chat happily among themselves, and through dreams congratulate the living and tell them truths that the ear does not know.
Again the Indians hereabouts have risen in rebellion. The Indians, debt-slaves, destroy haciendas and burn prisons and defend the last of their communal lands, which they work as a community despite the Juárez government.
The gods of the mountain also celebrate. They are the ones who deflect the gale when it carries disease or greed.
(155 and 274)
1869: Mexico City
Juárez and the Indians
For being a rebel, a bandit, a rabid socialist, Julio López was shot a year ago. At the head of Indians of the Chalco region, Julio López had vowed war on the rich and had rebelled to reclaim the stolen lands.
They have put soldiers’ uniforms on Indian prisoners in Chalco and forced
them to fight against the rebel Indians of Yucatán. Those “pacified” in each war become “pacifiers” in the next, rebels defeated and made to kill rebels; and thus the government of President Juárez keeps sending troops against the Mayas of Yucatán and the Mayas of Chiapas, the Coras of Nayarit and the Tarascans of Michoacán, the Yaquis of Sonora and the Apaches of the north.
To recover the lands of their communities, the Indians turn around hacienda signposts: the first dead fall and the air becomes nothing but gunsmoke. Juárez’s Constitution seeks to turn the Indians into small proprietors and free workers. Juárez’s laws ban the pillory and shackles, enslavement for debt and hunger wages. Reality, mean while, seizes lands the Indians still possess in common and makes them slaves of big estates or beggars in the cities.
Benito Juárez was born in the mountains, amid the rocks that resemble him, on the shores of Lake Guelatao. He learned to name the world in one of the hundred Indian languages of Mexico. Later, under the patronage of a pious man, he became a man of letters.
(142 and 274)
1869: London
Lafargue
When Paul Lafargue began laying siege to Laura Marx, the founder of scientific socialism was finishing the correction of the first volume of Capital. Karl Marx took a dim view of the Cuban’s ardent assaults, and told him to court his green-eyed daughter with quieter English manners. He also asked him for economic guarantees. Ousted from Germany, France, and Belgium, Marx has gone through hard times in London, devoured by debt, sometimes without a penny to buy a newspaper. The miseries of exile have killed three of his children.
But he cannot scare off Lafargue. He always knew he couldn’t. Lafargue was very young when he and Marx began to fight and to love each other. And now Marx’s first grandson is born of the Cuban mestizo, great-grandson of a Haitian mulatta and an Indian from Jamaica.
(177 and 279)
1869: Acosta Ñu
Paraguay Falls, Trampled Under Horses’ Hooves
and, fallen, fights on. The last cannons are made of church bells and fire stones and sand, while the Triple Alliance armies press on to the north. The wounded tear off their bandages, because it is better to bleed to death than serve in the enemy army or march off to Brazilian coffee plantations with the brand of slavery.
Not even graves are spared in the sacking of Asunción. In Piribebuy, the invaders overrun trenches defended by women, the mutilated, and old people, and set fire to the hospital filled with wounded. In Acosta Ñú, the offensive is resisted by battalions of children disguised with beards of wool or grass.
And the butchery goes on. Those not killed by bullets are killed by plague. And every death hurts. Every death seems like the last, but is the first.
(61 and 254)
1870: Mount Corá
Solano López
This is a caravan of dead people who breathe. Paraguay’s last soldiers tramp behind Marshal Francisco Solano López. No boots or harnesses are to be seen, because they have been eaten, but no sores or rags either: of mud and bone are these soldiers, wandering through the woods, masks of mud, carapaces of mud, pottery flesh that the sun has cooked with the mud of the swamps and the red dust of the deserts.
Marshal López does not surrender. Hallucinating, sword borne high, he heads this last march to nowhere. He discovers plots, or imagines them, and for the crime of treason or weakness has his brother and all his in-laws executed, and also the bishop and a minister and a general … For lack of powder, the executions are performed with a spear. Many die by López’s order, many more from exhaustion, and they are left behind on the road. The earth recovers its own and bones mark the trail for the pursuer.
Enormous enemy hosts close the circle at Mount Corá. They bring López down on the banks of the River Aquidabán, wound him with a spear, kill him with a sword, and with one shot finish him off, because he still howls.
(291)
1870: Mount Corá
Elisa Lynch
Surrounded by the conquerors, Elisa digs with her nails a grave for Solano López.
Bugles no longer sound, nor do bullets whistle, nor grenades explode. Flies cover the marshal’s face and attack his gashed body, but Elisa sees only a red mist. As her hands tear the ground open, she insults this accursed day; and the sun hesitates on the horizon because the day dares not withdraw before she finished cursing it.
This Irishwoman with golden hair, who has fought at the head of columns of women armed with hoes and sticks, has been López’s most implacable adviser. Last night, after sixteen years and four children, he told her for the first time that he loved her.
(25)
Guaraní
Of annihilated Paraguay, the language survives.
Mysterious powers has Guaraní, language of Indians, language of the conquered which the conquerors made their own. In spite of bans and slights, Guaraní is still the national language of this land in ruins, and will be so although the law wills otherwise. Here the mosquito will continue to be called “Devil’s fingernail” and the dragonfly, “Devil’s little horse”; the stars, “fires of the moon,” and dusk, “the mouth of night.”
Paraguayan soldiers gave passwords and pep talks in Guaraní, while the war lasted, and in Guaraní they sang. Now the dead fall silent, in Guaraní.
(152)
1870: Buenos Aires
Sarmiento
Argentina’s president, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, receives the military communiqué of the victory in Paraguay. He orders the band to play serenades, and writes: Providence decreed that a tyrant should cause the death of that Guaraní people. It was necessary to purge the earth of all that human excrescence.
Sarmiento, founder of the Animal Protection Society, preaches pure unabashed racism and practices it with untrembling hand. He admires the North Americans, free from any mixture of inferior races, but from Mexico southward he sees only barbarism, dirt, superstitions, chaos, and madness. Those dark shadows terrify and fascinate him. He goes for them with sword in one hand and lamp in the other. As governor and president, he multiplies cemeteries and schools, and fosters the noble virtues of throat-cutting, saving, and reading. As a writer, he publishes prose works of great talent in favor of the extermination of gauchos, Indians, and blacks and their replacement by white laborers from northern Europe, and in defense of the frock coat and the English-style haircut.
(310 and 311)
1870: Rio de Janeiro
A Thousand Candelabra Proliferate in the Mirrors
and silken shoes draw waltz circles on the lustrous floor of Baron de Itamaraty’s palace. Through clouds of guests pass the imperial couple, from salon to salon, endless hand-kissing and tinkling of glass, and as they go, martial trumpetings and thunderous cheers interrupt the ball. The gentlemen look like penguins and the ladies like butterflies, tightly enclosed in their crinolines, unfurling laces; and more than one wear European breasts, imported by Mademoiselle Arthémise, which ripple in perfect accompaniment to their breathing. With champagne and music in the French fashion, Brazil celebrates the devastation of Paraguay.
Carriages rolling up to the fiesta cross paths with caravans of blacks toting fetid pots and barrels. Clouds of flies pursue the procession to the beaches of Rio de Janeiro. Every evening, slaves throw the masters’ shit into the waters of the lovely bay.
(204)
1870: Rio de Janeiro
Mauá
While they celebrate the annihilation of Paraguay, the conquering countries fight over who will get the biggest bite of the conquered.
In Rio de Janeiro, someone observes the effervescent celebrations with furrowed brow and shrugs his shoulders at talk of new frontiers. Irineo Evangelista de Souza, baron of Mauá by grace of Emperor Pedro II, never wanted this war. From the start he had presentiments that it would be long and bloody, and also that whoever won it would lose it. Laurels for the empire of Brazil? Peace illuminated by glory? The empire prospering as if the war had never been? Baron de Mauá, Brazilian partner of the Rothsc
hilds of London, knows that the exterminators now owe British banks twice as much as they did before. Mauá, owner of great plantations, knows that the coffee estates have lost many thousands of black slaves on the battlefields. Accustomed to financing the victorious countries’ budgets and issuing their banknotes, Mauá also knows that they have papered themselves with valueless vouchers. And perhaps he knows—who knows?—that this just-ended war is the beginning of his personal ruin, that creditors will end up seizing even his gold eyeglasses and that, in his last years, he will again be that lonesome child some sailor had abandoned on the docks of Rio.
(109)
1870: Vassouras
The Coffee Barons
The southern Paraíba River valley produces most of the coffee the world consumes, and also produces the largest number of viscounts, barons, and marquises per square foot.
From the throne of Brazil, Emperor Pedro II now rewards with new titles of nobility the coffee slavers who have contributed so much money to the war against Paraguay.
No plantation has fewer than a hundred slaves. When it is still night, at the toll of the iron bell the slaves wash in the tank, offer loud thanks to Our Lord Jesus Christ, and march to work up the mountain, inspired by the cat-o’-nine-tails.
The masters’ sons are brought into the world by black midwives, and black wet nurses suckle them. Black nurses teach them songs, legends, and tastes in food. With black children they learn to play and with black girls they discover love. But from early on they know who is proprietor and who is property. Marriage to a cousin or niece will fortify family unity and perpetuate the nobility of the lineage.