The sun, the old sun, also attends the ceremony.
(183 and 288)
1782: Guaduas
With Glassy Eyes,
from a wooden cage, the head of José Antonio Galán gazes at the town of Charalá. In Charalá, where he was born, they are exhibiting his right foot. A hand of his is nailed up in the plaza of Socorro.
The cream of colonial society has repented of the sin of insolence, these rich Creoles who prefer to keep paying tribute and obedience to the Spanish monarch, thus avoiding the contagious plague that Galán, like Túpac Amaru, like Tupac Catari, incarnated and spread in their days of fury. Galán, chief captain of the commoners’ insurrection, has been betrayed and hunted down by those who were his comrades. In a hut he fell, after a long pursuit, together with his last twelve men.
Don Antonio Caballero y Góngora, the pompous archbishop, sharpened the sword that beheaded Galán. While throwing on the fire the treaty of peace, so promising, so deceiving, the Most Illustrious One added infamies against the spiteful plebeian. Galán has been quartered not merely as a rebel, but also as a man of most obscure birth and lover of his own daughter.
Now the archbishop has two thrones. Besides the apostolic one, he has acquired the viceregal throne of Bogotá.
(13 and 185)
1782: Sicuani
This Accursed Name
Diego Cristóbal, first cousin of Túpac Amaru and continuer of his war in Peru, has signed a peace treaty. The colonial authorities have promised pardon and a general amnesty.
Stretched out on the ground, Diego Cristobal swears fidelity to the king. Multitudes of Indians come down from the mountains and surrender their arms. The marshal stages a banquet of merry toasts and the bishop a Mass of thanksgiving. From Lima, the viceroy orders all houses to be illuminated for three nights.
Within a year and a half, in Cuzco, in the Plaza of Happiness, the executioner will tear to pieces the flesh of this cousin of Túpac Amaru, with red-hot pincers, before hanging him from the gallows. His mother will also be hanged and quartered. The judge, Francisco Díaz de Medina, had passed sentence to the effect that it is not fitting either for the King or for the State that any seed or race of this or any Túpac Amaru should remain, considering the great clamor and impression that this accursed name has aroused in the natives.
(183)
1783: Panama City
For Love of Death
Ever since dawn the ground has been steaming, pleading for a drink, and the living seek shade and fan themselves. If the heat shrivels the living, what will it not do to the dead, who have no one to fan them?
The important dead lie in the churches. So much does custom require in the dry tableland of Castile, and so it has to be also in this fiery furnace of Panama. The faithful stand on memorial stones, or kneel on them, and from below death whispers to them: Soon I’ll come for you. More than the panic of dying or the memory of irreparable loss though, it is the stink of putrefaction that brings tears to the eyes.
Sebastián López Ruiz, sage researcher into nature, writes a report showing that, here, this custom from over there is the enemy of hygiene and fatal for public health, and that it would be healthier to bury the gentry of Panama in some distant cemetery. The reply, when it comes, says in effect that the dead are well placed in the churches; and that what has been and is, will continue to be.
(323)
1783: Madrid
The Human Hand Vindicated
To the four winds trumpets proclaim that the king of Spain has decided to redeem the human hand. From here on, the gentleman who does manual work will not lose his noble condition. The king says that industriousness dishonors neither him who performs it, nor his family, and that no artisanship is unworthy of Spaniards.
Charles III wants to bring his reign up to date. His minister Campomanes dreams of promoting industry, popular education, and agrarian reform. From its great imperial feat in America, Spain gets the honors and other European monarchies get the benefits. How long will the silver of the colonies go on paying for merchandise that Spain does not produce? What is the point of the Spanish monopoly if the products leaving the port of Cadiz are English, French, Dutch, or German?
Knightly gentlemen, who in Spain are as abundant as monks, have hands that serve either to die for Spain or to kill her. Even if they are penniless, they don’t lower themselves to produce anything except glory. A long time ago those hands forgot how to work, as a hen’s wings have forgotten how to fly.
(175)
1785: Mexico City
Lawyer Villarroel Against the Pulque Saloon
Every pulque saloon is an office where adulteries, concubinages, rapes, pickpocketings, robberies, homicides, brawls, knifings, and other crimes are hatched … They are theaters in which men and women are transformed into the most abominable furies from hell, their mouths spewing the most refined obscenities, the vilest words, and most dissolute, infamous, offensive, and provocative things that the greatest of libertines could hardly utter if they were not perturbed by the fumes of the most fetid and disgusting of drinks … These are the effects of the negligence, the omissions and the tolerance of judges, who are not horrified at the sight of men and women lying in the streets as if they were dogs, exposed to being run over by a coachman as drunk as themselves, as often happens, dispatching them to eternity in such an unhappy situation as the one in which they find themselves.
(352)
The Pulque Saloon
When the viceroy expelled pulque from Mexico City, the outcast found shelter in the suburbs.
Liquor of the green plants … In taverns on the outskirts, the barman never stops coming and going between the big vats and the eager mugs, you stun me, you kill me, you make me walk on all fours, while a newborn child cries disconsolately in one corner and an old man sleeps off the effects in another.
Horses, donkeys, and fighting cocks, tethered to iron rings, grow old waiting outside. Inside, the bright colored vats bear defiant names: “Don’t stretch me out,” “The stuff for the strong,” “The brave one” … Inside, law does not exist, nor the time of day. Dice roll on the earth floor and flowery gambling cards are flung down on a barrel-top. Some fool sings to the sound of a merry harp, others pair off to kick up dust in a dance, a monk chats with a soldier and the soldier promises to get tough with a muleteer, I am plenty tough, I’m too tough, and the potbellied barman chimes in: What about another?
(153 and 266)
Pulque
Perhaps pulque brings their old gods back to the Indians. They offer it to them, sprinkling it on the ground or in the fire or raising a mug to the stars. Perhaps the gods are always thirsty for the pulque they sucked from the four hundred teats of mother Mayahuel.
Perhaps, too, the Indians drink to fortify themselves and to get even; certainly they drink to forget and to be forgotten.
According to the bishops, pulque is to blame for laziness and poverty and brings idolatry and rebellion. Barbarous vice of a barbarous people, says one of the king’s officers. Under the effect of the maguey’s heavy wine, he says, the child denies the father and the vassal his lord.
(153 and 331)
The Maguey
Armed with green swords, the maguey stands up to drought and hail, the icy nights and furious suns of the deserts of Mexico.
Pulque comes from the maguey, the tree that gives suck, and from the maguey come forage for animals, beams and tiles for roofing, fencing posts and fuel for fires. Its fleshy leaves provide rope, pouches, matting, soap, and paper, the paper of the ancient codices; and its thorns make good pins and needles.
The maguey only flowers when it is going to die. It opens and flowers as if saying farewell. A lofty stalk, perhaps a mast, perhaps a penis, shoots from the heart of the maguey toward the clouds in a burst of yellow flowers. Then the great stalk falls and with it falls the maguey, torn out by the root.
It is unusual to find a flowering maguey in the arid Mezquital valley. Hardly has it begun to shoot up w
hen the Indian castrates it and turns the wound downward, and thus the maguey yields up its pulque, which quenches thirst, feeds, and consoles.
(32 and 153)
The Mug
The Mexican potter has a long history. Three thousand years before Hernán Córtes, his hands were converting clay into receptacles or human figures which fire hardened against time. Much later on, the Aztecs explained that a good potter gives being to clay and makes things live.
This ancient tradition still flourishes in a daily multiplication of bottles, jars, pots, and, above all, drinking mugs: the ivorylike mugs of Tonalá, the tough mugs of Metepec, the bulging shiny ones of Oaxaca, the humble little ones of Chilililco; the reddish mugs of Toluca, dripping black tears … The mug of cooked clay presides over fiestas and kitchens and accompanies prisoner and beggar. It receives the pulque, scorned by the crystal glass, and it is the gift of lovers:
When I die, old lady, take my clay if you can
And fashion a mug with this refrain:
If you thirst for me, drink;
And if it stops at the brink,
That will be kisses from your old man.
(18, 153, and 294)
1785: Mexico City
Fiction in the Colonial Era
The viceroy of Mexico, Matías de Gálvez, signs a new edict in favor of Indian workers. The Indians are to receive fair wages, good food, and medical attention; and they will have two rest hours at noon, and be able to change employers whenever they like.
(146)
1785: Guanajuato
The Wind Blows Where It Wants
An abyss of light opens in the clear air and between the black walls of the sierra shines the desert. In the desert, a glitter of domes and towers, rise Mexico’s mining towns. Guanajuato, as densely populated as the viceroy’s capital, is the most distinguished. Its owners go to Mass in sedan chairs followed by swarms of beggars through a labyrinth of lanes and alleys, Kiss Lane, Slide Lane, Four Winds Lane; and between the cobblestones polished by the feet of time grow grasses and phantoms.
In Guanajuato church bells organize life; and chance governs it. Some mysterious slippery-fingered joker deals the cards. They say that here one treads on gold and silver wherever one goes, but everything depends on the veins that snake underground and offer and deny themselves at their whim. Yesterday, a fortunate gentleman celebrated his stroke of luck, and toasted everybody in the best wine, and paid for flute and guitar serenades, and bought fine Cambray lace and velvet trousers and silk lamé jackets and camisoles from Holland; and today the thread of silver that made him knight for a day disappears without trace.
The life of the Indians, on the other hand, does not hang on chance. Breathing mercury in the alloy factories leaves them forever with the shakes and toothless, and their chests burst from breathing murderous dust and pestilent vapors in the mines. Sometimes exploding dust blows them to bits, and sometimes they slip into the void when they go down carrying stones or when they come up carrying on their backs the foremen who call Indians their “little horses.”
(6, 261, and 349)
1785: Guanajuato
Silver Portrait
Using the language of fluttering fans, ladies chat in the leafy gardens. Somebody pees against the wall of a church and on one side of the plaza two beggars, sitting in the sun, pick at each other’s lice. Beneath a stone archway a distinguished doctor in a huge cloak talks of the Rights of Man, and a monk moves down the lane muttering eternal condemnations against the drunks, whores, and rowdies who cross in front of him. Not far from the city, collectors hunt Indians with lassos.
Guanajuato has long since dethroned Potosí. The world queen of silver is hungry for labor. The workers, free wage earners, don’t see a coin in all their lives, but are prisoners of debt. Their children will inherit the debts and also the fear of pain and prison and hunger, and of the old gods and the new.
(261 and 349)
1785: Lisbon
The Colonial Function
The Portuguese crown orders Brazil’s textile workshops closed down; in the future they must only produce rustic clothing for slaves. In the name of the queen, Minister Melo e Castro issues the orders. The minister observes that in most of the captaincies of Brazil have been set up, and are spreading ever more wildly, various factories and manufactories of cloth of differing qualities, including even gold and silver braid. These, he says, are pernicious transgressions. If they continue, the result will be that all the utilities and wealth of these most important colonies will end up as the patrimony of their inhabitants. Brazil being such a fertile land, so abundant in fruits, said inhabitants will become totally independent of their dominant metropolis: consequently it is indispensably necessary to abolish said factories and manufactories.
(205)
1785: Versailles
The Potato Becomes a Great Lady
Two and a half centures ago the Spanish conquistadors brought her from Peru. Since she came so highly recommended by the Indians, Europe destined her for hogs, jailbirds, and the dying. The potato has been jeered and castigated whenever she has tried to escape from pigsties, prisons, and hospitals. In several places she was banned; and in Besançon she was accused of causing leprosy.
Antoine Parmentier got to know the potato in jail. Parmentier was in a Prussian prison and they didn’t provide anything else to eat. At first he thought her stupid, but later he came to love her and discovered her charm and savoriness.
Free again in Paris, Parmentier organizes a banquet. D’Alembert, Lavoisier, American ambassador Benjamin Franklin, and other celebrities attend. Parmentier offers them an all-potato menu: potato bread, potato soup, potato puree, salads of potatoes enlivened with dressings to taste, fried potatoes, potato buns and pastries. For dessert, potato tart. To drink, potato brandy. Parmentier makes a speech in her defense. He extolls her nutritive virtues, proclaims her necessary for the palate and for the blood, and says the potato could conquer hunger in Europe, being invulnerable to hailstorms and easily cultivated. The guests, abrim with potatoes, applaud him with emotion and conviction.
Then Parmentier convinces the king. Louis XVI orders potatoes planted in the Sablons estates near Paris, and has them surrounded by a permanent guard of soldiers. Thus, he excites curiosity and desire for the forbidden fruit.
The definitive consecration takes place at Versailles. Queen Marie Antoinette, decked out like a garden with potato flowers, bestows the royal kiss on the cheek of Antoine Parmentier. King Louis, who has still not lost his head, embraces Parmentier. All the nobility of France attends the apotheosis of the potato, in this kingdom where the art of good cuisine is the only religion without atheists.
(156 and 250)
The Potato Was Born of Love and Punishment, As They Tell It in the Andes
The Inca, they say, condemned two lovers who violated the sacred laws. Let them be buried alive and together, he decided.
She had been a virgin consecrated to the Sun god. She had fled from the temple to give herself to a peasant serf.
Alive and together, the Inca decided. They were buried in a deep pit, tied together, face up; and not a complaint was heard as the dirt covered them.
Night fell and the stars moved in unaccustomed courses. Shortly afterward, gold disappeared from the riverbeds, and the fields of the kingdom became sterile, nothing but dust and stones. Only the soil that covered the lovers was immune to the drought.
The high priests counseled the Inca to disinter the lovers, burn them and scatter their ashes to the wind. So let it be, decided the Inca.
But they could not find them. They dug wide and deep and found nothing but a root. That root multiplied and from then on the potato was the staff of the Andean people.
(248)
1790: Paris
Humboldt
At age twenty, Alexander von Humboldt discovers the ocean and revolution.
At Dunkirk the ocean struck him dumb, and in Calais the moon blossoming from the waves drew a shout of wo
nder. Astonishment at the sea, revelation of the revolution: in Paris, a year after July Fourteenth, Humboldt lets himself go in the sweet whirlwind of streets in fiesta, merges into the people who dance and sing to their newborn liberty.
He has lived in search of answers and found questions. Without let-up he has inquired of books, of the heavens, and of the earth, pursuing the enigmas of the soul and the mysteries of the cosmos and the secrets of beetles and stones, always in love with the world and with men and women who fill him with dizziness and panic. Alexander will never be happy, says his brother Wilhelm, his mother’s favorite child.
At twenty, fever of living, fever of going places, Humboldt swears eternal fealty to the banners of the French revolution and swears he will cross the ocean, like Balboa and Robinson Crusoe, to the lands where it is always noon.
(30 and 46)
2790: Petit Goâve
The Missing Magic
The heft of the purse can at times achieve more than the color of the skin. In Haiti, poor mulattos are blacks, and free blacks who have accumulated enough cash are mulattos. Rich mulattos pay immense fortunes to become white, although few obtain the magic document that permits the offspring of master and slave to become a doctor, to style himself Monsieur, to wear a sword, or to touch a white woman without losing an arm.
From a gallows hangs the mulatto who claimed the rights of a citizen, recently proclaimed in Paris, and high on a pike through the town of Petit Goâve rides the head of another mulatto who wanted to be a deputy.