Birth of Our Power Read Online Free PDF Page B

… stubborn plants gripping, hugging the granite, and rooting into its crevices … trees whose obdurate roots have inexorably-cracked the stone and, having split it, now serve to bind it … sharp angles dominating the mountain, set in relief or faceted by the play of sunlight … We would have loved this rock—which seems at times to protect the city, rising up in the evening, a promontory over the sea (like an outpost of Europe stretching toward tropical lands bathed in oceans one imagines as implacably blue)—this rock from which one can see to infinity … We would have loved it had it not been for those hidden ramparts, those old cannons with their carriages trained low on the city, that mast with its mocking flag, those silent sentries with their olive-drab masks posted at every corner. The mountain was a prison—subjugating, intimidating the city, blocking off its horizon with its dark mass under the most beautiful of suns.
    We often climbed the paths which led upward toward the fortress, leaving below the scorched boulevards, the old narrow streets gray and wrinkled like the faces of hags, the odor of dust, cooking oil, oranges, and of humanity in the slums. The horizon becomes visible little by little, with each step, spiraling upward around the rock. Suddenly the harbor appears around a bend: the clean, straight line of the jetty, the white flower of a yacht club, floating in the basin like an incredible giantwater lily. In the distance, heaps of oranges—like enormous sunflowers dropped on the border of a gray city—piled up on the docks … And the ships. Two large German vessels: immobile. Under quarantine for several years now, they catch the eye. A six-master, under full sail, glittering in the sun, sails slowly into the harbor from the ends of the sea. Her prow, fringed with dazzling foam, cuts serenely through the amazing blue of liquid silk. She opens horizons even more remote, horizons which I can suddenly see, and which by closing my eyes I see more perfectly: Egypt, the Azores, Brazil, Uruguay, Havana, Mexico, Florida … From what other corners of the earth did these golden sails come? Perhaps only from Majorca. The ship probably bears the name of an old galleon, the name of a woman or a virgin as sonorous as a line of poetry:
Santa Maria de Los Dolores …
Christopher Columbus on his column is now visible above the harbor. Looking out from the city over the sea, the bronze explorer welcomes the sailing ship as she moves in toward him from a past as moving, as mysterious, and as promising as the future.
    The city is most attractive in the evening, when its avenues and its plaza light up: soft glowing coals, more brilliant than pearls, earthly stars shining more brightly than the stars of the heavens. By day, it looks too much like any European city: spires of cathedrals above the ancient streets, domes of academies and theaters, barracks, palaces, boxlike buildings pierced by countless windows—A compartmentalized ant heap where each existence has its own narrow cubicle of whitewashed or papered walls. From the very first, a city imparts a sense of poverty. One
sees,
in the sea of roofs compressed into motionless waves, how they shrivel up and crush numberless lives.
    It is from the height that one discovers the splendors of the earth. The view plunges down to the left into the harbor, the gulf lined with beaches, the port, the city. And the blue-shadowed mountains, far from shutting off the distances, open them up. The vast sea laughs at our feet in foamy frills on the pebbles and sand. Plains, orchards, fields marked as sharply as on a surveyor’s map, roads lined with small trees, a carpet of every shade of green stretches out to the right on the other side of the rock down to the gently sloping valley, which seems a garden from that height. Mountains on which, when the air is clear, pale snow crystals can be seen at the peak—where earth meets