Eric’s Reviews > Arauco > Status Update

Like air, love clung to all it wed. Love was a clarity abolishing corporeal separation. Love was the crystal substance on which Heaven’s ponderous spheres depended, with their sun and planets, moon and stars. And, yes, love was like these last warm days of April—a harvest joy, profound and melancholy, as all harvests were. Love was an autumn moment seen by winter’s eye.

"You do not need to know who you are to do what you have to, Pangi. You did, and will do, what you think is right, which is not easy. No one can ask more.”

"But I am Ñamku, not myself, when I act…when I speak!”

“No one is himself, alone. We all speak with the voices of the past.”

"I learned from you the words I spoke. I did not create what I received.”

"As I learned—and did not create—what I taught." p. 501

By saving two lives he had precipitated a conflict for which these Indians—who had no polity—had no word…for this was civil war. Who could have thought that his affection for two children would shatter their own people! He wondered if those who befriended Indians—like Inés, Juan Lobo, and himself—were paradoxically working harder at their extermination than Spanish cavalry, by corrupting the purity of their hate…

Money proved difficult for Blanca. Being ‘rich’ she could not fathom. To exchange she was accustomed, but why trade gold—which was essentially worthless in her opinion—for something useful? Whatever it might buy, gold was good for nothing in itself. It was stupid to have too much of anything anyway, as attracting envy and the nasty work of kalku.

Tomorrow he would take the machi to his resting place.

At dawn—having put Ñamku in a large wilal—Pangi was about to leave, when a white butterfly came to rest on the black mask. He smiled, seeing it prepare to fly with that pulse of wings that makes one think they are breathing with anticipation. Then—like a leaf with soul and purpose—it fluttered into the air. p. 416

The machi sighed and closed his eyes. Words fell like drops of rain around him, and it did not seem he could catch one.

"In kume mognen you are what you see. In kume mognen you see what you are. But the lik winka do not see what we see, or see what we are. Therefore they destroy both our mapu and us with strange innocence. For all their knowledge, they do not know what they are doing.”

Mankind says Fortuna’s wheel goes high, goes low, yet She knows this to be laughingly naïve, as if humans were limited to simple ups and downs, when every woman and man is... a text, which at any given moment is being woven into a greater textile. Mankind lived in fewer dimensions than it knew, and Fortuna... working on her spinning wheel with threads of lives—distant, or not—creating instantaneous tapestries. p. 355

This second kind of saint belonged in Heaven, where they helped you from a welcomed distance—for example, by giving you money, a safe journey, or male issue. Such saints had died long ago and been preserved on earth—if at all—in reliquaries. Saints—Redios!—were not supposed to be alive, peering over the shoulders of sinners committing the lapses Christ was born to redeem! p.299

Dammit, Mendoza (who even the other conquistadors are creeped out by) is still alive and he wants revenge. I'm worried, but it was SO DAMN SATISFYING seeing Ñamku (the albino Mapuche shaman on the cover) take Mendoza down several pegs by killing some of his man-eating dogs (each of which was "worth a thousand Indians" in the piece of shit's financial estimation).

"The dead are rooted in life. Without these roots... your am and mine will wander without a place to rest, for the dead return to memories. And now, imagine all that is Mapuche gone, or made strange, for this is what I fear the lik winka mean to do to us. The dead will have no living place to return to. Even the pillañ will cease to speak, without ears to hear their language." p.219