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  Nine hundred years ago, they made silk-weaving machines with bobbins worked by pedals, which the Italians copied after a two-century delay.

  They also invented the rudder, the spinning wheel, acupuncture, porcelain, soccer, playing cards, the magic lantern, fireworks, the pin-wheel, paper money, the mechanical clock, the seismograph, lacquer, phosphorescent paint, the fishing reel, the suspension bridge, the wheelbarrow, the umbrella, the fan, the stirrup, the horseshoe, the key, the toothbrush, and other things hardly worth mentioning.

  THE GREAT FLOATING CITY

  On the coast of Ceylon at the beginning of the fifth century, Admiral Zheng, commander of the Chinese fleet, etched in stone an homage to Allah, Shiva, and Buddha. And in three languages he asked the three-some to bless his sailors.

  Zheng, a eunuch loyal to the empire that mutilated him, commanded the largest fleet ever to sail the seven seas.

  At the center lay the gigantic ships with their gardens of fruits and vegetables, and around them a forest of a thousand masts:

  “The sails catch the wind like clouds in the sky . . . ”

  The ships traveled to and fro between the ports of China and the coasts of Africa, passing by way of Java and India and Arabia. The mariners left China carrying porcelain, silk, jade, and they returned loaded with stories and magic plants, and giraffes, elephants, and peacocks. They discovered languages, gods, customs. They learned the ten uses of the coconut and the unforgettable flavor of the mango. They discovered horses painted in black and white stripes, and long-legged birds that ran like horses. They found incense and myrrh in Arabia, and in Turkey rare stones like amber, which they called “dragon’s drool.” In the southern islands they were astonished by birds that talked like men and by men who wore a rattle hanging between their legs to announce their sexual prowess.

  The voyages of the great Chinese fleet were missions of exploration and commerce. They were not enterprises of conquest. No yearning for domination obliged Zheng to scorn or condemn what he found. What was not admirable was at least worthy of curiosity. And from trip to trip, the imperial library in Beijing continued growing until it held four thousand books that collected the wisdom of the world.

  At the time, the king of Portugal had six books.

  A GENEROUS POPE

  Seventy years after those voyages by the Chinese fleet, Spain launched the conquest of America and placed a Spaniard on the throne in the Vatican.

  Valencia-born Rodrigo Borgia became Pope Alexander VI, thanks to the cardinals’ votes he bought with four mule loads of gold and silver.

  The Spanish pope then issued a bull which gave the king and queen of Spain and their inheritors, in the name of God, the islands and lands which a few years later would be named America.

  The pope also confirmed that Portugal was owner and lord of the islands and lands of black Africa, from which she had been taking gold, ivory, and slaves for half a century.

  His intentions were not precisely the same as those that guided Admiral Zheng’s navigations. The pope gave away America and Africa “so that barbarian nations might be overpowered and converted to the Catholic faith.”

  At that point, America had fifteen times the population of Spain, and Africa a hundred times that of Portugal.

  EVIL COPIES GOOD

  In one of his frescoes in a chapel in Padua, Giotto painted the torments that demons inflict on sinners in hell.

  As in other artistic works of the period, the instruments of infernal torture, which provoked shock and fear, were the very tools used by the Holy Inquisition to impose the Catholic faith. God inspired his worst enemy: in hell Satan imitated the technology of pain that the inquisitors applied on earth.

  Punishment confirmed that this world was but a dress rehearsal for hell. In the here and now and in the Great Beyond, disobedience merited the same reward.

  ARGUMENTS OF THE FAITH

  For six centuries and in several countries, the Holy Inquisition punished rebels, heretics, witches, homosexuals, pagans . . .

  Many ended up at the stake, sentenced to roast over a slow fire fed with green wood. Many more were subjected to torture. Here are some of the instruments utilized to extract confessions, modify beliefs, and sow panic:

  the barbed collar,

  the hanging cage,

  the iron gag that stifled unwanted screams,

  the saw that cut you slowly in two,

  the finger-stretching tourniquet,

  the head-flattening tourniquet,

  the bone-breaking pendulum,

  the seat of pins,

  the long needle that perforated the devil’s moles,

  the iron claw that shredded flesh,

  the pincer and tongs heated to fiery red,

  the sarcophagus lined with sharp nails,

  the iron bed that extended until arms and legs got pulled out of

  their sockets,

  the whip with a nail or knife at the tip,

  the barrel filled with shit,

  the shackles, the stocks, the block, the pillory, the gaff,

  the ball that swelled and tore the mouths of heretics, the anuses of

  homosexuals, and the vaginas of Satan’s lovers,

  the pincer that ground up the tits of witches and adulterers,

  and fire on the feet,

  among other weapons of virtue.

  THE TORTURER’S CONFESSION

  In the year 2003, Al-Qaeda leader Ibn al-Shaykh was tortured until he confessed that Iraq had trained him in the use of chemical and biological weaponry. Immediately, the government of the United States joyfully blandished his words as proof that Iraq deserved to be invaded.

  Not long thereafter, the truth came out: as usual, the tortured said what the torturer wanted to hear.

  But any discomfiture from that revelation did not impede the United States government from practicing or preaching torture around the world, calling it by its many stage names: alternative means of coercion, intensive interrogation technique, pressure and intimidation tactic, method of convincing . . .

  With less and less dissembling, the biggest of the mass media now exalt the merits of the machinery for grinding human flesh, while more and more people applaud or at least accept it. Don’t we have a right to defend ourselves from the terrorists and criminals threatening us?

  But the inquisitors of yesteryear knew only too well, as do the country snatchers of today: torture is useless for protecting people. It is only good for terrorizing them.

  The bureaucracy of pain tortures in order to perpetuate the power of the powers it serves. A confession extracted by torture is worth little or nothing. But in the torture chamber the powerful do drop their masks. By torturing, they confess that fear is their daily bread.

  WE WERE ALL EXECUTIONERS

  Little or no change has come to Bòria Street in Barcelona, although now it devotes itself to serving other needs.

  During a good part of the Middle Ages, it was one of the settings where European justice was turned into public spectacle.

  The jester and the musicians headed up the procession. The condemned man or woman left the jail on the back of an ass, naked or nearly so, and while getting the lash he or she was subjected to showers of abuse, blows, saliva, shit, rotten eggs, and other homages from the crowd.

  The most enthusiastic punishers were also the most enthusiastic sinners.

  MERCENARIES

  Now they are called contractors.

  In Italy, centuries ago, they were called condottieri. They were killers for hire, and condotta was the word for contract.

  Paolo Ucello painted these warriors dressed so elegantly and so graciously arranged that his paintings look more like fashion shows than bloody battles.

  But the condottieri were men with hair on their chests, who feared nothing, except peace.

  In his youth Duke Francisco Sforza had been one, and he never forgot it.

  One afternoon when the duke was riding about Milan, he tossed a coin to a beggar from h
igh up on his horse.

  The beggar wished him the best:

  “May peace be with you.”

  “Peace?”

  A sword’s blow knocked the coin from the beggar’s hand.

  OUR LADY OF THE IMPOSSIBLE

  Because she believed in peace, she was called Our Lady of the Impossible.

  Saint Rita worked the miracle of peace in times of war,

  war between neighbors,

  war between families,

  war between kingdoms,

  war between gods.

  She also performed other miracles, the last one on her deathbed. Rita asked the figs to ripen in the middle of winter and she asked the rosebush to bloom under the snow. And thus she managed to die with the taste of figs in her mouth and the scent of fresh roses in her nose, while the bells of all the churches in Cascia, her hometown, rang all by themselves.

  HOLY WARRIOR

  No man could best her, neither with plow nor sword.

  In the silence of her garden at noon, she heard voices. Angels and saints spoke to her, Saint Michael, Saint Margaret, Saint Catherine, and even the supreme voice in heaven:

  “No one in the world can liberate the kingdom of France. Except you.”

  And she repeated it everywhere, always citing the source:

  “God told me.”

  Thus this unschooled peasant girl, born to harvest children, came to lead a great army that grew as it advanced.

  The warrior damsel, a virgin by divine mandate or male panic, pressed on in battle after battle.

  Lance in hand, charging on her steed against the English troops, she was unbeatable. Until she was beaten.

  The English took her prisoner and decided to let the French deal with the lunatic.

  She had battled in the name of God for France and its king, and the functionaries of God and the king sent her to the stake.

  Head shaven, in chains, she had no lawyer. The judges, the prosecutor, the experts from the Inquisition, the bishops, the priors, the canonists, the notaries, and the witnesses all agreed with the learned University of the Sorbonne, which decreed that the accused was schismatic, apostate, lying, suspected of heresy, errant in her faith, and blasphemous of God and the saints.

  She was nineteen when she was tied to a stake in the marketplace of Rouen and the executioner lit the fire.

  Later, the fatherland and the church that roasted her changed their minds. Now Joan of Arc is a heroine and a saint, symbol of France, emblem of Christianity.

  WHEN SHIPS NAVIGATED BY LAND

  Emperor Constantine gave his name to the city of Byzantium and that strategic meeting point of Asia and Europe became known as Constantinople.

  Eleven hundred years later, when Constantinople succumbed to the Turkish siege, another emperor, another Constantine, died with her, fighting for her, and Christianity lost its open door to the Orient.

  The Christian kingdoms had promised assistance, but at the moment of truth, besieged, suffocated Constantinople died alone. The enormous eight-meter cannons known as wall-busters, and the bizarre voyage of the Turkish fleet, were decisive in the final collapse. The Turkish ships had been unable to break the underwater chains that blocked their way, until Sultan Mehmet gave an unheard-of order: navigate on dry land. Riding on rolling platforms and pulled by many oxen, the ships slid over the hill that separated the Bosporus from the Golden Horn, up one side and down the other in the silence of the night. At dawn, sentries in the port discovered to their horror that the Turkish fleet, by some form of magic, was sailing the outlawed waters right under their noses.

  From that point forward, the siege, which had been by land, was also by sea, and the final massacre reddened the rain.

  Many Christians sought refuge in the immense cathedral of Saint Sophia, which nine centuries previous had sprung from Empress Theodora’s delirium. That throng of Christians expected an angel to come down from heaven and chase the invaders out with his fiery sword.

  No angel came.

  Sultan Mehmet did. He entered the cathedral mounted on his white horse and turned it into the main mosque of the city now known as Istanbul.

  THE DEVIL IN DISGUISE

  A number of years had passed since the fall of Constantinople when Martin Luther warned that Satan resided not only among the Turks and Moors, but “in our own home: in the bread we eat, in the water we drink, in the clothes we wear, and in the air we breathe.”

  Thus it was and thus it remains.

  Centuries later, in the year 1982, the devil, in the form of a housewife who howled and slithered along the floor, dared to visit the Vatican, obliging Pope John Paul II to wage hand-to-hand combat with the evil one. He warded off the intruder by reciting the demon-killing exorcisms of another pope, Urban VIII, who chased from the head of Galileo Galilei the devilish notion that the arth revolved around the sun.

  When the devil appeared in the form of an intern in the Oval Office, President Bill Clinton spurned such an antiquated Catholic methodology. He frightened off the evil one by unleashing a three-month torrent of missiles on Yugoslavia.

  SHE WALKS LIKE AN ANGEL

  Venus turned up one morning in the city of Sienna. They found her lying naked in the sun.

  The city paid homage to the marble goddess buried during the Roman Empire, who had favored them by emerging from the depths of the earth.

  She was offered the pinnacle of the city’s principal fountain as her home.

  No one tired of gazing at her; everyone wanted to touch her.

  But soon came war and its horrors, and Sienna was attacked and looted. In its session of November 7, 1357, the municipal council decided Venus was to blame. God had sent misfortune as punishment for the sin of idolatry. And the council ordered Venus, that invitation to lust, destroyed, and the pieces buried in the hated city of Florence.

  In Florence, a hundred and thirty years later, another Venus was born from the hand of Sandro Botticelli. The artist painted her rising from the foam of the sea, with no more clothing than her skin.

  And a decade later, when the monk Savonarola built his great bonfire of purification, it is said that Botticelli himself, repenting the sins of his brushes, fed the flames with some of the diabolical pranks he had painted in his youth.

  With Venus, he could not.

  DEVILCIDE

  The great beak of a bird of prey crowned his figure wrapped in a long black cloak. Underneath the cloak, a horsehair shirt tormented his skin.

  God’s wrath roared in his sermons. Father Girolamo Savonarola terrified, threatened, punished. His eloquence set the churches of Florence ablaze: he exhorted children to inform on their sinning parents, he denounced homosexuals and adulterous women hiding from the Inquisition, and he demanded that carnival be turned into a time of penance.

  Pulpits burned with his holy ire, and in the piazza of the seigniory burned the bonfire of the vanities, stirred up night and day by his words. Ladies renounced pleasure and threw their jewelry, perfumes, and potions into the fire, alongside lascivious paintings and books that exalted the libertine life.

  At the end of the fifteenth century, Savonarola too was tossed into the flames. Unable to control him, the Church burned him alive.

  LEONARDO

  When he was twenty-five, the watchdogs of public morality known as the Officers of the Night took Leonardo from the workshop of his teacher Verrocchio and plunked him in a cell. Two months he spent there, unable to sleep or breathe, terrified by the prospect of the stake. Homosexuality was punished by fire, and an anonymous tip accused him of “committing sodomy in the person of Jacopo Saltrelli.”

  He was absolved for lack of evidence, and restored to life.

  Then he painted master works, nearly all of them unfinished, which were the first to make use of sfumato and chiaroscuro,

  he wrote fables, legends, and recipes,

  he sketched the organs of the body perfectly for the first time, having studied anatomy from cadavers,

  he proved that the w
orld turned,

  he invented the helicopter, the airplane, the bicycle, the submarine, the parachute, the machine gun, the grenade, the mortar, the tank, the moving crane, the floating dredger, the spaghetti-making machine, the bread mill . . .

  and on Sundays he bought birds in the market and opened their cages.

  Those who knew him said he never embraced a woman. Yet from his hand was born the most famous portrait of all times. A woman.

  BREASTS

  To avoid punishment, some homosexuals dressed up as women and passed themselves off as prostitutes.

  At the end of the fifteenth century, Venice approved a law that obliged the professionals to show their tits. Bared breasts had to be displayed in the windows where they offered their services to clients walking by. They worked beside a bridge over the Rialto, which is still called the Ponte delle Tette.

  ORIGIN OF THE FORK

  They say Leonardo wished to perfect the fork by giving it three tines, but it ended up looking just like the trident of the king of hell.

  Centuries previous, Saint Pietro Damiani decried that novelty from Byzantium:

  “God would not have given us fingers if he wanted us to use that instrument of Satan.”

  Queen Elizabeth of England and the Sun King of France ate with their hands. When the writer Michel de Montaigne ate in a hurry, he bit his fingers. Every time the musician Claudio Monteverdi felt obliged to use a fork, he purchased three masses to pay for the sin.