Children of the Days Page 12

  God doesn’t want that and neither does the Devil.

  Hospitals and cemeteries would lose their biggest clients.

  The streets would be taken over by ridiculous cyclists and pathetic people on foot.

  Lungs could no longer inhale the tastiest of poisons.

  Feet, having forgotten how to walk, would trip over every pebble.

  Silence would deafen all ears.

  Highways would become depressing deserts.

  Radio, television, magazines and newspapers would lose their most generous advertisers.

  Oil-producing countries would face poverty.

  Corn and sugar, now food for cars, would return to the humble human table.

  September 23

  SEAFARING

  They called her the Mulata de Córdoba, and no one knows why. She was a mulatta, but she was born in the port of Veracruz and lived there always.

  They said she was a witch. Back around the year 1600 or so, the touch of her hands cured the ill and crazed the healthy.

  Suspecting that she was possessed by the Devil, the Holy Inquisition locked her up in the fort on the island of San Juan de Ulúa.

  In her cell she found a coal left behind from some long-ago fire.

  With that coal she started doodling on the wall and her hand, wanting to without wanting to, drew a ship. And the ship broke free of the wall and carried the prisoner to the open sea.

  September 24

  THE INVENTOR MAGICIAN

  In the year 1912 Harry Houdini showed off his new trick at the Busch Circus in Berlin:

  The Chinese water torture cell!

  The most original invention of all time!

  It was a tank filled to the brim with water, then hermetically sealed after Houdini was lowered in upside down with his wrists and ankles shackled. Through glass, the audience could watch him under water, not breathing for what seemed like centuries, until the drowned man somehow managed to make his escape.

  Houdini could not have known that many years later this form of asphyxiation would become the preferred torture of Latin America’s dictatorships, or the one most praised by the expert George W. Bush.

  September 25

  THE INQUISITIVE SAGE

  Miguel Ignacio Lillo never went to college, but book by book he built a science library that filled his entire house.

  On a day like today around 1915, a few students from Tucumán spent a long afternoon in that house of books, and they wanted to know how Don Miguel managed to keep them in such fine condition.

  “My books breathe the air,” the sage explained. “I open them. I open them and ask them questions. Reading is asking questions.”

  Don Miguel asked questions of his books and he asked many more of the world.

  For the joy of asking questions, he traveled by horseback all over northern Argentina, step by step, hand’s breadth by hand’s breadth. That’s how he learned secrets that the map conceals, old ways of speaking and living, birdsongs that cities ignore, wild pharmacies that display their wares in the open fields.

  Not a few birds and plants were named by him.

  September 26

  WHAT WAS THE WORLD LIKE WHEN IT WAS BEGINNING TO BE THE WORLD?

  Florentino Ameghino was another inquisitive sage.

  A paleontologist from childhood, he was still a boy in 1865, more or less, when he assembled his first prehistoric giant in a town in the province of Buenos Aires. On a day like today he emerged from a deep cave weighed down by bones, then in the street he started sorting jaws, vertebrae, hipbones . . .

  “This is a monster from the Mesozoic Era,” he explained to his neighbors. “Really ancient. You can’t imagine how ancient.”

  And behind his back Doña Valentina, the butcher, could not keep from laughing: “But sonny . . . They’re fox bones!”

  And they were.

  He was not discouraged.

  Throughout his life he gathered sixty thousand bones from nine thousand extinct animals, real or imaginary, and he wrote nineteen thousand pages that won him the gold medal and a diploma of honor at the Paris Exposition.

  September 27

  SOLEMN FUNERAL

  During the eleven presidencies of Antonio López de Santa Anna, Mexico lost half its territory and the president lost a leg.

  Half of Mexico was gobbled up by the neighbor to the north after a couple of battles and in return for fifteen million dollars. The leg, lost in combat, was buried on this day in 1842 in Santa Paula Cemetery with full military honors.

  The president, called Hero, Eagle, His Most Meritorious, Immortal Warrior, Founding Father, His Serene Highness, Napoleon of the West and the Mexican Caesar, lived in a mansion in Xalapa which looked a lot like the palace at Versailles.

  The president had all the furniture brought from Paris, even the decorations and knickknacks. In his bedroom he hung an enormous curved mirror, which vastly improved the looks of whomever contemplated his image in it. Every morning upon rising he stood before the magic mirror and it showed him a gentleman: tall, dapper—and honest.

  September 28

  RECIPE FOR REASSURING READERS

  Today is the international day devoted to the human right to information.

  Perhaps a good opportunity to recall that, a month or so after atom bombs annihilated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the New York Times discounted the rumors that were terrifying the world.

  On September 12, 1945, the daily published a front-page story by its chief science reporter William L. Laurence, which challenged the alarmist notions head-on. There was no radioactivity whatsoever in those razed cities, the article assured one and all, it’s only “the Japanese continuing their propaganda . . . ”

  That scoop won Laurence the Pulitzer Prize.

  Sometime later it came out that he was receiving two monthly paychecks: one from the New York Times, the other from the payroll of the US War Department.

  September 29

  A DANGEROUS PRECEDENT

  In 1948 Seretse Khama, the black prince of Botswana, married Ruth Williams, who was English and white.

  No one was happy with the news. The British Crown, lord and master of much of black Africa, named a commission of inquiry to look into the matter. The wedding between two races sets a dangerous precedent, the Judicial Inquiry ruled. The commission’s report was suppressed, and the couple was ordered into exile.

  After his banishment, Khama came to lead the struggle for Botswana’s independence. And in 1966 he became the country’s first president, elected by a wide majority in a clean vote.

  That was when he received, in London, the title of Sir.

  September 30

  INTERNATIONAL TRANSLATION DAY

  From the south of Veracruz a boy set out to seek his fortune.

  Upon his return years later, his father wanted to know what the boy had learned.

  The son answered, “I am a translator. I learned the language of birds.”

  Then a bird sang and the father demanded, “If you aren’t a damned liar, tell me what that bird said.”

  The son refused. He pleaded that he’d better not, that you wouldn’t want to know, but his father would not relent. So he translated the bird’s song.

  The father grew pale. And he kicked his son out of the house.

  OCTOBER

  October 1

  EMPTIED ISLAND

  “There will be no indigenous population except seagulls,” declared an internal British government memo.

  And in 1966 they kept their word.

  All the inhabitants of the island of Diego Garcia, minus the seagulls, were expelled under threat of bayonets and gunfire.

  The British then leased the emptied island to the United States for half a century.

  This paradise of white sand in the middle of the Indian Ocean became a military base, a station for spy satellites, a floating prison and torture chamber for suspected terrorists, and a staging ground for the annihilation of countries that deserve to be punished.


  It also has a golf course.

  October 2

  THIS WORLD ENAMORED OF DEATH

  Today, International Day of Nonviolence, let us recall the words of Dwight Eisenhower, who was not exactly a pacifist. In 1953, as president of the country that spends the most on weapons, he acknowledged:

  “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”

  October 3

  CURLING THE CURL

  In 1905 German hairdresser Karl Nessler invented the permanent wave.

  His experiments nearly incinerated the head of his long-suffering wife, a martyr to science, before Karl at last found the formula for making perfect curls and keeping them that way for two whole days in reality, and for several weeks in the advertising.

  Then he took on a French name, Charles, to give his product some style.

  Over time, curls became a privilege not only of women.

  A few men dared.

  We baldies did not.

  October 4

  WORLD ANIMAL DAY

  Until some time ago, many Europeans thought animals were demons in disguise.

  The execution of bedeviled beasts by hanging or by fire was a public spectacle as popular as the burning of Satan-loving witches.

  On April 18, 1499, in the French abbey of Josaphat near Chartres, a three-month-old pig was tried in court.

  Like all pigs, he had neither soul nor reason and was born to be eaten. But instead of being eaten he ate: he was accused of having had a child for lunch.

  The charge was not based on any evidence.

  Yet the little pig was still found guilty. Lacking proof, prosecuting attorney Jean Levoisier, a graduate in law and chief magistrate at the monastery at Saint-Martin de Laon, revealed that the devouring had taken place on Good Friday.

  Then the judge passed sentence: capital punishment.

  October 5

  COLUMBUS’S FINAL VOYAGE

  In 1992 the Dominican Republic finished building the most unusual lighthouse in the world, one so tall its beams disturb God’s sleep.

  The lighthouse was erected in homage to Christopher Columbus, the admiral who pioneered European tourism in the Caribbean.

  Before the inaugural ceremony, Columbus’s ashes were removed from Santo Domingo’s cathedral and transported to a new mausoleum at the foot of the lighthouse.

  While the ashes were en route, the president’s younger sister Emma Balaguer died suddenly after touring the lighthouse, and the stage on which Pope John Paul II was to give his blessing collapsed.

  Some malevolent minds considered this further proof that Columbus brings bad luck.

  October 6

  CORTÉS’S FINAL VOYAGES

  In 1547 when he felt death tickling his backside, Hernán Cortés instructed that he be buried in Mexico in the convent at Coyoacán, to be built in honor of his memory. When he died, the convent was still a maybe and the deceased was obliged to stay in a series of homes in Seville.

  At last he found passage on a ship to Mexico, where he took up residence beside his mother in the church of San Francisco in Texcoco. From there, he moved on to another church to lie beside the last of his children, where he remained until the viceroy ordered him transferred in secret to the Hospital de Jesús out of reach of the Mexican patriots dying to ravage his tomb.

  The key to the crypt went from hand to hand, priest to priest, for more than a century and a half, until not long ago forensic specialists confirmed that those awful teeth and syphilis-pocked bones were indeed what remained of the body of the conquistador of Mexico.

  Of his soul, no one knows. They say Cortés had it consigned to a soul-keeper from Usumacinta, an Indian named Tomás, who caught souls fleeing on the final breath and kept them in a collection of little jars, but that could never be confirmed.

  October 7

  PIZARRO’S FINAL VOYAGES

  The scientists who identified Hernán Cortés also confirmed that Francisco Pizarro resides in Lima. His is that pile of bones pierced by stakes and chipped by blows that tourists flock to.

  Pizarro, a pig farmer in Spain and a marquis in America, was assassinated in 1541 by his fellow conquistadors when they fought heroically over the Incas’ imperial booty.

  He was quietly buried in the cathedral’s front yard.

  Four years later, they let him inside. He found a spot under the main altar until an earthquake hit and he went missing.

  He remained missing for a long time.

  In 1891 a crowd of admirers gawked at his mummy in a glass urn, though it quickly came out that the mummy was an impostor.

  In 1977 workers repairing the cathedral crypt came upon a skull that once upon a time was said to belong to the hero. Seven years later a body came to join the skull, and Pizarro, complete at last, was moved with great pomp and ceremony to one of the cathedral’s shining chapels.

  Ever since, he has been on exhibit in Lima, the city he founded.

  October 8

  THESE THREE

  In 1967 seventeen hundred soldiers cornered Che Guevara and his handful of Bolivian guerrillas in a ravine called Quebrada del Yuro. Che was taken prisoner and murdered the following day.

  In 1919 Emiliano Zapata was shot down in Mexico.

  In 1934 Augusto César Sandino was slain in Nicaragua.

  These three were the same age, about to turn forty.

  These three Latin Americans of the twentieth century shared the same map and the same era.

  And these three were punished for trying to make history instead of repeating it.

  October 9

  I SAW HIM SEEING ME

  In 1967, while Che Guevara was lying in the schoolhouse at La Higuera, murdered by order of Bolivia’s generals and their distant commanders, a woman recounted what she had seen. She was one of many, a peasant among the many peasants who entered the school and walked slowly around the body.

  “We walked over there and he looked at us. We walked over here and he looked at us. He was always looking at us. He was really nice.”

  October 10

  THE GODFATHER

  My Sicilian friends tell me that Don Genco Russo, capo dei capi of the Mafia, arrived at the appointment a deliberate two and a half hours late.

  In Palermo, in the Hotel Sole, Frank Sinatra waited.

  On this midday in 1963, Hollywood’s idol paid homage to the monarch of Sicily: Sinatra kneeled before Don Genco and kissed his right hand.

  Throughout the world Sinatra was The Voice, but in the land of his ancestors more important than voice was silence.

  Garlic, symbol of silence, is one of four sacred foods at the Mafia’s table. The others are bread, symbolizing union; salt, emblem of courage; and wine, which is blood.

  October 11

  THE LADY WHO CROSSED THREE CENTURIES

  Alice was born a slave in 1686 and remained a slave throughout her one hundred and sixteen years of life.

  When she died in 1802, with her died a good part of the memory of Africans in America. Alice did not know how to read or write, but she was filled to the brim with voices that told and retold legends from far away and events lived nearby. Some of those stories came from the slaves she helped to escape.

  At the age of ninety, she went blind.

  At one hundred and two, she recovered her sight. “It was God,” she said. “He wouldn’t let me down.”

  They called her Alice of Dunks Ferry. Serving her master, she collected tolls on the ferry that carried passengers back and forth across the Delaware River.

  When the passengers, all white, made fun of this ancient woman, she left them stuck on the other side of the river. They called to her, shouted at her, but she paid no heed. The woman who had been blind was deaf.

  October 12

  THE DISCOVERY

  In 1492 the natives discovered they were Indians,

  they discovered they lived in Ame
rica,

  they discovered they were naked,

  they discovered there was sin,

  they discovered they owed obedience to a king and a queen from another world and a god from some other heaven,

  and this god had invented guilt and clothing

  and had ordered burned alive all who worshipped the sun and the moon and the earth and the rain that moistens it.

  October 13

  ROBOTS WITH WINGS

  Good news. On this day in the year 2011 the world’s military brass announced that drones could continue killing people.

  These pilotless planes, crewed by no one, flown by remote control, are in good health: the virus that attacked them was only a passing bother.

  As of now, drones have dropped their rain of bombs on defenseless victims in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Libya, Yemen and Palestine, and their services are expected in other countries.

  In the Age of the Almighty Computer, drones are the perfect warriors. They kill without remorse, obey without kidding around, and they never reveal the names of their masters.

  October 14

  A DEFEAT FOR CIVILIZATION

  In the year 2002, eight McDonald’s restaurants closed their doors in Bolivia.

  Barely five years had this civilizing mission lasted.

  No one forced McDonald’s out. Bolivians simply turned their backs, or better put, McDonald’s turned their stomachs. The most successful company on the planet had generously graced the country with its presence, and these ingrates refused to acknowledge the gesture.