Children of the Days Read online

  November 8

  LEGAL IMMIGRANTS

  They flew to Monterrey in a private plane.

  There, in the year 2008, they kicked off their triumphant tour. They were declared distinguished guests and were put on nine floats to tour the town.

  It was as if they were politicians on a victory lap, but they weren’t.

  They were mummies, mummies from the cholera plague that devastated the city of Guanajuato more than a century and a half before.

  The eleven women, seven men, five children and a bodiless head, all dressed for a party, then crossed the border. Though these mummies were Mexican, no one asked for their passports, nor did the border guards harass them.

  They continued unimpeded to Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Chicago, where they paraded under flowered arches to cheering crowds.

  November 9

  NO ENTRY

  On a day like today in 1989, the Berlin Wall met its end.

  But other walls were born to keep the invaded from invading the invaders,

  to keep Africans from collecting the wages the slaves never received,

  to keep Palestinians from returning to the country stolen from them,

  to keep Saharawis from entering their usurped land,

  to keep Mexicans from setting foot on the immense territory bitten off from their country.

  In the year 2005, the most famous human cannonball in the world, David Smith, protested in his own way the humiliating wall that separates Mexico from the United States. An enormous cannon shot him high into the Mexican air and David fell, safe and sound, on the forbidden side of the border.

  He had been born in the United States but, while his flight lasted, he was Mexican.

  November 10

  WORLD SCIENCE DAY

  Brazilian physician Drauzio Varella calculated that the world invests five times as much in male sex stimulants and female silicone implants as in finding a cure for Alzheimer’s.

  “In a few years,” he prophesied, “we will have old women with huge tits and old men with stiff cocks, but none of them will remember what they are for.”

  November 11

  FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY WAS BORN TWICE

  The first time was in Moscow on this day in 1821.

  He was born again at the end of 1849 in Saint Petersburg.

  Dostoevsky had spent eight months in prison awaiting the firing squad. At first he hoped it would never happen. Then he accepted that it would happen when it happened. And in the end, he wanted it to happen right now, the sooner the better, because waiting was worse than dying.

  Thus it went until early one morning when he and the other condemned men were dragged in chains to Semenovsk Square on the banks of the Neva.

  The commanding voice shouted orders, and at the first command the gunmen blindfolded their victims.

  At the second command, the click-clack of guns being cocked rang out.

  At the third command of “Aim,” there were pleas, moans, a few sobs. Then silence.

  And silence.

  And more silence. Until, in that silence without end, they were told that the tsar of all Russia, in a magnanimous gesture, had granted them a pardon.

  November 12

  I DON’T LIKE IT WHEN THEY LIE TO ME

  Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, born today in 1651, was the best.

  No one else flew so high in her place and her time.

  She entered the convent very young, believing that it would be less of a prison than the home. She was misinformed. By the time she found out, it was too late. She died years later, having been condemned to silence, this the most articulate of women.

  Her jailers liked to shower her with praise, which she never believed.

  On one occasion a court painter, sent by the Mexican Viceroy, painted a portrait that was something like a forerunner of Photoshop. She replied:

  This, in whom flattery has striven

  to pardon the years of their horrors,

  and vanquishing time of its rigors

  to defeat old age and oblivion,

  is a tedious mistaken errata,

  an empty yearning and, on close viewing,

  it’s cadaver, dust, shadow, nada.

  November 13

  THE FATHER OF MOBY-DICK

  In 1851 the first edition of Moby-Dick was published in New York.

  Herman Melville, a pilgrim on land and sea, had written a few successful books, but Moby-Dick, his masterpiece, never sold out its first printing and the books that followed met with no better fate.

  Melville died in obscurity, having learned that success and failure are accidents of doubtful importance.

  November 14

  THE MOTHER OF FEMALE JOURNALISTS

  On this morning in 1889, Nellie Bly set off.

  Jules Verne did not believe that this pretty little woman could circle the globe by herself in less than eighty days.

  But Nellie put her arms around the world in seventy-two, all the while publishing article after article about what she heard and observed.

  This was not the young reporter’s first exploit, nor would it be the last.

  To write about Mexico, she became so Mexican that the startled government of Mexico deported her.

  To write about factories, she worked the assembly line.

  To write about prisons, she got herself arrested for robbery.

  To write about mental asylums, she feigned insanity so well that the doctors declared her certifiable. Then she went on to denounce the psychiatric treatments she endured, as reason enough for anyone to go crazy.

  In Pittsburgh when Nellie was twenty, journalism was a man’s thing.

  That was when she committed the insolence of publishing her first articles.

  Thirty years later, she published her last, dodging bullets on the front lines of World War I.

  November 15

  HUGO BLANCO WAS BORN TWICE

  The first time was in Cuzco in 1934.

  Hugo Blanco arrived in a country split in two, Peru.

  He was born somewhere in between.

  He was white, but was raised in a town, Huanoquite, where the buddies he played and ran with spoke Quechua, and he went to school in Cuzco, where the sidewalks were reserved for decent folk, and Indians were not allowed on.

  Hugo was born the second time when he was ten years old. In school he heard the news from his town that Don Bartolomé Paz had branded an Indian peon named Francisco Zamata with a red-hot iron. This owner of lands and people had seared his initials, BP, on the peon’s ass because he hadn’t taken good care of his cows.

  The matter was not so uncommon, but it branded Hugo for life.

  Over the years, this man who was not Indian became one. He organized peasant unions and paid the price for his self-chosen disgrace with beatings and torture, jail and harassment and exile.

  On one of his fourteen hunger strikes, when he could go on no longer, the government was so moved it sent him a casket as a present.

  November 16

  AN EXAMINER OF LIFE

  Being so nearsighted, he had no choice but to invent lenses that laid the foundations of modern optical science, as well as a telescope that discovered a new star.

  And being a real gawker, he stared at a snowflake in the palm of his hand. He saw that its frozen soul was a six-pointed star, six, like the sides of the little cells in beehives. In his mind’s eye he saw that the hexagonal form is the best use of space.

  From the balcony of his house he discerned that the voyage of his plants in search of light was not circular, and he deduced that perhaps the voyage of the planets around the sun was not circular either. His telescope went on to measure the ellipses they describe on the sky.

  He lived his life looking.

  When he stopped seeing he died on this day in 1630.

  The gravestone of Johannes Kepler says:

  “I measured the heavens. Now the shadows I measure.”

  November 17

  THE OTHER EAR

&
nbsp; Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos died today in 1959.

  He had two sets of ears, one facing in, the other facing out.

  In the early years, when he earned his living playing piano in a Rio de Janeiro whorehouse, Villa-Lobos found a way to concentrate on his opus: he closed his outer ears to the cacophony of guffaws and drunkenness, and he opened his inner ears to the music being born, note by note.

  Much later, those inner ears would become his refuge against insults from the public and poison from the critics.

  November 18

  ZORRO WAS BORN FOUR TIMES

  For the first time in 1615. His name was William Lamport, and he was a redhead and Irish.

  He was born again when he changed his name and his country. He became Guillén Lombardo, a Spaniard, captain of the Spanish Armada.

  His third birth occurred when he became a hero of Mexico’s long struggle for independence. In the year 1659, sentenced to die at the stake, he hanged himself rather than face the dishonor of being burned alive.

  He was resuscitated in the twentieth century. In his fourth life he called himself Diego de la Vega and he wore a mask. He was Zorro, sword-fighting champion of the downtrodden, who left his mark with a “Z.”

  Douglas Fairbanks, Tyrone Power, Alain Delon and Antonio Banderas all wielded his sword in Hollywood.

  November 19

  THE MOSS AND THE STONE

  At dawn on this day in 1915, Joe Hill faced a firing squad in Salt Lake City.

  This foreign agitator, who had changed his name twice and his job and address a thousand times, had written the songs sung by striking workers all over the United States.

  On his last night, he asked his comrades not to waste time crying for him:

  My will is easy to decide,

  For there is nothing to divide.

  My kin don’t need to fuss and moan,

  Moss does not cling to a rolling stone.

  November 20

  THINGS CHILDREN SAY

  Today is Children’s Day.

  I go for a stroll and bump into a girl who is two or maybe a little older, that age when we’re all pagans.

  The girl is skipping along, greeting all the greenery she sees: “Hello, grass!” “Good morning, grass!”

  Then she stops to listen to the birds singing in the tops of the trees. And she applauds.

  At noon on this day, a boy of about eight, maybe nine, brings a present to my house.

  It’s a folder filled with drawings.

  The present comes from the students at a school in the Montevideo neighborhood of Cerrito de la Victoria. The young artist hands it to me with an explanation: “These drawings are us.”

  November 21

  THE SADDEST MATCH IN HISTORY

  In 1973 Chile was a country imprisoned by military dictatorship. The National Stadium had been turned into a concentration camp and torture chamber.

  The Chilean national team was to play a decisive World Cup qualifying match against the Soviet Union.

  Pinochet’s dictatorship decided that the match had to be played in the National Stadium, no matter what.

  The prisoners were hurriedly transferred and soccer’s top brass inspected the field—the turf was impeccable—and gave their blessing.

  The Soviet team refused to play along.

  Eighteen thousand fans bought tickets and cheered the goal that Francisco Valdés put in the empty net.

  The Chilean team played against no one.

  November 22

  INTERNATIONAL MUSIC DAY

  As those with long memories tell it, in other times the sun was the lord of music, until the wind stole music away.

  Ever since, birds console the sun with concerts at the beginning and end of the day.

  But now these winged singers cannot compete with the screech and roar of the motors that rule big cities, and little or no birdsong can be heard. In vain they burst their breasts trying, and the effort ruins their trills.

  Females no longer recognize their mates. The males, virtuoso tenors, irresistible baritones, do their best, but in the urban racket no one can tell who is whom, and the females end up accepting the embrace of unfamiliar wings.

  November 23

  GRANDPA

  Today in 1859 the first copy of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species rolled off the presses.

  In the original manuscript the book had another name. It was called Zoonomia, in homage to a work by Charles’s grandfather Erasmus Darwin.

  Erasmus had fathered fourteen children and several books. Seventy years ahead of his grandson, he warned that everything in nature that sprouts, crawls, walks or flies has a common ancestor, and that common ancestor was not the hand of God.

  November 24

  GRANDMA

  In 1974 her bones turned up in the rocky hills of Ethiopia.

  Her discoverers called her Lucy.

  Thanks to advanced technology, they were able to calculate her age at about three million, one hundred and seventy-five thousand years, give or take a day or two. And also her height: she was rather short, a little over three feet tall.

  The rest was deduced or maybe guessed: her body was quite hairy and she didn’t walk on all fours, rather she swung along in a chimpanzee walk, her hands nearly grazing the ground, though she preferred the treetops.

  She might have drowned in a river.

  She might have been fleeing a lion or some other unknown who showed an interest in her.

  She was born long before fire or the word, but perhaps she spoke a language of gestures and sounds that could have said, or tried to say, for example,

  “I’m cold,”

  “I’m hungry,”

  “Don’t leave me alone.”

  November 25

  INTERNATIONAL DAY FOR THE ELIMINATION OF VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN

  In the jungle of the Upper Paraná, the prettiest butterflies survive by exhibiting themselves. They display their black wings enlivened by red or yellow spots, and they flit from flower to flower without the least worry. After thousands upon thousands of years, their enemies have learned that these butterflies are poisonous. Spiders, wasps, lizards, flies and bats admire them from a prudent distance.

  On this day in 1960 three activists against the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic were beaten and thrown off a cliff. They were the Mirabal sisters. They were the prettiest, and they were called Las Mariposas, “The Butterflies.”

  In memory of them, in memory of their inedible beauty, today is International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. In other words, for the elimination of violence by the little Trujillos that rule in so many homes.

  November 26

  LAURA AND PAUL

  When Karl Marx read The Right to Be Lazy, he concluded, “If that’s Marxism, then I’m no Marxist.”

  The author, Paul Lafargue, seemed less a communist than an anarchist who harbored a suspicious streak of tropical lunacy.

  Neither was Marx pleased at the prospect of having this not-very-light-complexioned Cuban for a son-in-law. “An all too intimate deportment is unbecoming,” he wrote to him when Paul began making dangerous advances on his daughter Laura. And he added solemnly: “Should you plead in defense of your Creole temperament, it becomes my duty to interpose my sound sense between your temperament and my daughter.”

  Reason failed.

  Laura Marx and Paul Lafargue shared their lives for more than forty years.

  And on this night in the year 1911, when life was no longer life, in their bed at home and in each other’s arms, they set off on the final voyage.

  November 27

  WHEN THE WATERS OF RIO DE JANEIRO BURNED

  In 1910 the mutiny by Brazil’s sailors reached its climax.

  The rebels threatened the city of Rio de Janeiro with warning shots of cannon fire: “No more lashings or we’ll turn the city to rubble.”

  On board warships, whippings were common fare and the victims frequently ended up dead.
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  After five days the uprising triumphed. The whips were sent to the bottom of the ocean, and the pariahs of the sea paraded to cheers through Rio’s streets.

  Sometime after that, the leader of the insurrection, João Cândido, child of slaves, admiral by acclaim of his fellow mutineers, went back to being a regular sailor.

  Sometime after that, he was booted out of the service.

  Sometime after that, he was arrested.

  And sometime after that, he was locked away in an insane asylum.

  There is a monument to him, a song explains, in the worn-down stones of the docks.

  November 28

  THE MAN WHO TAUGHT BY LEARNING

  In the year 2009, the Brazilian government told Paulo Freire it was sorry. He was unable to acknowledge the apology since he had been dead for twelve years.

  Paulo was the prophet of education for action.

  In the beginning he taught classes under a tree. He taught thousands upon thousands of sugar workers in Pernambuco to read and write, so they could read the world and help to change it.

  The military dictatorship arrested him, threw him out of the country and forbade his return.

  In exile, Paulo wandered the world. The more he taught, the more he learned.

  Today, three hundred and forty Brazilian schools bear his name.

  November 29

  WORLD TERROR CHAMPIONSHIP

  In his scorn for human life, Hitler was unbeatable, but he had competitors.