Children of the Days Page 3

  Throughout her childhood Macarena was tormented by the same inexplicable nightmare: she was being chased by several men armed to the teeth, and night after night she would wake up crying.

  The nightmare stopped being a mystery when Macarena discovered the true story of her life. That was when she realized she had been dreaming her mother’s real panic: while Macarena was taking shape in the womb, her mother was fleeing the military witch hunt that caught up with her in the end and sent her to her death.

  February 17

  THE CELEBRATION THAT WAS NOT

  The peons on the farms of Argentina’s Patagonia went out on strike against stunted wages and overgrown workdays, and the army took charge of restoring order.

  Executions are grueling. On this night in 1922, soldiers exhausted from so much killing went to the bordello at the port of San Julián for their well-deserved reward.

  But the five women who worked there closed the door in their faces and chased them away, screaming, “You murderers! Murderers, get out of here!”

  Osvaldo Bayer recorded their names. They were Consuelo García, Ángela Fortunato, Amalia Rodríguez, María Juliache and Maud Foster.

  The whores. The virtuous.

  February 18

  BEREFT OF HIM

  When Michelangelo learned of the death of Francesco, who was his apprentice and much more, he took a hammer and smashed the marble he was sculpting.

  A short while later, he wrote that such a death:

  . . . had been God’s will, but it caused me grave harm and infinite pain. The saving grace lies in the fact that Francesco, who in life kept me alive, by dying taught me to die without sorrow. I had him for twenty-six years . . . Now only infinite misery remains. Most of me went with him.

  Michelangelo lies buried in Florence, in the church of Santa Croce.

  He and his inseparable Francesco used to sit on the steps of the church to enjoy, in the vast plaza below, the duels fought with kicks and blasts of the ball that we now call soccer.

  February 19

  PERHAPS THIS IS HOW HORACIO QUIROGA WOULD HAVE WRITTEN ABOUT HIS OWN DEATH

  Today I died.

  In the year 1937 I learned that I had a cancer that was untreatable.

  I knew that death, after me always, had caught up with me.

  I confronted death, face to face, and I told him: “This war is over.”

  I said: “You win.”

  I said: “But when is my choice.”

  And before death killed me, I killed myself.

  February 20

  WORLD DAY OF SOCIAL JUSTICE

  At the end of the nineteenth century, Juan Pío Acosta lived near Uruguay’s border with Brazil.

  In those lonely parts, his work kept him on the road, moving from town to town.

  He traveled by stagecoach, along with eight other passengers in first, second and third class.

  Juan Pío always bought a third-class ticket, which was the least expensive.

  He never understood why there were different prices. Everyone had the same seats, whether they paid more or paid less: jammed in, eating dust, jolted relentlessly.

  He never understood why until one bad winter day, when the wagon got stuck in the mud. The coachman ordered:

  “First-class, stay where you are!”

  “Second-class, get off!”

  “And those in third . . . start pushing!”

  February 21

  THE WORLD SHRINKS

  Today is International Mother Language Day.

  Every two weeks, a language dies.

  The world is diminished when it loses its human sayings, just as when it loses its diversity of plants and beasts.

  In 1974 Angela Loij died. She was one of the last Ona Indians from Tierra del Fuego, way out there at the edge of the world. She was the last one who spoke their language.

  Angela sang to herself, for no one else, in that language no longer recalled by anyone but her:

  I’m walking in the steps

  of those who have gone.

  Lost, am I.

  In times gone by, the Onas worshipped several gods. Their supreme god was named Pemaulk.

  Pemaulk meant “word.”

  February 22

  SILENCE

  In Istanbul, known in those days as Constantinople, Paul the Silentiary finished his fifteen love poems in the year 563.

  The Greek poet owed his name to his work. He was in charge of silence in the palace of Emperor Justinian.

  In his own bed, too.

  One of his poems says:

  Your breasts against my breast,

  your lips on my lips.

  Silence is the rest:

  Tongues that never pause I detest.

  February 23

  THE BOOK OF MARVELS

  One day like this in 1455, Europe’s first book printed with moveable type came off the press and it was a Bible.

  The Chinese had been printing books for two centuries, but today Johannes Gutenberg initiated the mass circulation of the most gripping novel in literature.

  Novels tell but don’t explain, and there is no reason why they should. The Bible does not say what Noah ate to reach the age of seven hundred by the time of the Flood, nor what method Abraham’s wife used to become pregnant at ninety, nor does it clarify whether Balaam’s ass, when arguing with its owner, spoke in Hebrew.

  February 24

  A LESSON IN REALISM

  In 1815 Napoleon Bonaparte escaped from his prison on the island of Elba and set off to regain the French throne.

  On he marched, accompanied by a steadily growing army, while his former official organ, Le Moniteur Universel, swore that the people of France were eager to die to protect King Louis XVIII. The paper said Napoleon had “sullied and raped the soil of the fatherland,” called him “foreign outlaw, usurper, traitor, plague, bandit chief, enemy of France who dares befoul the land from which he was expelled,” and announced: “This will be his final act of insanity.”

  In the end the king fled, no one died for him, and Napoleon took his seat on the throne without firing a shot.

  The same daily went on to report:

  The happy news of Napoleon’s arrival in the capital has caused a sudden and unanimous outburst of joy, everyone is hugging, cheers for the Emperor fill the air, in every eye are tears of bliss, all rejoice at the return of France’s hero and swear the deepest obedience to His Majesty the Emperor.

  February 25

  NIGHT OF THE KUNA

  The Panamanian government passed a law commanding “the settlement into civilized life of all existing barbarous, semi-barbarous and savage tribes in the country.”

  Its spokesman announced: “The Kuna Indians will never again paint their noses, only their cheeks, and they will no longer put rings in their noses, only in their ears. And they will no longer dress in molas, rather in civilized attire.”

  The religious ceremonies of Kuna women and men, which offended God, were outlawed, as was their mania for governing themselves in their own traditional way.

  In 1925, on the night of the twenty-fifth day of the month of the iguana, the Kunas used their knives on all the policemen who forbade them from living their lives.

  Ever since, Kuna women wear rings in their painted noses and dress in their molas, a splendid art form done by needle and thread instead of paintbrushes. And Kuna women and men continue holding their ceremonies and assemblies on the two thousand islands where they defend, by hook or by crook, their shared kingdom.

  February 26

  MY AFRICA

  At the end of the nineteenth century, the European colonial powers met in Berlin to divvy up Africa.

  Long and hard was the fight over colonial booty, the jungles, rivers, mountains, lands, subsoil, until new borders were drawn, and on this day in 1885 a General Act was signed “in the Name of God Almighty.”

  The European lords had the good taste not to mention gold, diamonds, ivory, oil, rubber, tin, cacao, coffee or palm oil. />
  They outlawed calling slavery by its name.

  They referred to the companies that provided human flesh to the world market as “charitable institutions.”

  They cautioned that they acted out of a desire to “regulate the conditions most favorable to the development of trade and civilization.”

  And if there were any doubt, they clarified that they were concerned with “furthering the moral and material wellbeing of the native populations.”

  Thus Europe drew a new map for Africa.

  Not a single African was present at that summit, not even as decoration.

  February 27

  EVEN BANKS ARE MORTAL

  “All greenness shall perish,” prophesied the Bible.

  In 1995 Barings Bank, the oldest in England, faced bankruptcy. A week later it was sold for the sum total of one (1) pound sterling.

  The bank had been the financier of the British Empire.

  Independence and the foreign debt were born as twins in Latin America. All of us were born owing. In our corner of the world, Barings Bank purchased nations, rented founding fathers, financed wars.

  And believed itself immortal.

  February 28

  WHEN

  When he was descending a spiral staircase onboard ship, it occurred to him that protein molecules might travel the same way, in a spiral over a wavy base. The thought turned out to be a scientific breakthrough.

  When he discovered that automobiles were the reason he coughed so much in the city of Los Angeles, he invented the electric car, which was a commercial failure.

  When he came down with kidney disease and medicine did not help, he prescribed himself healthy food and bombardments of vitamin C. He got better.

  When the bombs exploded over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he was invited to speak at a scientific conference in Hollywood. And when he discovered that he had not said what he wanted to say, he went on to lead the global campaign against nuclear weapons.

  When he received the Nobel Prize for the second time, Life magazine decried it as an insult to all Americans. By then the government of the United States, suspecting him of communist sympathies, had taken away his passport twice, or perhaps it was because he said that God was an unnecessary idea.

  His name was Linus Pauling. He was born along with the twentieth century.

  February 29

  NOT GONE WITH THE WIND

  Today’s day tends to drop off the calendar, but every four years it finds its way back.

  It is the strangest day of the year.

  But there was nothing strange about this day in Hollywood in 1940.

  In routine fashion, on February 29 Hollywood gave nearly all of its awards, eight Oscars, to Gone with the Wind, which was a long sigh of nostalgia for the good old days of slavery.

  Thus Hollywood confirmed its ways. Twenty-five years earlier, its first blockbuster was Birth of a Nation, an anthem of praise to the Ku Klux Klan.

  MARCH

  March 1

  WAS

  Eliza Lynch was digging the grave. With her fingernails.

  Slack-jawed, the victorious soldiers let her.

  Her pawing raised clouds of red dust and shook the loose strands of red hair spilling across her face.

  Francisco Solano López, the country’s president, lay at her side.

  This woman, now mutilated, did not cry for him, did not even look at him. She threw dirt on him, useless handfuls wanting to bury him in this land that had been his land.

  He was gone and Paraguay was gone.

  Murdered, the only Latin American country that refused to bow down to the bankers and the merchants.

  Five years the war had lasted.

  And while Eliza continued hurling fistfuls of earth on the man who had been her man, the sun went down and with the sun went this cursed day in the year 1870.

  From the foliage on Cerro Corá, a few birds bid it good-bye.

  March 2

  WHISTLING, I SPEAK

  Whistling is the language of La Gomera.

  And since 1999 the tongue preserved by this whistling people has been taught in the schools of the Canary Islands.

  In ancient times, the shepherds of La Gomera learned to whistle to communicate from distant hilltops across gorges that multiplied the echoes. Their whistles related news of comings and goings, dangers and delights, work to be done and the days going by.

  Though centuries have passed, on that island human whistles remain the envy of birds, as powerful as the voices of the wind and the sea.

  March 3

  THE FOUNDING MOTHERS OF BRAZIL

  This day in 1770 brought an end to the queendom of Teresa de Benguela in Quariterê.

  It was one of many sanctuaries of freedom for fugitive slaves in Brazil. For twenty years Teresa had thwarted the soldiers of Mato Grosso’s governor. They never did capture her alive.

  In these densely wooded hiding places, women did much more than cook and give birth; a number of them were fighters and leaders, like Zacimba Gambá in Espírito Santo, Mariana Crioula in the hinterlands of Rio de Janeiro, Zeferina in Bahia and Felipa Maria Aranha in Tocantins.

  In Pará, on the banks of the Trombetas River, no one questioned orders given by Mãe Domingas.

  In the vast refuge of Palmares in Alagoas, the African princess Aqualtune governed a free town until it was torched by colonial troops in 1677.

  In Pernambuco the community founded in 1802 by two fugitive black sisters, Francisca and Mendecha Ferreira, still exists. It is called Conceição das Crioulas.

  Whenever the slavers’ troops drew near, the former slave women filled their frizzy African tresses with seeds. As elsewhere in the Americas, they turned their heads into granaries, in case they had to flee at a moment’s notice.

  March 4

  THE SAUDI MIRACLE

  In 1938 a big story broke: Standard Oil Company had found a sea of oil under the immense sands of Saudi Arabia.

  Today that country is the world’s top producer of high-profile terrorists and of human rights violations. But the Western powers that so often invoke the Arab threat when they want to sow panic or justify dropping bombs get along famously with this kingdom of five thousand princes. Could it be because Saudi Arabia sells the most oil and buys the most weapons?

  March 5

  DIVORCE AS GOOD HYGIENE

  In 1953 a Luis Buñuel movie called Él opened in Mexico.

  Buñuel, a Spanish exile, had filmed the novel of another Spanish exile, Mercedes Pinto, which told of the misery of married life.

  It ran for a full three weeks on the marquee. Audiences laughed like it was a Cantinflas comedy.

  The author of the novel had been booted out of Spain in 1923. She had committed the sacrilege of giving a talk at the University of Madrid with a title that made her intolerable: “Divorce as Good Hygiene.”

  The dictator, Miguel Primo de Rivera, had her hauled in. He spoke in the name of the Holy Mother Catholic Church, and in a few words he said it all: “Shut up or leave.”

  Mercedes Pinto left.

  From that point on her creative stride, which awakened the earth wherever she tread, left footprints in Uruguay, Bolivia, Argentina, Cuba, Mexico . . .

  March 6

  THE FLORIST

  Georgia O’Keeffe lived and painted for nearly a century and died still painting.

  She raised a garden of paintings in the solitude of the desert.

  Georgia’s flowers—clitoris, vulva, vagina, nipple, belly button—were chalices for a thanksgiving mass for the joy of having been born a woman.

  March 7

  THE WITCHES

  In the year 1770, the English Parliament debated a law to punish wily women.

  Perfidious females had been seducing His Majesty’s subjects and tricking them into matrimony using such evil arts as “scents, paints, cosmetic washes, artificial teeth, false hair, Spanish wool, iron stays, hoops, high-heeled shoes or bolstered hips.”

  The authors of these frauds
, the bill said, “shall incur the penalty of the law in force against witchcraft and the like misdemeanours and the marriage, upon conviction, shall stand null and void.”

  Given the technological backwardness of the times, the bill failed to mention silicone, liposuction, Botox, plastic surgery and other medical and chemical innovations.

  March 8

  HOMAGES

  Today is International Women’s Day.

  Over the millennia, thinkers human and divine, all of them male, have taken up the woman question:

  Regarding their anatomy:

  Aristotle: “Woman is an incomplete man.”

  Saint Thomas Aquinas: “Woman is the misbegotten product of some defect in the male seed.”

  Martin Luther: “Men have broad shoulders and narrow hips, and accordingly they possess intelligence. Women have narrow shoulders and wide hips, to keep house and bear and raise children.”

  Regarding their nature:

  Francisco de Quevedo: “Hens lay eggs and women lay men.”

  Saint John of Damascus: “Woman is a sicked she-ass.”

  Arthur Schopenhauer: “Woman is an animal with long hair and short sight.”

  Regarding their fate:

  Jehovah said to women, according to the Bible: “Thy husband shall rule over thee.”