Children of the Days Read online

  Allah said to Mohammed, according to the Koran: “Righteous women are obedient.”

  March 9

  THE DAY MEXICO INVADED THE UNITED STATES

  On this early morning in 1916, Pancho Villa crossed the border with his horsemen, set fire to the city of Columbus, killed several soldiers, nabbed a few horses and guns, and the following day was back in Mexico to tell the tale.

  This lightning incursion is the only invasion the United States has suffered since its wars to break free from England.

  In contrast, the United States has invaded practically every country in the entire world.

  Since 1947 its Department of War has been called the Department of Defense, and its war budget the defense budget.

  The names are an enigma as indecipherable as the Holy Trinity.

  March 10

  THE DEVIL PLAYED THE VIOLIN

  On this night in 1712, the Devil visited the young violinist Giuseppe Tartini and played for him in his dreams.

  Giuseppe wanted the music to go on forever, but when he awoke it was gone.

  In search of that lost music, Tartini composed two hundred and nineteen sonatas, which he played with fruitless mastery throughout his life.

  The public applauded his failures.

  March 11

  THE LEFT IS THE UNIVERSITY OF THE RIGHT

  In 1931 a baby named Rupert was born in Australia.

  In a few short years Rupert Murdoch became lord and master of the media throughout the world.

  His astonishing success came not only thanks to his astute command of the dirty deal. Rupert understood the inner workings of capitalism, secrets he learned as a twenty-something student, when he was an admirer of Lenin and a reader of Marx.

  March 12

  SLEEP KNOWS MORE THAN WAKEFULNESS

  Mount Fuji, symbol of Japan, glows red.

  The clouds filling the sky are red with plutonium, yellow with strontium, purple with cesium, all of them bearing cancer and other monstrosities.

  Six nuclear plants have exploded.

  People flee in desperation but there is nowhere to go. “They tricked us! They lied to us!”

  Some throw themselves into the sea or the void, just to hurry fate along.

  Akira Kurosawa dreamed this nightmare and filmed it twenty years before the apocalyptic nuclear catastrophe his country suffered at the beginning of 2011.

  March 13

  A CLEAR CONSCIENCE

  On this day in the year 2007, the banana company Chiquita Brands, successor to United Fruit, admitted to financing Colombian paramilitary gangs during seven years, and agreed to pay a fine.

  The gangs offered protection against strikes and other untoward behavior by labor unions. One hundred and seventy-three union activists were murdered in the banana region during those years.

  The fine was twenty-five million dollars. Not a single penny reached the families of the victims.

  March 14

  CAPITAL

  In 1883 a crowd gathered for Karl Marx’s funeral in a London cemetery—a crowd of eleven, counting the undertaker.

  The most famous of his sayings became his epitaph: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.”

  This prophet of global change spent his life fleeing the police and his creditors.

  Regarding his masterwork, he said: “No one ever wrote so much about money while having so little. Capital will not even pay for the cigars I smoked writing it.”

  March 15

  VOICES IN THE NIGHT

  At dawn today in the year 44 BC, Calpurnia woke up in tears.

  She had dreamed her husband had been stabbed and was dying in her arms.

  Calpurnia told him the dream, and still sobbing pleaded with him to remain at home, for outside only his grave awaited.

  The supreme ruler, dictator for life, divine warrior, undefeated god, could not pay heed to a woman’s dream.

  Julius Caesar pushed her aside and walked toward the Roman Senate, to his death.

  March 16

  STORYTELLERS

  Around this day and others, festivals are held to celebrate people who tell tales out loud, writing in the air.

  Storytellers have several divinities to inspire and support them.

  One is Rafuema, the grandfather who recounted the origin of the Huitoto people in the Araracuara region of Colombia.

  Rafuema told the story that the Huitotos were born from the words that told the story of their birth. And every time he told it, the Huitotos were born again.

  March 17

  THEY KNEW HOW TO LISTEN

  Carlos and Gudrun Lenkersdorf were born and raised in Germany.

  In the year 1973, these two illustrious professors arrived in Mexico. They entered the world of the Mayas in a Tojolabal community and they introduced themselves by saying, “We have come to learn.”

  The Indians remained silent.

  After a while, one of them explained the silence: “This is the first time anyone has told us that.”

  And there they remained, Gudrun and Carlos, learning year after year.

  From the Mayan language they learned that no hierarchy separates subject from object, because I drink the water that drinks me and I am watched by all that I watch. And they learned to greet people in the Maya way:

  “I’m another you.”

  “You’re another me.”

  March 18

  WITH THEIR GODS INSIDE

  In the Andes, the Spanish conquistadors banished the indigenous gods and stamped out all idolatry.

  But somewhere around the year 1560, the gods returned. They traveled on their long wings from who knows where, and they entered the bodies of their children from Ayacucho to Oruro, and inside those bodies they began to dance. The dances, which spelled rebellion, were punished with lash or noose, but the gods kept dancing on and on, announcing the end of all humiliation.

  In the Quechua language the word ñaupa means “was,” but it also means “will be.”

  March 19

  BIRTH OF THE MOVIES

  In 1895 the Lumière brothers, Louis and Auguste, shot a very short film of workers leaving a factory in Lyon.

  That movie, the first in history, was seen by a small circle of friends and no one else.

  Not until December 28 did the Lumière brothers give it a public showing, along with nine more of their shorts, which also recorded fleeting moments from real life.

  In the basement of the Grand Café in Paris, that marvelous spectacle, child of the magic lantern, the wheel of life and other arts of illusionists, had its premiere.

  Full house. Thirty-five people at a franc a seat.

  Georges Méliès was in the audience. He wanted to buy their movie camera. Since they wouldn’t sell it to him, he had to invent his own.

  March 20

  THE WORLD UPSIDE DOWN

  On March 20 in the year 2003, Iraq’s air force bombed the United States.

  On the heels of the bombs, Iraqi troops invaded US soil.

  There was collateral damage. Many civilians, most of them women and children, were killed or maimed. No one knows how many, because tradition dictates tabulating the losses suffered by invading troops and prohibits counting victims among the invaded population.

  The war was inevitable. The security of Iraq and of all humanity was threatened by the weapons of mass destruction stockpiled in United States arsenals.

  There was no basis, however, to the insidious rumors suggesting that Iraq intended to keep all the oil in Alaska.

  March 21

  THE WORLD AS IT IS

  In the entire history of human butchery, World War II was the war that killed the most people. But the accounting came up short.

  Many soldiers from the colonies never appeared on the lists of the dead. They were Australian aborigines, Indians, Birmanians, Filipinos, Algerians, Senegalese, Vietnamese, and so many other black, brown and yellow people obliged to die for the fla
gs of their masters.

  When they are alive, people are ranked first, second, third or fourth class. When they are dead too.

  March 22

  WORLD WATER DAY

  We are made of water.

  From water life bloomed. Rivers of water are the blood that nourishes the earth, and of water too are the cells that do our thinking, the tears that do our crying and the recollections that form our memory.

  Memory tells us that today’s deserts were yesterday’s forests and that the dry world knew well enough to stay wet in those remote days when water and earth belonged to no one and to everyone.

  Who took the water? The monkey that raised the club. If I remember correctly, that’s how the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey begins. The unarmed monkey, meanwhile, got clubbed to death.

  Sometime later, in the year 2009, a space probe discovered water on the moon. The news sparked plans of conquest.

  Sorry, moon.

  March 23

  WHY WE MASSACRED THE INDIANS

  With a well-aimed swipe, General Efraín Ríos Montt overthrew another general in the year 1982 and proclaimed himself president of Guatemala.

  A year and a half later, the president, a pastor of the California-based Church of the Word, claimed victory in the holy war that exterminated four hundred and forty indigenous communities.

  He said the feat would not have been possible without the assistance of the Holy Spirit, who commanded his intelligence services. Another important collaborator, his spiritual advisor Francisco Bianchi, explained to a correspondent of the New York Times:

  “The guerrillas have many collaborators among the Indians. Those Indians are subversives, aren’t they? And how do you put an end to subversion? Obviously, you have to kill those Indians. And then people will say, ‘You are massacring innocents.’ But they are not innocent.”

  March 24

  WHY WE DISAPPEARED THE DISAPPEARED

  On this day in the year 1976, the military dictatorship that would disappear thousands of Argentines was born.

  Twenty years later, General Jorge Rafael Videla explained to a journalist, Guido Braslavsky:

  “No, they could not be shot. Let’s pick a number, say five thousand. Argentine society would not have put up with so many executions, two yesterday in Buenos Aires, six today in Córdoba, four tomorrow in Rosario, and on and on until we reached five thousand . . . No, that would not have worked. Should we reveal where the remains lie? But in the sea, in the River Plate, in the Riachuelo, what could we possibly show? At one point, consideration was given to making the list public. But then we realized that as soon as they are declared dead there will be questions to which we cannot reply: who killed them, when, where, how . . . ”

  March 25

  THE ANNUNCIATION

  On a day like today, more or less, the archangel Gabriel came down from heaven and the Virgin Mary learned that the child of God was living in her womb.

  Relics of the Virgin are now worshipped in churches all over the world:

  the shoes and slippers she wore,

  her nightgowns and her dresses,

  hairnets, diadems, combs,

  veils and locks of hair,

  traces of the milk that Jesus sucked

  and her four wedding rings, even though she married only once.

  March 26

  MAYA LIBERATORS

  On this night in 1936, Felipa Poot, a Maya Indian, was stoned to death in the town of Kinchil.

  Dying with her under the hail of stones were three other women, also Mayas, who had fought at her side against sadness and fear.

  They were killed by “the divine caste,” which is what those who owned the land and people of the Yucatán called themselves.

  March 27

  WORLD THEATER DAY

  In the year 2010, the public relations firm Murray Hill Inc. told the politicians who claim to govern to stop play-acting.

  A short while before, the United States Supreme Court had removed all limits on corporate donations to electoral campaigns; for a much longer while, the bribes legislators received from lobbyists had been legal.

  Applying the same logic, Murray Hill Inc. launched its own candidacy for US Congress in the state of Maryland. It was high time to do away with intermediaries:

  “This is our democracy. We bought it. We paid for it. Now it’s time we got behind the wheel ourselves. Vote Murray Hill Incorporated for the best democracy money can buy.”

  Many people thought this was a joke.

  March 28

  MANUFACTURING AFRICA

  When it opened in 1932, Tarzan of the Apes drew long lines at the movie houses.

  Tarzan’s howl from Hollywood has been the language of Africa everywhere ever since, even though the actor, Johnny Weissmuller, was born in Romania and never set foot in Africa.

  Tarzan’s vocabulary had its limits. He only knew how to say, “Me Tarzan, you Jane,” but he swam like no one else, winning five gold medals at the Olympics, and he yelled like no one had ever yelled.

  That king-of-the-jungle howl was the work of Douglas Shearer, a soundman who mixed voices for gorillas, hyenas, camels, violins, sopranos and tenors.

  Female fans besieged Johnny to the end of his days, begging him to howl.

  March 29

  THE JUNGLE WAS HERE

  Miracle in the Amazon: in the year 1967 a huge gusher of oil erupted in Lago Agrio.

  From that moment, and for a quarter of a century, Texaco Petroleum Company sat at the table, napkin at throat, knife and fork in hand, stuffing itself with oil and gas, and shitting eighteen billion gallons of poison on the Ecuadorian jungle.

  The Indians had never heard the word “pollution.” They learned its meaning when fish went belly up in the rivers, lakes turned to brine, trees withered on the banks, animals fled, nothing grew in the soil and people were born sick.

  Several presidents of Ecuador, all of them above suspicion, collaborated in this undertaking, which earned a chorus of selfless applause from the publicists who praised it, the journalists who celebrated it, the lawyers who defended it, the experts who justified it and the scientists who absolved it.

  March 30

  INTERNATIONAL DOMESTIC WORKERS DAY IN LATIN AMERICA

  Maruja had no idea how old she was.

  Of her years before, she said nothing. Of her years after, she expected nothing.

  She was neither pretty nor ugly nor indifferent.

  She walked with a shuffle, a duster, a broom or a spoon in her fist.

  Awake, she buried her head below her shoulders.

  Asleep, she buried her head between her knees.

  When she spoke, she kept her eyes on the ground, as if she were counting ants.

  She had worked in the homes of others for as long as she could remember.

  She had never been outside the city of Lima.

  Many times she changed houses and she felt at home in none.

  At last she found a place where she was treated as a person.

  Within a few days, she left.

  She was starting to like it.

  March 31

  THIS FLEA

  Today in 1631 John Donne died in London.

  This contemporary of Shakespeare’s published almost nothing during his lifetime.

  Centuries later, we are lucky to have a few of the verses he left behind.

  Like this:

  Twice or thrice had I loved thee,

  Before I knew thy face or name . . .

  Or this:

  It sucked me first, and now sucks thee,

  And in this flea, our two bloods mingled be . . .

  This flea is you and I, and this

  Our marriage bed, and marriage temple is . . .

  APRIL

  April 1

  THE FIRST BISHOP

  In 1553 the first bishop of Brazil, Pedro Fernandes Sardinha, set foot on these shores.

  Three years later, south of Alagoas, the Caeté Indians ate him for lunch.

&
nbsp; Some Brazilians are of the opinion that the meal was an invention of the colonial power, a pretext to steal the Caetés’ land and exterminate them in a prolonged “holy war.”

  Other Brazilians believe the story occurred more or less as told, that Bishop Sardinha, who carried his fate in his fishy name, was the involuntary founder of the national cuisine.

  April 2

  MANUFACTURING PUBLIC OPINION

  In 1917 President Woodrow Wilson announced that the United States would enter World War I.

  Four and a half years earlier, Wilson had been elected as the peace candidate.

  Public opinion embraced with the same enthusiasm his pacifist speeches and his declaration of war.

  Edward Bernays was the principal author of this miracle.

  When the war was over, Bernays acknowledged that he had used doctored photographs and made-up anecdotes to spark prowar sentiment.

  This public relations success kicked off a brilliant career.

  Bernays went on to advise several presidents and the world’s most powerful businessmen.

  Reality is not what it is; it’s what I tell you it is. We can thank him, more than anyone else, for the modern techniques of mass manipulation that can convince people to buy anything from a brand of soap to a war.