Children of the Days Read online

  April 3

  GOOD GUYS

  In 1882 a bullet pierced the neck of Jesse James. It was shot by his best friend, to collect the reward.

  Before becoming the country’s most famous outlaw, Jesse had fought against President Lincoln for the pro-slavery army of the South. When his side lost, he had to change jobs, and Jesse James’s gang was born.

  The gang started by pulling off what some say was the very first train robbery in the history of the United States. Wearing their Ku Klux Klan masks, they fleeced every passenger. Then they turned their hand to holding up banks and stagecoaches.

  Legend has it that Jesse was something like a Robin Hood of the Wild West, who stole from the rich and gave to the poor, only no one ever met a poor person who received a coin from his hands.

  Yet there is no question about his generosity to Hollywood. The movie industry can thank him for forty films, nearly all of them successes, in which stars from Tyrone Power to Brad Pitt have gripped his smoking revolver.

  April 4

  THE GHOST

  In 1846 Isidore Ducasse was born.

  It was wartime in Montevideo and he was baptized by cannon fire.

  As soon as he could, he went off to Paris, where he became the Comte de Lautréamont and his nightmares helped give rise to surrealism.

  He only dropped into the world for a visit. During his brief life he set fire to language, burned brightly through his words and disappeared in a puff of smoke.

  April 5

  DAY OF LIGHT

  It happened in Africa, in Ife, the sacred city of the Yoruba kingdom, maybe on a day like today or who knows when.

  An old man, very ill, brought his three sons before him and announced: “My most cherished things will belong to the one who can fill this room completely.”

  And he sat outside to wait while night fell.

  One of his sons brought all the straw he could find, but it filled the room only halfway.

  Another brought all the sand he could carry, but again half the room was left empty.

  The third lit a candle.

  And the room was filled.

  April 6

  NIGHT CROSSING

  In certain towns lost in the mountains of Guatemala, anonymous hands sew tiny worry dolls.

  A surefire remedy for anxiety, they calm stormy thoughts and come to the rescue when insomnia threatens.

  These minuscule worry dolls don’t say a thing. They heal by listening. Huddled under the pillow, they absorb sorrows and regrets, doubts and debts, all the phantoms that undermine a peaceful sleep, and they carry them off, magically far off, to the secret place where night is never an enemy.

  April 7

  THE DOCTOR’S BILL

  Three thousand seven hundred years ago the king of Babylonia, Hammurabi, set down in law the rates dictated by the gods for medical services:

  If with his bronze lancet the physician cureth a man of a serious wound or an eye abscess, ten silver shekels shall he receive.

  If the patient be a poor man, five silver shekels shall the physician receive.

  If the patient be the slave of someone, two silver shekels shall his owner give the physician.

  If a physician causeth the death of a free man or the loss of an eye, his hands shall be cut off.

  If a physician causeth the death of the slave of a poor man, one of his own slaves shall the physician give him. If a physician causeth the loss of a slave’s eye, half the slave’s value shall he pay.

  April 8

  THE MAN WHO WAS BORN MANY TIMES

  On this day in 1973, Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruíz y Picasso, more commonly known as Pablo Picasso, passed away.

  He was born in 1881. It seems he liked it, because he kept being born and reborn.

  April 9

  GOOD HEALTH

  In the year 2011 the population of Iceland said no for the second time to the International Monetary Fund.

  The Fund and the European Union had decided that Iceland’s three hundred twenty thousand inhabitants should be liable for the bankruptcy of its bankers, for which each and every Icelander owed a foreign debt of twelve thousand euros.

  Such socialism in reverse was rejected in two plebiscites. “The debt is not our debt. Why should we pay it?”

  In a world unhinged by the financial crisis, this small island lost in the waters of the North Atlantic offered us all a healthy lesson in common sense.

  April 10

  MANUFACTURING DISEASE

  Healthy? Unhealthy? It all depends on your point of view. From the point of view of the pharmaceutical industry, bad health can be very good.

  Take shyness, for example. This character trait used to be acceptable, even attractive. That is, until it became an illness. In the year 1980 the American Psychiatric Association decided that shyness was a psychological ailment and included it in its Manual of Mental Disorders, which is periodically updated by the high priests of Science.

  Like all illnesses, shyness requires medication. Ever since the news broke, Big Pharma has made a fortune selling hope to patients plagued by this “social phobia,” “allergy to people,” “severe medical problem” . . .

  April 11

  OPINION MAKERS

  On this day in the year 2002, a coup d’état turned the president of a business association into the president of Venezuela.

  His glory did not last long. A couple of days later, Venezuelans filling the streets reinstated the president they had elected with their votes.

  Venezuela’s biggest TV and radio networks celebrated the coup, but somehow failed to cover the massive demonstrations that restored Hugo Chávez to his rightful place.

  Unpleasant news is not worth reporting.

  April 12

  MANUFACTURING THE GUILTY PARTY

  On a day like today in the year 33—a day earlier, a day later—Jesus of Nazareth died on the cross.

  His judges had found him guilty of “inciting idolatry, blasphemy and abominable superstition.”

  Not many centuries later, the Indians of the Americas and the heretics of Europe were found guilty of those same crimes—exactly the same ones—and in the name of Jesus of Nazareth they were punished by lash, gallows, or fire.

  April 13

  WE KNEW NOT HOW TO SEE YOU

  In the year 2009, in the atrium of the convent of Maní in the Yucatán, forty-two Franciscan brothers held a ceremony of restitution for injuries caused to indigenous culture.

  “We ask forgiveness of the Maya people, for not having understood their worldview, their religion, for denying their divinities, for not having respected their culture, for having imposed over many centuries a religion they did not understand, for having treated as satanic their religious practices, and for having said and written that these were the work of the Devil and that their idols were Satan himself in the flesh.”

  Four and a half centuries before, in that very place, another Franciscan brother, Diego de Landa, had burned the Mayas’ books, and with them eight centuries of collective memory.

  April 14

  GRAND OR JUST PLAIN BIG?

  In the year 1588 Spain’s Invincible Armada, then the largest fleet in the world, was defeated in a matter of hours.

  In the year 1628 Sweden’s most powerful warship, the Vasa, also known as Invincible, sank on its maiden voyage. It never made it out of Stockholm’s harbor.

  And on the night of this day in 1912, the world’s safest and most luxurious ocean liner, humbly named Titanic, hit an iceberg and went down. This floating palace had few lifeboats, a uselessly small rudder, watchmen without binoculars and warning bells that were never heard.

  April 15

  THE BLACK PAINTINGS

  In 1828 Francisco de Goya died in exile.

  Harassed by the Inquisition, he had fled to France.

  On his deathbed, between incomprehensible mutterings, Goya spoke of his beloved home on
the outskirts of Madrid, on the banks of the Manzanares River. There, painted on the walls, was the best of his work, his most personal.

  After his death the house was sold and resold, paintings and all, until the works were finally removed from the walls and transferred onto canvases. In vain they were put up for sale at the Paris Exposition. No one wanted to see, much less buy, those ferocious prophesies of the century to come, in which grief slaughtered color and horror shamelessly revealed its raw face. The Prado Museum did not wish to buy them either, and at the beginning of 1882 they entered its halls by donation.

  The “black paintings” are now among the most visited in the museum.

  “I painted them for myself,” Goya said.

  He did not know that he painted them for us.

  April 16

  THE FLAMENCO SONG

  In the year 1881, Antonio Machado y Álvarez completed his anthology of flamenco songs, nine hundred couplets from the Gypsy songbook of Andalusia.

  In olden days tasteless

  were all the waves in the sea,

  then she spit, my dark-skinned dearest

  which was when they turned salty.

  Girls with dark complexion

  have a gaze that is so weird,

  it kills more in a single hour

  than death in an entire year.

  The day that you were born

  a piece of heaven fell to earth.

  Not until you cease to live

  will heaven regain its girth.

  He published the book and the critics panned it. Flamenco’s cante jondo evoked their scorn, because it was the work of Gypsies. But that’s precisely why these couplets carry their music with them, in their clapping palms and in their stamping feet.

  April 17

  CARUSO SANG AND RAN

  On this night in 1906, tenor Enrico Caruso sang Carmen at the Tivoli Opera House in San Francisco.

  The ovation carried him all the way to the door of the Palace Hotel.

  The master of bel canto slept poorly. As dawn was about to break, a violent tremor knocked him from his bed.

  The earthquake, the worst in California history, killed more than three thousand people and demolished half the city’s homes.

  Caruso started running and did not stop until he got to Rome.

  April 18

  KEEP AN EYE ON THIS GUY

  Today in 1955 Albert Einstein died.

  For twenty-two years the FBI tapped his telephone, read his mail and went through his garbage.

  They spied on Einstein because he was a spy for the Russians. So said his bulky police file. The file also said he had invented a death ray and a robot that could read minds. It said Einstein was a member, collaborator or fellow traveler of thirty-four Communist front organizations between 1937 and 1954, and was honorary chair of three Communist organizations. It concluded: “It seems unlikely that a man of his background could, in such a short time, become a loyal American citizen.”

  Not even death saved him. They continued spying on him. Not the FBI, but his colleagues, men of science who sliced his brain into two hundred forty pieces and analyzed them to find an explanation for his genius.

  They found nothing.

  Einstein had already warned, “I have no special gift. I am only passionately curious.”

  April 19

  CHILDREN OF THE CLOUDS

  In 1987 the king of Morocco finished building a north–south wall across the Sahara Desert, on lands that do not belong to him.

  This is the longest wall in the world, exceeded only by the Great Wall of China. All along it Moroccan soldiers block the Saharawi people from entering their land.

  Several times the United Nations confirmed the people of Western Sahara’s right to self-determination and called for a plebiscite to allow them to determine their own fate.

  But the kingdom of Morocco has refused and continues to refuse. That refusal is a confession. By denying the vote, Morocco confesses to having stolen a country.

  For forty years the Saharawi people have been waiting. They are condemned to a life sentence of anguish and nostalgia without parole.

  They call themselves “children of the clouds,” because since time immemorial they have pursued the rains. They also pursue justice, which is harder to find than water in the desert.

  April 20

  MANUFACTURING MISTAKES

  It was among the largest military expeditions ever launched in the history of the Caribbean. And it was the greatest blunder.

  The dispossessed and evicted owners of Cuba declared from Miami that they were ready to die fighting for devolution, against revolution.

  The US government believed them, and their intelligence services once again proved themselves unworthy of the name.

  On April 20, 1961, three days after disembarking at the Bay of Pigs, armed to the teeth and backed by warships and planes, these courageous heroes surrendered.

  April 21

  THE INDIGNANT ONE

  It happened in Spain in a town of La Rioja on the evening of this day in 2011, during an Easter procession.

  A huge crowd watched in silence as Jesus Christ, being whipped by Roman soldiers, passed by.

  A voice broke the silence.

  Seated on his father’s shoulders, Marcos Rabasco shouted at the man being whipped: “Fight back! Fight back!”

  Marcos was two years, four months and twenty-one days old.

  April 22

  EARTH DAY

  Einstein once said, “If the bee disappears from the surface of the earth, man would have no more than four years to live. No more bees, no more pollination . . . no more men!”

  He said it to a few friends.

  The friends laughed.

  He did not.

  Now it turns out there are fewer and fewer bees in the world.

  Today, on Earth Day, let us acknowledge that this is not happening due to God’s will or the Devil’s curse, but rather because of:

  the murder of natural forests and the proliferation of farmed ones;

  monocropping for export, which limits plant diversity;

  poisons that kill pests and with them everything else;

  chemical fertilizers that fertilize money and sterilize the soil;

  and radiation from the machines people buy because advertising tells us to.

  April 23

  FAME IS BALONEY

  Today, World Book Day, it wouldn’t hurt to recall that the history of literature is an unceasing paradox.

  What is the most popular scene in the Bible? Adam and Eve biting the apple. It’s not there.

  Plato never wrote his most famous line: “Only the dead have seen the end of war.”

  Don Quijote de la Mancha never said: “Let the dogs bark, Sancho. It’s a sign we are on track.”

  Voltaire’s best-known line was not said or written by him: “I do not agree with what you have to say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel never wrote: “All theory is gray, my friend, but green is the tree of life.”

  Sherlock Holmes never said: “Elementary, my dear Watson.”

  In none of his books or pamphlets did Lenin write: “The ends justify the means.”

  Bertolt Brecht was not the author of his most oft-cited poem: “First they came for the Communists / and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a Communist . . . “

  And neither was Jorge Luis Borges the author of his best-known poem: “If I could live my life over / I would try to make more mistakes . . . ”

  April 24

  THE PERILS OF PUBLISHING

  In the year 2004, for once the government of Guatemala broke with the tradition of impunity and officially acknowledged that Myrna Mack was killed by order of the country’s president.

  Myrna had undertaken forbidden research. Despite receiving threats, she had gone deep into the jungles and mountains to find exiles wandering in their own country, the indigenous survivors of the militar
y’s massacres. She collected their voices.

  In 1989, at a conference of social scientists, an anthropologist from the United States complained about the pressure universities exert to continually produce: “In my country if you don’t publish, you perish.”

  And Myrna replied: “In my country if you publish, you perish.”

  She published.

  She was stabbed to death.

  April 25

  DON’T SAVE ME, PLEASE

  During this week in 1951, Mohammad Mossadegh was elected prime minister of Iran in a landslide.

  Mossadegh had promised to take back Iran’s oil, which had been given away to the British.

  But nationalizing oil could lead to the sort of chaos that helps the Communists. So President Eisenhower gave the order to attack and the United States saved Iran. The coup d’état of 1953 put Mossadegh in prison, sent many of his followers to their graves and gave forty percent of the oil Mossadegh had nationalized to US companies.

  The following year, far from Iran, President Eisenhower gave another order to attack and the United States saved Guatemala. A coup d’état toppled the democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz because he had expropriated the uncultivated lands of the United Fruit Company. Expropriating land could lead to the sort of chaos that helps the Communists.

  Guatemala is still paying for that act of kindness.