Hunter of Stories Page 6

  For the thousandth time, the United Nations swore to respect and enforce the result.

  But the vote never occurred, and for a simple reason: Morocco refused to keep the promise it had made before the eyes of the world. It carried on as owner and overlord of the land and people of the Sahara, of the mineral-rich soil and subsoil, and of the fish-endowed waters of the sea.

  In vain, Saharan patriots continued proclaiming their desire for independence. Many have landed in prison or the cemetery for the unpardonable crime of wanting to be free.

  Wars of the Future

  In the year 2012 Brandon Bryant worked at a US airbase in the New Mexico desert.

  He was a pilot without a plane. Via fourteen screens and several keyboards, he directed planes without pilots, “drones,” seven thousand miles away.

  On one occasion, a country house in Afghanistan appeared on his screens, outbuildings and all. Every detail was clear.

  Fifteen seconds: from some far-off perch, a commander gave the order to fire.

  Ten seconds: Brandon warned the commander that a child was running toward the house.

  Six seconds: the order was repeated.

  Five seconds: Brandon pressed a key.

  Three seconds: the drone fired a missile.

  Two seconds: an explosion; the house disappeared and so did the child.

  Nothing but smoke.

  “Where is the child?” asked Brandon.

  The machine did not answer.

  Brandon repeated the question.

  The machine finally spoke: “It wasn’t a child. It was a dog.”

  “A two-legged dog?”

  That was when Brandon Bryant resigned from the military.

  Calumnies

  The saying has it that man is wolf to man.

  But rarely do wolves kill other wolves.

  Unlike us, wolves do not seek mutual extermination.

  Wolves have a bad reputation, but they are not the ones turning the world into an immense lunatic asylum and an overcrowded cemetery.

  War Against War

  While the twenty-first century was being born, Bertie Felstead, at the age of 106, lay dying. His lifespan touched three centuries and he was the sole survivor of an extraordinary soccer match played on Christmas Day 1915. The match was between British and German soldiers on an improvised pitch between the trenches.

  A ball appeared, who knows from where, and it started rolling, who knows how. The battlefield became a playing field. Enemies threw down their weapons and raced to control the ball.

  The soldiers played on until furious officers managed to remind them they had come to kill and to die.

  Once the soccer truce was quashed, the butchery began anew, but the ball had opened the door to a fleeting world where men obliged to hate each other met face to face.

  Soccer Revolution

  In the days when Brazil was still under military dictatorship, the players of the powerhouse team Corinthians, led by their most beloved and respected member, an extraordinary midfielder named Sócrates, managed to gain control of the club.

  Unseen, unheard of. The players discussed and decided everything by majority vote: the training regime, the approach to each match, how to divvy up the money from the gate, absolutely everything. Their shirts read “Democracia Corinthiana.”

  After two years, the displaced directors regained the tiller and put an end to it all. But while democracy lasted, Corinthians, governed by its players, served up the flashiest, most audacious soccer in Brazil, pulling in the largest crowds and winning the São Paulo championship two years running.

  Let’s Have Another Cup

  At the first Soccer World Cup, held in Uruguay in 1930, the hosts won the Jules Rimet trophy, a cup of pure gold studded with precious stones.

  During World War II, when Italy was champion, the head of the Italian soccer federation, Ottorino Barassi, hid the trophy in a shoebox under his bed to keep it from the Nazis.

  The trophy was stolen from a London display case during the 1966 World Cup in England. Scotland Yard found no clue, until a dog named Pickles discovered it, wrapped in newspaper, in a garden on the outskirts of the city. Pickles was declared a national hero.

  The next robbery happened in 1983, more than a decade after three-time champion Brazil won rights to keep the Rimet Cup in perpetuity. Melted down into ingots, the trophy disappeared into the black market of Rio de Janeiro.

  Ever since, the winner of each world championship receives a copy of the new trophy, while the original can be seen but not touched in a display case at FIFA headquarters in Zurich.

  The Barefoot Idol

  Thanks to Sailen Manna, India won the gold medal in soccer at the Asian Games in 1951.

  He played his entire career for Mohun Bagan Athletic Club, without pay, and never was he tempted by the contracts offered by foreign clubs.

  He played barefoot. In the opponents’ end his naked feet were rabbits that could not be snared.

  In his pocket he always carried an image of Kali, the goddess who knows how to go head-to-head with death.

  Sailen was nearly ninety when he died.

  The goddess accompanied him on his final voyage.

  Barefoot, like him.

  I Confess

  I am going to reveal my secret.

  I don’t want to take it with me to the grave. I can’t.

  I know how Uruguay won the 1950 World Cup.

  Yes, Obdulio’s courage, Schiaffino’s smarts, Ghiggia’s speed were all essential. That’s true. But there was something more.

  I was nine years old and very religious, a devotee of soccer and God, in that order.

  Listening to Carlos Solé broadcast the match over the radio from Maracanã Stadium, I chewed my fingernails that afternoon and my fingers, too.

  Goal for Brazil.

  Oooh.

  I fell to my knees and pleaded in tears, “Oh God, dear God, do me this favor, I beg of you. Do not deny me this miracle.”

  And I made Him a promise.

  God kept his part of the bargain: Uruguay won. But I never managed to recall what it was I had promised.

  It could be worse.

  Perhaps I saved myself from going about muttering Our Fathers day and night, for years on end, a sleepwalker lost in the streets of Montevideo.

  The Ball as Tool

  At the World Cups in 1934 and 1938, the Italian and German players saluted the crowds with outstretched palms. “Win or die,” Mussolini ordered. “Winning a match means more to some people than capturing a city,” Goebbels once noted in his diary.

  At the 1970 World Cup, Brazil’s military dictatorship wrapped itself in the glory of Pelé’s team. “Now no one can stop this country,” proclaimed the government’s advertising campaign.

  At the 1978 World Cup, the Argentine brass celebrated their triumph arm in arm with the unavoidable Henry Kissinger, as prisoners were being tossed alive from airplanes into the open sea.

  In 1980 Uruguay hosted the “Little World Cup,” a tournament among previous world champions organized to celebrate the Cup’s fiftieth anniversary. The dictatorship’s public relations machine trumpeted the home team’s victory as if the generals themselves had played on the pitch. But that tournament was where the crowd dared to break seven years of compulsory silence. The stands roared: “It’s going down, it’s going down, military rule is on the ground.”

  Sly but Honest

  On April 14, 1997, Sports Illustrated reported on a poll of elite athletes, most of them US Olympians or aspiring Olympians, conducted by the esteemed physician Bob Goldman.

  The athletes were guaranteed anonymity so they would tell the truth without fear of consequences.

  The question posed was:

  “You are offered a banned performance-enhancing substance, with two guarantees: (1) You will not be caught; (2) You will win. Would you take the substance?”

  Answering yes: 195 athletes.

  Answering no: 3.

  Depraved />
  A few centuries before Europe invaded South America, the high point of the fiestas of the Mapuches, the Tehuelches, and other peoples was a game that involved chasing a ball with a stick that had a curved end.

  In 1764 the council of bishops, meeting in Santiago, issued a condemnation. The council president, Bishop Manuel de Alday, decried the game’s “promiscuity, because it is played by men and women, all mixed together.”

  Today we call it “hockey” and it is no longer a sin.

  Jailed

  In 1572 the poet Fray Luis de León was imprisoned in Valladolid.

  He spent five years in solitary confinement.

  The Holy Inquisition punished him for translating into Castilian the Song of Songs, the book of the Bible that celebrates human desire and human passion:

  Open to me, my sister, my love, my dove, my undefiled:

  For my head is filled with dew, and my locks with the drops of the night…

  How much better is thy love than wine!

  Banned

  No one wanted to publish Mark Twain’s ringing denunciations of the massacres perpetrated in the Philippines and elsewhere by imperial troops of the United States.

  In 1905, he wrote:

  “Free speech is the privilege of the dead, the monopoly of the dead. They can speak their honest minds without offending.”

  Beloved, Behated

  Monteiro Lobato, the writer who made and continues to make Brazil’s children the happiest,

  the one who taught them to love the land of their birth,

  the adorable spiller of Brazil’s deepest secrets,

  who did time for defending the country’s oil and for railing against governments that conspired with the corporate behemoths of black gold and other mineral riches,

  died in 1948 at the age of sixty-something, homeless and penniless.

  His name could not be published in the dailies or spoken on the radio, and his books, banned from public libraries and public schools, were burned in churchyards because they did not treat religion with sufficient respect.

  Bless You Laughter, Always

  Darcy Ribeiro went in and out of the jungle as if it were his home, and indeed it was.

  He traveled light: a single book was all he carried, an old Spanish edition of Don Quixote.

  In his hammock, swaying under the leafy trees of the Amazon, Darcy reveled in his favorite book. On every page he let out a belly laugh, and the local children laughed with him. None of them knew how to read, but they all knew how to laugh.

  The Weaver

  In Remigio Mestas’s workshop in Oaxaca, clothing comes alive.

  Some passersby are attracted by the beauty of his blouses, shawls, and kerchiefs, but beauty is only the beginning.

  A Zapotec Indian, Remigio organized a national network of indigenous weavers, who through weaving discovered their roots and recovered their pride.

  “Clothing is more than cloth,” Remigio says, and he explains that garments have a spirit and transmit energy when they are born of loving hands.

  “Good clothing will tell you: I am your second skin.”

  Touch any of his creations and you’ll know he’s not lying.

  The Hatter

  The straw hats Andrés de la Cruz González weaves in a village in Chiapas take some time to come into existence. The palm leaves must be boiled, then set out to bleach for three days in the sun and another three nights under the watchful eye of the moon.

  Andrés decries the preference young people have for imported caps, and he points out that his fine palm-leaf sombreros offer protection to dreams and thoughts worth remembering.

  He inherited his secret art from his grandparents and will transmit it to the children of his children, so that the slender chain of time is never broken.

  Textiles and Time

  The Dogon people of Mali spin and weave under the bright sun.

  Nourished by light, their textiles shine and laugh. The weavers call them “words.”

  Textiles woven at night, in contrast, would be silent and dark.

  No one wants to weave after dusk. When the sun goes down, it closes the gates of heaven, and whoever continues weaving runs the risk of going blind.

  The Carpenter

  To illustrate a book published by the International Labour Organization, Daniel Weinberg searched high and low for a graphic of Jesus as a carpenter.

  No luck: in the entire history of art, Christ seemed never to have appeared as a worker.

  At long last, however, Daniel found one in Oaxaca. Painted on wood in 1960 by an anonymous artist, it portrays the entire family with the child Jesus helping his father in the workshop.

  How strange.

  The Discoverer

  Louis Pasteur invented more than the process that bears his name and protects our food.

  He also discovered several vaccines, including one for rabies.

  More difficult was his struggle against another sort of rabid beast: the envy of many of his colleagues.

  In the middle of the nineteenth century, Paris dailies debated which insane asylum Pasteur would be sent to. Would it be Charenton or Sainte-Anne?

  The Light Rider

  In 1895 when he was on the cusp of adolescence, Albert Einstein had a vision that opened doors to the unknown: he dreamed, or imagined, that he was riding through the heavens mounted on a beam of light.

  Some years later those doors led to the theory of relativity and other illuminations.

  The Sculptor

  In May of the year 1649 Seville lost the fragrance that was its fame and consolation.

  The city of orange blossoms reeked of death.

  As the plague spread, people dug ditches where they could lie down and die, while the orange trees stood bare and pitiful.

  The sculptor Juan Martínez Montañés, having throughout his long life made Christs and saints for Seville’s temples, wanted to sculpt the missing fragrance.

  He dedicated all his remaining energies to the task, day and night.

  Still carving flowers, he died.

  People say Seville recovered because he sacrificed what little life he had left. They say the flowers born from his hands cleansed the air of the moribund city.

  The Cook

  In ancient times the king of Maní in the Yucatán handed the cook a freshly killed animal and asked to be served the best part.

  The king received a plate of roast tongue and savored it.

  A short while later, the king gave the cook another freshly killed beast and asked to be served the worst part.

  Once again, there was tongue on his plate.

  The king might have been angry, but the cook was right.

  The Fireman

  From the day he was born, Emilio Casablanca was a painter and an incorrigible nighthawk.

  On one of his long drinking bouts, Emilio repeatedly lost his way in the labyrinth of Montevideo’s Old City, until at last he stumbled upon the office of the Socialist Party, where he had a bed. Somehow he managed to climb the stairs to the attic and collapse on his mattress. A lit cigarette dangled from his fingers.

  In the cold dawn, Emilio was out cold. But the cigarette was not.

  When “The Pistol” Dotti arrived to perform his daily chores as janitor, he smelled something acrid in the air.

  Smoke was seeping out of the attic. The Pistol leapt up the stairway, shoved open the door, and through clouds of smoke that stung his eyes, saw flames bursting from the bed where Emilio lay sound asleep.

  The nearest source of water was in the bathroom or the kitchen, neither of them at hand, so The Pistol, plucking up his courage, dropped his pants in one swoop and sprayed. Thereby earning his nickname.

  Artists

  The anarchist bricklayer Lucio Urtubia printed travelers’ checks by the thousands to sabotage the Spanish dictatorship.

  Governments print money to finance speculation, but Lucio dreamed of funding revolution. What’s more, while banks rob countries, in his free ti
me Lucio robbed banks.

  Another celebrated forger of that period was Adolfo Kaminsky, a dyer and draftsman. Thanks to his diligence, many of the persecuted managed to flee occupied France disguised in military uniforms, even if they were slightly off-tint. During the Nazis’ reign of terror in Paris, Adolfo never slept. He spent his nights falsifying identity documents, baptismal certificates, and safe-conducts, at the pace of thirty an hour.

  The Deceased

  In 1976, at the age of fifteen, a farmer named Lal Bihari applied for a bank loan in the municipality of Azamgarh in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh.

  The loan was denied. According to the civil registry, Lal Bihari was dead. No matter that he was breathing, the death certificate was unambiguous. Not only was he dead, his plot of land was now owned by an uncle.

  Ever since, Lal Bihari sleeps in the street, eats from garbage bins, waits night and day in interminable lines, roams from office to office filling out forms and signing letters, and beseeches churches and other charitable institutions for assistance. A lawyer once advised him to hang himself, because correcting the official registry is impossible. For how could Lal Bihari prove he was not playing a lively trick?

  He has learned how difficult it is for a dead man to find a job or a wife. And he has learned he is not alone. Many are the living dead in India.

  Having no union to defend him, he founded the Uttar Pradesh Association of Dead People, the world’s first union for the deceased.