Children of the Days Page 6

  April 26

  NOTHING HAPPENED HERE

  It occurred in Chernobyl in Ukraine in 1986.

  It was the worst nuclear catastrophe the world had ever suffered, but the only ones to learn of the tragedy from the first moment were the birds that fled and the worms that dug themselves into the ground.

  The Soviet government ordered silence.

  Radioactive rain fell over much of Europe and the government continued denying or refusing to speak.

  A quarter of a century later, in Fukushima, several nuclear reactors exploded and the Japanese government also remained silent or denied “alarmist versions.”

  The veteran British journalist Claud Cockburn was right when he suggested, “Never believe anything until it has been officially denied.”

  April 27

  LIFE’S TWISTS AND TURNS

  The Conservative Party was in power in Nicaragua on this day in 1837 when women won the right to abortion if their lives were in danger.

  One hundred seventy years later, in the very same country, legislators who claimed to be Sandinista revolutionaries outlawed abortion “in any circumstance,” and thus condemned poor women to prison or the cemetery.

  April 28

  THIS INSECURE WORLD

  Today, on World Day for Safety and Health at Work, it’s worth noting that these days nothing is as insecure as a job. More and more workers awaken each day wondering: “Am I about to become excess baggage? Who is going to hire me?”

  Many lose their jobs and on the job many lose their lives: every fifteen seconds a worker dies, murdered by what they call “workplace accidents.”

  Insecurity is the politicians’ preferred topic when they want to unleash the hysteria that wins elections. Danger, danger, they declare, on every corner there’s a thief, a rapist, a murderer. But those politicians never decry the dangers of working,

  or the dangers of crossing the street, since every twenty-four seconds a pedestrian is killed, murdered by what they call “traffic accidents”;

  or the dangers of eating, since whoever is safe from hunger may well be poisoned by the chemicals in their food;

  or the dangers of breathing, since in cities clean air is like silence, a luxury item;

  or the dangers of being born, since every three seconds a child dies before reaching the age of five.

  April 29

  SHE DOESN’T FORGET

  Who knows all the shortcuts through Africa’s jungles?

  Who knows how to evade the menacing approach of ivory hunters and other wild predators?

  Who can read her own tracks and the tracks of all others?

  Who preserves the memory of all and sundry?

  Who emits signals that humans can neither hear nor decipher?

  Signals that frighten or assist or threaten or greet from ten miles distant?

  It is she, the elephant elder. The oldest, the wisest. The one who walks at the head of the herd.

  April 30

  MEMORY’S CIRCLES

  This afternoon in 1977, fourteen mothers of disappeared children met for the first time.

  From then on they searched as a group, as a group they knocked on doors that would not open. “All for all,” they said.

  They said, “All for our children.”

  Thousands upon thousands of children had been devoured by the Argentine military dictatorship, and more than five hundred children had been kidnapped and given to officers as war booty. The papers, radio, TV breathed not a word of it.

  A few months after their first meeting, three of those mothers, Azucena Villaflor, Esther Ballestrino and María Eugenia Ponce, also disappeared, just like their children, and like them they were tortured and murdered.

  But by then the Thursday meetings were unstoppable. Their white kerchiefs moved round and round the Plaza de Mayo and around the world.

  MAY

  May 1

  INTERNATIONAL WORKERS’ DAY

  The technology of shared flight: the first goose to take off opens the way for the next, who clears the path for the third, and the strength of the third raises the fourth, who then helps the fifth, and the impulse of the fifth pulls along the sixth, who offers wind to the seventh . . .

  When the lead goose tires, he goes to the back of the line and leaves his spot to another, who moves to the apex of the V the geese form in the air. Each takes a turn, forward and back, and none of them believes he is supergoose because he flies first or that flying last makes him a loser.

  May 2

  OPERATION GERONIMO

  Geronimo led the Apache resistance in the nineteenth century.

  This chief of the invaded earned himself a nasty reputation for driving the invaders crazy with his bravery and brilliance, and in the century that followed he became the baddest bad guy in the West on screen.

  Keeping to that tradition, “Operation Geronimo” was the name chosen by the US government for the execution of Osama bin Laden, who was shot and disappeared on this day in 2011.

  But what did Geronimo have to do with bin Laden, the delirious caliph cooked up in the image laboratories of the US military? Was Geronimo even remotely like this professional fearmonger who would announce his intention to eat every child raw whenever a US president needed to justify a new war?

  The name was not an innocent choice: the US military always considered the Indian warriors who defended their lands and dignity against foreign conquest to be terrorists.

  May 3

  DISHONOR

  At the end of 1979, Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan.

  The official justification was to defend a secular government trying to modernize the country.

  I was a member of an international tribunal in Stockholm that took up the case in 1981.

  I will never forget the dramatic climax of those sessions.

  A leading religious figure, representing the Islamic fundamentalists known at that time as “freedom fighters” and now called “terrorists,” was giving testimony.

  The elderly man screamed, “The Communists have sullied the honor of our daughters! They taught them to read and to write!”

  May 4

  WHILE THE NIGHT LASTS

  In 1937 Noel Rosa died at the age of twenty-six.

  A musician of the Rio de Janeiro night, who in his short life saw the beach only in photographs, he wrote and sang sambas in the bars of the city that sings them still.

  In one of those bars a friend bumped into him at the nocturnal hour of ten in the morning.

  Noel was humming a newborn tune.

  On the table stood two bottles. One beer, the other cheap rum.

  The friend knew that tuberculosis was killing him. Noel saw the worry in his friend’s face and felt obliged to instruct him in the nutritive properties of beer. Pointing to the bottle he declared, “This is better for you than a good meal.”

  The friend, not exactly convinced, pointed at the bottle of rum. “What about that?”

  And Noel explained, “How good is a good meal if you don’t have something with it?”

  May 5

  BY SINGING I REBUKE

  In 1932 Noel Rosa recorded his samba “Quem dá mais?,” a short history of a country that had been auctioned off:

  How much will he earn, that auctioneer

  who must be Brazilian as well

  selling off in lots of three

  all of Brazil, pray tell?

  A couple of years later Enrique Santos Discépolo painted a portrait of Argentina’s days of infamy in his tango “Cambalache”:

  Today they’re all of a piece

  the friend, the damned cheat,

  the dumbbell, the genius, the thief,

  the generous soul, the deadbeat.

  Go for it man, get it while you can . . .

  May 6

  APPARITIONS

  The stock market crash left journalist Jonathan Tilove without a job.

  But in 2009, while cleaning out his office in Washington, he saw the Virgin Mary i
n a coffee stain on his desk, and his luck changed.

  As the crisis deepened and everybody lost faith in economists and politicians and journalists, he wasn’t the only one to discover the Virgin in a cheese sandwich or an asparagus plant or a dental X-ray.

  May 7

  THE PARTY POOPERS

  In 1954 Vietnamese rebels gave the French army a tremendous beating at their supposedly invulnerable base in Dien Bien Phu. After a century of conquering colonies, glorious France had to exit Vietnam in a hurry.

  Then it was the United States’ turn. Unbelievable: the greatest power on earth and in space also suffered a humiliating defeat in this tiny, badly armed country populated by the poorest of the poor.

  A peasant of slow gait, few words led both of these exploits.

  His name was Ho Chi Minh, and they called him Uncle Ho.

  Uncle Ho wasn’t at all like other revolutionary leaders.

  An activist returning from a village once reported that there was no way to organize those people. “They’re a bunch of Buddhist yahoos. They spend all day meditating.”

  “Go back there and meditate,” Uncle Ho ordered.

  May 8

  THE TASMANIAN DEVIL

  This diabolical monster with flared nostrils and bone-crushing teeth is famous the world over.

  But the real devil of Tasmania did not come from hell. It was the British Empire that exterminated the population of this island off Australia, and did so in the noble pursuit of civilizing it.

  The last victim of the English war of conquest was named Truganini. A queen dispossessed of her queendom, she died on this day in 1876, and with her died the language and memory of her people.

  May 9

  BORN TO FIND HIM

  Howard Carter was born on this morning in 1874, and half a century later he understood why he had come into the world.

  The revelation came to him when he discovered the tomb of Tutankhamun.

  Carter located it through sheer stubbornness, after years of trying everywhere, battling discouragement and the fearmongering of his fellow Egyptologists.

  On the day of the great find, he sat at the foot of the shortlived pharaoh, the boy surrounded by a thousand marvels, and spent long hours in silence.

  He returned many times.

  One of those times he saw what he had not seen before: there were seeds on the floor.

  The seeds had spent three thousand two hundred years waiting for the hand that would plant them.

  May 10

  THE UNFORGIVABLE

  The poet Roque Dalton wielded a defiant wit, he never learned to shut up or take orders, and he laughed and loved fearlessly.

  On the eve of this day in the year 1975, his fellow guerrillas in El Salvador shot him dead while he slept.

  Criminals: rebels who kill to punish disagreement are no less criminal than generals who kill to perpetuate injustice.

  May 11

  MR. EVERYTHING

  Eugène François Vidocq died in Paris in 1857.

  Beginning the moment he held up his father’s bakery at the age of fourteen, Eugène was a thief, a clown, a thug, a deserter, a smuggler, a schoolteacher chasing after little girls, the idol of the bordellos, a businessman, a stool pigeon, a spy, a criminologist, a ballistics expert, the director of the Sûreté Générale (the French FBI), and the founder of the very first private detective agency.

  Twenty duels he fought. Five times he turned into a nun or a crippled veteran to escape from jail. He was a master of disguises, a criminal playing a policeman, a policeman playing a criminal, and he was the friend of his enemies and the enemy of his friends.

  Sherlock Holmes and other notables of European detective literature owe many of their skills to the tricks Vidocq learned from his life of crime, which he later applied to fighting it.

  May 12

  LIVING SEISMOGRAPHS

  In the year 2008 a terrible earthquake struck China.

  The seismograph was invented in China nineteen centuries ago, but no machine warned what was coming.

  What raised the alarm were the animals. Scientists paid them no heed, but starting a few days before the catastrophe, hordes of crazed toads took off in every direction, hopping wildly across the streets of Guiyang and other cities, while in the Wuhan zoo tigers roared, peacocks screeched and elephants and zebras threw themselves against the bars of their cages.

  May 13

  TO SING, TO SEE

  To see the worlds of the world, shift your eyes.

  To have the birds hear your song, shift your throat.

  So say, so know, the ancient sages born at the source of the Orinoco River.

  May 14

  SOMEONE ELSE’S DEBT

  On this day in 1948 the state of Israel was born.

  Within a few months, more than eight hundred thousand Palestinians had been deported and more than five hundred of their villages had been turned to rubble.

  Those villages, where olive, fig, almond and other fruit trees grew, now lie buried under highways, shopping malls and amusement parks. They are dead and unnamed on the map rechristened by the Government Names Committee.

  Not much of Palestine is left. The two thousand years of persecution suffered by the Jewish people was invoked to justify this implacable gluttony, complete with property titles granted by the Bible.

  Persecuting Jews had always been a European sport. Now the Palestinians are paying the bill.

  May 15

  MAY TOMORROW BE MORE THAN JUST ANOTHER NAME FOR TODAY

  In 2011 thousands of homeless and jobless youth occupied the streets and squares of several Spanish cities.

  Their outrage spread. Healthy outrage turned out to be more contagious than disease, and the voices of “the indignant” crossed the borders drawn on maps. Their words echoed around the world:

  They put us in the fucking street and here we are.

  Turn off the TV and turn on the street.

  They call it a crisis but it’s a rip-off.

  Not too little money, too many crooks.

  Markets rule. I didn’t vote for them.

  They decide for us without us.

  Wage slave for rent.

  I’m looking for my rights. Anyone seen them?

  If they won’t let us dream, we won’t let them sleep.

  May 16

  OFF TO THE LOONY BIN

  Groupers and other fish,

  dolphins,

  swans, flamingos, albatrosses,

  penguins,

  buffaloes,

  ostriches,

  koala bears,

  orangutans and other monkeys,

  butterflies and other insects

  and many more of our relatives in the animal kingdom have homosexual relations, female to female, male to male, for an encounter or a lifetime.

  Lucky for them they aren’t people or they’d be sent to the loony bin.

  Until this day in the year 1990, homosexuality featured on the World Health Organization’s list of mental illnesses.

  May 17

  HOME

  The twenty-first century has been walking through time for a few years now, and the number of people without adequate housing has reached one billion.

  To solve this problem, experts are looking into the Christian example of Saint Simeon Stylites, who lived for thirty-seven years atop a column.

  In the morning Saint Simeon would come down to pray and at night he would tie himself down, so he wouldn’t tumble off in his sleep.

  May 18

  MEMORY’S VOYAGE

  In 1781 Túpac Amaru was quartered with an ax in the middle of the Plaza de Armas in Cuzco.

  Two centuries later, a tourist asked a barefoot boy who shined shoes in that very spot if he had ever met Túpac Amaru. The little bootblack, without raising his head, said that yes, he knew him. While he continued working, he murmured, practically in secret, “He’s the wind.”

  May 19

  THE PROPHET MARK

  Mark Twain
proclaimed:

  “I came in with Halley’s Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year and I expect to go out with it . . . The Almighty has said, no doubt: ‘Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.’”

  The comet visited the earth around this time in 1910. Twain, impatient, died a month before.

  May 20

  A RARE ACT OF SANITY

  In 1998 France passed a law that reduced the workweek to thirty-five hours.

  Work less, live more: Thomas More dreamed of this in Utopia, but we had to wait five centuries before a country finally dared commit such an act of common sense.

  After all, what are machines for if not to reduce the time we spend working and to lengthen our hours of freedom? Why does technological progress have to come bearing the gifts of anguish and unemployment?

  For once, at least, a country dared to challenge all that nonsense.

  Sanity did not last. When the thirty-five-hour week was ten years old, it expired.

  May 21

  WORLD DAY FOR CULTURAL DIVERSITY

  In 1906 a pygmy captured in the jungle of the Congo arrived at the Bronx Zoo in New York.

  He was named Ota Benga and was exhibited to the public in a cage along with an orangutan and four chimpanzees. The experts explained that this humanoid might represent the missing link, and to confirm their hypothesis they displayed him playing with his hairy brothers.