Children of the Days Read online

  Sometime later the pygmy was rescued by Christian charity.

  They did what they could but it was hopeless. Ota Benga refused to be saved. He would not speak, broke dishes at the table, hit anyone who tried to touch him. He was incapable of working any job, remained silent in the church choir and bit whoever tried to have a picture taken with him.

  At the end of the winter of 1916, after ten years of domestication, Ota Benga sat down in front of a fire, took off and burned the clothing he had been obliged to wear, then trained the pistol he had stolen on his heart.

  May 22

  TINTIN AMONG THE SAVAGES

  On this day in 1907 Belgian cartoonist Hergé, the father of comic-book hero Tintin, was born.

  Tintin incarnated the civilizing virtues of the white race.

  In his best-selling adventure, Tintin visited the Congo, still owned by Belgium, and there he laughed heartily at the ridiculous doings of black people and entertained himself hunting.

  He shot fifteen antelope, skinned a monkey for a disguise, blew up a rhinoceros with a stick of dynamite and stuck a gun into the open mouths of many crocodiles and pulled the trigger.

  Tintin said that elephants spoke much better French than black people. For a souvenir he killed one and pulled out its ivory tusks.

  The trip was a lot of fun.

  May 23

  MANUFACTURING POWER

  In 1937 John D. Rockefeller, owner of the world, king of oil, founder of Standard Oil Company, passed away.

  He had lived for nearly a century.

  The autopsy found not a single scruple.

  May 24

  THE HERETICS AND THE SAINT

  This day in the year 1543 marked the end of Nicolaus Copernicus’s life.

  He died as the first copies of his book, which demonstrated that the earth moved around the sun, went into circulation.

  The Church condemned the book as “false and altogether contrary to Holy Scripture,” sent the priest Giordano Bruno to the stake for spreading its ideas, and obliged Galileo Galilei to deny he had read and believed it.

  Three and a half centuries later, the Vatican repented of roasting Giordano Bruno alive and announced it would erect a statue of Galileo in its gardens.

  God’s embassy on earth takes its time to rectify things.

  But even as the Vatican pardoned these heresies, it beatified Cardinal Inquisitor Roberto Bellarmino—Saint Robert who art in heaven—the man who charged and sentenced Bruno and Galileo.

  May 25

  HERESIES

  In the year 325 in the city of Nicaea, Emperor Constantine I convened the first ecumenical council of Christendom. During the three months it sat, the three hundred bishops in attendance approved a creed vital for the struggle against heresy, and decided that the word “heresy,” from the Greek hairesis, which means “choice,” from then on would mean “error.”

  In other words, whoever freely chooses to disobey the owners of the faith is wrong.

  May 26

  SHERLOCK HOLMES DIED TWICE

  The first death of Sherlock Holmes occurred in 1891. His father killed him: the writer Arthur Conan Doyle couldn’t stand the fact that his pedantic offspring was more famous than he was. So, up in the Alps he threw Sherlock off a cliff.

  The news came out shortly thereafter in Strand magazine. Then the whole world dressed in mourning, the magazine lost readers and the writer lost friends.

  The resurrection of the most famous of all detectives was not long in coming.

  Conan Doyle had no choice but to bring him back to life.

  Of Sherlock’s second death nothing is known. No one answers the telephone in his Baker Street home. His time must have come by now because we all have to die, though it is curious that his obituary has never appeared in the Times.

  May 27

  BELOVED VAGABOND

  Fernando passed away today in 1963.

  He was a free spirit who belonged to everyone and to no one.

  When he tired of chasing cats across squares, he’d hit the streets with his singing and guitar-playing buddies and rumba with them from party to party, always chasing the music wherever it happened to be.

  He never missed a concert. A critic with a cultivated ear, he’d wag his tail if he liked what he heard, growl if he didn’t.

  Whenever the dogcatcher got hold of him, a crowd would set him free. Whenever a car nipped him, the best doctors would take him in and treat him.

  His carnal sins, committed in the middle of the street, tended to be punished with swift kicks that left him limping, and then the children’s brigade of the Progreso Club would give him intensive care.

  Three statues of Fernando grace his city, Resistencia, in Argentina’s Chaco.

  May 28

  OŚWIȨCIM

  Today in the year 2006, Pope Benedict, the supreme pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church, took a walk in the gardens of the city called, in Polish, Oświęcim.

  At a certain point the scenery changed.

  In German the city of Oświęcim is called Auschwitz.

  And in Auschwitz, the pope spoke. From the most famous death factory in the world, he asked, “And God, where was He?”

  No one told him that God had never changed his address.

  He asked, “Why did God remain silent?”

  No one pointed out that it was the Church that remained silent, the Church that spoke in God’s name.

  May 29

  VAMPIRES

  In the summer of 1725, Petar Blagojevic got out of his coffin in the village of Kisiljevo, bit nine neighbors and drank their blood. By order of the Austrian government, then in charge in these parts, the forces of order killed him definitively by driving a stake through his heart.

  Petar was the first officially recognized vampire, and the least famous.

  The most successful, Count Dracula, was born from the pen of Bram Stoker in 1897.

  More than a century later Dracula retired. What forced him out wasn’t the competition from the silly little vampires of Hollywood, which didn’t bother him in the least. No, he was tormented by feats of a different magnitude.

  Faced with the mighty gluttons who founded banks then made them founder, swilling blood as if the whole world were a neck, he knew his inferiority complex was terminal.

  May 30

  FROM THE STAKE TO THE ALTAR

  On this day in 1431, a nineteen-year-old girl was burned alive in the old marketplace at Rouen.

  She climbed the scaffold wearing an enormous cap, which said:

  Heretic,

  Recidivist,

  Apostate,

  Idolatress.

  After she was burned to death, her body was thrown from a bridge into the Seine, so the waters would carry her far away.

  She had been condemned by the Catholic Church and the Kingdom of France.

  Her name was Joan of Arc.

  Heard of her?

  May 31

  THE INCOMBUSTIBLE LADY

  Signora Girardelli, worker of wonders, left the European public bug-eyed back in the year 1820.

  She caressed her arms with lit candles, danced barefoot on red-hot irons, bathed in flames, gulped mouthfuls of boiling oil, swallowed fire, chewed up burning sticks and spit them out as pounds sterling . . . After such ardent exhibitions she showed off her unblemished body, her snow-white skin, and basked in applause.

  Skeptics said, “These are tricks.”

  She said not a word.

  JUNE

  June 1

  SAINTLY MEN

  In the year 2006 the Charity, Freedom and Diversity Party sought legal recognition in the Netherlands.

  This new political group said it represented “men who express their sexuality and erotic lives in free relations with boys and girls.”

  The party platform called for legalizing child pornography and sexual relations with minors.

  Eight years before, these campaigners for charity, freedom and diversity founded International BoyLove Da
y on the Internet.

  The party failed to collect the required number of signatures, never took part in any elections and, in the year 2010, committed suicide.

  June 2

  INDIANS ARE PERSONS

  In 1537 Pope Paul III issued a bull, “Sublimus Dei.”

  The bull admonished those “who, wishing to fulfill their greed, dare to affirm that Indians should be treated as dumb brutes created for our service, under the pretense that they are incapable of receiving the Catholic Faith.”

  In defense of the aboriginal people of the New World, it established that “Indians are truly men . . . and thus they may and should, freely and legitimately, enjoy their liberty and the possession of their property, and should not be in any way enslaved.”

  In America, nobody caught wind of it.

  June 3

  ATAHUALPA’S REVENGE

  The town of Tambogrande slept on a bed of gold.

  Gold lay under the houses, unbeknownst to anyone.

  The news arrived along with the eviction orders. The Peruvian government had sold the entire town to Manhattan Minerals Corp.

  Now you will all be millionaires, they were told. But no one obeyed. On this day in the year 2002, the result of a plebiscite was announced: the inhabitants of Tambogrande had decided to continue living from avocados, mangos, limes and other fruits of the land they had worked so hard to wrest from the desert.

  Well they knew that gold curses the places it inhabits: it blows apart the hills with dynamite and poisons the rivers with tailings that contain more cyanide than blessed water.

  Maybe they also knew that gold makes people crazy, because with gold the more you eat the hungrier you get.

  In 1533, Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro ordered Atahualpa strangled, even though the king of Peru had given him all the gold he demanded.

  June 4

  MEMORY OF THE FUTURE

  According to what we learned in school, the discovery of Chile took place in 1536.

  The news did not impress the Mapuches, who had discovered Chile three thousand years before.

  In 1563 they surrounded the main fort of the Spanish conquistadors.

  Besieged by thousands of furious Indians, the fort was on the point of surrender when Captain Lorenzo Bernal clambered up on the palisade and shouted, “We will win in the end! We don’t have Spanish women, so we’ll have yours. And with them we’ll have children who will be your masters.”

  The interpreter translated. Colocolo, the Indian leader, listened the way one listens to rain fall.

  He did not understand the sad prophecy.

  June 5

  NATURE IS NOT MUTE

  Reality paints still lifes.

  Disasters are called natural, as if nature were the executioner and not the victim. Meanwhile the climate goes haywire and we do too.

  Today is World Environment Day. A good day to celebrate the new constitution of Ecuador, which in the year 2008, for the first time in the history of the world, recognized nature as a subject with rights.

  It seems strange, this notion that nature has rights as if it were a person. But in the United States it seems perfectly normal that big companies have human rights. They do, ever since a Supreme Court decision in 1886.

  If nature were a bank, they would have already rescued it.

  June 6

  THE MOUNTAINS THAT WERE

  Over the past two centuries, four hundred seventy mountains have been decapitated in the Appalachians, the North American range named in memory of the region’s native people.

  Because they lived on fertile lands the Indians were evicted.

  Because they contained coal the mountains were hollowed out.

  June 7

  THE POET KING

  Nezahualcóyotl died twenty years before Columbus first set foot on the beaches of America.

  He was the king of Texcoco in the vast valley of Mexico.

  There, he left us his voice:

  It breaks, even if it be gold,

  it shatters, even if it be jade,

  it rends, even if it be a quetzal’s plumage.

  Here no one lives forever.

  Princes too come to die.

  All of us must go on to the region of mystery.

  Could it be we came to the earth in vain?

  At least we leave behind our songs.

  June 8

  SACRILEGE

  In the year 1504, Michelangelo unveiled his masterpiece: David stood tall in the main plaza of the city of Florence.

  Insults and stones greeted this utterly naked giant.

  Michelangelo was obliged to cover its indecency with a grape leaf, sculpted in bronze.

  June 9

  SACRILEGIOUS WOMEN

  In the year 1901, Elisa Sánchez and Marcela Gracia got married in the church of Saint George in the Galician city of A Coruña.

  Elisa and Marcela had loved in secret. To make things proper, complete with ceremony, priest, license and photograph, they had to invent a husband. Elisa became Mario: she cut her hair, dressed in men’s clothing, and faked a deep voice.

  When the story came out, newspapers all over Spain screamed to high heaven—“this disgusting scandal, this shameless immorality”—and made use of the lamentable occasion to sell papers hand over fist, while the Church, its trust deceived, denounced the sacrilege to the police.

  And the chase began.

  Elisa and Marcela fled to Portugal.

  In Oporto they were caught and imprisoned.

  But they escaped. They changed their names and took to the sea.

  In the city of Buenos Aires the trail of the fugitives went cold.

  June 10

  AND A CENTURY LATER

  Around this time in the year 2010, debate began in Buenos Aires on a bill to legalize gay marriage.

  Its enemies launched “God’s war against weddings from Hell,” but the bill kept clearing the hurdles in its path and on July 15 Argentina became the first Latin American country to recognize the equality of women and men all across the sexual spectrum.

  It was a defeat for the ruling hypocrisy, which expects us to live obeying and to die dissembling, and it was a defeat for the Holy Inquisition, which may change its name but never lacks fuel for the fire.

  June 11

  THE MAN WHO SOLD THE EIFFEL TOWER

  Count Victor Lustig, prophet of the Wall Street whiz kids to come, adopted several names and several titles of nobility, resided in several prisons in several countries, and in several languages was able to lie with utter sincerity.

  At noon on this day in 1925 the count was reading the newspaper in the lobby of the Hotel de Crillon in Paris, when he was struck by one of those great ideas that could finance his appetites whenever he tired of playing poker.

  He sold the Eiffel Tower.

  He printed up paper and envelopes with the seal of city hall and an engineer crony helped him write technical reports that proved the tower was falling down due to irreparable errors in its construction.

  The count visited potential clients, one by one, and invited them to purchase the thousands upon thousands of tons of steel for a song. Because it involved the most public symbol of the French nation, the deal had to be done in secret. Scandal was to be avoided at all cost. The sales took place in silence and with some urgency, since the tower could have collapsed at any moment.

  June 12

  THE MYSTERY EXPLAINED

  In the year 2010 the war against Afghanistan divulged its raison d’être: the Pentagon revealed that the country had mineral resources worth more than a trillion dollars.

  The Taliban were not among the resources named.

  Rather gold, cobalt, copper, iron and above all lithium, an essential ingredient in cellular telephones and laptop computers.

  June 13

  COLLATERAL DAMAGE

  Around this time in 2010 it came out that more and more US soldiers were committing suicide. It was nearly as common as death in combat.


  The Pentagon promised to hire more mental health specialists, already the fastest-growing job classification in the armed forces.

  The world is becoming an immense military base, and that base is becoming a mental hospital the size of the world. Inside the nuthouse, which ones are crazy? The soldiers killing themselves or the wars that oblige them to kill?

  June 14

  FLAG AS DISGUISE

  On this day in 1982 the Argentine dictatorship lost the war. Without even so much as a shaving nick, the generals, who had sworn to give their lives to recover the Falkland Islands long ago usurped by the British Empire, tamely surrendered.

  Here is the military division of labor: these heroic rapists of handcuffed women, these brave torturers and baby-snatchers and pocketers of everything else they could steal, made patriotic speeches; and young recruits from the poorest provinces marched off to the slaughterhouse of those far-off southern islands, where they died from bullets or the cold.

  June 15

  A WOMAN TALKS

  Several Argentine generals were tried for deeds committed during the military dictatorship.

  Silvina Parodi, a student accused of being a rabble-rousing troublemaker, was one of the many prisoners who disappeared forever.