Mirrors (75 page)

JUSTICE IN FRANCO’S DAY

On the uppermost part of the dais, wrapped in his black toga, sits the presiding judge.

To his right, the defense lawyer.

To his left, the prosecutor.

Steps below and still empty, the bench for the accused.

A new trial is about to begin.

Speaking to the bailiff, Judge Alfonso Hernández Pardo orders:

“Bring in the guilty man.”

DORIA

In Cairo in 1951, fifteen hundred women invaded Parliament.

They stayed for hours and there was no getting them out. They shouted that Parliament was a lie because half the population could neither vote nor be elected.

Religious leaders, representing heaven, raised their cries heavenwards: “Voting degrades women and goes against nature!”

Nationalist leaders, representing the fatherland, denounced the proponents of women’s suffrage for treason.

Winning the right to vote was costly, but in the end it was won, along with other triumphs of the Union of the Daughters of the Nile. Then the government forbade the union from becoming a political party, and sentenced Doria Shafik, the movement’s living symbol, to house arrest.

That was not out of the ordinary. Nearly all Egyptian women were sentenced to house arrest, and many a woman left the house on three occasions only: to go to Mecca, to attend her wedding, and to attend her funeral.

FAMILY PORTRAIT IN JORDAN

One day in the year 1998, Yasmin Abdullah came home in tears. All she could say over and over was:

“I’m not a girl anymore.”

She had gone to visit her older sister.

Her brother-in-law had raped her.

Yasmin ended up in the Jweidah prison, where she remained until her father put up the bail and promised to take care of her.

By that time, the father, mother, uncles and aunts, and the entire neighborhood had resolved at an assembly to cleanse the family honor with blood.

Yasmin was sixteen.

Her brother, Sarhan, put four bullets in her head.

Sarhan spent six months in prison. He was treated as a hero. As were the twenty-seven other men imprisoned in similar cases.

One out of every four crimes committed in Jordan is a “crime of honor.”

PHOOLAN

Phoolan Devi had the terrible idea to be born poor and female and a member of one of India’s lowest castes.

In 1974, at the age of eleven, her parents married her to a man from a caste not quite as low, and gave him a cow for a dowry.

Since Phoolan knew nothing of conjugal duties, her husband taught her by torture and rape. And when she fled, he went to the police, and the police tortured and raped her. And when she returned to the village, the ox, her ox, was the only one who did not accuse her of being impure.

And she left. And she met a thief with a long and impressive record. He was the only man who ever asked if she was cold and if she felt all right.

Her thieving lover was shot down in the village of Behmai and she was dragged through the streets and tortured and raped by a number of landowners. And some time later, Phoolan returned to Behmai at night leading a gang of strongmen. She searched for those landowners house-to-house and found twenty-two of them. And she woke them up, one by one, and killed them.

By then Phoolan was eighteen. Along the entire length of the Yamuna River people knew she was the daughter of the goddess Durga, and as beautiful and violent as her mother.

MAP OF THE COLD WAR

A tough guy, a he-man with hair on his chest, is Senator Joseph McCarthy. In the middle of the twentieth century he bangs his fist on the table and bellows that his country is on the verge of being taken over by Communist totalitarianism, like the reigns of terror behind the Iron Curtain, where

freedom is suffocated,
books are banned,
ideas are banned,
people turn others in before they get turned in themselves,
anyone who thinks is a threat to national security,
and anyone who dissents is a spy for the imperialists.

Senator McCarthy sows fear across the United States. And under the sway of fear, which rules by terrifying,

freedom is suffocated,
books are banned,
ideas are banned,
people turn others in before they get turned in themselves,
anyone who thinks is a threat to national security,
and anyone who dissents is a spy for the Communists.

FATHER OF THE COMPUTER

Alan Turing was sneered at for not being a tough guy, a he-man with hair on his chest.

He whined, croaked, stuttered. He used an old necktie for a belt. He rarely slept and went without shaving for days. And he raced from one end of the city to the other all the while concocting complicated mathematical formulas in his mind.

Working for British intelligence, he helped shorten the Second World War by inventing a machine that cracked the impenetrable military codes used by Germany’s high command.

At that point he had already dreamed up a prototype for an electronic computer and had laid out the theoretical foundations of today’s information systems. Later on, he led the team that built the first computer to operate with integrated programs. He played interminable chess games with it and asked it questions that drove it nuts. He insisted that it write him love letters. The machine responded by emitting messages that were rather incoherent.

But it was flesh-and-blood Manchester police who arrested him in 1952 for gross indecency.

At the trial, Turing pled guilty to being a homosexual.

To stay out of jail, he agreed to undergo medical treatment to cure him of the affliction. The bombardment of drugs left him impotent. He grew breasts. He stayed indoors, no longer went to the university. He heard whispers, felt stares drilling into his back.

He had the habit of eating an apple before going to bed.

One night, he injected the apple with cyanide.

MOTHER AND FATHER OF CIVIL RIGHTS

Rosa Parks, a black passenger on a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama, refused to give up her seat for a white passenger.

The driver called the police.

The officers arrived, said, “The law is the law,” and arrested Rosa for disturbing the peace.

Then a little-known pastor named Martin Luther King launched a bus boycott from his church. He put it this way:

Cowardice asks the question:
“Is it safe?”
Expediency asks the question:
“Is it politic?”
Vanity asks the question:
“Is it popular?”
But Conscience asks the question:
“Is it right?”

And he too went to jail.

The boycott lasted more than a year and unleashed an unstoppable tide of protest against racial discrimination from coast to coast.

In 1968, in the southern city of Memphis, a bullet tore into Reverend King’s face after he had criticized the military machine for feeding on Negro flesh in Vietnam.

According to the FBI, he was a dangerous sort.

Like Rosa and the many other lungs behind the wind.

SOCCER CIVIL RIGHTS