Mirrors (83 page)

The dead did not revive.

In March 2003, President George W. Bush accused Iraq of being on the verge of destroying the world with its weapons of mass destruction, “the most lethal weapons ever devised.”

Then the president invaded Iraq, sending planes and troops. He was acclaimed by journalists and by politicians, and his popularity sky-rocketed. The Republicans in power and the Democrats out of power became a single party united against terrorist aggression.

After the war had slaughtered Iraqis in vast numbers, most of them women and children, Bush confessed that the weapons of mass destruction never existed. “The most lethal weapons ever devised” were his own speeches.

In the following elections, he won a second term.

In my childhood, my mother used to tell me that a lie has no feet. She was misinformed.

ORIGIN OF THE EMBRACE

Thousands of years before its devastation, Iraq gave birth to the first love poem in world literature:

What I tell you
Let the weaver weave into song.

The song, in Sumerian, told of the encounter of a goddess and a shepherd.

That night, the goddess Ianna loved as if she were mortal. Dumuzi the shepherd was immortal as long as the night lasted.

LYING WARS

The war in Iraq grew out of the need to correct an error made by Geography when she put the West’s oil under the East’s sand. But no war is honest enough to confess:

“I kill to steal.”

“The devil’s shit,” as oil is called by its victims, has caused many wars and will certainly cause many more.

In Sudan, for instance, a huge number of people lost their lives between the final years of the twentieth century and the first years of the twenty-first, in an oil war that disguised itself as an ethnic and religious conflict. Derricks and drills, pipes and pipelines sprouted as if by magic in villages turned to ashes and in fields of ruined crops. In the Darfur region, where the butchery continues, the people, all Muslim, began to hate each other when they discovered there might be oil under their feet.

The killing in the hills of Rwanda also claimed to be an ethnic and religious war, even though killers and killed were all Catholics. Hatred, a colonial legacy, stemmed from the time when Belgium decreed that those who raised cattle were Tutsis and those who grew crops were Hutus, and that the Tutsi minority ought to dominate the Hutu majority.

In recent years, another multitude lost their lives in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in the service of foreign companies fighting over coltan. That rare mineral is an essential ingredient in cell phones, computers, microchips, and batteries, all of which are staples of the mass media. The media, however, forgot to mention coltan in their scant coverage of the war.

VORACIOUS WARS

In 1975, the king of Morocco invaded the homeland of the Saharan people and expelled the majority of the population.

Today Western Sahara is the last colony in Africa.

Morocco denies it the right to determine its own future, and thus admits to having stolen a country it has no intention of returning.

The Saharans, “children of the clouds,” pursuers of rain, have been handed a life sentence of constant anguish and perpetual nostalgia. In the desert, independence is harder to come by than water.

A thousand and one times, the United Nations has spoken out against the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian homeland.

In 1948, the founding of the state of Israel led to the expulsion of eight hundred thousand people. The Palestinians took with them the keys to their homes, as had the Jews kicked out of Spain centuries before. The Jews were never able to return to Spain. The Palestinians were never able to return to Palestine.

Those who stayed behind were condemned to live humiliated in territories that are nibbled away at daily by relentless incursions.

Susan Abdallah, a Palestinian, knows the recipe for making a terrorist:

Deprive him of food and water.

Surround his home with the machinery of war.

Attack him with all means at all times, especially at night.

Demolish his home, uproot his farmland, kill his loved ones.

Congratulations: you have created an army of suicide bombers.

WORLD-KILLING WARS

In the middle of the seventeenth century, Irish bishop James Ussher revealed that the world began in the year 404 before Christ, between dusk on Saturday, October 22, and nightfall the following day.

Regarding the end of the world, we don’t have such precise information. For sure, we fear its demise is not far off, given the feverish pace at which its murderers labor. The technological advances of the twenty-first century will no doubt equal the progress of the previous twenty thousand years of human history, but no one knows on which planet they will be celebrated. Shakespeare foretold it: “’Tis the times’ plague when madmen lead the blind.”

Machines built to help us live are helping us die.

Breathing and walking are forbidden in our great cities. Chemical bombardments melt the polar icecaps and the mountain snows. A California travel agency sells goodbye-glacier tours to Greenland. The sea eats away the shore and fishermen’s nets catch jellyfish instead of cod. Natural forests, riots of diversity, are turned into industrial forests or into deserts where not even the stones multiply. Since the beginning of this century, drought has put a hundred million peasant farmers in twenty countries at God’s mercy. “Nature has grown very tired,” wrote Spanish monk Luis Alfonso de Carvallo. That was in 1695. If only he could see us now.

When it isn’t drought, it’s flood. Year after year the number of never-ending floods, hurricanes, and cyclones grows. They call them natural disasters, as if nature were the aggressor and not the victim. World-killing disasters, poor-killing disasters: in Guatemala they say natural disasters are like old cowboy movies, because only the Indians die.

Why do the stars tremble? Perhaps they sense that soon we shall invade other heavenly bodies.

THE GIANT AT TULE

In the year 1586, Spanish priest Josep de Acosta caught sight of it in the town of Tule, three leagues from Oaxaca. “A bolt of lightning wounded this tree from the crown through its heart to the base. Before it was hit by lightning, they say it offered shade for a thousand men.”

And in 1630, Bernabé Cobo wrote that the tree had three doors wide enough to ride through on horseback.

It is still there. It was born before Christ, and it is still there. The oldest and largest living thing in the world. In the dense foliage of its branches, thousands of birds make their home.

This green god is doomed to solitude. No jungle is left to keep it company.

ORIGIN OF ROAD RAGE

Horses whinnied, coachmen cursed, whips whistled through the air.

The noble gentleman was in a fury. He had been waiting for what felt like centuries. His carriage was blocked by another carriage that was vainly trying to turn around amid many other carriages. He lost the little patience he had left, got out, unsheathed his sword, and sliced open the first horse he saw.