Children of the Days (12 page)

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Her best friend Cecilia testified in court on this day in the year 2008. She told of the agony she had suffered at the military base and admitted she had been the one who gave them Silvina's name, when she could no longer stand the daily and nightly torture.

“It was me. I took the executioners to the house where Silvina was. I saw them shove her out the door, hit her with their rifle butts, kick her. I heard her scream.”

Outside the courtroom, someone came over and asked her in a low voice, “After all that, how did you manage to go on living?”

And she answered, in a voice even lower, “Who told you I'm alive?”

Oscar Liñeira was another of the thousands of young men disappeared in Argentina. In military lingo, he was “transferred.”

Piero Di Monte, imprisoned at the same base, heard his last words: “I've got something to tell you. You know something? I've never made love. Now they're going to kill me and I never will.”

In 1782 the Quito municipal court ruled that Tomasa Surita had to pay the taxes on some cloth she had bought in Guayaquil.

Only males were legally authorized to buy or to sell, but she was still liable for the taxes.

“Let them collect it from my husband,” Tomasa said. “The law thinks we're idiots. If we women are idiots about getting paid, then we'll be idiots about paying too.”

The
United States of America v. Susan B. Anthony
, Northern District Court of New York, June 18, 1873.

“I think bicycling has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world,” said Susan B. Anthony.

Her companion in the struggle, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, said, “Woman is riding to suffrage on a bicycle.”

Certain physicians, like Philippe Tissié, warned that the bicycle might provoke abortion and cause sterility, while their colleagues insisted that this indecent apparatus might lead to depravity because it gave women pleasure when they pressed their intimate parts against the seat.

The truth is the bicycle gave women mobility, allowed them to leave the house and enjoy a dangerous taste of freedom. And it was the bicycle that sent the pitiless corset, which impeded pedaling, out of the clothes closet and into the museum.

Her soprano voice lent color to every syllable and won ovations in Rio de Janeiro.

By the end of the eighteenth century, Joaquina Lapinha became the first singer from Brazil to conquer Europe.

Carl Ruders, a Swedish opera fan, heard her in the year 1800 in a theater in Lisbon. Enthused, he praised “her good voice, imposing figure and great dramatic sense.”

“Unfortunately, Joaquina has very dark skin,” Ruders warned, “but she remedies that shortcoming with cosmetics.”

Today's soccer match in 2001 between Treviso and Genoa was a surprise.

One of Treviso's players, the Nigerian Akeem Omolade, was often greeted in Italy's stadiums with whistles and jeers and racist chants.

But today there was silence. The other ten Treviso players had all painted their faces black.