Children of the Days (18 page)

The cook convened the calf, the suckling pig, the ostrich, the goat, the deer, the chicken, the duck, the hare, the rabbit, the partridge, the turkey, the dove, the pheasant, the hake, the sardine, the cod, the tuna, the octopus, the shrimp, the squid and even the crab and the turtle, who were the last to arrive.

When all were present and accounted for, the cook explained, “I have brought you here to ask what sauce you would like to be eaten with.”

One of the invitees responded, “I don't want to be eaten at all.”

The cook then adjourned the meeting.

About this time in the year 2000, one hundred and eighty-nine countries drew up the Millennium Declaration, by which they committed themselves to solving the world's most pressing problems.

Only one goal has been reached and it did not figure on their list: they managed to multiply the number of experts required to take on such a challenging agenda.

According to what I heard in Santo Domingo, one of those experts stopped by a chicken farm on the outskirts of the city belonging to Doña María de las Mercedes Holmes, and asked her, “If I tell you exactly how many chickens you have, will you give me one?”

He turned on his touch-screen tablet computer, initiated the GPS, connected with the satellite camera through his 3G cell phone and booted up the pixel-counting function.

“You have one hundred and thirty-two chickens.”

And he caught one.

Doña María de las Mercedes did not leave it at that. “If I tell you what your work is, will you give me back my chicken? Okay, you're an international expert. I know because you came without anyone calling you, you entered my chicken farm without asking permission, you told me something I already knew and then you charged me for it.”

The state of Sergipe, in Brazil's Northeast: Paulo Freire begins a new workday with a group of very poor peasant farmers he is teaching to read and write.

“How are you, João?”

João does not reply. He tugs on the brim of his hat. A long silence. Finally, he says, “I couldn't sleep. All night long I couldn't close my eyes.”

No more words come, until he murmurs, “Yesterday, for the first time ever, I wrote my name.”

José Artigas lived his life fighting astride a native pony and sleeping under the stars. When he governed the lands he freed, his throne was a cow's skull and his only uniform a poncho.

He went into exile with nothing but the clothes on his back, and he died in poverty.

Now, in Uruguay's most important square, an enormous bronze founding father mounted on a charging steed contemplates us from on high.

This triumphant champion decked out for glory is identical to every other statue of a venerable military hero the world over.

He claims to be José Artigas.

It happened in 1815 when Uruguay was not yet a country, not yet called Uruguay.

In the name of the people's rebellion, José Artigas expropriated “the lands of the bad Europeans and the worse Creole Americans,” and ordered the land shared out among all.

It was the first land reform in America, half a century before Lincoln's Homestead Act and a century before Emiliano Zapata broke up Mexico's haciendas.

“A criminal act,” the offended parties cried. Then to add insult to injury, Artigas informed them, “The least fortunate shall benefit most.”

Five years later, a defeated Artigas marched into exile and in exile he died.

The lands were taken back from the least fortunate, but inexplicably the voices of the vanquished still say, “Nobody is better than anybody else.”

Wanted:
for kidnapping countries.

Wanted:
for strangling wages and slashing jobs.

Wanted:
for raping the land, poisoning the water and stealing the air.

Wanted:
for trafficking in fear.

On this day in 1921 Amilcar Cabral was born in the Portuguese colony of Guinea-Bissau, in West Africa.

He led the war of independence for both Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde.

His words:

“Watch out for militarism. We are armed militants, not the military. None of this is incompatible with the joy of living.”

“Ideas don't live in the head alone. They live also in the soul and the heart and the stomach and everywhere else.”

“Learn from life, learn from our people. Hide nothing from our people. Tell no lies, expose them. Mask no difficulties, mistakes, failures. Claim no easy victories.”

In 1973 Amilcar Cabral was assassinated.

He wasn't around to celebrate the independence of the countries he had worked so hard to bring about.

If I remember correctly, Sandokan, prince and pirate, the Tiger of Malaysia, was born in 1883.

Sandokan, like the other characters that kept me company as a child, materialized from the hand of Emilio Salgari.

Salgari was born in Verona and never sailed farther than the Italian coast. He never visited the Gulf of Maracaibo or the Yucatán jungle or the slave ports of the Ivory Coast. He never met the pearl fishermen of the Philippines or the sultans of the Orient or the pirates of the high seas or the giraffes of Africa or the buffaloes of the Wild West.

But thanks to him I was there, I met them.

When my mother wouldn't let me cross the street, Salgari's novels carried me across the seven seas and several seas more.

Salgari introduced me to Sandokan and to Lady Marianna, his impossible love, to Yanez the sailor, to the Black Corsair and to Honorata, daughter of the Corsair's enemy, and to so many other friends he invented so they would save him from hunger and keep him company in his solitude.

On this evening in 1821, a handful of gentlemen drew up the Declaration of Independence of Central America, which they solemnly signed the following morning.

The Declaration states, or more accurately confesses, that they had to declare independence without delay, “to prevent the terrible consequences that would result should the people declare it themselves.”

In the year 2008, the New York Stock Exchange tanked.

Hysterical days, historical days: the bankers, those cleverest of bank robbers, had sucked their businesses dry, though none of them was ever caught on security camera and no alarm was ever tripped. By then a widespread crash was unavoidable. The collapse ricocheted around the world; even the moon was afraid of being laid off and having to relocate to another sky.

The magicians of Wall Street, experts at selling castles in the air, stole millions of homes and jobs, but only one of them went to prison. And when they hollered at the top of their lungs for help, for the love of God, their zeal was honored with the largest reward ever paid in human history.

That mountain of money would have fed all the hungry people in the world, dessert included, from here to eternity. The idea did not occur to anyone.

At two in the morning on this day in 1810, Miguel Hidalgo shouted the cry that opened the way to Mexico's independence.

When that famous alarum was about to turn one hundred in 1910, the dictator Porfirio Díaz held the festivities a day early to coincide with his birthday, and he celebrated the centenary in a big way.

Mexico City, painted and polished, received distinguished invitees from thirty countries: top hats, feathered caps, fans, gloves, gold, silk, speeches . . . The Ladies Committee hid the beggars and shod the street kids. Indians were trousered gratis, while anyone wearing traditional homespun cotton was banned. Don Porfirio laid the cornerstone of Lecumberri Prison and solemnly inaugurated the Central Insane Asylum, with capacity for a thousand patients.

A stirring parade presented the nation's history. Hernán Cortés, the first of the many volunteers who came to improve the race, was played by a student from the dental school, and a glum-looking Indian marched in an Emperor Moctezuma costume. The crowd cheered loudest for the float that featured a French court in the style of Louis XVI.

The centenary celebrations were over and all that glowing garbage was swept away.

And the revolution began.

History remembers the revolutionary leaders Zapata, Villa and other he-men. The women, who lived in silence, went on to oblivion.

A few women warriors refused to be erased:

Juana Ramona, “la Tigresa,” who took several cities by assault;

Carmen Vélez, “la Generala,” who commanded three hundred men;

Ángela Jiménez, master dynamiter, who called herself Angel Jiménez;

Encarnación Mares, who cut her braids and reached the rank of second lieutenant hiding under the brim of her big sombrero, “so they won't see my woman's eyes”;

Amelia Robles, who had to become Amelio and who reached the rank of colonel;

Petra Ruiz, who became Pedro and did more shooting than anyone else to force open the gates of Mexico City;

Rosa Bobadilla, a woman who refused to be a man and in her own name fought more than a hundred battles;

and María Quinteras, who made a pact with the Devil and lost not a single battle. Men obeyed her orders. Among them, her husband.

This day in 1915 marked the end of Susan La Flesche Picotte's life.

At the age of twenty-five, Susan had become the first indigenous woman to graduate from medical school in the United States. Up to then, there had been no doctor at all on the reservation where the Omaha Indians eked out their lives.

Susan was the first and the only, the doctor for every person and every purpose, day and night, steadfast and alone in sun and snow. She combined medicine learned with knowledge inherited, college cures with granny's remedies, so that the lives of the Omahas would hurt less and last longer.

The battle of Salamis ended five centuries before Christ.

Artemisia, the first female admiral in history, warned Persia's King Xerxes that the Strait of Salamis was the wrong place for the heavy Persian ships to battle the agile Greek triremes.

Xerxes paid no heed.

In the midst of the battle, when his fleet was getting roundly thrashed, he had no choice but to put Artemisia in command and thus save at least a few ships and some honor.

A red-faced Xerxes admitted, “My men have become women, and my women men!”

Meanwhile, far from there, a boy named Herodotus had his fifth birthday.

Some time later, he would tell this story.

In the year 2003 the fourth Women's World Cup took place.

At the end of the tournament, the Germans were the champions. In 2007 they won the world trophy a second time.

It was no walk down the garden path.

From 1955 to 1970 soccer had been forbidden to German women.

The German Football Association explained why: “In fighting for the ball feminine elegance vanishes, and both body and soul inevitably suffer damage. Displaying the body violates etiquette and decency.”

Girolamo Cardano wrote treatises on algebra and medicine, found the solutions to several unsolvable equations, was the first to describe typhoid fever, researched the causes of allergies and invented several instruments still in use by navigators.

In his spare time he made prophecies.

When he did an astrological chart for Jesus of Nazareth that showed his fate had been written in the stars, the Holy Inquisition put him in prison.