Children of the Days (22 page)

“Who could lay siege to Tenochtitlán?” the songs asked. “Who could move the foundations of heaven?”

In the year 1519 messengers reported to Aztec king Moctezuma that several strange beings were on their way to Tenochtitlán. They spit thunder and had metal breasts, hairy faces and six-legged bodies.

Four days later the monarch welcomed them.

They had arrived on the very same sea by which the god Quetzalcóatl had departed in ancient times, and Moctezuma believed that Hernán Cortés was the god returning. He said to him, “You have come home.”

And he handed Cortés the crown and gave him offerings of gold: gold ducks, gold tigers, gold masks, gold and more gold.

Then, without unsheathing his sword, Cortés took the king prisoner in his own palace.

In the end, Moctezuma was stoned to death by his people.

In 1714 Bernardino Ramazzini died in Padua.

He was an unusual physician, who always began by asking, “What work do you do?”

That this might matter had never occurred to anyone before.

His experience allowed him to write the first treatise on occupational health, in which he described, one by one, the most common illnesses in more than fifty jobs. He demonstrated that there was little point in treating workers who must swallow their hunger and live deprived of sun and rest in shuttered workshops that are airless and filthy.

King Charles II was born in Madrid in 1661.

During his forty years he never managed to stand up or speak without drooling or keep the crown from falling off his head, a head that never hosted a single idea.

Charles was his aunt's grandson, his mother was his father's niece and his great-grandfather was his great-grandmother's uncle: the Hapsburgs liked to keep things close to home.

So much devotion to family put an end to them.

When Charles died, the dynasty in Spain died with him.

One night in 1619, when René Descartes was still quite young, he dreamed all night long.

As he told it, in the first dream he was bent over, unable to straighten up, struggling to walk against a fierce wind that propelled him toward school and church.

In the second dream a bolt of lightning knocked him out of bed and the room filled up with sparks that illuminated everything in sight.

And in the third, he opened an encyclopedia, looking for a way to live his life, but those pages were missing.

They flew to Monterrey in a private plane.

There, in the year 2008, they kicked off their triumphant tour. They were declared distinguished guests and were put on nine floats to tour the town.

It was as if they were politicians on a victory lap, but they weren't.

They were mummies, mummies from the cholera plague that devastated the city of Guanajuato more than a century and a half before.

The eleven women, seven men, five children and a bodiless head, all dressed for a party, then crossed the border. Though these mummies were Mexican, no one asked for their passports, nor did the border guards harass them.

They continued unimpeded to Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Chicago, where they paraded under flowered arches to cheering crowds.

On a day like today in 1989, the Berlin Wall met its end.

But other walls were born to keep the invaded from invading the invaders,

to keep Africans from collecting the wages the slaves never received,

to keep Palestinians from returning to the country stolen from them,

to keep Saharawis from entering their usurped land,

to keep Mexicans from setting foot on the immense territory bitten off from their country.

In the year 2005, the most famous human cannonball in the world, David Smith, protested in his own way the humiliating wall that separates Mexico from the United States. An enormous cannon shot him high into the Mexican air and David fell, safe and sound, on the forbidden side of the border.

He had been born in the United States but, while his flight lasted, he was Mexican.

Brazilian physician Drauzio Varella calculated that the world invests five times as much in male sex stimulants and female silicone implants as in finding a cure for Alzheimer's.

“In a few years,” he prophesied, “we will have old women with huge tits and old men with stiff cocks, but none of them will remember what they are for.”

The first time was in Moscow on this day in 1821.

He was born again at the end of 1849 in Saint Petersburg.

Dostoevsky had spent eight months in prison awaiting the firing squad. At first he hoped it would never happen. Then he accepted that it would happen when it happened. And in the end, he wanted it to happen right now, the sooner the better, because waiting was worse than dying.

Thus it went until early one morning when he and the other condemned men were dragged in chains to Semenovsk Square on the banks of the Neva.

The commanding voice shouted orders, and at the first command the gunmen blindfolded their victims.

At the second command, the click-clack of guns being cocked rang out.

At the third command of “Aim,” there were pleas, moans, a few sobs. Then silence.

And silence.

And more silence. Until, in that silence without end, they were told that the tsar of all Russia, in a magnanimous gesture, had granted them a pardon.

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, born today in 1651, was the best.

No one else flew so high in her place and her time.

She entered the convent very young, believing that it would be less of a prison than the home. She was misinformed. By the time she found out, it was too late. She died years later, having been condemned to silence, this the most articulate of women.

Her jailers liked to shower her with praise, which she never believed.

On one occasion a court painter, sent by the Mexican Viceroy, painted a portrait that was something like a forerunner of Photoshop. She replied:

In 1851 the first edition of
Moby-Dick
was published in New York.

Herman Melville, a pilgrim on land and sea, had written a few successful books, but
Moby-Dick
, his masterpiece, never sold out its first printing and the books that followed met with no better fate.

Melville died in obscurity, having learned that success and failure are accidents of doubtful importance.

On this morning in 1889, Nellie Bly set off.

Jules Verne did not believe that this pretty little woman could circle the globe by herself in less than eighty days.

But Nellie put her arms around the world in seventy-two, all the while publishing article after article about what she heard and observed.

This was not the young reporter's first exploit, nor would it be the last.

To write about Mexico, she became so Mexican that the startled government of Mexico deported her.

To write about factories, she worked the assembly line.

To write about prisons, she got herself arrested for robbery.

To write about mental asylums, she feigned insanity so well that the doctors declared her certifiable. Then she went on to denounce the psychiatric treatments she endured, as reason enough for anyone to go crazy.

In Pittsburgh when Nellie was twenty, journalism was a man's thing.

That was when she committed the insolence of publishing her first articles.

Thirty years later, she published her last, dodging bullets on the front lines of World War I.

The first time was in Cuzco in 1934.

Hugo Blanco arrived in a country split in two, Peru.

He was born somewhere in between.

He was white, but was raised in a town, Huanoquite, where the buddies he played and ran with spoke Quechua, and he went to school in Cuzco, where the sidewalks were reserved for decent folk, and Indians were not allowed on.

Hugo was born the second time when he was ten years old. In school he heard the news from his town that Don Bartolomé Paz had branded an Indian peon named Francisco Zamata with a red-hot iron. This owner of lands and people had seared his initials, BP, on the peon's ass because he hadn't taken good care of his cows.

The matter was not so uncommon, but it branded Hugo for life.

Over the years, this man who was not Indian became one. He organized peasant unions and paid the price for his self-chosen disgrace with beatings and torture, jail and harassment and exile.

On one of his fourteen hunger strikes, when he could go on no longer, the government was so moved it sent him a casket as a present.

Being so nearsighted, he had no choice but to invent lenses that laid the foundations of modern optical science, as well as a telescope that discovered a new star.

And being a real gawker, he stared at a snowflake in the palm of his hand. He saw that its frozen soul was a six-pointed star, six, like the sides of the little cells in beehives. In his mind's eye he saw that the hexagonal form is the best use of space.

From the balcony of his house he discerned that the voyage of his plants in search of light was not circular, and he deduced that perhaps the voyage of the planets around the sun was not circular either. His telescope went on to measure the ellipses they describe on the sky.

He lived his life looking.

When he stopped seeing he died on this day in 1630.

The gravestone of Johannes Kepler says:

“I measured the heavens. Now the shadows I measure.”

Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos died today in 1959.

He had two sets of ears, one facing in, the other facing out.

In the early years, when he earned his living playing piano in a Rio de Janeiro whorehouse, Villa-Lobos found a way to concentrate on his opus: he closed his outer ears to the cacophony of guffaws and drunkenness, and he opened his inner ears to the music being born, note by note.

Much later, those inner ears would become his refuge against insults from the public and poison from the critics.

For the first time in 1615. His name was William Lamport, and he was a redhead and Irish.

He was born again when he changed his name and his country. He became Guillén Lombardo, a Spaniard, captain of the Spanish Armada.