Children of the Days (6 page)

Georgia O'Keeffe lived and painted for nearly a century and died still painting.

She raised a garden of paintings in the solitude of the desert.

Georgia's flowers—clitoris, vulva, vagina, nipple, belly button—were chalices for a thanksgiving mass for the joy of having been born a woman.

In the year 1770, the English Parliament debated a law to punish wily women.

Perfidious females had been seducing His Majesty's subjects and tricking them into matrimony using such evil arts as “scents, paints, cosmetic washes, artificial teeth, false hair, Spanish wool, iron stays, hoops, high-heeled shoes or bolstered hips.”

The authors of these frauds, the bill said, “shall incur the penalty of the law in force against witchcraft and the like misdemeanours and the marriage, upon conviction, shall stand null and void.”

Given the technological backwardness of the times, the bill failed to mention silicone, liposuction, Botox, plastic surgery and other medical and chemical innovations.

Today is International Women's Day.

Over the millennia, thinkers human and divine, all of them male, have taken up the woman question:

Regarding their anatomy:

Aristotle: “Woman is an incomplete man.”

Saint Thomas Aquinas: “Woman is the misbegotten product of some defect in the male seed.”

Martin Luther: “Men have broad shoulders and narrow hips, and accordingly they possess intelligence. Women have narrow shoulders and wide hips, to keep house and bear and raise children.”

Regarding their nature:

Francisco de Quevedo: “Hens lay eggs and women lay men.”

Saint John of Damascus: “Woman is a sicked she-ass.”

Arthur Schopenhauer: “Woman is an animal with long hair and short sight.”

Regarding their fate:

Jehovah said to women, according to the Bible: “Thy husband shall rule over thee.”

Allah said to Mohammed, according to the Koran: “Righteous women are obedient.”

On this early morning in 1916, Pancho Villa crossed the border with his horsemen, set fire to the city of Columbus, killed several soldiers, nabbed a few horses and guns, and the following day was back in Mexico to tell the tale.

This lightning incursion is the only invasion the United States has suffered since its wars to break free from England.

In contrast, the United States has invaded practically every country in the entire world.

Since 1947 its Department of War has been called the Department of Defense, and its war budget the defense budget.

The names are an enigma as indecipherable as the Holy Trinity.

On this night in 1712, the Devil visited the young violinist Giuseppe Tartini and played for him in his dreams.

Giuseppe wanted the music to go on forever, but when he awoke it was gone.

In search of that lost music, Tartini composed two hundred and nineteen sonatas, which he played with fruitless mastery throughout his life.

The public applauded his failures.

In 1931 a baby named Rupert was born in Australia.

In a few short years Rupert Murdoch became lord and master of the media throughout the world.

His astonishing success came not only thanks to his astute command of the dirty deal. Rupert understood the inner workings of capitalism, secrets he learned as a twenty-something student, when he was an admirer of Lenin and a reader of Marx.

Mount Fuji, symbol of Japan, glows red.

The clouds filling the sky are red with plutonium, yellow with strontium, purple with cesium, all of them bearing cancer and other monstrosities.

Six nuclear plants have exploded.

People flee in desperation but there is nowhere to go. “They tricked us! They lied to us!”

Some throw themselves into the sea or the void, just to hurry fate along.

Akira Kurosawa dreamed this nightmare and filmed it twenty years before the apocalyptic nuclear catastrophe his country suffered at the beginning of 2011.

On this day in the year 2007, the banana company Chiquita Brands, successor to United Fruit, admitted to financing Colombian paramilitary gangs during seven years, and agreed to pay a fine.

The gangs offered protection against strikes and other untoward behavior by labor unions. One hundred and seventy-three union activists were murdered in the banana region during those years.

The fine was twenty-five million dollars. Not a single penny reached the families of the victims.

In 1883 a crowd gathered for Karl Marx's funeral in a London cemetery—a crowd of eleven, counting the undertaker.

The most famous of his sayings became his epitaph: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.”

This prophet of global change spent his life fleeing the police and his creditors.

Regarding his masterwork, he said: “No one ever wrote so much about money while having so little.
Capital
will not even pay for the cigars I smoked writing it.”

At dawn today in the year 44 BC, Calpurnia woke up in tears.

She had dreamed her husband had been stabbed and was dying in her arms.

Calpurnia told him the dream, and still sobbing pleaded with him to remain at home, for outside only his grave awaited.

The supreme ruler, dictator for life, divine warrior, undefeated god, could not pay heed to a woman's dream.

Julius Caesar pushed her aside and walked toward the Roman Senate, to his death.

Around this day and others, festivals are held to celebrate people who tell tales out loud, writing in the air.

Storytellers have several divinities to inspire and support them.

One is Rafuema, the grandfather who recounted the origin of the Huitoto people in the Araracuara region of Colombia.

Rafuema told the story that the Huitotos were born from the words that told the story of their birth. And every time he told it, the Huitotos were born again.

Carlos and Gudrun Lenkersdorf were born and raised in Germany.

In the year 1973, these two illustrious professors arrived in Mexico. They entered the world of the Mayas in a Tojolabal community and they introduced themselves by saying, “We have come to learn.”

The Indians remained silent.

After a while, one of them explained the silence: “This is the first time anyone has told us that.”

And there they remained, Gudrun and Carlos, learning year after year.

From the Mayan language they learned that no hierarchy separates subject from object, because I drink the water that drinks me and I am watched by all that I watch. And they learned to greet people in the Maya way:

“I'm another you.”

“You're another me.”

In the Andes, the Spanish conquistadors banished the indigenous gods and stamped out all idolatry.

But somewhere around the year 1560, the gods returned. They traveled on their long wings from who knows where, and they entered the bodies of their children from Ayacucho to Oruro, and inside those bodies they began to dance. The dances, which spelled rebellion, were punished with lash or noose, but the gods kept dancing on and on, announcing the end of all humiliation.

In the Quechua language the word
ñaupa
means “was,” but it also means “will be.”

In 1895 the Lumière brothers, Louis and Auguste, shot a very short film of workers leaving a factory in Lyon.

That movie, the first in history, was seen by a small circle of friends and no one else.

Not until December 28 did the Lumière brothers give it a public showing, along with nine more of their shorts, which also recorded fleeting moments from real life.

In the basement of the Grand Café in Paris, that marvelous spectacle, child of the magic lantern, the wheel of life and other arts of illusionists, had its premiere.

Full house. Thirty-five people at a franc a seat.

Georges Méliès was in the audience. He wanted to buy their movie camera. Since they wouldn't sell it to him, he had to invent his own.

On March 20 in the year 2003, Iraq's air force bombed the United States.

On the heels of the bombs, Iraqi troops invaded US soil.

There was collateral damage. Many civilians, most of them women and children, were killed or maimed. No one knows how many, because tradition dictates tabulating the losses suffered by invading troops and prohibits counting victims among the invaded population.

The war was inevitable. The security of Iraq and of all humanity was threatened by the weapons of mass destruction stockpiled in United States arsenals.

There was no basis, however, to the insidious rumors suggesting that Iraq intended to keep all the oil in Alaska.

In the entire history of human butchery, World War II was the war that killed the most people. But the accounting came up short.

Many soldiers from the colonies never appeared on the lists of the dead. They were Australian aborigines, Indians, Birmanians, Filipinos, Algerians, Senegalese, Vietnamese, and so many other black, brown and yellow people obliged to die for the flags of their masters.

When they are alive, people are ranked first, second, third or fourth class. When they are dead too.

We are made of water.

From water life bloomed. Rivers of water are the blood that nourishes the earth, and of water too are the cells that do our thinking, the tears that do our crying and the recollections that form our memory.

Memory tells us that today's deserts were yesterday's forests and that the dry world knew well enough to stay wet in those remote days when water and earth belonged to no one and to everyone.

Who took the water? The monkey that raised the club. If I remember correctly, that's how the movie
2001: A Space Odyssey
begins. The unarmed monkey, meanwhile, got clubbed to death.

Sometime later, in the year 2009, a space probe discovered water on the moon. The news sparked plans of conquest.

Sorry, moon.

With a well-aimed swipe, General Efraín Ríos Montt overthrew another general in the year 1982 and proclaimed himself president of Guatemala.

A year and a half later, the president, a pastor of the California-based Church of the Word, claimed victory in the holy war that exterminated four hundred and forty indigenous communities.

He said the feat would not have been possible without the assistance of the Holy Spirit, who commanded his intelligence services. Another important collaborator, his spiritual advisor Francisco Bianchi, explained to a correspondent of the
New York Times:

“The guerrillas have many collaborators among the Indians. Those Indians are subversives, aren't they? And how do you put an end to subversion? Obviously, you have to kill those Indians. And then people will say, ‘You are massacring innocents.' But they are not innocent.”