Children of the Days (8 page)

Three thousand seven hundred years ago the king of Babylonia, Hammurabi, set down in law the rates dictated by the gods for medical services:

On this day in 1973, Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruíz y Picasso, more commonly known as Pablo Picasso, passed away.

He was born in 1881. It seems he liked it, because he kept being born and reborn.

In the year 2011 the population of Iceland said no for the second time to the International Monetary Fund.

The Fund and the European Union had decided that Iceland's three hundred twenty thousand inhabitants should be liable for the bankruptcy of its bankers, for which each and every Icelander owed a foreign debt of twelve thousand euros.

Such socialism in reverse was rejected in two plebiscites. “The debt is not our debt. Why should we pay it?”

In a world unhinged by the financial crisis, this small island lost in the waters of the North Atlantic offered us all a healthy lesson in common sense.

Healthy? Unhealthy? It all depends on your point of view. From the point of view of the pharmaceutical industry, bad health can be very good.

Take shyness, for example. This character trait used to be acceptable, even attractive. That is, until it became an illness. In the year 1980 the American Psychiatric Association decided that shyness was a psychological ailment and included it in its
Manual of Mental Disorders
, which is periodically updated by the high priests of Science.

Like all illnesses, shyness requires medication. Ever since the news broke, Big Pharma has made a fortune selling hope to patients plagued by this “social phobia,” “allergy to people,” “severe medical problem” . . .

On this day in the year 2002, a coup d'état turned the president of a business association into the president of Venezuela.

His glory did not last long. A couple of days later, Venezuelans filling the streets reinstated the president they had elected with their votes.

Venezuela's biggest TV and radio networks celebrated the coup, but somehow failed to cover the massive demonstrations that restored Hugo Chávez to his rightful place.

Unpleasant news is not worth reporting.

On a day like today in the year 33—a day earlier, a day later—Jesus of Nazareth died on the cross.

His judges had found him guilty of “inciting idolatry, blasphemy and abominable superstition.”

Not many centuries later, the Indians of the Americas and the heretics of Europe were found guilty of those same crimes—exactly the same ones—and in the name of Jesus of Nazareth they were punished by lash, gallows, or fire.

In the year 2009, in the atrium of the convent of Maní in the Yucatán, forty-two Franciscan brothers held a ceremony of restitution for injuries caused to indigenous culture.

“We ask forgiveness of the Maya people, for not having understood their worldview, their religion, for denying their divinities, for not having respected their culture, for having imposed over many centuries a religion they did not understand, for having treated as satanic their religious practices, and for having said and written that these were the work of the Devil and that their idols were Satan himself in the flesh.”

Four and a half centuries before, in that very place, another Franciscan brother, Diego de Landa, had burned the Mayas' books, and with them eight centuries of collective memory.

In the year 1588 Spain's
Invincible Armada
, then the largest fleet in the world, was defeated in a matter of hours.

In the year 1628 Sweden's most powerful warship, the
Vasa
, also known as
Invincible
, sank on its maiden voyage. It never made it out of Stockholm's harbor.

And on the night of this day in 1912, the world's safest and most luxurious ocean liner, humbly named
Titanic
, hit an iceberg and went down. This floating palace had few lifeboats, a uselessly small rudder, watchmen without binoculars and warning bells that were never heard.

In 1828 Francisco de Goya died in exile.

Harassed by the Inquisition, he had fled to France.

On his deathbed, between incomprehensible mutterings, Goya spoke of his beloved home on the outskirts of Madrid, on the banks of the Manzanares River. There, painted on the walls, was the best of his work, his most personal.

After his death the house was sold and resold, paintings and all, until the works were finally removed from the walls and transferred onto canvases. In vain they were put up for sale at the Paris Exposition. No one wanted to see, much less buy, those ferocious prophesies of the century to come, in which grief slaughtered color and horror shamelessly revealed its raw face. The Prado Museum did not wish to buy them either, and at the beginning of 1882 they entered its halls by donation.

The “black paintings” are now among the most visited in the museum.

“I painted them for myself,” Goya said.

He did not know that he painted them for us.

In the year 1881, Antonio Machado y Álvarez completed his anthology of flamenco songs, nine hundred couplets from the Gypsy songbook of Andalusia.

He published the book and the critics panned it. Flamenco's
cante jondo
evoked their scorn, because it was the work of Gypsies. But that's precisely why these couplets carry their music with them, in their clapping palms and in their stamping feet.

On this night in 1906, tenor Enrico Caruso sang
Carmen
at the Tivoli Opera House in San Francisco.

The ovation carried him all the way to the door of the Palace Hotel.

The master of bel canto slept poorly. As dawn was about to break, a violent tremor knocked him from his bed.

The earthquake, the worst in California history, killed more than three thousand people and demolished half the city's homes.

Caruso started running and did not stop until he got to Rome.

Today in 1955 Albert Einstein died.

For twenty-two years the FBI tapped his telephone, read his mail and went through his garbage.

They spied on Einstein because he was a spy for the Russians. So said his bulky police file. The file also said he had invented a death ray and a robot that could read minds. It said Einstein was a member, collaborator or fellow traveler of thirty-four Communist front organizations between 1937 and 1954, and was honorary chair of three Communist organizations. It concluded: “It seems unlikely that a man of his background could, in such a short time, become a loyal American citizen.”

Not even death saved him. They continued spying on him. Not the FBI, but his colleagues, men of science who sliced his brain into two hundred forty pieces and analyzed them to find an explanation for his genius.

They found nothing.

Einstein had already warned, “I have no special gift. I am only passionately curious.”

In 1987 the king of Morocco finished building a north–south wall across the Sahara Desert, on lands that do not belong to him.

This is the longest wall in the world, exceeded only by the Great Wall of China. All along it Moroccan soldiers block the Saharawi people from entering their land.

Several times the United Nations confirmed the people of Western Sahara's right to self-determination and called for a plebiscite to allow them to determine their own fate.

But the kingdom of Morocco has refused and continues to refuse. That refusal is a confession. By denying the vote, Morocco confesses to having stolen a country.

For forty years the Saharawi people have been waiting. They are condemned to a life sentence of anguish and nostalgia without parole.

They call themselves “children of the clouds,” because since time immemorial they have pursued the rains. They also pursue justice, which is harder to find than water in the desert.

It was among the largest military expeditions ever launched in the history of the Caribbean. And it was the greatest blunder.

The dispossessed and evicted owners of Cuba declared from Miami that they were ready to die fighting for devolution, against revolution.

The US government believed them, and their intelligence services once again proved themselves unworthy of the name.

On April 20, 1961, three days after disembarking at the Bay of Pigs, armed to the teeth and backed by warships and planes, these courageous heroes surrendered.

It happened in Spain in a town of La Rioja on the evening of this day in 2011, during an Easter procession.

A huge crowd watched in silence as Jesus Christ, being whipped by Roman soldiers, passed by.

A voice broke the silence.

Seated on his father's shoulders, Marcos Rabasco shouted at the man being whipped: “Fight back! Fight back!”

Marcos was two years, four months and twenty-one days old.