Mirrors (59 page)

While every movie revolver blasted more bullets than a machine gun, the real towns where Westerns were set were makeshift little places, where yawns drowned out any shooting on the sound track.

Cowboys, those taciturn gents on horseback riding tall through the universe rescuing damsels in distress, were starving peons with no more female company than the cattle they drove through the desert, risking their lives for a pittance. They looked nothing like Gary Cooper or John Wayne or Alan Ladd, because they were black or Mexican or toothless whites who never knew the marvels of makeup.

And the Indians, condemned to working as extras in the role of the worst of the bad guys, were nothing like those feathered, war-painted, inarticulate retards who howled as they circled the stagecoach and peppered it with arrows.

The epic of the Wild West was the invention of a handful of immigrants from Eastern Europe with a keen eye for business. In the studios of Hollywood, Carl Laemmle, William Fox, the Warner brothers, Louis B. Mayer, and Adolph Zukor cooked up the most successful universal myth of the twentieth century.

BUFFALO BILL

In the eighteenth century, the colony of Massachusetts paid a hundred pounds sterling for every Indian scalp.

After the United States became independent, scalps were priced in dollars.

In the nineteenth century, Buffalo Bill Cody was crowned the greatest scalper of Indians and greatest exterminator of the buffalo that gave him his name and his fame.

Not long after the sixty million buffalo had been reduced to less than a thousand, and hunger had driven the last rebellious Indians to turn themselves in, Buffalo Bill took his grand show, the Wild West Circus, on a world tour. In a new city every two days, he rescued stagecoaches harried by savages, broke indomitable colts, and shot bullets that split a fly down the middle.

The hero interrupted the tour to spend the first Christmas of the twentieth century with his family.

Surrounded by loved ones and in the warmth of his home, he raised his glass, offered a toast, took a drink, and fell to the floor, stiff as a board.

In suing for divorce, he accused his wife, Lulu, of trying to poison him.

She confessed to having put something in his drink, but claimed it was a love potion, Dragon’s Blood was the brand, that a Gypsy had sold her.

THE AGES OF SITTING BULL

At thirty-two, baptism by fire. Sitting Bull defends his people against an enemy attack.

At thirty-six, his Indian nation elects him chief.

At forty-one, Sitting Bull sits. In the middle of a battle on the banks of the Yellowstone River, having walked toward the shooting soldiers, he sits down on the ground. He lights his pipe. Bullets zing like wasps. He remains immobile, smoking.

At forty-three, he learns that whites have found gold in the Black Hills, on lands reserved for the Indians, and their invasion has already begun.

At forty-four, during a long ritual dance, he has a vision: thousands of soldiers fall like grasshoppers from the sky. That night a dream tells him: “Your people will defeat the enemy.”

At forty-five, his people defeat the enemy. The Sioux and the Cheyenne, united, give General George Custer and his troops a tremendous thrashing.

At fifty-two, following years of exile and prison, he agrees to read a speech in honor of the completion of the Northern Pacific Railroad. At the end of his speech, he sets aside the papers, faces the audience, and says:

“I hate all white people. You are thieves and liars.”

The interpreter translates:

“We give thanks to civilization.”

The audience applauds.

At fifty-four, he gets a job in Buffalo Bill’s show. In the circus ring, Sitting Bull plays Sitting Bull. Hollywood is not yet Hollywood, but tragedy is already being repeated as farce.

At fifty-five, a dream tells him: “Your people will kill you.”

At fifty-nine, his people kill him. Indians wearing police uniforms bring an arrest warrant. In the gun battle, he dies.

ORIGIN OF DISAPPEARANCES

Thousands of unburied dead wander the Argentinean pampa. They are the disappeared from the last military dictatorship.

General Jorge Videla and his henchmen used disappearance as a weapon of war on a scale never before seen. He used it, but he did not invent it. A century beforehand, against Argentina’s native peoples, General Julio Argentino Roca employed the same masterpiece of cruelty, which obliges each victim to die and die again and go on dying, while his loved ones lose their minds chasing his elusive shadow.

In Argentina, as in all of the Americas, the Indians were the first disappeared. They disappeared before they even appeared. General Roca called his invasion of Indian lands the “conquest of the desert.” Patagonia was “an empty space,” a kingdom of nothing, inhabited by no one.

After that, Indians continued disappearing. Those who surrendered and gave up their land and everything else were called
indios reducidos:
reduced to the point of disappearing. And those who did not surrender and were defeated by gunfire and sword blows disappeared into numbers, becoming the nameless dead of military body counts. And their children disappeared too: divvied up as war booty, called by other names, emptied of memory, they became little slaves for the murderers of their parents.

TALLEST STATUE

At the end of the nineteenth century, bullets from Remingtons brought the clearing of the Patagonia to a close.

As the few survivors of the killing departed, they sang a lament:

Land of mine do not leave me,
no matter how far away I go.

During his trip through the region, Charles Darwin had already warned that the natives were dying out not by natural selection but due to a government policy of extermination. Domingo Faustino Sarmiento believed that savage tribes constituted “a danger to society,” and the architect of the final safari, General Roca, called his victims “wild animals.”

The army undertook the hunt in the name of public security, but the Indians’ lands were also tempting. When the Rural Society congratulated him on his mission accomplished, General Roca proclaimed :

“Forever free from Indian domination is this incredibly vast territory that now offers astonishing promise to immigrants and foreign capital.”

Six million hectares passed into the hands of sixty-seven landowners. When he died in 1914, Roca left his inheritors sixty-five thousand hectares of land stolen from the Indians.

During his lifetime, not all Argentines appreciated the dedication of this warrior for the fatherland, but death enhanced his stature: now his is the country’s tallest statue and thirty-five other monuments commemorate him, his figure graces the highest-denomination bill, and a city plus numerous avenues, parks, and schools bear his name.

LONGEST STREET

A massacre inaugurated Uruguay’s independence.

In July 1830, the constitution was approved, and a year later the new country was baptized in blood.

About five hundred Charrúa Indians, who had survived centuries of conquest, persecution, and harassment, were living north of the Negro River, exiles in their own land.

The new government summoned them to a meeting. The chiefs came accompanied by their people. They were promised peace, jobs, respect.

They ate, drank, and continued drinking until they passed out. Then, by sword and bayonet, they were executed.

This act of betrayal was termed a battle. And from then on the gulch where it occurred was called Salsipuedes—“Get out if you can.”

Very few men got out. The women and children were shared around, the former as flesh for the barracks, the latter as slaves for the posh families of Montevideo.

Fructuoso Rivera, Uruguay’s first president, planned and later celebrated “this civilizing mission to put an end to the raids of the savage hordes.”

Foretelling the crime, he had written: “It will be grand, it will be beautiful.”

The country’s longest street, which cuts across the city of Montevideo, bears his name.

MARTÍ

A father and son were strolling along Havana’s flower-filled streets when they ran across a bald and skinny gentleman hurrying as if he were late.