Mirrors (61 page)

In colonial times, those Brazilian families who could afford the luxury sent their sons to study at the University of Coimbra in Portugal.

Later on, several schools were set up in Brazil to train lawyers and doctors: few of either, since potential clients were scarce in a country where the many had neither rights nor any medicine but death. Several schools, but no university.

Until 1922. That year Belgium’s King Leopold III announced plans to visit the country, and such an august presence merited a
doctor honoris causa,
which only a university could bestow.

Thus the university was hurriedly concocted and installed in a rambling old house occupied by the Imperial Institute of the Blind. Sadly, the blind had to be evicted.

And thus Brazil, which owes the best of her music, her soccer, her food, and her joy to blacks, gave an honorary doctorate to a king whose only merit was his membership in a family that specialized in exterminating blacks in the Congo.

ORIGIN OF SADNESS

Montevideo was not always gray. It was grayed.

Back around 1890, a traveler who visited Uruguay’s capital could still pay homage to “the city where bright colors triumph.” The houses that faced the street were red, yellow, blue . . .

Shortly thereafter, those in the know explained that such a barbaric custom was not proper for a European nation. To be European, no matter what the map said, one had to be civilized. To be civilized, one had to be serious. To be serious, one had to be sad.

And in 1911 and 1913, municipal ordinances specified that paving stones for sidewalks had to be gray and that “only paint that imitates the construction materials, like sandstone, brick, or stone in general, will be allowed” on street-facing facades.

Painter Pedro Figari mocked this example of colonial stupidity: “Fashion insists that even the doors, window-frames, and sunshades be painted gray. Our cities aspire to be like Paris . . . Montevideo, luminous city, is sullied, crushed, castrated . . . ”

And Montevideo succumbed to copyitis.

Even so, during those years Uruguay’s creative energies made it the epicenter of Latin American audacity. The country had free secular education before England, women’s suffrage before France, the eight-hour day before the United States, and legal divorce seventy years before it was restored in Spain. President José Battle, “Don Pepe,” nationalized public services, separated church and state, and changed the names of holidays. In Uruguay, Easter is still called Tourism Week, as if Jesus had the misfortune to be tortured and killed during his week off.

OUT OF PLACE

The painting made Édouard Manet famous is of a typical Sunday scene: two men and two women having a picnic on the grass on the outskirts of Paris.

Nothing out of the ordinary, save one detail. The men, impeccable gentlemen, are fully clothed and the women are completely naked. The men are discussing some serious topic, as men are wont to do, and the women are about as significant as the trees around them.

The woman in the foreground is looking at us. Perhaps she is asking, “Where am I? What am I doing here?”

Women are but decoration, and not only in the painting.

SOULLESS

Aristotle knew what he was talking about:

“A woman is like a deformed man. She lacks an essential element: a soul.”

Painting and sculpture were forbidden kingdoms for the beings without souls.

In sixteenth-century Bologna, there were five hundred and twenty-five painters, one of whom was a woman.

In the seventeenth century, the Académie des Beaux-Arts of Paris had four hundred and fifty members, fifteen of whom were women, all of them wives or daughters of male painters.

In the nineteenth century, Suzanne Valadon was a market vendor, a circus acrobat, and a model for Toulouse-Lautrec. She used corsets made of carrots and shared her studio with a goat. That she was the first woman who dared to paint male nudes surprised no one. She had to be nuts.

Erasmus of Rotterdam also knew what he was talking about:

“A woman is always a woman, in other words, crazy.”

RESURRECTION OF CAMILLE

The family declared her insane and had her committed.

Camille Claudel spent the last thirty years of her life in an asylum, held captive.

It was for her own good, they said.

In the asylum, a freezing prison, she refused to sketch or sculpt.

Her mother and her sister never visited her.

Once in a while her brother, Paul the saint, turned up.

When Camille the sinner died, no one claimed her body.

It was years before the world discovered that Camille had been more than the humiliated lover of Auguste Rodin.

Nearly half a century after her death, her works came back to life. They traveled and they astonished: bronze that dances, marble that cries, stone that loves. In Tokyo, the blind asked and were allowed to touch the sculptures. They said the figures breathed.

VAN GOGH

Four uncles and a brother were art dealers, yet he managed to sell but one painting in his entire life. Out of admiration or pity, the sister of a friend paid four hundred francs for a work in oils,
The Red Vineyard,
painted in Arles.

More than a century later, his works are on the financial pages of newspapers he never read,

the priciest paintings in galleries he never set foot in,
the most viewed in museums that ignored his existence,
and the most admired in academies that advised him to take up
another trade.

Today, Van Gogh decorates restaurants where no one would have served him,

the clinics of doctors who would have had him committed,
and the offices of lawyers who would have locked him away.

THAT SCREAM

Edvard Munch heard the heavens scream.

Sunset had passed, but in the sun’s wake tongues of fire were rising from the horizon, when the heavens screamed.

Munch painted that scream.

Now whoever sees his painting covers his ears.

The new century was born screaming.

PROPHETS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote
The Communist Manifesto
in the middle of the nineteenth century. They did not write it to understand the world, but to help change it. A century later, one-third of humanity lived in societies inspired by a pamphlet barely twenty-three pages long.

The
Manifesto
was an accurate prophecy. Capitalism is a sorcerer incapable of controlling the forces it unleashes, the authors said, and in our days anyone who has eyes in his face can see that at a glance.

But it never occurred to the authors that the sorcerer would have more lives than a cat,

or that big factories would disperse their labor force to reduce the costs of production and the threat of rebellion,

or that social revolutions would take place more frequently in countries called “barbarous” than in those called “civilized,”

or that the workers of the world would unite less often than they would divide,

or that the dictatorship of the proletariat would become the stage name for the dictatorship of the bureaucracy.

And thus, for what it said and what it did not, the
Manifesto
confirmed the most profound truth its authors had hit upon: reality is more powerful and astonishing than its interpreters. “Gray is theory and green the tree of life,” Goethe said, by way of the devil’s tongue. Anticipating those who would turn Marxism into an infallible science or an irrefutable religion, Marx used to caution that he was no Marxist.