Mirrors (64 page)

Like the tango, the samba was not considered respectable: “dime-store music, nigger music.”

In 1917, the same year that Gardel ushered tango in the front door, samba burst on the scene during carnival one night in Rio de Janeiro. That night, which went on for years, the mute sang and the street lamps danced.

Not long after that, samba traveled to Paris and Paris went wild. The music, a meeting ground of all the musics of a prodigiously musical country, was irresistible.

But the Brazilian government, which at the time refused to allow blacks on the national soccer team, found Europe’s blessing discomfiting. The country’s most famous musicians now were black, and Europe might think Brazil was in Africa.

The master muse of those musicians, Pixinguinha, maestro of flute and sax, created an inimitable style. The French had never heard anything like it. More than playing music, he played with music and invited everyone to join the game.

ORIGIN OF HOLLYWOOD

On ride the masked men, wrapped in white sheets, bearing white crosses, torches held high: mounted avengers of the virtue of ladies and the honor of gentlemen strike fear into Negroes hungering for damsels’ white flesh.

At the height of a wave of lynchings, D. W. Griffith’s film
The Birth of a Nation
sings a hymn of praise to the Ku Klux Klan.

This is Hollywood’s first blockbuster and the greatest box office success ever for a silent movie. It is also the first film to ever open at the White House. President Woodrow Wilson gives it a standing ovation. Applauding it, he applauds himself: freedom’s famous flag-bearer wrote most of the texts that accompany the epic images.

The president’s words explain that the emancipation of the slaves was “a veritable overthrow of Civilization in the South, the white South under the heel of the black South.”

Ever since, chaos reigns because blacks are “men who knew none of the uses of authority, except its insolences.”

But the president lights the lamp of hope: “At last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan.”

And even Jesus himself comes down from heaven at the end of the movie to give his blessing.

ORIGIN OF MODERN ART

West African sculptors have always sung while they worked. And they do not stop singing until their sculptures are finished. That way the music gets inside the carvings and keeps on singing.

In 1910, Leo Frobenius found ancient sculptures on the Slave Coast that made his eyes bulge.

Their beauty was such that the German explorer believed they were Greek, brought from Athens, or perhaps from the lost Atlantis. His colleagues agreed: Africa, daughter of scorn, mother of slaves, could not have produced such marvels.

It did, though. Those music-filled effigies had been sculpted a few centuries previous in the belly button of the world, in Ife, the sacred place where the Yoruba gods gave birth to women and men.

Africa turned out to be an unending wellspring of art worth celebrating. And worth stealing.

It seems Paul Gaugin, a rather absentminded fellow, put his name on a couple of sculptures from the Congo. The error was contagious. From then on Picasso, Modigliani, Klee, Giacometti, Ernst, Moore, and many other European artists made the same mistake, and did so with alarming frequency.

Pillaged by its colonial masters, Africa would never know how responsible it was for the most astonishing achievements in twentieth-century European painting and sculpture.

ORIGIN OF THE MODERN NOVEL

A thousand years ago, two Japanese women wrote as if it were today.

According to Jorge Luis Borges and Marguerite Yourcenar, no one ever wrote a better novel than
The Tale of Genji,
Murasaki Shikibu’s masterful tale of masculine adventure and feminine humiliation.

Another Japanese, Sei Shōnagon, shared with Murasaki the rare honor of being praised a millennium after the fact. Her
The Pillow Book
gave birth to the
zuihitsu
genre, which means literally “brush drippings.” It is a multicolored mosaic made up of short stories, notes, reflections, news items, poems. These seemingly random fragments invite us to penetrate that time and place.

THE UNKNOWN SOLDIER

France lost a million and a half men in the First World War.

Four hundred thousand, nearly a third, were unidentified.

In homage to those anonymous martyrs, the government resolved to build the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

For burial, they chose at random one of the fallen at the Battle of Verdun.

Somebody noticed the dead soldier was black, a member of the battalion from the French colony of Senegal.

The error was corrected in time.

Another anonymous soldier, this time white-skinned, was buried under the Arc de Triomphe on November 11, 1920. Wrapped in the nation’s flag, he was honored with speeches and medals.

FORBIDDEN TO BE POOR

“A criminal is born, not made,” as the Italian physician Cesare Lombroso liked to say, glorying in his ability to identify lawbreakers by their physical traits.

To prove that
homo criminalis
was predestined to do evil, Brazilian physician Sebastião Leão undertook a study of the prisoners in the Porto Alegre jail. But his research revealed

that the source of crime was poverty, not biology;

that the black prisoners, members of a race considered inferior,

were as intelligent as the others or more so;

that the mulatto prisoners, members of a race considered weak and degraded, reached old age hale and hearty;

that the verses written on the walls were enough to prove that not all criminals were unintelligent;

that the physical characteristics which Lombroso attributed to friends of the knife, prominent chin, protruding ears, long eyeteeth, were less common in jail than on the outside;

that beardlessness could not be a trait of society’s enemies as Lombrosoclaimed, because among the many prisoners in Porto Alegre, ten at most had little facial hair;

and that the steamy climate did not encourage lawbreaking, for the crime rate did not rise in summer.

INVISIBLE MEN

In 1869, the Suez Canal made navigation possible between two seas.

We know that Ferdinand de Lesseps was the project’s mastermind,

that Said Pasha and his inheritors sold the canal to the French and the English for practically nothing,

that Giuseppe Verdi composed “Aida” to be sung at the inaugural ceremony,

and that ninety years later, after a long and painful fight, President Gamal Abdel Nasser succeeded in making the canal Egyptian.

Who recalls the hundred and twenty thousand prisoners and peasants, sentenced to forced labor, who died building it, murdered by hunger, exhaustion, and cholera?

In 1914, the Panama Canal sliced open a channel between two oceans.

We know that Ferdinand de Lesseps was the project’s mastermind,

that the construction company went belly up in one of the most earth-shattering scandals in French history,

that President Teddy Roosevelt of the United States seized the canal and all of Panama along with it,

and that sixty years later, after a long and painful fight, President Omar Torrijos succeeded in making the canal Panamanian.

Who recalls the West Indian, East Indian, and Chinese workers who were lost building it? For every kilometer, seven hundred died, murdered by hunger, exhaustion, yellow fever, and malaria.

INVISIBLE WOMEN