Mirrors (65 page)

Tradition required that the umbilical cords of newborn girls be buried under the ashes in the kitchen, so that early on they would learn a woman’s place and never leave it.

When the Mexican Revolution began, many left their place, but they took the kitchen with them. For better or for worse, out of desire or obligation, they followed their men from battle to battle. They carried babies hanging from their breasts, and pots and pans strapped to their backs. And munitions too: it was women’s job to supply tortillas for the belly and bullets for the gun. And when men fell, women took up their weapons.

On the trains, men and horses rode in the cars. Women were on the roof, praying to God it would not rain.

Without the women who came from country and town, who followed the fighters, who rode the rails, who treated the wounded, who cooked the food, who fought the enemy, who braved death, the revolution never would have happened.

None of them got a pension.

FORBIDDEN TO BE A PEASANT

While the euphoric horse thief Pancho Villa set the north of Mexico aflame, the morose muleteer Emiliano Zapata led the revolution in the south.

All over the country, peasant farmers rose up in arms:

“Justice went up to heaven. You won’t find it here,” they said.

They fought to bring it back.

What else could they do?

In the south, sugar reigned behind its castle walls, while corn eked out a living on the old lava flows. The world market brought the local market to its knees, and the usurpers of land and water advised the men they had dispossessed:

“Plant in flower pots.”

The rebels were men not of war but of the earth, and they would suspend the revolution to plant or to harvest.

Sitting in the shade of laurel trees among neighbors who talked of cocks and horses, Zapata said little and listened a lot. But this taciturn man managed to stir up settlements far and wide with the good news of his land reform.

Never was Mexican society so changed.

Never was Mexican society so punished for changing.

A million dead. All or nearly all of them peasants, even if some wore uniforms.

PHOTOGRAPH: THE THRONE

National Palace, Mexico City, December 1914.

The countryside, risen in revolution, invades the urban world. The North and the South, Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata, conquer Mexico City.

While their soldiers, lost like blind men in a gunfight, wander the streets asking for food and dodging vehicles never before seen, Villa and Zapata enter the seat of government.

Villa offers Zapata the president’s golden chair.

Zapata turns him down.

“We ought to burn it,” he says. “It’s bewitched. When a good man sits here, he turns bad.”

Villa laughs as if it were a joke, flops his great humanity over the chair, and poses for Augustín Víctor Casasola’s camera.

At his side Zapata appears distant, aloof, while he gazes at the camera as if it shoots bullets, not pictures, and with his eyes he says:

“Nice place to leave.”

And in no time at all, the leader of the South returns to the little town of Anenecuilco, his cradle, his sanctuary, and from there he continues directing the recovery of stolen land.

Villa does not take long to do the same:

“This village is too big for us.”

Those who later sit in the coveted seat with the gold-leaf design preside over the butchery that reestablishes order.

Zapata and Villa, betrayed, are assassinated.

RESURRECTION OF ZAPATA

He was born, they say, with a little hand tattooed on his chest.

He died with seven bullet holes in his body.

The assassin received fifty thousand pesos and the rank of brigadier general.

The assassinated received a multitude of peasants with hats in hand, who came to pay their respects.

From their indigenous ancestors they inherited silence.

They said nothing, or they said:

“Poor guy.”

Nothing else.

But later on in town squares, little by little tongues began to loosen:

“It wasn’t him.”

“It was someone else.”

“I thought he looked too fat.”

“The mole above his eye was missing.”

“He left on a ship, from Acapulco.”

“He slipped away at night, on a white horse.”

“He went to Arabia.”

“He’s over there, in Arabia.”

“Arabia’s really far away, farther than Oaxaca.”

“He’ll be back soon.”

LENIN

He never wrote the most famous maxim people attribute to him, and who knows if he ever said it:

“The ends justify the means.”

In any case, he certainly did what he did because he knew what he wanted to achieve and he lived to achieve it. He spent his days and nights organizing, arguing, studying, writing, conspiring. He allowed himself time to breathe and eat. Never to sleep.

He had been living in Switzerland for ten years, on his second exile. He was austere, dressed in old clothes and ugly boots. He lived in a room over a shoe-repair shop, and the smell of sausages that wafted up from the butcher’s next door made him nauseous. He spent all day in the public library, and was more in touch with Hegel and Marx than with the workers and peasants of his own country and his own time.

In 1917, when he got on the train that returned him to St. Petersburg, the city later named for him, few Russians knew who he was. The party he founded, which would soon acquire absolute power, had little popular support and was more or less to the left of the moon.

But Lenin knew better than anyone what the Russian people needed most:
peace and land.
As soon as he got off the train and gave his first speech, a crowd sick and tired of war and humiliation saw in him their interpreter and their instrument.

ALEXANDRA

To be natural and clean, like the water we drink, love must be free and mutual. But men demand obedience and deny pleasure. Without a new morality, without a radical shift in daily life, there will be no real emancipation. If the revolution is not to be a lie, it must abolish in law and in custom men’s right of property over women and the rigid social norms that are the enemies of diversity.

Give or take a word, this is what Alexandra Kollontai, the only woman in Lenin’s cabinet, demanded.

Thanks to her, homosexuality and abortion were no longer crimes, marriage was no longer a life sentence, women had the right to vote and to equal pay, and there were free child care centers, communal dining halls, and collective laundries.

Years later, when Stalin decapitated the revolution, Alexandra managed to save her neck. But she was no longer Alexandra.

STALIN

He learned to write in the language of Georgia, his homeland, but in the seminary the monks made him speak Russian.

Years later in Moscow, his south Caucasus accent still gave him away.

So he decided to become more Russian than the Russians. Was not Napoleon, who hailed from Corsica, more French than the French? And was not Catherine the Great, who was German, more Russian than the Russians?

The Georgian, Iosif Dzhugashvili, chose a Russian name. He called himself Stalin, which means “steel.”

The man of steel expected his son to be made of steel too: from childhood, Stalin’s son Yakov was tempered in fire and ice and shaped by hammer blows.

It did not work. He was his mother’s child. At the age of nineteen, Yakov wanted no more of it, could bear no more.

He pulled the trigger.

The gunshot did not kill him.

He awoke in the hospital.

At the foot of the bed, his father commented:

“You can’t even get that right.”

ALIBIS