Children of the Days (19 page)

Upon his release, Girolamo prophesied, “I shall die on September 21, 1576.”

From that moment, he stopped eating.

And he hit the mark.

Today, for one day, environmentalists and other irresponsible people want automobiles to disappear from the world.

A day without cars? Suppose it's contagious and that day becomes every day?

God doesn't want that and neither does the Devil.

Hospitals and cemeteries would lose their biggest clients.

The streets would be taken over by ridiculous cyclists and pathetic people on foot.

Lungs could no longer inhale the tastiest of poisons.

Feet, having forgotten how to walk, would trip over every pebble.

Silence would deafen all ears.

Highways would become depressing deserts.

Radio, television, magazines and newspapers would lose their most generous advertisers.

Oil-producing countries would face poverty.

Corn and sugar, now food for cars, would return to the humble human table.

They called her the Mulata de Córdoba, and no one knows why. She was a mulatta, but she was born in the port of Veracruz and lived there always.

They said she was a witch. Back around the year 1600 or so, the touch of her hands cured the ill and crazed the healthy.

Suspecting that she was possessed by the Devil, the Holy Inquisition locked her up in the fort on the island of San Juan de Ulúa.

In her cell she found a coal left behind from some long-ago fire.

With that coal she started doodling on the wall and her hand, wanting to without wanting to, drew a ship. And the ship broke free of the wall and carried the prisoner to the open sea.

In the year 1912 Harry Houdini showed off his new trick at the Busch Circus in Berlin:

It was a tank filled to the brim with water, then hermetically sealed after Houdini was lowered in upside down with his wrists and ankles shackled. Through glass, the audience could watch him under water, not breathing for what seemed like centuries, until the drowned man somehow managed to make his escape.

Houdini could not have known that many years later this form of asphyxiation would become the preferred torture of Latin America's dictatorships, or the one most praised by the expert George W. Bush.

Miguel Ignacio Lillo never went to college, but book by book he built a science library that filled his entire house.

On a day like today around 1915, a few students from Tucumán spent a long afternoon in that house of books, and they wanted to know how Don Miguel managed to keep them in such fine condition.

“My books breathe the air,” the sage explained. “I open them. I open them and ask them questions. Reading is asking questions.”

Don Miguel asked questions of his books and he asked many more of the world.

For the joy of asking questions, he traveled by horseback all over northern Argentina, step by step, hand's breadth by hand's breadth. That's how he learned secrets that the map conceals, old ways of speaking and living, birdsongs that cities ignore, wild pharmacies that display their wares in the open fields.

Not a few birds and plants were named by him.

Florentino Ameghino was another inquisitive sage.

A paleontologist from childhood, he was still a boy in 1865, more or less, when he assembled his first prehistoric giant in a town in the province of Buenos Aires. On a day like today he emerged from a deep cave weighed down by bones, then in the street he started sorting jaws, vertebrae, hipbones . . .

“This is a monster from the Mesozoic Era,” he explained to his neighbors. “Really ancient. You can't imagine how ancient.”

And behind his back Doña Valentina, the butcher, could not keep from laughing: “But sonny . . . They're fox bones!”

And they were.

He was not discouraged.

Throughout his life he gathered sixty thousand bones from nine thousand extinct animals, real or imaginary, and he wrote nineteen thousand pages that won him the gold medal and a diploma of honor at the Paris Exposition.

During the eleven presidencies of Antonio López de Santa Anna, Mexico lost half its territory and the president lost a leg.

Half of Mexico was gobbled up by the neighbor to the north after a couple of battles and in return for fifteen million dollars. The leg, lost in combat, was buried on this day in 1842 in Santa Paula Cemetery with full military honors.

The president, called Hero, Eagle, His Most Meritorious, Immortal Warrior, Founding Father, His Serene Highness, Napoleon of the West and the Mexican Caesar, lived in a mansion in Xalapa which looked a lot like the palace at Versailles.

The president had all the furniture brought from Paris, even the decorations and knickknacks. In his bedroom he hung an enormous curved mirror, which vastly improved the looks of whomever contemplated his image in it. Every morning upon rising he stood before the magic mirror and it showed him a gentleman: tall, dapper—and honest.

Today is the international day devoted to the human right to information.

Perhaps a good opportunity to recall that, a month or so after atom bombs annihilated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the
New York Times
discounted the rumors that were terrifying the world.

On September 12, 1945, the daily published a front-page story by its chief science reporter William L. Laurence, which challenged the alarmist notions head-on. There was no radioactivity whatsoever in those razed cities, the article assured one and all, it's only “the Japanese continuing their propaganda . . . ”

That scoop won Laurence the Pulitzer Prize.

Sometime later it came out that he was receiving two monthly paychecks: one from the
New York Times
, the other from the payroll of the US War Department.

In 1948 Seretse Khama, the black prince of Botswana, married Ruth Williams, who was English and white.

No one was happy with the news. The British Crown, lord and master of much of black Africa, named a commission of inquiry to look into the matter. The wedding between two races sets a dangerous precedent, the Judicial Inquiry ruled. The commission's report was suppressed, and the couple was ordered into exile.

After his banishment, Khama came to lead the struggle for Botswana's independence. And in 1966 he became the country's first president, elected by a wide majority in a clean vote.

That was when he received, in London, the title of Sir.

From the south of Veracruz a boy set out to seek his fortune.

Upon his return years later, his father wanted to know what the boy had learned.

The son answered, “I am a translator. I learned the language of birds.”

Then a bird sang and the father demanded, “If you aren't a damned liar, tell me what that bird said.”

The son refused. He pleaded that he'd better not, that you wouldn't want to know, but his father would not relent. So he translated the bird's song.

The father grew pale. And he kicked his son out of the house.

“There will be no indigenous population except seagulls,” declared an internal British government memo.

And in 1966 they kept their word.

All the inhabitants of the island of Diego Garcia, minus the seagulls, were expelled under threat of bayonets and gunfire.

The British then leased the emptied island to the United States for half a century.

This paradise of white sand in the middle of the Indian Ocean became a military base, a station for spy satellites, a floating prison and torture chamber for suspected terrorists, and a staging ground for the annihilation of countries that deserve to be punished.

It also has a golf course.

Today, International Day of Nonviolence, let us recall the words of Dwight Eisenhower, who was not exactly a pacifist. In 1953, as president of the country that spends the most on weapons, he acknowledged:

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”

In 1905 German hairdresser Karl Nessler invented the permanent wave.

His experiments nearly incinerated the head of his long-suffering wife, a martyr to science, before Karl at last found the formula for making perfect curls and keeping them that way for two whole days in reality, and for several weeks in the advertising.

Then he took on a French name, Charles, to give his product some style.

Over time, curls became a privilege not only of women.

A few men dared.

We baldies did not.

Until some time ago, many Europeans thought animals were demons in disguise.

The execution of bedeviled beasts by hanging or by fire was a public spectacle as popular as the burning of Satan-loving witches.

On April 18, 1499, in the French abbey of Josaphat near Chartres, a three-month-old pig was tried in court.

Like all pigs, he had neither soul nor reason and was born to be eaten. But instead of being eaten he ate: he was accused of having had a child for lunch.

The charge was not based on any evidence.