Children of the Days (21 page)

Back around the year 630 or so, a renowned Chinese physician and alchemist named Sun Simiao mixed potassium nitrate, saltpeter, sulfur, charcoal, honey and arsenic. He was seeking the elixir of eternal life; he discovered an instrument of death.

In 1867 the Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel patented dynamite in his country.

In 1876 he patented gelignite, better known as blasting jelly.

In 1895 he established the Nobel Peace Prize. As its name indicates, the prize rewards antiwar champions. It is financed with the fortune he harvested on the battlefields.

The Navajo Indians cure by chanting and painting.

Those medicinal arts, holy breath against unholy death, work alongside herbs, water and the gods.

Night after night for nine nights, the sick one listens to chants that frighten off the evil shadows in his body, while the painter's fingers paint in the sand: arrows, suns, moons, birds, rainbows, lightning bolts, serpents and everything else that helps heal.

When the curing ceremony is over, the patient returns home, the chants fade and the grains of painted sand blow away.

On sweltering spring nights in the southern half of the world, male crickets call to the females.

They call by rubbing their four wings together.

Those wings don't know how to fly. But they know how to sing.

Scientists did not take him seriously. Antonie van Leeuwenhoek had no Latin and no degree, and his discoveries were the fruit of happenstance.

To get a better look at the weaves of the fabric he sold, Antonie began experimenting with combinations of magnifying glasses, and by putting glass to glass he invented a five-hundred-lens microscope that in a drop of water revealed a multitude of microbes swimming as fast as they could.

Among other triflings, this cloth merchant discovered red blood cells, bacteria, spermatozoids, yeast, the life cycle of ants, the sexual life of fleas and the anatomy of bee stingers.

In the same city, Delft, in the same month of 1632, both Antonie and the painter Vermeer were born. And in that city each of them dedicated their lives to seeing the invisible. Vermeer sought the light hiding in shadows, while Antonie spied on the secrets of our most diminutive relatives in the kingdom of this world.

It wasn't worth much in Colombia, the life of a man. That of a peasant practically nothing. The life of an Indian absolutely nothing. That of a rebel Indian less than nothing.

Nevertheless, inexplicably, in 1967 Quintín Lame died of old age.

He was born on this day in 1880 and lived his many years either in prison or in battle.

In Tolima, one of the scenes of his mishaps, he was jailed one hundred and eight times.

In the mug shots his eyes are always like stewed prunes from prison's first hello, and his head is shaved to sap his strength.

Landowners trembled at his name, and no doubt death feared him too. A man of soft speech and delicate gestures, Quintín walked the length and breadth of Colombia urging indigenous people to rebel.

“We have not come like unyoked pigs to stick our noses in somebody else's field. This land is our land,” Quintín would say, and his tirades were history classes. He spoke of the past of that present, the why and the when of so much misfortune: knowing the before, lets you create a different after.

After twenty years of cannon fire and thousands upon thousands of dead Chinese, Queen Victoria sang her victory song: China, which had banned drugs, opened its doors to the opium sold by British merchants.

While the imperial palaces burned, Prince Gong signed the surrender in 1860.

It was a victory for freedom: freedom of commerce, that is.

In 1986 President Ronald Reagan took up the spear that Richard Nixon had raised a few years previous, and the war against drugs received a multimillion-dollar boost.

From that point on, profits escalated for drug traffickers and the big money-laundering banks;

more powerful drugs came to kill twice as many people as before;

every week a new jail opens in the United States, since the country with the most drug addicts always has room for a few addicts more;

Afghanistan, a country invaded and occupied by the United States, became the principal supplier of nearly all the world's heroin;

and the war against drugs, which turned Colombia into one big US military base, is turning Mexico into a demented slaughterhouse.

Today in 1769 in Caracas, Simón Rodríguez was born.

The Church baptized him as a
párvulo expósito
, a foundling, a child of no one, but he was the sanest child Hispanic America has ever known.

To punish his sanity, they called him “El Loco.” He said that our countries were not free, even if they had anthems and flags, because free people don't copy, they create, and free people don't obey, they think. To really teach, El Loco liked to say, is to teach to question.

In 1981, in a gesture of generosity that honors his memory, General Augusto Pinochet gave away the rivers, lakes and subterranean waters of Chile for a few coins. Several mining companies, like Xstrata of Switzerland, and power companies, like Endesa of Spain and AES Gener of the United States, became owners in perpetuity of the country's mightiest rivers. Endesa received a watershed the size of Belgium.

Farmers and indigenous communities lost their rights to water and were obliged to buy it. Ever since, the desert grows ever larger, devouring fertile lands and emptying the countryside of people.

In 1938 spaceships landed on the coasts of the United States and the Martians launched their attack. They had ferocious tentacles, enormous black eyes that shot fiery rays and foaming V-shaped mouths.

Many horrified citizens took to the streets wrapped in wet towels to protect themselves from the poison gas the Martians emitted, and many more chose to shut themselves in behind locks and more locks, armed to the teeth, awaiting the final battle.

Orson Welles invented that extraterrestrial invasion and broadcast it over the radio.

The invasion was a lie, but the fear was real.

And the fear continued: the Martians turned into Russians, Koreans, Vietnamese, Cubans, Nicaraguans, Afghanis, Iraqis, Iranians...

In the year 1517 German monk Martin Luther nailed his challenge to the door of All Saints Church at Wittenberg Castle.

Thanks to an invention called the printing press those words did not just stay put. Luther's theses crossed streets and squares and entered the homes, taverns and temples of Germany and beyond.

The Protestant faith was being born. Luther attacked the Church of Rome's ostentation and extravagance, the blatant sale of tickets to Paradise, the hypocritical chastity of priests and more.

His heresies spread not only by word. Also by image, which reached many more people since few could read but nearly all could see.

The engravings that helped spread Luther's protest, works of Lucas Cranach, Hans Holbein and other artists, were not, shall we say, kind: the pope appeared as a monstrous golden calf, or an ass with bosoms and a Devil's tail, or an obese man covered in jewels falling head first into the flames of hell.

Without intending to, these sharp instruments of religious propaganda paved the way for the editorial cartoons of our day.

In 1986 Mad Cow disease struck the British Isles and more than two million cows suspected of harboring contagious dementia faced capital punishment.

In 1997 avian flu from Hong Kong sowed panic and condemned a million and a half birds to premature death.

In the year 2009 Mexico and the United States suffered an outbreak of swine flu, and the entire world had to shield itself from the plague. Millions of pigs, no one knows how many, were sacrificed for coughing or sneezing.

Who is guilty of causing human disease? Animals.

It's that simple.

Free of all suspicion are the giants of global agribusiness, those sorcerer's apprentices who turn food into high-potency chemical bombs.

In Mexico tonight, as every year on this night, the living host the dead, and the dead eat and drink and dance and get caught up on all the latest gossip from the neighborhood.

But when night comes to a close, when church bells and first light bid them adieu, some of the dead get lively and try to hide in the shrubbery or behind the tombs in the graveyard. People chase them out with brooms: “Get going,” “Leave us in peace,” “We don't want to see you until next year.”

You see, the dead are real layabouts.

In Haiti, a long-standing tradition forbids carrying the casket straight to the cemetery. The funeral cortege has to twist and turn and zigzag to fool the one who has died, so he won't be able to find his way back home.

The living minority defends itself as best as it can.

Not only men lost their heads. Women, too, were decapitated and forgotten, since they weren't important like Marie Antoinette.

Three exemplary cases:

Olympe de Gouges was beheaded by the French Revolution in 1793 to remove her belief that women were citizens;

in 1943 Marie-Louise Giraud climbed the scaffold for having performed abortions, “criminal acts against the French family”;

and the same year in Munich the guillotine sliced off the head of a student, Sophie Scholl, for handing out antiwar leaflets against Hitler. “Too bad,” Sophie said. “Such a fine sunny day and I have to go.”