Children of the Days (24 page)

Costa Rica's president Don Pepe Figueres once said: “Here, the only thing wrong is everything.”

And in the year 1948 he disbanded the armed forces.

Many were those who decried it as the end of the world, or at least the end of Costa Rica.

But the world kept on turning, and Costa Rica was kept safe from wars and coups d'état.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, John Brown, a white traitor to his race and class, led an assault on a military arsenal in Virginia to get weapons for the slaves on the plantations.

Colonel Robert E. Lee commanded the troops that surrounded and captured Brown. Lee was promoted to general and soon came to lead the army that defended slavery during the long US war between the South and the North.

Lee, general of the slavers, died in bed. His send-off included military honors, martial music, cannon salutes and speeches that exalted the virtues of “the greatest military genius in America.”

Brown, friend of the slaves, was convicted of murder, conspiracy and treason for his assault on the arsenal, and was sentenced to die. He was hanged on this day in 1859.

Today, which by coincidence is the International Day for the Abolition of Slavery.

For four centuries black Africa specialized in the sale of human flesh. In the international division of labor, Africa's fate was to produce slaves for the world market.

In 1720 one king refused.

Agaja Trudo, king of Dahomey, set fire to the Europeans' forts and razed the slave ports to the ground.

For ten years he fought off harassment from the traffickers and attacks from neighboring kingdoms.

He could hold out no longer.

Europe refused to sell him weapons if he did not pay in human coin.

Like us, trees remember.

But unlike us, they do not forget: they grow rings in their trunks, one after another, to stockpile their memory.

The rings tell the story of each tree, revealing its age, as much as two thousand years in some cases, the climate it lived through, the floods and droughts it endured; the rings conserve the scars of fires, infestations and earthquakes.

One day like today, a scholar of the subject, José Armando Boninsegna, was given the best possible explanation by the children at a school in Argentina:

“Little trees go to school and learn to write. Where do they write? On their bellies. And how do they write? With rings that you can read.”

The president of the Spanish Society of Natural History ruled in 1886 that the cave paintings at Altamira were not thousands of years old: “They are the work of some mediocre disciple of today's school of modern art,” he insisted, confirming the suspicions of nearly all the experts.

Twenty years later, those experts had to admit they were wrong. Thus it was proven that the longing for beauty, like hunger, like desire, has always accompanied the human adventure in the world.

Many years before that thing we call civilization, we were turning bird's bones into flutes and seashells into necklaces, we were making colors by mixing earth, blood, powdered rocks and plant juices to beautify our caves and turn our bodies into walking paintings.

When the Spanish conquistadors arrived at Veracruz, they found the Huasteco Indians walking around naked, she's and he's, with their bodies painted to please each other and themselves.

“These are the worst,” concluded the conquistador Bernal Díaz del Castillo.

On this day in 1938, the House Committee on Un-American Activities, operating out of Washington, questioned Hallie Flanagan.

She ran the Federal Theatre Project.

Joe Starnes, a congressman from Alabama, led the interrogation.

Referring to an article Hallie had written, he asked: “You are quoting from this Marlowe. Is he a Communist?”

“I am very sorry. I was quoting from Christopher Marlowe.”

“Tell us who Marlowe is, so we can get the proper reference.”

“He was the greatest dramatist in the period immediately preceding Shakespeare.”

“Of course, we had what some people call Communists back in the days of the Greek theater.”

“Quite true.”

“And I believe Mr. Euripides was guilty of teaching class consciousness, wasn't he?”

“I believe that was alleged against all of the Greek dramatists.”

“So we cannot say when it began,” sighed Congressman Starnes.

In the year 1633, more or less on this day, Gregório de Matos was born, the poet who knew best how to poke fun at colonial Brazil.

In 1969, at the height of the military dictatorship, the commander of the Sixth Region denounced his poems as “subversive.” They had been enjoying the sleep of the just for three centuries in the library of the Ministry of Culture in the city of Salvador da Bahia, when the commander threw them onto the bonfire.

In 1984, in a neighboring country, the military dictatorship of Paraguay banned a play about to open in the Harlequin Theater, since it was a “pamphlet against order, discipline, soldiers and the law.” Twenty-four centuries had passed since Euripides had written
The Trojan Women
.

In 1906 Santiago Ramón y Cajal received the Nobel Prize in medicine.

He had wanted to be a painter.

His father would not let him, so he had to become the greatest Spanish scientist of all time.

He got his revenge by sketching his discoveries. His drawings of the brain were on a par with Miró and Klee: “The garden of neurology sparks incomparable artistic emotions,” he liked to say.

He enjoyed exploring the mysteries of the nervous system, but he loved drawing them even more.

And what he loved most of all was saying out loud whatever was on his mind, well aware that it would make him more enemies than friends.

Sometimes he would ask in surprise, “You have no enemies? How can that be? Did you never tell the truth or stand up for justice?”

In 1986 the Nobel Prize for medicine went to Rita Levi-Montalcini.

In troubled times, during the dictatorship of Mussolini, Rita had secretly studied nerve fibers in a makeshift lab hidden in her home.

Years later, after a great deal of work, this tenacious detective of the mysteries of life discovered the protein that multiplies human cells, which won her the Nobel.

She was about eighty by then and she said, “My body is getting wrinkled, but not my brain. When I can no longer think, all I'll want is help to die with dignity.”

In the year 2009, on the anniversary of the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, President Barack Obama received the Nobel Peace Prize.

In his acceptance speech, the president thought it wise to pay homage to war: “times when nations will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified.”

Four and a half centuries before, when the Nobel Prize did not exist and evil resided in countries not with oil but with gold and silver, Spanish jurist Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda also defended war as “not only necessary but morally justified.”

Ginés explained that war was necessary against the Indians of the Americas, “being by nature servile men who are barbarian, uncultured and inhuman,” and that war was justified, “because it is just, by natural right, that the body obey the soul, that the appetite obey reason, that brutes obey man, women their husbands, the imperfect the perfect and the worse the better, for the good of all.”

Fernando Pessoa, the poet from Portugal, believed he lived with five or six other poets inside him.

At the end of 2010 the Brazilian writer José Paulo Cavalcanti completed his many years of research on “someone who dreamed he was many.”

Cavalcanti discovered that Pessoa did not contain five or even six: he had one hundred and twenty-seven guests in his capacious body, each with his own name, style and history, birth date and horoscope.

His one hundred and twenty-seven inhabitants signed poems, articles, letters, essays, books . . .

Several of them published vituperous criticisms of him, but Pessoa never kicked any of them out, even if it was not easy to keep such a large family fed.

Long after giving birth to Jesus, the Virgin Mary traveled to Mexico.

She arrived on this day in the year 1531 and introduced herself as the Virgin of Guadalupe. By a fortunate coincidence her visit occurred precisely where Tonantzin, the Aztec mother god, had her temple.

From that moment on the Virgin of Guadalupe became the incarnation of the Mexican nation: Tonantzin lives on in the Virgin, and Mexico and Jesus share the same mother.

In Mexico, as everywhere else in Latin America, outlawed gods entered the Catholic divinities on currents of air and took up residence in their bodies.

Tlaloc brings rain as Saint John the Baptist, and as Saint Isidore the Laborer Xochipilli makes flowers bloom.

God the Father is Father Sun.

Tezcatlipoca, Jesus on the cross, points in the four directions from which the winds of the indigenous universe flow.

In 1589 Pope Sixtus V decided that castrated men should sing in Saint Peter's Basilica.

To enable male singers to become sopranos of high notes and unbroken trills, their testicles were mutilated.

For more than three centuries castrated men took the place of women in church choirs: the sinning voices of the daughters of Eve, which would have soiled the purity of the sanctuaries, were forbidden.

In 1794 the archbishop of Mexico, Alonso Núñez de Haro, signed the sentence condemning Father Servando Teresa de Mier.

On the anniversary of the visit of the Virgin Mary to Mexico, Father Servando had given a sermon before the viceroy, the archbishop and the members of the Royal Audience.

More than a sermon, it was a cannonball. Father Servando dared to affirm that there was nothing random or coincidental about it: the Virgin Mary
was
the Aztec goddess Tonantzin, and Thomas the Apostle
was
Quetzalcóatl, the plumed serpent worshipped by the Indians.

For having committed such scandalous blasphemy, Father Servando was stripped of his title of doctor in philosophy and was forbidden in perpetuity from teaching, hearing confession or giving sermons. And he was sentenced to exile in Spain.

From that point on, he was jailed seven times and seven times he escaped. He fought for Mexico's independence, wrote ferocious and funny attacks on the Spanish and penned serious treatises on his vision of a republic freed from colonial and military strictures—the Mexican nation as would be when it became its own lord and master.

Today would have been the birthday of Chico Mendes.

Would have been.

But the assassins of the Amazon, who kill troublesome trees, also kill troublesome people.

People like Chico Mendes.

His parents, debt slaves, arrived in the rubber plantations from the far-off desert of Ceará.

He learned to read when he was twenty-four.