Children of the Days (25 page)

In the Amazon he organized unions that united the solitary—enslaved peons, displaced Indians—against the devourers of lands and their hired guns, and against the World Bank experts who financed the poisoning of the rivers and the razing of the jungle.

Thus he was marked for death.

The gunshots came through the window.

For forty years the mass miscommunications media joyously celebrated steady victories in the war on poverty. Year after year, poverty was beating a hasty retreat.

So it went until today in the year 2007, when experts from the World Bank, with the assistance of the International Monetary Fund and a few United Nations agencies, updated their statistical tables on the world's buying power. In a report by the International Comparison Program, which obtained little or no media coverage, the experts corrected some of the data from earlier measurements. Among other small errors, they discovered that the number of poor people was five hundred million more than previously recorded.

They, the poor, already knew.

On this morning in 2010, as on every other morning, Mohamed Bouazizi was hauling his cart filled with fruit and vegetables somewhere in Tunis.

As on every other morning, the police arrived to collect the levy they had concocted.

But this morning, Mohamed refused to pay.

The policemen beat him, overturned his cart and stomped all over his fruit and vegetables splattered on the ground.

Mohamed then doused himself from head to foot with gasoline and set himself on fire.

In a few days, that little flame, no taller than a street vendor, grew to encompass the entire Arab world, ablaze with people tired of being nobody.

Today, International Migrants Day, is not a bad moment to recall that the first ones in human history obliged to emigrate were Adam and Eve.

According to the official version, Eve tempted Adam: she offered him the forbidden fruit and it was her fault that both of them were banished from Paradise.

But is that how it happened? Or did Adam do what he did of his own accord?

Maybe Eve offered him nothing and asked nothing of him.

Maybe Adam chose to bite the forbidden fruit when he learned that Eve had already done so.

Maybe she had already lost the privilege of immortality and Adam opted to share her damnation.

So he became mortal. But not alone.

At the end of 1919, two hundred and fifty “foreign undesirables” left the port of New York, forbidden ever to return to the United States.

Among those heading off into exile was the “highly dangerous foreigner” Emma Goldman, who had been arrested several times for opposing the draft, for promoting contraceptives, for organizing strikes and for other attacks on national security.

Some of Emma's sayings:

“Prostitution is the greatest triumph of Puritanism.”

“Is there anything indeed more terrible, more criminal, than our glorified sacred function of motherhood?”

“Heaven must be an awfully dull place if the poor in spirit live there.”

“If voting changed anything, it would be illegal.”

“Every society has the criminals it deserves.”

“All wars are wars among thieves who are too cowardly to fight, and therefore induce the young manhood of the whole world to do the fighting for them.”

This day could be any other day.

No days in Enheduanna's life are known.

A few facts are: Enheduanna lived four thousand three hundred years ago in the kingdom where writing was invented, now called Iraq,

and she was the first woman writer, the first woman who signed her words,

also the first woman who wrote laws,

and an astronomer, a sage of the stars,

that she suffered exile,

and in writing she sang to the moon goddess Inanna, her protector, and she celebrated the joy of writing, which is a fiesta:

Some people maintain the Wright brothers invented the airplane around this time in 1903, but others insist it happened a couple of years later and Santos-Dumont was the creator of the first machine worthy of that name.

The only thing absolutely certain is that three hundred and fifty million years earlier, a pair of tiny flaps sprouted from the body of a dragonfly's ancestor, and those flaps became wings that grew longer and longer over the next few million years, urged on by the desire to fly.

Dragonflies were the first to travel by air.

In 1773 the earth trembled from hunger and over the course of a few days it devoured the city now called Antigua, which for more than two centuries had ruled Guatemala and the entire region of Central America.

In religious festivals Antigua rises from its ruins. Its streets become carpets of flowers patterned as suns and fruits and birds of great plumage. No one can tell whether the feet walking on them are celebrating the coming birth of Jesus or the rebirth of the city.

Local people weave these street gardens—patient hands, petal by petal, leaf by leaf—to make Antigua immortal as long as the fiesta lasts.

On Christmas Eve in 1991 the Soviet Union passed away, and in the manger Russian capitalism was born.

The new faith worked a miracle: transfigured apparatchiks turned into businessmen, Communist Party leaders changed religion and became brazen nouveaux riches who put a “for sale” sign on the state and bought everything buyable in their country and the world for the price of bananas.

Not even soccer clubs escaped.

Jesus could not celebrate his birthday because he had no birthday.

In the year 354 the Christians of Rome decided that he had been born on December 25.

That was the day the pagans of the north of the world celebrated the passing of the longest night of the year and the arrival of the sun god, who came to end the darkness.

The sun god came to Rome from Persia.

He had been called Mitra.

Then he was called Jesus.

In times gone by the sons of the sun and the daughters of the moon lived together in the African kingdom of Dahomey.

Together they cuddled and squabbled until the gods separated them and condemned them to live far apart.

Ever since, the sons of the sun are fish in the sea and the daughters of the moon are stars in the night.

Starfish do not fall from the sky: they travel from there. And in the waters they seek out their lost lovers.

Matsuo Bashō was born to be a samurai, but he renounced war and became a poet. A wandering poet.

A month after his death, back in 1694 more or less, the roads of Japan longed for the footsteps of his straw sandals and the words he left hanging from the roofs of the homes that took him in. Like these:

Oscar Niemeyer began the year 2007 with one hundred years under his belt and eight buildings under construction.

The liveliest of all architects had not tired of transforming, project by project, the skyline of the world.

His aged eyes were not fixed on the high heavens that humiliate us; they gazed freshly, happily at the drifting clouds, his source of inspiration for the next creation.

In the clouds he discovered cathedrals, gardens of incredible flowers, monsters, galloping horses, birds with many wings, exploding seas, flying foam and undulating women who offered themselves in the wind and with the wind flew off.

Every time doctors put him in the hospital, believing his time had arrived, Oscar killed his boredom composing sambas and singing them with the nurses.

And that is how this cloud hunter, this pursuer of fugitive beauty, left his first century of life behind and kept right on going.

The drinking was copious when we bid good-bye to the departing year, and I got lost in the streets of Cádiz.

I asked how I could get to the market. An old man peeled his back off the wall and very grudgingly replied, pointing nowhere: “You do whatever the street tells you.”

The street told me and I made it home.

A few thousand years before, Noah navigated without compass or sails or even a rudder.

His ark drifted wherever the wind bade him, and he was saved from the flood.