Children of the Days (3 page)

On this January day in 1808, the exhausted ships that had left Lisbon two months before arrived on the coast of Brazil without bread or water.

Napoleon was trampling the map of Europe and at the Portuguese border he unleashed the stampede: the Portuguese court, obliged to change address, marched off to the tropics.

Queen Maria led the way. Right behind her came the prince and the dukes, counts, viscounts, marquises and barons, all wearing the wigs and sumptuous attire inherited later on by the carnival of Rio de Janeiro. On their heels, butting up against each other in desperation, came priests and military officers, courtesans, dressmakers, doctors, judges, notaries, barbers, scribes, cobblers, gardeners . . .

Queen Maria was not quite in her right mind, which is a nice way to say she was off her rocker, but she pronounced the only reasonable phrase to be heard amid that bunch of lunatics: “Not so fast, it's going to look like we're running away!”

In 1901, the day after Queen Victoria breathed her last, a solemn funeral ceremony began in London.

Organizing it was no easy task. A grand farewell was due the queen who gave her name to an epoch and set the standard for female abnegation by wearing black for forty years in memory of her dead husband.

Victoria, symbol of the British Empire, lady and mistress of the nineteenth century, imposed opium on China and virtue on her own country.

In the seat of her empire, works that taught good manners were required reading. Lady Gough's
Book of Etiquette
, published in 1863, established some of the social commandments of the times: one must avoid, for example, the intolerable proximity of male and female authors on library shelves.

Books could only stand together if the authors were married, such as in the case of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

On this day in 1965 Winston Churchill passed away.

In 1919, when presiding over the British Air Council, he had offered one of his frequent lessons in the art of war:

“I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas . . . I am strongly in favor of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes. The moral effect should be so good . . . and would spread a lively terror.”

And in 1937, speaking before the Palestine Royal Commission, he offered one of his frequent lessons on the history of humanity:

“I do not admit that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia . . . by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race . . . has come in and taken their place.”

The people of Nicaragua celebrate the Güegüense and laugh right along with him.

During these days, the days of his fiesta, the streets become stages where this rogue spins yarns, sings ditties and reels off dance-steps, and by labor and grace of his mummery everyone becomes a storyteller, a singer, a dancer.

The Güegüense is the daddy of Latin American street theater.

Since the beginning of colonial times, he has been teaching the arts of the master trickster: “When you can't beat 'em, tie 'em. When you can't tie 'em, tie 'em up.”

Century after century, the Güegüense has never stopped playing the fool. He's the font of fatuous gibberish, the master of devilries envied by the Devil himself, the de-humbler of the humble, a fucking fucked fucker.

On this day in the year 2009, a plebiscite said yes to a new constitution proposed by President Evo Morales.

Up to this day, Indians were not the sons and daughters of Bolivia: they were only its hired hands.

In 1825 the first constitution bestowed citizenship on three or four percent of the population. The rest, indigenous people, women, the poor, the illiterate, were not invited to the party.

For many foreign journalists, Bolivia is an ungovernable country, incompetent, incomprehensible, intractable, insane. They've got the wrong “in”: they should just admit that for them Bolivia is invisible. And that should come as no surprise, for until today Bolivia was blind to itself.

On this day in 1756, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born.

Centuries later, even babies love the music he left us.

It has been proven time and again that newborns cry less and sleep better when they listen to Mozart.

His welcome to the world is the best way of telling them, “This is your new home. And this is how it sounds.”

Long before the printing press, Emperor Charlemagne set up in Aachen large teams of copyists who built the finest library in Europe.

Charlemagne, who did so much for reading, did not know how to read. He died an illiterate, at the beginning of the year 814.

Today in 1860 Anton Chekhov was born.

He wrote as if he were saying nothing.

And he said everything.

In 1933 Adolf Hitler was named Germany's chancellor. Soon after, he presided over an immense rally, as befitted the new lord and master of the nation.

Modestly he screamed: “I am founding the new era of truth! Awaken, Germany! Awaken!” Rockets, fireworks, church bells, chants and cheers echoed his words.

Five years earlier, the Nazi Party had won less than three percent of the vote.

Hitler's Olympic leap to the summit was as spectacular as the simultaneous fall into the abyss of Germany's wages, employment, the mark and you name it.

Germany, crazed by the collapse of everything, unleashed a witch-hunt against the guilty parties: Jews, Reds, homosexuals, Gypsies, the mentally retarded and those afflicted by the habit of thinking too much.

Today in 1908, Atahualpa Yupanqui was born.

In life they were three: guitar, horse and he. Or four, counting the wind.

Blas de Lezo was born in Guipúzcoa in 1689.

This admiral of the Spanish Armada defeated English pirates off the Peruvian coast, subjugated the powerful city of Genoa, trounced the city of Oran in Algeria and in Cartagena de Indias, fighting with few ships and a lot of guile, humiliated the British Navy.

In the course of his twenty-two battles, a cannonball took off one of his legs, a piece of shrapnel cost him an eye and a musket ball left him with only one arm.

“Halfman,” they called him.

Today on the coasts of the Americas people pay homage to Iemanyá.

On this night the mother goddess of all fish, who came from Africa centuries ago on the slave ships, rises up from the foam of the sea and opens her arms wide. The current brings her combs, brushes, bottles of perfume, cakes, candies and other offerings from sailors dying from love and fear, of her.

Iemanyá's friends and relatives from the African Olympus usually come along to the party:

Xangô, her son, who unleashes the rains from the heavens;

Oxumaré, the rainbow, guardian of fire;

Ogún, blacksmith and warrior, ruffian and womanizer;

Oshún, the lover who sleeps in the rivers and never erases what she writes;

and Exú, who is Satan of hell and also Jesus of Nazareth.

In 1899 the streets of Rio de Janeiro went wild dancing to the song that launched the history of carioca carnival parades.

That luscious pleasure was called “O abre alas”; the dance was a maxixe, Brazil's uproarious answer to those stiff ballroom set pieces.

The songwriter was Chiquinha Gonzaga, a composer since childhood.

At the age of sixteen, her parents married her off, and the Marquis of Caxias was godfather at the wedding.

At twenty, her husband insisted she choose between music and family. “I don't understand life without music,” she said, and off she went.

Her father announced that the family's honor had been besmirched and he accused Chiquinha of having inherited her flair for sin from some black grandmother. He declared her dead and forbade anyone in his house from mentioning the name of that loose woman.

Her name was Juana Aguilar, but she was called Juana the Long, for the scandalous size of her clitoris.

The Holy Inquisition received several denunciations of that “criminal excess,” and in the year 1803 the Royal Audience of Guatemala sent a surgeon, Narciso Esparragosa, to examine the accused.

This expert in anatomy warned that such a clitoris could be dangerous, as was well known in Egypt and other kingdoms of the Orient, and he found Juana guilty of “flouting the natural order.”

They grew up together, the guitar and Violeta Parra.

When one called, the other came.

The guitar and she laughed together, cried together, mused together, believed together.

The guitar had a hole in its breast.

So would she.

On this day in 1967, the guitar called and Violeta did not come.

Then or ever again.

Bob Marley was born poor and slept on the studio floor when he recorded his first songs.

In a few short years he became rich and famous, sleeping on a feather bed, cuddling Miss World, adored far and wide.

But he never forgot that he was more than himself.

Through his voice sang the resonance of times long past, the fiesta and fury of warrior slaves who for two centuries drove their owners crazy in the mountains of Jamaica.