Children of the Days (4 page)

Roy Sullivan, a Virginia forest warden, was born on this seventh day in 1912, and during his seventy years he survived seven lightning bolts:

In 1942 lightning tore off a toenail.

In 1969 another bolt singed off his eyebrows and eyelashes.

In 1970 a third charred his left shoulder.

In 1972 a bolt left him bald.

In 1973 another burned his legs.

In 1976 a bolt gashed one ankle.

In 1977 a seventh bolt seared his chest and belly.

But the bolt of lightning that split his skull in 1983 did not come from the heavens.

They say it issued from a woman. A word she said, or didn't.

They say.

In 1980 an extraordinary demonstration hit the streets of the Brazilian city of Sorocaba.

Under the military dictatorship, a court had outlawed kisses that undermined public morals. The ruling by Judge Manuel Moralles, which punished such kisses with jail terms, described them this way:

The city responded by becoming one huge kissodrome. Never had people kissed so much. Prohibition sparked desire and many were those who out of simple curiosity wanted a taste of the
unsophismable
kiss.

Aphrodite was the first female nude in the history of Greek sculpture.

Praxiteles carved her wearing nothing except a tunic fallen about her feet, and the city of Cos insisted that he clothe her. But another city, Cnidus, offered her a temple. There the most womanly of goddesses, the most goddessly of women, took up residence.

Although she was enclosed and well guarded, people were wild about her and flocked to see her.

On a day like today, fed up with the harassment, Aphrodite fled.

It happened north of the Uruguay River. The king of Spain bestowed upon his father-in-law, the king of Portugal, seven missions of Jesuit priests. The gift included the thirty thousand Guaraní Indians who lived there.

The Guaranís refused to submit and the Jesuits, accused of conspiring with them, were sent back to Europe.

On this day in 1756, in the hills of Caiboaté, the resistance was defeated.

Victory went to the combined armies of Spain and Portugal, more than four thousand soldiers accompanied by horses, cannon and a large number of land grabbers and slave hunters.

Final score, according to the official statistics:

Indians killed, 1,723.

Spaniards killed, 3.

Portuguese killed, 1.

While the year 1962 was being born, an unknown musical group, two guitars, bass, and drums, auditioned for a record company in London.

The boys returned to Liverpool and sat down to wait.

They counted the hours, they counted the days.

When they had no nails left to bite, on a day like today, they received a response. Decca Recording Company told them frankly, “We don't like your sound.”

They went further. “Guitar groups are on the way out.”

The Beatles did not commit suicide.

Under the sagging roof of the Chengdu station in Sichuan, hundreds of young Chinese women smile for the camera.

All wear new aprons.

All are freshly washed, combed, groomed.

All have just given birth.

They are waiting for the train that will take them to Beijing.

In Beijing they will breastfeed the babies of others.

These milk cows will be well paid and well fed.

Meanwhile, very far from Beijing, in the villages of Sichuan, their own babies will be fed powdered milk.

They all say they do it for their babies, to pay for their education.

In the year 2008, Miguel López Rocha, who was fooling around on the outskirts of the Mexican city of Guadalajara, slipped and fell into the Santiago River.

Miguel was eight years old.

He did not drown.

He was poisoned.

The river contained arsenic, sulfuric acid, mercury, chromium, lead and furans, dumped into its waters by Aventis, Bayer, Nestlé, IBM, DuPont, Xerox, United Plastics, Celanese, and other companies from countries that prohibit such largesse.

The sons and daughters of the enemy were war booty during the Argentine military dictatorship, which not so long ago stole more than five hundred children.

But many more, over a much longer period, were stolen by Australia's democracy, with consent from the law and applause from the public.

In the year 2008, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd apologized to the aboriginal communities that had been stripped of their sons and daughters for more than a century.

State agencies and Christian churches had kidnapped the children and placed them with white families to save them from poverty and crime, and to civilize them and distance them from savage customs.

“To whiten the race,” people used to say.

“Marxism is the worst form of mental illness,” ruled Colonel Antonio Vallejo Nájera, psychiatrist supreme in Generalissimo Francisco Franco's Spain.

He had studied Republican mothers in prison and proven that they harbored “criminal tendencies.”

To defend the purity of the Iberian race, threatened by Marxist degeneration and maternal delinquency, thousands of newborns and infants, children of Republican parents, were kidnapped and plopped into the arms of families devoted to the cross and sword.

Who were those children? Who are they, so many years later?

No one knows.

Franco's dictatorship falsified the records to cover its tracks and ordered everyone to forget: it stole the children and it stole their memory.

Macarena Gelman was one of the many victims of Operation Condor, the common market of terror that linked South America's dictatorships.

Macarena's mother was pregnant with her when the Argentine generals sent her to Uruguay. The Uruguayan dictatorship oversaw the birth, killed the mother and handed the newborn daughter to a police chief.

Throughout her childhood Macarena was tormented by the same inexplicable nightmare: she was being chased by several men armed to the teeth, and night after night she would wake up crying.

The nightmare stopped being a mystery when Macarena discovered the true story of her life. That was when she realized she had been dreaming her mother's real panic: while Macarena was taking shape in the womb, her mother was fleeing the military witch hunt that caught up with her in the end and sent her to her death.

The peons on the farms of Argentina's Patagonia went out on strike against stunted wages and overgrown workdays, and the army took charge of restoring order.

Executions are grueling. On this night in 1922, soldiers exhausted from so much killing went to the bordello at the port of San Julián for their well-deserved reward.

But the five women who worked there closed the door in their faces and chased them away, screaming, “You murderers! Murderers, get out of here!”

Osvaldo Bayer recorded their names. They were Consuelo García, Ángela Fortunato, Amalia Rodríguez, María Juliache and Maud Foster.

The whores. The virtuous.

When Michelangelo learned of the death of Francesco, who was his apprentice and much more, he took a hammer and smashed the marble he was sculpting.

A short while later, he wrote that such a death:

Michelangelo lies buried in Florence, in the church of Santa Croce.

He and his inseparable Francesco used to sit on the steps of the church to enjoy, in the vast plaza below, the duels fought with kicks and blasts of the ball that we now call soccer.

Today I died.

In the year 1937 I learned that I had a cancer that was untreatable.

I knew that death, after me always, had caught up with me.

I confronted death, face to face, and I told him: “This war is over.”

I said: “You win.”

I said: “But when is my choice.”

And before death killed me, I killed myself.

At the end of the nineteenth century, Juan Pío Acosta lived near Uruguay's border with Brazil.

In those lonely parts, his work kept him on the road, moving from town to town.

He traveled by stagecoach, along with eight other passengers in first, second and third class.

Juan Pío always bought a third-class ticket, which was the least expensive.

He never understood why there were different prices. Everyone had the same seats, whether they paid more or paid less: jammed in, eating dust, jolted relentlessly.

He never understood why until one bad winter day, when the wagon got stuck in the mud. The coachman ordered:

“First-class, stay where you are!”

“Second-class, get off!”

“And those in third . . . start pushing!”

Today is International Mother Language Day.

Every two weeks, a language dies.

The world is diminished when it loses its human sayings, just as when it loses its diversity of plants and beasts.

In 1974 Angela Loij died. She was one of the last Ona Indians from Tierra del Fuego, way out there at the edge of the world. She was the last one who spoke their language.

Angela sang to herself, for no one else, in that language no longer recalled by anyone but her:

In times gone by, the Onas worshipped several gods. Their supreme god was named Pemaulk.

Pemaulk meant “word.”

In Istanbul, known in those days as Constantinople, Paul the Silentiary finished his fifteen love poems in the year 563.

The Greek poet owed his name to his work. He was in charge of silence in the palace of Emperor Justinian.

In his own bed, too.

One of his poems says: