Mirrors (24 page)

Though filth incubated disease, water had a bad reputation in Christian Europe. Except in baptism, bathing was avoided because it felt good and invited sin. In the tribunals of the Holy Inquisition, frequent bathing was proof of Mohammedan heresy. When Christianity was imposed on Spain as the only truth, the crown ordered the many public baths left by the Muslims razed, because they were sources of perdition.

Not a single saint, male or female, ever set foot in a bath, and kings rarely bathed since that’s what perfume was for. Queen Isabella of Castile had a soul that was sparkling clean, but historians debate whether she bathed two or three times in her entire life. The elegant Sun King of France, the first man to wear high heels, bathed only once between 1647 and 1711. And that time it was on doctor’s orders.

SAINTS OF THE MIDDLE AGES PRACTICED MEDICINE ON AN INDUSTRIAL SCALE

According to contemporary testimony, Saint Dominic of Silos “opened the closed eyes of the blind, cleansed the filthy bodies of lepers, afforded the sick the longed for gift of health, granted the deaf their lost hearing, straightened hunchbacks, made the lame leap with glee, made the crippled jump for joy, made the mute shout . . . ”

Father Bernard of Toulouse “cured twelve blind men, three deaf men, seven cripples, four hunchbacks, and healed other sick people numbering more than thirty.”

Saint Louis “brought back to health an innumerable quantity of people suffering from tumefactions, gout, paralysis, blindness, fistulas, tumors and lameness.”

Death did not reduce the saints’ therapeutic powers. In France, cemeteries kept strict account of the miracles that healed visitors to sacred sepulchres: “41% hemiplegics and paraplegics, 19% blind, 12% demented, 8% deaf, mutes, and deaf-mutes, and 17% suffering from fevers and other maladies.”

ORIGIN OF CHILDHOOD

If the plague didn’t get them, cold or hunger did. Execution by hunger could occur early in a poor child’s life, if not enough milk was left over in Mother’s breasts after nursing the infants of the rich.

But not even babes of a comfortable cradle looked out on an easy life. All over Europe, adults helped boost the infant mortality rate by subjecting their children to an education that tended toward the severe side.

The educational process started with turning babies into mummies. Every day servants wrapped them from head to foot in cloths tightly secured by straps and ties.

That way their pores were closed to plagues and to the satanic vapors that permeated the air, and what’s more the infants would not be a bother. Held prisoner, they could barely breathe, never mind cry, and with arms and legs pinioned they could not kick or fuss.

If bedsores or gangrene did not finish them off, these human packages moved on to the next stage. With belts holding them upright, they learned how to stand and walk as God commands, thus avoiding the animal habit of crawling on all fours. Once they were a bit bigger, they began an intensive course in the many uses of the cat-o-nine-tails, the cane, the paddle, the wooden or iron rod, and other pedagogical tools.

Not even kings were safe. Louis XIII of France was crowned king on his eighth birthday, and he began the day by receiving his quota of lashes.

The king survived childhood.

Other children also survived, who knows how, and became adults well schooled to educate their own children.

GOD’S LITTLE ANGELS

When Flora Tristán traveled to London, she was astounded to find that English mothers never caressed their children. Children occupied the lowest rung on the social ladder, below that of women. They were as deserving of trust as a broken sword.

Nevertheless, three centuries earlier it was an Englishman who became the first high-ranking European to champion children as persons worthy of respect and enjoyment. Thomas More loved them and defended them, spent time with them every chance he got, and shared with them the desire for a life of never-ending play.

His example did not last long.

For centuries, and until very recently, corporal punishment was legal in British schools. Democratically, without regard to social class, adult civilization had the right to correct childhood barbarity by beating girls with straps and striking boys with rods or canes. In the name of morals, for many generations these disciplinary instruments corrected the vices and deviations of those who had gone astray.

Not until 1986 were straps, rods, and canes outlawed in British state schools. Later on, the private schools followed suit.

To keep children from being children, parents may still punish them as long as the blows are applied “in reasonable measure and without leaving a mark.”

FATHER OF THE OGRE

The best-known children’s stories, terrorist creations that they are, also merit inclusion in the arsenal of adult weaponry against little people.

Hansel and Gretel tips you off that your parents are likely to abandon you. Little Red Riding Hood teaches you that every stranger could be the wolf who will eat you up. Cinderella compels you to distrust stepmothers and stepsisters. But the character who most effectively teaches obedience and spreads fear is the Ogre.

The child-eating Ogre in Perrault’s stories was based on an illustrious gentleman, Gilles de Retz, who fought alongside Joan of Arc at Orléans and in other battles.

This lord of several castles, the youngest marshal in France, was accused of torturing, raping, and killing wayward children caught wandering about his estates in search of bread or perhaps a job in one of the choruses that sang to the glory of his accomplishments.

Under torture, Gilles confessed to hundreds of infanticides, and gave detailed accounts of his carnal delights.

He ended up on the gallows.

Five and a half centuries later, he was absolved. A tribunal in the French Senate reviewed the trial, decreed it was a travesty, and revoked the sentence.

He was unable to celebrate the good news.

THE TATAR OGRE

Genghis Khan, the Antichrist who led the Mongolian hordes sent by Satan, was the Ogre of the stories that for many years terrorized Europe’s adults.

“They aren’t men! They are demons!” shrieked Frederick II, king of Sicily and of Prussia.

In reality, Europe was offended because Genghis Khan thought the continent not worth invading. He scorned it as backward, and stuck to Asia. Using rather indelicate methods, he conquered an enormous empire that stretched from the Mongolian plateau to the Russian steppes, encompassing China, Afghanistan, and Persia.

His reputation rubbed off on the entire Khan clan.

Yet Genghis’s grandson Kublai Khan did not devour raw the Europeans who turned up from time to time before his throne in Beijing. He feted them, listened to them, hired them.

Marco Polo worked for him.

MARCO POLO

He was in prison in Genoa when he dictated the book of his travels. His fellow inmates believed every word. While they listened to the adventures of Marco Polo, twenty-seven years wandering on the roads of the Orient, each and every prisoner escaped and traveled with him.

Three years later, the former prisoner from Venice published his book. “Published” is a manner of speaking, because the printing press had yet to appear in Europe. Several handmade copies circulated. The few readers Marco Polo found did not believe a thing.