Mirrors (47 page)

THE AGES OF IQBAL

In Pakistan, as in other countries, slavery survives.

Children of the poor are disposable goods.

When Iqbal Masih was four, his parents sold him for fifteen dollars.

He was bought by a rug maker. He worked chained to the loom fourteen hours a day. At the age of ten, Iqbal was a hunchback with the lungs of an old man.

Then he escaped and became the spokesman for Pakistan’s child slaves.

In 1995, when he was twelve years old, a fatal bullet knocked him from his bicycle.

FORBIDDEN TO BE A WOMAN

In 1804, Napoleon Bonaparte crowned himself emperor and decreed a civil code known as the Napoleonic Code, which still serves as the legal foundation for nearly the entire world.

This masterpiece of the bourgeoisie in power consecrated double standards and elevated property rights to the highest perch on the altar of justice.

Married women were deprived of rights, as were children, criminals, and the mentally deficient. A woman had to obey her husband. She had to follow him wherever he led, and she needed his permission for practically everything but breathing.

Divorce, which the French Revolution had made into a simple transaction, was restricted by Napoleon to cases of serious misconduct. The husband could divorce his wife for adultery. The wife could only get a divorce if enthusiasm led the husband to bed his lover on the matrimonial mattress.

In the worst of cases, the adulterous husband paid a fine. In every case, the adulterous wife went to prison.

The code did not authorize murdering an unfaithful wife caught in flagrante. But when a cuckolded husband killed, the judges, always men, whistled and looked the other way.

These dispositions, these customs, held sway in France for more than a century and a half.

PALACE ART IN FRANCE

In the midst of conquering Europe, Napoleon crossed the Alps at the head of his immense army.

Jacques-Louis David painted the scene.

In the painting Napoleon wears the handsome dress uniform of the commanding general of the French army. The golden cape flutters with timely elegance in the breeze. His hand, held high, points to the heavens. His brisk white steed, mane and tail curled in the beauty shop, echoes his gesture by rearing up on two legs. The rocks on the ground are engraved with the names of Bonaparte and his two comrades, Hannibal and Charlemagne.

In reality, Napoleon did not wear a uniform. He crossed the freezing heights shivering with cold, wrapped in a heavy gray overcoat that covered his face, and on the back of an equally gray mule that struggled to keep its foothold on the slippery anonymous rocks.

BEETHOVEN

He had a prisonlike childhood and he believed in freedom as a religion.

That is why he dedicated his Third Symphony to Napoleon and then erased the dedication,

he invented music with no thought to what people might say,
he mocked the princes,
he lived in perpetual disagreement with everyone,
he was alone and he was poor, and he had to move house seventy
times.

And he hated censorship.

In the Ninth Symphony, the censors changed the title “Ode to Freedom,” taken from the poet Friedrich von Schiller, to “Ode to Joy.”

At the debut of the Ninth in Vienna, Beethoven took revenge. He conducted the orchestra and the chorus with such unbridled energy that the censored “Ode” became a hymn to the joy of freedom.

After the piece ended, he stood with his back to the audience, until someone turned him around and he could see the ovation that he could not hear.

ORIGIN OF NEWS AGENCIES

Napoleon was crushed by the British at the Battle of Waterloo, south of Brussels.

Field Marshall Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington, took credit for the victory, but the true winner was the banker Nathan Rothschild, who did not fire a shot and was far from the scene.

Rothschild was the commander in chief of a platoon of carrier pigeons. Quick and well trained, they brought him the news in London. Before anyone else, he knew that Napoleon had lost, but he spread word that the French victory had been overwhelming, and he fooled the market by selling off everything British: bonds, stocks, pounds. Before you could say amen, everyone followed the lead of the man who always knew what he was doing. The assets of the nation they believed had been defeated got sold off as junk. Then Rothschild bought. He bought everything for nothing.

Thus was England victorious on the battlefield and vanquished on the stock exchange.

The banker Rothschild multiplied his fortune twenty times over and became the richest man in the world.

Several years later, toward the middle of the nineteenth century, the first international news agencies were born: Havas, now called France Presse, Reuters, Associated Press . . .

They all used carrier pigeons.

ORIGIN OF THE CROISSANT

Napoleon, a symbol of France, was born in Corsica. His father, an enemy of France, gave him an Italian name.

The croissant, another symbol of France, was born in Vienna. Not for nothing does it bear the name and form of a crescent moon, which was and remains the symbol of Turkey. Turkish troops had laid siege to Vienna. One day in 1683, the city broke the siege and that same night, in a pastry shop, Peter Wender invented the croissant. And Vienna ate the vanquished.

Then Georg Franz Kolschitzky, a Cossack who had fought for Vienna, asked to be paid in coffee beans, which the Turks had left behind in their retreat, and he opened the city’s first café. And Vienna drank the vanquished.

ORIGIN OF FRENCH COOKING

The cuisine that is the pride of France was founded by Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, a disillusioned revolutionary, and Alexandre Balthazar Laurent Grimod de La Reynière, a nostalgic monarchist.

The Revolution was over, the serfs had changed lords. A new order was emerging, a new class was in charge, and these two set out to tutor the palates of the victorious bourgeoisie.

Brillat-Savarin, author of the first treatise on gastronomy, is said to have uttered the words later repeated by so many others: “Tell me what you eat and I will tell you who you are.” And also: “The discovery of a new dish contributes more to human happiness than that of a new star.” His knowledge came from his mother, Aurora, a specialist who died at the dinner table at the age of ninety-nine: she felt ill, drained her wineglass, and begged them to hurry the dessert.

Grimod de La Reynière was the founder of culinary journalism. His articles in newspapers and yearbooks fed restaurants with new ideas. No more was the art of good eating a luxury reserved for the banquet halls of nobility. The one whose fingers were all over this had none: Grimod de La Reynière, grand master of pen and spoon, was born with no hands, and he wrote, cooked, and ate with hooks.

GOYA