Mirrors (57 page)

In 1856, the French government hired Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin, the country’s number-one master magician, to enlighten Algeria.

Algeria’s sorcerers had to be taught a lesson. Tricksters who swallowed glass and cured wounds with a touch, they were sowing the seeds of rebellion against colonial rule.

Robert-Houdin showed off his talent. The big sheiks and local shamans were astonished by his supernatural powers.

At the climactic moment of the ceremony, the envoy from Europe placed a small chest on the ground and asked the strongest of Algeria’s strongmen to lift it. The muscleman could not. He tried again and again and again, and he could not. With his last heave he fell to the ground, trembling violently, and he fled, terrified.

The humiliation over, Robert-Houdin was left alone in his tent. He disconnected the powerful electromagnet hidden under a floorboard, and picked up the chest as well as the little generator that triggered electric shocks.

HERE LAY INDIA

Pierre Loti, a writer who sold tales of an exotic Asia to the French public, visited India in 1899.

He traveled by train.

At each station, a chorus of hunger awaited him.

More penetrating than the roar of the locomotive was the pleading of children, or rather skeletons of children, their lips purple and eyes out of orbit, peppered by flies, beseeching alms. Two or three years previous, a girl or boy cost a rupee, but now no one wanted them even for free.

The train carried more than passengers. In the back several freight cars were filled with rice and millet for export. Guards watched over them, finger on the trigger. No one came near those cars. Only the pigeons that pecked at the sacks and flew off.

CHINA DISHED UP AT EUROPE’S TABLE

China produced never-ending famines, plagues, and droughts. The so-called Boxers, who began as a secret society, wanted to restore the country’s broken dignity by expelling foreigners and Christian churches.

“If it does not rain,” they said, “there is a reason. The churches have bottled up the sky.”

At the end of the century, they launched a rebellion from the north which set fire to China’s countryside and reached all the way to Beijing.

Then eight nations, Great Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Austria, Russia, Japan, and the United States, sent shiploads of soldiers to reestablish order by decapitating all who had heads.

Next, they sliced up China as if it were a pizza, and each took ports, lands, and cities that the phantasmal Chinese dynasty bestowed upon them as concessions for periods of up to ninety-nine years.

AFRICA DISHED UP AT EUROPE’S TABLE

Following in England’s footsteps, Europe one fine day decided that slavery was an abominable crime. Jurists discovered that the slave trade violated people’s rights and the Church revealed that it was offensive in God’s eyes.

Then Europe began its colonial conquest deep inside Africa. Before, the men from cold lands went no farther than the ports where they bought slaves. Now the way to the hot lands was opened by explorers, behind whom came warriors mounted on cannons, and behind them missionaries armed with crucifixes, and behind them merchants. The highest waterfall and the largest lake in Africa were named Victoria in honor of a not-very-African queen, and the invaders baptized rivers and mountains, somehow believing the story that they were discovering everything they saw. And the blacks performing slave labor in mines and on plantations were no longer called slaves.

In 1885, in Berlin, after a year of much scuffling, the European conquistadors managed to agree on how to divvy up the loot.

Three decades later, Germany lost the First World War and with it the African colonies it had gained, thus enlarging the dominions of the British, the French, and the Belgians.

A long while had passed since Friedrich Hegel explained that Africa had no history and that it would only be of interest “for the study of barbarism and savagery,” and another thinker, Herbert Spencer, judged that civilization would wipe inferior races off the map, “because every obstacle, human or brute, must be eliminated.”

The three decades leading up to war in 1914 were called “an era of world peace.” During those sweet years, a quarter of the planet went down the throats of a handful of countries.

CAPTAIN OF DARKNESS

When Africa was carved up at the Berlin conference, King Leopold of Belgium got the Congo as his private playground.

By shooting elephants, the king turned his colony into the world’s greatest source of ivory, and by whipping and mutilating blacks, he supplied abundant cheap rubber for the wheels of the automobiles that had begun to roll down the world’s streets.

He never set foot in the Congo because of the bugs. Writer Joseph Conrad, however, did. And in
Heart of Darkness,
his best-known novel, Kurtz was the name he gave to Captain Léon Rom, a distinguished officer of the colonial force. The natives received his orders on all fours, and he called them “stupid beasts.” At the entrance to his house, among the garden flowers, were twenty stakes that completed the decor. Each held up the head of a rebellious black. And at the entrance to his office, amid more garden flowers, hung a noose swaying in the breeze.

In his free time, when not hunting Africans or elephants, the captain painted pastoral scenes, wrote poetry, and collected butterflies.

TWO QUEENS

Shortly before dying, Queen Victoria had the great pleasure of acquiring another pearl for her well-laden crown. The Ashanti kingdom, one vast gold mine, became a British colony.

The conquest had taken several wars over the course of an entire century.

The final battle began when the English demanded the Ashantis hand over the sacred throne, home of the nation’s soul.

Ashanti men were ferocious, better avoided than confronted, but in the final battle a woman took the lead. The queen mother, Yaa Asantewaa, pushed the male chiefs aside:

“Where does the bravery lie? Not in you.”

The fight was arduous. At the end of three months, the logic of British cannons won out.

Victoria, the triumphant queen, died in London.

Yaa Asantewaa, the vanquished queen, died far from her own land.

The victors never found the sacred throne.

Years later, the Ashanti kingdom, called Ghana, was the first colony in black Africa to win independence.

WILDE

The lord chamberlain of the kingdom of Great Britain was much more than a valet. Among other things, he was in charge of censoring the theater. With help from experts, he decided which plays ought to be cut or closed in order to protect the public from the dangers of immorality.

In 1892, Sarah Bernhardt announced that Oscar Wilde’s new play,
Salome,
would open in London. Two weeks before opening night, the play was shut down.

No one protested, save the playwright. Wilde reminded one and all that he was an Irishman living in a nation of Tartuffes, but the English just congratulated him on the joke. This chubby genius, who wore a white flower in his lapel and a knife blade on his tongue, was the most venerated celebrity in the theaters and salons of London.

Wilde made fun of everyone, including himself:

“I can resist everything except temptation,” he said.

And one night he shared his bed with the son of the Marquis of Queensberry, tempted by his languid beauty, mysteriously youthful and jaded at once. That was the first of many nights. The marquis found out and he declared war. And he won.

After three humiliating trials, which offered daily banquets for the press and unleashed the indignation of the citizenry against this corruptor of youth, the jury found him guilty of gross indecency committed against the young men who had the pleasure of accusing him.

He spent two years in jail working with pick and shovel. His creditors auctioned off everything he owned. When he got out, his books had disappeared from the stores, his plays from the stage. No one applauded him, no one invited him.

He lived alone, and alone he drank, pronouncing his brilliant sayings for no one.

Death was kind. It came quickly.

FRIGID RIGID MORALS