Mirrors (67 page)

At seventeen, Josephine Baker dances the Charleston on Broadway.

At eighteen, she crosses the Atlantic and conquers Paris. The “Bronze Venus” performs in the nude, with no more clothing than a belt of bananas.

At twenty-one, her outlandish combination of clown and femme fatale makes her the most popular and highest-paid performer in Europe.

At twenty-four, she is the most photographed woman on the planet. Pablo Picasso, on his knees, paints her. To look like her, the pallid young damsels of Paris rub themselves with walnut cream, which darkens the skin.

At thirty, she has problems in some hotels because she travels with a chimpanzee, a snake, a goat, two parrots, several fish, three cats, seven dogs, a cheetah named Chiquita who wears a diamond-studded collar, and a little pig named Albert, whom she bathes in Je Reviens perfume by Worth.

At forty, she receives the Legion of Honor for service to the French Resistance during the Nazi occupation.

At forty-one and on her fourth husband, she adopts twelve children of many colors and many origins, whom she calls “my rainbow tribe.”

At forty-five, she returns to the United States. She insists that everyone, whites and blacks, sit together at her shows. If not, she will not perform.

At fifty-seven, she shares the stage with Martin Luther King and speaks against racial discrimination before an immense crowd at the March on Washington.

At sixty-eight, she recovers from a calamitous bankruptcy and at the Bobino Theater in Paris she celebrates a half century on the stage.

And she departs.

SARAH

“I never stop acting,” she said. “Always and everywhere, in all sorts of places, at every instant. I am my own double.”

Nobody knew if Sarah Bernhardt was the best actress in the world or the biggest liar in history or both at once.

At the beginning of the twenties, after half a century of unchallenged reign, she remained the queen of theater in Paris and wherever else her endless tours took her. She was nearly eighty, so thin she cast no shadow, and minus a leg. All Paris knew it, but all Paris chose to believe that the irresistible girl, who drew sighs just by walking by, was doing a stupendous job of portraying a poor mutilated elderly woman.

SURRENDER OF PARIS

When he was a barefoot boy kicking soccer balls made of rags down nameless streets, he rubbed his knees and ankles with grasshopper grease. That’s what he said, and that was how he got his leg magic.

José Leandro Andrade did not say much. He did not celebrate his goals or his loves. When he danced past defenders with a ball glued to his foot, he moved with the same haughty gait and absent expression as when he danced the tango with a woman glued to his frame.

In the Olympics of 1924, he astonished Paris. The crowds were delirious, the press called him “the Black Marvel.” Fame brought dames. Letters rained down on him, none of which he could read. They were written on perfumed paper by ladies who exposed their knees and blew smoke rings from long, gold cigarette holders.

When he returned to Uruguay, he brought back a silk kimono, gray gloves, and a wristwatch.

All this was soon over.

In those days, soccer was played for wine and food and pleasure.

He sold newspapers on the street.

He sold his medals.

He was the first black star of world soccer.

HAREM NIGHTS

In the museums of Paris, writer Fatema Mernissi saw the
Odalisques
painted by Henri Matisse.

They were harem flesh: voluptuous, indolent, obedient.

Fatema looked at the dates on the paintings, compared, and confirmed: when Matisse portrayed Turkish women like that, in the twenties and thirties, they were well on their way to becoming full citizens, gaining entry to the university and Parliament, winning the right to divorce, and tearing off the veil.

The harem, a lockup for women, had been outlawed in Turkey, but not in Europe’s imagination. Virtuous gentlemen, monogamous in their wakeful hours and polygamous in their dreams, could enjoy free passes to that exotic paradise, where empty-headed, tight-lipped females delighted in pleasing the male jailer. Any mediocre office worker could close his eyes and become a powerful caliph, caressed by a multitude of naked belly-dancing virgins vying for the favor of a night alongside their lord and master.

Fatema had been born and raised in a harem.

PESSOA’S PERSONS

He was one, he was many, he was everyone, he was no one.

Fernando Pessoa, sad bureaucrat, prisoner of the clock, solitary author of love letters never sent, carried an insane asylum around inside himself.

Of the denizens, we know their names, the dates and even hours of their births, their astrological signs, weights, and heights.

And their works, because they were all poets.

Alberto Caeiro, pagan, mocker of metaphysics and other intellectual acrobatics that reduce life to concepts, wrote burps.

Ricardo Reis, monarchist, Hellenist, child of classical culture, who was born several times and had several astrological signs, wrote constructions.

Álvaro de Campos, engineer from Glasgow, vanguardist, who studied energy and feared losing his zest for life, wrote sensations.

Bernardo Soares, master of the paradox, prose poet, scholar, who claimed to be an unwilling aide in some library, wrote contradictions.

And Antonio Mora, psychiatrist and nutcase, interned at Cascais, wrote lucubrations and locobrations.

Pessoa also wrote. When the others slept.

WAR STREET

From the start of the twentieth century, a mechanized bell announced each day’s opening and closing on the New York Stock Exchange. The pealing tones paid homage to the self-sacrificing labors of the speculators who make the world go round, determine the value of goods and countries, manufacture millionaires and mendicants, and are capable of killing more people than any war, plague, or drought.

On October 24, 1929, the bell rang cheerily as ever on the worst day in the entire history of that cathedral of finance. Its collapse closed banks and factories, sent unemployment skyrocketing, and pushed wages down the basement stairs. The entire world got stuck with the bill.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon consoled the victims. He said the crisis had its advantages, because “people will work harder and lead a more moral life.”

FORBIDDEN TO WIN ELECTIONS

So people would work harder and lead a more moral life, the Wall Street crash brought down the price of coffee and with it the elected government of El Salvador.

The reins of the country were seized by General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez, who liked to use a magic pendulum to find poison in his soup and enemies on the map.

The general called democratic elections, but the people abused the opportunity. The majority voted for the Communist Party. So the general had to annul the vote and a popular revolt erupted, as did Izalco volcano after many years asleep.

Machine guns reestablished the peace. Thousands died. How many, no one knows. They were peons, they were poor, they were Indians: the economy called them “the labor force” and death called them “unidentified.”

Indigenous leader José Feliciano Ama had already been killed several times when he was hanged from the branch of an olive tree. And there he was left to swing in the breeze, a civics lesson for schoolchildren brought from all over the country.

FORBIDDEN TO BE FERTILE