Mirrors

  VISIT TO THE VATICAN

  On the off chance he’ll answer, I ask Michelangelo:

  “Why does the statue of Moses have horns?”

  “In the fresco The Creation of Adam in the Sistine Chapel, we all fix our gaze on the finger that gives Adam life, but who is that naked girl God is casually yet lovingly caressing with his other hand?”

  “In the fresco The Creation of Eve, what are broken branches doing in Eden? Who cut them? Was logging allowed?”

  “And in the fresco The Last Judgment, who is the pope who has been punched by an angel and is tumbling down to hell carrying the pontifical keys and a bulging purse?”

  “The Vatican concealed forty-one little penises that you painted in that fresco. Did you know that your friend and colleague Daniele da Volterra was the one who covered those crotches with cloths of shame by order of the pope, and for that reason earned the nickname Il Braghettone, the Underwear Man?”

  BOSCH

  A condemned man shits gold coins.

  Another hangs from an immense key.

  The knife has ears.

  The harp plays the musician.

  Fire freezes.

  The pig wears a nun’s habit.

  Inside the egg lives death.

  Machines run people.

  Each nut dwells in his own world.

  No one meets up with anyone.

  All are running nowhere.

  They have nothing in common, save fear of each other.

  “Five centuries ago, Hieronymus Bosch painted globalization,” to quote John Berger.

  PRAISED BE BLINDNESS

  In Siracusa, Sicily, back around the year 300, Saint Lucy gouged out her eyes, or had them gouged out, for refusing to accept a pagan husband. She lost her sight to win entry to heaven, and pictures show the saint holding a platter on which she offers her eyes to Our Lord Jesus Christ.

  Twelve hundred and fifty years later, Saint Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, published in Rome his spiritual exercises. There he wrote this testimony of blind submission:

  “Take, Lord, and receive all my freedom, my memory, my understanding, and my will.”

  And as if that were not enough:

  “To get everything right, I must always believe that what I see as white is black, if the Church hierarchy so determines.”

  FORBIDDEN TO BE CURIOUS

  Knowledge is sin. Adam and Eve ate the fruit of that tree and look what happened to them.

  Some time later, Nicolaus Copernicus, Giordano Bruno, and Galileo Galilei were punished for having shown that the earth moves around the sun.

  Copernicus did not dare publish his scandalous revelation until he felt death approaching. The Catholic Church included his work in the Index of Forbidden Books.

  Bruno, wandering poet, spread the word about Copernicus’s heresy: the earth was but one of the planets of the solar system, not the center of the universe. The Holy Inquisition locked him up in a dungeon for eight years. Several times he had the chance to repent, and several times Bruno refused. In the end, this obstinate mule was set aflame before a crowd in the Roman market at Campo de’ Fiori. While he burned, they brought a crucifix to his lips. He turned away.

  A few years later, exploring the heavens with the thirty-two lenses of his telescope, Galileo confirmed that the condemned man was right.

  He was imprisoned for blasphemy.

  He broke down during the interrogation.

  In a loud voice, he swore that he cursed any who believed the earth moved around the sun.

  And under his breath, they say, he murmured the phrase that made him famous for all time.

  THE DANGEROUS VICE OF ASKING

  Which is worth more? Experience or doctrine?

  By dropping stones and pebbles, big balls and little balls, Galileo Galilei proved that velocity remains the same no matter the weight. Aristotle was wrong, and for nineteen centuries no one had noticed.

  Johannes Kepler, another curious fellow, discovered that plants do not rotate in circles when they follow the light over the course of a day. Wasn’t the circle supposed to be the perfect path of everything that revolves? Wasn’t the universe supposed to be the perfect work of God?

  “This world is not perfect, not nearly,” Kepler concluded. “Why should its paths be perfect?”

  His reasoning seemed suspicious to Lutherans and Catholics alike. Kepler’s mother had spent four years in prison accused of practicing witchcraft. They must have been up to something.

  But he saw, and helped others to see in those times of obligatory gloom:

  he deduced that the sun turns on its axis,

  he discovered an unknown star,

  he invented a unit of measure he called the “diopter” and founded

  modern optics.

  And when his final days were drawing near, he let it be known that just as the sun determined the route of plants, the seas obeyed the moon.

  “Senile dementia,” his colleagues diagnosed.

  RESURRECTION OF SERVET

  In 1553 in Geneva, Miguel Servet was reduced to ashes along with his books. At the request of the Holy Inquisition, John Calvin had him burned alive using green wood.

  As if that were not fire enough, French inquisitors burned him again, in effigy, a few months later.

  Servet, a Spanish physician, lived his life in flight, changing names, changing kingdoms. He did not believe in the Holy Trinity or in baptism before reaching the age of reason. And he committed the unpardonable insolence of showing that blood does not lie still, rather it flows through the body and is purified in the lungs.

  That is why he is known today as the Copernicus of physiology.

  Servet wrote: “In this world there is no truth, only passing shadows.”

  And his shadow passed.

  Centuries later, it returned. It was stubborn, like him.

  EUROEVERYTHING

  On his deathbed, Copernicus published the book that founded modern astronomy.

  Three centuries before, Arab scientists Mu’ayyad al-Din al-’Urdi and Nasir al-Din Tusi had come up with the theorems crucial to that development. Copernicus used their theorems but did not cite the source.

  Europe looked in the mirror and saw the world.

  Beyond that lay nothing.

  The three inventions that made the Renaissance possible, the compass, gunpowder, and the printing press, came from China. The Babylonians scooped Pythagoras by fifteen hundred years. Long before anyone else, the Indians knew the world was round and had calculated its age. And better than anyone else, the Mayans knew the stars, eyes of the night, and the mysteries of time.

  Such details were not worthy of Europe’s attention.

  SOUTH

  Arab maps still showed the south on top and the north below, but by the thirteenth century Europe had reestablished the natural order of the universe.

  According to the rules of that order, dictated by God, north was up and south was down.

  The world was a body. In the north lay the limpid countenance, eyes raised to heaven. In the south lay the musky nether parts, populated by filth and by dark beings named antipodes, the reverse image of the luminous inhabitants of the north.

  In the south, rivers ran backward, summers were cold, day was night, and the devil was God. The sky was black, empty. All the stars had fled north.

  BESTIARY

  Beyond Europe, monsters swarmed, the sea bellowed, and the earth burned. A few travelers had been able to overcome their fear. Upon their return, they told their stories.

  Odoric of Pordenone, who set forth in the year 1314, saw two-headed birds and hens covered in wool instead of feathers. In the Caspian Sea, live lambs emerged from the buds of plants. In Africa, Pygmies married and had children when they reached six months of age.

  John Mandeville visited some of the islands of the Orient in 1356. There he saw headless people who ate and spoke through an open mouth in their chests, and he also saw people with a single foot that was someti
mes used as a parasol or an umbrella. The inhabitants of the island of Tacorde, who ate nothing but raw snakes, did not speak. They hissed.

  In 1410, Cardinal Pierre d’Ailly described Asia according to the tales of travelers. On the island of Taprobane there were mountains of gold, guarded by dragons and by ants as large as dogs.

  Antonio Pigafetta went around the world in 1520. He saw trees that sprouted leaves with feet, and during the day they leapt from the branches and went for a stroll.

  ORIGIN OF SEA BREEZES

  According to the stories of ancient mariners, the sea was once still, an immense lake without waves or ripples, and it could only be navigated by paddle.

  Then a canoe, lost in time, arrived from the other side of the world and found the island where the breezes lived. The mariners captured them and carried them off and obliged them to blow. The canoe rode on the captive breezes, and the mariners, who had spent centuries paddling and paddling, could at last lie down to sleep.

  They never awakened.

  The canoe crashed against a rocky cliff.

  Ever since, the breezes wander the globe in search of their lost island home. Trade winds and monsoons and hurricanes roam the seven seas, in vain. To avenge that long-ago kidnapping, they sometimes sink the ships that cross their path.

  AFTERMAP

  A couple of millennia ago, Seneca foretold that someday the map of the world would extend beyond Iceland, known then as Thule.

  Seneca the Elder, who was a Spaniard, wrote:

  In the later years of the world, will come

  certain times in which the ocean sea will release

  the meekness of things.

  And a great land will open.

  And a new mariner,

  like the one who guided Jason

  and who went by the name Tiphys,

  will discover a new world

  and the island of Thule will no longer be the last of the lands.

  COLUMBUS

  Defying the fury of the winds and the hunger of ship-eating monsters, Admiral Christopher Columbus set sail.

  He did not discover America. The Polynesians had arrived a century previous, and the Vikings four centuries before that. And three hundred centuries before them all came the oldest inhabitants of these lands, people whom Columbus called Indians, believing he had entered the Orient by the back door.

  Since he did not understand what they said, Columbus was convinced the natives did not know how to speak. Since they went about naked, were docile, and gave up everything in return for nothing, he believed they were not thinking beings.

  Although he died insisting his travels had taken him to Asia, Columbus did begin to harbor doubts on his second voyage. When his ships anchored off the Cuban coast in the middle of June 1494, the admiral dictated a statement affirming that he was in China. He left written evidence that his crew agreed: anyone saying the contrary was to receive a hundred lashes, be fined ten thousand maravedies, and have his tongue cut out.

  At the bottom of the page, the few sailors who knew how to write signed their names.

  FACES

  The caravels left the port of Palos heading the same way as the birds, toward the void.

  Four and a half centuries after the first voyage, Daniel Vázquez Díaz painted the walls of the Rábida Monastery, next door to the port, in homage to the discovery of America.

  Although the artist intended a celebration, involuntarily he disclosed the rotten mood Columbus and his sailors were in. No one smiles in those paintings, and the long, somber faces portend nothing good. They sensed the worst. Perhaps those poor devils, pulled from prison or kidnapped from the docks, knew they were to do the dirty work Europe needed to become what it is today.

  DESTINIES

  On his third crossing of the ocean sea, Christopher Columbus was clapped in chains and, in the name of the Spanish Crown, returned to Spain a prisoner.

  In the name of the Crown, Vasco Núñez de Balboa lost his head. In the name of the Crown, Pedro de Alvarado was tried and imprisoned.

  Diego de Almagro was strangled to death by Francisco Pizarro, who was then stabbed sixteen times by the son of his victim.

  Rodrigo de Bastidas, the first Spaniard to navigate the Magdalena River, ended his days on the point of his lieutenant’s knife.

  Cristóbal de Olid, conquistador of Honduras, lost his head by order of Hernán Cortés.

  Hernán Cortés, the luckiest conquistador, died a marquis and in bed, but could not avoid being tried by the King’s envoy.

  AMERIGO

  Botticelli’s Venus was a girl named Simonetta, who lived in Florence and married not Amerigo Vespucci, but his cousin. Lovesick, Amerigo drowned his sorrows in seawater rather than tears. And he sailed all the way to the land that now bears his name.

  Under a sky of stars never before seen, Amerigo found people who had neither king nor property nor clothing, who valued feathers more than gold, and with whom he traded a brass bell for a hundred and fifty-seven pearls worth a thousand ducats. He got along well with these untrustworthy innocents, though he slept with one eye open in case they decided to roast him on a grill.

  And he also feared losing his faith. Up to then he had believed, literally, in everything the Bible said. But seeing what he saw in America, Amerigo could never again believe the story of Noah’s ark, because no ship, no matter how immense, could hold all those birds of a thousand plumages and a thousand calls, and the outrageously prodigious diversity of beasts, bugs, and brutes.

  ISABELLA

  Columbus left from the tiny port of Palos, not from Cádiz as planned, because it was filled to bursting. Thousands upon thousands of Jews were being expelled from the land of their forebears and the forebears of their forebears.

  Columbus made his voyage thanks to Queen Isabella. So did the Jews.

  And after the Jews, it was the Muslims’ turn.

  For ten years, Isabella battled the final bastion of Islam in Spain. When Granada fell and her Crusade ended, she did all she could to save those souls condemned to eternal hellfire. In her infinite compassion, she offered them pardon and conversion. They answered her with sticks and stones. At that point she had no choice: she ordered the sacred books of Mohammed burned in the central square of the conquered city, and she expelled the infidels who persisted in their false religion and insisted on speaking Arabic.

  Other expulsion decrees, signed by other monarchs, completed the purge. Spain sent into everlasting exile her children of befouled blood, Jews and Muslims, and thus emptied herself of her finest artisans, artists, and scientists, of her most advanced farmers, and of her most experienced bankers and merchants. In exchange, Spain multiplied her beggars and her warriors, her parasitic nobles, and her fanatical monks, all of untainted Christian blood.

  Isabella, born on Holy Thursday and a devotee of Our Lady of Anguishes, founded the Spanish Inquisition and named as her confessor the celebrated Supreme Inquisitor, Torquemada.

  Her last will and testament, inflamed with mystical ardor, emphasized defending the purity of the faith and the purity of the race. Of the kings to come she begged and commanded them “never to cease fighting for the faith against the infidels and always to give great favor to matters of the Holy Inquisition.”

  THE AGES OF JUANA LA LOCA

  At the age of sixteen, she marries a Flemish prince. Her parents, the Catholic Monarchs, marry her off to a man she has never met.

  At eighteen, she discovers the bath. An Arab maiden shows her the delights of water. Juana, thrilled, bathes every day. A shocked Queen Isabella comments: “My daughter is abnormal.”

  At twenty-three, she tries to regain her children, who for reasons of state she rarely sees. “My daughter has lost her marbles,” remarks her father, King Ferdinand.

  At twenty-four, on a trip to Flanders, her ship sinks. Unflappable, she demands her food be served. Her husband, stuffed into an enormous lifesaver and kicking wildly in fear, screams, “You’re crazy!”

  At twenty-
five, scissors in hand, she hovers over several ladies of the court suspected of marital infidelity, and clips their curls.

  At twenty-six, she is a widow. Her husband, recently proclaimed king, drank a glass of ice-cold water. She suspects it was poisoned. She sheds not a tear, but from then on dresses perpetually in black.

  At twenty-seven, she spends her days seated on the throne in Castile, staring into space. She refuses to put her signature to laws, letters, or anything else they place before her.

  At twenty-nine, her father declares her insane and locks her up in a castle on the banks of the Duero River. Catalina, the youngest of her daughters, stays with her. The girl grows up in the cell next door, and from her window watches other children play.

  At thirty-six, she is alone. Her son Charles, soon to become emperor, has taken Catalina away. She refuses to eat until they bring her daughter back. They tie her up, beat her, oblige her to eat. Catalina does not return.

  At seventy-six, after nearly half a century of prison life, the queen who never reigned dies. For a long time she has been immobile, gazing at nothing.