Mirrors

  CHARLES

  The son of Juana la Loca was a king of seventeen crowns, inherited, conquered, or bought.

  In 1519, in Frankfurt, having convinced the electors of the Holy Roman Empire with two tons of gold, he became emperor of all Europe.

  This persuasive argument was lent to him by bankers: the Germans Fugger and Welser, the Genovese Fornari and Vivaldo, and the Florentine Gualterotti.

  Charles was nineteen years old and already a prisoner of the bankers.

  He reigned in reins.

  LEGACY DENIED

  One night in Madrid I asked a taxi driver:

  “What did the Moors bring to Spain?”

  “Trouble,” he answered without a trace of hesitation or doubt.

  The Moors were Islamic Spaniards who called Spain home for eight centuries, thirty-two generations, and whose culture shone there as nowhere else.

  Many Spaniards know nothing of the light still glowing from those lamps. The Muslim legacy includes:

  religious tolerance, later crushed by the Catholic Monarchs,

  windmills, parks, and aqueducts that still quench the thirst of several

  cities and their surrounding fields,

  the postal service,

  vinegar, mustard, saffron, cinnamon, cumin, cane sugar, churros,

  meatballs, dried fruits,

  chess,

  zero and the other digits we use,

  algebra and trigonometry,

  classic works by Anaxagoras, Ptolemy, Plato, Aristotle, Euclid,

  Archimedes, Hippocrates, Galen, and others, which became known in

  Spain and in Europe through their Arabic translations,

  the four thousand Arabic words in the language of Castile,

  and several cities of incredible beauty, like Granada, of which an

  anonymous verse sings:

  Please give the man a penny,

  Lady, you must be kind,

  His sorrow is worse than any,

  To be in Granada and be blind.

  MAIMONIDES AND AVERROES

  Jewish and Muslim cultures flowered side by side in Spain under the caliphs.

  Two sages, Maimonides, a Jew, and Averroes, a Muslim, were born nearly at the same time in Córdoba in the twelfth century, and they traveled down the same path.

  Both were physicians.

  The sultan of Egypt was a patient of Maimonides, and Averroes took care of the caliph of Córdoba without ever forgetting, as he wrote, that “most deaths are caused by medicine.”

  Both were jurists too.

  Maimonides consolidated Hebrew law, up to that point dispersed among many books, and he brought coherence and unity to the myriad rabbinical writings on the subject. Averroes was the highest judicial authority in all of Muslim Andalusia, and his decisions set precedents under Islamic law for centuries.

  And both were philosophers.

  Maimonides wrote Guide for the Perplexed to help the Jews, who had discovered Greek philosophy thanks to Arabic translations, overcome the contradiction between reason and faith.

  That contradiction condemned Averroes. Fundamentalists accused him of putting human reason before divine revelation. Even worse, he refused to limit the exercise of reason to the male half of humanity, and said that women in several Islamic nations were treated like vegetables. He was banished.

  Neither man died in the city of his birth. Maimonides died in Cairo, Averroes in Marrakesh. A mule took Averroes back to Córdoba. The mule carried his body and his outlawed books.

  STONE

  When triumphant Catholics invaded the Córdoba mosque, they smashed half of the one thousand columns and filled the edifice with suffering saints.

  The Córdoba Cathedral is now its official name, but no one calls it that. It remains the Mosque. This forest of stone columns, the survivors, is still a Muslim temple, even though prayers to Allah are prohibited.

  At the ceremonial center, in sacred space, lies a boulder, large and unadorned.

  The priests allowed it to stay.

  They believed it was mute.

  WATER AND LIGHT

  Back in the year 1600-something, sculptor Luis de la Peña wanted to sculpt light. In his workshop on an alley in Granada, he spent his entire life trying and failing.

  It never occurred to him to look up. There, on the crest of a hill of red earth, other artists had sculpted light, and water too.

  In the turrets and gardens of the Alhambra, crown of the Muslim kingdom, those artists had made the impossible possible.

  The Alhambra is not a stationary sculpture. It breathes water and light and plays with them as they cavort with each other: liquid light, shining water.

  FORBIDDEN TO BE

  The great-grandson of Queen Isabella, Emperor Philip II, sworn enemy of water and light, reiterated certain prohibitions against the Moors, and as the year 1567 began, he decided to implement them with an iron fist.

  It was forbidden to:

  speak, read, or write in Arabic,

  dress in traditional garb,

  celebrate holidays with Moorish instruments or song,

  use Moorish names or nicknames,

  bathe in public baths.

  This last prohibition forbade what no longer existed.

  A century before, there had been six hundred public baths in the city of Córdoba alone.

  THE MOST POWERFUL MAN IN THIS WORLD LIVED IN THE OTHER

  Emperor Chin was the founder of China, and from him China got its name. Emperor Philip II was lord and master of half the world, stretching from America to the Philippines, and from him the Philippines got its name. Both of them lived for their deaths.

  The Spanish monarch spent his weekends at El Escorial cemetery, built for his eternal rest, and he slept his finest siestas in his coffin: a rehearsal.

  Everything else mattered but little. His Invincible Armada had been minced, and cobwebs had invaded the coffers of the Royal Treasury, but the promenades to his funerary temple sheltered him from the world’s ingratitude.

  On his final journey from throne to grave, King Philip had sixty thousand masses celebrated in homage to his own glory.

  LAST SPARK OF THE TURBANS

  Moorish rage exploded. Against the prohibitions, the remaining children of Mohammed in the lands of Andalusia rose up.

  For over a year the soldiers of Christ were unable to stamp out the flames. Then, just as in the times of the Crusades, a decisive favor came their way: they were given exclusive rights to all booty, tax-free, as well as the right to enslave all prisoners.

  The forces of order then seized the wheat and the millet, the almonds, cows, sheep, silks, gold, clothing, necklaces, girls, and women. And any men they hunted down, they auctioned off.

  THE DEVIL IS MUSLIM

  Dante knew Mohammed was a terrorist. Not for nothing did he locate him in one of the circles of hell, condemned to be disemboweled in perpetuity. “One whom I saw ripped,” the poet rejoiced in The Divine Comedy, “right from his chin to where we fart . . . ”

  More than one pope found proof that the hordes of Muslims tormenting Christians were not beings of flesh and blood, rather a great army of demons that grew larger with every blow of the lance, sword, and harquebus.

  Back in the year 1564, demonologist Johannes Wier counted the number of plainclothes devils working full time for the perdition of Christian souls. There were 7,409,027, organized in seventy-nine legions.

  A lot of boiling water has flowed under hell’s bridge since that census was taken. How many envoys from the kingdom of darkness would there be today? Their flair for the theater makes a precise tally difficult. Those sneaks still wear turbans to hide their horns, and long tunics to cover their tails and bat’s wings, not to mention the bombs they carry under their arms.

  THE DEVIL IS JEWISH

  Hitler did not invent a thing. For two thousand years, the Jews, the unpardonable assassins of Jesus, have been the ones guilty of all sins.

  What do you mean, Jesus was
Jewish? And the twelve apostles and four evangelists too? Impossible. Revealed truths live outside the realm of doubt: in synagogues the devil teaches Jews to defile the host, poison holy waters, cause bankruptcies, and spread plagues.

  England expelled them in 1290, leaving not a one, but that did not stop Marlowe and Shakespeare, who probably never met a Jew in their lives, from inventing characters who fit the caricature of a blood-sucking parasitic moneylender.

  Accused of serving the evil one, this accursed people wandered for centuries, from expulsion to expulsion, from massacre to massacre. After England, they were tossed in succession from France, Austria, Spain, Portugal, and from several Swiss, German, and Italian cities. They had lived in Spain for thirteen centuries. When they left, they took the keys to their homes with them. Some have them still.

  The colossal butchery organized by Hitler was the culmination of a long history.

  Hunting Jews has always been a European sport.

  Now the Palestinians, who never played it, are paying the bill.

  THE DEVIL IS BLACK

  Like the night, like sin, black is the enemy of innocence and light.

  In his renowned book of travels, Marco Polo described the inhabitants of Zanzibar: “They are quite black and go entirely naked. . . . They have big mouths, and their noses are so flattened and their lips and eyes so big that they are horrible to look at. Anyone who saw them in another country would say that they were devils.”

  In Spain three centuries later, a black-painted Lucifer rode a chariot of fire onstage in playhouses and at fairs.

  Saint Theresa could not shake him off. He stood right beside her once, “a very abominable shade of black.” Another time, when he sat on her prayer book, she saw a red flame emerge from his black body as the prayers burned him.

  In America, everyone knew it was Satan who pounded the drums on the plantations, calling on the thousands of imported slaves to disobey, and who put music and writhing and shuddering into the bodies of his children born to sin. Even Martín Fierro, the poor and punished gaucho, felt a little better when he compared himself to the blacks:

  “Those guys were made by the Devil,” he said, “as a blight on hell.”

  THE DEVIL IS FEMALE

  Malleus Maleficarum, also known as The Hammer of Witches, recommends the most ruthless techniques for exorcising titty, long-haired demons.

  At the request of Pope Innocent VIII, two German inquisitors, Heinrich Kramer and Jakob Sprenger, wrote the book that became the juridical and theological basis for the tribunals of the Holy Inquisition.

  The authors demonstrate that witches, Satan’s harem, represent women in their natural state, for “all witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which in women is insatiable.” And they warn that such beings of pleasant aspect, fetid touch, and deadly company enchant men and attract them, serpent’s hiss, scorpion’s tail, only to annihilate them.

  That treatise on criminology advises torturing everyone suspected of witchcraft. Those who confess deserve the stake; those who do not also deserve the stake, because only a witch, fortified by her lover the devil at the witches’ Sabbath, could resist such suffering without telling all.

  Pope Honorius III decreed:

  “Women should not speak. Their lips carry the stigma of Eve, who led men to perdition.”

  Eight centuries later, the Catholic Church still denies women the pulpit.

  The same fear drives fundamentalist Muslims to mutilate women’s genitalia and cover their faces.

  And a sense of relief moves orthodox Jewish men to begin each day by whispering:

  “Thanks be to God for not making me a woman.”

  THE DEVIL IS POOR

  Today’s cities are immense jails holding prisoners of fear, where fortresses masquerade as homes and armor as clothing.

  A state of siege. Do not get distracted, do not let down your guard, do not ever trust, say the lords of the world, masters of impunity who rape the environment, kidnap countries, extort wages, and murder by the throng. Watch out, they warn, the bad guys are right there, huddled in miserable slums, chewing on their envy, resentfully licking their wounds.

  The poor: the ragamuffins for all bondage, the dead for all wars, the flesh for all prisons, the bargain-basement hands for all jobs.

  Hunger, which kills silently, kills the silent. Experts speak for them, poorologists who tell us what the poor do not work at, what they do not eat, what they do not weigh, what height they do not reach, what they do not have, what they do not think, what parties they do not vote for, what they do not believe in.

  The only question unanswered is why poor people are poor. Could it be because we are fed by their hunger and clothed by their nakedness?

  THE DEVIL IS FOREIGN

  The blame-o-meter indicates that immigrants have come to steal our jobs, and the danger-o-meter is flashing red.

  If poor, young, and nonwhite, the intruder from outside is deemed guilty at first sight, guilty of indigence, of chaos, of carrying the unconcealed weapon of his skin. If neither poor nor young nor dark, a nasty welcome is justified in any case, since he or she has come prepared to work twice as hard for half as much.

  Anxiety about losing one’s job is among the most fearsome of all the fears that govern us in these times of fear, and immigrants are always at hand to take responsibility for unemployment, shrinking wages, crime, and other calamities.

  In times past, Europe showered soldiers, prisoners, and starving peasants on the south of the world. These protagonists of colonial adventures went down in the history books as envoys of God and civilization sent to save barbaric lands.

  Now comes the return voyage. Those who travel south to north, or perish in the attempt, are protagonists of colonial misadventures, and in the history books they will go down as envoys of the devil and barbarism sent to ruin civilized lands.

  THE DEVIL IS HOMOSEXUAL

  In Renaissance Europe, fire was the fate reserved for the children of hell, since from fire they had come. England punished with “horrendous death those who had had sexual relations with animals, Jews, or persons of the same sex.”

  Before the Spanish Conquest, homosexuals were free in America, except in the kingdoms of the Aztecs and the Incas. Conquistador Vasco Núñez de Balboa took Indians who practiced that abnormality with utter normality and threw them to hungry dogs. He believed homosexuality was contagious. Five centuries later, I heard the same story from the archbishop of Montevideo.

  Historian Richard Nixon knew the vice could be fatal for civilization:

  “You know what happened to the Greeks? Homosexuality destroyed them. Sure, Aristotle was a homo, we all know that, so was Socrates. Do you know what happened to the Romans? The last six emperors were fags.”

  Civilizer Adolf Hitler took drastic measures to save Germany from the peril. “Degenerates guilty of aberrant crimes against nature” were obliged to wear a pink triangle. How many of them died in the concentration camps? No one knows.

  In the year 2001, the German government decided “to rectify the exclusion of homosexuals from being counted among the victims of the Holocaust.” It took them more than half a century to correct the omission.

  THE DEVIL IS GYPSY

  Hitler believed “the Gypsy plague” was a threat, and he was not alone.

  Centuries ago many people became convinced that this race of dark color carries crime in its veins, and they believe it still: always unwelcome, drifters with no home but the road, defilers of lasses and latches, charmed fingers for cards and the knife.

  In a single night in August 1944, 2,897 Gypsies, women, children, men, perished in the gas chambers of Auschwitz.

  Of all the Gypsies of Europe, one in four was annihilated during the war.

  About them, who even asked?

  THE DEVIL IS INDIAN

  The conquistadors confirmed that Satan, expelled from Europe, had found refuge on the islands and coasts of the Caribbean kissed by his fiery mouth.

  There lived
beastly beings who called carnal sin “play,” and who practiced it at all hours and with all comers, who knew nothing of the Ten Commandments or the Seven Sacraments or the Seven Deadly Sins, who went about naked, and who had the habit of eating each other.

  The conquest of America was a long and thorny exorcism. The evil one was so deeply rooted in this land that when the Indians seemed to be devotedly kneeling before the Virgin, they were really praying to the serpent crushed beneath her foot. And when they kissed the cross they were celebrating the encounter between the rain and the earth.

  The conquistadors fulfilled the mission of returning to God the gold, silver, and numerous other riches that the devil had usurped. Recovering the booty was no easy task. Now and again, however, they got a little help from above. When the lord of hell laid an ambush in a narrow canyon to keep the Spaniards from reaching the mountain of silver in Potosí, an archangel came down from the heights and gave him a tremendous thrashing.

  ORIGIN OF AMERICA

  In Cuba, according to Christopher Columbus, there were mermaids with men’s faces and roosters’ feathers.

  In Guyana, according to Sir Walter Raleigh, there were people with eyes on their shoulders and mouths in their chests.