The sailor sails on, though he knows he will never touch the stars that guide him.
LABOR RELATIONS
Rocinante, Don Quijote’s stallion, was nothing but skin and bones.
“Metaphysical you are.”
“Because I don’t eat.”
Rocinante merely ruminated on his complaints, but Sancho Panza railed against the exploitation of the squire by the knight. He complained about the pay he received for his labor, nothing but blows, hunger, bad weather, and promises, and he demanded a decent wage in cold, hard cash.
Don Quijote found such expressions of crass materialism despicable. Invoking his fellows of the errant knighthood, the noble gentleman concluded:
“Squires never ever worked for wages, rather for the good will of their masters.”
And he promised Sancho Panza he would be made governor of the first kingdom his master conquered, and he would receive the title of count or marquis.
But the plebeian wanted a steady job with a regular paycheck.
Four centuries have passed. We’re no farther along.
HEMOPHOBIA
Beginning in the fifteenth century, and for the longest time, Spain required proof of clean blood.
“Clean” meant pure Christian blood, by lineage inherited or purchased. Those who were Jews, Moors, heretics, or descendants of Jews, Moors, or heretics up to the seventh generation, could not hold public office, be it civil, military, or ecclesiastical.
From the sixteenth century on, clean blood was a prerequisite for travel to America. It seems that was the reason why Cervantes could not take off for the New World. Twice, he was rejected: “Look here for what may please you,” was the terse official response.
Some Jewish blood cell was suspected of navigating the veins of the father of Don Quijote. Dishonorable races were given to literature.
DEATH BY DOCTOR
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the French bought more than thirty million leeches a year.
For many centuries, doctors had been bleeding patients by leech or by cuts to free the body of bad blood. Bleeding was the preferred remedy for pneumonia, depression, rheumatism, apoplexy, broken bones, nervous exhaustion, and headaches.
Bleeding debilitated the sick. No evidence that it worked was ever recorded, but science continued using it as a cure-all for twenty-five hundred years, until well into the twentieth century.
That infallible remedy caused more devastation than all the plagues combined.
MOLIÈRE
As if the bite of the plague were not bad enough, fear of disease became a new disease.
In England, doctors looked after patients who believed they were fragile clay figurines, and who stayed away from people for fear they would bump into them and shatter. In France, Molière dedicated the last of the plays he wrote, directed, and acted in to the imaginary invalid.
Mocking his own obsessions, Molière poked fun at himself. He played the lead role: buried in the pillows of his easy chair, wrapped in furs, cap pulled down over his ears, he underwent continual bleedings, purges, and cleanses, prescribed by doctors who diagnosed bradyspepsia, dyspepsia, apepsia, lientery, dysentery, hydropsy, hypochondria, hypocrisy . . .
One afternoon, not long into a successful run, the entire cast pleaded with him to cancel the performance. Molière was very ill, truly ill and not only with a fevered imagination. He coughed more than he breathed and could barely speak or walk.
Cancel the performance? He never bothered to answer. His fellow actors were asking him to betray the kingdom where he had lived ever since that fine day when he was reborn as Molière, for the pleasure of all good people.
And that night, the imaginary invalid made the full house laugh as never before. Comedy, written and acted by Molière, took him out of his suffering and his fear of death, and he pulled off the greatest performance of his life. He coughed hard enough to break a rib, but forgot not a word of his long monologues, and when he vomited blood and fell to the floor the audience believed, or knew, that death was part of the play, and they gave him a standing ovation as the curtain fell with him.
ORIGIN OF ANESTHESIA
The carnival of Venice lasted four months, except when it lasted longer.
From everywhere came acrobats, musicians, thespians, puppeteers, prostitutes, magicians, fortune-tellers, and vendors offering love potions, good-luck tonics, and elixirs for a long life.
And from everywhere came the tooth pullers and the aching mouths that Saint Apollonius had been unable to cure. In agony, the latter approached the gates of Saint Mark, where, pliers in hand, the extractors awaited, anesthetists at their side.
The anesthetists did not put patients to sleep: they entertained them. They gave them not poppy or mandrake, but jokes and pirouettes. And their humor and grace were so miraculous that pain forgot to hurt.
The anesthetists were monkeys and dwarfs, dressed for carnival.
ORIGIN OF THE VACCINATION
At the beginning of the eighteenth century, smallpox killed half a million Europeans a year.
That was when Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, wife of the British ambassador in Istanbul, tried to get Europe to adopt Turkey’s tried and true method of prevention: a drop of variolic pus immunized against the murderous plague. But people mocked a woman masquerading as a scientist and preaching chicanery from pagan lands.
Seventy years later, an English doctor, Edward Jenner, inoculated the son of his gardener, an eight-year-old, with the so-called cowpox, which devastated the herds but did humans little harm. And then he gave him the deadly smallpox. The child did not fall ill.
Thus the vaccination was born, owing its existence to a child of servants used as a laboratory guinea pig, and owing its name to the Latin word for cow, vacca.
ORIGIN OF THE PROCESSION
In 1576 a plague caused a conflict between Archbishop Carlo Borromeo, a sinner on his way to sainthood, and the governor of Milan.
The archbishop ordered his followers to gather in the churches and beg God to pardon the sins that had brought the plague upon them. But the governor prohibited any gathering in closed buildings to avoid contagion.
So Archbishop Borromeo invented the procession. He ordered the saints and all their relics taken from the churches and carried through the city streets on the shoulders of the crowd.
A sea of lilies, tapers, and angels’ wings stopped at the door of every church to sing hymns of praise to the virtuous of Christendom, and to perform scenes from their lives and miracles.
Thespians died of envy.
MASKS
In Milan, Archbishop Borromeo deplored that “this adulterous, ungrateful world, enemy of God, this blind and crazy, ugly and pestiferous world,” had submitted to the masked lasciviousness of pagan festivals.
And he passed sentence on masks:
“Masks deform the human face and thus profane our divine likeness to God.”
In the name of God, the Church outlawed them. In the name of freedom, some time later, Napoleon did the same.
The masks of commedia dell’arte found refuge among the puppets.
With four sticks and a rag, puppeteers put on their tiny shows in public squares shared with acrobats, drifters, wandering minstrels, storytellers, and carnival magicians.
And when the masked puppets’ mockery of the lords and ladies got out of hand, the police whacked the puppeteers with their nightsticks and hauled them off to jail. And the puppets were left abandoned, gloves without hands, in the dark and empty square.
OTHER MASKS
African masks will not make you invisible. They neither hide, nor disguise, nor mask.
The gods that founded our earthly life in Africa send masks to transmit energy to their children. The mask with bull’s horns gives strength, the one featuring antelope antlers offers speed, the one with an elephant’s trunk teaches resistance, the one that has wings makes you fly.
Whenever a mask breaks, the mask-maker carves a new one. The mask’s spir
it will not be left homeless, and the people will not be left helpless.
PASQUINADES
The word “pasquinade,” meaning a libelous lampoon, comes from a statue in Rome. On the breast or back of that marble personage named Pasquino, anonymous hands wrote homages to the popes.
• On Alexander VI:
Alexander sells the nails and he sells Jesus crucified.
There’ll be no challenge to those sales: Al bought the goods before He
died.
• On Leo X:
Dead is the tenth of the Pope Leos,
well-known for the affection he had
for knaves and false impresarios
for tyrants rotten, dishonest, and bad.
• On Paul IV:
More faith, my children, and much less thought,
the Holy Office says a lot.
And there’s no reason they need name,
since to extinguish reason they have flame.
And keep your tongues hidden, don’t let them be viewed,
’cause Pope Paul likes them barbecued.
• And this is what the statue of Pasquino said to Pope Pius V, who sent quite a few suspected writers of pasquinades to the stake:
The gallows, oh, and the slow fire,
all the torments you desire,
frighten me not, Pius my dear.
You can send me to the stake
but shut me up you cannot make.
Of stone I’m made. I laugh, I sneer.
For you I am a threat to fear.
RECORD OF THE DEVIL’S CONFESSION
He had been decrepit since childhood.
Charles II, king of Spain and of America, was over thirty yet he had to be spoon-fed and he could not walk without falling down.
Useless were the dead pigeons the doctors placed on his head, and equally useless the capons raised on snake meat that his servants put down his throat, the cow’s piss they gave him to drink, and the scapularies stuffed with fingernails and eggshells slipped under his pillow by the friars who watched over his sleep.
Twice they married him off and no prince was born to either queen, even though both breakfasted on donkey’s milk with extract of agaric mushroom.
At that time the devil lived in Asturias, inside the body of a nun in the convent at Cangas. The exorcist, Father Antonio Álvarez Argüelles, extracted this confession:
“It is true that the king has been cursed,” the exorcist said the nun said the devil said. And the hex had been carried out with the remains of a cadaver.
“Using brains to disarm his ability to lead. Using entrails to destroy his health. Using kidneys to keep him from siring.”
And the exorcist said the nun said the devil said the author of the evil deed was a woman. The king’s mom, to be precise.
TERESA
Teresa of Ávila entered the convent to save herself from hell, the conjugal hell. Better to be a slave to God than servant to a brute.
But Saint Paul gave women three rights: “to obey, to serve, and to remain silent.” So the representative of His Holiness the pope found Teresa guilty “of being an apprehensive and unsettled female, disobedient and contumacious, who under the guise of devotion invents evil doctrines against Saint Paul, who commanded women not to teach.”
In Spain, Teresa founded several convents where the nuns not only gave classes but were in charge, where virtue was prized and lineage worthless, where no one had to submit proof of clean blood.
In 1576 she was accused before the Inquisition, because her grandfather claimed to be a true Christian but was a converted Jew, and because her mystical trances were the work of the devil ensconced in her body.
Four centuries later, on his deathbed, Francisco Franco wielded Teresa’s right arm to defend himself from the devil. By one of those strange turns life takes, Teresa had become a saint and a role model for Iberian women and, except for one foot which ended up in Rome, her remains were housed in several churches around Spain.
JUANA
Like Teresa of Ávila, Juana Inés de la Cruz became a nun to remain free of the matrimonial cage.
Like Teresa, in the convent her talent caused offense. Did this head of a woman contain the brain of a man? Why did she have a man’s handwriting? Since she was such a good cook, why would she want to think? Deriding her questioners, she answered:
“What could we women know, but kitchen philosophy?”
Like Teresa, Juana wrote, although the priest Gaspar de Astete warned her that “Christian maidens need not know how to write, and it may cause them harm.”
Like Teresa, Juana not only wrote, but, scandal of scandals, she wrote undeniably well.
In different centuries, on different shores of the same sea, Juana the Mexican and Teresa the Spaniard defended, aloud and on paper, the despised half of the world.
Like Teresa, Juana was threatened by the Inquisition. And the Church, her Church, persecuted her for extolling human concerns as much or more than divine ones, for seldom obeying, and for questioning far too much.
With blood, not ink, Juana signed her confession. She vowed eternal silence. And mute she died.
GOODBYE
The best paintings by Ferrer Bassa, the Giotto of Catalunia, are on the walls of the convent of Pedralbes, place of bleached stones, in the heights of Barcelona.
There, detached from the world, lived the cloistered nuns.
It was a one-way street: the gate closed behind them and it closed for good. Their families paid large dowries so they would merit the glory of being forever married to Christ.
Within the convent, at the foot of one of the Ferrer Bassa frescoes in the chapel of Saint Michael, there are words that have survived, as if in hiding, the passing of the centuries.
No one knows who wrote them.
But we do know when. There is a date in Roman numerals, 1426.
The words are barely decipherable. In gothic letters, in Catalan, they pled and plead still:
Tell Juan
not to forget me.
TITUBA
She was captured in South America as a child, and was sold and sold again and then once more, passed from owner to owner until she ended up in the town of Salem in North America.
There, in that Puritan sanctuary, the slave Tituba served in the home of Reverend Samuel Parris.
The daughters of the reverend adored her. They were in heaven when Tituba told them stories of apparitions or read their fortunes in the whites of an egg. And in the winter of 1692, when the girls were possessed by Satan and writhed shrieking on the floor, only Tituba could calm them. She caressed them and whispered stories until they fell asleep in her lap.
That sealed her fate: she was the one who had brought hell into the virtuous kingdom of God’s chosen people.
The storytelling magician was put in the stocks in the public square, and she confessed.
They accused her of baking pies from the devil’s recipe book, and they whipped her until she said yes.
They accused her of dancing naked at the witches’ Sabbath, and they whipped her until she said yes.
They accused her of sleeping with Satan, and they whipped her until she said yes.
And when they told her that her accomplices were two old ladies who never went to church, the accused became the accuser and she pointed her finger at the possessed pair. And they stopped whipping her.
Then other accused also accused.
And the gallows were never empty.
WOMEN POSSESSED
Theologian and friar Martín de Castañega confirmed that the devil preferred women to men, because “they are pusillanimous and have less robust hearts and more humid brains.”
Satan seduced them by caressing them with his goat’s hoof and his wooden claw, or by disguising himself as a toad dressed as a prince.
Exorcisms of possessed women brought overflow crowds to the churches.
Protecting the breast of the exorcist were scapularies filled with consecrated salt, blessed rue, an
d the hair and nails of saints. Crucifix held high, he did battle with witchcraft. The bedeviled woman swore, howled, bit, shrieked insults in the tongues of hell, and with loud laughter tore off her clothes and proffered her naughty parts. The climax came when the exorcist rolled on the floor hugging the body where the devil had made himself at home, until the convulsions and wailing ceased.
Afterward, some searched the floor for the nails and bits of glass vomited by the possessed.
HENDRICKJE
In the year 1654, a young and flagrantly pregnant woman named Hendrickje Stoffels was judged and found guilty by the council of the Reformed Church in Amsterdam.
She confessed to “having fornicated with the painter Rembrandt,” and admitted to sharing his bed without being married, “like a whore,” or in a more literal translation, “committing whoredom.”
The council punished her by obliging her to repent and do penance and by permanently excluding her from the table of Our Lord Jesus Christ.
Rembrandt was not found guilty, perhaps because the jury had in mind the episode of Eve and the apple. But the scandal caused the price of his work to tumble and he had to declare bankruptcy.
The master of chiaroscuro, who revealed light born of darkness, spent his final years in the shadows. He lost his house and his paintings. He was buried in a rented grave.