Mirrors

  RESURRECTION OF VERMEER

  His works were worthless when he died. In 1676 his widow paid the baker with two paintings.

  Vermeer van Delft was sentenced to oblivion.

  Two centuries passed before he returned to the world, rescued by the impressionists, hunters of light. Renoir said his portrait of a woman making lace was the most beautiful painting he had ever seen.

  Vermeer, chronicler of triflings, painted only his home and a bit of the neighborhood. His wife and daughters were his models, and domestic chores were his subjects. Always the same, never the same: in the household routine, Vermeer, like Rembrandt, knew how to unveil the suns that the dark northern sky denied him.

  In his paintings there are no hierarchies. Nothing and no one is more or less luminous. The light of the universe vibrates, secretly, as much in the glass of wine as in the hand that offers it, in the letter as much as in the eyes that read it, in a worn tapestry as much as in the unworn face of the girl watching.

  RESURRECTION OF ARCIMBOLDO

  Each person was a source of flavor, odor and color:

  the ear, a tulip

  the eyebrows, two crayfish

  the eyes, two grapes

  the eyelids, ducks’ bills

  the nose, a pear

  the cheek, an apple

  the chin, a pomegranate

  and the hair, a forest of branches.

  Giuseppe Arcimboldo, court painter, kept three emperors in stitches.

  They celebrated him because they did not understand him. His paintings looked like amusement parks. And that was how the pagan artist managed to survive and live in luxury.

  Arcimboldo indulged in the mortal sin of idolatry, exalting human communion with wild exuberant nature. His portraits, said to be inoffensive and playful, in actual fact were ferocious mockery.

  When he died, art’s memory suppressed him like a nightmare.

  Four centuries later, he was resuscitated by the surrealists, his belated children.

  THOMAS MORE

  Thomas More was understood all too well, and that may be what cost him his life. In 1535 Henry VIII, the glutton king, raised his head on a pike beside the Thames.

  Twenty years previous, the man who would be beheaded had written a book that recounted the customs of an island called Utopia, where property was held in common, money did not exist, and there was neither poverty nor wealth.

  In the voice of his character, a traveler returned from America, Thomas More expressed his own dangerous ideas:

  • On wars:

  Robbers prove sometimes gallant soldiers, soldiers often prove brave robbers; so near an alliance there is between those two sorts of life.

  • On thievery:

  No punishment, how severe soever, [is] able to restrain those from robbing who can find out no other way of livelihood. You first make thieves and then punish them.

  • On the death penalty:

  It seems to me a very unjust thing to take away a man’s life for a little money; for nothing in the world can be of equal value with a man’s life . . . extreme justice is an extreme injury.

  • On money:

  So easy a thing would it be to supply all the necessities of life, if that blessed thing called money, which is pretended to be invented for procuring them, was not really the only thing that obstructed their being procured!

  • On private property:

  Till property is taken away, there can be no equitable or just distribution of things, nor can the world be happily governed.

  ERASMUS

  Erasmus of Rotterdam dedicated In Praise of Folly to his friend Thomas More.

  In that book Folly spoke in the first person. She said all joy and happiness was due to her favors, she urged smoothing the furrowed brow, proposed an alliance of children and the elderly, and mocked “arrogant philosophers, empurpled kings, pious priests, thrice-holy pontiffs, and all that rabble of gods.”

  This annoying, irreverent man preached the communion of Christian teachings and pagan traditions:

  “Saint Socrates, pray for us.”

  His insolent output was censured by the Inquisition, placed on the Catholic Index of Forbidden Books, and frowned on by the new Protestant church.

  ORIGIN OF THE ELEVATOR

  King Henry VIII of England had six queens.

  He widowed easily.

  He devoured women and banquets whole.

  Six hundred lackeys served at his table, overflowing with partridge pastries, peacocks in all their sublime plumage, and cuts of mutton or suckling pig on which, knife in hand, he bestowed noble titles before biting into them.

  When his last queen arrived, Henry was so fat he could no longer ascend the staircase that led from the dining room to the nuptial bed.

  The king had no choice but to invent a chair that by means of a complicated mechanism of pulleys carried him seated from plate to pillow.

  PRECURSOR OF CAPITALISM

  England, Holland, France, and other countries owe him a statue.

  A goodly part of the power of the powerful comes from the gold and silver he stole, from the cities he burned, from the galleons he pillaged, and from the slaves he rounded up.

  Some fine sculptor ought to carve an effigy of this armed functionary of nascent capitalism: knife between the teeth, patch on one eye, peg leg, hook for a hand, parrot on the shoulder.

  DANGEROUS CORNERS OF THE CARIBBEAN

  Pirates built America. On the islands and coasts of the Caribbean, they were more feared than hurricanes.

  In his diary, Columbus mentioned God fifty-one times and gold a hundred and thirty-nine times, even though God was everywhere while there was not enough gold to fill a tooth.

  But time passed and the fertile fields of America flowered with abundant gold, silver, sugar, cotton, and other marvels. Pirates specialized in purloining such fruit. And in reward for their efforts, these instruments of capital accumulation were inducted into British nobility.

  Queen Elizabeth of England was a partner of the fearsome Francis Drake, who provided her with a profit of 4,600 percent on her investment. She made him Sir Francis. She also knighted Drake’s uncle, John Hawkins, and she took part in the business Hawkins founded when he bought three hundred slaves in Sierra Leone, sold them in Santo Domingo, and his three ships returned to London loaded down with sugar, skins, and ginger.

  From that point forward, the slave trade became England’s own mountain of silver, the Cerro Rico of Potosí it had lacked.

  RALEIGH

  In the south of America, he sought El Dorado. In the north, he found tobacco. He was a navigator, a warrior, an explorer, a poet. And he was a pirate.

  Sir Walter Raleigh:

  who smoked a pipe and revealed the pleasures of tobacco to British nobility;

  who in court wore a doublet studded with diamonds, and in battle wore armor made of silver;

  the favorite of Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen;

  who for her named Virginia, the land still called by that name;

  who for her assaulted Spanish ports and galleons, and who was made at the tap of her sword a noble knight;

  who years later for the same deeds had his head chopped off in the Tower of London.

  With Elizabeth dead, King James wanted a Spanish queen, so the pirate Raleigh, the villain of the movie, was convicted of high treason.

  His widow received, as was the custom, his embalmed head.

  FAMILY PORTRAIT IN ENGLAND

  The feud between the Yorks and the Lancasters might not have been more than a quarrel among neighbors if William Shakespeare had not set his pen to the topic.

  The poet surely never imagined that by dint of his talent the dynastic war between the white rose and the red rose would acquire a universal dimension.

  In England’s history and in Shakespeare’s play, King Richard III, patron saint of serial killers, unleashed a river of blood on his way to the throne. He killed King Henry VI and Prince Edward too. He drowned his brother Clar
ence in a barrel of wine and, that accomplished, he did away with his nephews. He locked up the two little princes in the Tower of London, smothered them with their pillows, and buried them in secret at the foot of a staircase. He also strangled Lord Hastings and decapitated the Duke of Buckingham, his best friend, his other self, just in case they were plotting something.

  Richard III was the last English monarch to die in battle.

  Shakespeare gave him the words that made him immortal:

  “My kingdom for a horse!”

  MARE NOSTRUM

  More than a century after the pope in Rome divided half the world between Spain and Portugal, the English jurist John Selden published Mare clausum in 1635.

  This treatise proved that not only the land had an owner, but the sea as well, and His Majesty the king of England was, by natural right, the legitimate proprietor of the lands and waters of his expanding empire.

  Thus the foundation of British property law was laid on the god Neptune, on Noah and his three sons, on Genesis, Deuteronomy, and the Psalms, and on the prophecies of Isaiah and Ezekiel.

  Three hundred and sixty years later, the United States claimed all rights over outer space and the celestial bodies, but they did not invoke such prestigious authorities.

  THANKS

  Year after year, at the end of November, the United States celebrates Thanksgiving. The nation expresses its gratitude to God and to the Indians who helped God save the conquering Pilgrims.

  The winter of 1620 had killed half the Europeans who arrived on the Mayflower. The following year God decided to save the survivors. The Indians gave them shelter, hunted and fished for them, taught them to grow corn, to avoid poisonous plants, to use medicinal plants, and to find nuts and cranberries and other wild fruits.

  The saved then offered their saviors a Thanksgiving feast. It was held in the English village of Plymouth, which a short while before had been Patuxet, an Indian village devastated by smallpox, yellow fever, and other novelties brought from Europe.

  That was the first and last Thanksgiving in colonial times.

  When the colonists invaded Indian lands, the moment of truth arrived. The invaders, calling themselves “holy” and also “the chosen,” stopped calling the Indians “natives” and started calling them “savages.”

  THIS EXECRABLE CREW OF BUTCHERS

  At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Jonathan Swift portrayed the colonial adventure in the final chapter of Gulliver’s Travels:

  A crew of pirates goes on shore to rob and plunder, they see a harmless people, are entertained with kindness; they give the country a new name; they take formal possession of it for their king; they set up a rotten plank, or a stone, for a memorial.

  Here commences a new dominion, acquired with a title by divine right. Natives are driven out or destroyed; their princes tortured to discover their gold; a free license given to all acts of inhumanity and lust, the earth reeking with the blood of its inhabitants: and this execrable crew of butchers, employed in so pious an expedition, is a modern colony, sent to convert and civilize an idolatrous and barbarous people!

  FATHER OF GULLIVER

  The first edition of Gulliver’s Travels was published under a different title and without the author’s name.

  Perils obliged caution. The previous works of Jonathan Swift, a high-ranking priest, dean of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in Ireland, had earned him several charges of sedition, and landed the publisher in jail.

  The runaway success of Gulliver allowed Swift to sign his name to later editions. He also signed his new book. A Modest Proposal: For Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland from Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick was the extraordinarily long title of the fiercest political pamphlet ever written.

  In the icy language of economic science, the author laid out the objective advantages of sending the children of the poor to the slaughterhouse. These children could become “at a year old a most delicious, nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked or boiled,” and what’s more their skins could be made into ladies’ gloves.

  This was published in 1729, when even ghosts were wandering the streets of Dublin in search of food. It did not sit well.

  Swift specialized in formulating insufferable questions:

  Why did his plan to promote cannibalism provoke horror when the entire country of Ireland was being eaten alive by England and no one moved a finger?

  Were the Irish dying of hunger because of the climate or because of colonial strangulation?

  Why was he a free man when he was in England and a slave as soon as he set foot in Ireland?

  Why didn’t the Irish refuse to buy English clothing and English furniture, and learn to love their country?

  Why didn’t they burn everything that came from England, save the people?

  He was declared insane.

  His savings had financed Dublin’s first public insane asylum, but he was not sent there. He died before it was finished.

  CELESTIAL AND TERRESTRIAL

  England, eighteenth century: everything was on the rise.

  Smoke rose from factory chimneys,

  smoke rose from victorious cannons,

  waves rose from the seven seas ruled by the hundred thousand sailors of the king of England,

  profits rose on all the goods England sold,

  and earnings rose on all the money England loaned.

  Every Englishman, no matter how uninformed, knew that the world and the sun and the stars revolved around London.

  But William Hogarth, the greatest English artist of the century, was not distracted by the splendors of London at the summit of the universe. He was more attracted by lows than highs. In his paintings and etchings, everything was falling down. Across the floor rolled drunks and bottles,

  broken masks,

  broken swords,

  broken contracts,

  wigs,

  corsets,

  ladies’ undergarments,

  gentlemen’s honor,

  votes bought by politicians,

  titles of nobility bought by the nouveaux riches,

  cards that told of fortunes lost,

  letters that told of loves lost,

  and the rubbish of the city.

  FREEDOM’S PHILOSOPHER

  Centuries have passed and the influence of English philosopher John Locke on universal thought continues to grow.

  It is entirely appropriate. Thanks to Locke we know that God bestowed the world on its legitimate proprietors, “the industrious and rational.” It was Locke who laid the philosophical groundwork for human freedom in all its dimensions: free enterprise, free trade, free competition, free hiring and firing.

  And the freedom to invest. While he was writing An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, the philosopher did his part for human understanding by investing his savings in Royal African Company stock.

  That firm, owned by the British Crown and by “the industrious and rational,” hunted and captured slaves in Africa and sold them in America.

  According to the Royal African Company, its efforts guaranteed “a constant and sufficient supply of Merchantable Negroes, at moderate rates.”

  CONTRACTS

  When the eighteenth century began, a Bourbon king sat on the throne in Madrid for the first time.

  As soon as he donned the crown, Philip V became a slave trader.

  He signed a contract with the French Compagnie de Guinée and his cousin, the king of France.

  The contract gave each monarch 25 percent of the profits from the sale of forty-eight thousand slaves in the Spanish colonies of America during the following ten years, and established that the trade would be carried out on Catholic ships with Catholic captains and Catholic sailors.

  Twelve years later, King Philip signed a contract with the English South Sea Company and the queen of England.

  The contract gave each monarch 25 percent of the profits from
the sale of one hundred and forty-four thousand slaves in the Spanish colonies of America during the following thirty years, and established that the blacks must not be old or defective, must have all their teeth, and must bear the seals of the Spanish Crown and the British company, branded in a visible spot.

  The owners guaranteed a quality product.

  BRIEF HISTORY OF TRADE BETWEEN AFRICA AND EUROPE

  Hereditary slavery had been around since the times of Greece and Rome and was nothing new. But with the Renaissance, Europe introduced certain novelties: never before had slavery been determined by skin color, and never before had the sale of human flesh been the brightest light in the world of business.

  During the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, Africa sold slaves and bought rifles: it traded hands for arms.

  Then during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Africa delivered gold, diamonds, copper, ivory, rubber, and coffee in exchange for Bibles: it traded the riches of the earth for the promise of heaven.

  HOLY WATER

  A map published in Paris in 1761 revealed the origins of Africa’s horror. It depicted a variety of savage beasts crowded around the scarce watering holes in the desert, fighting to get at the water. Excited by the heat or by thirst, the animals mounted whatever happened to be near, paying no attention to species, and such promiscuity gave rise to the most dreadful monsters in the world.