Mirrors

  From the box of honor, João V, the king of Portugal known as the Magnanimous, observes the auto-da-fé where the king of puppets burns.

  Thus this Antonio bids farewell to the world, while on the very same day of the same year, 1730, on the other side of the sea another Antonio says hello.

  Antonio Francisco Lisboa is born in Ouro Preto. He will be called Aleijadinho the Cripple. He too will lose his fingers, not from torture but from a mysterious curse.

  ALEIJADINHO

  Brazil’s ugliest man creates the finest beauty in colonial art.

  In stone, Aleijadinho sculpts the glory and agony of Ouro Preto, the Potosí of gold.

  Son of an African slave, this mulatto has slaves who carry him, bathe him, feed him, and tie the chisel to his stump.

  Assailed by leprosy, syphilis, or who knows what, Aleijadinho has lost an eye and his teeth and his fingers, but the rest of him carves stone with the hands he lacks.

  Night and day he works, as if bent on revenge, and his Christs, his Virgin Marys, his saints, his prophets shine brighter than gold, while the fount of gold itself grows ever more chary in fortunes and prodigious in misfortune and unrest.

  Ouro Preto and the entire region agree with the precocious appraisal offered by the Count of Assumar, who was its governor:

  “It seems as if the earth exhales tumult, and water riots; the clouds vomit disobedience, and the stars disorder; this climate is the tomb of peace and the cradle of rebellion.”

  PALACE ART IN BRAZIL

  The brush of Pedro Américo de Figueiredo e Melo, an artist of the epic genre, depicted the sacred moment for all eternity.

  In his painting, a lively horseman unsheathes his sword and utters the earth-shattering cry that gives birth to the Brazilian nation, while the Dragoons of the Honor Guard pose for the occasion, weapons held high, plumes on war helmets and manes on horses aflutter in the breeze.

  Contemporary accounts do not coincide precisely with those brush-strokes.

  They say the hero, Pedro, a Portuguese prince, squatted on his haunches on the bank of a stream called Ipiranga. His supper had not sat well with him and he was “doubling over to answer the call of nature,” in the words of one chronicle, when a messenger brought a letter from Lisbon. Without interrupting his efforts, the prince had him read out the letter from his royal parents, which contained certain affronts, perhaps aggravated by his bellyache. In the midst of the reading, he stood up and swore lengthily, which official history translated in abbreviated form as the famous cry:

  “Independence or death!”

  Thus, that morning in 1822, the prince tore the Portuguese insignia off his cassock and became emperor of Brazil.

  THE AGES OF PEDRO

  Bearing nine years of age and eighteen names, Pedro de Alcântara Francisco Antônio João Carlos Xavier de Paula Miguel Rafael Joaquim José Gonzaga Pascoal Sipriano Serafim de Bragança e Bourbon, prince and heir to the Portuguese crown, disembarked in Brazil. The British brought him here along with all his court to keep him safe from Napoleon’s assaults. At the time, Brazil was Portugal’s colony and Portugal was England’s colony, although the latter went unsaid.

  At the age of nineteen, Pedro was married to Leopoldina, the archduchess of Austria. He paid her no heed. Like many other tourists to come, he spent his time chasing dark-skinned lovelies in Rio’s blazing night.

  At the age of twenty-four, he proclaimed Brazil independent and became Emperor Pedro I. Without pause, he then signed the first loan agreements with British banks. The new nation and the foreign debt were born as twins. They remain inseparable.

  At the age of thirty-three, he got the crazy notion to abolish slavery. He dipped his quill in the inkpot but did not manage to sign the decree. A coup d’état left him throneless, sitting on air.

  At the age of thirty-four, he returned to Lisbon and became King Pedro IV of Portugal.

  At the age of thirty-six, this king of two thrones died in Lisbon and was buried there, in the land that had been his mother and his enemy.

  FREEDOM BETRAYS

  The official history of Brazil continues to call the first uprisings for national independence inconfidencias, acts of disloyalty.

  Long before the Portuguese prince declared himself emperor of Brazil, there were several failed attempts. The most notable were the Inconfidencia mineira in Ouro Preto in 1789, which died stillborn, and the Inconfidencia bahiana, which broke out in 1794 in Salvador da Bahia and lasted four years.

  The only leader of the former to be hanged and quartered was a low-ranking officer, Tiradentes, the tooth puller. The other conspirators, mining barons fed up with paying colonial taxes, were pardoned.

  The Bahian rebellion lasted longer and went farther. It sought not only an independent republic but also equality of rights for all, no matter the color of your skin.

  After much blood was spilled and the rebellion put down, colonial authorities pardoned all but four of the leaders. Hanged and quartered were Manoel Lira, João do Nascimento, Luis Gonzaga, and Lucas Dantas. These four were black, the sons or grandsons of slaves.

  And there are those who believe justice is blind.

  RESURRECTION OF TÚPAC AMARU

  Túpac Amaru, the last king of the Incas, fought the Spaniards for forty years in the mountains of Peru. In 1572, when the executioner’s ax severed his neck, Indian prophets announced that one day the head would rejoin the body.

  And it did. Two centuries later, José Gabriel Condorcanqui claimed the name waiting for him. Transformed into Túpac Amaru, he led the largest and longest indigenous rebellion in the entire history of the Americas.

  The Andes were on fire. From the summits to the sea, up rose the victims of forced labor in the mines, plantations, and workshops. The rebels threatened the colonial dinner plate with victory after victory as they advanced at an unstoppable pace, fording rivers, climbing mountains, crossing valleys, taking town after town. They were on the verge of conquering Cuzco.

  The sacred city, the heart of power, lay before them: from the heights they could see it, they could taste it.

  Eighteen centuries had passed since Spartacus had Rome within his grasp, and history repeated itself. Túpac Amaru decided not to attack. Indian troops, led by a chief who had sold out, defended the besieged city, and Túpac did not kill Indians. Not that, never. He knew it was necessary, there was no other way, but . . .

  While he vacillated from yes to no to who knows, days and nights passed and Spanish soldiers, lots of them and well armed, were making their way from Lima.

  In vain his wife, Micaela Bastidas, who commanded the rearguard, sent him messages:

  “You have to bring these sorrows to an end . . . ”

  “I have not the patience to put up with all this . . . ”

  “Many times I have told you not to waste time in those towns . . . ”

  “I have sent you plenty of warnings . . . ”

  “If it is our ruin you want, just lie down and go to sleep.”

  In 1781, the rebel leader entered Cuzco. He entered in chains, under a hail of stones and insults.

  RAIN

  In the torture chamber, the king’s envoy interrogated him.

  “Who are your accomplices?” he asked.

  And Túpac Amaru answered:

  “Here there are no accomplices but you and I. You the oppressor and I the liberator, we both deserve death.”

  He was sentenced to die by being quartered. They tied him to four horses, his arms and legs forming a cross, and his body did not break. Spurs dug into the bellies of the horses, which lurched in vain, and his body did not break.

  They turned to the executioner’s ax.

  It was a time of long drought in the Valley of Cuzco and the noon was ferociously bright, but the sky suddenly grew black and cracked and unleashed one of those downpours that drown the world.

  The other rebel leaders, male and female, Micaela Bastidas, Túpac Catari, Bartolina Sisa, Gregoria Apaza . . . were quartered. An
d through the towns that had rebelled, their remains were paraded, then burned, and the ashes thrown to the wind, “so that no memory of them shall remain.”

  HAVES AND HAVE-NOTS

  In 1776, the independence of the United States foreshadowed what would occur later on from Mexico south.

  To remove any doubts about the place of the Indians in the new nation, George Washington proposed “the total destruction and devastation of their settlements.” Thomas Jefferson voiced the opinion that “this unfortunate race has justified its extermination.” And Benjamin Franklin suggested that rum could be the “appointed means” to get rid of the savages.

  To remove any doubts about the place of women, the Constitution of the State of New York added the adjective “masculine” to the right to vote.

  To remove any doubts about the place of poor whites, the signatories to the Declaration of Independence were all rich whites.

  And to remove any doubts about the place of blacks in the newborn nation, six hundred and fifty thousand slaves remained enslaved. Black hands built the White House.

  MISSING FATHER

  The Declaration of Independence affirmed that all men are created equal.

  Shortly thereafter, the Constitution of the United States clarified the concept: it established that each slave was worth three-fifths of a person.

  One drafter of the Constitution, Gouverneur Morris, opposed this provision, but in vain. Not long before he had tried, also in vain, to get the State of New York to abolish slavery, and managed to extract a constitutional promise that in the future “every being who breathes the air of this State shall enjoy the privileges of a freeman.”

  Morris, a central figure at the moment the United States acquired a face and a soul, was a founding father that history forgot.

  In the year 2006, Spanish journalist Vicente Romero looked for his grave. He found it behind a church in the South Bronx. The gravestone, erased by rain and sun, provided a platform for two large garbage cans.

  ANOTHER MISSING FATHER

  Robert Carter was buried in the garden.

  In his will he asked “to be laid under a shady tree, where he might be undisturbed, and sleep in peace and obscurity. No stone, nor inscription.”

  This Virginia patrician was one of the richest, if not the richest, of all the prosperous landowners who broke ties with England.

  Although several other founding fathers looked askance at slavery, none of them freed their slaves. Carter was the only one to unchain the four hundred and fifty blacks he owned “to allow them to live and work according to their own will and pleasure.” He freed them seventy years before Abraham Lincoln abolished slavery, and he did so gradually, taking care that none was simply turned out and deserted.

  Such folly condemned him to solitude and oblivion.

  He was cut off by his friends, his neighbors, and his family, all of whom were convinced that free blacks were a threat to personal and national security.

  Later on, his acts were rewarded with collective amnesia.

  SALLY

  When Jefferson lost his wife, her property became his. Among other goods, he inherited Sally.

  There is testimony of her beauty in her early years.

  Later on, nothing.

  Sally never spoke, or if she did either no one listened or no one bothered to write it down.

  Of President Jefferson, in contrast, we have several portraits and many words. We know that he harbored well-founded suspicions that “the blacks are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of the body and the mind,” and that he always expressed “great aversion” to the mixing of white blood and black blood, which to him was morally repugnant. He believed that if the slaves were one day to be freed, the peril of contamination would have to be avoided by removing them “beyond the reach of mixture.”

  In 1802, journalist James Callender published an article in the Richmond Recorder which made public what everyone knew: President Jefferson was the father of Sally’s children.

  DEATH TO TEA, LONG LIVE COFFEE

  The British Crown decreed that its colonies had to pay an unpayable tax. In 1773, furious colonists in North America sent forty tons of London tea to the bottom of the harbor. The operation was dubbed the Boston Tea Party. And the American Revolution began.

  Coffee became a symbol of patriotism, though there was nothing patriotic about it. It had been discovered who knows when in the hinterland of Ethiopia, when goats ate the red fruit of a bush and danced all night, and after a voyage of centuries it reached the Caribbean.

  In 1776, Boston’s cafés were dens of conspiracy against the British Crown. And years later, President George Washington held court in a café that sold slaves and coffee cultivated by slaves in the Caribbean.

  A century later, the men who won the West drank coffee by the light of their campfires, not tea.

  IN GOD WE TRUST?

  Presidents of the United States tend to speak in God’s name, although none of them has let on if He communicates by letter, fax, telephone, or telepathy. With or without His approval, in 2006 God was proclaimed chairman of the Republican Party of Texas.

  That said, the All Powerful, who is even on the dollar bill, was a shining absence at the time of independence. The constitution did not mention Him. At the Constitutional Convention, when a prayer was suggested, Alexander Hamilton responded:

  “We don’t need foreign aid.”

  On his deathbed, George Washington wanted no prayers or priest or minister or anything.

  Benjamin Franklin said divine revelation was nothing but poppycock.

  “My mind is my own church,” affirmed Thomas Paine, and President John Adams believed that “this world would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it.”

  According to Thomas Jefferson, Catholic priests and Protestant ministers were “soothsayers and necromancers” who divided humanity, making “one half the world fools and the other half hypocrites.”

  A PROLOGUE TO THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

  Down the main street of Abbeville marched the procession.

  Everyone on the sidewalks doffed their hats when the host, raised high above the crosses and saints, passed by. Everyone, that is, except for three young men who had their eyes on the girls in the crowd and did not notice.

  They were charged. Not only had they refused to bare their heads before the white flesh of Jesus, they had smirked at it. Witnesses brought additional grave evidence: the host had been broken, causing it to bleed, and a wooden cross had been found mutilated in a ditch.

  The tribunal focused its bolts of ire on one of the three, Jean-François de La Barre. Although he had just turned twenty, that insolent young man bragged that he had read Voltaire, and he defied the judges with his stupid arrogance.

  The day of the execution, a fine morning in the year 1766, no one was missing from the market square. Jean-François climbed the scaffold with a sign hanging from his neck:

  “Impious, blasphemer, sacrilegious, execrable, abominable.”

  The executioner tore out the tongue of the condemned man and cut off his head. He chopped up the body and threw the pieces into a bonfire. Along with the body parts, he tossed in a few of Voltaire’s books, so that author and reader could burn together.

  ADVENTURES OF THE MIND IN DARK TIMES

  Twenty-seven volumes.

  The figure is not so impressive considering the seven hundred and forty-five volumes of the Chinese encyclopedia, published a few years previous.

  But the French L’Encyclopédie put its seal on the Enlightenment and in a way offered the light that gave it its name. The pope in Rome ordered that blasphemous book burned and he excommunicated anyone found in possession of it. The authors, Diderot, D’Alembert, Jaucourt, Rousseau, Voltaire, and several more, risked or suffered jail and exile, but the influence of their great collective work was felt all over Europe.

  Two and a half centuries later, their invitation to think is still astonishing. A few definitio
ns, plucked from its pages:

  Authority: “Nature gives no man the right to rule over others.”

  Censure: “Nothing is more dangerous to faith than having it subject to human opinion.”

  Clitoris: “A woman’s center of sexual pleasure.”

  Courtier: “Applied to those who have been placed between kings and the truth, with the objective of keeping truth from reaching the kings.”

  Man: “Man is worthless without land. Land is worthless without man.”

  Inquisition: “Moctezuma was condemned for sacrificing prisoners to his gods. What would he say if he laid eyes on an auto-da-fé?”

  Slavery: “Hateful commerce, against the law of nature, in which certain men buy and sell other men as if they were animals.”

  Orgasm: “Is there anything else so worth achieving?”

  Usury: “Jews did not practice usury. It was Christian oppression that forced the Jews to become money-lenders.”

  MOZART

  The man who was music wrote music all day and all night and beyond all day and night, as if he were racing against death, as if he knew death would come soon.

  He composed at a feverish pace, one piece after another, and in his scores he left some measures blank for improvising adventures in freedom.