Mirrors

No one knows how he found the time, but in his fleeting life he spent long hours with his nose in the books of his vast library, or enmeshed in animated discussion with people despised by the imperial police, like Joseph von Sonnenfels, the jurist who managed to get Vienna to outlaw torture, a first in Europe. His friends were the enemies of despotism and stupidity. A child of the Enlightenment, reader of L’Encyclopédie, Mozart shared the ideas that stirred up his times.

  At the age of twenty-five, he lost his job as the king’s musician and never set foot in court again. From then on, he lived from his concerts and the sales of his works, which were many and highly valued, though lowly priced.

  He was an independent artist when independence was a rare feat, and it cost him dearly. In punishment for his freedom, he died suffocated by debt: the world owed him for so much music, yet he died owing.

  WIGS

  At the court in Versailles, more than a hundred perruquiers worked on those contraptions, which leaped over the Channel and landed on the skulls of the king of England, the duke of York, and other slave traders who imposed French fashion on the high nobility of Britain.

  Male wigs began in France as a way to show class, not to hide baldness. The ones made of natural hair showered in talcum powder were the most expensive and required the mo every morning.

  High class, high towers: the ladies, helped out by switches, now called extensions, wore complicated wire frames perched on their heads so their hair could rise floor by exuberant floor adorned with feathers and flowers. The rooftop of the hairdo might have been decorated with little sailboats or farms complete with toy animals. Putting it together was no mean feat, and just keeping it on your head was a challenge. As if that were not enough, the ladies had to navigate while wedged inside enormous crinolines that had them constantly bumping into each other.

  Tresses and attire ate up nearly all the time and energy of the aristocracy. Any left over was spent at banquets. All that sacrifice was exhausting. The French Revolution did not meet much resistance when it swallowed the feast and crushed the wigs and crinolines.

  THE DESPICABLE HUMAN HAND

  In Spain, manual trades were dishonorable until the end of the eighteenth century.

  Whoever lived or had lived from the labor of his hands, or who had a father, a mother, or grandparents of lowly, vile occupations, did not merit the courtesy of being called “sir.”

  Among those lowly, vile occupations were

  farmers,

  stone carvers,

  woodworkers,

  vendors,

  tailors,

  barbers,

  grocers,

  and shoemakers.

  These degraded beings paid taxes.

  In contrast, exempt from paying taxes were

  military officers,

  nobles,

  and priests.

  THE REVOLUTIONARY HUMAN HAND

  In 1789, the Bastille was attacked and taken by a furious mob.

  And in all France the producers rose up against the parasites. The population refused to continue paying the tribute and tithes that had fattened the venerable and useless institutions of the monarchy, the aristocracy, and the Church.

  It wasn’t long before the king and queen fled. Their carriage headed north toward the border. The little princes were dressed up as girls. The governess, dressed as a baroness, carried a Russian passport. The king, Louis XVI, was her butler; the queen, Marie Antoinette, her servant.

  Night had fallen when they reached Varennes.

  Suddenly, a crowd emerged from the shadows, surrounded the carriage, captured the monarchs, and returned them to Paris.

  MARIE ANTOINETTE

  The king mattered little. The queen, Marie Antoinette, was the one they despised: for being a foreigner, for yawning during royal ceremonies, for going without a corset, for taking lovers. And for her extravagance. They called her “Madame Deficit.”

  The spectacle drew a crowd. When the head of Marie Antoinette rolled at the feet of the executioner, the audience roared its approval.

  A disembodied head. And no necklace.

  All France was convinced the queen had bought herself the most expensive piece of jewelry in Europe, a necklace made of six hundred and forty-seven diamonds. Everyone also believed she had said if the people had no bread, let them eat cake.

  THE MARSEILLAISE

  The most famous anthem in the world came into being at a famous moment in world history. But it was also the child of the hand that wrote it and of the mouth that first sang it: the hand and mouth of its utterly unfamous composer, Captain Claude Rouget de Lisle, who wrote it in a single night.

  Cries from the street dictated the words, and the music poured forth as if it had always been waiting inside him.

  It was the turbulent year 1792: Prussian troops were marching against the French Revolution. Speeches and proclamations were stirring the streets of Strasbourg:

  “Citizens, to arms!”

  To defend the besieged revolution, the recently recruited Armée du Rhin was headed for the front. Rouget de Lisle’s anthem rallied the troops. The chorus swelled, tears flowed, and a couple of months later it reappeared, who knows how, at the other end of France. Volunteers in Marseille marched off to battle singing that powerful tune, which came to be called “The Marseillaise,” and all France sang the chorus. When the people attacked the Palace of the Tuileries, that was the song on their lips.

  The composer was imprisoned, accused of treason for having committed the indiscretion of disagreeing with the Revolution’s sharpest ideologue, Madame Guillotine.

  In the end Captain Rouget de Lisle was released. No uniform, no income.

  For years he scrounged a living on the street, devoured by fleas, hounded by the police. When he said he was the father of the anthem of the Revolution, people laughed in his face.

  ANTHEMS

  The first known national anthem was born of parents unknown in England in 1745. Its verses declared the kingdom would crush the Scottish rebels, to “frustrate their knavish tricks.”

  Half a century later, the Marseillaise warned that the Revolution would “water the fields with the impure blood” of the invaders.

  At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the anthem of the United States proclaimed its imperial vocation blessed by God: “Conquer we must, when our cause it is just.” And at the end of that century, the Germans consolidated their delayed national unity by erecting three hundred and twenty-seven statues of Emperor Wilhelm and four hundred and seventy of Bismarck, while singing the anthem that put Germany über alles, above all.

  Generally speaking, anthems reinforce the identity of each nation by means of threats, insults, self-praise, homages to war, and the honorable duty to kill and be killed.

  In Latin America, these paeans to the glories of the founding fathers sound like they were written for funeral pageants:

  the Uruguayan anthem invites us to choose between country and

  grave

  and the Paraguayan between the republic and death,

  the Argentine exhorts us to vow to die with glory,

  the Chilean proclaims the country’s land will be the grave of the

  free,

  the Guatemalan calls for victory or death,

  the Cuban insists that dying for the fatherland is living,

  the Ecuadorian shows that the holocaust of heroes is a fertile seed,

  the Peruvian exults in the terror its cannons inspire,

  the Mexican recommends soaking the fatherland’s standards in

  waves of blood,

  and the Colombian bathes itself in the blood of heroes who with

  geographic enthusiasm do battle at Thermopylae.

  OLYMPE

  The symbols of the French Revolution are female, women of marble or bronze with powerful naked breasts, Phrygian caps, flags aflutter.

  But what the Revolution produced was the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, and when revolutionary militant
Olympe de Gouges proposed a Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen, she was hauled off to jail. The Revolutionary Tribunal found her guilty and the guillotine removed her head.

  At the foot of the scaffold, Olympe asked:

  “If we women have the right to face the people from the guillotine, should we not also have the right to face them from the tribune?”

  Not allowed. They could not speak, they could not vote. The Convention, the revolutionary congress, closed down all women’s political associations and forbade women from debating men as equals.

  Olympe de Gouges’ companions were sent to the lunatic asylum. And soon after her execution, it was Manon Roland’s turn. Manon was the wife of the minister of the interior, but not even that could save her. She was found guilty of “an anti-natural tendency to political activism.” She had betrayed her feminine nature, which was to keep house and give birth to brave sons, and she had committed the deadly offense of sticking her nose into the masculine affairs of state.

  And the guillotine dropped once more.

  THE GUILLOTINE

  A tall doorway without a door, an empty frame. At the top, poised, the deadly blade.

  She went by several names: the Machine, the Widow, the Barber. When she decapitated King Louis, she became Little Louise. And in the end, one name stuck, the guillotine.

  Joseph Guillotin protested in vain. A thousand and one times, the doctor and sworn enemy of the death penalty protested that the executioner who sowed terror and drew multitudes was not his daughter. No one listened. People went right on believing that he was the father of the leading lady of the most popular show in Paris.

  People also believed, and still do, that Guillotin died on the guillotine. In reality, he breathed his last breath in the peace of his own bed, his head well attached to his body.

  The guillotine labored on until 1977. Its last victim was a Tunisian immigrant executed in the yard of a Paris prison by a superfast model with an electronic trigger.

  THE REVOLUTION LOST ITS HEAD

  To sabotage the Revolution, landowners set fire to their crops. The specter of hunger roamed the cities. The kingdoms of Austria, Prussia, England, Spain, and Holland prepared for war against the contagious French Revolution, which insulted tradition and threatened the holy trinity of crown, wig, and cassock.

  Besieged from within and without, the Revolution reached the boiling point. The people were the audience watching a drama performed in their name. Not many attended the debates. There was no time. The lineups for food were long.

  Differences of opinion led to the scaffold. All the revolutionary leaders were enemies of monarchy, but some of them had kings in their hearts, and by a new, divine revolutionary right, they were the owners of the absolute truth and absolute power. Whoever dared to disagree was a counterrevolutionary ally of the enemy, a foreign spy, a traitor to the cause.

  Marat escaped the guillotine because a mad girl stabbed him in the bath.

  Saint-Just, inspired by Robespierre, accused Danton.

  Danton, sentenced to death, asked them not to forget to put his head on display, and as a bequest he left his balls to Robespierre. He said the man would need them.

  Three months later, Saint-Just and Robespierre were decapitated.

  Without wanting it or knowing it, the desperate, chaotic republic was working for the restoration of the monarchy. The Revolution, which had promised liberty, equality, and fraternity, ended up paving the way for the despotism of Napoleon Bonaparte, who founded his own dynasty.

  BÜCHNER

  In 1835, German dailies published this notice from the authorities:

  WANTED

  GEORG BÜCHNER, DARMSTADT MEDICAL STUDENT,

  21 YEARS OLD, GRAY EYES,

  PROMINENT FOREHEAD, LARGE NOSE, SMALL MOUTH,

  NEARSIGHTED.

  Büchner, a social agitator, organizer of poor peasants, traitor to his class, was on the run from the police.

  Soon thereafter, at the age of twenty-three, he died.

  He died of fever: so much life in so few years. Between one leap and the next in his life as a fugitive, Büchner wrote, a century ahead of his time, the plays that would found modern theater: Woyzeck, Leonce and Lena, Danton’s Death.

  In Danton’s Death, the German revolutionary had the courage to put onstage, painfully and mercilessly, the tragic fate of the French Revolution, which had begun by proclaiming “the despotism of freedom” and ended up imposing the despotism of the guillotine.

  WHITE CURSE

  The black slaves of Haiti gave Napoleon Bonaparte’s army a tremendous thrashing, and in 1804 the flag of the free fluttered over the ruins.

  But Haiti was a country ruined from the first. On the altars of French sugar plantations, lands and lives had been burned alive, and then the calamities of war exterminated a third of the population.

  The birth of independence and the death of slavery, feats accomplished by blacks, were unpardonable humiliations for the white owners of the world.

  Eighteen of Napoleon’s generals were buried on the rebel isle. The new nation, born in blood, was sentenced to blockade and solitude: no one bought from her, no one sold to her, no one recognized her. For being disloyal to the colonial master, Haiti was obliged to pay France a gigantic sum in reparations. This expiation for the sin of dignity, which she paid for nearly a century and a half, was the price France exacted for diplomatic recognition.

  No one else recognized her. Not even Simón Bolívar, who owed her everything. Haiti had provided ships, weapons, and soldiers for his war of independence against Spain, on only one condition: that the slaves be freed, an idea that had never occurred to the man known as the Liberator. Later on, when Bolívar triumphed, he refused to invite Haiti to the congress of new Latin American nations.

  Haiti became the leper of the Americas.

  Thomas Jefferson warned from the beginning that the plague had to be confined to that island, because it provided a very bad example.

  Bad example: disobedience, chaos, violence. In South Carolina, by law any black sailor could be jailed while his ship was in port, for fear he might spread the antislavery fever that threatened all the Americas. In Brazil, that fever was called haitianismo.

  TOUSSAINT

  He was born a slave, the son of slaves.

  He was frail and homely.

  He spent his childhood chatting with horses and plants.

  In time he became the master’s coachman and doctor to his gardens.

  He had never killed a fly when the exigencies of war placed him where he now stands. Now he is called Toussaint L’Ouverture, because the blows of his sword part the enemy’s defenses. This self-made general instructs his troops, illiterate slaves, explaining the whys and hows of the Revolution through stories he learned or made up as a child.

  It is 1803, and the French army is on its last legs.

  General Leclerc, Napoleon’s brother-in-law, proposes:

  “Let’s talk.”

  Toussaint agrees.

  They capture him, place him in chains, load him onto a ship.

  Imprisoned in the coldest castle in France, from the cold he dies.

  SLAVERY DIED MANY DEATHS

  Look in any encyclopedia. Ask which was the first country to abolish slavery. The encyclopedia will answer: Britain.

  It is true that one fine day the British Empire, the world champion of the slave trade, changed its mind after it totted up the numbers and realized the sale of human flesh was no longer so profitable. But London discovered slavery was evil in 1807 and the news was so unconvincing that it had to be repeated twice over in the next thirty years.

  It is also true that the French Revolution had freed the slaves of the colonies, but the liberating decree, called “immortal,” died a short time later, assassinated by Napoleon Bonaparte.

  The first country that was free, truly free, was Haiti. It abolished slavery three years before England, on a night illuminated by the sun of bonfires, while c
elebrating its recently won independence and recuperating its forgotten indigenous name.

  DEAD MAN SPEAKING

  The abolition of slavery was also repeated throughout the nineteenth century in the new Latin American nations.

  Repetition was proof of impotence. In 1821, Simón Bolívar pronounced slavery dead. Thirty years later, the deceased still enjoyed good health, and new laws of abolition were decreed in Colombia and Venezuela.

  The very day in 1830 that Uruguay’s constitution was proclaimed, the newspapers featured advertisements like:

  For sale: very cheap, a Negro shoemaker.

  For sale: one maid recently given birth, good for the lady.

  For sale: one young Negro, 17 years old, no vices.

  For sale: one very Spanish-looking mulatta for all farm work, and one large sugar kettle.

  Five years before, in 1825, the first law forbidding the sale of persons in Uruguay had been passed, and it had to be repeated in 1842, 1846, and 1853.

  Brazil was last in the Americas, next to last in the world. Slavery was legal until the end of the nineteenth century. Afterward, it was illegal but still operative, and that remains the case today. In 1888, the Brazilian government ordered all existing documentation on the topic burned. Thus slave labor was officially erased from the country’s history. It died without having existed, and it exists despite having died.