Mirrors

  THE AGES OF IQBAL

  In Pakistan, as in other countries, slavery survives.

  Children of the poor are disposable goods.

  When Iqbal Masih was four, his parents sold him for fifteen dollars.

  He was bought by a rug maker. He worked chained to the loom fourteen hours a day. At the age of ten, Iqbal was a hunchback with the lungs of an old man.

  Then he escaped and became the spokesman for Pakistan’s child slaves.

  In 1995, when he was twelve years old, a fatal bullet knocked him from his bicycle.

  FORBIDDEN TO BE A WOMAN

  In 1804, Napoleon Bonaparte crowned himself emperor and decreed a civil code known as the Napoleonic Code, which still serves as the legal foundation for nearly the entire world.

  This masterpiece of the bourgeoisie in power consecrated double standards and elevated property rights to the highest perch on the altar of justice.

  Married women were deprived of rights, as were children, criminals, and the mentally deficient. A woman had to obey her husband. She had to follow him wherever he led, and she needed his permission for practically everything but breathing.

  Divorce, which the French Revolution had made into a simple transaction, was restricted by Napoleon to cases of serious misconduct. The husband could divorce his wife for adultery. The wife could only get a divorce if enthusiasm led the husband to bed his lover on the matrimonial mattress.

  In the worst of cases, the adulterous husband paid a fine. In every case, the adulterous wife went to prison.

  The code did not authorize murdering an unfaithful wife caught in flagrante. But when a cuckolded husband killed, the judges, always men, whistled and looked the other way.

  These dispositions, these customs, held sway in France for more than a century and a half.

  PALACE ART IN FRANCE

  In the midst of conquering Europe, Napoleon crossed the Alps at the head of his immense army.

  Jacques-Louis David painted the scene.

  In the painting Napoleon wears the handsome dress uniform of the commanding general of the French army. The golden cape flutters with timely elegance in the breeze. His hand, held high, points to the heavens. His brisk white steed, mane and tail curled in the beauty shop, echoes his gesture by rearing up on two legs. The rocks on the ground are engraved with the names of Bonaparte and his two comrades, Hannibal and Charlemagne.

  In reality, Napoleon did not wear a uniform. He crossed the freezing heights shivering with cold, wrapped in a heavy gray overcoat that covered his face, and on the back of an equally gray mule that struggled to keep its foothold on the slippery anonymous rocks.

  BEETHOVEN

  He had a prisonlike childhood and he believed in freedom as a religion.

  That is why he dedicated his Third Symphony to Napoleon and then erased the dedication,

  he invented music with no thought to what people might say,

  he mocked the princes,

  he lived in perpetual disagreement with everyone,

  he was alone and he was poor, and he had to move house seventy

  times.

  And he hated censorship.

  In the Ninth Symphony, the censors changed the title “Ode to Freedom,” taken from the poet Friedrich von Schiller, to “Ode to Joy.”

  At the debut of the Ninth in Vienna, Beethoven took revenge. He conducted the orchestra and the chorus with such unbridled energy that the censored “Ode” became a hymn to the joy of freedom.

  After the piece ended, he stood with his back to the audience, until someone turned him around and he could see the ovation that he could not hear.

  ORIGIN OF NEWS AGENCIES

  Napoleon was crushed by the British at the Battle of Waterloo, south of Brussels.

  Field Marshall Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington, took credit for the victory, but the true winner was the banker Nathan Rothschild, who did not fire a shot and was far from the scene.

  Rothschild was the commander in chief of a platoon of carrier pigeons. Quick and well trained, they brought him the news in London. Before anyone else, he knew that Napoleon had lost, but he spread word that the French victory had been overwhelming, and he fooled the market by selling off everything British: bonds, stocks, pounds. Before you could say amen, everyone followed the lead of the man who always knew what he was doing. The assets of the nation they believed had been defeated got sold off as junk. Then Rothschild bought. He bought everything for nothing.

  Thus was England victorious on the battlefield and vanquished on the stock exchange.

  The banker Rothschild multiplied his fortune twenty times over and became the richest man in the world.

  Several years later, toward the middle of the nineteenth century, the first international news agencies were born: Havas, now called France Presse, Reuters, Associated Press . . .

  They all used carrier pigeons.

  ORIGIN OF THE CROISSANT

  Napoleon, a symbol of France, was born in Corsica. His father, an enemy of France, gave him an Italian name.

  The croissant, another symbol of France, was born in Vienna. Not for nothing does it bear the name and form of a crescent moon, which was and remains the symbol of Turkey. Turkish troops had laid siege to Vienna. One day in 1683, the city broke the siege and that same night, in a pastry shop, Peter Wender invented the croissant. And Vienna ate the vanquished.

  Then Georg Franz Kolschitzky, a Cossack who had fought for Vienna, asked to be paid in coffee beans, which the Turks had left behind in their retreat, and he opened the city’s first café. And Vienna drank the vanquished.

  ORIGIN OF FRENCH COOKING

  The cuisine that is the pride of France was founded by Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, a disillusioned revolutionary, and Alexandre Balthazar Laurent Grimod de La Reynière, a nostalgic monarchist.

  The Revolution was over, the serfs had changed lords. A new order was emerging, a new class was in charge, and these two set out to tutor the palates of the victorious bourgeoisie.

  Brillat-Savarin, author of the first treatise on gastronomy, is said to have uttered the words later repeated by so many others: “Tell me what you eat and I will tell you who you are.” And also: “The discovery of a new dish contributes more to human happiness than that of a new star.” His knowledge came from his mother, Aurora, a specialist who died at the dinner table at the age of ninety-nine: she felt ill, drained her wineglass, and begged them to hurry the dessert.

  Grimod de La Reynière was the founder of culinary journalism. His articles in newspapers and yearbooks fed restaurants with new ideas. No more was the art of good eating a luxury reserved for the banquet halls of nobility. The one whose fingers were all over this had none: Grimod de La Reynière, grand master of pen and spoon, was born with no hands, and he wrote, cooked, and ate with hooks.

  GOYA

  In 1814 Ferdinand VII posed for Francisco de Goya. There was nothing unusual in that. Goya, court painter for the Spanish Crown, was doing a portrait of the new monarch. But artist and king detested each other.

  The king suspected, and with good reason, that Goya’s court paintings were disingenuously kind. The artist had no choice but to do the job that earned him his daily bread and provided an effective shield against the enmity of the Holy Inquisition. There was no lack of desire on God’s tribunal to burn alive the creator of La maja desnuda and numerous other works that mocked the virtue of priests and the bravery of warriors.

  The king had power and the artist had nothing. It was to reestablish the Inquisition and the privileges of nobility that Ferdinand came to the throne borne on the shoulders of a crowd cheering:

  “Long live chains!”

  Sooner rather than later, Goya lost his job as the king’s painter and was replaced by Vicente López, an obedient bureaucrat with a brush.

  The unemployed artist then took refuge in a country home on the banks of the Manzanares River, and on the walls he created the masterpieces known as the Black Paintings.


  Goya painted them for himself, for his own pleasure or displeasure, in nights of solitude and despair. By the light of candles bristling on his hat, this utterly deaf man managed to hear the broken voices of his times and give them shape and color.

  MARIANA

  In 1814 King Ferdinand killed Pepa.

  Pepa was what the people called the Constitution of Cádiz, which two years earlier had abolished the Inquisition and enshrined freedom of the press, the right to vote, and other insolent novelties.

  The king decided that Pepa never was. He declared it “null and worthless and void, as if such acts, which ought to have been removed from time’s way, had never occurred.”

  Then to remove from time’s way the enemies of monarchic despotism, gallows were built all over Spain.

  Early one morning in 1831, outside one of the gates of the city of Granada, the executioner twisted the tourniquet until the iron collar broke the neck of Mariana Pineda.

  She was guilty. Of embroidering a flag, of not betraying freedom’s conspirators, and of refusing to provide the judge who condemned her with the favor of her love.

  Mariana had a brief life. She liked forbidden ideas, forbidden men, black mantillas, hot chocolate, and slow tunes.

  FANS

  The “lady liberals,” as Cádiz police called them, conspired in code.

  From their Andalusian grandmothers they had learned the secret language of fans, which worked equally well for disobeying husband or king: the slow unfoldings and rapid closings, the ripplings, the flutterings.

  If a lady swept her hair off her forehead with the fan closed, it meant: “Do not forget me.”

  If she hid her eyes behind the open fan: “I love you.”

  If she opened the fan beside her lips: “Kiss me.”

  If she rested her lips on the closed fan: “I don’t trust him.”

  If she drew her finger across the ribs: “We have to talk.”

  If she fanned herself while looking out from the balcony: “Let’s meet outside.”

  If she closed her fan upon entering: “Today I cannot go out.”

  If she fanned with her left hand: “Do not believe that woman.”

  PALACE ART IN ARGENTINA

  May 25, 1810: it is raining in Buenos Aires. Under umbrellas, a crowd of top hats. White and sky-blue badges are handed around. In what today is called the Plaza de Mayo, the assembled gentlemen in frock coats bellow, “Long live the fatherland” and “Send the viceroy packing.”

  In real reality, not airbrushed for a grade-school lithograph, there were no top hats or frock coats, and it seems it was not even raining, so no umbrellas. There was a choir recruited to stand outside and cheer the few men inside City Hall who were discussing independence.

  Those few, shopkeepers, smugglers, learned doctors, and military officers, were the founding fathers who would soon lend their names to avenues and streets.

  No sooner was independence declared than they established free trade.

  Thus the port of Buenos Aires murdered the nation’s embryonic industry just as it was being born in the thread factories, textile mills, distilleries, saddleries, and other artisan workshops of Córdoba, Catamarca, Tucumán, Santiago del Estero, Corrientes, Salta, Mendoza, San Juan . . .

  A few years later, the British foreign secretary, George Canning, offered a toast to the freedom of Spain’s American colonies:

  “Hispanic America is British,” he declared, raising his glass.

  Even the curbstones were British.

  THE INDEPENDENCE THAT WAS NOT

  Thus the lives of the heroes of Latin America’s emancipation came to an end.

  Shot by firing squad: Miguel Hidalgo, José María Morelos, José Miguel Carrera, and Francisco de Morazán.

  Assassinated: Antonio José de Sucre.

  Hanged and quartered: Tiradentes.

  Exiled: José Artigas, José de San Martín, Andrés de Santa Cruz, and Ramón Betances.

  Imprisoned: Toussaint L’Ouverture and Juan José Castelli.

  José Martí fell in battle.

  Simón Bolívar died in solitude.

  On August 10, 1809, while the city of Quito celebrated its liberation, an anonymous hand wrote on a wall:

  Final day of despotism

  and first day of the same.

  Two years later in Bogotá, Antonio Nariño admitted:

  “We have changed masters.”

  THE LOSER

  He preached in the desert and died alone.

  Simón Rodríguez, who had been Bolívar’s teacher, spent half a century roving Latin America on the back of a mule, founding schools, and saying what no one wanted to hear.

  A fire took nearly all his papers. Here are a few of the words that survived:

  • On independence:

  We are independent but not free. Something must be done for these poor people, who have become less free than before. Before, they had a shepherd king who did not eat them until they were dead. Now the first to show up eats them alive.

  • On colonialism of the mind:

  Europe’s know-how and the prosperity of the United States are for our America two enemies of freedom of thought. The new republics are unwilling to adopt anything that does not have their stamp of approval . . . If you are going to imitate everything, imitate originality!

  • On colonialist trade:

  Some think prosperity is seeing their ports filled with ships—foreign ships, and their homes turned into storerooms for goods—foreign goods. Every day brings another load of manufactured clothes, down to the caps the Indians wear. Soon we shall see little golden packages bearing the royal coat of arms containing ‘newly processed’ clay for children accustomed to eating dirt.

  • On popular education:

  To make students recite by rote what they do not understand is like training parrots. Teach children to be curious so they learn to obey their own minds rather than obeying authorities the way the narrow-minded do, or obeying custom the way the stupid do. He who knows nothing, anyone can fool. He who has nothing, anyone can buy.

  ARTIGAS

  The architecture of death is a specialty of the military.

  In 1977 the Uruguayan dictatorship erected a gravestone in memory of José Artigas.

  This enormous structure was a high-class prison: word had it that the hero might escape, a century and a half after his death.

  To decorate the mausoleum and dissemble the intention, the dictatorship wanted to cover it with sayings from the founding father. But the man who had led the first agrarian reform in the Americas, the general who liked to be called “Citizen Artigas,” said that the most downtrodden should become the most privileged. He insisted that our rich patrimony should never be sold off at the low price imposed by need. And he repeated again and again that his authority emanated from the people and did not extend beyond them.

  The military found not a single quotation that would not prove dangerous.

  They decided Artigas had been mute.

  The walls of black marble feature nothing but dates and names.

  TWO TRAITORS

  Domingo Faustino Sarmiento despised José Artigas. No one else did he hate so much. “Traitor to his race,” he called him, and it was true. Artigas, though white and blue-eyed, fought alongside mestizo gauchos and blacks and Indians. And he was defeated and went into exile, and he died in solitude and oblivion.

  Sarmiento was also a traitor to his race. Just look at his portraits. At war with what he saw in the mirror, he preached and practiced the extermination of dark-skinned Argentineans and their replacement by blue-eyed Europeans. And he was president of his country, a torch-bearer of civilization, covered in glory and accolades, immortal hero.

  CONSTITUTIONS

  The main avenue in Montevideo is called “18 de julio” to honor the day the constitution of Uruguay was born. And the stadium where the very first soccer World Cup was played was built to commemorate the centenary of that foundational document.

 
The Magna Carta of 1830, identical to the constitution planned for Argentina, denied citizenship to women, the illiterate, slaves, and anyone who was “a paid servant, a day laborer, or a rank and file soldier.” Only one out of ten Uruguayans had the right to be a citizen of the new country, and 95 percent of the population did not vote in the first elections.

  So it was throughout the Americas, from north to south. All our countries were born of a lie. Independence disowned those who had risked their lives fighting for her, and women, poor people, Indians, and blacks were not invited to the party. The constitutions draped that travesty in the prestige of legality.

  Bolivia took a hundred and eighty-one years to discover that it was a country made up mostly of Indians. The revelation occurred in 2006 when Evo Morales, an Aymara Indian, was elected president by an avalanche of votes.

  That same year Chile found out that half of all Chileans are female, and Michelle Bachelet became president.

  AMERICA ACCORDING TO HUMBOLDT

  When the nineteenth century was taking its first baby steps, Alexander von Humboldt entered America and revealed its innards. Years later, he wrote:

  • On social classes:

  Mexico is the country of inequality. The monstrous inequality in rights and riches is striking. The greater or lesser degree of whiteness of skin decides the rank which man occupies in society.