• On slaves:
In no place does one feel so ashamed to be European as in the Antilles, be it the French, British, Dutch, or Spanish ones. To discuss which country treats the blacks better is like choosing between being stabbed and being skinned alive.
• On Indians:
Among all religions, none masks human unhappiness like the Christian religion. Whoever visits the ill-fated Americans living under the priests’ lash will never again want to learn anything about Europeans and their theocracy.
• On the expansion of the United States:
The North Americans’ conquests disgust me. I wish them the worst in tropical Mexico. Much better would it be if they stayed home instead of spreading their insane slavery.
ORIGIN OF ECOLOGY
That strange and valiant German was concerned about sustainable development long before it came to be called that. Everywhere he went he was astounded by the diversity of the natural world and horrified by how little respect it commanded.
On the island of Uruana in the Orinoco River, Humboldt noticed that the Indians left behind a good part of the eggs the turtles laid on the beach so that reproduction would continue. But he saw that the Europeans did not follow that wise custom, and warned their greed would endanger a rich resource that nature had placed within reach.
Why was the level of Venezuela’s Lake Valencia falling? Because the native forest had been leveled to make way for colonial plantations. Humboldt said the old trees had delayed the evaporation of rainwater, prevented soil erosion, and kept the rivers and lakes in harmonious balance. The murder of those trees was the cause of the merciless droughts and relentless floods:
“It is not just Lake Valencia,” he said. “All the region’s rivers are drying up. The mountains are deforested because the European colonists cut down the trees. The rivers are dry for much of the year, and when it rains in the mountains they become torrents that destroy the fields.”
MAP ERASED
One evening in 1867 the Brazilian ambassador pinned the Grand Crucifix of the Imperial Order of the Cross on the chest of Bolivia’s dictator Mariano Melgarejo. Melgarejo had the habit of giving away chunks of the country in return for medals or horses. That evening his eyes welled up with tears and, then and there, he gave the ambassador sixty-five thousand square kilometers of rubber-rich Bolivian jungle. With that gift, plus another two hundred thousand square kilometers seized by force, Brazil got all Bolivia’s trees that cried tears of rubber for the world market.
In 1884 Bolivia lost another war, this time against Chile. They called it the War of the Pacific, but it was the Saltpeter War. Saltpeter, a vast carpet of brilliant whiteness, was the fertilizer most coveted by Europe’s farmers and a key input for the military industry. John Thomas North, a British businessman who at parties liked to dress up as Henry VIII, polished off all the saltpeter that had belonged to Peru and Bolivia. Chile won the war, and he picked up the spoils. Peru lost a great deal, as did Bolivia, deprived of an outlet to the sea, four hundred kilometers of coastline, four ports, seven bays, and one hundred and twenty thousand square kilometers of desert rich in saltpeter.
But this many-times-mutilated country was not formally erased from the map until a diplomatic incident occurred in La Paz.
Maybe it happened or maybe not. I’ve been told the story many times and this is how it goes: Melgarejo, the drunken dictator, welcomed the representative of England by offering him a glass of chicha, a fermented corn liquor that was and remains the national drink. The diplomat thanked him and praised chicha’s virtues, but said he would prefer hot chocolate. So the president kindly served him an immense jug of hot chocolate filled to the brim. He held the ambassador prisoner throughout the night until he finished the last drop of that punishment, and at dawn he was paraded about town sitting backward on a mule.
When Queen Victoria heard the story in Buckingham Palace, she asked for a map of the world. She then asked where the hell Bolivia was, crossed the country out with a piece of chalk, and passed sentence:
“Bolivia does not exist.”
MAP GOBBLED
Between 1833 and 1855 Antonio López de Santa Anna was president of Mexico eleven times.
During that period Mexico lost Texas, California, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, and a good chunk of Colorado and Wyoming.
For the modest sum of fifteen million dollars, and a number never counted of Indian and mestizo soldiers killed, Mexico was reduced by half.
The dismemberment began in Texas, called Tejas back then. There, slavery had been outlawed. Sam Houston led the invasion that reestablished it.
Houston and Stephen Austin and other slave-owning land-grabbers are now freedom’s heroes and founding fathers of the state. Their names speak of health and culture. The city of Houston offers cures or solace to the seriously ill, and Austin gives luster to academics.
MAP BROKEN
The first volley did not kill Francisco Morazán. He got up as best he could and ordered the firing squad to take better aim.
After, the coup de grâce shattered his skull.
Central America was shattered too, into five pieces that today have become six. Those six countries, which alternately ignore and mistreat one another, were at the time of Morazán a single republic.
He led Central America from 1830 to 1838. He wanted it united and to that end he fought.
In his final battle he led eighty men against five thousand. When he entered San José de Costa Rica, bound to his saddle, a crowd watched in silence.
A short while later he was sentenced and shot and the rain continued pelting him for hours.
When Morazán was born in Honduras, there was not a single public school or hospital where the poor could go before heading for the cemetery.
In Honduras and throughout Central America, Morazán turned convents into schools and hospitals, and the high priests declared that this Satan expelled from heaven was responsible for smallpox and drought and even the war the Church waged against him.
Thirteen years after Morazán’s downfall, William Walker invaded these lands.
THE PREDESTINED
In 1856, William Walker proclaims himself president of Nicaragua.
The ceremony includes speeches, a military parade, a mass, and a banquet featuring fifty-three toasts of European wines.
A week later, United States Ambassador John H. Wheeler officially recognizes the new president, and his speech compares him to Christopher Columbus.
Walker imposes Louisiana’s constitution on Nicaragua, reestablishing slavery, abolished in all Central America thirty years previous. He does so for the good of the blacks, because “inferior races cannot compete with the white race, unless they are given a white master to channel their energies.”
This Tennessee gentleman known as “the Predestined” receives orders directly from God. Gruff, grim, always dressed in mourning, he leads a band of mercenaries recruited on the docks who claim to be the Knights of the Golden Circle and like to be called, modestly, the Phalange of Immortals.
“Five or none,” Walker proclaims, as he sets out to conquer all Central America.
And the five Central American countries, divorced, poisoned by mutual rancor, recover their lost unity, at least for a while: they unite against the invaders.
And the Immortals die.
MAP CHANGED
In 1821, the American Colonization Society bought a piece of Africa.
In Washington the new country was christened Liberia and its capital was called Monrovia, in honor of James Monroe, who at the time was president of the United States. Also in Washington, they designed the flag to be just like their own, except with a single star, and they elected the country’s government. Harvard drew up the constitution.
The citizens of the newborn nation were freed slaves, or rather slaves expelled from the plantations of the southern United States.
No sooner did they set foot in Africa than those who had been slaves became masters. The native
population, “those jungle savages,” owed obedience to the newcomers, who had suddenly risen from the bottom to the top.
Backed by cannon, they took over the best lands and claimed the exclusive right to vote.
Later on, with the passing of the years, they granted rubber concessions to Firestone and Goodrich, and gave away the oil, iron, and diamonds to other U.S. companies.
Their descendants, 5 percent of the population, continue running this foreign military base in Africa. Every so often, when the poor masses get rowdy, they call in the Marines to restore order.
NAME CHANGED
She learned to read by reading numbers. Playing with numbers was her favorite pastime and at night she dreamed of Archimedes.
Her father forbade it:
“Such things are not for women,” he said.
When the French Revolution set up the Polytechnic School, Sophie Germain was eighteen. She wanted to go. They shut the door in her face:
“Such things are not for women,” they said.
By herself, she studied, researched, invented.
She sent her work by mail to Professor Joseph-Louis Lagrange. Sophie signed it Monsieur Antoine-August LeBlanc, and thus kept the most excellent professor from responding:
“Such things are not for women.”
They had been writing back and forth, mathematician to mathematician, for ten years when the professor discovered that the he was a she.
From that point on, Sophie was the only woman allowed into Europe’s masculine Olympus of science: in mathematics she probed theorems, and later on in physics she revolutionized the study of elastic surfaces.
A century later, her contributions helped make possible the Eiffel Tower, among other things.
The names of several scientists are inscribed on the tower.
Sophie’s is not there.
Her death certificate from 1831 says she was a bondholder, not a scientist:
“Such things are not for women,” the clerk said.
THE AGES OF ADA
At eighteen, she runs away in the arms of her tutor.
At twenty, she marries, or is married, despite her notorious incompetence in domestic matters.
At twenty-one, she begins studying mathematical logic on her own. Not the most appropriate occupation for a lady, but her family indulges her. Maybe that way she will stay in her right mind, and stave off the insanity that her father’s genes have in store for her.
At twenty-five, she invents a foolproof system based on probability theory for winning at the racetracks. She bets the family jewels. She loses everything.
At twenty-seven, she publishes a revolutionary paper. She does not put her name to it. A scientific paper by a woman? That publication makes her the first programmer in history: it lays out a new method for setting up a machine to undertake repetitive tasks and save textile workers from the drudgery of routine.
At thirty-five, she falls ill. The doctors diagnose hysteria. It is cancer.
In 1852, at the age of thirty-six, she dies. At that very age her father, the poet Lord Byron, whom she never saw, also died.
A century and a half later, in homage to her, one of the languages for programming computers is named Ada.
THE HE’S ARE SHE’S
In 1847, three novels excite England’s readers.
Wuthering Heights by Ellis Bell tells a devastating tale of passion and shame. Agnes Grey by Acton Bell strips bare the hypocrisy of the family. Jane Eyre by Currer Bell exalts the courage of an independent woman.
No one knows that the authors are female. The brothers Bell are actually the sisters Brontë.
These fragile girls, virgins all, Emily, Anne, Charlotte, avenge their solitude by writing poems and novels in a village lost on the Yorkshire moors. Intruders into the male world of literature, they don men’s masks so the critics will forgive them for having dared. But the critics pan their works anyway, as “rude,” “crude,” “nasty,” “savage,” “brutal,” “libertine” . . .
FLORA
Flora Tristán, grandmother of Paul Gaugin, errant activist, revolution’s pilgrim, dedicated her turbulent life to fighting against a husband’s right of property over his wife, a boss’s right of property over his workers, and a master’s right of property over his slaves.
In 1833, she traveled to Peru. On the outskirts of Lima she visited a sugar mill. She saw the stones that ground the cane, the kettles that boiled the molasses, the refinery that made the sugar. Everywhere she looked, she saw black slaves coming and going, working in silence. They were not even aware of her presence.
The owner told her he had nine hundred. In better times, twice as many, he complained.
And he said everything he was expected to say: that blacks were lazy like Indians, that they only worked under the lash, that . . .
When they were leaving, Flora came across a lockup to one side of the plantation.
Without asking permission, she went inside.
There, in the utter darkness of a dungeon, she managed to make out the figures of two women, naked, crouching in a corner.
“They’re worse than animals,” the guard said scornfully. “Animals don’t kill their young.”
These slaves had killed their young.
The two gazed at her, who gazed back at them from the other side of the world.
CONCEPCIÓN
She spent her life struggling heart and soul against the hell of jail and for the dignity of women imprisoned in jails disguised as homes.
An opponent of collective absolution, she called a spade a spade.
“When it is everyone’s fault, it is no one’s,” she liked to say. She earned herself a few enemies this way. Over the long term her prestige became indisputable, though her country had a hard time accepting it. And not only her country, her times too.
Back in 1840-something, Concepción Arenal took courses at the law school disguised as a man, her chest flattened by a double corset.
Back in 1850-something, she continued dressing like a man to attend the Madrid soirées where unbecoming topics were debated at unbecoming hours.
And back in 1870-something, a prestigious English organization, the John Howard Association for Penal Reform, named her its representative in Spain. The document certifying her position referred to her as “Mr. Concepción Arenal.”
Forty years later, another woman from Galicia, Emilia Pardo Bazán, became the first female university professor in Spain. No student bothered to attend her class. She lectured to an empty hall.
VENUS
She was captured in South Africa and sold in London.
And she was mockingly named Hottentot Venus. For two shillings you could see her naked in a cage, her tits so long she could breastfeed a baby on her back. For twice as much you could touch her ass, the biggest behind in the world.
A sign described the savage as half-human, half-animal, “the epitome of all that the civilized Englishman, happily, is not.”
From London she went on to Paris. Experts from the Museum of Natural History wanted to know if this Venus belonged to a species falling somewhere between man and the orangutan.
She was twenty-something when she died. Georges Cuvier, a celebrated naturalist, undertook the dissection. He reported that she had the skull of a monkey, a tiny brain, and a mandrill’s ass.
Cuvier cut off the inner labia of her vagina, an enormous flap, and placed it in a jar.
Two centuries later, the jar was put on display in Paris at the Musée de l’Homme, next to the genitals of another African woman and those of a Peruvian Indian.
Nearby, in another series of jars, were the brains of several European scientists.
THE REAL AMERICA
Queen Victoria received them at Buckingham Palace, they visited the courts of Europe, in Washington they were invited to the White House.
Bartola and Máximo were the tiniest beings ever. John Henry Anderson, who had purchased them, put them on display dancing in the palms of his hands.
/> Circus posters called them Aztecs, even though according to Anderson they came from a Mayan city hidden in the jungles of Yucatán, where cocks crowed underground and the natives wore turbans and ate human flesh.
The European scientists who studied them determined that their skulls could not hold moral principles, and that Bartola and Máximo were descended from American ancestors incapable of thinking or speaking. That is why they could only repeat a few words, like parrots, and could not understand anything but their master’s orders.
DIET OF AIR
In the middle of the nineteenth century, Bernard Kavanagh drew crowds in England. He announced that for seven days and seven nights he would not swallow a mouthful or drink a drop, and moreover he had been following such a diet for five and a half years.
Kavanagh did not charge to get in, but he did accept donations, which went straight into the hands of the Holy Spirit and the Most Holy Virgin.
After London, he performed his affecting spectacle in other cities, engaging in fast after fast, always inside cages or hermetically sealed rooms, always under medical control and police surveillance, and always surrounded by avid crowds.
When he died, the body disappeared and was never found. Many believed that Kavanagh had eaten himself. He was Irish, and in those years that was not at all unusual.