Mirrors

  Then China was invaded by Japan. Conquest was not difficult. The country was drugged and humiliated and ruined.

  NATURAL DISASTERS

  An empty desert of footsteps and voices, nothing but dust stirred by the wind.

  Many Chinese hang themselves, rather than killing to kill their hunger or waiting for hunger to kill them.

  In London, the British merchants who triumphed in the Opium War establish the China Famine Relief Fund.

  This charitable institution promises to evangelize the pagan nation via the stomach: food sent by Jesus will rain from heaven.

  In 1879, after three years without rain, the Chinese number fifteen million fewer.

  OTHER NATURAL DISASTERS

  In 1879, after three years without rain, the Indians number nine million fewer.

  It is the fault of nature:

  “These are natural disasters,” say those who know.

  But in India during these atrocious years, the market is more punishing than the drought.

  Under the law of the market, freedom oppresses. Free trade, which obliges you to sell, forbids you to eat.

  India is a not a poorhouse, but a colonial plantation. The market rules. Wise is the invisible hand, which makes and unmakes, and no one should dare correct it.

  The British government confines itself to helping a few of the moribund die in work camps it calls “relief camps,” and to demanding the taxes that the peasants cannot pay. The peasants lose their lands, sold for a pittance, and for a pittance they sell the hands that work it, while shortages send the price of grain hoarded by merchants sky-high.

  Exporters do a booming trade. Mountains of wheat and rice pile up on the wharves of London and Liverpool. India, starving colony, does not eat, but it feeds. The British eat the Indians’ hunger.

  On the market this merchandise called hunger is highly valued, since it broadens investment opportunities, reduces the cost of production, and raises the price of goods.

  NATURAL GLORIES

  Queen Victoria was the most enthusiastic admirer and the only reader of the verses of Lord Lytton, her viceroy in India.

  Moved by literary gratitude or patriotic fervor, the viceregal poet held an enormous banquet in Victoria’s honor when she was proclaimed empress. Lord Lytton invited seventy thousand guests to his palace in Delhi for seven days and seven nights.

  According to the Times, this was “the most colossal and expensive meal in world history.”

  At the height of the drought, when fields baked by day and froze by night, the viceroy arose at the banquet to read out an upbeat message from Queen Victoria, who predicted for her Indian subjects “happiness, prosperity, and welfare.”

  English journalist William Digby, who happened to be present, calculated that about a hundred thousand Indians died of hunger during the seven days and seven nights of the great feast.

  UPSTAIRS, DOWNSTAIRS

  In a slow and complicated ceremony marked by the back and forth of speeches, presentation of insignia, and exchange of offerings, India’s princes became English gentlemen and swore loyalty to Queen Victoria. For these vassal princes, the bartering of gifts was, according to well-informed sources, a trading of bribes for tribute.

  The numerous princes lived at the summit of the caste pyramid, a system reproduced and perfected by British imperial power.

  The empire did not need to divide to rule. Long-sacred social, racial, and cultural divisions were history’s bequest.

  From 1872 on, the British census classified the population of India according to caste. Imperial rule thus not only reaffirmed the legitimacy of this national tradition, but also used it to organize an even more stratified and rigid society. No policeman could have dreamed up a better way to control the function and destiny of each person. The empire codified hierarchies and servitudes, and forbade any and all from stepping out of place.

  CALLOUSED HANDS

  The princes who served the British Crown lived in perpetual despair over the scarcity of tigers in the jungle and the abundance of jealousy in the harem.

  In the twentieth century, they still consoled themselves as best they could:

  the maharaja of Bharatpur bought all the Rolls-Royces on the market in London and used them for garbage collection;

  the one from Junagadh had many dogs, each with his own room, servant, and telephone;

  the one from Alwar set fire to the racetrack when his pony lost a race;

  the one from Kapurthala built an exact replica of the Palace of Versailles;

  the one from Mysore built an exact replica of Windsor Palace; the one from Gwalior bought a miniature gold and silver train that ran about the palace dining room carrying salt and spices to his guests;

  the cannons of the maharaja of Baroda were made of solid gold;

  and for a paperweight the one from Hyderabad used a 184-carat diamond.

  FLORENCE

  Florence Nightingale, the most famous nurse in the world, dedicated most of her ninety years of life to India, although she was never able to set foot in the country she loved so dearly.

  Florence was a nurse who needed nursing, having contracted an incurable disease in the Crimean War. But from her London bedroom she wrote innumerable articles and letters to bring the reality of India to the attention of the British public.

  • On imperial indifference to famine:

  Five times number perished as in Franco-German war. No one takes any notice. We say nothing of the famine in Orissa, when a third of its population was deliberately allowed to whiten the fields with its bones.

  • On rural property:

  The very drum pays for being beat. The ryot pays a fee for everything he does himself, and for everything the zemindar does not do for himself and makes the ryot do for him.

  • On British justice in India:

  We are told that the ryot has the remedy of English justice. He has not. A man has not that which he can’t use.

  • On the patience of the poor:

  Agrarian riots may become the normal state of things throughout India. Let us not be too sure that these patient silent millions will remain in silence and patience forever. The dumb shall speak and the deaf shall hear.

  DARWIN’S VOYAGE

  Young Charles Darwin did not know what to do with his life. His father encouraged him thus:

  “You will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family.”

  At the end of 1831, he left.

  After five years navigating South America, the Galapagos, and other far-flung realms, he returned to London. He brought with him three giant tortoises, one of which died in the year 2007 in a zoo in Australia.

  He came back a different man. Even his father noticed:

  “Why the shape of his head is quite altered!”

  He brought back more than tortoises. He brought questions. His head was teeming with questions.

  DARWIN’S QUESTIONS

  Why does the wooly mammoth have a thick coat? Could the mammoth be an elephant that found a way to stay warm when the ice age set in?

  Why is the giraffe’s neck so long? Could it be because over time it got stretched in order to reach fruit high in the treetops?

  Were the rabbits that run in the snow always white, or did they become white to fool the foxes?

  Why does the finch have a different beak depending on where it lives? Could it be that their beaks adapted bit by bit to the environment through a long evolutionary process, so they could crack open fruits, catch larvae, drink nectar?

  Does the incredibly long pistil of the orchid indicate that there are butterflies nearby whose remarkably long tongues are as long as the pistil that awaits them?

  No doubt it was a thousand and one questions like these which, with the passage of years and doubts and contradictions, became the pages of his explosive book on the origin of the species and the evolution of life in the world.

  Blasphemous notion, intolerable lesson in humility: Darwin revealed that God did not create t
he world in seven days, nor did He model us in his image and likeness.

  Such horrible news was not well received. Who did this fellow think he was to correct the Bible?

  Samuel Wilberforce, bishop of Oxford, asked Darwin’s readers:

  “Are you descended from the apes on your grandfather’s side or your grandmother’s?”

  I’LL SHOW YOU THE WORLD

  Darwin liked to cite James Coleman’s travel notes.

  No one better described the fauna of the Indian Ocean,

  the sky above flaming Vesuvius,

  the glow of Arabian nights,

  the color of the heat in Zanzibar,

  the air in Ceylon, which is made of cinnamon,

  the winter shadows of Edinburgh,

  and the grayness of Russian jails.

  Preceded by his white cane, Coleman went around the world, from tip to toe.

  This traveler, who did so much to help us see, was blind.

  “I see with my feet,” he said.

  ONLY HUMAN

  Darwin told us we are cousins of the apes, not the angels. Later on, we learned we emerged from Africa’s jungle and that no stork ever carried us from Paris. And not long ago we discovered that our genes are almost identical to those of mice.

  Now we can’t tell if we are God’s masterpiece or the devil’s bad joke. We puny humans:

  exterminators of everything,

  hunters of our own,

  creators of the atom bomb, the hydrogen bomb, and the neutron

  bomb, which is the healthiest of all bombs since it vaporizes people and

  leaves objects intact,

  we, the only animals who invent machines,

  the only ones who live at the service of the machines they invent,

  the only ones who devour their own home,

  the only ones who poison the water they drink and the earth that

  feeds them,

  the only ones capable of renting or selling themselves, or renting or

  selling their fellow humans,

  the only ones who kill for fun,

  the only ones who torture,

  the only ones who rape.

  And also

  the only ones who laugh,

  the only ones who daydream,

  the ones who make silk from the spit of a worm,

  the ones who find beauty in rubbish,

  the ones who discover colors beyond the rainbow,

  the ones who furnish the voices of the world with new music,

  and who create words so that

  neither reality nor memory will be mute.

  THE INSANITY OF FREEDOM

  It happened in Washington in 1840.

  A government census measured dementia among blacks in the United States.

  According to the census, there were nine times as many cases among free blacks as among slaves.

  The North was a vast insane asylum, and the farther north one went the worse it got. Going from north to south, however, one went from lunacy to sanity. Among the slaves who worked the prosperous cotton, tobacco, and rice plantations, madness barely existed.

  The census reaffirmed the master’s convictions. The fine medicine of slavery developed moral equilibrium and good judgment. Freedom, in contrast, churned out nutcases.

  In twenty-five northern cities, not a single sane black person was found, and in thirty-nine cities in the state of Ohio and twenty in New York, the number of black mental cases outnumbered the total black population.

  The census might seem dubious, yet it was taken as the official truth for a quarter of a century, until Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves, won the war, and lost his life.

  THE GOLD RUSH

  It happened in 1880.

  For years John Sutter shuffled all over the Capitol and the White House wearing a threadbare colonel’s uniform and hauling a bag full of documents. When by some miracle he found someone willing to listen, he pulled out his deeds to the city of San Francisco and its vast surroundings, and told the story of the millionaire undone by the gold rush.

  He had founded his empire in the Sacramento Valley, where he purchased numerous Indian vassals and the title of colonel and a Pleyel piano. Then gold sprouted like wheat and his lands and homes were invaded, his cattle and sheep eaten, and his crops ruined.

  He lost everything, and from then on spent his life in court. When a judge ruled in his favor, a crowd set fire to the courthouse.

  He moved to Washington.

  There he lived hoping, and hoping he died.

  Now a street in San Francisco bears his name.

  Consolation arrived late.

  WHITMAN

  It happened in Boston in 1882.

  The New England Society for the Suppression of Vice blocked distribution of the second edition of Leaves of Grass.

  A few years earlier, after the first edition came out, the author lost his job.

  Public morality would not tolerate Walt Whitman’s effusive praise of the pleasures of the night.

  That was the case even though Whitman managed to hide what was most forbidden. In one passage, Leaves of Grass insinuates something, but in the remainder and even in his intimate diaries he took the trouble to change “his” to “her” and to put “she” where he had written “he.”

  The great poet, who celebrated resplendent nudity, had no choice but to disguise himself to survive. He invented six children he never had, lied about romances with women who never existed, and painted himself as the bearded tough guy who embodied American virility, plowing virgin fields and untouched girls.

  EMILY

  It happened in Amherst in 1886.

  When Emily Dickinson died, the family discovered eighteen hundred poems hidden in her bedroom.

  On tiptoe she lived, and on tiptoe she wrote. She published only eleven poems in her entire lifetime, all anonymously or under a pseudonym.

  From her Puritan ancestors, she inherited boredom, a mark of distinction for her race and her class: do not touch, do not speak. Gentlemen went into politics and business; ladies perpetuated the species and lived in ill health.

  Emily inhabited solitude and silence. Cloistered in her bedroom, she invented poems that broke the rules of grammar and the rules of her own isolation. And every day she wrote a letter to her sister-in-law Susan, who lived next door, and sent it by mail.

  Those poems and letters formed a secret sanctuary. There, her hidden sorrows and forbidden desires could yearn freely.

  UNIVERSAL TARANTULA

  It happened in Chicago in 1886.

  On the first of May, strikes paralyzed cities across the country. The Philadelphia Tribune offered a diagnosis: “The labor element has been bitten by a kind of universal tarantula—it has gone dancing mad.”

  Dancing mad were the workers who fought for the eight-hour day and for the right to form unions.

  Four labor leaders were charged with murder. The following year they were sentenced with no evidence by a kangaroo court. George Engel, Adolph Fischer, Albert Parsons, and August Spies marched to the gallows. The fifth condemned man, Louis Linng, blew himself up in his cell with a smuggled dynamite cap.

  On every May first, the entire world remembers them. With the passing of time, constitutions, laws, and international accords have proved them right.

  But some of the most powerful corporations have yet to find out. They outlaw unions and keep track of the workday with those melting clocks painted by Salvador Dalí.

  MR. CORPORATION

  It happened in Washington in 1886.

  Gargantuan companies won the same legal rights as regular home-grown citizens.

  The Supreme Court annulled over two hundred laws that regulated or limited the activities of business, and at the same time extended human rights to private corporations. The law conferred on big companies the same rights as persons, as if they, too, breathed: the right to life, to free expression, to privacy . . .

  At the beginning of the twenty-first century, corporations
are still humans.

  DON’T STEP ON MY FLOWERS

  In 1871 a revolution left Paris, for the second time, in the hands of the Communards.

  Charles Baudelaire compared the police to the god Jupiter, and warned that with no aristocracy the cult of beauty would disappear.

  Théophile Gautier offered an eyewitness account:

  “Stinking beasts, with their savage howls, are invading us.”

  The short-lived government of the Commune burned the guillotine, took over the barracks, separated church from state, handed factories closed by the bosses over to the workers, outlawed night shifts, and established secular, free, and mandatory schooling.

  “Secular, free, and mandatory schooling will do nothing but increase the number of imbeciles,” predicted Gustave Flaubert.

  The Commune did not last long. Two months and a bit. The troops that had fled to Versailles returned, attacked, and after several days of combat they crushed the workers’ barricades and celebrated their victory with firing squads. For a week they killed night and day, machine guns killing by the dozen. Flaubert urged them to show no compassion for the “rabid dogs,” and his first recommendation was “to do away with universal suffrage, which is shameful to the human spirit.”

  Anatole France also celebrated the butchery: