Mirrors

  Thus the university was hurriedly concocted and installed in a rambling old house occupied by the Imperial Institute of the Blind. Sadly, the blind had to be evicted.

  And thus Brazil, which owes the best of her music, her soccer, her food, and her joy to blacks, gave an honorary doctorate to a king whose only merit was his membership in a family that specialized in exterminating blacks in the Congo.

  ORIGIN OF SADNESS

  Montevideo was not always gray. It was grayed.

  Back around 1890, a traveler who visited Uruguay’s capital could still pay homage to “the city where bright colors triumph.” The houses that faced the street were red, yellow, blue . . .

  Shortly thereafter, those in the know explained that such a barbaric custom was not proper for a European nation. To be European, no matter what the map said, one had to be civilized. To be civilized, one had to be serious. To be serious, one had to be sad.

  And in 1911 and 1913, municipal ordinances specified that paving stones for sidewalks had to be gray and that “only paint that imitates the construction materials, like sandstone, brick, or stone in general, will be allowed” on street-facing facades.

  Painter Pedro Figari mocked this example of colonial stupidity: “Fashion insists that even the doors, window-frames, and sunshades be painted gray. Our cities aspire to be like Paris . . . Montevideo, luminous city, is sullied, crushed, castrated . . . ”

  And Montevideo succumbed to copyitis.

  Even so, during those years Uruguay’s creative energies made it the epicenter of Latin American audacity. The country had free secular education before England, women’s suffrage before France, the eight-hour day before the United States, and legal divorce seventy years before it was restored in Spain. President José Battle, “Don Pepe,” nationalized public services, separated church and state, and changed the names of holidays. In Uruguay, Easter is still called Tourism Week, as if Jesus had the misfortune to be tortured and killed during his week off.

  OUT OF PLACE

  The painting made Édouard Manet famous is of a typical Sunday scene: two men and two women having a picnic on the grass on the outskirts of Paris.

  Nothing out of the ordinary, save one detail. The men, impeccable gentlemen, are fully clothed and the women are completely naked. The men are discussing some serious topic, as men are wont to do, and the women are about as significant as the trees around them.

  The woman in the foreground is looking at us. Perhaps she is asking, “Where am I? What am I doing here?”

  Women are but decoration, and not only in the painting.

  SOULLESS

  Aristotle knew what he was talking about:

  “A woman is like a deformed man. She lacks an essential element: a soul.”

  Painting and sculpture were forbidden kingdoms for the beings without souls.

  In sixteenth-century Bologna, there were five hundred and twenty-five painters, one of whom was a woman.

  In the seventeenth century, the Académie des Beaux-Arts of Paris had four hundred and fifty members, fifteen of whom were women, all of them wives or daughters of male painters.

  In the nineteenth century, Suzanne Valadon was a market vendor, a circus acrobat, and a model for Toulouse-Lautrec. She used corsets made of carrots and shared her studio with a goat. That she was the first woman who dared to paint male nudes surprised no one. She had to be nuts.

  Erasmus of Rotterdam also knew what he was talking about:

  “A woman is always a woman, in other words, crazy.”

  RESURRECTION OF CAMILLE

  The family declared her insane and had her committed.

  Camille Claudel spent the last thirty years of her life in an asylum, held captive.

  It was for her own good, they said.

  In the asylum, a freezing prison, she refused to sketch or sculpt.

  Her mother and her sister never visited her.

  Once in a while her brother, Paul the saint, turned up.

  When Camille the sinner died, no one claimed her body.

  It was years before the world discovered that Camille had been more than the humiliated lover of Auguste Rodin.

  Nearly half a century after her death, her works came back to life. They traveled and they astonished: bronze that dances, marble that cries, stone that loves. In Tokyo, the blind asked and were allowed to touch the sculptures. They said the figures breathed.

  VAN GOGH

  Four uncles and a brother were art dealers, yet he managed to sell but one painting in his entire life. Out of admiration or pity, the sister of a friend paid four hundred francs for a work in oils, The Red Vineyard, painted in Arles.

  More than a century later, his works are on the financial pages of newspapers he never read,

  the priciest paintings in galleries he never set foot in,

  the most viewed in museums that ignored his existence,

  and the most admired in academies that advised him to take up

  another trade.

  Today, Van Gogh decorates restaurants where no one would have served him,

  the clinics of doctors who would have had him committed,

  and the offices of lawyers who would have locked him away.

  THAT SCREAM

  Edvard Munch heard the heavens scream.

  Sunset had passed, but in the sun’s wake tongues of fire were rising from the horizon, when the heavens screamed.

  Munch painted that scream.

  Now whoever sees his painting covers his ears.

  The new century was born screaming.

  PROPHETS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

  Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote The Communist Manifesto in the middle of the nineteenth century. They did not write it to understand the world, but to help change it. A century later, one-third of humanity lived in societies inspired by a pamphlet barely twenty-three pages long.

  The Manifesto was an accurate prophecy. Capitalism is a sorcerer incapable of controlling the forces it unleashes, the authors said, and in our days anyone who has eyes in his face can see that at a glance.

  But it never occurred to the authors that the sorcerer would have more lives than a cat,

  or that big factories would disperse their labor force to reduce the costs of production and the threat of rebellion,

  or that social revolutions would take place more frequently in countries called “barbarous” than in those called “civilized,”

  or that the workers of the world would unite less often than they would divide,

  or that the dictatorship of the proletariat would become the stage name for the dictatorship of the bureaucracy.

  And thus, for what it said and what it did not, the Manifesto confirmed the most profound truth its authors had hit upon: reality is more powerful and astonishing than its interpreters. “Gray is theory and green the tree of life,” Goethe said, by way of the devil’s tongue. Anticipating those who would turn Marxism into an infallible science or an irrefutable religion, Marx used to caution that he was no Marxist.

  ORIGIN OF ADVERTISING

  The Russian physician Ivan Pavlov discovered conditioned reflexes.

  He called this sequence of stimulus and response “learning”:

  the bell rings, the dog gets fed, the dog salivates;

  hours later, the bell rings, the dog gets fed, the dog salivates;

  the following day, the bell rings, the dog gets fed, the dog salivates;

  and the process is repeated hour after hour, day after day, until the bell rings, the dog is not fed, but he salivates anyway.

  Hours later, days later, the dog continues salivating when the bell rings, even though his plate is empty.

  POTIONS

  The Postum Cereal Company led you down Happiness Road to Healthy City and on into the Sunlight. There was something religious about those shimmering bowls in the ads, one cereal was even called Elijah’s Manna. And their Grape-Nuts prevented appendicitis, tuberculosis, malaria, and tooth decay.

  In 18
83, Professor Holloway spent fifty thousand pounds sterling advertising a product made from soap and aloe, an infallible remedy for the fifty diseases enumerated in the ad.

  Dr. Gregory’s stomach powders made your belly like new, thanks to the exotic combination of Turkish rhubarb, calcined magnesite, and Jamaican ginger. And Dr. Varon’s liniment, “approved by members of the Royal Academy of Medicine,” cured colds, asthma, and measles.

  Clark Stanley’s Snake Oil, which had nothing to do with snakes, was a mixture of kerosene, camphor, and turpentine that did away with rheumatism. Sometimes it also did away with rheumatics, but that bit of news was left out of the advertisements.

  The ads did not mention the morphine in Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup, undoubtedly manufactured by an easygoing family. And neither did the ads explain why the word “coca” was in the name Coca-Cola, “the ideal brain tonic” invented by Dr. Pemberton.

  MARKETING

  At the end of the 1920s, advertising beat the drum to spread marvelous news: “Fly, don’t ride.” Leaded gasoline made you go faster, and going faster meant getting ahead in life. The ads showed a car going at a snail’s pace, and the embarrassed child inside: “Gee, Pop, they’re all passing you!”

  Gasoline with lead additives was invented in the United States, and from the United States a barrage of advertising imposed it on the world. In 1986, when the U.S. government finally decided to outlaw it, the number of victims of lead poisoning around the planet was incalculable. It was known all along that leaded gasoline was killing adults in the United States at a rate of five thousand a year, and causing irreparable damage to the nervous systems and mental development of millions of children.

  The principal authors of this crime were two executives from General Motors, Charles Kettering and Alfred Sloan. They have gone down in history as generous benefactors of humanity. They founded a hospital.

  MARIE

  She was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize, and she won it twice.

  She was the first woman professor at the Sorbonne, and for many years the only one.

  And later on, when it was too late to celebrate, she was the first woman accepted into the Panthéon, the portentous mausoleum reserved for “the Great Men of France,” even though she was not a man and had been born and raised in Poland.

  At the end of the nineteenth century, Marie Sklodowska and her husband, Pierre Curie, discovered a substance that emitted four hundred times more radiation than uranium. They called it polonium, in honor of Marie’s country of birth. Next, they began experimenting with radium, three thousand times more powerful than uranium. They invented the word “radioactivity,” and they received, jointly, the Nobel Prize.

  Pierre had his doubts: were they the bearers of a gift from heaven or from hell? In his acceptance speech in Stockholm, he recalled the case of Alfred Nobel himself, the inventor of dynamite:

  “Powerful explosives have enabled man to do wonderful work. But they are also a terrible means of destruction in the hands of the great criminals who lead people to war.”

  Very shortly thereafter, Pierre was killed, run over by a horse-drawn cart carrying four tons of military materiel.

  Marie survived him, and lived to see her body pay the price of her success. Radiation gave her burns, open sores, and horrible pain until she finally died of pernicious anemia.

  Her daughter Irene, who also won the Nobel Prize for her achievements in the new realm of radioactivity, died of leukemia.

  FATHER OF THE LIGHTBULB

  He sold newspapers on trains. At the age of eight he started school, but he lasted only three months. The teacher sent him home, explaining, “This child is too dumb.”

  When Thomas Alva Edison grew up, he patented eleven hundred inventions: the incandescent lightbulb, the electric locomotive, the phonograph, the movie projector . . .

  In 1878, he founded what would later become the General Electric Company and set up the first electric power plant.

  Thirty-two years later, this illuminator of modern life sat down with journalist Elbert Hubbard.

  He said:

  “Some day some fellow will invent a way of concentrating and storing up sunshine, instead of this old, absurd Prometheus scheme of fire.”

  And he also said:

  “Sunshine is a form of energy, and the winds and the tides are manifestations of energy. Do we use them? Oh, no! We burn up wood and coal, as renters burn up the front fence for fuel.”

  TESLA

  Nikola Tesla always claimed to have invented the radio, but Guglielmo Marconi got the Nobel for it. In 1943, after years of litigation, the U.S. Supreme Court acknowledged that Tesla’s patent was first. He never heard the news. He had been in his grave for five months.

  Tesla always claimed to have invented the alternating current generator, which today lights up the cities of the world, but the invention got a bad reputation because it was first tried out frying condemned men in the electric chair.

  Tesla always claimed he could light a lamp from twenty-five miles away without any wires, but when he actually did so he blew up the power station in Colorado Springs and got run out of town.

  Tesla always claimed he had invented little steel men guided by remote control, and rays that could photograph the inside of the body, but few took seriously this circus magician who spoke regularly with his deceased friend Mark Twain and received messages from Mars.

  Tesla died in a hotel in New York with his pockets as empty as they had been sixty years before when he got off the boat from Croatia. To honor his memory, the unit of measure for magnetic flows is now called the Tesla, as is the coil that produces over a million volts of electricity.

  ORIGIN OF AERIAL BOMBARDMENTS

  In 1911, Italian airplanes dropped grenades on several settlements in the Libyan desert.

  The test proved that attacking from the air was quicker, cheaper, and more devastating than land offensives. The commander of the air force reported:

  “The bombardment has been marvelously effective at demoralizing the enemy.”

  The experiments that followed also featured European massacres of Arab civilians. In 1912, French airplanes attacked Morocco, selecting densely populated targets so they would not miss. And the following year, the Spanish air force tested, also on Morocco, a novelty from Germany: fragmentation bombs that sprayed deadly shards of steel in all directions.

  Then . . .

  THE AGES OF SANTOS DUMONT

  At the age of thirty-two, Brazilian argonaut Alberto Santos Dumont, inexplicably alive after multiple flying disasters, receives the title of chevalier of France’s Legion of Honor. The press declares him the most elegant man in Paris.

  At thirty-three, he is the father of the modern airplane. He invents a motorized bird that takes off without a catapult and climbs to an altitude of six meters. When he lands, he declares:

  “I have the utmost confidence in the future of the airplane.”

  At forty-nine, shortly after the First World War, he warns the League of Nations:

  “The feats of flying machines allow us to foresee with horror the great destructive power they could have, sowing death not only among combatants but also, lamentably, among people who are defenseless.”

  At fifty-three:

  “I don’t see why dropping explosives from airplanes could not be outlawed, when dropping poison into the water system is.”

  At fifty-nine, he wonders:

  “Why did I invent this thing? Instead of spreading love it has become a cursed weapon of war.”

  And he hangs himself. Since he is so tiny, practically weightless, practically heightless, his necktie does the trick.

  PHOTOGRAPH: A FACE IN THE CROWD

  Munich, Odeonplatz, August 1914.

  The imperial flag waves overhead. Under its shelter, a multitude exults in the ecstasy of being German.

  Germany has declared war. “War! War!” shout the people, crazed with joy, eager to march straight into battle.

  In
the photograph’s lower corner, lost in the crowd, is the face of a man in a state of bliss, eyes raised toward heaven, mouth agape. Those who know him could tell us his name is Adolf, he is Austrian and rather ugly, his voice is screechy, and he is always on the verge of a nervous breakdown. He sleeps in an attic room and ekes out a living in bars, going table to table, selling his watercolors of pastoral scenes copied from calendars.

  The photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann, does not know him. He has no idea that in that sea of heads his camera has recorded the presence of the Messiah, the redeemer of the race of the Nibelungs and the Valkyries, the Siegfried who will avenge the defeat and humiliation of this great Germany that will march singing from the nuthouse to the slaughterhouse.

  KAFKA

  As the drums of the first world butchery drew near, Franz Kafka wrote Metamorphosis. And not long after, the war under way, he wrote The Trial.

  They are two collective nightmares:

  a man awakens as an enormous cockroach and cannot fathom why, and in the end he is swept away by a broom;

  another man is arrested, charged, judged, and found guilty, and cannot fathom why, and in the end he is knifed by the executioner.

  In a certain way those stories, those books, continued in the pages of the newspapers, which day after day told of the progress of the war machine.