The author, ghost with feverish eyes, shadow without a body, wrote from the ultimate depths of anguish.
He published little, practically no one read him.
He departed in silence, as he had lived. On his deathbed, bed of pain, he only spoke to ask the doctor:
“Kill me, or else you are a murderer.”
NIJINSKY
In Switzerland in 1919, in a ballroom at the Hotel Suvretta in Saint Moritz, Vaslav Nijinsky danced for the last time.
Before an audience of millionaires, the most famous dancer in the world announced that he would dance the war. And by the light of candelabras, he danced it.
Nijinsky spun in furious whirlwinds and left the ground and broke apart in the air and fell back, thunderstruck, and he rolled about as if the marble floor were mud, and then he began to spin again and, rising once more, again he broke apart, and again, and again, until finally the remains of him, a mute howl, crashed through the window and was lost in the snow.
Nijinsky had entered the realm of madness, his land of exile. He never returned.
ORIGIN OF JAZZ
It was 1906. People were coming and going as usual along Perdido Street in a poor neighborhood of New Orleans. A five-year-old child peeking out the window watched that boring sameness with open eyes and very open ears, as if he expected something to happen.
It happened. Music exploded from the corner and filled the street. A man was blowing his cornet straight up to the sky and around him a crowd clapped in time and sang and danced. And Louis Armstrong, the boy in the window, swayed back and forth with such enthusiasm he nearly fell out.
A few days later, the man with the cornet entered an insane asylum. They locked him up in the Negro section.
That was the only time his name, Buddy Bolden, appeared in the newspapers. He died a quarter of a century later in the same asylum, and the papers did not notice. But his music, never written down or recorded, played on inside the people who had delighted in it at parties or at funerals.
According to those in the know, that phantom was the founder of jazz.
RESURRECTION OF DJANGO
He was born in a gypsy caravan and spent his early years on the road in Belgium, playing the banjo for a dancing bear and a goat.
He was eighteen when his wagon caught fire and he was left for dead. He lost a leg, a hand. Goodbye road, goodbye music. But as they were about to amputate, he regained the use of his leg. And from his lost hand he managed to save two fingers and become one of the best jazz guitarists in history.
There was a secret pact between Django Reinhardt and his guitar. If he would play her, she would lend him the fingers he lacked.
ORIGIN OF THE TANGO
It was born in the River Plate, in the whorehouses on the outskirts of the city. Men danced it among themselves to pass the time, while the women attended to other customers in bed. Its slow, stuttering melodies echoed in alleyways where knives and sadness reigned.
The tango wore its birthmark on its forehead, harsh life in the lower depths, and for that reason was not allowed in anywhere else.
But what was unpresentable managed to pry open the door. In 1917, led by Carlos Gardel, the tango turned up downtown in Buenos Aires, climbed onstage at the Esmeralda Theater, and introduced itself by name. Gardel sang “Mi noche triste” and tango’s isolation was over. Bathed in tears, the snobbish middle class gave it a raucous welcome that washed away its original sin.
That was the first tango Gardel ever recorded. It still gets played and it sounds better and better. They call Gardel “the Magician.” It is no exaggeration.
ORIGIN OF THE SAMBA
Like the tango, the samba was not considered respectable: “dime-store music, nigger music.”
In 1917, the same year that Gardel ushered tango in the front door, samba burst on the scene during carnival one night in Rio de Janeiro. That night, which went on for years, the mute sang and the street lamps danced.
Not long after that, samba traveled to Paris and Paris went wild. The music, a meeting ground of all the musics of a prodigiously musical country, was irresistible.
But the Brazilian government, which at the time refused to allow blacks on the national soccer team, found Europe’s blessing discomfiting. The country’s most famous musicians now were black, and Europe might think Brazil was in Africa.
The master muse of those musicians, Pixinguinha, maestro of flute and sax, created an inimitable style. The French had never heard anything like it. More than playing music, he played with music and invited everyone to join the game.
ORIGIN OF HOLLYWOOD
On ride the masked men, wrapped in white sheets, bearing white crosses, torches held high: mounted avengers of the virtue of ladies and the honor of gentlemen strike fear into Negroes hungering for damsels’ white flesh.
At the height of a wave of lynchings, D. W. Griffith’s film The Birth of a Nation sings a hymn of praise to the Ku Klux Klan.
This is Hollywood’s first blockbuster and the greatest box office success ever for a silent movie. It is also the first film to ever open at the White House. President Woodrow Wilson gives it a standing ovation. Applauding it, he applauds himself: freedom’s famous flag-bearer wrote most of the texts that accompany the epic images.
The president’s words explain that the emancipation of the slaves was “a veritable overthrow of Civilization in the South, the white South under the heel of the black South.”
Ever since, chaos reigns because blacks are “men who knew none of the uses of authority, except its insolences.”
But the president lights the lamp of hope: “At last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan.”
And even Jesus himself comes down from heaven at the end of the movie to give his blessing.
ORIGIN OF MODERN ART
West African sculptors have always sung while they worked. And they do not stop singing until their sculptures are finished. That way the music gets inside the carvings and keeps on singing.
In 1910, Leo Frobenius found ancient sculptures on the Slave Coast that made his eyes bulge.
Their beauty was such that the German explorer believed they were Greek, brought from Athens, or perhaps from the lost Atlantis. His colleagues agreed: Africa, daughter of scorn, mother of slaves, could not have produced such marvels.
It did, though. Those music-filled effigies had been sculpted a few centuries previous in the belly button of the world, in Ife, the sacred place where the Yoruba gods gave birth to women and men.
Africa turned out to be an unending wellspring of art worth celebrating. And worth stealing.
It seems Paul Gaugin, a rather absentminded fellow, put his name on a couple of sculptures from the Congo. The error was contagious. From then on Picasso, Modigliani, Klee, Giacometti, Ernst, Moore, and many other European artists made the same mistake, and did so with alarming frequency.
Pillaged by its colonial masters, Africa would never know how responsible it was for the most astonishing achievements in twentieth-century European painting and sculpture.
ORIGIN OF THE MODERN NOVEL
A thousand years ago, two Japanese women wrote as if it were today.
According to Jorge Luis Borges and Marguerite Yourcenar, no one ever wrote a better novel than The Tale of Genji, Murasaki Shikibu’s masterful tale of masculine adventure and feminine humiliation.
Another Japanese, Sei Shōnagon, shared with Murasaki the rare honor of being praised a millennium after the fact. Her The Pillow Book gave birth to the zuihitsu genre, which means literally “brush drippings.” It is a multicolored mosaic made up of short stories, notes, reflections, news items, poems. These seemingly random fragments invite us to penetrate that time and place.
THE UNKNOWN SOLDIER
France lost a million and a half men in the First World War.
Four hundred thousand, nearly a third, were unidentified.
In homage to those anonymous martyrs, the government resolved to build the Tomb of
the Unknown Soldier.
For burial, they chose at random one of the fallen at the Battle of Verdun.
Somebody noticed the dead soldier was black, a member of the battalion from the French colony of Senegal.
The error was corrected in time.
Another anonymous soldier, this time white-skinned, was buried under the Arc de Triomphe on November 11, 1920. Wrapped in the nation’s flag, he was honored with speeches and medals.
FORBIDDEN TO BE POOR
“A criminal is born, not made,” as the Italian physician Cesare Lombroso liked to say, glorying in his ability to identify lawbreakers by their physical traits.
To prove that homo criminalis was predestined to do evil, Brazilian physician Sebastião Leão undertook a study of the prisoners in the Porto Alegre jail. But his research revealed
that the source of crime was poverty, not biology;
that the black prisoners, members of a race considered inferior,
were as intelligent as the others or more so;
that the mulatto prisoners, members of a race considered weak and degraded, reached old age hale and hearty;
that the verses written on the walls were enough to prove that not all criminals were unintelligent;
that the physical characteristics which Lombroso attributed to friends of the knife, prominent chin, protruding ears, long eyeteeth, were less common in jail than on the outside;
that beardlessness could not be a trait of society’s enemies as Lombrosoclaimed, because among the many prisoners in Porto Alegre, ten at most had little facial hair;
and that the steamy climate did not encourage lawbreaking, for the crime rate did not rise in summer.
INVISIBLE MEN
In 1869, the Suez Canal made navigation possible between two seas.
We know that Ferdinand de Lesseps was the project’s mastermind,
that Said Pasha and his inheritors sold the canal to the French and the English for practically nothing,
that Giuseppe Verdi composed “Aida” to be sung at the inaugural ceremony,
and that ninety years later, after a long and painful fight, President Gamal Abdel Nasser succeeded in making the canal Egyptian.
Who recalls the hundred and twenty thousand prisoners and peasants, sentenced to forced labor, who died building it, murdered by hunger, exhaustion, and cholera?
In 1914, the Panama Canal sliced open a channel between two oceans.
We know that Ferdinand de Lesseps was the project’s mastermind,
that the construction company went belly up in one of the most earth-shattering scandals in French history,
that President Teddy Roosevelt of the United States seized the canal and all of Panama along with it,
and that sixty years later, after a long and painful fight, President Omar Torrijos succeeded in making the canal Panamanian.
Who recalls the West Indian, East Indian, and Chinese workers who were lost building it? For every kilometer, seven hundred died, murdered by hunger, exhaustion, yellow fever, and malaria.
INVISIBLE WOMEN
Tradition required that the umbilical cords of newborn girls be buried under the ashes in the kitchen, so that early on they would learn a woman’s place and never leave it.
When the Mexican Revolution began, many left their place, but they took the kitchen with them. For better or for worse, out of desire or obligation, they followed their men from battle to battle. They carried babies hanging from their breasts, and pots and pans strapped to their backs. And munitions too: it was women’s job to supply tortillas for the belly and bullets for the gun. And when men fell, women took up their weapons.
On the trains, men and horses rode in the cars. Women were on the roof, praying to God it would not rain.
Without the women who came from country and town, who followed the fighters, who rode the rails, who treated the wounded, who cooked the food, who fought the enemy, who braved death, the revolution never would have happened.
None of them got a pension.
FORBIDDEN TO BE A PEASANT
While the euphoric horse thief Pancho Villa set the north of Mexico aflame, the morose muleteer Emiliano Zapata led the revolution in the south.
All over the country, peasant farmers rose up in arms:
“Justice went up to heaven. You won’t find it here,” they said.
They fought to bring it back.
What else could they do?
In the south, sugar reigned behind its castle walls, while corn eked out a living on the old lava flows. The world market brought the local market to its knees, and the usurpers of land and water advised the men they had dispossessed:
“Plant in flower pots.”
The rebels were men not of war but of the earth, and they would suspend the revolution to plant or to harvest.
Sitting in the shade of laurel trees among neighbors who talked of cocks and horses, Zapata said little and listened a lot. But this taciturn man managed to stir up settlements far and wide with the good news of his land reform.
Never was Mexican society so changed.
Never was Mexican society so punished for changing.
A million dead. All or nearly all of them peasants, even if some wore uniforms.
PHOTOGRAPH: THE THRONE
National Palace, Mexico City, December 1914.
The countryside, risen in revolution, invades the urban world. The North and the South, Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata, conquer Mexico City.
While their soldiers, lost like blind men in a gunfight, wander the streets asking for food and dodging vehicles never before seen, Villa and Zapata enter the seat of government.
Villa offers Zapata the president’s golden chair.
Zapata turns him down.
“We ought to burn it,” he says. “It’s bewitched. When a good man sits here, he turns bad.”
Villa laughs as if it were a joke, flops his great humanity over the chair, and poses for Augustín Víctor Casasola’s camera.
At his side Zapata appears distant, aloof, while he gazes at the camera as if it shoots bullets, not pictures, and with his eyes he says:
“Nice place to leave.”
And in no time at all, the leader of the South returns to the little town of Anenecuilco, his cradle, his sanctuary, and from there he continues directing the recovery of stolen land.
Villa does not take long to do the same:
“This village is too big for us.”
Those who later sit in the coveted seat with the gold-leaf design preside over the butchery that reestablishes order.
Zapata and Villa, betrayed, are assassinated.
RESURRECTION OF ZAPATA
He was born, they say, with a little hand tattooed on his chest.
He died with seven bullet holes in his body.
The assassin received fifty thousand pesos and the rank of brigadier general.
The assassinated received a multitude of peasants with hats in hand, who came to pay their respects.
From their indigenous ancestors they inherited silence.
They said nothing, or they said:
“Poor guy.”
Nothing else.
But later on in town squares, little by little tongues began to loosen:
“It wasn’t him.”
“It was someone else.”
“I thought he looked too fat.”
“The mole above his eye was missing.”
“He left on a ship, from Acapulco.”
“He slipped away at night, on a white horse.”
“He went to Arabia.”
“He’s over there, in Arabia.”
“Arabia’s really far away, farther than Oaxaca.”
“He’ll be back soon.”
LENIN
He never wrote the most famous maxim people attribute to him, and who knows if he ever said it:
“The ends justify the means.”
In any case, he certainly did what he did because he knew what he wanted to achi
eve and he lived to achieve it. He spent his days and nights organizing, arguing, studying, writing, conspiring. He allowed himself time to breathe and eat. Never to sleep.
He had been living in Switzerland for ten years, on his second exile. He was austere, dressed in old clothes and ugly boots. He lived in a room over a shoe-repair shop, and the smell of sausages that wafted up from the butcher’s next door made him nauseous. He spent all day in the public library, and was more in touch with Hegel and Marx than with the workers and peasants of his own country and his own time.
In 1917, when he got on the train that returned him to St. Petersburg, the city later named for him, few Russians knew who he was. The party he founded, which would soon acquire absolute power, had little popular support and was more or less to the left of the moon.
But Lenin knew better than anyone what the Russian people needed most: peace and land. As soon as he got off the train and gave his first speech, a crowd sick and tired of war and humiliation saw in him their interpreter and their instrument.
ALEXANDRA
To be natural and clean, like the water we drink, love must be free and mutual. But men demand obedience and deny pleasure. Without a new morality, without a radical shift in daily life, there will be no real emancipation. If the revolution is not to be a lie, it must abolish in law and in custom men’s right of property over women and the rigid social norms that are the enemies of diversity.