Mirrors

  Give or take a word, this is what Alexandra Kollontai, the only woman in Lenin’s cabinet, demanded.

  Thanks to her, homosexuality and abortion were no longer crimes, marriage was no longer a life sentence, women had the right to vote and to equal pay, and there were free child care centers, communal dining halls, and collective laundries.

  Years later, when Stalin decapitated the revolution, Alexandra managed to save her neck. But she was no longer Alexandra.

  STALIN

  He learned to write in the language of Georgia, his homeland, but in the seminary the monks made him speak Russian.

  Years later in Moscow, his south Caucasus accent still gave him away.

  So he decided to become more Russian than the Russians. Was not Napoleon, who hailed from Corsica, more French than the French? And was not Catherine the Great, who was German, more Russian than the Russians?

  The Georgian, Iosif Dzhugashvili, chose a Russian name. He called himself Stalin, which means “steel.”

  The man of steel expected his son to be made of steel too: from childhood, Stalin’s son Yakov was tempered in fire and ice and shaped by hammer blows.

  It did not work. He was his mother’s child. At the age of nineteen, Yakov wanted no more of it, could bear no more.

  He pulled the trigger.

  The gunshot did not kill him.

  He awoke in the hospital.

  At the foot of the bed, his father commented:

  “You can’t even get that right.”

  ALIBIS

  It was said, is said: social revolutions under attack from the powerful within and from the imperialists without cannot afford the luxury of freedom.

  Nevertheless, it was in the first years of the Russian Revolution, when it was beleaguered by enemy harassment, civil war, and foreign invasion, that its creative energy flowed most freely.

  In better times later on, when the Communists controlled the entire country, the dictatorship of the bureaucracy imposed its sole truth and condemned diversity as unpardonable heresy.

  Painters Marc Chagall and Wassily Kandinsky left and never returned.

  Poet Vladimir Mayakovsky put a bullet through his heart.

  Another poet, Sergei Yesenin, hanged himself.

  Writer Isaac Babel was shot.

  Vsevolod Meyerhold, who had made a revolution with his bare theatrical stages, was also shot.

  Shot too were Nikolai Bukharin, Grigory Zinoviev, and Lev Kamenev, revolutionary leaders from the beginning, while Leon Trotsky, founder of the Red Army, was assassinated in exile.

  Of the revolutionaries who began it all, not one remained. All were purged: buried, locked up, or driven out. And they were removed from official photographs and from history books.

  The revolution elevated to the throne the most mediocre of its leaders.

  For what you did or what you would do, as punishment or just in case, Stalin sacrificed those who cast a shadow on him, those who said no, those who did not say yes, those who were dangerous today, and those who would be dangerous tomorrow.

  PHOTOGRAPH: ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE

  Bolshoi Theater Square, Moscow, May 1920.

  Lenin addresses Soviet soldiers before they depart for the Ukrainian front to fight the Polish army.

  At Lenin’s side on the dais above the crowd are Leon Trotsky, the other orator on the program, and Lev Kamenev.

  The photograph by G. P. Goldshtein becomes a symbol of the Communist revolution around the globe.

  A few years later, Trotsky and Kamenev would be gone from the photo and from the world.

  A little retouching erased them and put five wooden steps in their place, while executioners did the rest.

  THE INQUISITION IN STALIN’S TIME

  Isaac Babel was an outlawed writer. He explained:

  “It’s a new genre I’ve invented: silence.”

  He was imprisoned in 1939.

  The trial lasted twenty minutes.

  He confessed to having written books in which his petit bourgeois outlook distorted revolutionary reality.

  He confessed to having committed crimes against the Soviet state.

  He confessed to having spoken with foreign spies.

  He confessed to having contact with Trotskyites during his trips outside the country.

  He confessed to knowing about a plot to assassinate Comrade Stalin and not going to the police.

  He confessed to feeling attracted to the enemies of the fatherland.

  He confessed that all his confessions were false.

  They shot him that very night.

  His wife learned of it fifteen years later.

  ROSA

  She was born in Poland, lived in Germany. She dedicated her life to social revolution, right up to the day at the beginning of 1919 when the guardian angels of German capitalism broke her skull with their rifle butts.

  Not long before, Rosa Luxemburg wrote an article on the first years of the Russian Revolution. The article, penned in her German jail cell, opposed the divorce of socialism and democracy.

  • On the new democracy:

  Socialist democracy is not something which begins only in the promised land after the foundations of the socialist economy are laid. It does not come as some sort of Christmas present for the worthy people who, in the interim, have loyally supported a handful of socialist dictators. Socialist democracy begins simultaneously with the beginnings of the destruction of class rule and of the construction of socialism.

  • On the people’s energy:

  The remedy which Trotsky and Lenin have found, the elimination of democracy as such, is worse than the disease it is supposed to cure; for it stops up the very living source from which alone can come correction of all the innate shortcomings of social institutions. That source is the active, untrammeled, energetic political life of the broadest masses of the people.

  • On public control:

  Public control is indispensably necessary. Otherwise the exchange of experiences remains only within the closed circle of the officials of the new regime. Corruption becomes inevitable.

  • On freedom:

  Freedom for the supporters of the government, only for the members of one party—however numerous they may be—is no freedom at all. Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently.

  • On the dictatorship of bureaucracy:

  Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of the press and of assembly, without a free struggle among opinions, life withers in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life in which the bureaucracy remains the only active element. Public life gradually falls asleep, as a few party leaders of inexhaustible energy and boundless experience direct and rule. Among them, in reality only a dozen outstanding heads do the leading, and an elite of the working class is invited from time to time to meetings where they are to applaud the speeches of the leaders and to approve proposed resolutions unanimously.

  ORIGIN OF TWO COUNTRIES

  They say Churchill said:

  “Jordan was an idea I had one spring at about four-thirty in the afternoon.”

  The fact is that during the month of March 1921, in just three days, British Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill and his forty advisers drew a new map for the Middle East. They invented two countries, named them, appointed their monarchs, and sketched their borders with a finger in the sand. Thus the land embraced by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, the clay of the very first books, was called Iraq. And the new country amputated from Palestine was called Transjordan, later Jordan.

  The task at hand was to change the names of colonies so they would at least appear to be Arab kingdoms. And to divide those colonies, to break them up: an urgent lesson drawn from imperial memory.

  While France pulled Lebanon out of a hat, Churchill bestowed the crown of Iraq on the errant Prince Faisal, and a plebiscite ratified him with suspicious enthusiasm: he got 96 percent of the vote. His brother Prince Abdullah became king of Jo
rdan. Both monarchs belonged to a family placed on the British payroll at the recommendation of Lawrence of Arabia.

  The manufacturers of countries signed the birth certificates of Iraq and Jordan in Cairo’s Semiramis Hotel, and then went out to see the pyramids.

  Churchill fell off his camel and hurt his hand.

  Fortunately, it was nothing serious. Churchill’s favorite artist could continue painting landscapes.

  UNGRATEFUL KING

  In 1932, Ibn Saud completed his long war to conquer Mecca and Medina, and proclaimed himself king and sultan of those holy cities and of the vast surrounding desert.

  In an act of humility, Ibn Saud named his kingdom Saudi Arabia after his own family. And in an act of amnesia, he gave the country’s petroleum to an American company, Standard Oil, forgetting that between 1917 and 1924 he and his family had eaten from the hand of the British, as the account books attest.

  Saudi Arabia became a model of democracy in the Middle East. Its five thousand princes waited seventy-three years to hold the first elections. In that vote, for municipal offices only, no political parties took part since they were all outlawed. No women either, since they too were outlawed.

  THE AGES OF JOSEPHINE

  At nine years old, she works cleaning houses in St. Louis on the banks of the Mississippi.

  At ten, she starts dancing for coins in the street.

  At thirteen, she marries.

  At fifteen, once again. Of the first husband she retains not even a bad memory. Of the second, his last name, because she likes how it sounds.

  At seventeen, Josephine Baker dances the Charleston on Broadway.

  At eighteen, she crosses the Atlantic and conquers Paris. The “Bronze Venus” performs in the nude, with no more clothing than a belt of bananas.

  At twenty-one, her outlandish combination of clown and femme fatale makes her the most popular and highest-paid performer in Europe.

  At twenty-four, she is the most photographed woman on the planet. Pablo Picasso, on his knees, paints her. To look like her, the pallid young damsels of Paris rub themselves with walnut cream, which darkens the skin.

  At thirty, she has problems in some hotels because she travels with a chimpanzee, a snake, a goat, two parrots, several fish, three cats, seven dogs, a cheetah named Chiquita who wears a diamond-studded collar, and a little pig named Albert, whom she bathes in Je Reviens perfume by Worth.

  At forty, she receives the Legion of Honor for service to the French Resistance during the Nazi occupation.

  At forty-one and on her fourth husband, she adopts twelve children of many colors and many origins, whom she calls “my rainbow tribe.”

  At forty-five, she returns to the United States. She insists that everyone, whites and blacks, sit together at her shows. If not, she will not perform.

  At fifty-seven, she shares the stage with Martin Luther King and speaks against racial discrimination before an immense crowd at the March on Washington.

  At sixty-eight, she recovers from a calamitous bankruptcy and at the Bobino Theater in Paris she celebrates a half century on the stage.

  And she departs.

  SARAH

  “I never stop acting,” she said. “Always and everywhere, in all sorts of places, at every instant. I am my own double.”

  Nobody knew if Sarah Bernhardt was the best actress in the world or the biggest liar in history or both at once.

  At the beginning of the twenties, after half a century of unchallenged reign, she remained the queen of theater in Paris and wherever else her endless tours took her. She was nearly eighty, so thin she cast no shadow, and minus a leg. All Paris knew it, but all Paris chose to believe that the irresistible girl, who drew sighs just by walking by, was doing a stupendous job of portraying a poor mutilated elderly woman.

  SURRENDER OF PARIS

  When he was a barefoot boy kicking soccer balls made of rags down nameless streets, he rubbed his knees and ankles with grasshopper grease. That’s what he said, and that was how he got his leg magic.

  José Leandro Andrade did not say much. He did not celebrate his goals or his loves. When he danced past defenders with a ball glued to his foot, he moved with the same haughty gait and absent expression as when he danced the tango with a woman glued to his frame.

  In the Olympics of 1924, he astonished Paris. The crowds were delirious, the press called him “the Black Marvel.” Fame brought dames. Letters rained down on him, none of which he could read. They were written on perfumed paper by ladies who exposed their knees and blew smoke rings from long, gold cigarette holders.

  When he returned to Uruguay, he brought back a silk kimono, gray gloves, and a wristwatch.

  All this was soon over.

  In those days, soccer was played for wine and food and pleasure.

  He sold newspapers on the street.

  He sold his medals.

  He was the first black star of world soccer.

  HAREM NIGHTS

  In the museums of Paris, writer Fatema Mernissi saw the Odalisques painted by Henri Matisse.

  They were harem flesh: voluptuous, indolent, obedient.

  Fatema looked at the dates on the paintings, compared, and confirmed: when Matisse portrayed Turkish women like that, in the twenties and thirties, they were well on their way to becoming full citizens, gaining entry to the university and Parliament, winning the right to divorce, and tearing off the veil.

  The harem, a lockup for women, had been outlawed in Turkey, but not in Europe’s imagination. Virtuous gentlemen, monogamous in their wakeful hours and polygamous in their dreams, could enjoy free passes to that exotic paradise, where empty-headed, tight-lipped females delighted in pleasing the male jailer. Any mediocre office worker could close his eyes and become a powerful caliph, caressed by a multitude of naked belly-dancing virgins vying for the favor of a night alongside their lord and master.

  Fatema had been born and raised in a harem.

  PESSOA’S PERSONS

  He was one, he was many, he was everyone, he was no one.

  Fernando Pessoa, sad bureaucrat, prisoner of the clock, solitary author of love letters never sent, carried an insane asylum around inside himself.

  Of the denizens, we know their names, the dates and even hours of their births, their astrological signs, weights, and heights.

  And their works, because they were all poets.

  Alberto Caeiro, pagan, mocker of metaphysics and other intellectual acrobatics that reduce life to concepts, wrote burps.

  Ricardo Reis, monarchist, Hellenist, child of classical culture, who was born several times and had several astrological signs, wrote constructions.

  Álvaro de Campos, engineer from Glasgow, vanguardist, who studied energy and feared losing his zest for life, wrote sensations.

  Bernardo Soares, master of the paradox, prose poet, scholar, who claimed to be an unwilling aide in some library, wrote contradictions.

  And Antonio Mora, psychiatrist and nutcase, interned at Cascais, wrote lucubrations and locobrations.

  Pessoa also wrote. When the others slept.

  WAR STREET

  From the start of the twentieth century, a mechanized bell announced each day’s opening and closing on the New York Stock Exchange. The pealing tones paid homage to the self-sacrificing labors of the speculators who make the world go round, determine the value of goods and countries, manufacture millionaires and mendicants, and are capable of killing more people than any war, plague, or drought.

  On October 24, 1929, the bell rang cheerily as ever on the worst day in the entire history of that cathedral of finance. Its collapse closed banks and factories, sent unemployment skyrocketing, and pushed wages down the basement stairs. The entire world got stuck with the bill.

  U.S. Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon consoled the victims. He said the crisis had its advantages, because “people will work harder and lead a more moral life.”

  FORBIDDEN TO WIN ELECTIONS

  So people would work harder and
lead a more moral life, the Wall Street crash brought down the price of coffee and with it the elected government of El Salvador.

  The reins of the country were seized by General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez, who liked to use a magic pendulum to find poison in his soup and enemies on the map.

  The general called democratic elections, but the people abused the opportunity. The majority voted for the Communist Party. So the general had to annul the vote and a popular revolt erupted, as did Izalco volcano after many years asleep.

  Machine guns reestablished the peace. Thousands died. How many, no one knows. They were peons, they were poor, they were Indians: the economy called them “the labor force” and death called them “unidentified.”

  Indigenous leader José Feliciano Ama had already been killed several times when he was hanged from the branch of an olive tree. And there he was left to swing in the breeze, a civics lesson for schoolchildren brought from all over the country.

  FORBIDDEN TO BE FERTILE

  So people would work hard and lead a more moral life, the crash on Wall Street also made the price of sugar nosedive.

  The disaster severely punished the islands of the Caribbean and gave Brazil’s northeast the coup de grâce.