Mirrors

  “For the last day of the next to last month of the year, no nectar compares to tripe from a mule’s ass stuffed with fly shit.”

  BRIEF HISTORY OF BEER

  One of the earliest proverbs, written in the language of the Sumerians, exonerates drink in case of accident:

  Beer is good.

  What’s bad is the road.

  As the oldest of all books tells it, King Gilgamesh’s friend Enkidu was a savage brute until he discovered beer and bread.

  Beer traveled to Egypt from the land we now call Iraq. Because it gave the face new eyes, the Egyptians believed it was a gift from their god Osiris. And since barley beer was the twin sister of bread, they called it “liquid bread.”

  In the Andes, it is the oldest of offerings: from the beginning, the earth has asked for a few drops of chicha, corn beer, to cheer up its days.

  BRIEF HISTORY OF WINE

  Reasonable doubt keeps us wondering if Adam was tempted by an apple or by a grape.

  But we know with certainty there has been wine in this world ever since the Stone Age, when grapes fermented on their own.

  Ancient Chinese canticles prescribed wine to alleviate the pangs of sadness.

  The Egyptians believed the god Horus had one eye that was sun and one that was moon. The moon-eye cried teardrops of wine, which the living drank to put themselves to sleep and the dead drank in order to awaken.

  A grapevine was the emblem of Cyrus the great, king of the Persians, and wine bathed the festivals of the Greeks and the Romans.

  To celebrate human love, Jesus turned six vessels of water into wine. It was his first miracle.

  THE KING WHO WANTED TO LIVE FOREVER

  Time, our midwife, will be our executioner. Yesterday time suckled us and tomorrow it will devour us.

  So it goes, and well we know it.

  Or do we?

  The very first book born in the world recounts the adventures of King Gilgamesh, who refused to die.

  This epic, passed on by word of mouth beginning five thousand years ago, was written down by the Sumerians, the Akkadians, the Babylonians, and the Assyrians.

  Gilgamesh, monarch of the banks of the Euphrates, was the son of a goddess and a man. Divine will, human destiny: from the goddess he inherited power and beauty, from the man he inherited death.

  To be mortal meant nothing to him until his friend Enkidu reached his final day.

  Gilgamesh and Enkidu had shared astonishing feats. Together they entered the Cedar Forest, home of the gods, and defeated the giant guardian whose bellow made the mountains tremble. And together they humiliated the Bull of Heaven who, with a single roar, opened a hole that swallowed a hundred men.

  The death of Enkidu crushed Gilgamesh and terrified him. He discovered that his valiant friend was made of clay, and that he too was made of clay.

  So he set off in search of eternal life. The pursuer of immortality wandered through steppes and deserts,

  he crossed light and darkness,

  he navigated great rivers,

  he arrived in the garden of paradise,

  he was served by a masked barmaid, possessor of secrets,

  he reached the other side of the sea,

  he discovered the ark that survived the flood,

  he found the plant that gives youth to the aged,

  he followed the route of the northern stars and the route of the southern stars,

  he opened the door through which the sun enters, and closed the door through which the sun departs.

  And he became immortal.

  Until he died.

  ANOTHER ADVENTURE IN IMMORTALITY

  Maui, founder of the Polynesian Islands, was born half man, half god, like Gilgamesh.

  His divine half obliged the sun, always in a great hurry, to walk slowly across the sky. And with a fishhook he caught the islands of New Zealand, Hawaii, Tahiti, raised them one after another from the bottom of the sea, and placed them where they now lie.

  But his human half sentenced him to death. Maui knew it, and his feats did not help him forget it.

  In search of Hine, the goddess of death, he traveled to the underworld.

  And there he found her: immense, asleep in the mist. She looked like a temple. Her raised knees formed an arch over the hidden door to her body.

  To achieve immortality, he would have to go right inside death, travel all the way through her, and exit by her mouth.

  At the door, a great half-open slit, Maui let fall his clothes and his weapons. Naked, in he went, and bit by bit he slithered along the path of moist and burning darkness that his progress disclosed in the depths of the goddess.

  Halfway through the journey, the birds sang and she awoke and felt Maui excavating her innards.

  And she closed the passage and never let him out.

  BORN OF TEARS

  Before Egypt was Egypt, the sun created the sky and the birds that fly through it. He created the Nile and the fish that swim in it. And he painted its black banks green with the teeming life of plants and animals.

  Then the sun, maker of life, sat back to contemplate his work.

  The sun felt the deep breathing of the newborn world as it opened before his eyes and he heard the first voices.

  Such tremendous beauty hurt.

  The sun’s tears fell to earth and made mud.

  And from that mud came people.

  NILE

  The Nile obeyed the Pharaoh. It was he who opened the way for the floods that year by year ensured Egypt’s astonishing fertility. After death too: when the first ray of sun filtered through the grate on Pharaoh’s tomb and lit up his face, everyone knew the earth would offer three harvests.

  Thus it was.

  Not anymore.

  Of the seven arms of the delta only two remain, and of the holy cycles of fertility, which are no longer holy or cycles, all that remains are the ancient hymns of praise for the longest river:

  Thou quenchest the thirst of the flocks.

  Thou drinkest the tears of all eyes.

  Rise up Nile, may thy voice resound!

  May thy voice be heard!

  STONE THAT SPEAKS

  When Napoleon invaded Egypt, one of his soldiers found on the banks of the Nile a great black stone entirely engraved with symbols.

  They called it Rosetta.

  Jean François Champollion, a student of dead languages, spent his youth going round and round that stone.

  Rosetta spoke three languages. Two had been deciphered. Not the Egyptian hieroglyphs.

  The writing of the creators of the pyramids remained an enigma. A scripture much commented upon: Herodotus, Strabo, Diodorus, and Horapollo all pretended to translate it, making it up as they went along, as did the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher, who published four tomes of nonsense. All of them believed hieroglyphs were a system of symbolic images, and the meanings varied according to the fantasy of each translator.

  Mute symbols or deaf men? For years and years, Champollion peppered the Rosetta Stone with questions, and received only obstinate silence in response. The poor fellow was wasting away from hunger and discouragement when one day he thought of a possibility that had occurred to no one before: suppose the hieroglyphs were sounds as well as symbols? Suppose they were something like the letters of an alphabet?

  That day the tombs opened and the dead kingdom spoke.

  WRITING, NO

  Some five thousand years before Champollion, the god Thoth traveled to Thebes and offered King Thamus of Egypt the art of writing. He explained hieroglyphs and said that writing was the best remedy for poor memory and feeble knowledge.

  The king refused the gift: “Memory? Knowledge? This invention will encourage forgetting. Knowledge resides in truth, not in its appearance. One cannot remember with the memory of another. Men will record, but they won’t recall. They will repeat, but they will not live. They will learn of many things, but they won’t understand a thing.”

  WRITING, YES

  Ganesha is stout
, thanks to his love of candy, and he has the ears and trunk of an elephant. But he writes with human hands.

  He is the master of initiations, the one who helps people begin their work. Without him, nothing in India would ever get under way. In the art of writing as in everything else, the first step is what counts. Any beginning is a grand moment in life, so Ganesha teaches, and the first words of a letter or a book are as fundamental as the first bricks of a house or a temple.

  OSIRIS

  Egyptian scripture tells us the story of the god Osiris and his sister Isis.

  Osiris was murdered in one of those family quarrels that occur frequently on earth and in the heavens, then he was quartered and scattered in the depths of the Nile.

  Isis, his sister and lover, dove down and collected the pieces. One by one, she joined his parts with seams of clay, and out of clay she modeled whatever was missing. When the body was complete, she lay him down on the bank of the river.

  That clay, stirred and mixed by the Nile, contained grains of barley and seeds of other plants.

  The sprouting body of Osiris stood up and walked.

  ISIS

  Like Osiris, Isis was privy to the mysteries of perpetual birth. We know her image: a mother goddess breastfeeding her son Horus, as the Virgin Mary suckled Jesus much later on. But Isis was never what we might call a virgin. She began making love to Osiris when they were growing together inside their mother’s womb. And she practiced the world’s oldest profession for ten years in the city of Tyre.

  In the thousands of years that followed, Isis traveled the world resuscitating whores, slaves, and others among the damned.

  In Rome, she founded temples for the poor alongside bordellos. The temples were razed by imperial order, their priests crucified, but like stubborn mules they came back to life again and again.

  And when Emperor Justinian’s soldiers demolished the sanctuary of Isis on the island of Philae in the Nile, and built the very Catholic church of Saint Stephen on the ruins, Isis’s pilgrims continued paying homage to their errant goddess at the Christian altar.

  SAD KING

  According to Herodotus, Pharaoh Sesostris III dominated all of Europe and Asia. He rewarded valiant peoples by bestowing on them a penis as their emblem, and humiliated cowardly ones by engraving a vulva on their stellae. As if that weren’t enough, he tread on the bodies of his own children to save himself from the fire set by his brother, who kindly wished to roast him alive.

  All this seems incredible, and it is. But several facts are indisputable: this pharaoh extended the network of irrigation canals and turned deserts into gardens. When he conquered Nubia he enlarged the empire beyond the second cataract of the Nile. The kingdom of Egypt had never been so vigorous or so envied.

  However, the statues of Sesostris III are the only ones to show a somber face, anguished eyes, puckered lips. The other pharaohs immortalized by imperial sculptors watch us serenely from a state of celestial peace.

  Eternal life was a privilege of the pharaohs. Perhaps that privilege could also be a curse.

  ORIGIN OF THE HEN

  Pharaoh Tuthmosis was returning from Syria after completing one of the crushing campaigns that extended his power and glory from the Nile Delta to the Euphrates River.

  As was the custom, the body of the vanquished king hung upside down on the prow of the flagship, and the entire fleet was filled with tributes and offerings.

  Among the gifts was a female bird never before seen, fat and ugly. The giver had delivered the unpresentable present himself: “Yes, yes,” he confessed, eyes on the floor. “This bird is not beautiful. It does not sing. It has a blunt beak, a silly crest, and stupid eyes. And its wings of sad feathers have forgotten how to fly.”

  Then he swallowed. And he added, “But it sires a child a day.” He opened a box where seven eggs lay. “Here are last week’s children.”

  The eggs were submerged in boiling water.

  The pharaoh tasted them, peeled and dressed with a pinch of salt.

  The bird traveled in his chambers, lying by his side.

  HATSHEPUT

  “Her splendor and her form were divine; she was a maiden beautiful and blooming.”

  Thus was the modest self-portrait of Hatsheput, the eldest daughter of Tuthmosis. When the warrior daughter of a warrior came to occupy his throne, she decided to call herself “king” and not “queen.” Queens were the women of kings, but Hatsheput was unique, the daughter of the sun, the greatest of the great.

  This pharaoh with tits used a man’s helmet and mantle, wore a stage-prop beard, and gave Egypt twenty years of prosperity and glory.

  The little nephew she raised, who learned from her the arts of war and good government, wiped out all memory of her. He ordered the usurper of male power erased from the list of pharaohs, her name and image removed from paintings and stellae, and the statues she had erected to her own glory demolished.

  But a few statues and inscriptions escaped the purge, and thanks to that oversight we now know there was once a female pharaoh disguised as a man, a mortal who did not want to die, one who announced: “My falcon rises high above the kingly banner into all eternity.”

  Thirty-four hundred years later, her tomb was found. Empty.

  THE OTHER PYRAMID

  The construction of a pyramid could take more than a century. Brick by brick, day after day, thousands upon thousands of men worked to erect the immense resting place where each pharaoh would spend eternity surrounded by the treasures of his funerary array.

  Egyptian society not only built pyramids, it was one.

  At the base lay the landless peasant. During the flooding of the Nile he built temples, raised dikes, dug canals. And when the waters returned to their channel, he worked the lands of others.

  Four thousand years ago, the scribe Dua-Khety portrayed him:

  The farmer wears his yoke.

  His shoulders sag under the weight.

  On his neck he has a festering sore.

  In the morning, he waters leeks.

  In the evening, he waters coriander.

  At midday, he waters palm trees.

  Sometimes he sinks down and dies.

  No funerary monuments for him. Naked he lived and in death, dirt was his home. He was laid out by the roadside in the desert with the reed mat on which he had slept and the clay jug from which he had drunk.

  In his fist they placed a few grains of wheat, in case he felt like eating.

  GOD OF WAR

  Face on or in profile, one-eyed Odin inspired fear. The divinity of war’s glory, father of massacres, lord of evildoers and the hanged, was the godliest god of the Vikings.

  His two trusted ravens, Hugin and Munin, were his master spies. Every morning they took off from their perch on his shoulders and flew over the world. At dusk they returned to tell him all they had seen and heard.

  The Valkyries, angels of death, also flew for him. They circled battlefields and chose the best soldiers from among the cadavers and recruited them for the army of ghosts Odin commanded on high.

  On earth, Odin offered fabulous booty to the princes he protected, and he armed them with invisible shields and invincible swords. But when he decided he wanted them at his side in heaven he would send them to their deaths.

  Though he had a fleet of a thousand ships and galloped on eight-legged horses, Odin preferred to stay put. This prophet of the wars of our times fought from afar. His magic lance, grandmother of the remote-controlled missile, flew from the sky and found its way straight to the enemy’s breast.

  THEATER OF WAR

  Japan’s Prince Yamato Takeru, born a couple of millennia ago, child number eighty of the emperor, began his career by chopping his twin brother into little pieces for being late to the family supper.

  He then annihilated the rebellious peasants of the island of Kyûshû. Dressed as a woman, coiffed and made up as a woman, he seduced the leaders of the uprising and at a party his sword split them open like melons. Elsewhere he a
ttacked other poor wretches who dared to challenge the imperial order, and by making hamburger of them he pacified the enemy, as was said then, as is said now.

  His most famous exploit put an end to the infamous renown of a bandit who wreaked havoc in the province of Izumo. Prince Yamato offered him pardon and peace, and the troublemaker responded with an invitation to ride with him through his domain. Yamato brought along a wooden sword in a luxurious scabbard, a sheathed sham. At noon, the prince and the bandit cooled off in a river. While the other swam, Yamato switched swords. He slipped the wooden one in the bandit’s scabbard, keeping the bandit’s metal blade for himself.

  At dusk, he challenged him.

  ART OF WAR

  Twenty-five centuries ago, General Sun Tzu of China wrote the first treatise on military tactics and strategy. His sage advice is still heeded today not just on battlefields but in business, where blood tends to flow more freely.

  If you are able, appear unable.

  If you are strong, appear weak.

  When you are near, appear distant.

  Never attack when the enemy is powerful.

  Always avoid battles you cannot win.

  If you are weaker, retreat.