One day in the year 1998, Yasmin Abdullah came home in tears. All she could say over and over was:
“I’m not a girl anymore.”
She had gone to visit her older sister.
Her brother-in-law had raped her.
Yasmin ended up in the Jweidah prison, where she remained until her father put up the bail and promised to take care of her.
By that time, the father, mother, uncles and aunts, and the entire neighborhood had resolved at an assembly to cleanse the family honor with blood.
Yasmin was sixteen.
Her brother, Sarhan, put four bullets in her head.
Sarhan spent six months in prison. He was treated as a hero. As were the twenty-seven other men imprisoned in similar cases.
One out of every four crimes committed in Jordan is a “crime of honor.”
PHOOLAN
Phoolan Devi had the terrible idea to be born poor and female and a member of one of India’s lowest castes.
In 1974, at the age of eleven, her parents married her to a man from a caste not quite as low, and gave him a cow for a dowry.
Since Phoolan knew nothing of conjugal duties, her husband taught her by torture and rape. And when she fled, he went to the police, and the police tortured and raped her. And when she returned to the village, the ox, her ox, was the only one who did not accuse her of being impure.
And she left. And she met a thief with a long and impressive record. He was the only man who ever asked if she was cold and if she felt all right.
Her thieving lover was shot down in the village of Behmai and she was dragged through the streets and tortured and raped by a number of landowners. And some time later, Phoolan returned to Behmai at night leading a gang of strongmen. She searched for those landowners house-to-house and found twenty-two of them. And she woke them up, one by one, and killed them.
By then Phoolan was eighteen. Along the entire length of the Yamuna River people knew she was the daughter of the goddess Durga, and as beautiful and violent as her mother.
MAP OF THE COLD WAR
A tough guy, a he-man with hair on his chest, is Senator Joseph McCarthy. In the middle of the twentieth century he bangs his fist on the table and bellows that his country is on the verge of being taken over by Communist totalitarianism, like the reigns of terror behind the Iron Curtain, where
freedom is suffocated,
books are banned,
ideas are banned,
people turn others in before they get turned in themselves,
anyone who thinks is a threat to national security,
and anyone who dissents is a spy for the imperialists.
Senator McCarthy sows fear across the United States. And under the sway of fear, which rules by terrifying,
freedom is suffocated,
books are banned,
ideas are banned,
people turn others in before they get turned in themselves,
anyone who thinks is a threat to national security,
and anyone who dissents is a spy for the Communists.
FATHER OF THE COMPUTER
Alan Turing was sneered at for not being a tough guy, a he-man with hair on his chest.
He whined, croaked, stuttered. He used an old necktie for a belt. He rarely slept and went without shaving for days. And he raced from one end of the city to the other all the while concocting complicated mathematical formulas in his mind.
Working for British intelligence, he helped shorten the Second World War by inventing a machine that cracked the impenetrable military codes used by Germany’s high command.
At that point he had already dreamed up a prototype for an electronic computer and had laid out the theoretical foundations of today’s information systems. Later on, he led the team that built the first computer to operate with integrated programs. He played interminable chess games with it and asked it questions that drove it nuts. He insisted that it write him love letters. The machine responded by emitting messages that were rather incoherent.
But it was flesh-and-blood Manchester police who arrested him in 1952 for gross indecency.
At the trial, Turing pled guilty to being a homosexual.
To stay out of jail, he agreed to undergo medical treatment to cure him of the affliction. The bombardment of drugs left him impotent. He grew breasts. He stayed indoors, no longer went to the university. He heard whispers, felt stares drilling into his back.
He had the habit of eating an apple before going to bed.
One night, he injected the apple with cyanide.
MOTHER AND FATHER OF CIVIL RIGHTS
Rosa Parks, a black passenger on a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama, refused to give up her seat for a white passenger.
The driver called the police.
The officers arrived, said, “The law is the law,” and arrested Rosa for disturbing the peace.
Then a little-known pastor named Martin Luther King launched a bus boycott from his church. He put it this way:
Cowardice asks the question:
“Is it safe?”
Expediency asks the question:
“Is it politic?”
Vanity asks the question:
“Is it popular?”
But Conscience asks the question:
“Is it right?”
And he too went to jail.
The boycott lasted more than a year and unleashed an unstoppable tide of protest against racial discrimination from coast to coast.
In 1968, in the southern city of Memphis, a bullet tore into Reverend King’s face after he had criticized the military machine for feeding on Negro flesh in Vietnam.
According to the FBI, he was a dangerous sort.
Like Rosa and the many other lungs behind the wind.
SOCCER CIVIL RIGHTS
The grass was getting long in the empty stadiums.
Strikers on strike, and defenders too: Uruguay’s soccer players, slaves of their teams, were simply demanding acknowledgment of their union and its right to exist. Their cause was so scandalously just that people supported them, even as time wore on and each soccerless Sunday became an insufferable yawn.
The owners would not yield, and just sat on their hands and waited for hunger to exact surrender. But the players held firm, their spirits boosted by the example of a proud man of few words, Obdulio Varela, a black, all-but-illiterate soccer player and bricklayer. He lifted up the fallen and urged on the weary.
And that was how, at the end of seven long months, Uruguay’s players won the strike of crossed legs.
A year later, in 1950, they also won the World Cup.
Brazil, playing at home in Maracanã Stadium, was the indisputable favorite. It had just trounced Spain 6-1 and Sweden 7-1. Fate’s verdict named Uruguay as the last lamb to be sacrificed on its altar in the final. And so it was shaping up, Uruguay losing and two hundred thousand fans roaring in the stands, when Obdulio, playing with a swollen ankle, gritted his teeth. Then the captain of the strike became captain of an impossible victory.
MARACANÃ
The moribund held off their death and babies hurried up their birth.
Rio de Janeiro, July 16, 1950, Maracanã Stadium.
The night before, no one could fall asleep.
The morning after, no one wanted to wake up.
PELÉ
Two British teams were battling out the championship match. The final whistle was not far off and they were still tied, when one player collided with another and fell, out cold.
A stretcher carried him off and the entire medical team went to work, but the man did not come to.
Minutes passed, centuries passed, and the coach was swallowing the clock, hands and all. He had already used up his substitutions. His boys, ten against eleven, were defending as best they could, which was not much.
The coach could see defeat coming, when suddenly the team doctor ran up and cried ecstatically:
“We did it! He’s coming around!”
And in a low vo
ice, added:
“But he doesn’t know who he is.”
The coach went over to the player, who was babbling incoherently as he tried to get to his feet, and in his ear informed him:
“You are Pelé.”
They won five-nil.
Years ago in London, I heard this lie that told the truth.
MARADONA
Never before had a star soccer player openly criticized the lords of the industry. But the most famous and popular athlete of all time took to the ramparts to defend players who were neither famous nor popular.
This generous and caring idol managed to score, in the space of five minutes, the two most contradictory goals in the entire history of soccer. His devoted fans venerated him for both: for the goal of the artist, embroidered by his legs’ devilish tricks, and perhaps even more for the goal of the thief, pickpocketed by his hand.
They adored Diego Armando Maradona for his prodigious acrobatics and because he was a dirty god, a sinner, the most human of the deities. Anyone could see in him a walking synthesis of human, or at least masculine, weaknesses: he was a womanizer, a glutton, a drunk, a hustler, a liar, a braggart, and utterly irresponsible.
But gods, no matter how human, do not retire.
He could never return to the anonymous crowd from whence he came.
Fame, which saved him from poverty, held him like a prisoner.
Maradona was condemned to believing he was Maradona, obliged to be the hub of every party, the baby at every christening, the deceased at every wake.
Neither urine analysis nor blood tests can detect the drug of success, but it is far more devastating than cocaine.
PHOTOGRAPH: THE SCORPION
London, Wembley Stadium, fall of 1995.
The Colombian soccer team is challenging venerable old England in its holiest house of worship, and goalkeeper René Higuita makes an incomparable save.
His body flying horizontal, the keeper lets a deadly blast from an English striker sail past and then sends it back with his heels, flexing his legs the way a scorpion flips its tail.
It is worth looking closely at this piece of Colombian I.D. Its revelatory power resides not in the athletic prowess, but in the grin splitting Higuita’s face from ear to ear while he commits his unforgivable sacrilege.
BRECHT
Bertolt Brecht loved unmasking reality.
In 1953, raucous protests broke out across Communist Germany. Workers took to the streets and Soviet tanks moved quickly to shut their mouths. The official press then published a letter from Brecht in support of the ruling party. The letter, chopped up and switched around, did not say what he had written. But Brecht managed to slip past the censors with a poem spread via the underground:
After the uprising of June 17
the Secretariat of the Writers’ Union
handed out a few leaflets on Stalin Avenue
in which one could read that the people
had lost the government’s trust
and that only with great effort
could they recover it.
Would it not be easier
for the government to dissolve the people
and elect another?
A HUNDRED FLOWERS AND ONLY ONE GARDENER
In China, during Mao’s final years, anyone who dared to show what reality was and not what the Party ordered it to be committed an act of treason.
But in other times, Mao was not the person he ended up being. In his early twenties, he proposed a melding of Lao Tse and Karl Marx, and he dared to formulate it like this: “Imagination is thought, the present is the past and the future, the past and the future are the present, small is big, male is female, the many are one, and change is permanence.”
At that point, there were sixty Communists in all China.
Forty years later, the revolution took power with Mao at the helm. Women no longer had to hobble along on bound feet as commanded by appalling tradition, nor were there parks with signs warning:
CHINESE AND DOGS NOT ALLOWED.
The revolution changed the lives of one-fourth of humanity and Mao did not hide his differences with the practices bequeathed by Stalin, for whom contradictions were not proof of life or winds of history, but bothers that existed only to be crushed.
Mao said:
“Discipline that stifles creativity and initiative should be abolished.” And he said:
“Fear is no solution. The more afraid you are, the more ghosts will come to visit you.”
And he put forth the slogan:
“Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend.”
But the flowers did not last.
In 1957, the Great Helmsman launched the Great Leap Forward and announced that the Chinese economy would soon humble the richest economies in the world. From then on, difference and doubt were forbidden. Belief was obligatory in the lying numbers that bureaucrats churned out to keep their jobs.
Mao listened only to the echoes of his own voice telling him what he wished to hear. The Great Leap Forward leapt into the abyss.
RED EMPEROR
I was in China three years after the failure of the Great Leap Forward. No one talked about it. It was a state secret.
I saw Mao paying homage to Mao. In Tiananmen Square, the Gate of Heavenly Peace, Mao presided over an immense parade led by an immense statue of Mao. The plaster Mao held his hand high, and the flesh-and-blood Mao answered the greeting. From an ocean of flowers and colored balloons, the crowd cheered both.
Mao was China and China was his shrine. Mao exhorted all to follow the example set by Lei Feng and Lei Feng exhorted all to follow the example set by Mao. Lei Feng, a young Communist apostle of dubious existence, spent his days consoling the sick, helping widows, and giving his food away to orphans. His nights he spent reading the complete works of Mao. When he slept, he dreamed of Mao, his guide for every step. Lei Feng had no girlfriend or boyfriend because he did not waste time on frivolities, and it never occurred to him that life could be contradictory or reality diverse.
YELLOW EMPEROR
Pu Yi was three years old in 1908 when he first sat on the throne reserved for the Sons of Heaven. The minuscule emperor was the only person in China allowed to wear yellow. The great crown of pearls slipped over his eyes, but there was not much to look at anyway. Swimming inside tunics of silk and gold, he was bored with the immensity of the Forbidden City, his palace, his prison, forever surrounded by a throng of eunuchs.
The monarchy fell and Pu Yi became Henry, christened by the English. Later on, the Japanese sat him on the throne of Manchuria, and he had three hundred courtiers who ate the leftovers from his ninety dishes.
Tortoises and cranes symbolize eternal life in China. Though Pu Yi was neither a tortoise nor a crane, he managed to keep his head on his shoulders, something quite uncommon in his line of work.
In 1949, when Mao took power, Pu Yi crowned his career by converting to Marxism-Leninism.
At the end of 1963, when I interviewed him in Beijing, he was dressed like everyone else, blue uniform buttoned to the collar, his worn shirt cuffs protruding from the sleeves of his coat. He made his living by pruning plants in the Beijing Botanical Garden.
He was surprised that anyone would be interested in talking to him. He recited his mea culpa, “I am a traitor, I am a traitor,” and in an unwavering monotone he repeated slogans for a couple of hours.
Every so often, I was able to interrupt him. Of his aunt, the empress, the phoenix, all he recalled was her deathlike face, which so frightened him he cried. She gave him a candy and he threw it on the floor. The women in his life he met via photographs that the mandarins or the English or the Japanese gave him to choose from. Until at last, thanks to President Mao, he had been able to marry the woman he truly loved.
“Who is she, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“A worker, a hospital nurse. We got married on May 1st.”
I asked him if he was a member of the Communist Party.
No, he was not.
I asked him if he would like to be.
The interpreter was named Wang, not Freud, and he must have been exhausted, because he translated:
“For me, that would be a tremendous horror.”
FORBIDDEN TO BE INDEPENDENT
In the middle of 1960, the Congo, until then a Belgian colony, celebrated its independence.
Speech followed speech, and the audience was melting from heat and boredom. Belgium, a strict teacher, warned of the dangers of freedom. The Congo, grateful pupil, promised to behave.
Then Patrice Lumumba’s speech exploded and ruined the party. He spoke out against the “empire of silence,” and through him the silenced found a voice. He paid homage to the fathers of independence, the murdered, the imprisoned, the tortured, and the exiled, who throughout so many years had fought “to bring to an end the humiliating slavery imposed on us by force.”
His words, received in icy silence by the Europeans present, were interrupted eight times by ovations from the Africans in the audience.
That speech sealed his fate.
Lumumba, recently released from prison, had won the first free elections in the Congo’s history, and headed up its first government. But the Belgian press called him a “delirious and illiterate thief.” In Belgian intelligence cables, Lumumba was dubbed Satan. The director of the CIA, Allen Dulles, sent instructions to his agents:
“The removal of Lumumba must be an urgent objective.”