Mirrors

If your enemies are united, divide them.

  Advance when they are unprepared

  and attack where they least expect it.

  To know your enemy, know yourself.

  HORROR OF WAR

  On the back of a blue ox rode Lao Tse.

  He was traveling the paths of contradiction, which led to the secret place where water and fire fuse.

  In contradiction all meets nil, life meets death, near meets far, before meets after.

  Lao Tse, village philosopher, believed that the richer a nation is, the poorer it becomes. He believed that knowing war teaches peace, because suffering inhabits glory:

  Every action provokes reactions.

  Violence always returns.

  Only thistles and thorns grow where armies encamp.

  War summons hunger.

  He who delights in conquest, delights in human pain.

  Every victory should be celebrated with a funeral.

  YELLOW

  The most fearful river in China is called Yellow, thanks either to a dragon’s recklessness or to human folly.

  Before China was China, the dragon Kau Fu tried to cross the sky mounted on one of the ten suns.

  By noon he could no longer bear the heat.

  Set ablaze by the sun, crazed by thirst, the dragon dropped into the first river he saw. From the heights he plummeted to the depths and drank the water down to the last drop, leaving nothing but a long bed of yellow clay where the river had been.

  Some say this version is not scientific. They say it is a historical fact that the Yellow River has been called as such for about two thousand years, since the forests on its banks were felled and could no longer afford protection from avalanches of snow, mud, and garbage. Then the river, formerly jade green, lost its color and gained its name. With the passing of time, things got worse until the river became one huge sewer. In 1980, four hundred river dolphins lived there. In 2004, only one was left. It didn’t last long.

  YI AND THE DROUGHT

  All ten suns had gone haywire and were spinning about the sky.

  The gods summoned Yi, the unbeatable bowman, master of masters in the art of the arrow.

  “The earth is roasting,” they told him. “People are dying, and animals and plants are dying too.”

  As night came to an end, Yi the archer lay in wait. At dawn he let fly.

  One after another the suns were snuffed out.

  Only the sun that now lights our days survived.

  The gods mourned the deaths of their glowing sons. And though the gods themselves had called on Yi, they expelled him from heaven.

  “If you love the earthlings so, go live with them.”

  Forced into exile, Yi became mortal.

  YU AND THE FLOOD

  After drought came flood.

  The rocks groaned, the trees howled. The Yellow River, nameless still, swallowed people and crops, drowned valleys and mountains.

  Yu, the lame god, came to rescue the world.

  Hobbling along, Yu ventured into the flood and with his shovel opened canals and tunnels to drain the furious waters.

  Yu was assisted by a fish that knew the river’s secrets, by a dragon that went first and deflected the current with his tail, and by a tortoise that went last and carried away all the mud.

  ORIGIN OF THE CHINESE BOOK

  Cang Jie had four eyes.

  He earned his living reading stars and telling fortunes.

  After much study of the design of constellations, the profile of mountains, and the plumage of birds, he created the symbols that spell words.

  In one of the oldest of books, made of bamboo tablets, the ideograms invented by Cang Jie tell the story of a kingdom where men lived longer than eight centuries and women were the color of light because they ate sunshine.

  The Lord of Fire, who ate stones, challenged royal authority and sent his troops to march on the throne. His magic powers wrapped the palace in a dense curtain of fog, leaving the king’s guard dumbstruck. Soldiers teetered in the darkness, blind, aimless, when the Black Woman with bird feathers flew down from the heights, invented the compass, and presented it to the desperate king.

  The fog was defeated, and the enemy too.

  FAMILY PORTRAIT IN CHINA

  In ancient times, Shun, Lord Hibiscus, reigned over China. Hou Ji, Lord Millet, was his minister of agriculture.

  The two had faced a number of difficulties in childhood.

  Right from birth, Shun’s father and his older brother detested him. They set fire to the house when he was a baby, but he was not even singed. So they put him in a hole in the ground and threw in enough dirt to bury him completely, but he was not bothered in the least.

  His minister, Hou Ji, also managed to survive his family’s tenderness. His mother, convinced that the newborn would give her bad luck, abandoned him in the countryside, hoping that hunger would kill him. And when it did not, she ditched him in the woods for the tigers to eat. When the tigers paid no heed, she tossed him into a snowdrift so the cold would put an end to him. A few days later she found him in good humor and slightly overheated.

  SILK THAT WAS SPITTLE

  Queen Lei Zu, wife of Huang Di, founded the Chinese art of silk making.

  As memory’s storytellers would have it, Lei Zu reared the first worm. She gave it white mulberry leaves to eat, and soon threads of the worm’s spittle were weaving a cocoon around its body. Bit by tiny bit, Lei Zu’s delicate fingers unraveled that mile-long thread. Thus the cocoon that was to become a butterfly became silk instead.

  And silk became transparent gauze, muslin, tulle, and taffeta. It dressed ladies and lords in plush velvets and sumptuous brocades embroidered with pearls.

  Outside the kingdom, silk was a forbidden luxury. Its trade routes passed over snow-capped mountains, fiery deserts, and seas populated by mermaids and pirates.

  FLIGHT OF THE CHINESE WORM

  Much later on, scores of fearsome enemies no longer lay in wait along the silk routes. Yet those who attempted to take mulberry seeds or the eggs of the thread-making worm out of China still lost their heads.

  In the year 420, Xuan Zang, the king of Yutian, asked for the hand of a Chinese princess. He had spied her just once, but from then on he saw her wherever he looked.

  The princess, Lu Shi was her name, was given to him.

  An ambassador traveled on the king’s behalf to retrieve her.

  There was an exchange of gifts and interminable banquets and ceremonies.

  At one point, when they could be alone, the ambassador warned the princess of the worries that beset the husband who awaited her. Yutian had always used jade to pay for China’s silk, but little jade remained in the kingdom.

  Lu Shi said nothing, and nothing was revealed by her full-moon face.

  And they set off. The caravan accompanying her, thousands of camels, thousands of tinkling bells, crossed the vast desert and reached the border at Yumenguan Pass.

  The inspection lasted several days. Not even the princess herself was spared a search.

  At last, the nuptial cortege arrived at its destination.

  Lu Shi had traveled without saying a word, without so much as a gesture.

  She ordered them all to stop at a monastery. There she was bathed and perfumed. To the strains of music she ate, and in silence she slept.

  When her king arrived, Lu Shi gave him the mulberry seeds she had hidden in her medicine chest. She then introduced him to three maids from among her servants, who were neither maids nor servants, but experts in the arts of silk making. Then she removed from her head the great headdress made of cinnamon-tree leaves, and parted her long black hair. There lay the eggs of the silkworm.

  From China’s point of view, Lu Shi was a traitor to her country of birth.

  From Yutian’s point of view, she was a heroine of the country she ruled.

  THE EMPEROR WHO DEDICATED HIS LIFE TO BUILDING HIS DEATH

  China comes from Chin, Chin Shi Huang, its first emperor.
br />   Through blood and fire, he transformed a collection of warring fiefdoms into a nation. He imposed a common language and a common system of weights and measures, and he created a single currency of bronze coins with a hole in the center. To protect his domain he raised the Great Wall, an endless crest of stone that crossed the map and is still, twenty-two hundred years later, the most visited defensive barricade in the world.

  But he never lost sleep over such minutiae. The project of his life was his death: his sepulchre, his palace for the afterlife.

  Construction began the day he first sat on the throne at the age of thirteen, and year by year the mausoleum grew until it was larger than a city. The army that was to guard it also grew, to more than seven thousand horsemen and infantrymen, their uniforms the color of blood and their armor black. Those clay warriors, modeled by the very best sculptors, were born exempt from aging and incapable of treason. Today, they astonish the world.

  The funerary monument was the task of prisoners, who were worked to death and thrown to the desert. The emperor directed even the smallest details and he urged them to work faster and faster. Several times his enemies had tried to kill him. He traveled in disguise and every night he slept in a different house. He was terrified of dying without the great grave he deserved.

  The day arrived when the colossal undertaking was finished. The army was complete, the gigantic mausoleum too, and it was a masterpiece. Any change would have insulted its perfection.

  Then, when the emperor was about to complete half a century of living, death came for him and he let himself go.

  The great theater was ready, the curtain rose, the performance was about to begin. He could not possibly fail to show up. It was an opera composed for solo voice.

  FOOT MURDERERS

  A couple of centuries ago, Li Ju-chen invented an upside-down China. His novel, The Flowers in the Mirror, took place in a country of women, where women ruled.

  In the story, she was he, and he, she. The men, sentenced to pleasing women, were obliged to perform a great variety of services. Among other humiliations, they had to accept having their feet atrophied.

  No one took seriously that flight of fancy. And things continued as before, with men binding female feet until they turned into something like the hooves of goats.

  For over a thousand years, until well into the twentieth century, the canons of beauty would not allow a girl’s foot to grow. The first version of Cinderella, written in ninth-century China, gave literary form to the male fetish for the diminutive female foot, and at the same time, give or take a year, the custom of binding daughters’ feet from infancy took root.

  It was about more than aesthetic ideals. Bound feet also bind: they were shields of virtue. By preventing women from walking freely, they foiled any indecent escapades that might have put the family honor at risk.

  WORD SMUGGLERS

  Yang Huanyi, whose feet were crippled in infancy, stumbled through life until the autumn of the year 2004, when she died just shy of her hundredth birthday.

  She was the last to know Nushu, the secret language of Chinese women.

  This female code dated from ancient times. Barred from male language, which they could not write, women founded a clandestine one, out of men’s reach. Fated to be illiterate, they invented an alphabet of symbols that masqueraded as decorations and was indecipherable to the eyes of their masters.

  Women sketched their words on garments and fans. The hands that embroidered were not free. The symbols were.

  MALE PANIC

  In the most ancient of nights, they lay together for the very first time, woman and man. Then he heard a threatening rumble in her body, a gnashing of teeth between her legs, and fear cut short their embrace.

  Anywhere in the world, even the most macho of machos still trembles when he recalls, without knowing what he recalls, that fear of being devoured. And he wonders, without knowing what he wonders, could woman be an entrance with no exit? Could it be that he who enters her, in her will remain?

  A DANGEROUS WEAPON

  In more than thirty countries, tradition insists the clitoris be severed.

  That slash confirms the husband’s right of property over his woman or his women.

  The mutilators call this crime against female pleasure “purification,” and they explain that the clitoris

  is a poison dart

  is a scorpion’s tail

  is a termites’ nest

  kills men or makes them ill

  excites women

  poisons their milk

  and makes them insatiable

  and crazy as can be.

  To justify mutilation, they cite the Prophet Mohammed, who never spoke of this matter, and the Koran, which does not mention it either.

  NINE MOONS

  Gútapa spent his life drowsing in a hammock, while his wife, who had not even a name, scratched his head, waved away mosquitoes, and fed him with a spoon. Once in a while, he would get up and give her a good beating, to keep her in line and himself in shape.

  When the woman fled, Gútapa went looking for her in the deep gorges of the Amazon, pounding a club on every possible hiding place. With all his heart and soul, he struck a mighty blow in one spot, unaware that therein lay a wasps’ nest.

  The wasps, a furious whirlwind, stung him a thousand times on the knee.

  The knee swelled up and kept on swelling, moon after moon, until it was the size of a huge balloon. Inside, many tiny men and women began to take form and move about, weaving baskets, stringing necklaces, and carving arrows and blowguns.

  Under the ninth moon, Gútapa gave birth. From his knee were born the first Tikunas, welcomed with great huzzahs by the blue-winged, red-lored, and grape-eating parrots, and other commentators.

  VICTORIOUS SUN, MOON VANQUISHED

  The moon lost her first battle against the sun when he spread word that it wasn’t the wind who was impregnating women.

  Then history brought more sad news:

  the division of labor assigned nearly all tasks to the females so that

  we males could dedicate ourselves to mutual extermination,

  the right to property and the right to inheritance allowed women

  to be owners of nothing,

  the organization of the family enclosed them in the cage of father,

  husband, and son,

  and along came the state, which was like the family, only bigger.

  The moon shared in her daughters’ downfall.

  Left far behind were the times when the Egyptian moon would devour the sun at dusk and sire him at dawn,

  when the Irish moon kept the sun in line by threatening him with perpetual night,

  and when the kings of Greece and Crete would dress up as queens with taffeta tits, and in sacred ceremonies unfurl the moon as their standard.

  In the Yucatan, moon and sun lived in matrimony. When they fought, it caused an eclipse. The moon was lady of the seas and the springs, and goddess of the earth. With the passing of time, she lost her powers. Now she only reigns over births and illnesses.

  On the coasts of Peru, we can date her humiliation. Shortly before the Spanish invasion, in the year 1463, the moon of the Chimú kingdom, the most powerful of moons, surrendered to the army of the Incan sun.

  MEXICANS

  Tlazoltéotl, Mexico’s moon, goddess of the Huasteca night, managed to elbow her way into the macho pantheon of the Aztecs.

  She was the most mothering of mothers, who protected women in labor and their midwives, and guided seeds on their voyage to becoming plants. Goddess of love and also of garbage, condemned to eat shit, she embodied fertility and lust.

  Like Eve, like Pandora, Tlazoltéotl bore the guilt for men’s perdition. Women born in her times lived condemned to seek pleasure.

  And when the earth trembled, in soft vibrations or devastating earthquakes, no one doubted: “It is she.”

  EGYPTIANS

  Herodotus the Greek proved that the river and the sky o
f Egypt were unlike any other river or any other sky, and the same was true of its customs. Funny people, the Egyptians: they kneaded dough with their feet, and clay with their hands, and they mummified their dead cats and kept them in sacred chests.

  But most remarkable was the place women held among men. Whether nobles or plebeians, they married freely without surrendering their names or their possessions. Education, property, work, and inheritance were theirs by right, not only for men, and women were the ones who shopped in the market while men stayed home weaving. According to Herodotus, who was not entirely trustworthy, women peed standing up and men on their knees.

  HEBREWS

  According to the Old Testament, the daughters of Eve were to suffer divine punishment forever.

  Stoning could be the fate of adulteresses and witches and brides who were not virgins,

  to the stake marched the daughters of priests who became prostitutes,

  and off with the hand of any woman who grabbed a man by the balls, even in self-defense or in defense of her husband.

  For forty days a woman giving birth to a son remained impure. Eighty days of filth if the child was a girl. Impure was the menstruating woman for seven days and nights, and her impurity infected all who touched her or touched the chair on which she sat or the bed in which she slept.