Hunter of Stories

  Nothing ever caused him more pain. Andresito, his chosen son, was the bravest of his soldiers and the quietest. A silent Indian, whose actions spoke for him.

  The Charrúas’ Claw

  In the year 1832, the few Charrúa warriors who survived the defeat of Artigas were invited to sign a peace treaty. The president of Uruguay, Fructuoso Rivera, promised them land.

  Once the Indians had eaten well and drunk well, and were sound asleep, soldiers went to work. To save bullets, they killed the Indians with knives, and to save time, they dumped the bodies into a stream called Salsipuedes, which means “get out if you can.”

  Official history calls this deception a “battle.” Today, whenever Uruguayans win a soccer trophy, we celebrate the triumph of “the Charrúas’ claw.”

  Coffee’s Journey

  Captain John Newton sang hymns while piloting his ships across the sea, ships filled to bursting with slaves in chains.

  “How sweet the name of Jesus sounds…”

  Coffee had emerged in Ethiopia, millennia before, born from the black tears of the god Waka.”

  Perhaps the god was crying in advance for the misery coffee, like sugar, would bring to the millions of slaves stolen from Africa and worked to death in the name of other gods on the plantations of the Americas.

  Cafés with History

  At the café Bar El Cairo, located not in Egypt but in the Argentine city of Rosario, cartoonist and writer Roberto Fontanarrosa has a table. He died a few years ago, but you can always find him there, along with his dog Mendieta and his friend Inodoro Pereira.

  The first group of Argentinean artists and writers was founded at the Café Tortoni in Buenos Aires.

  The Brazilian Academy of Letters, presided over by novelist Machado de Assis, met at the Confeitaria Colombo in Rio de Janeiro.

  At the Café Paraventi in the city of São Paulo, Olga Benário and Luiz Carlos Prestes dreamed up the Brazilian revolution.

  During their time in exile, Trotsky and Lenin discussed the Russian revolution at the Café Central in Vienna.

  Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa wrote several of his master works in the Café A Brasileira in Lisbon.

  While the twentieth century was being born, Pablo Picasso held the first exhibit of his works at the Café Els Quatre Gats in Barcelona.

  In 1894, writer Ferenc Molnár threw the keys to Budapest’s New York Café into the waters of the Danube so no one could lock the door.

  In 1898, Émile Zola penned his famous open letter, “J’accuse,” at the Café de la Paix in Paris.

  In 1914, the socialist Jean Jaurès, who had declared war on war, was murdered in the Café du Croissant, also in Paris.

  The epicenter of the 1919 insurrection against British occupation in Cairo was the Café Riche.

  In 1921, the Sunset Cafe opened in Chicago, and there Louis Armstrong and Benny Goodman spread their musical wings.

  Noon Splendor

  There were fish never before seen, plants from no garden, books from impossible bookstores.

  At the fair on Tristán Narvaja Street in Montevideo, there were mountains of fruit and city blocks of fragrant flowers of all hues. Bird musicians and human dancers vied for attention while preachers of heaven and orators of earth screamed words of doom from their soapbox mounts. The former proclaimed the hour of resurrection, the latter the day of insurrection.

  Someone wandering among the stalls offered a hen for sale on a leash like a dog; another was selling a penguin blown off course to our beaches from the snows of the south.

  There were long lines of exhausted shoes, mouths wide open and tongues hanging out. The shoes were sold in pairs and also singly, lone shoes for people with a lone foot. There were used eyeglasses, used keys, used dentures. The dentures sat in an earthen jar filled with water. Each customer reached in, selected one, popped it in and flapped his gums; if the denture did not fit, he returned it to the jar.

  There were clothes for dressing up and clothes for dressing down, medals for athletes and for generals, clocks that kept whatever time you wished. And there were also the friends and lovers you stumbled upon without knowing you were looking for them.

  Memory’s fiesta, coming next Sunday at noon.

  Memory’s Helping Hand

  In Saint Petersburg, when it was still Leningrad, I learned the history of that city’s resurrection.

  Between 1941 and 1944 Hitler’s troops murdered it. Nine hundred days of continuous bombardment and blockade turned the city, once Queen of the Baltic, capital of czarist Russia, and cradle of the Communist revolution, into an immense ruin inhabited by ghosts.

  Twenty years after that tragedy, I saw a city returned to its former self. Brick by brick, day after day, its citizens had built it anew. The plans for reconstruction came from photographs, sketches, old newspaper columns, and testimony from the residents of every neighborhood.

  Memory gave birth to a city reborn.

  Memory Is Not an Endangered Species

  The Mexican farmers organized in the Network for the Defense of Corn respond to queries: “Memory is our primary seed. Since people lost their love for corn, we don’t even know where we’re from.”

  A woman from the south of Veracruz, member of the same network: “Huge quantities of herbicide, insecticide, fertilizer and of course the earth gets sick. With all those chemicals the soil gets addicted.”

  Another: “Varieties are disappearing. Corn is not like it was before, when beans, chilies, tomatoes, and squash grew alongside it.”

  And an elderly farmer, nostalgic for the old flavors of rural life, concluded: “We no longer know how to read the rain, the stars, the delicacy of the air…”

  Seeds of Identity

  In the middle of the year 2011, more than fifty Peruvian organizations came together to defend the 3,250 varieties of the potato. Such diversity, the legacy of 8,000 years of peasant agriculture, faces a mortal threat from an invasion of genetically modified seed that would impose a few standardized varieties on behalf of powerful corporations.

  What a paradox today’s world is. In the name of freedom we are invited to choose between the same and the same, be it on the table or on television.

  Divine Offering

  Tunupa, the god of lightning who calls down the rain, is also a volcano that rules over the altiplano of the Andes.

  At his feet lies an infinite white plain that looks like snow but is actually salt, and on his slopes blossom fields of quinoa.

  “I brought quinoa to console the desperate,” people say the volcano said.

  He gave the tiny grains to the Aymara and Quechua people, who thus survived fierce sun and frost and were rescued from hunger.

  Amnesia

  Nicolae Ceausescu ran Romania’s dictatorship for more than twenty years.

  He faced no opposition because the population was too busy filling the prisons and cemeteries, but everyone enjoyed the right to endlessly applaud the Pharaonic monuments he built with volunteer labor in homage to himself.

  Also exercising the right to applaud were notable politicians, like Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, both his bosom buddies, and the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, which showered money and praise on a Communist dictatorship that obeyed their orders with no questions asked.

  To celebrate his absolute rule, Ceausescu had a scepter carved from marble and gave himself the title “Conductor of the People.”

  As was the custom, no one disagreed.

  But shortly thereafter, a hurricane of popular fury led to his execution in a ceremony of collective exorcism.

  Then, magically, the favorite of the world’s powerful became the bad guy of the picture.

  It tends to happen.

  Monster Wanted

  Saint Columba was rowing across Loch Ness when an immense serpent with a gaping mouth attacked his boat. Saint Columba, who had no desire to be eaten, chased it off by making the sign of the cross.

  Fourteen centuries later, the monster was s
een again by someone living nearby, who happened to have a camera around his neck, and pictures of it and of curious footprints came out in the Glasgow and London papers.

  The creature turned out to be a toy, the footprints made by baby hippopotamus feet, which are sold as ashtrays.

  The revelation did nothing to discourage the tourists.

  The market for fear feeds on the steady demand for monsters.

  Ladies and Gentlemen!

  “Only a few tickets left and they’re going fast! Don’t miss out!”

  The first human zoos were founded in 1874 by German businessman Carl Hagenbeck. They spread nearly everywhere in Europe and were a huge success.

  Not to be left behind, the Argentine Rural Society put on a spectacle of its own sixty-five years later. The ticket-buying public could enjoy a trip to prehistory and ogle a handful of nearly naked Macás Indians kidnapped from the Gran Chaco and displayed in a corral alongside the country’s prize cattle.

  Let’s Go Out

  At the end of the nineteenth century, many residents of Montevideo spent their Sundays on a favorite outing: an excursion to the jail and the insane asylum.

  Contemplating prisoners and lunatics, the visitors felt certifiably free and sane.

  Foreigner

  In a community newspaper in Barcelona’s Raval neighborhood, an anonymous hand wrote:

  Your god is Jewish, your music is African, your car is Japanese, your pizza is Italian, your gas is Algerian, your coffee is Brazilian, your democracy is Greek, your numbers are Arabic, your letters are Latin.

  I am your neighbor. And you call me a foreigner?

  Aesop

  Lilian Thuram, great-grandson of slaves on the island of Guadeloupe, asked his smallest child, “What does God look like?”

  Without hesitation, the boy answered, “God is white.”

  Thuram was a great soccer player, a European and world champion, but that response changed his life.

  He decided to leave the playing field and dedicate his best efforts to restoring black dignity across the world.

  He decried racism in soccer and in education, which, except in the case of slave owners’ descendants, drains children of their past.

  And he delved into collective memory, which opened his eyes to endless discoveries. His work to reveal the hidden was laden with doubt and all but bereft of certainties, but he was not discouraged. Linking disparate studies, he demonstrated that Aesop may have been a black slave in Nubia, and he reminded us that there were black pharaohs in Egypt and hundreds of shrines in the Congo celebrating the Black Virgin, even if the Church said she was not black at all but only looked that way from the smoke of incense and the sins of the unfaithful.

  A Fable from Aesop’s Time

  An old woman found an empty vessel shattered on the ground.

  All that remained of the good Palermo wine was the aroma.

  She sniffed the fragments of fine pottery again and again, with growing pleasure.

  After imbibing many a lungful, she offered this flattery to the vanished wine: “If these are your footprints, how lovely must have been your steps.”

  If Larousse Says So…

  In 1885, Joseph Anténor Firmin, a black Haitian, published in Paris a book of more than six hundred pages entitled On the Equality of Human Races.

  The work had little distribution and evoked no response except silence. In those days, Larousse’s Grand dictionnaire universel had the last word. It helpfully explained: “In the negro species, the brain is less developed than in the white species.”

  And Las Vegas Was Born

  Back in the year 1950-something Las Vegas wasn’t much. Its greatest attraction were the mushroom clouds sent up by the US Army, a spectacle the nearly exclusively white residents could enjoy from their porches. Also attracting audiences that were indeed exclusively white were the great black performers of the day, the stars of song.

  Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, and Nat King Cole were well paid, but had to slip in and out by the service entrance. The day Sammy Davis Jr. jumped into the swimming pool, the hotel manager ordered it drained and refilled.

  Thus it was until 1955, when a millionaire opened what he called “the first interracial casino in the United States.” Joe Louis, the legendary boxer, greeted the customers, by then white and black, and Las Vegas set off on the path to becoming Las Vegas.

  The owners of the village soon to become the most sumptuous paradise of plastic were still racists, but they had made a discovery: racism is not good business. After all, a black man’s dollars are as green as a white man’s.

  Would You Mind Repeating That?

  Nowadays, the global dictatorship of the market gives orders that are rather contradictory: “Tighten your belts and drop your pants.”

  Commandments from on high are not much more consistent, truth be told. In the Bible (Exodus 20:13), God orders: “Thou shalt not kill.”

  And in the following chapter (Exodus 21:12–17), the same God orders us to kill and offers five different reasons for doing so.

  The Golden Throne

  As they tell it on Olympus, Zeus, the god of gods, and his wife Hera got into one of those domestic disputes that will age you a hundred years. Things were going from bad to worse when their son, Hephaestus, turned up uninvited and took his mother’s side.

  Cast out by his father, Hephaestus fell all the way to earth.

  He found refuge in a cave and there he took up metalwork.

  His masterpiece he dedicated to Mom.

  It was a golden throne with but one defect: whoever sat in it would be enchained forever.

  Illuminated Little Dictator

  The man who burned the most books and read the fewest was the owner of the heftiest library in Chile.

  Augusto Pinochet accumulated thousands upon thousands of volumes, thanks to the public monies he converted to funds for his personal use.

  He bought books not to read them, but to have them.

  An inexhaustible supply: it was like adding dollars to his accounts in Riggs Bank.

  His library contained 887 works on Napoleon Bonaparte alone, all luxuriously bound. And sculptures of his favorite hero adorned the shelves.

  Every book featured Pinochet’s personal seal of ownership, his ex libris: a winged figure of Liberty bearing a torch.

  To house the collection, he built the President Augusto Pinochet Ugarte Library at the Chilean Army’s War College.

  Invincible Little Dictator

  Killing was a pleasure and it mattered little if the cadaver was a crow, a duck, or a Republican. But hunting quail was Francisco Franco’s specialty.

  One day in October 1959, the generalissimo killed 4,600 quail, thus breaking his own record.

  Photographers immortalized that glorious day. At the feet of the victor, his spoils covered the earth.

  The Terrorizer

  Back in the years 1975 and 1976, before and after the coup d’état that imposed the most savage of Argentina’s many military dictatorships, death threats flew fast and furious and anyone suspected of the crime of thinking simply disappeared.

  Orlando Rojas, a Paraguayan exile, answered his telephone in Buenos Aires. Every day a voice repeated the same thing: “I’m calling to tell you you’re going to die.”

  “So you aren’t?” Orlando asked.

  The terrorizer would hang up.

  Purgatory

  In July of the year 1936, at the height of his war against the Spanish Republic, Generalísimo Francisco Franco gave an interview to American journalist Jay Allen.

  Franco said the victory of the cross and the sword was imminent: “We will go on at whatever cost.”

  “You will have to shoot half of Spain,” the journalist suggested.

  Franco replied: “I said whatever the cost.”

  The purgers worked hand in glove with confessor priests and soldiers. Spain had to be cleansed of rats, fleas, and Bolsheviks.

  Closed Doors

  In August
of the year 2004, a shopping center caught fire in Asunción, Paraguay.

  Three hundred ninety-six people died.

  The doors were barred so that no one could escape without paying.

  Invisible

  In November of the year 2012, a factory fire burned 110 workers alive in Bangladesh. They labored in sweatshops and had neither rights nor security.

  In April of the following year, another Bangladeshi sweatshop conflagration burned 1,127 workers alive.

  They were invisible, like the slaves in other parts of this globalized world.

  And practically invisible were their wages, a dollar a day.

  In full view, however, are the outrageous prices charged for the clothing their hands produced for Walmart, JCPenney, Sears, Benetton, H&M…

  The First Strike

  It broke out in Egypt, in the Valley of the Kings, on November 14 in the year 1152 BC.

  The protagonists of the first strike in history were the stonecutters, carpenters, masons, and draftsmen building the pyramids, who dropped tools until they received the wages they were due.

  Long ago, Egypt’s workers won the right to strike and also free medical attention for workplace accidents.

  Until recently we knew nothing or nearly nothing about this.

  Perhaps because others might follow their lead.