The Windbreak
The priest Thomas Müntzer led the peasant insurrection of 1525 in Germany.
This enemy of princes and of the lords of land and war rallied droves of men who refused to be the property of other men.
Martin Luther cursed his renegade disciple as a fool: “I would not believe in Müntzer, even if he swallowed the Holy Spirit, feathers and all.”
Müntzer responded: “I would not believe in Luther, even if he swallowed a hundred thousand Bibles whole.”
Müntzer’s revolution occupied land, burned castles, confronted both the army and the high priests, but within the year it was over.
The victors killed thousands of rebellious serfs and cut off Müntzer’s head, which they displayed in the central square of the imperial city of Mühlhausen as a lesson to all.
Echoes
In the middle of the seventeenth century, agrarian communities that defied the all-powerful nobility spread across the fields of England and survived.
Centuries have passed and the words spoken and written by one of the communities’ stalwarts, Gerrard Winstanley, still resound:
Thy Father is the Spirit of Community and thy Mother is the Earth.
In the beginning of Time, the great Creator Reason, made the Earth to be a Common Treasury, but not one word was spoken that one branch of mankind should rule over another.
Every man and woman shall have the free liberty to marry whom they love, if they can obtain the love and liking of that party whom they would marry.
If the earth were set free from kingly bondage, many secrets of God and his works in nature would be made public, which men nowadays keep secret to get a living by. But when commonwealth’s freedom is established, then will knowledge cover the earth, as the waters cover the seas.
Was Order Restored?
Workers on general strike in November of the year 1922 committed the crime of occupying the city of Guayaquil without firing a shot. The few days they governed were more peaceful than any before in that part of the world. Those born to obey took the place God had reserved for those born to rule, and that is simply not done. The president of Ecuador called for “order and tranquility, cost what it may.”
The announcement soon came that order had been restored.
Now every November wooden crosses bob in the current of the Guayas River, set afloat to commemorate the workers murdered and thrown into the waters by presidential decree.
Nests United
Maybe mutual aid and community awareness are not human inventions.
Housing cooperatives, for example, might have been inspired by birds.
In southern Africa and elsewhere, birds by the hundreds have always built their nests together, sharing the labor of all for all. They begin by erecting a large straw roof, under which each couple weaves its nest, linked to the rest in a grand apartment block that reaches the highest branches of the trees.
The Other School
Ernesto Lange grew up in the region of San José in the Uruguayan countryside.
As a child, sparrows kept him company. At dusk thousands of them congregated in the trees to bid goodbye to the departing sun, and after night fell they continued singing.
The sparrows were rather ugly, but the music of the choir that gathered without fail to give thanks to the sun for its warmth and light was lovely.
Ernesto’s story made me remember something I saw many years ago in a park in Gijón: there, lone peacocks, the most beautiful of birds, displayed their astonishing fans of colored feathers and howled disconsolately, each in solitude, while darkness grew and the day withered.
The Activist
Laudelina de Campos Mello, granddaughter of slaves, was born in 1904.
From the age of twelve she had to take charge of her five younger brothers.
Her black skin did not help her find employment in the city of São Paulo, but she managed to cook and clean in several private homes, from dawn to dusk, taking her brothers with her.
Granny Nina, as she became known, was twenty when she was elected president of the domestic workers’ union.
From then on she dedicated her life to helping women who, like her, were born already condemned to perpetual servitude.
She died at the age of eighty-six.
At her funeral there were no speeches.
All of her fellow workers were there and they said goodbye with song.
The Seamstress
She sewed the best doublets in the city of La Paz, elegant bulwarks against the cold. In quality and taste, nothing could compare with her creations.
But Simona Manzaneda’s mastery reached far beyond that. This seamstress of delicate hands and soft words plotted against the colonial power. Between the basted layers of her many skirts and amid their many folds, she hid maps, letters, instructions, and messages that helped win freedom for the land now known as Bolivia.
Simona sewed and conspired until someone gave her away.
They cut off her braids and shaved her head. Mounted on a burro, she was paraded naked in the city’s main plaza, and after fifty lashes she was shot in the back.
Not a moan escaped her. She knew her death was no mistake.
The Dangerous Woman
In November of the year 1976 agents of Argentina’s military dictatorship shot up Clara Anahí Mariani’s home and murdered her parents.
She was never heard from again, although her name figures on a list of “subversive delinquents” compiled by the Intelligence Division of the Buenos Aires Provincial Police.
Her record says: “Extremist.”
She was three months old when that record was filed.
Look Who’s Looking
In the days of Al Capone, spying was frowned upon in the United States, since it violated citizens’ freedom and privacy.
Years later, surveillance has become a patriotic duty.
Nearly everyone agrees spying is the proper way to foil the troublemakers who serve the cause of international terrorism by invoking human rights. As in the case of several dubious individuals who happen to be friends of the author of this book.
Admirable Heroes, Unwanted Guests
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the leaders of Chile’s struggle for independence openly admired the indigenous resistance that was the toughest bone the Spanish conquistadors had to chew.
The earliest patriots identified with the Mapuche warriors Caupolicán and Lautaro.
Barely a few years later, the largest newspapers were already applauding the war against the Indians, whom they called “unwanted guests in the Chilean fatherland.”
Now the papers call them “terrorists” for defending lands still being stolen from them.
Leeches
For several centuries leeches were among Europe’s main imports.
Doctors believed the worms cured the ill by sucking their blood.
Common sense finally determined that bloodletting weakens the sick and hastens death.
Even so, modern leeches, made over to look less repulsive, now operate as honorable companies in many fields, and will suck your blood for a fee as they conduct you to the cemetery.
Hallelujah
A midday hour in mid-1972 was witness to a memorable religious ceremony in the city of Quito.
It was a huge story in the papers, on television and radio, and the city’s gossipers spoke of nothing else.
The liturgy reached its culminating moment when the sizable gathering, faces bathed in tears and accompanied by a blaring bugle, sang the national anthem as the honoree slowly ascended to the summit of the Shrine of the Heroes.
There on high, the altar built especially for this grand occasion glowed brightly in the sun.
At its center, wreathed in flowers, lay the honoree: the first barrel of Ecuadorean oil extracted by Texaco.
The crowd, on its knees, paid its devoted respects.
General Guillermo Rodríguez Lara, a dictator with a generous soul, who had made a gift of the
country’s oil to the company, declared: “We are going to plant oil! A new era has begun!”
Not long after, the truth came out. June 26, 1972, marked the beginning of arguably the worst massacre of nature in the history of the Amazon.
The Virgin Mary Privatized
What is not profitable does not deserve to exist, not on earth and not in heaven.
In the year 2002 the Virgin of Guadalupe, mother and symbol of Mexico, was sold not once, but twice.
In March the multinational company Viotran promised to pay $12 million for the rights to the Virgin’s image for five years. The contract, signed by the abbot of the Basilica of Guadalupe with the backing of Cardinal Norberto Rivera, conferred blessings on all the religious articles the company would produce.
Then in July a Chinese businessman named Wu You Lin secured the Virgin’s trademark for a much lower price and for a much longer period.
No one knows who she belongs to anymore.
The Welcome
For a few short days in the year 1982, the Uruguayan city of Fray Bentos was Hollywood.
A crowd, the likes of which had never been seen, cheered the city’s first black limousine carrying an Arab sheikh, Abubaker Bakhashab, trailed by an eye-popping retinue of women dressed for a thousand and one nights.
During his stay in Uruguay, the savior of our flagging economy handed out promises left and right: fabulous investments, jobs galore, top wages, and juicy interest rates for anyone who would like to double his savings in the time it takes to say “amen.”
No one could resist, until the night the sheik and his entire retinue evaporated without a trace.
Not even one of the many rings that weighed down his fingers remained as a souvenir, though he did paper the city with rubber checks.
That fleeting visit turned out to be prophetic: in short order powerful foreign companies turned up with the noble intention of repeating the story.
The Gates of Paradise
In the year 2009, the town of Moatize in Mozambique woke up to find itself the richest source of coal in the world.
Lifelong residents had to abandon their favorite haunts, devoured by companies come from afar to celebrate the discovery.
The mines drank up all the water and turned the town into a branch office of hell.
Farmers are still awaiting the fertile land they were promised.
What they got were fields of stone.
A Visit to Hell
Some years ago, during one of my deaths, I paid a visit to hell.
I had heard that in the underworld you can get your favorite wine and any delicacy you want, lovers for all tastes, dancing music, endless pleasure…
Once again, I was able to corroborate the fact that advertising lies. Hell promises a great life, but all I found were people waiting in line.
In that endless queue, snaking out of sight along narrow smoky passages, were women and men of all epochs, from cavemen to astronauts.
All were condemned to wait. To wait for eternity.
That’s what I discovered: hell is waiting.
My Face, Your Face
According to those in the know, dolphins can recognize themselves in the mirror.
Any dolphin can identify the image he sees.
Our cousins, chimpanzees, orangutans, and gorillas, also peek in the mirror and have no doubt: this is me.
For us, things are more complicated, especially on those unfortunate depressing days only good for bad news or nail soup. When a day like that begins, all we can think is: Who is that guy looking at me? Who the hell’s face am I shaving?
Masks
In West Africa, masks disclose the truth. Faces obscure, while masks reveal.
Depending on your vantage point—direct or in profile, close up or from afar, from above or below—by the magic of their art masks uncover the many in the one, the lives and deaths in every life. For each of us is multiple and masks have not learned how to lie.
This Shoe
Rafael Bieber picked it up: “This shoe, the one you’re looking at, has a story.”
He told me it had belonged to a patient who had trouble breathing.
Sometimes a machine or medication opened his lungs for a time, but then the air would abandon the suffocating man, no matter how much he implored it to come back.
One night in his distress, the fellow threw this shoe at the windowpane. At last, air came into his house and into his body, and he slid into a deep sleep after so many enemy nights.
When he awoke the floor was littered with shards of glass.
But they were not from his window, not from a window at all: they were what remained of the mirror, his mirror, shattered into a thousand pieces by this shoe.
The Doctor
Shennong, the Chinese god of farmers, felt deep compassion for the victims of polluted water and toxic plants. He taught farmers to distinguish drinkable from undrinkable, edible from inedible, and by saving lives he became the divine patron of Chinese medicine.
How would Shennong carry on his charitable work nowadays, when even ducks have asthma, doves suffer allergies, and herons have to spit out the poisoned water of the rivers?
Peace upon the Water
The world’s fairest court, also the oldest in Europe, is not made up of jurists.
The Water Tribunal of Valencia, founded in the year 960, meets every Thursday at noon in the doorway of a cathedral that was once a mosque.
Its sensible rulings do not descend from above or come from afar: the judges, who resolve any conflicting claims on the water from the eight irrigation canals that supply Valencia’s orchards, are local farmers who work their own land.
The canals, like the court, are a legacy of Muslim Spain.
Once upon a Time, There Was a River
The Ganges was born from the seven steps of the god Vishnu, who left his footprints on the stones of the seven regions across India.
The river was the incarnation of Ganga, prettiest of the goddesses, who had her house amid the stars until she took it into her head to come live in this murderous world.
Only a few years ago, pilgrims visited the Ganges to drink the waters of immortality.
Today, that water kills.
Still sacred, but now one of the most polluted rivers on earth, the Ganges sickens whoever drinks from it or eats the food irrigated by its waters.
Once upon a Time, There Was a Sea
It was a lake, and because it was one of the four largest in the world, they called it a sea, the Aral Sea.
Inundated by industrial waste and runoff from chemical fertilizers, abandoned by the rivers engineers diverted, not much of it is left.
Its waters have turned brackish, and brine has sterilized its shores.
A few boats, once for fishing and now ghosts, lie some distance inland.
Occasionally, voices announce the resurrection.
No one believes them.
We’ll Have to Change Planets
God forbid that India should ever take to industrialization after the manner of the West. The economic imperialism of a single tiny island kingdom (Britain) is today keeping the world in chains. If an entire nation of 300 million took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts.
—Mahatma Gandhi, October 1926
A Nation Called Garbage
In 1997 a sailor named Charles Moore discovered a new archipelago made entirely of garbage, nearly three times the size of Spain.
The islands of this immense dump in the North Pacific feed on plastic debris: bottles, bottle caps, wrappers, fragments, and whatever other junk the cities of civilization chuck into the open sea.
In 2013 a campaign was launched to bestow nationhood on the new country, which might as well have its own flag.
Sorcerers’ Apprentices
From the beginning of the millennium, in laboratories worthy of Dr. Frankenstein, experts have been working to save humanity.
They set themselves up in the Cayman
Islands, not to evade taxes as suspicious minds might think, but rather to invent new ways of solving global warming and other scourges.
To cool the earth, they have tried shooting sulfur into the stratosphere, seeding the clouds. To end the plague of bug bites, they have propagated millions of sterile male mosquitoes, genetically modified, who dupe the females with promises of love but can never reproduce.
Autoism
With television proffering auto bodies more erotic than human ones, the deification of wheels has spread like a disease across the globe and our legs have withered from disuse.
At the beginning of this century, an international survey revealed an eloquent fact: asked what crime would hurt the most, most people answered to have their car stolen and not get it back.
A Riddle
A group of friends were invited to a feast on one condition: they would have to eat blindfolded.
After the meal, the cook commanded: “Each mouth shall say what it has eaten.”
Most of them answered, “It tasted like chicken.”
That was the only animal not on the menu, but no one argued. After all, not even chicken tastes like chicken anymore, since everything tastes like everything else and nothing at all. In these days of mandatory uniformity, chickens are mass produced, as are shrimp and fish.