Children of the Days (10 page)

Noel was humming a newborn tune.

On the table stood two bottles. One beer, the other cheap rum.

The friend knew that tuberculosis was killing him. Noel saw the worry in his friend's face and felt obliged to instruct him in the nutritive properties of beer. Pointing to the bottle he declared, “This is better for you than a good meal.”

The friend, not exactly convinced, pointed at the bottle of rum. “What about that?”

And Noel explained, “How good is a good meal if you don't have something with it?”

In 1932 Noel Rosa recorded his samba “Quem dá mais?,” a short history of a country that had been auctioned off:

A couple of years later Enrique Santos Discépolo painted a portrait of Argentina's days of infamy in his tango “Cambalache”:

The stock market crash left journalist Jonathan Tilove without a job.

But in 2009, while cleaning out his office in Washington, he saw the Virgin Mary in a coffee stain on his desk, and his luck changed.

As the crisis deepened and everybody lost faith in economists and politicians and journalists, he wasn't the only one to discover the Virgin in a cheese sandwich or an asparagus plant or a dental X-ray.

In 1954 Vietnamese rebels gave the French army a tremendous beating at their supposedly invulnerable base in Dien Bien Phu. After a century of conquering colonies, glorious France had to exit Vietnam in a hurry.

Then it was the United States' turn. Unbelievable: the greatest power on earth and in space also suffered a humiliating defeat in this tiny, badly armed country populated by the poorest of the poor.

A peasant of slow gait, few words led both of these exploits.

His name was Ho Chi Minh, and they called him Uncle Ho.

Uncle Ho wasn't at all like other revolutionary leaders.

An activist returning from a village once reported that there was no way to organize those people. “They're a bunch of Buddhist yahoos. They spend all day meditating.”

“Go back there and meditate,” Uncle Ho ordered.

This diabolical monster with flared nostrils and bone-crushing teeth is famous the world over.

But the real devil of Tasmania did not come from hell. It was the British Empire that exterminated the population of this island off Australia, and did so in the noble pursuit of civilizing it.

The last victim of the English war of conquest was named Truganini. A queen dispossessed of her queendom, she died on this day in 1876, and with her died the language and memory of her people.

Howard Carter was born on this morning in 1874, and half a century later he understood why he had come into the world.

The revelation came to him when he discovered the tomb of Tutankhamun.

Carter located it through sheer stubbornness, after years of trying everywhere, battling discouragement and the fearmongering of his fellow Egyptologists.

On the day of the great find, he sat at the foot of the shortlived pharaoh, the boy surrounded by a thousand marvels, and spent long hours in silence.

He returned many times.

One of those times he saw what he had not seen before: there were seeds on the floor.

The seeds had spent three thousand two hundred years waiting for the hand that would plant them.

The poet Roque Dalton wielded a defiant wit, he never learned to shut up or take orders, and he laughed and loved fearlessly.

On the eve of this day in the year 1975, his fellow guerrillas in El Salvador shot him dead while he slept.

Criminals: rebels who kill to punish disagreement are no less criminal than generals who kill to perpetuate injustice.

Eugène François Vidocq died in Paris in 1857.

Beginning the moment he held up his father's bakery at the age of fourteen, Eugène was a thief, a clown, a thug, a deserter, a smuggler, a schoolteacher chasing after little girls, the idol of the bordellos, a businessman, a stool pigeon, a spy, a criminologist, a ballistics expert, the director of the Sûreté Générale (the French FBI), and the founder of the very first private detective agency.

Twenty duels he fought. Five times he turned into a nun or a crippled veteran to escape from jail. He was a master of disguises, a criminal playing a policeman, a policeman playing a criminal, and he was the friend of his enemies and the enemy of his friends.

Sherlock Holmes and other notables of European detective literature owe many of their skills to the tricks Vidocq learned from his life of crime, which he later applied to fighting it.

In the year 2008 a terrible earthquake struck China.

The seismograph was invented in China nineteen centuries ago, but no machine warned what was coming.

What raised the alarm were the animals. Scientists paid them no heed, but starting a few days before the catastrophe, hordes of crazed toads took off in every direction, hopping wildly across the streets of Guiyang and other cities, while in the Wuhan zoo tigers roared, peacocks screeched and elephants and zebras threw themselves against the bars of their cages.

So say, so know, the ancient sages born at the source of the Orinoco River.

On this day in 1948 the state of Israel was born.

Within a few months, more than eight hundred thousand Palestinians had been deported and more than five hundred of their villages had been turned to rubble.

Those villages, where olive, fig, almond and other fruit trees grew, now lie buried under highways, shopping malls and amusement parks. They are dead and unnamed on the map rechristened by the Government Names Committee.

Not much of Palestine is left. The two thousand years of persecution suffered by the Jewish people was invoked to justify this implacable gluttony, complete with property titles granted by the Bible.

Persecuting Jews had always been a European sport. Now the Palestinians are paying the bill.

In 2011 thousands of homeless and jobless youth occupied the streets and squares of several Spanish cities.

Their outrage spread. Healthy outrage turned out to be more contagious than disease, and the voices of “the indignant” crossed the borders drawn on maps. Their words echoed around the world:

Groupers and other fish,

dolphins,

swans, flamingos, albatrosses,

penguins,

buffaloes,

ostriches,

koala bears,

orangutans and other monkeys,

butterflies and other insects

and many more of our relatives in the animal kingdom have homosexual relations, female to female, male to male, for an encounter or a lifetime.

Lucky for them they aren't people or they'd be sent to the loony bin.

Until this day in the year 1990, homosexuality featured on the World Health Organization's list of mental illnesses.

The twenty-first century has been walking through time for a few years now, and the number of people without adequate housing has reached one billion.

To solve this problem, experts are looking into the Christian example of Saint Simeon Stylites, who lived for thirty-seven years atop a column.

In the morning Saint Simeon would come down to pray and at night he would tie himself down, so he wouldn't tumble off in his sleep.

In 1781 Túpac Amaru was quartered with an ax in the middle of the Plaza de Armas in Cuzco.

Two centuries later, a tourist asked a barefoot boy who shined shoes in that very spot if he had ever met Túpac Amaru. The little bootblack, without raising his head, said that yes, he knew him. While he continued working, he murmured, practically in secret, “He's the wind.”

Mark Twain proclaimed:

“I came in with Halley's Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year and I expect to go out with it . . . The Almighty has said, no doubt: ‘Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.'”

The comet visited the earth around this time in 1910. Twain, impatient, died a month before.

In 1998 France passed a law that reduced the workweek to thirty-five hours.

Work less, live more: Thomas More dreamed of this in
Utopia
, but we had to wait five centuries before a country finally dared commit such an act of common sense.

After all, what are machines for if not to reduce the time we spend working and to lengthen our hours of freedom? Why does technological progress have to come bearing the gifts of anguish and unemployment?

For once, at least, a country dared to challenge all that nonsense.

Sanity did not last. When the thirty-five-hour week was ten years old, it expired.

In 1906 a pygmy captured in the jungle of the Congo arrived at the Bronx Zoo in New York.

He was named Ota Benga and was exhibited to the public in a cage along with an orangutan and four chimpanzees. The experts explained that this humanoid might represent the missing link, and to confirm their hypothesis they displayed him playing with his hairy brothers.