Children of the Days (20 page)

Yet the little pig was still found guilty. Lacking proof, prosecuting attorney Jean Levoisier, a graduate in law and chief magistrate at the monastery at Saint-Martin de Laon, revealed that the devouring had taken place on Good Friday.

Then the judge passed sentence: capital punishment.

In 1992 the Dominican Republic finished building the most unusual lighthouse in the world, one so tall its beams disturb God's sleep.

The lighthouse was erected in homage to Christopher Columbus, the admiral who pioneered European tourism in the Caribbean.

Before the inaugural ceremony, Columbus's ashes were removed from Santo Domingo's cathedral and transported to a new mausoleum at the foot of the lighthouse.

While the ashes were en route, the president's younger sister Emma Balaguer died suddenly after touring the lighthouse, and the stage on which Pope John Paul II was to give his blessing collapsed.

Some malevolent minds considered this further proof that Columbus brings bad luck.

In 1547 when he felt death tickling his backside, Hernán Cortés instructed that he be buried in Mexico in the convent at Coyoacán, to be built in honor of his memory. When he died, the convent was still a maybe and the deceased was obliged to stay in a series of homes in Seville.

At last he found passage on a ship to Mexico, where he took up residence beside his mother in the church of San Francisco in Texcoco. From there, he moved on to another church to lie beside the last of his children, where he remained until the viceroy ordered him transferred in secret to the Hospital de Jesús out of reach of the Mexican patriots dying to ravage his tomb.

The key to the crypt went from hand to hand, priest to priest, for more than a century and a half, until not long ago forensic specialists confirmed that those awful teeth and syphilis-pocked bones were indeed what remained of the body of the conquistador of Mexico.

Of his soul, no one knows. They say Cortés had it consigned to a soul-keeper from Usumacinta, an Indian named Tomás, who caught souls fleeing on the final breath and kept them in a collection of little jars, but that could never be confirmed.

The scientists who identified Hernán Cortés also confirmed that Francisco Pizarro resides in Lima. His is that pile of bones pierced by stakes and chipped by blows that tourists flock to.

Pizarro, a pig farmer in Spain and a marquis in America, was assassinated in 1541 by his fellow conquistadors when they fought heroically over the Incas' imperial booty.

He was quietly buried in the cathedral's front yard.

Four years later, they let him inside. He found a spot under the main altar until an earthquake hit and he went missing.

He remained missing for a long time.

In 1891 a crowd of admirers gawked at his mummy in a glass urn, though it quickly came out that the mummy was an impostor.

In 1977 workers repairing the cathedral crypt came upon a skull that once upon a time was said to belong to the hero. Seven years later a body came to join the skull, and Pizarro, complete at last, was moved with great pomp and ceremony to one of the cathedral's shining chapels.

Ever since, he has been on exhibit in Lima, the city he founded.

In 1967 seventeen hundred soldiers cornered Che Guevara and his handful of Bolivian guerrillas in a ravine called Quebrada del Yuro. Che was taken prisoner and murdered the following day.

In 1919 Emiliano Zapata was shot down in Mexico.

In 1934 Augusto César Sandino was slain in Nicaragua.

These three were the same age, about to turn forty.

These three Latin Americans of the twentieth century shared the same map and the same era.

And these three were punished for trying to make history instead of repeating it.

In 1967, while Che Guevara was lying in the schoolhouse at La Higuera, murdered by order of Bolivia's generals and their distant commanders, a woman recounted what she had seen. She was one of many, a peasant among the many peasants who entered the school and walked slowly around the body.

“We walked over there and he looked at us. We walked over here and he looked at us. He was always looking at us. He was really nice.”

My Sicilian friends tell me that Don Genco Russo,
capo dei capi
of the Mafia, arrived at the appointment a deliberate two and a half hours late.

In Palermo, in the Hotel Sole, Frank Sinatra waited.

On this midday in 1963, Hollywood's idol paid homage to the monarch of Sicily: Sinatra kneeled before Don Genco and kissed his right hand.

Throughout the world Sinatra was The Voice, but in the land of his ancestors more important than voice was silence.

Garlic, symbol of silence, is one of four sacred foods at the Mafia's table. The others are bread, symbolizing union; salt, emblem of courage; and wine, which is blood.

Alice was born a slave in 1686 and remained a slave throughout her one hundred and sixteen years of life.

When she died in 1802, with her died a good part of the memory of Africans in America. Alice did not know how to read or write, but she was filled to the brim with voices that told and retold legends from far away and events lived nearby. Some of those stories came from the slaves she helped to escape.

At the age of ninety, she went blind.

At one hundred and two, she recovered her sight. “It was God,” she said. “He wouldn't let me down.”

They called her Alice of Dunks Ferry. Serving her master, she collected tolls on the ferry that carried passengers back and forth across the Delaware River.

When the passengers, all white, made fun of this ancient woman, she left them stuck on the other side of the river. They called to her, shouted at her, but she paid no heed. The woman who had been blind was deaf.

In 1492 the natives discovered they were Indians,

they discovered they lived in America,

they discovered they were naked,

they discovered there was sin,

they discovered they owed obedience to a king and a queen from another world and a god from some other heaven,

and this god had invented guilt and clothing

and had ordered burned alive all who worshipped the sun and the moon and the earth and the rain that moistens it.

Good news. On this day in the year 2011 the world's military brass announced that drones could continue killing people.

These pilotless planes, crewed by no one, flown by remote control, are in good health: the virus that attacked them was only a passing bother.

As of now, drones have dropped their rain of bombs on defenseless victims in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Libya, Yemen and Palestine, and their services are expected in other countries.

In the Age of the Almighty Computer, drones are the perfect warriors. They kill without remorse, obey without kidding around, and they never reveal the names of their masters.

In the year 2002, eight McDonald's restaurants closed their doors in Bolivia.

Barely five years had this civilizing mission lasted.

No one forced McDonald's out. Bolivians simply turned their backs, or better put, McDonald's turned their stomachs. The most successful company on the planet had generously graced the country with its presence, and these ingrates refused to acknowledge the gesture.

A distaste for progress dissuaded Bolivia from embracing either junk food or the dizzying pace of contemporary life.

Homemade empanadas derailed development. Bolivians, stubbornly attached to the ancient flavors of the family hearth, continue eating without haste in long, slow ceremonies.

Gone forever is the company that everywhere else makes children happy, fires workers who try to unionize and jacks up the rate of obesity.

In the year 2009 the Mexican government authorized “experimental and limited” planting of genetically modified corn.

A clamor of protest arose from the countryside. Everyone knew the wind would spread this invasion far and wide, turning GMO corn into an unavoidable fate.

Many of the first villages of the Americas had been raised on corn: corn was people, people were corn, and corn, like people, came in all sorts of colors and flavors.

Will the children of corn, those whom corn begat, manage to resist the chemical industry's mad dash to impose its poisonous dictatorship on the world? Or will we end up accepting throughout the Americas this merchandise that calls itself corn but comes in only one color and has no flavor and no memory?

The English jurist John Cooke defended those no one else would and attacked the ones no one else could.

Thanks to him, for the first time in history the divine rights of kings bowed before the law of humans: in 1649, as lead prosecutor, Cooke charged King Charles I and convinced the jury with his well-argued case. The king was convicted of the crime of tyranny and the executioner cut off his head.

A few years later, the lawyer paid for his deed. He was accused of regicide and locked up in the Tower of London. He defended himself saying, “I simply applied the law.”

That mistake cost him his life. Every attorney knows that the law smiles at those above and spits on those below.

Today in 1660 Cooke was hanged, drawn and quartered in the very room where he had challenged royal power.

Today is International Day for the Eradication of Poverty.

Poverty does not explode like bombs or boom like gunfire.

We know everything about poor people: what they don't work at, what they don't eat, how much they don't weigh, how much they don't grow, what they don't think, how often they don't vote, and what they don't believe in.

The only thing left to learn is why poor people are poor.

Could it be because we are clothed by their nakedness and nourished by their hunger?

Today in the year 1929, the law acknowledged for the first time that the women of Canada are persons.

Up to then, women thought they were, but the law disagreed.

The legal definition of persons did not include women, so the Supreme Court had decreed.

Emily Murphy, Nellie McClung, Irene Parlby, Henrietta Edwards and Louise McKinney drank tea and conspired.

And they trounced the Supreme Court.

Two thousand five hundred years ago, at dawn on a day like today, Socrates took a stroll around Piraeus with Glaucon, Plato's older brother.

Glaucon told the story of a shepherd from the kingdom of Lydia who once found a ring, slipped it on his finger and realized that no one could see him. The magic ring made him invisible in the eyes of all others.

Socrates and Glaucon philosophized lengthily on the moral of the story. But neither of the two wondered why women and slaves were invisible in Greece even though they never used magic rings.

In 1843 Linus Yale, inspired by something the Egyptians invented four thousand years before, patented the most invulnerable lock ever made.

Yale went on to secure the doors and gates of nearly every country, and became the greatest defender of property rights in the world.

These days, cities ill with fright are nothing but gigantic locks.

Few hands hold the keys.