Mirrors (35 page)

The
ananas,
or
abacaxi,
which the Spaniards called
piña
and the English
pineapple,
had better luck.

Although it came from America, this exquisite delight was cultivated in the greenhouses of the kings of England and France, and was celebrated by every mouth that had the privilege of tasting it.

And centuries later, when machines hacked off its headdress and stripped it nude and gouged out its eyes and heart and sliced and canned it at a hundred fruits a minute, in Brazil architect Oscar Niemeyer offered it the homage it deserved: the
ananas
became a cathedral.

DON QUIJOTE

Marco Polo dictated his book of marvels in the Genoa jail.

Exactly three centuries later, Miguel de Cervantes sired
Don Quijote de La Mancha
in the Seville jail, where he had been imprisoned for unpaid debts. And it was another flight of freedom launched from behind bars.

Stuffed into his tin-can armor, atop his skeletal mount, Don Quijote seemed fated for eternal ridicule. A madman who believed he was a character out of a chivalric novel and that chivalric novels were history books.

But we readers who for centuries laughed at him also laughed with him. A broom is a horse for a playful child, and while we read we share in his harebrained misadventures and make them our own. So much our own that the antihero becomes a hero, and we even attribute to him things he never said. “They bark, Sancho, the signal for us to ride,” is the quotation most often cited by Spanish-speaking politicians. Only Don Quijote never said it.

The sad-faced knight had spent over three and a half centuries stumbling along the roads of the world when Che Guevara wrote his last letter to his parents. To say goodbye the revolutionary did not choose a quote from Marx. He wrote: “Once again beneath my heels I feel Rocinante’s ribs. I take to the road again with my shield held high.”

The sailor sails on, though he knows he will never touch the stars that guide him.

LABOR RELATIONS

Rocinante, Don Quijote’s stallion, was nothing but skin and bones.

“Metaphysical you are.”

“Because I don’t eat.”

Rocinante merely ruminated on his complaints, but Sancho Panza railed against the exploitation of the squire by the knight. He complained about the pay he received for his labor, nothing but blows, hunger, bad weather, and promises, and he demanded a decent wage in cold, hard cash.

Don Quijote found such expressions of crass materialism despicable. Invoking his fellows of the errant knighthood, the noble gentleman concluded:

“Squires never ever worked for wages, rather for the good will of their masters.”

And he promised Sancho Panza he would be made governor of the first kingdom his master conquered, and he would receive the title of count or marquis.

But the plebeian wanted a steady job with a regular paycheck.

Four centuries have passed. We’re no farther along.

HEMOPHOBIA

Beginning in the fifteenth century, and for the longest time, Spain required proof of clean blood.

“Clean” meant pure Christian blood, by lineage inherited or purchased. Those who were Jews, Moors, heretics, or descendants of Jews, Moors, or heretics up to the seventh generation, could not hold public office, be it civil, military, or ecclesiastical.

From the sixteenth century on, clean blood was a prerequisite for travel to America. It seems that was the reason why Cervantes could not take off for the New World. Twice, he was rejected: “Look here for what may please you,” was the terse official response.

Some Jewish blood cell was suspected of navigating the veins of the father of Don Quijote. Dishonorable races were given to literature.

DEATH BY DOCTOR

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the French bought more than thirty million leeches a year.

For many centuries, doctors had been bleeding patients by leech or by cuts to free the body of bad blood. Bleeding was the preferred remedy for pneumonia, depression, rheumatism, apoplexy, broken bones, nervous exhaustion, and headaches.

Bleeding debilitated the sick. No evidence that it worked was ever recorded, but science continued using it as a cure-all for twenty-five hundred years, until well into the twentieth century.

That infallible remedy caused more devastation than all the plagues combined.

MOLIÈRE

As if the bite of the plague were not bad enough, fear of disease became a new disease.

In England, doctors looked after patients who believed they were fragile clay figurines, and who stayed away from people for fear they would bump into them and shatter. In France, Molière dedicated the last of the plays he wrote, directed, and acted in to the imaginary invalid.

Mocking his own obsessions, Molière poked fun at himself. He played the lead role: buried in the pillows of his easy chair, wrapped in furs, cap pulled down over his ears, he underwent continual bleedings, purges, and cleanses, prescribed by doctors who diagnosed bradyspepsia, dyspepsia, apepsia, lientery, dysentery, hydropsy, hypochondria, hypocrisy . . .

One afternoon, not long into a successful run, the entire cast pleaded with him to cancel the performance. Molière was very ill, truly ill and not only with a fevered imagination. He coughed more than he breathed and could barely speak or walk.

Cancel the performance? He never bothered to answer. His fellow actors were asking him to betray the kingdom where he had lived ever since that fine day when he was reborn as Molière, for the pleasure of all good people.

And that night, the imaginary invalid made the full house laugh as never before. Comedy, written and acted by Molière, took him out of his suffering and his fear of death, and he pulled off the greatest performance of his life. He coughed hard enough to break a rib, but forgot not a word of his long monologues, and when he vomited blood and fell to the floor the audience believed, or knew, that death was part of the play, and they gave him a standing ovation as the curtain fell with him.

ORIGIN OF ANESTHESIA

The carnival of Venice lasted four months, except when it lasted longer.

From everywhere came acrobats, musicians, thespians, puppeteers, prostitutes, magicians, fortune-tellers, and vendors offering love potions, good-luck tonics, and elixirs for a long life.

And from everywhere came the tooth pullers and the aching mouths that Saint Apollonius had been unable to cure. In agony, the latter approached the gates of Saint Mark, where, pliers in hand, the extractors awaited, anesthetists at their side.

The anesthetists did not put patients to sleep: they entertained them. They gave them not poppy or mandrake, but jokes and pirouettes. And their humor and grace were so miraculous that pain forgot to hurt.

The anesthetists were monkeys and dwarfs, dressed for carnival.

ORIGIN OF THE VACCINATION

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, smallpox killed half a million Europeans a year.

That was when Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, wife of the British ambassador in Istanbul, tried to get Europe to adopt Turkey’s tried and true method of prevention: a drop of variolic pus immunized against the murderous plague. But people mocked a woman masquerading as a scientist and preaching chicanery from pagan lands.