Mirrors (46 page)

A tall doorway without a door, an empty frame. At the top, poised, the deadly blade.

She went by several names: the Machine, the Widow, the Barber. When she decapitated King Louis, she became Little Louise. And in the end, one name stuck, the guillotine.

Joseph Guillotin protested in vain. A thousand and one times, the doctor and sworn enemy of the death penalty protested that the executioner who sowed terror and drew multitudes was not his daughter. No one listened. People went right on believing that he was the father of the leading lady of the most popular show in Paris.

People also believed, and still do, that Guillotin died on the guillotine. In reality, he breathed his last breath in the peace of his own bed, his head well attached to his body.

The guillotine labored on until 1977. Its last victim was a Tunisian immigrant executed in the yard of a Paris prison by a superfast model with an electronic trigger.

THE REVOLUTION LOST ITS HEAD

To sabotage the Revolution, landowners set fire to their crops. The specter of hunger roamed the cities. The kingdoms of Austria, Prussia, England, Spain, and Holland prepared for war against the contagious French Revolution, which insulted tradition and threatened the holy trinity of crown, wig, and cassock.

Besieged from within and without, the Revolution reached the boiling point. The people were the audience watching a drama performed in their name. Not many attended the debates. There was no time. The lineups for food were long.

Differences of opinion led to the scaffold. All the revolutionary leaders were enemies of monarchy, but some of them had kings in their hearts, and by a new, divine revolutionary right, they were the owners of the absolute truth and absolute power. Whoever dared to disagree was a counterrevolutionary ally of the enemy, a foreign spy, a traitor to the cause.

Marat escaped the guillotine because a mad girl stabbed him in the bath.

Saint-Just, inspired by Robespierre, accused Danton.

Danton, sentenced to death, asked them not to forget to put his head on display, and as a bequest he left his balls to Robespierre. He said the man would need them.

Three months later, Saint-Just and Robespierre were decapitated.

Without wanting it or knowing it, the desperate, chaotic republic was working for the restoration of the monarchy. The Revolution, which had promised liberty, equality, and fraternity, ended up paving the way for the despotism of Napoleon Bonaparte, who founded his own dynasty.

BÜCHNER

In 1835, German dailies published this notice from the authorities:

WANTED

GEORG BÜCHNER, DARMSTADT MEDICAL STUDENT,
21 YEARS OLD, GRAY EYES,
PROMINENT FOREHEAD, LARGE NOSE, SMALL MOUTH,
NEARSIGHTED.

Büchner, a social agitator, organizer of poor peasants, traitor to his class, was on the run from the police.

Soon thereafter, at the age of twenty-three, he died.

He died of fever: so much life in so few years. Between one leap and the next in his life as a fugitive, Büchner wrote, a century ahead of his time, the plays that would found modern theater:
Woyzeck, Leonce and Lena, Danton’s Death.

In
Danton’s Death
, the German revolutionary had the courage to put onstage, painfully and mercilessly, the tragic fate of the French Revolution, which had begun by proclaiming “the despotism of freedom” and ended up imposing the despotism of the guillotine.

WHITE CURSE

The black slaves of Haiti gave Napoleon Bonaparte’s army a tremendous thrashing, and in 1804 the flag of the free fluttered over the ruins.

But Haiti was a country ruined from the first. On the altars of French sugar plantations, lands and lives had been burned alive, and then the calamities of war exterminated a third of the population.

The birth of independence and the death of slavery, feats accomplished by blacks, were unpardonable humiliations for the white owners of the world.

Eighteen of Napoleon’s generals were buried on the rebel isle. The new nation, born in blood, was sentenced to blockade and solitude: no one bought from her, no one sold to her, no one recognized her. For being disloyal to the colonial master, Haiti was obliged to pay France a gigantic sum in reparations. This expiation for the sin of dignity, which she paid for nearly a century and a half, was the price France exacted for diplomatic recognition.

No one else recognized her. Not even Simón Bolívar, who owed her everything. Haiti had provided ships, weapons, and soldiers for his war of independence against Spain, on only one condition: that the slaves be freed, an idea that had never occurred to the man known as the Liberator. Later on, when Bolívar triumphed, he refused to invite Haiti to the congress of new Latin American nations.

Haiti became the leper of the Americas.

Thomas Jefferson warned from the beginning that the plague had to be confined to that island, because it provided a very bad example.

Bad example: disobedience, chaos, violence. In South Carolina, by law any black sailor could be jailed while his ship was in port, for fear he might spread the antislavery fever that threatened all the Americas. In Brazil, that fever was called
haitianismo
.

TOUSSAINT

He was born a slave, the son of slaves.

He was frail and homely.

He spent his childhood chatting with horses and plants.

In time he became the master’s coachman and doctor to his gardens.

He had never killed a fly when the exigencies of war placed him where he now stands. Now he is called Toussaint L’Ouverture, because the blows of his sword part the enemy’s defenses. This self-made general instructs his troops, illiterate slaves, explaining the whys and hows of the Revolution through stories he learned or made up as a child.

It is 1803, and the French army is on its last legs.

General Leclerc, Napoleon’s brother-in-law, proposes:

“Let’s talk.”

Toussaint agrees.

They capture him, place him in chains, load him onto a ship.

Imprisoned in the coldest castle in France, from the cold he dies.

SLAVERY DIED MANY DEATHS

Look in any encyclopedia. Ask which was the first country to abolish slavery. The encyclopedia will answer: Britain.

It is true that one fine day the British Empire, the world champion of the slave trade, changed its mind after it totted up the numbers and realized the sale of human flesh was no longer so profitable. But London discovered slavery was evil in 1807 and the news was so unconvincing that it had to be repeated twice over in the next thirty years.

It is also true that the French Revolution had freed the slaves of the colonies, but the liberating decree, called “immortal,” died a short time later, assassinated by Napoleon Bonaparte.

The first country that was free, truly free, was Haiti. It abolished slavery three years before England, on a night illuminated by the sun of bonfires, while celebrating its recently won independence and recuperating its forgotten indigenous name.

DEAD MAN SPEAKING

The abolition of slavery was also repeated throughout the nineteenth century in the new Latin American nations.

Repetition was proof of impotence. In 1821, Simón Bolívar pronounced slavery dead. Thirty years later, the deceased still enjoyed good health, and new laws of abolition were decreed in Colombia and Venezuela.

The very day in 1830 that Uruguay’s constitution was proclaimed, the newspapers featured advertisements like:

For sale: very cheap, a Negro shoemaker.

For sale: one maid recently given birth, good for the lady.

For sale: one young Negro, 17 years old, no vices.

For sale: one very Spanish-looking mulatta for all farm work, and one large sugar kettle.

Five years before, in 1825, the first law forbidding the sale of persons in Uruguay had been passed, and it had to be repeated in 1842, 1846, and 1853.

Brazil was last in the Americas, next to last in the world. Slavery was legal until the end of the nineteenth century. Afterward, it was illegal but still operative, and that remains the case today. In 1888, the Brazilian government ordered all existing documentation on the topic burned. Thus slave labor was officially erased from the country’s history. It died without having existed, and it exists despite having died.