Mirrors (48 page)

In 1814 Ferdinand VII posed for Francisco de Goya. There was nothing unusual in that. Goya, court painter for the Spanish Crown, was doing a portrait of the new monarch. But artist and king detested each other.

The king suspected, and with good reason, that Goya’s court paintings were disingenuously kind. The artist had no choice but to do the job that earned him his daily bread and provided an effective shield against the enmity of the Holy Inquisition. There was no lack of desire on God’s tribunal to burn alive the creator of
La maja desnuda
and numerous other works that mocked the virtue of priests and the bravery of warriors.

The king had power and the artist had nothing. It was to reestablish the Inquisition and the privileges of nobility that Ferdinand came to the throne borne on the shoulders of a crowd cheering:

“Long live chains!”

Sooner rather than later, Goya lost his job as the king’s painter and was replaced by Vicente López, an obedient bureaucrat with a brush.

The unemployed artist then took refuge in a country home on the banks of the Manzanares River, and on the walls he created the masterpieces known as the Black Paintings.

Goya painted them for himself, for his own pleasure or displeasure, in nights of solitude and despair. By the light of candles bristling on his hat, this utterly deaf man managed to hear the broken voices of his times and give them shape and color.

MARIANA

In 1814 King Ferdinand killed Pepa.

Pepa was what the people called the Constitution of Cádiz, which two years earlier had abolished the Inquisition and enshrined freedom of the press, the right to vote, and other insolent novelties.

The king decided that Pepa never was. He declared it “null and worthless and void, as if such acts, which ought to have been removed from time’s way, had never occurred.”

Then to remove from time’s way the enemies of monarchic despotism, gallows were built all over Spain.

Early one morning in 1831, outside one of the gates of the city of Granada, the executioner twisted the tourniquet until the iron collar broke the neck of Mariana Pineda.

She was guilty. Of embroidering a flag, of not betraying freedom’s conspirators, and of refusing to provide the judge who condemned her with the favor of her love.

Mariana had a brief life. She liked forbidden ideas, forbidden men, black mantillas, hot chocolate, and slow tunes.

FANS

The “lady liberals,” as Cádiz police called them, conspired in code.

From their Andalusian grandmothers they had learned the secret language of fans, which worked equally well for disobeying husband or king: the slow unfoldings and rapid closings, the ripplings, the flutterings.

If a lady swept her hair off her forehead with the fan closed, it meant: “Do not forget me.”

If she hid her eyes behind the open fan: “I love you.”

If she opened the fan beside her lips: “Kiss me.”

If she rested her lips on the closed fan: “I don’t trust him.”

If she drew her finger across the ribs: “We have to talk.”

If she fanned herself while looking out from the balcony: “Let’s meet outside.”

If she closed her fan upon entering: “Today I cannot go out.”

If she fanned with her left hand: “Do not believe that woman.”

PALACE ART IN ARGENTINA

May 25, 1810: it is raining in Buenos Aires. Under umbrellas, a crowd of top hats. White and sky-blue badges are handed around. In what today is called the Plaza de Mayo, the assembled gentlemen in frock coats bellow, “Long live the fatherland” and “Send the viceroy packing.”

In real reality, not airbrushed for a grade-school lithograph, there were no top hats or frock coats, and it seems it was not even raining, so no umbrellas. There was a choir recruited to stand outside and cheer the few men inside City Hall who were discussing independence.

Those few, shopkeepers, smugglers, learned doctors, and military officers, were the founding fathers who would soon lend their names to avenues and streets.

No sooner was independence declared than they established free trade.

Thus the port of Buenos Aires murdered the nation’s embryonic industry just as it was being born in the thread factories, textile mills, distilleries, saddleries, and other artisan workshops of Córdoba, Catamarca, Tucumán, Santiago del Estero, Corrientes, Salta, Mendoza, San Juan . . .

A few years later, the British foreign secretary, George Canning, offered a toast to the freedom of Spain’s American colonies:

“Hispanic America is British,” he declared, raising his glass.

Even the curbstones were British.

THE INDEPENDENCE THAT WAS NOT

Thus the lives of the heroes of Latin America’s emancipation came to an end.

Shot by firing squad: Miguel Hidalgo, José María Morelos, José Miguel Carrera, and Francisco de Morazán.

Assassinated: Antonio José de Sucre.

Hanged and quartered: Tiradentes.

Exiled: José Artigas, José de San Martín, Andrés de Santa Cruz, and Ramón Betances.

Imprisoned: Toussaint L’Ouverture and Juan José Castelli.

José Martí fell in battle.

Simón Bolívar died in solitude.

On August 10, 1809, while the city of Quito celebrated its liberation, an anonymous hand wrote on a wall:

Final day of despotism
and first day of the same.

Two years later in Bogotá, Antonio Nariño admitted:

“We have changed masters.”

THE LOSER

He preached in the desert and died alone.

Simón Rodríguez, who had been Bolívar’s teacher, spent half a century roving Latin America on the back of a mule, founding schools, and saying what no one wanted to hear.

A fire took nearly all his papers. Here are a few of the words that survived:

• On independence:

We are independent but not free. Something must be done for these poor people, who have become less free than before. Before, they had a shepherd king who did not eat them until they were dead. Now the first to show up eats them alive.

• On colonialism of the mind:

Europe’s know-how and the prosperity of the United States are for our America two enemies of freedom of thought. The new republics are unwilling to adopt anything that does not have their stamp of approval . . . If you are going to imitate everything, imitate originality!

• On colonialist trade:

Some think prosperity is seeing their ports filled with ships—foreign ships, and their homes turned into storerooms for goods—foreign goods. Every day brings another load of manufactured clothes, down to the caps the Indians wear. Soon we shall see little golden packages bearing the royal coat of arms containing ‘newly processed’ clay for children accustomed to eating dirt.

• On popular education:

To make students recite by rote what they do not understand is like training parrots. Teach children to be curious so they learn to obey their own minds rather than obeying authorities the way the narrow-minded do, or obeying custom the way the stupid do. He who knows nothing, anyone can fool. He who has nothing, anyone can buy.

ARTIGAS