Mirrors (51 page)

Flora Tristán, grandmother of Paul Gaugin, errant activist, revolution’s pilgrim, dedicated her turbulent life to fighting against a husband’s right of property over his wife, a boss’s right of property over his workers, and a master’s right of property over his slaves.

In 1833, she traveled to Peru. On the outskirts of Lima she visited a sugar mill. She saw the stones that ground the cane, the kettles that boiled the molasses, the refinery that made the sugar. Everywhere she looked, she saw black slaves coming and going, working in silence. They were not even aware of her presence.

The owner told her he had nine hundred. In better times, twice as many, he complained.

And he said everything he was expected to say: that blacks were lazy like Indians, that they only worked under the lash, that . . .

When they were leaving, Flora came across a lockup to one side of the plantation.

Without asking permission, she went inside.

There, in the utter darkness of a dungeon, she managed to make out the figures of two women, naked, crouching in a corner.

“They’re worse than animals,” the guard said scornfully. “Animals don’t kill their young.”

These slaves had killed their young.

The two gazed at her, who gazed back at them from the other side of the world.

CONCEPCIÓN

She spent her life struggling heart and soul against the hell of jail and for the dignity of women imprisoned in jails disguised as homes.

An opponent of collective absolution, she called a spade a spade.

“When it is everyone’s fault, it is no one’s,” she liked to say. She earned herself a few enemies this way. Over the long term her prestige became indisputable, though her country had a hard time accepting it. And not only her country, her times too.

Back in 1840-something, Concepción Arenal took courses at the law school disguised as a man, her chest flattened by a double corset.

Back in 1850-something, she continued dressing like a man to attend the Madrid soirées where unbecoming topics were debated at unbecoming hours.

And back in 1870-something, a prestigious English organization, the John Howard Association for Penal Reform, named her its representative in Spain. The document certifying her position referred to her as “Mr. Concepción Arenal.”

Forty years later, another woman from Galicia, Emilia Pardo Bazán, became the first female university professor in Spain. No student bothered to attend her class. She lectured to an empty hall.

VENUS

She was captured in South Africa and sold in London.

And she was mockingly named Hottentot Venus. For two shillings you could see her naked in a cage, her tits so long she could breastfeed a baby on her back. For twice as much you could touch her ass, the biggest behind in the world.

A sign described the savage as half-human, half-animal, “the epitome of all that the civilized Englishman, happily, is not.”

From London she went on to Paris. Experts from the Museum of Natural History wanted to know if this Venus belonged to a species falling somewhere between man and the orangutan.

She was twenty-something when she died. Georges Cuvier, a celebrated naturalist, undertook the dissection. He reported that she had the skull of a monkey, a tiny brain, and a mandrill’s ass.

Cuvier cut off the inner labia of her vagina, an enormous flap, and placed it in a jar.

Two centuries later, the jar was put on display in Paris at the Musée de l’Homme, next to the genitals of another African woman and those of a Peruvian Indian.

Nearby, in another series of jars, were the brains of several European scientists.

THE REAL AMERICA

Queen Victoria received them at Buckingham Palace, they visited the courts of Europe, in Washington they were invited to the White House.

Bartola and Máximo were the tiniest beings ever. John Henry Anderson, who had purchased them, put them on display dancing in the palms of his hands.

Circus posters called them Aztecs, even though according to Anderson they came from a Mayan city hidden in the jungles of Yucatán, where cocks crowed underground and the natives wore turbans and ate human flesh.

The European scientists who studied them determined that their skulls could not hold moral principles, and that Bartola and Máximo were descended from American ancestors incapable of thinking or speaking. That is why they could only repeat a few words, like parrots, and could not understand anything but their master’s orders.

DIET OF AIR

In the middle of the nineteenth century, Bernard Kavanagh drew crowds in England. He announced that for seven days and seven nights he would not swallow a mouthful or drink a drop, and moreover he had been following such a diet for five and a half years.

Kavanagh did not charge to get in, but he did accept donations, which went straight into the hands of the Holy Spirit and the Most Holy Virgin.

After London, he performed his affecting spectacle in other cities, engaging in fast after fast, always inside cages or hermetically sealed rooms, always under medical control and police surveillance, and always surrounded by avid crowds.

When he died, the body disappeared and was never found. Many believed that Kavanagh had eaten himself. He was Irish, and in those years that was not at all unusual.

AN OVERPOPULATED COLONY

No smoke rose from the chimneys. In 1850, after five years of hunger and disease, Ireland’s countryside was depopulated, and slowly the empty houses fell in. The people had marched off either to the cemetery or to the ports of North America.

Nothing grew in that land, not even potatoes. The only thing growing was the number of crazy people. The Dublin insane asylum, paid for by Jonathan Swift, had ninety inmates when it opened its doors. A century later, it had over three thousand.

In the middle of the famine, London sent some emergency relief, but after a few months charitable feelings ran out. The empire refused to continue aiding that irksome colony. As the prime minister, Lord John Russell, put it, the ungrateful Irish repaid generosity with rebellion and slander, and that did not sit well with public opinion.

Sir Charles Edward Trevelyan, the top official in charge of the Irish crisis, attributed the famine to Divine Providence. Ireland was the most densely populated country in all Europe, and, since man could not prevent overpopulation, God was taking care of it “in all his wisdom, in an unexpected fashion, but with great efficacy.”

ORIGIN OF FAIRY TALES

In the first half of the seventeenth century, James I and Charles I, kings of England, Scotland, and Ireland, took a number of measures to protect Britain’s embryonic industry. They outlawed the export of unprocessed wool, required the use of local textiles even in luxury clothing, and closed the doors on a good part of the manufactures coming from France and Holland.

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Daniel Defoe, the creator of Robinson Crusoe, wrote several essays on economics and trade. In one of his most widely read works, Defoe praised the role of state protectionism in the development of the British textile industry: if it weren’t for those kings, who with their customs barriers and taxes did so much to further the industry, England would have remained a provider of raw wool for foreigners. England’s industrial growth led Defoe to imagine the world of the future as an immense colony dependent on its products.