August 7
SPY ON ME
Mata Hari was born on this day in 1876.
Sumptuous beds were her battlefields in World War I. Top military and political leaders succumbed to her charms, and they confided secrets she then sold to France or Germany or whomever would pay more.
In 1917 a French military court condemned her to death.
The most beloved spy in the world blew kisses to the firing squad.
Eight of the twelve soldiers missed.
August 8
CURSED AMERICA
Today in 1553 marked the end of Girolamo Fracastoro’s life. The Italian physician and writer had researched syphilis, among other contagious diseases, and concluded that the malady did not come to Europe from the Indians of the Americas.
In our time, Moacyr Scliar, Fracastoro’s Brazilian colleague in science and letters, continued demolishing the myth of the supposed “American curse.”
Long before the conquest of the New World, the French called syphilis “the Italian disease,” and the Italians called it “the French disease.”
The Dutch and the Portuguese called it “the Spanish disease.”
It was “the Portuguese disease” for the Japanese, “the German disease” for the Polish and “the Polish disease” for the Russians.
And the Persians believed it came from the Turks.
August 9
INTERNATIONAL DAY OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLES
Rigoberta Menchú was born in Guatemala four centuries and a half after the conquest by Pedro de Alvarado, and five years after Dwight Eisenhower conquered it once more.
In 1982, when the army swept through the Mayas’ highlands, nearly all of Rigoberta’s family was wiped out. Erased from the map was the village where her umbilical cord had been buried so she would set down roots.
Ten years later, she received the Nobel Peace Prize. She declared: “I receive this prize as an homage to the Maya people, even though it arrives five hundred years late.”
The Mayas are a patient people. They have survived five centuries of butchery.
They know that time, like a spider, weaves slowly.
August 10
MANUELAS
All men. But one was a woman, Manuela Cañizares, who recruited the others and brought them to her home to conspire.
On the night of August 9, 1809, the men spent hours and hours arguing—yes, no, who knows—and could not agree on whether to proclaim Ecuador’s independence. When once more they postponed the matter for another occasion, Manuela faced them and shouted, “Cowards! Wimps! You were born to be servants!” And at dawn today the door of a new era opened.
Another Manuela, Manuela Espejo, also an early promoter of independence, was Ecuador’s first female journalist. Since such a career was not proper for ladies, she used a pseudonym to publish her audacious articles against the servile mentality that humiliated her country.
Yet another Manuela, Manuela Sáenz, will always be known as Simón Bolívar’s lover, but she was also herself: a woman who fought against the colonial power and male omnipotence and the hypocritical prudery of each.
August 11
FAMILY
As people know in black Africa and indigenous America, your family is your entire village with all its inhabitants, living or dead.
And your relatives aren’t only human.
Your family also speaks to you in the crackling of the fire,
in the murmur of running water,
in the breathing of the forest,
in the voices of the wind,
in the fury of thunder,
in the rain that kisses you
and in the birdsong that greets your footsteps.
August 12
ATHLETES MALE AND FEMALE
In 1928 the Amsterdam Olympics came to an end.
Tarzan, alias Johnny Weissmuller, was the swimming champ and Uruguay the soccer champ. For the first time the Olympic flame, alight in a tower, burned throughout the competition, from beginning to end.
These games were memorable for another novelty: women took part.
Never in the entire history of the Olympics, from Greece onward, had there been anything like it.
In ancient Greece, not only were women banned from competition, they could not even attend as spectators.
The founder of the modern Olympics, Baron de Coubertin, opposed the presence of women as long as his reign lasted: “For women, grace, home and children. For men, competitive sports.”
August 13
THE RIGHT TO BRAVERY
In 1816 the government in Buenos Aires bestowed the rank of lieutenant colonel on Juana Azurduy “in virtue of her manly efforts.”
She led the guerrillas who took Cerro Potosí from the Spaniards in the war of independence.
War was men’s business and women were not allowed to horn in, yet male officers could not help but admire “the virile courage of this woman.”
After many miles on horseback, when the war had already killed her husband and five of her six children, Juana also lost her life. She died in poverty, poor even among the poor, and was buried in a common grave.
Nearly two centuries later, the Argentine government, now led by a woman, promoted her to the rank of general, “in homage to her womanly bravery.”
August 14
THE MOSQUITO MANIAC
In 1881 Cuban physician Carlos Finlay demonstrated that yellow fever, also known as black vomit, was transmitted by a certain female mosquito. At the same time, he unveiled a vaccine that could eradicate the disease.
Carlos, known in the neighborhood as “the Mosquito Maniac,” spoke of his discovery before the Academy of Medical, Physical and Natural Sciences of Havana.
It took twenty years for the rest of the world to find out.
During those twenty years, while prestigious scientists in prestigious places followed false leads, yellow fever continued its deadly ways.
August 15
THE JEWEL AND THE CROWN
Winston Churchill proclaimed:
“It is alarming and also nauseating to see Mr. Gandhi . . . this malignant subversive fanatic . . . The truth is that Gandhiism and all it stands for will, sooner or later, have to be grappled with and finally crushed. It is no use trying to satisfy a tiger by feeding him cats’ meat . . . We have no intention of casting away the most truly bright and precious jewel in the Crown of the King, which more than all our other Dominions and Dependencies constitutes the glory and strength of the British Empire.”
Fifteen years later, the jewel abandoned the crown. On this day in 1947, India won its independence.
The hard road to freedom began in 1930 when Mahatma Gandhi, skinny and half-naked, reached a beach on the Indian Ocean.
It was the salt march. They were only a few when the march began, but a multitude by the time they got there. Each of them picked up a pinch of salt from the beach and brought it to his mouth, and thus broke the British law that forbade Indians from consuming salt from their own country.
August 16
SUICIDE SEEDS
For about three hundred and sixty million years, plants have been producing fertile seeds that generate new plants and new seeds, and never have they ever charged anyone for the favor.
But in 1998 a patent gave its blessing to the company Delta and Pine to produce and sell sterile seeds, which meant new seeds had to be purchased for every planting. In the middle of August of the year 2006, Monsanto, blessed be thy name, bought out Delta and Pine and also its patent.
Thus Monsanto consolidated its universal power: sterile seeds, known as “suicide seeds” or “terminator seeds,” form part of a very lucrative line that also obliges farmers to buy herbicides, pesticides and other poisons from the genetically modified pharmacy.
At Easter in the year 2010, a few months after the earthquake, Haiti received a grand gift from Monsanto: sixty thousand bags of seed produced by the chemical industry. Farmers gathered to receive the offering, and they burned
every sack in an immense bonfire.
August 17
DANGEROUS WOMAN
Mae West, sinning flesh, voracious vampiress, was born in 1893.
In 1927 she and her entire entourage went to jail for having put on stage at a Broadway theater an invitation to pleasure, subtly titled Sex.
When she finished serving time for her “crime of public obscenity,” she decided to move from Broadway to Hollywood, from stage to screen, believing that the kingdom of freedom was about to arrive.
But in 1930, to ward off government censorship, Hollywood invented its own certificate of moral correctness, which for thirty-eight years determined which movies could open and which could not.
The Hays Code sought to keep the movies free of nudity, suggestive dances, lustful kissing, adultery, homosexuality and other perversions that undermine the sanctity of marriage and family. Not even Tarzan’s films escaped unscathed and Betty Boop had to put on a long skirt. Naturally, Mae West kept getting into trouble.
August 18
THE NETWORK OF NETWORKS
Around this time in 1969, a group of scientists in the US armed forces started up a new project: they were going to create a network of networks to connect and coordinate military operations on a scale never before seen.
In the war to conquer heaven and earth, this invention, not yet called the Internet, turned into a victory for the United States against its rival power, still called the Soviet Union.
Paradoxically, with the passing of the years, this instrument of war has also served to amplify the voices of peace, which previously resounded like a wooden bell.
August 19
WAR ON THE CHESSBOARD
In 1575 the first important battle in the history of chess was fought.
The winner, Leonardo da Cutri, received a prize of a thousand ducats, an ermine cape and a letter of congratulations from King Philip II of Spain.
The loser, Ruy López de Segura, wrote the book that founded the art of black–white combat on the checkered field. In that work the author, a cleric, beatifically advised:
When you sit down to play, if it is a clear and sunny day, make sure the enemy has the sun in his face, because it will blind him. And if it is dark and you are playing with lamps, put the light on his right because it will bother his eyes and cast a shadow when he reaches his right hand over the board, so he will have a hard time seeing where he is moving the pieces.
August 20
HEAVEN’S WORKFORCE
In the Ecuadorian highlands stands the church of Licto.
This fortress of the faith was reconstructed using gigantic stones, as the twentieth century came into being.
Since slavery was long gone, or so said the law, free Indians took up the task: they carried the stones on their backs from a quarry several leagues distant, and several of them lost their lives walking those narrow paths alongside deep gorges.
The priests charged sinners in stones for their salvation. Every baptism was paid for with twenty, and a wedding cost twenty-five. Fifteen stones was the price of a burial. If the family did not deliver them, the deceased could not enter the cemetery; he was buried in “evil land” and from there went straight to hell.
August 21
THE DIVISION OF LABOR
At Stanford University in the United States psychologists carried out a revealing experiment on the relationship between man and function.
They recruited a few students, white, well-educated, well-behaved and in good physical and mental health.
The toss of a coin decided who would be the jailer and who the prisoner in a fictitious jail set up in the basement of a university building.
The prisoners, unarmed, were numbers without names. The jailers, names without numbers, carried nightsticks.
It seemed like a game, but from the very first day those playing the role of jailer began to enjoy its pleasures. Permission to use the toilet was given only after much begging, prisoners were obliged to sleep naked on the concrete floor, and those who protested paid for their insolence in punishment cells, deprived of food and water.
Blows, insults, humiliations: the experiment did not last long. No more than a week. On this day in 1971, it ended.
August 22
THE BEST WORKERS
The French priest Jean-Baptiste Labat recommended in one of his books published in 1742:
African ten-to-fifteen-year-olds are the best slaves to take to America. The advantage is you can educate them so that they’ll keep up the pace as best suits their masters. Children more easily forget their native countries and the vices that hold sway there, they become fond of their masters and they are less inclined to rebel than older blacks.
This pious missionary knew what he was talking about. On the French islands of the Caribbean, Père Labat performed baptisms, communions and confessions, and between masses kept an eye on his properties. He owned lands and slaves.
August 23
THE IMPOSSIBLE COUNTRY
In 1791 another owner of lands and slaves sent a letter from Haiti: “The blacks are very obedient and will remain so always,” it said.
The letter was making its way to Paris when the impossible happened: on the night of August 22, a stormy night, the greatest slave uprising in the entire history of humanity exploded from the depths of the Haitian jungle. And those “very obedient” blacks went on to humble the army of Napoleon Bonaparte that was soon to overrun Europe from Madrid to Moscow.
August 24
IT WAS THE DAY OF THE ROMAN GOD OF FIRE
And it was the year 79.
Pliny the Elder was sailing the world at the helm of a Roman fleet.
When he entered the Bay of Naples, he saw black smoke rising out of Vesuvius like a tall tree opening its branches to the sky. Suddenly night fell at noon, the world shook with violent tremors and a bombardment of fiery stones buried the carefree city of Pompeii.
A few years before, fire had razed the city of Lugdunum and Seneca had written: “A single night lay between the greatest city and none.”
Lugdunum revived and is now called Lyon. Pompeii did not disappear; it lay intact under the ashes, preserved by the volcano that destroyed it.
August 25
THE IMPRISONED CITY IS RESCUED
At dawn on this day in 1944, Paris went crazy.
The Nazi occupation was over.
The first tanks and armored cars had entered the city a few hours before. “Is it the Americans?” people asked.
The names scrawled in white paint on those tanks and armored cars were: “Guadalajara,” “Ebro,” “Teruel,” “Brunete,” “Madrid,” “Don Quijote,” “Durruti” . . .
The first liberators of Paris were the Spanish Republicans.
Defeated in their own land, they had fought for France.
They were convinced that Spain’s rescue would follow.
They were wrong.
August 26
PURITY OF THE FAITH
Ivan the Terrible was born on this day in 1530.
To educate the people in the Christian faith, in Moscow he built the great cathedral of Saint Basil, which remains the loveliest symbol of the city, and to perpetuate his Christian power he sent a few sinners to hell, his rivals, his relatives:
he set the dogs on Prince Andrei and Archbishop Leonid;
he burned Prince Pyotr alive;
with an ax he chopped up the princes Aleksandr, Repnin, Snuyon, Nikolai, Dmitri, Telepnev and Tyutin;
he drowned his cousin Vladimir in the river, as well as his sister-in-law Aleksandra and his aunt Eudoxia;
he poisoned five of his seven wives;
and with a blow from his cane he killed his son, his favorite, the one who bore his name, because the affront was too great.
August 27
PURITY OF THE RACE
In 1924 an imprisoned Adolf Hitler dictated his book Mein Kampf. On a day like today, he transmitted to the scribe what for him was the fundamental lesson of history:
&nb
sp; All the great cultures of the past perished only because the originally creative race died out from blood poisoning.
Fourteen years later, Benito Mussolini proclaimed in his Manifesto of Race:
The purely European physical and psychological characteristics of Italians should not be altered in any way whatsoever. It is high time that the Italians declare themselves to be frankly racist.
August 28
“I HAVE A DREAM”
On this day in 1963, before an immense crowd carpeting the vast open mall of Washington, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. dreamed out loud:
“I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. . . I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low . . . ”
At the time the FBI had declared King “the most dangerous Negro of the future in this nation,” and numerous spies followed his every step, day and night.
But he continued denouncing racial humiliation and the Vietnam War, which turned black men into cannon fodder, and without any hesitation he said that his country was “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.”
In 1968 a bullet split his skull.
August 29
COLORED MAN
Children of the Days Page 10