by Paulo Coelho
‘Evening, Mrs Bolton! – Your Ladyship will be all right now, so I can leave you. Good-night to your Ladyship! Good-night Mrs Bolton!’
He saluted, and turned away.
Introduction
The air is unsteady, fearsome and uncontrollable. It is the realm of mind, the idea of the spirit and the world of change. The winds, the clouds, the mist, all atmospheric phenomena, belong to the air. But when we breathe we know that the world is real and that we belong to it. When we take in air, and when we breathe it out, we can feel the very pace of creation. Untouchable, the air can only be felt, or lived. Infinite and invisible, it shapes mountains and creates the waves. It takes up sand and creates the landscapes of reason and madness. When you hear the wind passing through the branches of a tree, you can hear God’s voice whispering or roaring his words to you and to the universe. But anger can be found in those winds. St John said, ‘The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth’ (John, 3:8). The air is the great sign of the spirit, but it can also be the uncontrolled life of emotions and beliefs abandoned to their own devices. The torment, the tempest or the hurricane are the wages of unconsciousness and passion. Air is linked to blood. Blood, a strange and mysterious fluid, hot and vital… Finally, the air allows communication and action, but if it is not tamed it leads to instability and agitation. This ambiguity finds its own path in the texts of this section.
Mandela’s letter opens a breach in one of the most unfair political systems of all times, namely apartheid. This letter remains a very clear declaration, a call for freedom and justice. Of course,those two words are in some contexts now out of fashion, but for the people who endured such an unbearable situation those two words were everything. Political action can sometimes touch a kind of universal nerve, and its seeds can give beautiful plants. Far away from politics, the life and fate of Remedios the Beauty in One Hundred Years of Solitude transport us to a supernatural America, where the dead smell of strong perfumes and women can fly wrapped in white sheets… The parable of Remedios the Beauty reveals the strength of the miraculous and its compelling power of attraction. Stranger yet is The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson’s masterpiece, which tells of the transformation of a scientist into something quite different. The distortion of shape and morals invented by Jekyll bears witness to the unconscious and will given free rein. Like an echo of Wilde’s experience, Dr Jekyll imagines a new behaviour, symbolically expressed by a potion. But this one is not the ‘potable gold’ of the alchemist; it is, rather, a great dissolution of the self and the summoning of unreached parts of the personality. The most impressive illustration of this ‘imagination’ can be found in the Two Minutes Hate in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, where people give vent to their innermost fears in a public blast of hate. The reforming revolution turned into something disastrous and people are manipulated and slowly destroyed by Big Brother and his agents. Borges’ Library of Babel presents itself as a remarkable mirror, despite Borges’ own horror of that object. The spectacular structure of the unlikely library throws us into the labyrinth, another favourite theme in the author’s work. But the description of the library reveals an obsession with the discovery of the Book, the Book of all books… or, better, God’s Book. This ultimate journey can be viewed through the insane ‘memory’ of a great author, recalled in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, with ‘Jorge de Burgos’. And if air allows travel, it allows, too, losing oneself. And this can be a form of madness.
NELSON MANDELA
from No Easy Walk to Freedom
Black Man in a White Man’s Court
Mandela was arrested in August of 1962 and put on trial, charged on two counts: inciting African workers to strike; and leaving South Africa without a valid travel document. He turned the trial into a scathing indictment of White domination.
This chapter is an almost complete account of the trial held in Pretoria in the Old Synagogue (converted into a courtroom) where less than two years earlier Mandela and twenty-eight others had been acquitted in the Treason Trial. The trial opened in October 1962. Mandela was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment for incitement to strike, and two years’ imprisonment on the second charge of leaving South Africa without a valid permit or passport.
Your Worship, I have elected to conduct my own defence. Some time during the progress of these proceedings, I hope to be able to indicate that this case is a trial of the aspirations of the African people, and because of that I thought it proper to conduct my own defence.
I have an application to address to Your Worship. At the outset, I want to make it perfectly clear that the remarks I am going to make are not addressed to Your Worship in his personal capacity, nor are they intended to reflect upon the integrity of the Court.
The point I wish to raise in my argument is based not on personal considerations, but on important questions that go beyond the scope of this present trial. I might also mention that in the course of this application I am frequently going to refer to the White man and the White people. I want at once to make it clear that I am no racialist, and I detest racialism, because I regard it as a barbaric thing, whether it comes from a Black man or from a White man. The terminology that I am going to employ will be compelled on me by the nature of the application I am making.
I want to apply for Your Worship’s recusal from this case. I challenge the right of this Court to hear my case on two grounds.
Firstly, I challenge it because I fear that I will not be given a fair and proper trial. Secondly, I consider myself neither legally nor morally bound to obey laws made by a Parliament in which I have no representation.
In a political trial such as this one, which involves a clash of the aspirations of the African people and those of Whites, the country’s courts, as presently constituted, cannot be impartial and fair.
In such cases, Whites are interested parties. To have a White judicial officer presiding, however high his esteem, and however strong his sense of fairness and justice, is to make Whites judges in their own case.
It is improper and against the elementary principles of justice to entrust Whites with cases involving the denial by them of basic human rights to the African people.
What sort of justice is this that enables the aggrieved to sit in judgement over those against whom they have laid a charge?
A judiciary controlled entirely by Whites and enforcing laws enacted by a White Parliament in which Africans have no representation – laws which in most cases are passed in the face of unanimous opposition from Africans—
Here the Magistrate interrupted.
*
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights provides that all men are equal before the law and are entitled, without any discrimination, to equal protection of the law.
In May 1951, Dr D. F. Malan, then Prime Minister, told the Union Parliament that this provision of the Declaration applied in this country. Similar statements have been made on numerous occasions in the past by prominent Whites in this country, including judges and magistrates.
But the real truth is that there is in fact no equality before the law whatsoever as far as our people are concerned, and statements to the contrary are definitely incorrect and misleading.
It is true that an African who is charged in a court of law enjoys, on the surface, the same rights and privileges as an accused who is White in so far as the conduct of his trial is concerned. He is governed by the same rules of procedure and evidence as apply to a White accused. But it would be grossly inaccurate to conclude from this fact that an African consequently enjoys equality before the law.
In its proper meaning equality before the law means the right to participate in the making of the laws by which one is governed, a constitution which guarantees democratic rights to all sections of the population, the right to approach the court for protection or relief in the case of the violation of rights guaranteed in the cons
titution, and the right to take part in the administration of justice as judges, magistrates, attorneys-general, law advisers, and similar positions.
In the absence of these safeguards the phrase ‘equality before the law’, in so far as it is intended to apply to us, is meaningless and misleading. All the rights and privileges to which I have referred are monopolized by Whites, and we enjoy none of them.
The White man makes all the laws, he drags us before his courts and accuses us, and he sits in judgement over us.
It is fit and proper to raise the question sharply, what is this rigid colour-bar in the administration of justice? Why is it that in this courtroom I face a White magistrate, confronted by a White prosecutor, and escorted into the dock by a White orderly? Can anyone honestly and seriously suggest that in this type of atmosphere the scales of justice are evenly balanced?
Why is it that no African in the history of this country has ever had the honour of being tried by his own kith and kin, by his own flesh and blood?
I will tell Your Worship why: the real purpose of this rigid colour-bar is to ensure that the justice dispensed by the courts should conform to the policy of the country, however much that policy might be in conflict with the norms of justice accepted in judiciaries throughout the civilized world.
I feel oppressed by the atmosphere of White domination that lurks all around in this courtroom. Somehow this atmosphere calls to mind the inhuman injustices caused to my people outside this courtroom by this same White domination.
It reminds me that I am voteless because there is a Parliament in this country that is White-controlled. I am without land because the White minority has taken a lion’s share of my country and forced me to occupy poverty-stricken Reserves, over-populated and over-stocked. We are ravaged by starvation and disease…
Interruption by the Magistrate.
How can I be expected to believe that this same race discrimination, which has been the cause of so much injustice and suffering right through the years, should now operate here to give me a fair and proper trial? Is there no danger that an African may regard these courts, not as impartial tribunals dispensing justice without fear or favour, but as instruments used by the White man to punish those among us who clamour for deliverance from the fiery furnace of White rule?
I have grave fears that this system of justice may enable the guilty to drag the innocent before the courts. It enables the unjust to prosecute and demand vengeance against the just.
This is the first ground of my objection: that I will not be given a fair and proper trial.
The second ground of my objection is that I consider myself neither morally nor legally obliged to obey laws made by a Parliament in which I am not represented.
That the will of the people is the basis of the authority of government is a principle universally acknowledged as sacred throughout the civilized world, and constitutes the basic foundations of freedom and justice. It is understandable why citizens, who have the vote as well as the right of direct representation in the country’s governing bodies, should be morally and legally bound by the laws governing the country.
It would be equally understandable why we, as Africans, should adopt the attitude that we are neither morally nor legally bound to obey laws which we have not made, nor can we be expected to have confidence in courts which enforce such laws.
I am aware that in many cases of this nature in the past, South African courts have upheld the right of the African people to work for democratic changes. Some of our judicial officers have even openly criticized the policy which refuses to acknowledge that all men are born free and equal, and fearlessly condemned the denial of opportunities to our people.
But such exceptions exist in spite of, not because of, the grotesque system of justice that has been built up in this country. These exceptions furnish yet another proof that even among the country’s Whites there are honest men whose sense of fairness and justice revolts against the cruelty perpetrated by their own White brothers to our people.
The existence of genuine democratic values among some of the country’s Whites in the judiciary, however slender they may be, is welcomed by me. But I have no illusions about the significance of this fact, healthy a sign as it might be. Such honest and upright Whites are few and they have certainly not succeeded in convincing the vast majority of the rest of the White population that White supremacy leads to dangers and disaster.
However, it would be a hopeless commandant who relied for his victories on the few soldiers in the enemy camp who sympathize with his cause. A competent general pins his faith on the superior striking power he commands and on the justness of his cause which he must pursue uncompromisingly to the bitter end.
I hate race discrimination most intensely and in all its manifestations. I have fought it all during my life; I fight it now, and will do so until the end of my days. Even though I now happen to be tried by one whose opinion I hold in high esteem, I detest most violently the set-up that surrounds me here. It makes me feel that I am a Black man in a White man’s court. This should not be. I should feel perfectly at ease and at home with the assurance that I am being tried by a fellow South African who does not regard me as an inferior, entitled to a special type of justice.
This is not the type of atmosphere most conducive to feelings of security and confidence in the impartiality of a court.
The Court might reply to this part of my argument by assuring me that it will try my case fairly and without fear or favour, that in deciding whether or not I am guilty of the offence charged by the State, the Court will not be influenced by the colour of my skin or by any other improper motive.
That might well be so. But such a reply would completely miss the point of my argument.
As already indicated, my objection is not directed to Your Worship in his personal capacity, nor is it intended to reflect upon the integrity of the Court. My objection is based upon the fact that our courts, as presently constituted, create grave doubts in the minds of an African accused, whether he will receive a fair and proper trial.
This doubt springs from objective facts relating to the practice of unfair discrimination against the Black man in the constitution of the country’s courts. Such doubts cannot be allayed by mere verbal assurances from a presiding officer, however sincere such assurances might be. There is only one way, and one way only, of allaying such doubts, namely, by removing unfair discrimination in judicial appointments. This is my first difficulty.
I have yet another difficulty about similar assurances Your Worship might give. Broadly speaking, Africans and Whites in this country have no common standard of fairness, morality and ethics, and it would be very difficult to determine on my part what standard of fairness and justice Your Worship has in mind.
In their relationship with us, South African Whites regard it as fair and just to pursue policies which have outraged the conscience of mankind and of honest and upright men throughout the civilized world. They suppress our aspirations, bar our way to freedom, and deny us opportunities to promote our moral and material progress, to secure ourselves from fear and want. All the good things of life are reserved for the White folk and we Blacks are expected to be content to nourish our bodies with such pieces of food as drop from the tables of men with White skins. This is the White man’s standard of justice and fairness. Herein lies his conception of ethics. Whatever he himself may say in his defence, the White man’s moral standards in this country must be judged by the extent to which he has condemned the vast majority of its inhabitants to serfdom and inferiority.
We, on the other hand, regard the struggle against colour discrimination and for the pursuit of freedom and happiness as the highest aspiration of all men. Through bitter experience, we have learnt to regard the White man as a harsh and merciless type of human being whose contempt for our rights, and whose utter indifference to the promotion of our welfare, makes his assurances to us absolutely meaningless and hypocritical.
I have the hope an
d confidence that Your Worship will not hear this objection lightly nor regard it as frivolous. I have decided to speak frankly and honestly because the injustice I have referred to contains the seeds of an extremely dangerous situation for our country and people. I make no threat when I say that unless these wrongs are remedied without delay, we might well find that even plain talk before the country’s courts is too timid a method to draw the attention of the country to our political demands.
The application for the recusal of the Magistrate was refused.
GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
from One Hundred Years of Solitude
Remedios the Beauty was the only one who was immune to the banana plague. She was becalmed in a magnificent adolescence, more and more impenetrable to formality, more and more indifferent to malice and suspicion, happy in her own world of simple realities. She did not understand why women complicated their lives with corsets and petticoats, so she sewed herself a coarse cassock that she simply put over her and without further difficulties resolved the problem of dress, without taking away the feeling of being naked, which according to her lights was the only decent way to be when at home. They bothered her so much to cut the rain of hair that already reached to her thighs and to make rolls with combs and braids with red ribbons that she simply shaved her head and used the hair to make wigs for the saints. The startling thing about her simplifying instinct was that the more she did away with fashion in a search for comfort and the more she passed over conventions as she obeyed spontaneity, the more disturbing her incredible beauty became and the more provocative she became to men. When the sons of Colonel Aureliano Buendía were in Macondo for the first time, Úrsula remembered that in their veins they bore the same blood as her great-granddaughter and she shuddered with a forgotten fright. ‘Keep your eyes wide open,’ she warned her. ‘With any of them your children will come out with the tail of a pig.’ The girl paid such little attention to the warning that she dressed up as a man and rolled around in the sand in order to climb the greased pole, and she was at the point of bringing on a tragedy among the seventeen cousins, who were driven mad by the unbearable spectacle. That was why none of them slept at the house when they visited the town and the four who had stayed lived in rented rooms at Úrsula’s insistence. Remedios the Beauty, however, would have died laughing if she had known about that precaution. Until her last moment on earth she was unaware that her irreparable fate as a disturbing woman was a daily disaster. Every time she appeared in the dining room, against Úrsula’s orders, she caused a panic of exasperation among the outsiders. It was all too evident that she was completely naked underneath her crude nightshirt and no one could understand that her shaved and perfect skull was not some kind of challenge, and that the boldness with which she uncovered her thighs to cool off was not a criminal provocation, nor was her pleasure when she sucked her fingers after eating. What no member of the family ever knew was that the strangers did not take long to realize that Remedios the Beauty gave off a breath of perturbation, a tormenting breeze that was still perceptible several hours after she had passed by. Men expert in the disturbances of love, experienced all over the world, stated that they had never suffered an anxiety similar to the one produced by the natural smell of Remedios the Beauty. On the porch with the begonias, in the parlour, in any place in the house, it was possible to point out the exact place where she had been and the time that had passed since she had left it. It was a definite, unmistakable trace that no one in the family could distinguish because it had been incorporated into the daily odours for a long time, but it was one that the outsiders identified immediately. They were the only ones, therefore, who understood how the young commander of the guard had died of love and how a gentleman from a faraway land had been plunged into desperation. Unaware of the restless circle in which she moved, of the unbearable state of intimate calamity that she provoked as she passed by, Remedios the Beauty treated the men without the least bit of malice and in the end upset them with her innocent complaisance. When Úrsula succeeded in imposing the command that she eat with Amaranta in the kitchen so that the outsiders would not see her, she felt more comfortable, because, after all, she was beyond all discipline. In reality, it made no difference to her where she ate, and not at regular hours but according to the whims of her appetite. Sometimes she would get up to have lunch at three in the morning, sleep all day long, and she would spend several months with her timetable all in disarray until some casual incident would bring her back into the order of things. When things were going better she would get up at eleven o’clock in the morning and shut herself up until two o’clock, completely nude, in the bathroom, killing scorpions as she came out of her dense and prolonged sleep. Then she would throw water from the cistern over herself with a gourd. It was an act so prolonged, so meticulous, so rich in ceremonial aspects that one who did not know her well would have thought that she was given over to the deserved adoration of her own body. For her, however, that solitary rite lacked all sensuality and was simply a way of passing the time until she was hungry. One day, as she began to bathe herself, a stranger lifted a tile from the roof and was breathless at the tremendous spectacle of her nudity. She saw his desolate eyes through the broken tiles and had no reaction of shame but rather one of alarm.