Children of the Days (23 page)

His third birth occurred when he became a hero of Mexico's long struggle for independence. In the year 1659, sentenced to die at the stake, he hanged himself rather than face the dishonor of being burned alive.

He was resuscitated in the twentieth century. In his fourth life he called himself Diego de la Vega and he wore a mask. He was Zorro, sword-fighting champion of the downtrodden, who left his mark with a “Z.”

Douglas Fairbanks, Tyrone Power, Alain Delon and Antonio Banderas all wielded his sword in Hollywood.

At dawn on this day in 1915, Joe Hill faced a firing squad in Salt Lake City.

This foreign agitator, who had changed his name twice and his job and address a thousand times, had written the songs sung by striking workers all over the United States.

On his last night, he asked his comrades not to waste time crying for him:

Today is Children's Day.

I go for a stroll and bump into a girl who is two or maybe a little older, that age when we're all pagans.

The girl is skipping along, greeting all the greenery she sees: “Hello, grass!” “Good morning, grass!”

Then she stops to listen to the birds singing in the tops of the trees. And she applauds.

At noon on this day, a boy of about eight, maybe nine, brings a present to my house.

It's a folder filled with drawings.

The present comes from the students at a school in the Montevideo neighborhood of Cerrito de la Victoria. The young artist hands it to me with an explanation: “These drawings are us.”

In 1973 Chile was a country imprisoned by military dictatorship. The National Stadium had been turned into a concentration camp and torture chamber.

The Chilean national team was to play a decisive World Cup qualifying match against the Soviet Union.

Pinochet's dictatorship decided that the match had to be played in the National Stadium, no matter what.

The prisoners were hurriedly transferred and soccer's top brass inspected the field—the turf was impeccable—and gave their blessing.

The Soviet team refused to play along.

Eighteen thousand fans bought tickets and cheered the goal that Francisco Valdés put in the empty net.

The Chilean team played against no one.

As those with long memories tell it, in other times the sun was the lord of music, until the wind stole music away.

Ever since, birds console the sun with concerts at the beginning and end of the day.

But now these winged singers cannot compete with the screech and roar of the motors that rule big cities, and little or no birdsong can be heard. In vain they burst their breasts trying, and the effort ruins their trills.

Females no longer recognize their mates. The males, virtuoso tenors, irresistible baritones, do their best, but in the urban racket no one can tell who is whom, and the females end up accepting the embrace of unfamiliar wings.

Today in 1859 the first copy of Charles Darwin's
On the Origin of Species
rolled off the presses.

In the original manuscript the book had another name. It was called
Zoonomia
, in homage to a work by Charles's grandfather Erasmus Darwin.

Erasmus had fathered fourteen children and several books. Seventy years ahead of his grandson, he warned that everything in nature that sprouts, crawls, walks or flies has a common ancestor, and that common ancestor was not the hand of God.

In 1974 her bones turned up in the rocky hills of Ethiopia.

Her discoverers called her Lucy.

Thanks to advanced technology, they were able to calculate her age at about three million, one hundred and seventy-five thousand years, give or take a day or two. And also her height: she was rather short, a little over three feet tall.

The rest was deduced or maybe guessed: her body was quite hairy and she didn't walk on all fours, rather she swung along in a chimpanzee walk, her hands nearly grazing the ground, though she preferred the treetops.

She might have drowned in a river.

She might have been fleeing a lion or some other unknown who showed an interest in her.

She was born long before fire or the word, but perhaps she spoke a language of gestures and sounds that could have said, or tried to say, for example,

“I'm cold,”

“I'm hungry,”

“Don't leave me alone.”

In the jungle of the Upper Paraná, the prettiest butterflies survive by exhibiting themselves. They display their black wings enlivened by red or yellow spots, and they flit from flower to flower without the least worry. After thousands upon thousands of years, their enemies have learned that these butterflies are poisonous. Spiders, wasps, lizards, flies and bats admire them from a prudent distance.

On this day in 1960 three activists against the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic were beaten and thrown off a cliff. They were the Mirabal sisters. They were the prettiest, and they were called Las Mariposas, “The Butterflies.”

In memory of them, in memory of their inedible beauty, today is International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. In other words, for the elimination of violence by the little Trujillos that rule in so many homes.

When Karl Marx read
The Right to Be Lazy
, he concluded, “If that's Marxism, then I'm no Marxist.”

The author, Paul Lafargue, seemed less a communist than an anarchist who harbored a suspicious streak of tropical lunacy.

Neither was Marx pleased at the prospect of having this not-very-light-complexioned Cuban for a son-in-law. “An all too intimate deportment is unbecoming,” he wrote to him when Paul began making dangerous advances on his daughter Laura. And he added solemnly: “Should you plead in defense of your Creole temperament, it becomes my duty to interpose my sound sense between your temperament and my daughter.”

Reason failed.

Laura Marx and Paul Lafargue shared their lives for more than forty years.

And on this night in the year 1911, when life was no longer life, in their bed at home and in each other's arms, they set off on the final voyage.

In 1910 the mutiny by Brazil's sailors reached its climax.

The rebels threatened the city of Rio de Janeiro with warning shots of cannon fire: “No more lashings or we'll turn the city to rubble.”

On board warships, whippings were common fare and the victims frequently ended up dead.

After five days the uprising triumphed. The whips were sent to the bottom of the ocean, and the pariahs of the sea paraded to cheers through Rio's streets.

Sometime after that, the leader of the insurrection, João Cândido, child of slaves, admiral by acclaim of his fellow mutineers, went back to being a regular sailor.

Sometime after that, he was booted out of the service.

Sometime after that, he was arrested.

And sometime after that, he was locked away in an insane asylum.

There is a monument to him, a song explains, in the worn-down stones of the docks.

In the year 2009, the Brazilian government told Paulo Freire it was sorry. He was unable to acknowledge the apology since he had been dead for twelve years.

Paulo was the prophet of education for action.

In the beginning he taught classes under a tree. He taught thousands upon thousands of sugar workers in Pernambuco to read and write, so they could read the world and help to change it.

The military dictatorship arrested him, threw him out of the country and forbade his return.

In exile, Paulo wandered the world. The more he taught, the more he learned.

Today, three hundred and forty Brazilian schools bear his name.

In his scorn for human life, Hitler was unbeatable, but he had competitors.

In the year 2010 the Russian government officially acknowledged that Stalin had been the author of the murder of fourteen thousand five hundred Polish prisoners in Katyn, Kharkov and Miednoje. The Poles were shot in the back of the head in the spring of 1940, a crime always attributed to Nazi Germany.

In 1945, when the victory of the Allies was already inevitable, the German city of Dresden and the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were razed to the last stone. The official version from the victorious powers maintained the cities were military targets, but the thousands upon thousands of dead were all civilians, and in the ruins not even a slingshot could be found.

This day in the year 2010 saw the opening of a world conference to defend the environment, number one thousand and one.

As usual, nature's exterminators recited love poems to her.

It was held in Cancún.

No place could have been better.

At first sight Cancún is a picture postcard, but to transform this old fishing village into a gigantic trendy hotel with thirty thousand rooms, over the last half century dunes, lakes, pristine beaches, virgin forests and mangroves were wiped out, along with every other obstacle that nature put in the way of its path to prosperity. Even the beach sand was sacrificed. Now Cancún buys its sand from somewhere else.