[The
following passages
are excerpted from
Eduardo Galeano’s
book
Children of the
Days: A Calendar of
Human History,
just out in
paperback (Nation
Books).]
March 30, 2015 "ICH"
- "Tomdispatch"
-
The Shoe
-
(January 15)
In 1919 Rosa
Luxemburg, the revolutionary,
was murdered in Berlin.
Her killers
bludgeoned her with rifle blows
and tossed her into the waters
of a canal.
Along the way,
she lost a shoe.
Some hand
picked it up, that shoe dropped
in the mud.
Rosa longed
for a world where justice would
not be sacrificed in the name of
freedom, nor freedom sacrificed
in the name of justice.
Every day,
some hand picks up that banner.
Dropped in the
mud, like the shoe.
The Celebration That Was
Not
(February 17)
The peons on
the farms of Argentina’s
Patagonia went out on strike
against stunted wages and
overgrown workdays, and the army
took charge of restoring order.
Executions are
grueling. On this night in 1922,
soldiers exhausted from so much
killing went to the bordello at
the port of San Julián for their
well-deserved reward.
But the five
women who worked there closed
the door in their faces and
chased them away, screaming,
“You murderers! Murderers, get
out of here!”
Osvaldo Bayer
recorded their names. They were
Consuelo García, Ángela
Fortunato, Amalia Rodríguez,
María Juliache, and Maud Foster.
The whores.
The virtuous.
Sacrilegious Women
(June 9)
In the year
1901, Elisa Sánchez and Marcela
Gracia got married in the church
of Saint George in the Galician
city of A Coruña.
Elisa and
Marcela had loved in secret. To
make things proper, complete
with ceremony, priest, license
and photograph, they had to
invent a husband. Elisa became
Mario: she cut her hair, dressed
in men’s clothing, and faked a
deep voice.
When the story
came out, newspapers all over
Spain screamed to high heaven --
“this disgusting scandal, this
shameless immorality” -- and
made use of the lamentable
occasion to sell papers hand
over fist, while the Church, its
trust deceived, denounced the
sacrilege to the police.
And the chase
began.
Elisa and
Marcela fled to Portugal.
In Oporto they
were caught and imprisoned.
But they
escaped. They changed their
names and took to the sea.
In the city of
Buenos Aires the trail of the
fugitives went cold.
The Right to Bravery
(August 13)
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.”
Mexico’s Women
Liberators
(September 17)
The centenary
celebrations were over and all
that glowing garbage was swept
away.
And the
revolution began.
History
remembers the revolutionary
leaders Zapata, Villa, and other
he-men. The women, who lived in
silence, went on to oblivion.
A few women
warriors refused to be erased:
Juana Ramona,
“la Tigresa,” who took several
cities by assault;
Carmen Vélez,
“la Generala,” who commanded
three hundred men;
Ángela Jiménez,
master dynamiter, who called
herself Angel Jiménez;
Encarnación
Mares, who cut her braids and
reached the rank of second
lieutenant hiding under the brim
of her big sombrero, “so they
won’t see my woman’s eyes”;
Amelia Robles,
who had to become Amelio and who
reached the rank of colonel;
Petra Ruiz,
who became Pedro and did more
shooting than anyone else to
force open the gates of Mexico
City;
Rosa
Bobadilla, a woman who refused
to be a man and in her own name
fought more than a hundred
battles;
and María
Quinteras, who made a pact with
the Devil and lost not a single
battle. Men obeyed her orders.
Among them, her husband.
The Mother of Female
Journalists
(November 14)
On this
morning in 1889, Nellie Bly set
off.
Jules Verne
did not believe that this pretty
little woman could circle the
globe by herself in less than
eighty days.
But Nellie put
her arms around the world in
seventy-two, all the while
publishing article after article
about what she heard and
observed.
This was not
the young reporter’s first
exploit, nor would it be the
last.
To write about
Mexico, she became so Mexican
that the startled government of
Mexico deported her.
To write about
factories, she worked the
assembly line.
To write about
prisons, she got herself
arrested for robbery.
To write about
mental asylums, she feigned
insanity so well that the
doctors declared her
certifiable. Then she went on to
denounce the psychiatric
treatments she endured, as
reason enough for anyone to go
crazy.
In Pittsburgh
when Nellie was twenty,
journalism was a man’s thing.
That was when
she committed the insolence of
publishing her first articles.
Thirty years
later, she published her last,
dodging bullets on the front
lines of World War I.
International Day for
the Elimination of Violence
Against Women
(November 25)
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.
The Art of Living
(December 9)
In 1986 the
Nobel Prize for medicine went to
Rita Levi-Montalcini.
In troubled
times, during the dictatorship
of Mussolini, Rita had secretly
studied nerve fibers in a
makeshift lab hidden in her
home.
Years later,
after a great deal of work, this
tenacious detective of the
mysteries of life discovered the
protein that multiplies human
cells, which won her the Nobel.
She was about
eighty by then and she said, “My
body is getting wrinkled, but
not my brain. When I can no
longer think, all I’ll want is
help to die with dignity.”
Eduardo
Galeano is one of Latin
America’s most distinguished
writers. He is the author of
Open
Veins of Latin America, the
Memory of Fire Trilogy,
Mirrors, and many other
works. His newest book,
Children of the Days: A Calendar
of Human History
(Nation Books), is just out in
paperback and is excerpted in
this piece. He is the recipient
of many international prizes,
including the first Lannan Prize
for Cultural Freedom, the
American Book Award, and the
Casa de las Américas Prize.
Mark Fried
is the translator of seven books
by Eduardo Galeano including
Children of the Days. He is
also the translator, among other
works, of Firefly
by Severo Sarduy. He lives in
Ottawa, Canada.
Copyright 2015
Eduardo Galeano