Eduardo Galeano - Children of the Days - A Calendar of Human History

She had been condemned by the Catholic Church and the Kingdom of France.

Her name was Joan of Arc.

Heard of her?

Signora Girardelli, worker of wonders, left the European public bug-eyed back in the year 1820.

She caressed her arms with lit candles, danced barefoot on red-hot irons, bathed in flames, gulped mouthfuls of boiling oil, swallowed fire, chewed up burning sticks and spit them out as pounds sterling. After such ardent exhibitions she showed off her unblemished body, her snow-white skin, and basked in applause.

Skeptics said, “These are tricks.”

She said not a word.

In the year 2006 the Charity, Freedom and Diversity Party sought legal recognition in the Netherlands.

This new political group said it represented “men who express their sexuality and erotic lives in free relations with boys and girls.”

The party platform called for legalizing child pornography and sexual relations with minors.

Eight years before, these campaigners for charity, freedom and diversity founded International BoyLove Day on the Internet.

The party failed to collect the required number of signatures, never took part in any elections and, in the year 2010, committed suicide.

In 1537 Pope Paul III issued a bull, “Sublimus Dei.”

The bull admonished those “who, wishing to fulfill their greed, dare to affirm that Indians should be treated as dumb brutes created for our service, under the pretense that they are incapable of receiving the Catholic Faith.”

In defense of the aboriginal people of the New World, it established that “Indians are truly men. and thus they may and should, freely and legitimately, enjoy their liberty and the possession of their property, and should not be in any way enslaved.”

In America, nobody caught wind of it.

The town of Tambogrande slept on a bed of gold.

Gold lay under the houses, unbeknownst to anyone.

The news arrived along with the eviction orders. The Peruvian government had sold the entire town to Manhattan Minerals Corp.

Now you will all be millionaires, they were told. But no one obeyed. On this day in the year 2002, the result of a plebiscite was announced: the inhabitants of Tambogrande had decided to continue living from avocados, mangos, limes and other fruits of the land they had worked so hard to wrest from the desert.

Well they knew that gold curses the places it inhabits: it blows apart the hills with dynamite and poisons the rivers with tailings that contain more cyanide than blessed water.

Maybe they also knew that gold makes people crazy, because with gold the more you eat the hungrier you get.

In 1533, Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro ordered Atahualpa strangled, even though the king of Peru had given him all the gold he demanded.

According to what we learned in school, the discovery of Chile took place in 1536.

The news did not impress the Mapuches, who had discovered Chile three thousand years before.

In 1563 they surrounded the main fort of the Spanish conquistadors.

Besieged by thousands of furious Indians, the fort was on the point of surrender when Captain Lorenzo Bernal clambered up on the palisade and shouted, “We will win in the end! We don’t have Spanish women, so we’ll have yours. And with them we’ll have children who will be your masters.”

The interpreter translated. Colocolo, the Indian leader, listened the way one listens to rain fall.

He did not understand the sad prophecy.

Reality paints still lifes.

Disasters are called natural, as if nature were the executioner and not the victim. Meanwhile the climate goes haywire and we do too.

Today is World Environment Day. A good day to celebrate the new constitution of Ecuador, which in the year 2008, for the first time in the history of the world, recognized nature as a subject with rights.

It seems strange, this notion that nature has rights as if it were a person. But in the United States it seems perfectly normal that big companies have human rights. They do, ever since a Supreme Court decision in 1886.

If nature were a bank, they would have already rescued it.

Over the past two centuries, four hundred seventy mountains have been decapitated in the Appalachians, the North American range named in memory of the region’s native people.

Because they lived on fertile lands the Indians were evicted.

Because they contained coal the mountains were hollowed out.

Nezahualcóyotl died twenty years before Columbus first set foot on the beaches of America.

He was the king of Texcoco in the vast valley of Mexico.

There, he left us his voice:

It breaks, even if it be gold ,

it shatters, even if it be jade ,

it rends, even if it be a quetzal’s plumage .

Here no one lives forever .

Princes too come to die .

All of us must go on to the region of mystery .

Could it be we came to the earth in vain?

At least we leave behind our songs .

In the year 1504, Michelangelo unveiled his masterpiece: David stood tall in the main plaza of the city of Florence.

Insults and stones greeted this utterly naked giant.

Michelangelo was obliged to cover its indecency with a grape leaf, sculpted in bronze.

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.

Around this time in the year 2010, debate began in Buenos Aires on a bill to legalize gay marriage.

Its enemies launched “God’s war against weddings from Hell,” but the bill kept clearing the hurdles in its path and on July 15 Argentina became the first Latin American country to recognize the equality of women and men all across the sexual spectrum.

It was a defeat for the ruling hypocrisy, which expects us to live obeying and to die dissembling, and it was a defeat for the Holy Inquisition, which may change its name but never lacks fuel for the fire.

Count Victor Lustig, prophet of the Wall Street whiz kids to come, adopted several names and several titles of nobility, resided in several prisons in several countries, and in several languages was able to lie with utter sincerity.