The names are an enigma as indecipherable as the Holy Trinity.
March 10. THE DEVIL PLAYED THE VIOLIN
On this night in 1712, the Devil visited the young violinist Giuseppe Tartini and played for him in his dreams.
Giuseppe wanted the music to go on forever, but when he awoke it was gone.
In search of that lost music, Tartini composed two hundred and nineteen sonatas, which he played with fruitless mastery throughout his life.
The public applauded his failures.
March 11. THE LEFT IS THE UNIVERSITY OF THE RIGHT
In 1931 a baby named Rupert was born in Australia.
In a few short years Rupert Murdoch became lord and master of the media throughout the world.
His astonishing success came not only thanks to his astute command of the dirty deal. Rupert understood the inner workings of capitalism, secrets he learned as a twenty-something student, when he was an admirer of Lenin and a reader of Marx.
March 12. SLEEP KNOWS MORE THAN WAKEFULNESS
Mount Fuji, symbol of Japan, glows red.
The clouds filling the sky are red with plutonium, yellow with strontium, purple with cesium, all of them bearing cancer and other monstrosities.
Six nuclear plants have exploded.
People flee in desperation but there is nowhere to go. “They tricked us! They lied to us!”
Some throw themselves into the sea or the void, just to hurry fate along.
Akira Kurosawa dreamed this nightmare and filmed it twenty years before the apocalyptic nuclear catastrophe his country suffered at the beginning of 2011.
March 13. A CLEAR CONSCIENCE
On this day in the year 2007, the banana company Chiquita Brands, successor to United Fruit, admitted to financing Colombian paramilitary gangs during seven years, and agreed to pay a fine.
The gangs offered protection against strikes and other untoward behavior by labor unions. One hundred and seventy-three union activists were murdered in the banana region during those years.
The fine was twenty-five million dollars. Not a single penny reached the families of the victims.
March 14. CAPITAL
In 1883 a crowd gathered for Karl Marx’s funeral in a London cemetery — a crowd of eleven, counting the undertaker.
The most famous of his sayings became his epitaph: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.”
This prophet of global change spent his life fleeing the police and his creditors.
Regarding his masterwork, he said: “No one ever wrote so much about money while having so little. Capital will not even pay for the cigars I smoked writing it.”
March 15. VOICES IN THE NIGHT
At dawn today in the year 44 BC, Calpurnia woke up in tears.
She had dreamed her husband had been stabbed and was dying in her arms.
Calpurnia told him the dream, and still sobbing pleaded with him to remain at home, for outside only his grave awaited.
The supreme ruler, dictator for life, divine warrior, undefeated god, could not pay heed to a woman’s dream.
Julius Caesar pushed her aside and walked toward the Roman Senate, to his death.
March 16. STORYTELLERS
Around this day and others, festivals are held to celebrate people who tell tales out loud, writing in the air.
Storytellers have several divinities to inspire and support them.
One is Rafuema, the grandfather who recounted the origin of the Huitoto people in the Araracuara region of Colombia.
Rafuema told the story that the Huitotos were born from the words that told the story of their birth. And every time he told it, the Huitotos were born again.
March 17. THEY KNEW HOW TO LISTEN
Carlos and Gudrun Lenkersdorf were born and raised in Germany.
In the year 1973, these two illustrious professors arrived in Mexico. They entered the world of the Mayas in a Tojolabal community and they introduced themselves by saying, “We have come to learn.”
The Indians remained silent.
After a while, one of them explained the silence: “This is the first time anyone has told us that.”
And there they remained, Gudrun and Carlos, learning year after year.
From the Mayan language they learned that no hierarchy separates subject from object, because I drink the water that drinks me and I am watched by all that I watch. And they learned to greet people in the Maya way:
“I’m another you.”
“You’re another me.”
March 18. WITH THEIR GODS INSIDE
In the Andes, the Spanish conquistadors banished the indigenous gods and stamped out all idolatry.
But somewhere around the year 1560, the gods returned. They traveled on their long wings from who knows where, and they entered the bodies of their children from Ayacucho to Oruro, and inside those bodies they began to dance. The dances, which spelled rebellion, were punished with lash or noose, but the gods kept dancing on and on, announcing the end of all humiliation.
In the Quechua language the word ñaupa means “was,” but it also means “will be.”
March 19. BIRTH OF THE MOVIES
In 1895 the Lumière brothers, Louis and Auguste, shot a very short film of workers leaving a factory in Lyon.
That movie, the first in history, was seen by a small circle of friends and no one else.
Not until December 28 did the Lumière brothers give it a public showing, along with nine more of their shorts, which also recorded fleeting moments from real life.
In the basement of the Grand Café in Paris, that marvelous spectacle, child of the magic lantern, the wheel of life and other arts of illusionists, had its premiere.
Full house. Thirty-five people at a franc a seat.
Georges Méliès was in the audience. He wanted to buy their movie camera. Since they wouldn’t sell it to him, he had to invent his own.
March 20. THE WORLD UPSIDE DOWN
On March 20 in the year 2003, Iraq’s air force bombed the United States.
On the heels of the bombs, Iraqi troops invaded US soil.
There was collateral damage. Many civilians, most of them women and children, were killed or maimed. No one knows how many, because tradition dictates tabulating the losses suffered by invading troops and prohibits counting victims among the invaded population.
The war was inevitable. The security of Iraq and of all humanity was threatened by the weapons of mass destruction stockpiled in United States arsenals.
There was no basis, however, to the insidious rumors suggesting that Iraq intended to keep all the oil in Alaska.
March 21. THE WORLD AS IT IS
In the entire history of human butchery, World War II was the war that killed the most people. But the accounting came up short.
Many soldiers from the colonies never appeared on the lists of the dead. They were Australian aborigines, Indians, Birmanians, Filipinos, Algerians, Senegalese, Vietnamese, and so many other black, brown and yellow people obliged to die for the flags of their masters.
When they are alive, people are ranked first, second, third or fourth class. When they are dead too.