Inflation
He’d been skinny all his life, but in death he was a blimp.
To get the lid of the casket nailed down, the entire extended family had to sit on it. A diversity of opinions emerged regarding his sudden spread.
“Death makes you swell.”
“It’s the carbonic gas.”
“It’s his rotten moods.”
“It’s his soul,” sobbed the widow. “His soul is trying to get out of that suit.”
The suit, an English tweed, was the only luxury the dead man had ever allowed himself. When owls were hovering near and the end was in sight, he had it made to measure, so at least he could clothe his death in something.
He left no inheritance. Nothing. The family had always lived in poverty and detected no change.
Many years later, Nicola Di Sàbato attended her uncle’s exhumation.
Not much was left of the body, just bones and the suit in tatters.
The suit was stuffed full of money.
The bills, many thousands of them, were by then worthless.
The Exemplary Candidate
He did not cry when evoking his underprivileged childhood. He did not kiss babies or sign autographs or have his picture taken alongside invalids. He did not promise a thing. He did not inflict interminable speeches on the voters. He made no proposals from the left or the right or the center. He couldn’t be bribed; he turned up his nose at money, although bouquets of flowers made him smack his lips loudly.
In the 1996 elections, he topped all polls. He was the leading candidate for mayor in the town of Pilar, and his fame spread across Brazil’s Northeast. Tired of politicians who lie even when they tell the truth, people trusted this young even-toed ungulate bovine, commonly known as a goat, who was white with a beard to match. At rallies, Federico danced on his hind legs and frolicked persuasively to the beat of the band that accompanied him on his campaign stops.
On the eve of certain victory, he was found dead, his beard red with dried blood. Poisoned.
The Ballot and the Bullet
It was 1916, an election year in Argentina.
In the town of Campana, people voted at the back of the general store.
José Gelman, a carpenter by profession, was the first to arrive. He was going to vote for the first time in his life, and his breast swelled with civic pride. That morning this immigrant, who had come from the other side of the world, who had never known anything but the despotism of military rule in Ukraine, was about to join the democratic process.
When José went to place his vote in the ballot box, a vote for the Radical Party, a hoarse growl stayed his hand. “You picked from the wrong pile,” the voice warned.
Through the window grate he spied the barrel of a shotgun. The barrel gestured toward the correct one, the pile of ballots for the Conservative Party.
The Price of Democracy
Doris Haddock, a retired worker, walked from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C. A tortoise crossed the United States from coast to coast.
She set out to decry the selling of democracy to the millionaires who finance political campaigns, and she gave speeches all along the way.
She’d been on the march for over a year, fried by the sun, frozen by the cold, blown by the wind, when she got stopped by the snow. An enormous snowfall covered the state of Virginia.
Doris celebrated her birthday in the town of Cumberland. Ninety candles. And she pressed on by ski.
For the entire last month, she skied through the snow.
She reached Washington for the birth of the twenty-first century. A large crowd accompanied her to the Capitol, workplace of the hired hands who sell their legislative services to the highest corporate bidder.
On the steps of Congress, Doris made a laconic address. Pointing at the Capitol doorway, she said, “This is turning into a bawdy house.”
And she walked away.
Civilization and Barbarism
While the gods sleep, or pretend to, people walk. It is market day in this town hidden on the outskirts of Totonicapàn, and there is a lot of coming and going. From other villages, women carrying bundles arrive by verdant pathways. Like teeth seeking a mouth, they meet up in this market today, tomorrow in another, and they catch up on everything by chatting leisurely as they sell one thing at a time.
An old woman spreads her cloth on the ground and lays out her wares: copal incense, anil and cochineal dyes, a few very hot chiles, herbs for cooking, a bowl of wild honey, a rag doll, a doll made of painted clay, belts, laces, sashes, necklaces made of seeds, combs made of bone, little mirrors. .
A tourist, new to Guatemala, wants to buy it all.
Since she does not understand, the tourist says it with his hands: everything. She shakes her head. He insists, “Tell me what you want, and I’ll tell you what I’ll pay.” And he repeats, “I’ll buy everything.” His voice grows louder. He yells. She, a seated statue, remains silent.
The tourist, fed up, storms off. He thinks, “This country is never going anywhere.”
She watches him go. She thinks, “My things don’t want to go with you.”
The World Market
Trees the color of cinnamon, fruit of gold.
Mahogany hands wrap white seeds inside large green leaves.
The seeds ferment in the sun. Later, unwrapped and in the open, the sun dries them and slowly paints them copper.
Then, cacao begins its voyage across the blue sea.
Between the hands that grow it and the mouths that eat it, cacao is processed in factories owned by Cadbury, Mars, Nestle, or Hershey and is sold in the supermarkets of the world. For every dollar in the cash register, three and a half cents go to the villages from which cacao comes.
A journalist from Toronto, Richard Swift, was in one of those villages in the mountains of Ghana.
He visited the plantations.
When he sat down to rest, he pulled a few chocolate bars from his pack. Before he could take a bite, he was surrounded by curious children.
Here was something they had never tasted. They loved it.
The Global Government
At the dusk of the twentieth century and of his own life, Julius Nyerere spoke with the international community. That is to say, he got an audience with the big shots at the World Bank in Washington.
Nyerere became Tanzania’s first president following a long struggle against the colonial power, and he believed in independence and wanted it to be much more than a salute to the flag.
“How come you failed?” the top international experts asked him.
Nyerere answered, “We took over a country with eighty-five percent of its adult population illiterate. The British ruled us for forty-three years. When they left, there were two trained engineers and twelve doctors. This is the country we inherited. When I stepped down, there was ninety-one percent literacy and nearly every child was in school. We trained thousands of engineers and doctors and teachers. For the last ten years, Tanzania has been signing on the dotted line and doing everything the IMF and the World Bank wanted. Enrollment in school has plummeted to sixty-three percent, and conditions in health and other social services have deteriorated.”
And Julius Nyerere returned the question: “How come you failed?”