Children of the Days by Eduardo Galeano Page A

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,
    â€œI’m cold,”
    â€œI’m hungry,”
    â€œDon’t leave me alone.”

November 26
L AURA AND P AUL
    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.

November 27
W HEN THE W ATERS OF R IO DE J ANEIRO B URNED
    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.

November 28
T HE M AN W HO T AUGHT BY L EARNING
    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.

November 30
A D ATE IN P ARADISE
    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.

 
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DECEMBER
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December 1
F AREWELL TO A RMS
    Costa Rica’s president Don Pepe Figueres once