December 21
THE JOY OF SAYING
This day could be any other day.
No days in Enheduanna’s life are known.
A few facts are: Enheduanna lived four thousand three hundred years ago in the kingdom where writing was invented, now called Iraq,
and she was the first woman writer, the first woman who signed her words,
also the first woman who wrote laws,
and an astronomer, a sage of the stars,
that she suffered exile,
and in writing she sang to the moon goddess Inanna, her protector, and she celebrated the joy of writing, which is a fiesta:
like giving birth,
creating life,
conceiving the world.
December 22
THE JOY OF FLYING
Some people maintain the Wright brothers invented the airplane around this time in 1903, but others insist it happened a couple of years later and Santos-Dumont was the creator of the first machine worthy of that name.
The only thing absolutely certain is that three hundred and fifty million years earlier, a pair of tiny flaps sprouted from the body of a dragonfly’s ancestor, and those flaps became wings that grew longer and longer over the next few million years, urged on by the desire to fly.
Dragonflies were the first to travel by air.
December 23
RESURRECTIONS
In 1773 the earth trembled from hunger and over the course of a few days it devoured the city now called Antigua, which for more than two centuries had ruled Guatemala and the entire region of Central America.
In religious festivals Antigua rises from its ruins. Its streets become carpets of flowers patterned as suns and fruits and birds of great plumage. No one can tell whether the feet walking on them are celebrating the coming birth of Jesus or the rebirth of the city.
Local people weave these street gardens—patient hands, petal by petal, leaf by leaf—to make Antigua immortal as long as the fiesta lasts.
December 24
A MIRACLE!
On Christmas Eve in 1991 the Soviet Union passed away, and in the manger Russian capitalism was born.
The new faith worked a miracle: transfigured apparatchiks turned into businessmen, Communist Party leaders changed religion and became brazen nouveaux riches who put a “for sale” sign on the state and bought everything buyable in their country and the world for the price of bananas.
Not even soccer clubs escaped.
December 25
VOYAGE OF THE SUN
Jesus could not celebrate his birthday because he had no birthday.
In the year 354 the Christians of Rome decided that he had been born on December 25.
That was the day the pagans of the north of the world celebrated the passing of the longest night of the year and the arrival of the sun god, who came to end the darkness.
The sun god came to Rome from Persia.
He had been called Mitra.
Then he was called Jesus.
December 26
VOYAGE TO THE SEA
In times gone by the sons of the sun and the daughters of the moon lived together in the African kingdom of Dahomey.
Together they cuddled and squabbled until the gods separated them and condemned them to live far apart.
Ever since, the sons of the sun are fish in the sea and the daughters of the moon are stars in the night.
Starfish do not fall from the sky: they travel from there. And in the waters they seek out their lost lovers.
December 27
THE TRAVELER
Matsuo Bashō was born to be a samurai, but he renounced war and became a poet. A wandering poet.
A month after his death, back in 1694 more or less, the roads of Japan longed for the footsteps of his straw sandals and the words he left hanging from the roofs of the homes that took him in. Like these:
Days and months are travelers of eternity.
Thus pass the years.
Those who navigate the sea or ride horses across the land are forever traveling, until they succumb under the weight of time.
Many are the men of old who died along the way.
I have only succumbed to the temptation of clouds, the vagabonds of the sky.
December 28
NOSTALGIA FOR THE FUTURE
Oscar Niemeyer began the year 2007 with one hundred years under his belt and eight buildings under construction.
The liveliest of all architects had not tired of transforming, project by project, the skyline of the world.
His aged eyes were not fixed on the high heavens that humiliate us; they gazed freshly, happily at the drifting clouds, his source of inspiration for the next creation.
In the clouds he discovered cathedrals, gardens of incredible flowers, monsters, galloping horses, birds with many wings, exploding seas, flying foam and undulating women who offered themselves in the wind and with the wind flew off.
Every time doctors put him in the hospital, believing his time had arrived, Oscar killed his boredom composing sambas and singing them with the nurses.
And that is how this cloud hunter, this pursuer of fugitive beauty, left his first century of life behind and kept right on going.
December 29
THE ROAD IS DESTINY
The drinking was copious when we bid good-bye to the departing year, and I got lost in the streets of Cádiz.
I asked how I could get to the market. An old man peeled his back off the wall and very grudgingly replied, pointing nowhere: “You do whatever the street tells you.”
The street told me and I made it home.
A few thousand years before, Noah navigated without compass or sails or even a rudder.
His ark drifted wherever the wind bade him, and he was saved from the flood.
December 30
WE ARE MADE OF MUSIC
When I cock my ear
I hear tunes that come from far away,
from the past,
from other times,
from hours that are no longer
and from lives that are no longer.
Perhaps our lives
are made of music.
On the day of resurrection,
my eyes will open again in Seville.
—Boabdil, the last king of Muslim Spain
December 31
VOYAGE OF THE WORD
In Rome in the year 208, Quintus Serenus Sammonicus wrote Liber medecinalis, a book in which he revealed his discoveries in the arts of healing.
Among other remedies, this physician to two emperors, poet and owner of the best library of his time, proposed an infallible way to avoid tertian fever and keep death at bay: by hanging a word across your chest day and night.
The word was “Abracadabra,” which in ancient Hebrew meant and still means, “Give your fire until the last of your days.”
Contents
January
1: Today
2: From Fire to Fire
3: Memory on Legs
4: Land That Attracts
5: Land That Speaks
6: Land That Awaits
7: The Granddaughter
8: I Will Not Say Good-bye
9: Elegy to Brevity
10: Distances
11: The Pleasure of Going
12: The Rush to Get There
13: Earth That Bellows
14: The Haitian Curse
15: The Shoe
16: The Wet Law
17: The Man Who Executed God
18: Holy Water
19: With Him Was Born an Era
20: Sacred Serpent
21: They Walked on Water
22: A Kingdom Moves
23: Civilizing Mother
24: Civilizing Father
25: The Right to Roguery
26: The Second Founding of Bolivia
27: Open Your Ears
28: Open Your Mind
29: Humbly I Speak
30: The Catapult
31: We Are Made of Wind
February
1: An Admiral Torn to Pieces
2: The Goddess Is Celebrating
3: Carnival Takes Wing
4: The Threat
5: In Two Voices
6: The Wail
7: The Eighth Bolt
8: General Smooch
9: Marble That Breathes
10: A Victory for Civilization
11: No
12: World Breastfeeding Day
13: The Danger of Playing
14: Stolen Children
15: More Stolen Children
16: The Condor Plan
17: The Celebration That Was Not
18: Bereft of Him
19: Perhaps This Is How Horacio Quiroga Would Have Written About His Own Death
20: World Day of Social Justice
21: The World Shrinks
22: Silence
23: The Book of Marvels
24: A Lesson in Realism
25: Night of the Kuna
26: My Africa
27: Even Banks Are Mortal
28: When
29: Not Gone with the Wind
March
1: Was
2: Whistling, I Speak
3: The Founding Mothers of Brazil
4: The Saudi Miracle
5: Divorce as Good Hygiene
6: The Florist
7: The Witches
8: Homages
9: The Day Mexico Invaded the United States
10: The Devil Played the Violin
11: The Left Is the University of the Right
12: Sleep Knows More Than Wakefulness
13: A Clear Conscience
14: Capital
15: Voices in the Night
16: Storytellers
17: They Knew How to Listen
18: With Their Gods Inside
19: Birth of the Movies
20: The World Upside Down
21: The World as It Is
22: World Water Day
23: Why We Massacred the Indians
24: Why We Disappeared the Disappeared
25: The Annunciation
26: Maya Liberators
27: World Theater Day
28: Manufacturing Africa
29: The Jungle Was Here
30: International Domestic Workers Day in Latin America
31: This Flea
April
1: The First Bishop
2: Manufacturing Public Opinion
3: Good Guys
4: The Ghost
5: Day of Light
6: Night Crossing
7: The Doctor’s Bill
8: The Man Who Was Born Many Times
9: Good Health
10: Manufacturing Disease
11: Opinion Makers
12: Manufacturing the Guilty Party
13: We Knew Not How to See You
14: Grand or Just Plain Big?
15: The Black Paintings
16: The Flamenco Song
17: Caruso Sang and Ran
18: Keep an Eye on This Guy
19: Children of the Clouds
20: Manufacturing Mistakes
21: The Indignant One
22: Earth Day
23: Fame Is Baloney
24: The Perils of Publishing
25: Don’t Save Me, Please
26: Nothing Happened Here
27: Life’s Twists and Turns
28: This Insecure World
29: She Doesn’t Forget
30: Memory’s Circles
May
1: International Workers’ Day
2: Operation Geronimo
3: Dishonor
4: While the Night Lasts
5: By Singing I Rebuke
6: Apparitions
7: The Party Poopers
8: The Tasmanian Devil
9: Born to Find Him
10: The Unforgivable
11: Mr. Everything
12: Living Seismographs
13: To Sing, to See
14: Someone Else’s Debt
15: May Tomorrow Be More Than Just Another Name for Today
16: Off to the Loony Bin
17: Home
18: Memory’s Voyage
19: The Prophet Mark
20: A Rare Act of Sanity
21: World Day for Cultural Diversity
22: Tintin Among the Savages
23: Manufacturing Power
24: The Heretics and the Saint
25: Heresies
26: Sherlock Holmes Died Twice
27: Beloved Vagabond
28: Oświęcim
29: Vampires
30: From the Stake to the Altar
31: The Incombustible Lady
June
1: Saintly Men
2: Indians Are Persons
3: Atahualpa’s Revenge
4: Memory of the Future
5: Nature Is Not Mute
6: The Mountains That Were
7: The Poet King
8: Sacrilege
9: Sacrilegious Women
10: And a Century Later
11: The Man Who Sold the Eiffel Tower
12: The Mystery Explained
13: Collateral Damage
14: Flag as Disguise
15: A Woman Talks
16: I’ve Got Something to Tell You
17: Tomasa Didn’t Pay
18: Susan Didn’t Pay Either
19: Danger: Bicycles!
20: That Shortcoming
21: We Are All You
22: The World’s Waist
23: Fires
24: The Sun
25: The Moon
26: The Kingdom of Fear
27: We Are All Guilty
28: Hell
29: The Great Heretofore
30: A Nuisance Is Born
July
1: One Terrorist Fewer
2: Olympic Prehistory
3: The Stone in the Hole
4: The Southern Cross
5: The Right to Laugh
6: Fool Me
7: Fridamania
8: Leader for Life
9: The Suns the Night Hides
10: Manufacturing Novels
11: Manufacturing Tears
12: Consecration of the Top Scorer
13: The Goal of the Century
14: The Losers’ Trunk
15: An Exorcism
16: My Dear Enemy
17: International Justice Day
18: History Is a Roll of the Dice
19: The First Tourist on Rio’s Beaches
20: The Interloper
21: The Other Astronaut
22: The Other Moon
23: Twins
24: Sinners Be Damned
25: Recipe for Spreading the Plague
26: It’s Raining Cats
27: The Locomotive from Prague
29: We Want a Different Time
30: International Friendship Day
31: Time Foretold
August
1: Our Mother Who Art in Earth
2: Champ
3: The Beloveds
4: Clothing Tells the Tale
5: The Liar Who Was Born Thrice
6: God’s Bomb
7: Spy On Me
8: Cursed America
9: International Day of Indigenous Peoples
10: Manuelas
11: Family
12: Athletes Male and Female
13: The Right to Bravery
14: The Mosquito Maniac
15: The Jewel and the Crown
16: Suicide Seeds
17: Dangerous Woman
18: The Network of Networks
19: War on the Chessboard
20: Heaven’s Workforce
21: The Division of Labor
22: The Best Workers
23: The Impossible Country
24: It Was the Day of the Roman
God of Fire
25: The Imprisoned City Is Rescued
26: Purity of the Faith
27: Purity of the Race
28: “I Have a Dream”
29: Colored Man
30: Day of the Disappeared
31: Heroes
September
1: Traitors
2: The Inventor of Preemptive War
3: Thankful People
4: I Give My Word
5: Fight Poverty: Kill Somebody Poor
6: The International Community
7: The Visitor
8: International Literacy Day
9: Statues
10: The First Land Reform in America
11: A Day Against Terrorism
12: Living Words
13: The Armchair Traveler
14: Independence as Prophylactic
15: Adopt a Banker!
16: Costume Ball
17: Mexico’s Women Liberators
18: The First Female Doctor
19: The First Female Admiral
20: Female Champions
21: Prophet of Himself
22: Car-free Day
23: Seafaring
24: The Inventor Magician
25: The Inquisitive Sage
26: What Was the World Like When It Was Beginning to Be the World?
27: Solemn Funeral
28: Recipe for Reassuring Readers
29: A Dangerous Precedent
30: International Translation Day
October
1: Emptied Island
2: This World Enamored of Death
3: Curling the Curl
4: World Animal Day
5: Columbus’s Final Voyage
6: Cortés’s Final Voyages
7: Pizarro’s Final Voyages
8: These Three
9: I Saw Him Seeing Me
10: The Godfather
11: The Lady Who Crossed Three Centuries
12: The Discovery
13: Robots with Wings
14: A Defeat for Civilization
15: Born from Corn
16: He Believed Justice Was Just
17: Silent Wars
18: Women Are Persons
19: Invisible
20: The Prophet Yale
21: Thou Shalt Blow One Another Up
22: International Day of Natural Medicine
23: To Sing
24: To See
25: A Stubborn Man
26: War for Drugs
27: War Against Drugs
28: Simón’s Folly
29: Good-hearted Man
30: The Martians Are Coming!