August 5. THE LIAR WHO WAS BORN THRICE
In 1881, when Pinocchio was no more than two months old, he was already an idol among Italy’s children.
The book that narrated his adventures sold like candy.
Pinocchio was created by the carpenter Geppetto, who in turn was created by the writer Carlo Collodi. As soon as Geppetto made his hands, pinewood hands, the doll pulled off the carpenter’s wig and revealed his bald pate. No sooner had he made his legs than Pinocchio took off running to complain to the police.
Collodi was fed up with the shenanigans of this mischievous brat and decided to hang him. He left him swinging from a holm oak.
Soon enough, besieged by the children of all Italy, Collodi had to bring him back to life. That was his second birth.
The third birth was a few years in coming. In 1940 Walt Disney stirred up a jam of honey and tears in Hollywood and resurrected Pinocchio, miraculously made good.
August 6. GOD’S BOMB
In 1945, while this day was dawning, Hiroshima lost its life. The atomic bomb’s first appearance incinerated this city and its people in an instant.
The few survivors, mutilated sleepwalkers, wandered among the smoking ruins. The burns on their naked bodies carried the stamp of the clothing they were wearing when the explosion hit. On what remained of the walls, the atom bomb’s flash left silhouettes of what had been: a woman with her arms raised, a man, a tethered horse.
Three days later, President Harry Truman spoke about the bomb over the radio.
He said: “We thank God that it has come to us, instead of to our enemies; and we pray that He may guide us to use it in His ways and for His purposes.”
August 7. SPY ON ME
Mata Hari was born on this day in 1876.
Sumptuous beds were her battlefields in World War I. Top military and political leaders succumbed to her charms, and they confided secrets she then sold to France or Germany or whomever would pay more.
In 1917 a French military court condemned her to death.
The most beloved spy in the world blew kisses to the firing squad.
Eight of the twelve soldiers missed.
August 8. CURSED AMERICA
Today in 1553 marked the end of Girolamo Fracastoro’s life. The Italian physician and writer had researched syphilis, among other contagious diseases, and concluded that the malady did not come to Europe from the Indians of the Americas.
In our time, Moacyr Scliar, Fracastoro’s Brazilian colleague in science and letters, continued demolishing the myth of the supposed “American curse.”
Long before the conquest of the New World, the French called syphilis “the Italian disease,” and the Italians called it “the French disease.”
The Dutch and the Portuguese called it “the Spanish disease.”
It was “the Portuguese disease” for the Japanese, “the German disease” for the Polish and “the Polish disease” for the Russians.
And the Persians believed it came from the Turks.
August 9. INTERNATIONAL DAY OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLES
Rigoberta Menchú was born in Guatemala four centuries and a half after the conquest by Pedro de Alvarado, and five years after Dwight Eisenhower conquered it once more.
In 1982, when the army swept through the Mayas’ highlands, nearly all of Rigoberta’s family was wiped out. Erased from the map was the village where her umbilical cord had been buried so she would set down roots.
Ten years later, she received the Nobel Peace Prize. She declared: “I receive this prize as an homage to the Maya people, even though it arrives five hundred years late.”
The Mayas are a patient people. They have survived five centuries of butchery.
They know that time, like a spider, weaves slowly.
August 10. MANUELAS
All men. But one was a woman, Manuela Cañizares, who recruited the others and brought them to her home to conspire.
On the night of August 9, 1809, the men spent hours and hours arguing — yes, no, who knows — and could not agree on whether to proclaim Ecuador’s independence. When once more they postponed the matter for another occasion, Manuela faced them and shouted, “Cowards! Wimps! You were born to be servants!” And at dawn today the door of a new era opened.
Another Manuela, Manuela Espejo, also an early promoter of independence, was Ecuador’s first female journalist. Since such a career was not proper for ladies, she used a pseudonym to publish her audacious articles against the servile mentality that humiliated her country.
Yet another Manuela, Manuela Sáenz, will always be known as Simón Bolívar’s lover, but she was also herself: a woman who fought against the colonial power and male omnipotence and the hypocritical prudery of each.
August 11. FAMILY
As people know in black Africa and indigenous America, your family is your entire village with all its inhabitants, living or dead.
And your relatives aren’t only human.
Your family also speaks to you in the crackling of the fire,
in the murmur of running water,
in the breathing of the forest,
in the voices of the wind,
in the fury of thunder,
in the rain that kisses you
and in the birdsong that greets your footsteps.
August 12. ATHLETES MALE AND FEMALE
In 1928 the Amsterdam Olympics came to an end.
Tarzan, alias Johnny Weissmuller, was the swimming champ and Uruguay the soccer champ. For the first time the Olympic flame, alight in a tower, burned throughout the competition, from beginning to end.
These games were memorable for another novelty: women took part.
Never in the entire history of the Olympics, from Greece onward, had there been anything like it.
In ancient Greece, not only were women banned from competition, they could not even attend as spectators.
The founder of the modern Olympics, Baron de Coubertin, opposed the presence of women as long as his reign lasted: “For women, grace, home and children. For men, competitive sports.”
August 13. THE RIGHT TO BRAVERY
In 1816 the government in Buenos Aires bestowed the rank of lieutenant colonel on Juana Azurduy “in virtue of her manly efforts.”
She led the guerrillas who took Cerro Potosí from the Spaniards in the war of independence.
War was men’s business and women were not allowed to horn in, yet male officers could not help but admire “the virile courage of this woman.”
After many miles on horseback, when the war had already killed her husband and five of her six children, Juana also lost her life. She died in poverty, poor even among the poor, and was buried in a common grave.
Nearly two centuries later, the Argentine government, now led by a woman, promoted her to the rank of general, “in homage to her womanly bravery.”
August 14. THE MOSQUITO MANIAC
In 1881 Cuban physician Carlos Finlay demonstrated that yellow fever, also known as black vomit, was transmitted by a certain female mosquito. At the same time, he unveiled a vaccine that could eradicate the disease.
Carlos, known in the neighborhood as “the Mosquito Maniac,” spoke of his discovery before the Academy of Medical, Physical and Natural Sciences of Havana.