Children of the Days by Eduardo Galeano Read Free Book Online Page A

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
I NTERNATIONAL D AY OF I NDIGENOUS P EOPLES
    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
M ANUELAS
    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
F AMILY
    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
A THLETES M ALE AND F EMALE
    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
T HE R IGHT TO B RAVERY
    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