Mirrors by Eduardo Galeano Read Free Book Online Page B

empty. He who fails to dominate his peasants only augments their vileness.

FOUNT OF THE FOUNTAIN

    Peasants did not tire of displeasing their lords.
    The fountain of the city of Mainz offers artistic testimony to that fact.
    “Don’t miss it,” the tourist guides insist. This German renaissance treasure, displayed in all its golden splendor in the market square, is the symbol of the city and the hub of its celebrations.
    It was born of a celebration: the fountain, crowned by the Virgin and child, was a gift from the archbishop of Brandenburg to give thanks to heaven for the victory of the princes.
    Desperate peasants had stormed the castles whose opulence they had paid for with their sweat, a multitude of pitchforks and hoes defying the power of cannon, spears, and swords.
    Thousands of men hanged or beheaded gave mute testimony to the reestablishment of order. The fountain as well.

PLAGUES

    In the medieval division of labor, priests prayed, knights killed, and peasants fed all and sundry. In times of famine, peasants abandoned ruined crops and fruitless harvests, too much rain or none at all, and took to the road, fighting over carcasses and roots. And when their skin turned yellow and their eyes bugged out, they took to assaulting castles or convents.
    In normal times, the peasants worked and, moreover, they sinned. When plagues occurred, the peasants caught the blame. Misfortune did not strike because the priests prayed poorly, but because their faithful were unfaithful.
    From the pulpits, God’s functionaries cursed them:
    “Slaves to the flesh! You deserve divine punishment!”
    Between 1348 and 1351, divine punishment liquidated one out of every four Europeans. The plague razed fields and cities, did in sinners and virtuous alike.
    According to Boccaccio, the Florentines had breakfast with their relatives and supper with their ancestors.

WOMEN AGAINST THE PLAGUE

    Because the land was offended, the plague spread across Russia, annihilating animals and humans. Men had forgotten to bring offerings in gratitude for the last harvest, or they had wounded the pregnant land by driving shovels or posts into it while it slept under the snow.
    Then women enacted a ritual passed down from the dark night of time. The earth, origin and destiny of all who live upon it, received her daughters, fecund like her, and not a single man dared show his face.
    A woman yoked herself to the plow, oxlike, and set off to make the furrow. Others followed, sowing seeds. All walked naked, barefoot, their hair down. They banged pots and pans and laughed great big belly laughs, scaring off fear and cold and the plague.

CURSED WATER

    We know Nostradamus from his predictions, which are still hot tickets all over the world.
    We may not know that Nostradamus was also a physician, an extraordinary one who did not believe in leeches. For the plague he prescribed air and water: ventilating air, cleansing water.
    Though filth incubated disease, water had a bad reputation in Christian Europe. Except in baptism, bathing was avoided because it felt good and invited sin. In the tribunals of the Holy Inquisition, frequent bathing was proof of Mohammedan heresy. When Christianity was imposed on Spain as the only truth, the crown ordered the many public baths left by the Muslims razed, because they were sources of perdition.
    Not a single saint, male or female, ever set foot in a bath, and kings rarely bathed since that’s what perfume was for. Queen Isabella of Castile had a soul that was sparkling clean, but historians debate whether she bathed two or three times in her entire life. The elegant Sun King of France, the first man to wear high heels, bathed only once between 1647 and 1711. And that time it was on doctor’s orders.

SAINTS OF THE MIDDLE AGES PRACTICED MEDICINE ON AN INDUSTRIAL SCALE

    According to contemporary testimony, Saint Dominic of Silos “opened the closed eyes of the blind, cleansed the filthy bodies of lepers, afforded the sick