Free Children of the Days by Eduardo Galeano Page B

on a ship to Mexico, where he took up residence beside his mother in the church of San Francisco in Texcoco. From there, he moved on to another church to lie beside the last of his children, where he remained until the viceroy ordered him transferred in secret to the Hospital de Jesús out of reach of the Mexican patriots dying to ravage his tomb.
    The key to the crypt went from hand to hand, priest to priest, for more than a century and a half, until not long ago forensic specialists confirmed that those awful teeth and syphilis-pocked bones were indeed what remained of the body of the conquistador of Mexico.
    Of his soul, no one knows. They say Cortés had it consigned to a soul-keeper from Usumacinta, an Indian named Tomás, who caught souls fleeing on the final breath and kept them in a collection of little jars, but that could never be confirmed.

October 7
P IZARRO’S F INAL V OYAGES
    The scientists who identified Hernán Cortés also confirmed that Francisco Pizarro resides in Lima. His is that pile of bones pierced by stakes and chipped by blows that tourists flock to.
    Pizarro, a pig farmer in Spain and a marquis in America, was assassinated in 1541 by his fellow conquistadors when they fought heroically over the Incas’ imperial booty.
    He was quietly buried in the cathedral’s front yard.
    Four years later, they let him inside. He found a spot under the main altar until an earthquake hit and he went missing.
    He remained missing for a long time.
    In 1891 a crowd of admirers gawked at his mummy in a glass urn, though it quickly came out that the mummy was an impostor.
    In 1977 workers repairing the cathedral crypt came upon a skull that once upon a time was said to belong to the hero. Seven years later a body came to join the skull, and Pizarro, complete at last, was moved with great pomp and ceremony to one of the cathedral’s shining chapels.
    Ever since, he has been on exhibit in Lima, the city he founded.

October 8
T HESE T HREE
    In 1967 seventeen hundred soldiers cornered Che Guevara and his handful of Bolivian guerrillas in a ravine called Quebrada del Yuro. Che was taken prisoner and murdered the following day.
    In 1919 Emiliano Zapata was shot down in Mexico.
    In 1934 Augusto César Sandino was slain in Nicaragua.
    These three were the same age, about to turn forty.
    These three Latin Americans of the twentieth century shared the same map and the same era.
    And these three were punished for trying to make history instead of repeating it.

October 10
T HE G ODFATHER
    My Sicilian friends tell me that Don Genco Russo, capo dei capi of the Mafia, arrived at the appointment a deliberate two and a half hours late.
    In Palermo, in the Hotel Sole, Frank Sinatra waited.
    On this midday in 1963, Hollywood’s idol paid homage to the monarch of Sicily: Sinatra kneeled before Don Genco and kissed his right hand.
    Throughout the world Sinatra was The Voice, but in the land of his ancestors more important than voice was silence.
    Garlic, symbol of silence, is one of four sacred foods at the Mafia’s table. The others are bread, symbolizing union; salt, emblem of courage; and wine, which is blood.

October 11
T HE L ADY W HO C ROSSED T HREE C ENTURIES
    Alice was born a slave in 1686 and remained a slave throughout her one hundred and sixteen years of life.
    When she died in 1802, with her died a good part of the memory of Africans in America. Alice did not know how to read or write, but she was filled to the brim with voices that told and retold legends from far away and events lived nearby. Some of those stories came from the slaves she helped to escape.
    At the age of ninety, she went blind.
    At one hundred and two, she recovered her sight. “It was God,” she said. “He wouldn’t let me down.”
    They called her Alice of Dunks Ferry. Serving her master, she collected tolls on the ferry that carried passengers back and forth across the Delaware River.
    When the