The War Of The End Of The World - Mario Vargas Llosa [8]
Since his radical ideas had made life difficult for his father in Scotland, he had settled in the South of France, where he was placed under arrest in 1868 for having helped the workers in the spinning mills of Bordeaux during a strike, and sent to Cayenne. He died there. The following year Galileo went to prison, charged with having helped set fire to a church—priests were the people he hated most, after soldiers and bankers—but in a few months he escaped and began working with a doctor in Paris who had been a friend of his father’s. It was at this time that he changed his name to Galileo Gall, since his own name was too well known by the police, and started publishing little political notes and popular-science pieces in a Lyons paper: L’Etincelle de la révolte.
One of the things he prided himself on was the fact that he had fought, from March to May of 1871, with the Communards of Paris for the freedom of humanity and had personally witnessed the genocide of thirty thousand men, women, and children at the hands of Thiers’s forces. He, too, was condemned to death, but before the execution he managed to escape from the military barracks where he had been imprisoned, dressed in the uniform of a sergeant-jailer whom he had killed. He went to Barcelona and stayed there for several years studying medicine and practicing phrenology with Mariano Cubí, a savant who boasted of being able to detect the most secret traits and inclinations of any man by running his fingertips just once across his head. Galileo Gall had apparently passed his examinations and was about to receive his medical degree when his love of freedom and progress, or his vocation as an adventurer, again impelled him to action and a life on the move. He and a handful of comrades equally addicted to the Idea attacked the Montjuich barracks one night, to unleash the storm that, they thought, would shake the foundations of Spain. But someone had informed on them and the soldiers greeted them with a hail of bullets. He saw his comrades fall fighting, one by one; when he was finally captured, he had several wounds. He was condemned to death, but since Spanish law provides that a wounded man may not be put to death by the garrote, they decided to cure him before they executed him. Friendly and influential persons helped him escape from the hospital, provided him with false papers, and put him aboard a freighter.
He had traveled through many countries, whole continents, ever faithful to the ideas of his childhood. He had palpated yellow, black, red, and white craniums and alternately engaged in political action and scientific pursuits, depending on the circumstances of the moment; throughout this life of adventures, jails, fistfights, clandestine meetings, escapes, setbacks, he scribbled notebooks that corroborated, and enriched with examples, the teachings of his masters: his father, Proudhon, Gall, Bakunin, Spurzheim, Cubí. He had been clapped in prison in Turkey, in Egypt, in the United States for attacking the social order and religion, but thanks to his lucky star and his scorn for danger he never remained behind bars for long.
In 1894 he was the medical officer on a German boat that was shipwrecked off Bahia; what was left of it remained beached forever opposite the Forte de São Pedro. It had been a mere six years since Brazil had abolished slavery and five since it had ceased to be an empire and become a republic. He was fascinated by its