(204)
1639: Lima
Martín de Porres
The bells of Santo Domingo church ring out the death toll. By the candles’ light, bathed in icy sweat, Martín de Porres has delivered up his soul after much fighting against the Devil with the aid of Most Holy Mary and of St. Catherine, virgin and martyr. He died in his bed, with a stone for pillow and a skull at his side, while the viceroy of Lima knelt and kissed his hand and implored his intercession for a small place for him up in Heaven.
Martín de Porres was the offspring of a black slave and her master, a gentleman of pure Spanish lineage, who did not impregnate her by way of using her as an object but rather to apply the Christian principle that in bed all are equal before God.
At fifteen, Martín was given to a monastery of Dominican friars. Here he performed his works and miracles. Being a mulatto, he was never ordained as a priest; but embracing the broom with love, he swept out each day the rooms, cloisters, infirmary, and church. Razor in hand, he shaved the monastery’s two hundred priests; he nursed the sick and distributed clean clothes smelling of rosemary.
When he learned that the monastery was hard up for money, he went to see the prior: “Ave Maria.”
“Gratia plena.”
“Your Grace should sell this mulatto dog,” he offered.
He put in his bed ulcerated beggars from the street, and prayed on his knees all night long. A supernatural light made him white as snow; white flames escaped from his face when he crossed the cloister at midnight, flying like a divine meteor, heading for the solitude of his cell. He walked through padlocked doors and sometimes prayed kneeling in the air, far off the ground; angels accompanied him to the choir holding lights in their hands. Without leaving Lima he consoled captives in Algiers and saved souls in the Philippines, China, and Japan; without budging from his cell he pealed the Angelus. He cured the dying with clothes dipped in black roosters’ blood and powdered toad and with exorcisms learned from his mother. With the touch of a finger he stopped toothaches and turned open wounds into scars; he made brown sugar white and put out fires with a glance. The bishop had to forbid him to perform so many miracles without permission.
After matins he would strip and scourge his back with a whip of ox sinews tied in thick knots and cry as he drew blood: “Vile mulatto dog! How long is your sinful life to last?”
With imploring, tearful eyes always begging pardon, the first dark-skinned addition to the Catholic Church’s lily-white sanctoral calendar has passed through the world.
(216)
1639: San Miguel de Tucumán
From a Denunciation of the Bishop of Tucumán, Sent to the Inquisition Tribunal in Lima
With the sincerity and truth with which so sacred a tribunal should be addressed, I denounce the person of the Reverend Bishop of Tucumán, Don Fr. Melchor Maldonado de Saavedra, of whom I have heard things most gravely suspicious in our holy Catholic faith, which are of general currency through this whole bishopric. That in Salta, celebrating confirmations, a comely young girl came and he said to her: “Your Grace is better taken than confirmed”; and in Cordoba this last year of 1638 another came in the presence of many people and lifting his cassock he said: “Get out! I shouldn’t be confirming you from below but from on top”; and with the first one he notoriously cohabited …
(140)
1639: Potosí
Testament of a Businessman
Through the curtains pokes the nose of the notary. The bedroom smells of wax and of death. By the light of the one candle the skull can be seen beneath the dying man’s skin.
“What are you waiting for, you vulture?”
The businessman does not open his eyes but his voice sounds firm.
“My shadow and I have discussed and decided,” he says. And sighs. And orders the notary: “You are not to add or subtract anything. Hear me? I’ll pay you two hundred pesos in birds, so that with their feathers, and the ones you use to write, you can fly to hell. Are you listening? Ay! Each day I live is borrowed time. Every day it costs me more. Write, get going! Hurry up, man. I order that with a fourth part of the silver I leave, there should be built in the small square of the bridge a great latrine so that nobles and plebeians of Potosí may pay homage there every day to my memory. Another fourth part of my bullion and coins to be buried in the yard of this my house, and at the entrance to be kept four of the fiercest dogs, tied with chains and with plenty of food, to guard this interment.
His tongue does not tangle up and he continues, without taking a breath: “And with another fourth part of my wealth, that the most exquisite dishes be cooked and placed in my silver service and inserted in a deep ditch, with everything that remains in my larders, because I want the worms to gorge themselves sick as they will do with me. And I order …”
He wags his index finger, projecting a clublike shadow on the white wall: “And I order … that nobody whatever should attend my funeral, that my body be accompanied by all the asses that there are in Potosí, decked with the richest vestments and the best jewels, to be provided from the rest of my fortune.”
(21)
The Indians Say:
The land has an owner? How’s that? How is it to be sold? How is it to be bought? If it does not belong to us, well, what? We are of it. We are its children. So it is always, always. The land is alive. As it nurtures the worms, so it nurtures us. It has bones and blood. It has milk and gives us suck. It has hair, grass, straw, trees. It knows how to give birth to potatoes. It brings to birth houses. It brings to birth people. It looks after us and we look after it. It drinks chicha, accepts our invitation. We are its children. How is it to be sold? How bought?
(15 and 84)
1640: São Salvador de Bahia
Vieira
The mouth sparkles as it fires words lethal like gunfire. The most dangerous orator in Brazil is a Portuguese priest raised in Bahia, a Bahian to the soul.
The Dutch have invaded these lands, and the Jesuit Antonio Vieira asks the colonial gentry if we are not just as dark-colored to the Dutch as the Indians are to us.
From the pulpit the lord of the word rebukes the lords of the land and of the people: “Does it make me a lord that I was born farther away from the sun, and others, slaves, that they were born closer? There can be no greater departure from understanding, no greater error of judgment among men!”
In the little Ayuda church, oldest in Brazil, Antonio Vieira also accuses God, who is guilty of helping the Dutch invaders: “Although we are the sinners, my God, today it is you who must repent!”
(33, 171, and 226)
1641: Lima
Avila
He has interrogated thousands and thousands of Indians without finding one who is not a heretic. He has demolished idols and temples, has burned mummies; has shaved heads and skinned backs with the lash. At his passage, the wind of Christian faith has purified Peru.
The priest Francisco de Avila has reached seventy-five to find that his strength is failing him. He is half deaf and even his clothes hurt; and he decides not to leave the world without obtaining what he has wanted since he was a boy. So he applies to enter the Company of Jesus.
“No,” says the rector of the Jesuits, Antonio Vázquez.
“No,” because although he claims to be a learned man and great linguist, Francisco de Avila cannot conceal his condition of mestizo.
(14)
1641: Mbororé
The Missions
The mamelukes are coming from the region of San Pablo. Hunters of Indians, devourers of lands, they advance to the beat of a drum, raised flag and military order, thunder of war, wind of war, across Paraguay. They carry long ropes with collars for the Indians they will catch and sell as slaves in the plantations of Brazil.
The mamelukes or bandeirantes have for years been devastating the missions of the Jesuits. Of the thirteen missions in the Guayrá, nothing is left but stones and charcoal. New evangelical communities have arisen from the exodus, downstream on the Paran
á; but the attacks are incessant. In the missions the snake finds the birds all together and fattened up, thousands of Indians trained for work and innocence, without weapons, easy to pick off. Under the priests’ tutorship the Guaranís share a regimented life, without private property or money or death penalty, without luxury or scarcity, and march to work singing to the music of flutes. Their sugarcane arrows are futile against the arquebuses of the mamelukes, who test the blades of their swords by splitting children in half and carry off shredded cassocks and caravans of slaves as trophies.
But this time, a surprise awaits the invaders. The king of Spain, scared by the fragility of these frontiers, has ordered firearms issued to the Guaranís. The mamelukes flee in disorder.
From the houses rise plumes of smoke and songs of praise to God. The smoke, which is not from arson but from chimneys, celebrates victory.
(143)
1641: Madrid
Eternity Against History
The count-duke of Olivares gnaws his fists and mutters curses. He commands much, after twenty years of doings and undoings at court, but God has a stronger tread.
The Board of Theologians has just turned down his project of channeling the Tagus and Manzanares rivers, which would be so welcomed by the plains of Castile. The rivers will remain as God made them, and the plans of engineers Carducci and Martelli will end up in the files.
In France, it is announced that the great Languedoc canal will soon be opened, to join the Mediterranean with the Garonne Valley. Meanwhile, in this Spain that has conquered America, the Board of Theologians decides that he sins against Divine Providence who tries to improve what she, for inscrutable motives, has wished to be imperfect. If God had desired that the rivers should be navigable, he would have made them navigable.
(128)
1644: Jamestown
Opechancanough
Before an English soldier shoots him in the back, Chief Opechancanough asks himself: “Where is the invisible guardian of my footsteps? Who has stolen my shadow?”
At the age of one hundred, he has been defeated. He had come to the battlefield on a litter.
Over eighty years ago, Admiral Pedro Menéndez de Avilés took him to Cádiz. He presented him at the court of Philip II: Here is a fine Indian prince of Florida. They dressed him in breeches, doublet, and ruff. In a Dominican monastery in Seville they taught him the language and religion of Castile. Then in Mexico, the viceroy gave him his name, and Opechancanough became Luis de Velasco. Later he returned to the land of his fathers as interpreter and guide to the Jesuits. His people thought he was returning from the dead. He preached Christianity and then took off their clothes and cut the Jesuits’ throats and went back to his old name.
Since then he has killed many and seen much. He has seen villages and fields devoured by flames and his brothers sold to the highest bidder, in this region that the English baptized Virginia in memory of a spiritually virginal queen. He has seen men swallowed up by smallpox and lands devoured by enslaving tobacco. He has seen seventeen of the twenty-eight communities that were here wiped off the map and the others given a choice between diaspora and war. Thirty thousand Indians welcomed the English navigators who arrived at Chesapeake Bay one fresh morning in 1607. Three thousand survive.
(36 and 207)
1645: Quito
Mariana de Jesús
Year of catastrophes for the city. A black bow hangs on every door. The invisible armies of measles and diphtheria have invaded and are destroying. Night has closed in right after dawn and the volcano Pichincha, king of snow, has exploded: a great vomit of lava and fire has fallen on the fields, and a hurricane of ash has swept the city.
“Sinners, sinners!”
Like the volcano, Father Alonso de Rojas hurls flame from his mouth. In the gleaming pulpit of the church of the Jesuits, a church of gold, Father Alonso beats his breast, which echoes as he weeps, cries, clamors: “Accept, O Lord, the sacrifice of the humblest of Your servants! Let my blood and my flesh expiate the sins of Quito!”
Then a young woman rises at the foot of the pulpit and says serenely: “I.”
Before the people who overflow the church, Mariana announces that she is the chosen one. She will calm the wrath of God. She will take all the castigations that her city deserves.
Mariana has never played at being happy, nor dreamed that she was, nor ever slept for more than four hours. The only time a man ever brushed her hand, she was ill with a fever for a week after. As a child she decided to be the bride of God and gave Him her love, not in the convent but in the streets and fields: not embroidering or making sweets and jellies in the peace of the cloisters, but praying with her knees on thorns and stones and seeking bread for the poor, remedy for the sick, and light for those in the darkness of ignorance of divine law.
Sometimes Mariana feels called by the patter of rain or the crackle of fire, but always the thunder of God sounds louder: that God of anger with beard of serpents and eyes of lightning, who appears nude in her dreams to test her.
Mariana returns home, stretches out on her bed, and readies herself to die in place of all. She pays for God’s forgiveness. She offers her body for Him to eat and her blood and her tears for Him to drink until he gets dizzy and forgets.
That way the plague will cease, the volcano will calm down, and the earth will stop trembling.
(176)
1645: Potosí
Story of Estefanía, Sinful Woman of Potosí (Abbreviation of Chronicle by Bartolomé Arzáns de Orsúa y Vela)
Estefanía was born in this imperial Town and grew up in beauty beyond the power of nature to enhance.
At fourteen, the lovely damsel left home, advised by other lost women; and her mother, seeing the abominable determination with which this daughter broke away, gave up the ghost within a few days.
This did not cause the daughter to mend her ways. Having already lost the priceless treasure of virginity, she dressed profanely and became a public and scandalous sinner.
Seeing so much discredit and ill fame, her brother called her to his house and said: “Hurt you as it may, you must hear me. While you continue in mortal sin you are an enemy of God and a slave of the Devil, and furthermore you debase your nobility and dishonor all your lineage. Consider, sister, what you are doing, get out of that muck, fear God, and do penance.” To which Estefanía replied: “What do you want of me, you bloody hypocrite?” And while the brother reproved her, she seized in a flash the dagger that hung on the wall and set on him with diabolical ferocity, saying: “This is the only answer your arguments deserve.” She left him dead in a lake of blood and afterward disguised that misdeed by a pretense of sentiment, dressing herself in mourning and making much of her grief.
Also her aged father, sorrowing for the death of the good son and the scandal of the bad daughter, succeeded in confronting her with good arguments, to which the heartless girl listened against her will. Instead of mending her ways, she ended up loathing the venerable gentleman and at midnight she set fire to the roof of his house. The anguished old man sprang from his bed shouting at the top of his voice: “Fire, fire!” But the beams supporting the roof collapsed, and there and then the terrible element consumed him.
Seeing herself free, Estefanía gave herself with more wantonness to greater vices and sins.
In those days there came to Potosí a man of the realms of Spain, one of the most opulent merchants who came in those galleons to Peru, and the beauty and grace of that public sinner came to his attention. He solicited her, and when they were most enjoying their obscenities a former lover of the lady, armed with every weapon and with two thirsty pistols, turned up determined to avenge the affront.
The former lover found the woman alone, but she restrained his angry spirit with deceitful words, and when she had mitigated his fury she took a knife from her sleeve with great promptness and the wretch fell to the ground dead.
Estefanía mentioned the event to the rich merchant. After some months, being much tormented by
jealousy, he threatened to bring her to justice for the homicide. In those days they went together to bathe in Tarapaya Lake. She threw off her rich clothing, revealing the snow of her body dotted with loveliest crimson, and threw herself naked into the water. The carefree merchant followed her, and when they were together in the middle of the lake, she pushed the luckless man’s head into the water with all the strength of her arms.
Let it not be thought that her abominations stopped there. With one blow of a sword she ended the life of a gentleman of illustrious blood; and she killed two others with poison she inserted in a lunch. Her intrigues ended the days of others with sword-thrusts in the breast, while Estefanía remained full of joy that blood should be shed on her account.
So it went up to the year 1645, when the sinful woman heard a sermon by Father Francisco Patiño, a servant of God whose admirable virtues Potosí was enjoying at the time, and God came to her aid with a ray of his divine grace. And so great was Estefanía’s sorrow that she began to weep streams of tears, with great sighs and sobs that seemed to tear out her soul, and when the sermon ended she threw herself at the priest’s feet pleading for confession.
The priest exhorted her to penitence and absolved her, it being well known with what felicity women surrender themselves into the serpent’s hands, due to flaws inherited from her who tempted Adam. Estefanía rose from the confessor’s feet like another Magdalene and when she was on her way home—oh, happy sinner!— she earned the appearance of Most Holy Mary, who said to her: “Daughter, thou art forgiven. I have pleaded for you to my Son, because in your childhood you prayed with my rosary.”