Ricardo Palma and Nineteenth–Century Peru
The milieu of Ricardo Palma’s childhood and adolescence prepared him well for the role of chronicler of the past. The son of a local merchant of Lima, Palma was born on February 7, 1833, and named Manuel Palma (he began using Ricardo at age 15). At the time, Lima was a city more colonial than republican in appearance and custom; everywhere the young Palma turned, he was faced with buildings, characters, and stories that echoed the republic’s recent colonial past. “Nothing changed in my homeland” Palma wrote about the first half of the nineteenth century, “except the form of address: ‘his excellency señor viceroy’ was substituted with ‘his excellency señor president.”9In the Lima of his childhood, Palma came into contact with notable characters of the City of Kings10during its ancien regime: Pancho Sales, an old black basketweaver who had once been an executioner employed by viceroys, and who continued to uncover his head when he spoke of “our master the king”; María Abascal, a beautiful woman named after Viceroy Abascal (and rumored to have been his illegitimate daughter) who became the mistress of the patriot hero Bernardo Monteagudo during the Wars of Independence; and Juanita Breña, also known as Juana la Marimacho, a butcher in the central plaza who had once been one of the viceregal capital’s most famous bullfighters.11Moreover, Palma’s fond memories of the stories he heard in his childhood would shape the colloquial intonations of the traditions he wrote later in life. In several of his writings, he refers to elderly ladies (sometimes Aunt Catita, other times Granny) who entertained him and other neighborhood children with “a thousand and one rumors, stories, histories, legends, and miracles, in which the viceroyalty, religion, and superstition combined into the most captivating image of the past that a child could have.”12
Palma once wrote that in his adolescence he was a militant romantic, “one of those poets who would light his cigarette with a star from the night sky.”13His ubiquity in bohemian, romantic circles capped his rise from a modest home and small schools to the city’s most important educational institution. It also paralleled the strengthening of the Peruvian state at midcentury under General Ramón Castilla (president 1844–1851 and 1854–1862), whose rise to power coincided with the beginning of a large influx of money into state coffers through the guano trade. During Castilla’s first term in office, the 16–year–old Palma ascended to center stage in the social and cultural life of Lima by entering the Convictorio de San Carlos, the city’s most prestigious educational institution. Founded in the eighteenth century and ruled by European models of instruction, the patrician school was often at the center of the city’s political life: The president and his magistrates would attend and participate in the school’s examinations, and invite distinguished students to the presidential palace and other public functions.14In this privileged setting, Palma made friendships and alliances that would last a lifetime, and that partially explain some of his later political activities.
Between 1848 and 1860, Palma and his friends gathered to discuss literature, published their writing in newspapers, and staged their extravagant plays on exotic and Peruvian themes. One of their defining characteristics was their irreverence and satirical bent, which was made manifest in their witty critiques of politicians and literary figures. A popular sonnet of the day that Palma cites as a representative example of their biting discourse ends this way: “If a Brutus saved Rome, why in hell can’t so many brutes save this country?”15In this period, Palma published his first poems in the newspaper El Comercio, founded a satirical newspaper with his friends, authored three plays that he later disowned (La Hermana del Verdugo, La Muerte o la Libertad, and Rodil), and wrote a romantic story, “Consolation,” that he later chose to include in his last collection of traditions. In 1853, the 20–year–old Palma joined the navy, in which he served for six years, all the while remaining current with Lima’s literary scene and publishing poetry and prose. The Castilla regime had become unsteady and Palma was about to enter into the center of revolutionary and political currents that would shape his life for over a decade and ultimately lead to a deep disenchantment with politics. “Where two Peruvians come together there is civil war,” he once wrote to his Mexican friend Vicente Riva Palacio, “and where three or more gather there is anarchy.”16
Since Palma found himself deeply involved in the political life of his country between 1860 and 1872, a brief introduction to Peruvian history is in order. Like other Latin American nations in the nineteenth century, Peru began its republican life under the damaging influence of economic depression and a succession of military caudillos and civil wars. In the decades that followed independence, Peru was less a nation than a aggregate of regional interests centered around the power of the estancieros (the owners of large landed estates) and their military protectors, the caudillos, who in turn were networked under the authority of a caudillo president.17The absence of a ruling class capable of taking the reins of power after independence resulted in the preeminence of the military as arbiter of the presidency and national politics until the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Between the end of Simón Bolívar’s dictatorship in 1825 and when General Ramón Castilla came to power in 1845, Peru endured over a dozen different shifts in presidential control, most of them violent, and an occupation by Bolivia that was finally ended with the military intervention of Chile.
The pacification imposed by General Ramón Castilla beginning in 1845 enabled some modernization in political administration, education, and culture. The nation’s first budget was presented to the congress in 1845, a state accounting agency and statistics bureau was established, national measures were taken to improve education, the railroad arrived, and a Bureau of Public Works went to work in Lima, paving streets, building promenades, and erecting monuments.18Most importantly however, the state began to take advantage of the rich deposits of guano on the islands off the coast of Peru. The great demand for this fertilizing agent in Europe inaugurated a 40–year period in which the national economy was predicated entirely on this product. Despite the large amounts of capital that guano introduced into Peru, the use of a consignment system that worked through foreign firms for the sale of the product was inefficient and wasteful.19Worst of all, the false confidence created by guano resulted in expenditures that were larger than the income it generated, and ultimately weakened the economy.20
In 1856, a liberal congress enacted a constitution that sparked a revolt by conservatives appalled by its emphatic anticlericalism; Castilla decided it was best to temper the law of the land and dissolved the congress so that a more conservative body could draft a moderate constitution. The abrogation of the Constitution of 1856 in favor of the Constitution of 1860 energized many of the more liberal elements in Peru against Castilla. Although Ricardo Palma had socialized with President Castilla and benefitted from the state’s protection for many years as a navy officer, he was drawn to the liberal reaction through the influence of General José Gálvez, an alumnus of the Convictorio of San Carlos.21In Gálvez’s plot to overthrow Castilla, Palma was to serve as a liaison with conspirators in the port city of Callao. When the coup failed, Palma and others, including Gálvez, were forced to flee to Chile, where they lived in exile for three years.
In Valparaíso, Chile, Palma wrote articles for the local press and befriended notable Chilean writers, such as José Victorino Lastarria, Alberto Blest Gana, and Benjamin Vicuña Mackenna.22In his journalistic writings of this period, Palma criticized the Peruvian state’s version of the coup of 1860, and passionately rallied Latin Americans against future Spanish incursions in the continent.23On the literary front, the tradition had begun to mature. Between 1859 and 1861, Palma’s early traditions had appeared in print in Lima (for example “Palla Huarcuna”), and continued appearing in Chile during his exile. Palma was steadily moving away from the conventions of romanticism and finding the style that would define the tradition as a distinctive form. Moreover, Palma’s work on a compendium of tales about the Spanish Inquisition in Lima, An
ales de la Inquisición de Lima (1863), encouraged him to further cultivate the cross–pollination of history and fiction that the emerging tradition embodied. When the new Peruvian president declared amnesty in 1863, Palma returned, but not before a peculiar incident in which, upon hearing a passionate critique of the tyranny of Castilla in a Chilean theatre, he rose to publicly defend his former foe. Palma’s idolization of Gálvez and his defense and eventual reconciliation with Castilla underline how his liberalism was linked to the cult of personality surrounding caudillismo: in a political system where power was only adjudicated by the military, liberals and conservatives channeled their aspirations through the men who could militarily bring them to power.24
After returning to Peru, Palma traveled to Europe, where he visited Paris and London. The trip was cut short because Peru and Spain were on the verge of war. President Juan Antonio Pezet’s conciliatory dealings with Spain, which had assaulted Peruvian sovereignty by taking control of the Chincha Islands, provoked popular unrest and energized several caudillos, including Palma’s old mentor José Gálvez to overthrow the president. Colonel Mariano Prado took the presidency, and with Gálvez as defense minister, led the country in a successful war against Spain. Palma was stationed in the port city of Callao with Gálvez during the short war, and almost perished in the Spanish cannon fusilade that killed his political mentor. Once victory over Spain was attained, Peru found itself divided again over the issue of the Constitution of 1860, which was replaced with a more liberal charter in 1867. This time, Palma sided with the conservative reaction, which deposed Prado and put Colonel José Balta in the presidency. The 35–yearold Palma now moved to the center of political life during Balta’s troubled tenure, serving as the president’s personal secretary and as senator for the state of Loreto.
Balta’s presidency was largely ineffectual and characterized by corruption and wastefulness. One sector of Lima’s political and economic elite had begun to seriously question the centrality of the military in politics, opposing Balta and militarism in general. They represented the interests of the plutocracy that had attained economic affluence through guano, whether as merchants, financiers, or landowners, and sought a larger role in managing guano profits and the national economy.25They called themselves the Civilistas, and their presidential candidate and principal ideologue, Manuel Pardo, would win the presidency in 1872. During Balta’s presidency, Palma’s parliamentary speeches underline how far from Civilista ideology he truly was. Most notably, when a prospective monument to José Gálvez was criticized for representing the hero as an individual, Palma defended his old mentor and the inclusion of individuated allegories in national monuments.26When some senators, preoccupied by the lack of funds in state coffers, raised financial objections to proposals to provide recompense in the form of gold medals to the veterans of the Battle of Callao where the Spanish fleet was repelled, Palma was intransigent: “I do not understand how, in speaking of prizes and rewards, our lips pronounce the word economy.”27The rejection of the word “economy” is revealing here, for it underlines Palma’s distrust of the classically liberal, and antimilitarist tenets of emergent Civilista ideology, which spurned Balta’s extravagant expenditures.28In 1872, when President Balta was assassinated in a failed coup, Palma’s political career came to an end.
During the Civilista presidency of Manuel Pardo (1872–1876), and the return of Mariano Ignacio Prado to the presidency (1876–1879), Palma remained publicly silent on political affairs; he had decided to sideline himself permanently from politics.29Instead, he focused his energies on his varied literary projects, primarily the publication of several volumes of traditions. In 1876, the 43–year–old Palma, who once referred to himself as the “eternal bachelor,” married Cristina San Román and started a large family.30A year later, he found himself embroiled in a controversy that strengthened his resolve to remain politically inconspicous. Palma published a historical monograph that suggested that Bolívar had ordered the assasination of the Peruvian patriot Bernardo Monteagudo, unleashing passionate protests and stinging criticism by Bolivarians across the continent. Palma withdrew into his role of tradicionista, telling Vicuña Mackenna “I have learned the lesson not to write any more about contemporary history.”31Although he would continue to write about Bolívar and other republican and post–independence figures in his traditions, their stories would be anecdotal, like those of the colonial characters that dominate most of the Peruvian Traditions.
The Chilean invasion and occupation of Peru during the War of the Pacific (1879–1884) enabled Palma to fashion himself as the savior of the National Library in the years following the war. He was a personal friend of General Miguel Iglesias, who negotiated the Treaty of Ancón, and under whose authority he became director of the library. When General Cáceres overthrew Iglesias in 1885, Palma felt himself alienated by the new president’s administration, although he was careful not to criticize the leader directly in his correspondence.32Fearful of another revolution, he confided to his friend Vicente Riva Palacio that he did not trust liberals or conservatives to save the country.33With the election of President Morales Bermúdez in 1889, Palma’s reticent political views become even harder to trace. Peru was now heading toward a period of relative stability that historians have called the “Aristocratic Republic” (1895–1919), in which a series of alliances and counteralliances between political parties steered the country away from constant turmoil and toward modernization. One of Palma’s roles in this period was that of consummate bureaucrat, whose post in the National Library both protected and marginalized him from politics. Always on hand for ceremonial ocassions, Palma sought to be as politically circumspect as possible throughout the years, while trying to secure financial resources for the maintenance of the library.
Palma’s close relationship with President Nicolás de Piérola, who came to power in 1895, provides some indication of the writer’s sympathies toward the end of the century. Piérola had been Balta’s finance minister and was the most passionate and conspiratorial anti–Civilista on the Peruvian political scene.34According to Peter Flindell Klarén, Piérola “believed that Catholicism and a firm authoritarian hand at the head of a centralist state were the key political ingredients necessary to hold together a geographically disparate, heterogeneous and highly class–based society.”35Palma always considered himself a liberal, but his distrust of the capitalist roots of Civilismo (that explains his identification with Piérola) and his rejection of the Jacobinism of the younger generation of liberals underscore his conservatism.36The aging author and librarian greeted the new century as a political anachronism, a throwback to the liberal caudillismo of the first half of the century. In the words of José Carlos Mariátegui: “The criollo or, rather, demos of Lima was neither consistent nor original. From time to time he was aroused by the clarion call of some budding caudillo; but once the spasm had passed, he fell once again into voluptuous somnolence. All his impatience and rebelliousness were converted into a joke, an impertinent remark, or an epigram, which found their literary expression in the biting satire of Tradiciones.”37Ultimately, Palma remained an irrelevant figure in Peruvian politics by his own choosing. He repeatedly told many of his correspondents that he rejected politics in favor of his work as a librarian and the literary life.
One of the issues that dominated Palma’s life continously after the War of the Pacific was his difficult relationship with Spain and its Royal Academy over the inclusion of Latin American regionalisms in its dictionary. Palma expressed his ardent Latin Americanism by writing against Spanish imperialism during his Chilean exile and fighting in Peru’s war with Spain in 1865. Later in life he continued this fight by lobbying for inclusion of Latin American regionalisms in the dictionary and by populating his traditions with Peruvian expressions. Palma was not anti–Spanish, but rather a hispanophile intent on consolidating a transatlantic community of Spanish speakers through the democratization of the dictionary of the Royal Academy.38For the Columbian centenary o
f 1892, Palma traveled to Spain and urged the Academy to accept New World regionalisms in the same manner that the peninsula’s own regionalisms had been accepted and included in the dictionary. Although many words were accepted, the Academy continued to resist many of his impassioned arguments about other words. For Palma, the Academy’s attitude toward the Spanish language was like that of Don Quixote with his imaginary beloved, Dulcinea of Toboso. In rejecting this idealization of linguistic purity, Palma celebrated the more mundane, changeable qualities of language and wrote: “In languages...[sic] like Maritornes.”39Rather than diluting Castilian, or fragmenting the Spanish–speaking world, Palma believed that Latin American Spanish would enrich the mother tongue’s “anemic lexicon.”40
Despite Palma’s commitment to sideline himself from politics, he became an unsuspecting target of criticism in 1886 by the representative of a new generation of intellectuals, Manuel González Prada (1848–1918). The conflict would flare up again in 1912, when Palma’s disagreements with the administration of President Augusto Leguia’s intrusion in library affairs led to his resignation and to the naming of González Prada as new director.41What is significant about González Prada is that his pointed attacks on the tradition laid the foundations for future claims among literary critics that Palma’s traditions were ideologically conservative. Beginning in 1886, González Prada gave a series of speeches in which he rejected archaic writing, Spanish influence in Peruvian letters, and the timid, expressive protocols of many writers on the scene. On July 29, 1888, González Prada gave a speech at the Politeama Theatre, in which he declared: “Old men to the grave, and young men to the task at hand!”42A few months later, he made a thinly veiled reference to Palma by characterizing the tradition as a monstrous genre that falsified and caricatured history.43Other than Palma’s deep disillusionment, little came of these skirmishes in 1888, but the old wounds would open again 24 years later when González Prada was named his successor as director of the National Library. Angered by the outpouring of support for Palma after his resignation, González Prada wrote a report criticizing Palma for misusing the library for personal ends, and for writing personal notes in many of its books.44
Peruvian Traditions Page 2
