I
In August of 1690 His Excellency don Melchor Portocarrero Lazo de la Vega, count of La Monclova, knight commander of Zarza of the Order of Alcántara, and 23rd viceroy of Peru by the Grace of His Majesty Charles II, entered Lima. In addition to his daughter, doña Josefa, and his family and servants, several soldiers accompanied him on the journey from Mexico. Don Fernando de Vergara, a nobleman from Extremadura and captain of gentleman lancers, stood out from the others thanks to his dashing and martial air, and it is said of him that even in the company of Mexican beauties he had not lost his reputation as an austere Benedictine monk. A swashbuckler, a gambler, and a lover who besieged the ladies, it was more than difficult to make him settle down, and the viceroy, who professed a paternal affection for him, proposed to find him a bride himself, so as to see if the proverbial saying that has it that “a change of condition is a change of habit” is true.
Evangelina Zamora had, along with her youth and beauty, other qualities that made her the most enviable match of the City of Kings. Her great–grandfather had been, after Jerónimo de Aliaga, the municipal magistrate Ribera, Martín de Alcántara, and Diego Maldonado the Rich, one of the conquistadors most favored by Pizarro, who rewarded them with shares of land in the Rimac Valley. The emperor gave him permission to use a don before his name, and a few years later the valuable gifts that he sent the crown secured for him the honor of a habit of the Order of Santiago. With a hundred years behind him, rich, and a nobleman, our conquistador concluded that he no longer had a mission to rule over this vale of tears, and in 1604 he departed it, bequeathing to his eldest son a country estate and urban properties worth a fortune that was estimated at the time to be a fifth of a million pesos.
Evangelina’s grandfather and father added to the inheritance, and the young lady found herself orphaned at the age of 20, under the protection of a guardian and envied for her fortune.
The daughter of the count of La Monclova, who was in modest circumstances, and the wealthy young Evangelina soon cemented the most cordial friendship. The latter thus had a reason to visit the viceroy’s palace, and while there frequently found herself in the company of the captain of lancers, who, as a young man attentive to women, wasted no opportunity to pay court to the young lady who finally, without confessing to the amorous inclination that the nobleman from Extremadura had succeeded in awakening in her breast, listened with secret pleasure to the proposal of marriage to don Fernando. The intermediary was the viceroy himself, and a well–bred young lady would never think of saying no to so distinguished a sponsor.
During the first five years of their marriage, Captain Vergara forgot his former life of dissipation. His wife and children were his one source of happiness; he was, let us put it thus, an exemplary husband.
But one fateful day the devil caused don Fernando to accompany his spouse to a festive family gathering, and caused there to be a gaming room where not only was the classic card game malilla abarrotadaplayed, but many devotees of the little cubes of the dice box were also gathered round a table covered in green baize. The passion for gambling was merely slumbering in the captain’s soul, and it is no cause for surprise that at the sight of the dice it awakened stronger than ever. He gambled, with such bad luck that he lost 20,000 pesos that night.
From that time on, the model husband changed his habits completely, and returned to his feverish existence as a gambler. Because luck turned against him more and more frequently, he was obliged to squander the fortune of his wife and children in order to pay his gambling debts and plunge into that bottomless abyss that goes by the name of making good one’s losses.
Among his companions in vice was a young marquis whom the dice persistently favored, and don Fernando took it into his head to fight against such mad luck. On many nights he took the marquis to dine at the home of Evangelina, and once dinner was over, the two friends shut themselves up in another room to wager the “shirt off their backs,” an expression that, in the language of gamblers, has a literal meaning.
The gambler and the madman are decidedly one and the same. In my opinion, if any shortcoming diminishes the historical figure of Emperor Augustus, it is the fact that, according to Suetonius, he gambled at odds and evens after dinner.
In vain did Evangelina make every effort to lead the unrestrained gambler away from the precipice. Tears and tenderness, quarrels and reconciliations were useless. The good lady had no more weapons to bring to bear on the heart of the man she loved.
One night the unhappy wife had already retired to her bed when don Fernando awakened her to ask her for her engagement ring, a diamond solitaire of very great value. Evangelina gave a start in surprise, but her husband calmed her fears, telling her that it was simply a matter of curiosity of some friends who doubted the worth of the precious jewel.
What had happened in the room where the rival gamblers had been? Don Fernando had lost a large sum, and not having anything of his own left to gamble, had agreed that he would bet his wife’s splendid ring.
Bad luck is inexorable. The precious jewel gleamed on the ring finger of the marquis who had won.
Don Fernando shook with shame and remorse. The marquis took his leave, and Vergara accompanied him to the drawing room, but on reaching it he turned his head toward a glass screen adjacent to Evangelina’s bedroom, and through the panes he saw her sobbing as she knelt before an image of Mary.
A horrible vertigo overcame don Fernando, and swift as a tiger he threw himself on the marquis and thrust his dagger in his back three times.
The ill–fated marquis fled to the bedroom and fell lifeless at the foot of Evangelina’s bed.
II
At a very early age the count of La Monclova sent a company he commanded into the fray at Arras in 1654. His courage took him into the thick of the battle, and he was carried from the field in a state near death. He eventually recovered, though with the loss of his right arm, which it was found necessary to amputate. It was replaced by a silver one, and this was the source of the nickname he was known by in Mexico and in Lima.
The viceroy “Silver Arm,” on whose coat of arms there appeared this motto: “Ave Maria gratia plena,” succeeded the illustrious don Melchor de Navarra y Rocafull as viceroy of Peru. “With prestige equal to that of his predecessor, albeit with fewer gifts for governing,” Lorente says, “of pure habits, devout, conciliatory, and moderate, the count of La Monclova edified the people through his example, and the needy found him ever ready to give his emoluments and the rents from his house as alms.”
In the fifteen years and four months that the rule of “Silver Arm” lasted, a rule whose duration no viceroy attained either up until then or afterward, the country enjoyed total peace, governance was orderly, and magnificent residences were built in Lima. It is true that the public treasury did not particularly flourish, but this was for causes unrelated to politics. The magnificence and luxury of the processions and religious feast days of the time were reminiscent of the days of the count of Lemos. The arcades with their 85 arches, which cost 25,000 pesos to build, the city hall, and the gallery of the palace were constructed in this era.
In 1694 a freak was born in Lima with two heads and two pretty faces, two hearts, four arms, and two chests joined by cartilege. From its waist to its feet there was little about it that was out of the ordinary, and the erudite scholar and encyclopedist don Pedro de Peralta of Lima wrote a curious book, with the title of Desvios de la naturaleza,2in which, as well as offering a minute anatomical description of the freak, he endeavors to prove that it was endowed with two souls.
Following the death of Charles the Bewitched in 1700, Philip V, who succeeded him, rewarded the count of La Monclova by making him a grandee of Spain.
Ill, an octogenarian, and weary of ruling, the viceroy “Silver Arm” urged the court to replace him. The count of La Monclova died on September 22, 1702, without seeing this desire realized, and was buried in the cathedral; his successor, the marquis of Castell–dos–Ríus, did no
t arrive in Lima until July of 1707.
Doña Josefa, the daughter of the count of La Monclova, continued to live in the palace after the death of the viceroy; but one night, with the connivance of her confessor, Father Alonso Mesía, she climbed out a window and sought asylum with the nuns of Saint Catherine, taking her vows in the habit of Saint Rose, whose cloister was under construction. In May of 1710 doña Josefa Portocarrero Lazo de la Vega entered the new convent, of which she was the first abbess.
III
Four months after his imprisonment, the Royal Audience sentenced don Fernando de Vergara to death. From the first, the latter declared that the killing of the marquis was a premeditated act committed in a fit of desperation at being a ruined gambler. Confronted with such a frank confession, the tribunal was forced to apply the death penalty.
Evangelina used every possible resource to free her husband from a shameful death, to no avail, and in the midst of her grief, the day set for the criminal’s execution arrived. The unselfish and courageous Evangelina then resolved to make, for the love of her children, an unprecedented sacrifice.
Dressed in mourning she presented herself in the drawing room of the palace, as the viceroy, the count of La Monclova, was conferring with the magistrates. She stated that don Fernando had murdered the marquis, his right to do so being protected by law; that she was an adulteress; and that, having been surprised by her husband, she had fled from his wrath, and her partner in crime had received his just due at the hands of the offended husband.
The frequency of the visits by the marquis to Evangelina’s residence, her ring on the dead man’s hand that was taken to be a love token, the stab wounds in his back, the fact that the body had been found at the foot of the lady’s bed, and other small details were reason enough for the viceroy, giving credence to the revelation, to order a stay of the sentence.
The magistrate who had heard the case made his appearance in the prison in order to have don Fernando attest to the truth of his wife’s declaration. But the clerk had only just finished reading it when Vergara, in prey to a thousand contrary sentiments, let out a frightful peal of laughter.
The wretch had gone mad!
A few years later, death folded its wings about the chaste bed of the noble spouse, and an austere priest offered the dying lady the consolations of religion.
Evangelina’s four children knelt at their mother’s bedside to await her final blessing. The unselfish victim, obliged by her confessor, thereupon revealed to them the tremendous secret: “The world will forget,” she said to them, “the name of the woman who gave birth to you, but it would have been relentless with you had your father mounted the steps of the scaffold. God, who reads into the crystal of my conscience, knows that I have lost my honor in the eyes of society so that you would not be one day called the children of a father hanged to death.”
1Juana Manuela Gorriti (1819–1892) an Argentinian novelist and cultural critic whose Lima literary salon Palma attended in his adolescence. Gorriti authored Panoramas de la vida (1876) fiction and prose, and a memoir of her Lima salón, Veladas literarias de Lima (1876–1877) (1892). See Dreams and Realities: Selected Fiction of Juana Manuela Gorriti, trans. Sergio Waisman, ed. Francine Massiello (2003)—Ed.
2Freaks of nature.
A Viceroy and an Archbishop
A Chronicle of the Era of
the Twentieth Viceroy of Peru
The colonial era, rich in events that were providentially paving the way for the day of Independence in the New World, is a source
barely tapped as yet by American intelligences.
Therefore, and pardon our bold presumption, each time that the feverish desire to write takes possession of us, a demon of temptation that youth can scarcely resist, we evoke in our nocturnal solitude the mysterious genius that watches over the history of the bygone days of a people that lives on, nourished not by memories or hopes but by realities.
We repeat: In America tradition is barely alive. America still enjoys the novelty of a discovery and values a fabulous treasure that has barely begun to be exploited.
Either because of the indolence of governments with respect to the conservation of their archives, or because of the negligence of our forefathers as regards the recording of the facts, it is undeniable that it would be very difficult today to write a complete history of the era of the viceroys. The early days of the empire of the Incas, after which there follows the bloody trail of the conquest, have come down to us depicted in fabulous and implausible colors. It appears that a similar fate awaits the three centuries of Spanish domination.
Meanwhile, it is up to our young people to do something to keep tradition from being completely lost. That is therefore the purpose on which our attention is focused by choice, and in order to attract that of the people we believe it useful to adorn every historical narrative with the trappings of romance. If in writing down these notes on the founder of Talca and Los Angeles we have not achieved our objective, forgive us in the name of the good intention that guided us and the immense quantity of dust that we have breathed in on leafing through chronicles and reading manuscripts letter by letter in countries where, in addition to the scarcity of documents, the archives are not easily available to the person who wishes to consult them.
I
The Number Thirteen
His Excellency don José Manso de Velazco, who earned the title of count of Superunda for having rebuilt Callao (destroyed by the famous earthquake of 1746), took command of the viceroyalty of Peru on July 13, 1745, replacing the marquis of Villagarcia. The importance that a chronicler might assign to this date would be beneath our notice had it not had, as old documents recount, a noticeable influence on the viceroy’s spirits and future; and here, with your permission, dear reader, my pen is going to allow itself a few moments’ idle talk and moralizing.
The more intelligent or bold a man, the more his spirit appears to be susceptible of welcoming a superstition. The flight or the song of a bird is for many a grim omen, whose influence is not powerful enough to overcome the force of reason. Only the fool is not superstitious. Caesar placed his trust in luck during a storm. Napoleon, who distributed thrones as the booty of war, remembered, on giving battle, the brightness of the sun at Austerlitz, and is even said to have had his future read in the cards by a fortune teller (Mademoiselle Lenormand).
But this preoccupation is never so obvious as when it is a question of the number 13. It so happened that a number of times when there were 13 guests at a banquet, one of them would die within the year; it is certain that this is the source of the exhaustive care with which Cabalists count how many persons are seated at table. The devout explain that the bad luck of the number 13 stems from the fact that at the divine Last Supper Judas was the 13th at table.
Another of the peculiarities of the number 13, also known as “the friar’s dozen,” is that it designates the number of coins given as an earnest when a close friend or relative decides to have himself one last spree before marrying. This is the origin of the instinctive horror of marriage that bachelors profess, a horror that we will not deign to say whether or not it is well founded, just as we would not dare to declare ourselves either advocates or enemies of the sacred bonds of matrimony.
A close friend complained of having attended a banquet at which the guests at table numbered 13. “And did anyone die? Did anything unfortunate occur?” “Certainly!” (the friend being interrogated replied). “I got married during that year.”
The truth is that once the viceroy was alone in the palace with his secretary Pedro Bravo de Ribera, he could not keep himself from saying to him:
“I think, Pedro, that my government will bring me great misfortune. My reason tells me that the next 13 years do not bode well.”
The secretary smiled derisively at the superstition of his lord and master, in whose life, with which he was intimately acquainted, there would no doubt be a turn of events in which the fateful number to which he had just alluded would play a
n important role.
And the fact that his heart was a faithful prophet for the viceroy (since during his 15 years as viceroy catastrophes abounded) is substantiated by a rapid review of the history of those years.
Don José Velazco had been viceroy for a little over a year when the destruction of Callao took place, followed by a devastating epidemic in the highlands, and the fire in the government archives housed in the residence of the marquis of Salinas, a fire that was held to be arson. Tremendous earthquakes in Quito, Latacunga, Trujillo, and Concepción de Chile, the Santa flood, a fire that destroyed Panama, and the rebellion of the Indians of Huarochiri, which was put down by hanging the principal ringleaders, figure among the dire calamities of that era.
In August of 1747, immediately following the destruction of Callao, the town of Bellavista was founded; the convent of Ocopa, dedicated to the propagation of the faith, was erected; the church of the Discalced Fathers was consecrated; the nun and woman of letters Sor María Juana, along with four other Capuchin sisters, founded a convent in Cajamarca; the so–called Newton’s comet was seen; the state tobacco monopoly was established; the Royal Tribunal of Panama was done away with; and in 1755 a census was taken in Lima, resulting in the registration of 54,000 inhabitants.
II
Regarding an Excommunication, and How because of
It the Viceroy and the Archbishop Became Enemies
The obligation to motivate the following chapter would doubtless make us run the risk of mentioning facts that might wound touchy sensibilities were we not to adopt the tactic of changing names and telling of the event at a gallop. On a country estate in the Ate valley, near Lima, there lived a poor priest who was acting as chaplain of the estate. The owner, who was no less than a grandee of Castile, owing to matters of little importance that, moreover, are irrelevant here, caused the good chaplain to be paraded through the patio one morning, riding on a donkey and being given a good taste of the lash; he is said to have died shortly thereafter of pain and shame.
Peruvian Traditions Page 11
