The viceroy placed his hopes in Jeromillo’s quick wits and kept up his gallant small talk. To get out of a snare, it’s head first and then arms, as the proverb has it.
When Jeromillo, who was nobody’s fool, received His Excellency’s message, he realized without further prompting that his master was in grave danger. The only thing in the bedroom closet was a pair of pistols with gold inlays, a splendid royal gift that Philip III had given don Francisco on the day he took his leave of the monarch before sailing for America.
The page had doña Leonor’s servant arrested, and from the few words that escaped the latter in his surprise, Jeromillo gathered that he must come to His Excellency’s aid without a moment to lose.
Luckily the house that was the scene of the viceroy’s love–adventure was only a block from the palace, and a few minutes later the captain of the guard, with a squad of halberdiers, surprised six of the vicuñas who had sworn to kill the viceroy or force him into making some sort of concession to the Basque faction.
Don Francisco said to the lady with a mocking smile: “The meshes of your net were made of silk, milady, so you needn’t be surprised that the lion has broken through them. It is indeed a pity that we weren’t able to play out our roles to the end, you as Judith and I as Holofernes!”
And turning to the captain of the guard, he added:
“Don Jaime, let those men go free, and take care that this incident doesn’t come to light and set people’s tongues to wagging! And you, milady, don’t take me for an accomplice to murder. Honor, rather, the prince of Esquilache, who swears to you by the quarters of his coat of arms that even if he ordered the disturbances in Potosí put down, he never authorized the beheading of anyone not sentenced to death according to the law.
IV
A month later doña Leonor and the vicuñas set out on the road back to Potosí. But on the same night that they left Lima, a patrol found the body of don Rafael Ortiz de Sotomayor in an alleyway with a dagger buried in his chest.
1See note 1, “The Corregidor of Tinta.”—Ed.
2Supporters of the Comunidades in Spain who staged a bloody rebellion against Charles V.
3Into the deep blue sea / the rivers flow, / so into your eyes / do mine go.
4Por dios, si no me quieres / que no me mires; / ya que no me rescates, / no me cautives.
5The gallant being a courtly gentleman / And the descendant of a saint, / has today fasted / As befits a good Christian. / Since he would kiss my hand / as he politely puts it, / I grant him this desire / if he will propose nothing more, / and my house will be honored / should he come to take refreshment here.
6Sweet buns.
Everyone the Master in His Own House
I
I don’t know in exactly what year of the last century a Mercedarian, a friar of great influence and importance with the title of Visitor General of the Order, came from Spain to this City of Kings. The date doesn’t matter one iota, for even though I am of two minds as to when it took place, my story is nonetheless true.
The Visitor brought with him royal documents and pontifical decrees that accorded him any number of powers and privileges. The sons of Nolasco received him with great festivities, poems in his honor and banquets, giant figures in procession, and I don’t know what other nonsense.
Not so much to warmly receive the guest as to figure out the extent of the Visitor’s powers, the Very Reverend archbishop went with great ceremony to visit him and proposed that they have lunch together three times a week in the archbishop’s palace.
To emphasize the importance of the friar, we need only point to the fact that he was addressed as Your Excellency, as paper and parchment documents testify.
I don’t dare say for certain, but I have reason to suspect that His Excellency the Visitor was none other than Friar José González de Aguilar Flores de Navarra, the king’s theologian, lord of the baronetcies of Algar and Escala in Valencia, and (to top it all off!) grandee first class of Spain.
The first morning that His Reverence and His Excellency were to lunch together in each other’s cordial company, the former sent his coach round to the door of the convent of La Merced a little before eight, and the Visitor made himself comfortable on the soft cushions.
Once he had reached the drawing room of the bishop’s palace and after exchanging greetings and other mumbo–jumbo as etiquette required, the Visitor said:
“In order not to keep Your Reverence waiting, I have come without saying the Divine Office.”
“Well, there is time for Your Excellency to fulfill your duty in my cathedral.”
And with a servant accompanying him, after walking through the Patio of the Orange Trees, the two of them entered the sacristy. The Visitor then dressed in vestments and, attended by an altar boy, said Mass at the high altar.
When the canons gathered at nine o’clock in the choir and found out what had just taken place, they were beside themselves.
“What!” they cried out in a fury. “How does a friar dare say Mass at ourhigh altar!”
Given the canons’ pride, the incident was something that cried out to high heaven and had to be remedied.
After a delicious lunch of cracklings, tamales, sanguito de ñajú,1little cakes made of almond paste and candied fruit, and other appetizing Creole dishes, the guest departed and the indignant canons entered with their complaint, and what with their melodramatic show of anger and their recriminations they made the good–natured archbishop’s head spin.
He turned every shade of red, for to tell the whole truth the fault was largely his because it had not occurred to him to assign the celebrant a chapel of his own. In high dudgeon the canons brought up rules and briefs and other foolishness, and after a long controversy it was agreed that if the Visitor took it into his head to say Mass in the cathedral again, he would do so at a portable altar.
II
And several weeks went by, and when there was no longer anyone who remembered what had happened, a Sunday morning came round, and the Visitor arose in a cheerful mood, saying that he had taken a notion to put a reform into effect in hischurch immediately.
And secretly summoning a dozen carpenters, he ordered that the altar of Our Lady of Antigua, located near the door, be partitioned off with planks from the central nave and the remainder of the church.
The Dominicans argue with the Mercedarians as to which order was first established in Lima, but it is historically proven that the first Mass in our capital was celebrated by a Mercedarian monk, Friar Antonio Bravo; that in 1535 Father Miguel Orenes was at the time provincial or commander of the Order; and that when the conquistador Pizarro was assassinated in 1541, the Mercedarians, who had been branded as supporters of Almagro, had already almost finished building their convent and church, investing in them the sum of 700,000 pesos.
Let us continue this Tradition.
The friars murmured, sotto voce, that His Excellency’s brain had become addled, but respect kept them from making the slightest comment about their superior’s order.
On the following day the enclosure of the altar was finished, with its own little door. The workers had labored all night.
This was the first of the three Rogation Days that precede the feast of the Ascension of Our Lord, and following the ritual, the archbishop and his choir visited each of the great churches in turn. That Monday it was the turn of the church of La Merced.
With all the friars of his convent, His Excellency went to the door of the church to solemnly receive the visit.
The group was about to enter the central nave leading to the high altar, when the Visitor headed them off, saying:
“Stop; this is not the right way.” And turning to the archbishop he added:
“Your Reverence: since the canons do not approve of a friar celebrating Mass at yourhigh altar, I have decided that they can officiate only at the altar by the door of mychurch.”
“But Your Excellency ...” the archbishop stammered.
“There is
nothing for it, Your Reverence. Everyone is master in his own house.”
“And God in everyone’s house, brother,” a choirmaster murmured. And that was that. The archbishop and his canons turned around and proceeded to celebrate Rogations in another church that, if we are not mistaken, was La Concepción.
It would appear that the canons still hold a grudge against the Mercedarians that has become traditional, and that they are unwilling to forgive them for the arrogance of the Visitor. A good proof is that they have never again come to celebrate Rogation Days in the church of La Merced.
1Cornmeal pudding with okra.
The Latin of a Young Lady of Lima
(To José Rosendo Gutiérrez)
It is well known that in the system of education in the past, it was very important to make youngsters waste three or four years studying the language of Virgil and Cicero, and that in the end they were left not rightly knowing either Latin or Spanish.
A boy asked his father:
“Papa, what is Latin?”
“Something that takes three years to learn and three weeks to forget.” I am of the opinion that Heinecius with his Metaphysics in Latin, Justinian with his Institutes in Latin, and Hippocrates with his Aphorisms in Latin must have left little trace in the minds of young scholars. And I don’t say that because I think—heaven free me from talking such nonsense!—that in the past there were not eminent men learned in letters and science among us, but because it worries me to imagine a university proceeding in which a doctoral thesis, always greeted with loud applause, was read for 60 minutes, when the gathering of ladies and prominent personages who did not know the slightest thing about Nebrija and the professors who taught Duns Scotus and Digestus the Elder were sometimes left as much in the dark as the last lay brother.
So it is not surprising that students left the classrooms with little of substance in their brains, while at the same time their heads were chock full of sophistries and their speech distressingly pedantic.
In medicine, the doctors, by dint of Latinisms more than by prescriptions, dispatched their fellows to rot in the ground.
The sick chose to die in Spanish and this preference in matters of taste was responsible for the great prestige of household remedies and of charlatans who gave them out. Among the medicines of that innocent age, none amuses me more, being both cheap and speedy, than the virtue attributed to prayers of Christian doctrine. Thus those suffering from typhoid fever were to take a salve, which in the naive opinion of our grandfathers was something cooler and less irritating than a cold drink made from melon seeds. The credo, on the other hand, was deemed to be a hot remedy, and was a better sudorific than borage water or punch laced with brandy. And I leave in the inkwell the opinion that the Gospels, when applied on the stomach, were an excellent poultice, not to mention the blessed buns of Saint Nicholas, or the ejaculatory prayers against the seven–day fever, or the little crystal balls sold by certain friars to keep children from becoming scrawny or from being sucked by witches.
On the platforms of tribunals, men who wore judge’s togas and academic robes devised pleas that were half in Latin and half in Spanish, and besides the hodge–podge of tongues, justice, which by itself is blind, suffered as though its cataracts were being removed.
The language of Latium was so much the fashion that not only was there a Latin of the sacristy but also a Latin of the kitchen; a good proof of this is the story of a pope, who, tiring of polenta and macaroni, ventured one day to eat a certain dish from America, and His Holiness apparently found it so tasty that he must have gone round the bend, and forgetting Tuscan, exclaimed in Latin: Beati indiani qui manducant pepiani.1
When a certain bishop reprimanded a cleric who was going about armed with a sword, the latter excused himself by claiming that he used to it to defend himself against dogs.
“But you don’t need a sword for that,” His Reverence replied, “for if you recite the Gospel of Saint John you won’t be bitten.”
“Well and good, Your Reverence, but if the dogs don’t understand Latin, how do I escape danger?”
In literature Gongorism was all the rage, and writers vied to see which of them could outdo the other in extravagance. In order not to be accused of being a liar, I mention here the works of two distinguished Lima poets: the Jesuit Rodrigo Valdez2 and the encyclopedic Peralta,3the two of them most estimable from another point of view. And I shall say nothing of Lunarejo, a wise Cuzcan who, among other books, published one with the title Apologética de Góngora.
In the days of the viceroy and count of Superunda we had a woman poet, the fruit of our Lima orchard, named doña María Manuela Carrillo de Andrade y Sotomayor, a lady of great importance, who martyrized not only the Spanish muses but Latin ones as well. And I say that she martyrized them and subjected them to public shame because (and forgive me the lack of gallantry) the verses by my fellow LimenÖan that I have read are worse than bad. Doña María filled reams of Catalonian paper with her scribbles, and even wrote short plays and comedies that were performed in our coliseum.
And I leave in the inkwell any further mention, among other women poets from Lima who were intimately related to the mischievous nymphs who dwell on Parnassus, of doña Violante de Cisneros; doña Rosalía Astudillo y Herrera; sor Rosa Corbalán, a nun of the Order of The Conception; doña Josefa Bravo de Lagunas, abbess of Santa Clara; the Capuchin sor María Juana; sor Juana de Herrera y Mendoza, of the Order of Saint Catherine; doña Manuela Orrantía; and doña María Juana Calderón y Vadillo, daughter of the marquis of Casa Calderón and wife of don Gaspar Ceballos, a Knight of the Order of Santiago and also a devotee of letters. Doña María Juana, who died in 1809 at the age of 83, had the Cuzcan bishop Gorrochátegui as her teacher of literature, and was a very skillful translator of Latin, French, and Italian.
Many of these women knew not only Latin, but Greek as well; and there were some, such as doña Isabel de Orbea, who was denounced to the Inquisition as being a philosopher, and the Trinitarian nun doña Clara Fuentes, who could trump and win every trick from the theologians, jurists, and canon lawyers of Christendom.
I have recounted what I have of doña María Manuela Carrillo de
Andrade y Sotomayor and other of her martyred companions to show that even women acquired the knack of Latinizing, and that many had at their fingertips Ovid’s Metamorphoses and his Ars Amandi4 and translated them, meaning that there existed even a Latin of the bedroom.
Now, with your permission, I am going to bring to light a brief story that I heard many times when I was a boy ... and it has rained more than than once from then till now!
Well then, in the days of Amat, there was a girl in Lima named Mariquita Castellanos, a young lady of many comings and goings, of whom I had occasion to speak at length in my first book of Traditions.5Such as the fact that she was the source of a saying that became proverbial: “I’m a pretty girl: la Castellanos!”
It appears that Mariquita spent her early years in the convent of Santa Clara, until she reached the age of chivateo (the name our forebears gave to puberty), whereupon she abandoned convent bars and began to gambol about in this City of Kings. The girl was as pretty as a nosegay of flowers, and what is more, sharp witted, as is proved by the reputation that her clever remarks had in Lima.
There existed at the time a poetaster, a great Latinist whose name is irrelevant, whom Mariquita kept on the string. The suitor had offered to bring her as a present a satin skirt worth three bull’s eyes, the vulgar expression for doubloons. But it is the fate of poets to have an abundance of consonants and not of money, and days and days went by while the promised garment remained where it was, running the danger of growing moldy, in the shopkeeper’s display window.
Mariquita was piqued at being mocked and resolved to put an end to it by dismissing the informal courtship, as long in the promising as it was short in the fulfilling. The swain came to visit her, and since at the time nerves and spleen, two complaints very helpful as excuses for doing or
saying a vulgar thing, had not yet been invented, the nymph received him with an air of displeasure, avoiding conversation and venturing only an occasional monosyllable. The poet lost his temper and his language became Latinized as he said to the girl:
Háblame, niña, con pausa.
Estás triste? Quare causa?6
And Mariquita, remembering the Latin that she had heard spoken by the chaplain of the sisters of Saint Clare, shot back this rejoinder:
Tristis est anima mea,
hasta que la saya vea.7
The love–smitten poet, seeing that the girl had hit upon his sore spot, had to come up with this excuse that, in situations such as this, is enough to cut through the Gordian knot:
Et quare conturbas me
si sabes que no hay con qué?8
Whereupon the girl, showing him to the door, said to him:
Entonces, fugite in allia,
Que otro gato dará algalia.9
And raw rice for the devil with a tail, messhall rice for the bobtailed devil, Calcutta rice for the devil who’s a son of a... dog, and that’s the end of the story.
1Blessed be the Indians who eat peppers [Latin].
2Rodrigo de Valdez (1609–1682), author of Poema heroyco hispano–latino pagegyrico de la fundacion, y grandezas de la muy noble, y leal ciudad de Lima (1687).—Ed.
3Pedro de Peralta Barnuevo (1664–1743), author of the epic poem Lima fundada (2 vols., 1732).—Ed.
4The Art of Love [Latin].
5A reference to “¡Pues bonita soy yo, la Castellanos!”—Ed.
6Speak slowly to me, girl, / Are you sad? What is the cause?
7I’m in sad spirits / Until I see the skirt.
8And why do you upset me, / If you know I haven’t the means?
9Then flee elsewhere, / for another cat will give me civet.
Peruvian Traditions Page 15
