It was written in the stars that, like the Inca Atahualpa, his love of chess was to be fatal for the Inca Manco.
One afternoon Inca Manco and Gómez Pérez were absorbed in a game, with Diego Méndez and three caciques as onlookers.
Manco made a move to castle his king, not allowed at that point by the rules of the game, and Gómez Pérez argued:
“It’s too late for you to do that, you cheater.”
We do not know whether the Inca realized the insulting implications of the strange Castilian word, but he insisted on defending what he believed to be a correct and valid move. Gómez turned around to his countryman Diego Méndez and said to him:
“Look, captain, at what this swine of an Indian is trying to pull!”
Here I yield the floor to the anonymous chronicler whose manuscript, which goes as far as the era of the viceroy Toledo, is included in Volume VIII of the Documentos inéditos del Archivo de Indias: “The Inca then raised his hand and gave the Spaniard a slap in the face. The latter put his hand to his dagger and dealt him two stab wounds, from which he died immediately. The Indians hastened to take vengeance, and hacked to pieces the aforesaid killer and as many Spaniards as were in that province of Vilcapampa.”
Several chroniclers say that the quarrel took place during a game of bowls, but others state that the tragic event came about because of a heated disagreement during a game of chess.
Popular tradition among Cuzcans is what I have related, basing myself as well on the authority of the anonymous sixteenth–century writer.
1Free invention and the art of chess, by Ruy López of Segovia, a cleric, resident of the town of Zafra.
2Francoise André Philidor (1726–1795), French opera composer and famous chess player whose L’analyze des échecs (1749) was a landmark treatise on the game.—Ed.
3A reference to Medula eutropelica calculatoria, que enseña jugar a las damas con espada y broquél, dividida en tres tratados (1718) by Pablo Cecina Rica y Fergel.—Ed.
4The one plays chess and the other sleeps, / Oh what a sight! / Neither eating nor noticing anything, / Oh what a sight! / The one snores and the other plays chess.../ Oh what a sight!
5Juan Valera (1824–1905), Spanish novelist whose works include Pepita Jiménez (1874) and Morsamor (1899).—Ed.
6See “Friars’ Work!,” note 4.—Ed.
7When Francisco Pizarro arrived in Peru in April of 1831, the Inca empire was torn by a civil war between two sons of the Inca Huayna Capac: Atahualpa and Huáscar. Huáscar was executed by Atahualpa in 1532, and Atahualpa by the Spaniards in 1533. That same year, a third son of Huayna Capac, Manco, was recognized as ruler of the Inca realm by the Spanish conquistadors. Manco rebelled against his Spanish sponsors in 1836.—Ed.
Between Garibaldi ...and Me
I
Around the year 1865 I was the guest in Le Havre of Luis Cisneros, who held the post of consul of Peru there.
Almost every Sunday we had a visitor, an old man 70 years old, who had lunch with us and entertained us with his talk of America and the war of Independence.
His name was Monsieur Fysquet, and he had a modest post in Le Havre, I don’t remember whether it was as a security guard or in the harbor master’s office.
When, after the capture of Miranda and the expulsion of his lieutenant general Bolívar,1 Spanish dominion in Venezuela appeared to be unquestionable, don Simón was forced to wander from one of the Antilles to another, seeking men to revive the revolution.
Petion, the president of Haiti, worked out a secret treaty with Bolívar and secured for him a fleet of brigantines, command of which the latter entrusted to the French naval officer Luis Brion, giving him the title of admiral of the naval forces in Venezuela.
Fysquet shipped out on one of the vessels as chief petty officer, and told us long and amusing tales about his adventures at sea, as well as recounting intimate anecdotes about Bolívar.
He frequently came out with these phrases: “In the days when I conversed with the Liberator aboard ship” or “In my conversations with Bolívar,” but we never managed to find out what the conversations were about.
Finally, one morning I made him down a good many glasses of a magnificent burgundy that had just been given to Cisneros, and I discovered that the conversations that he spoke of in the plural had never gone beyond the singular.
One afternoon off Carúpano, a sail was seen on the horizon, and fearing that it was a Spanish vessel, the admiral notified Bolívar.
The latter came on deck on his way to the bridge, and met Fysquet, leaning over the gunwale and looking through a spyglass at the suspicious ship.
Given Bolívar’s impetuousness, it was only to be expected that he did not have the patience to wait the half minute that he would have needed to join Brion on the bridge and use his spyglass.
Without a word, Bolívar took the spyglass from Fysquet, searched the horizon for half a minute, and not trusting his eyesight, gave it back to Fysquet and said to him:
“Does that ship have a flag?”
“No, general, but it is hoisting one this minute.”
“Is it a Spanish flag?”
“No, general, it is English.”
“Then there is no reason for alarm.”
And he headed for the bridge to join Brion.
When he came to lunch with us, Fysquet proudly displayed on his old but well–brushed frock coat the gold medal that Venezuela and Colombia awarded to those who fought for its independence. If the curiosity of some of my readers leads them to want to know more about the chief petty officer who was a contemporary of Bolívar, I recommend that they read a delightful novel by Luis Cisneros entitled La medalla de un libertador.
II
Well then, mutatis mutandis,2my conversation with don José Garibaldi was cut from the same cloth as Fysquet’s with don Simón Bolívar.
In 1851, the poet Trinidad Fernández and I, a lad of 18 Februaries, were columnists and proofreaders at El Correo de Lima, with the hefty salary of 30 pesos a month. What a sinecure!
The print shop did business in a large house on the calle de Aumente.
The editor’s office was located in a spacious room off the patio.
The furniture consisted of a desk with a blue baize top for the boss, two extremely rickety little tables, a wooden bench that had probably belonged to some convent, and a dozen more or less broken down chairs.
The get–together of friends began a little after four o’clock in the afternoon. Those who attended regularly were, among others, the members of the Supreme Court, Mariátegui, León y Lazo (the father of the famous painter), Colonel Juan Espinosa (who signed his writings with the pseudonym “The Soldier of the Andes”), and a French merchant, don Carlos Ledos, a sketch of whom I feel obliged to offer my reader.
Ledos, who had come originally from Mexico, had lived for years in Lima. He wanted to set up a farm for growing silkworms, and when his efforts did not meet with success he established a mercantile agency in the calle de las Mantas, an occupation that went quite well for him, and might have gone very well indeed had he not had the wild idea of becoming a journalist and a patriot in a foreign country, for rather than settling bills and doing sums, he busied himself in giving the government of Peru lessons in running the country from the columns of El Correo, and all his articles appeared with the initials C. L.
When those in authority did not provide him with good and abundant material to write about, he resorted to a subject that, under his pen, was inexhaustible: religious tolerance. He consumed more ink on the subject that the famous Tostado, bishop of Avila, in all his works put together.
After the revolution of 1848 in France, Mazzini and other apostles of freedom began to gain favor as they spread the idea that he would bring unity to Italy and the disappearance of the temporal power of the Popes. Such grandiose ideals must not have earned the sympathy of don Carlos Ledos, for he published an article in which he treated Mazzini very condescendingly, derided Carlos Alberto and
the courage of the Italians, and ended by calling Garibaldi a second–rate hero.
Here begins the story of my relationship with Garibaldi.
It was shortly after two o’clock on the afternoon of December 6, 1851, and I was at my editor’s desk scribbling a page of my column, when a gentleman appeared, and without crossing the threshold, said to me:
“Good afternoon. Has the Frenchman Ledos come in yet?”
“No, sir,” I answered him.
“What time does he come in?”
“After four.”
“Can you tell me where I can find him at present?”
“In the calle de las Mantas, in his office.”
With no more than a slight nod of his head, the person who had asked me the three questions strode off.
He was no less than the heroic paladin of the seven–year siege of Montevideo, the great captain who had humiliated the battle–hardened army of the tyrant Rosas, which up until then had always been victorious: It was don José Garibaldi,3who had been in Peru for several months; thanks to his renown he was looked upon in Lima with admiration and greeted with respect when people met him on the main streets of the city.
A quarter of an hour had not gone by when there arrived at the print shop the news that something serious was going on near the main square, and this columnist, in fulfillment of his obligation, rushed to the calle de las Mantas.
There was an immense crowd, and the prefect of Lima, on horseback, with a squad of police was doing his best to break it up.
In the doorway of Ledos’s office, surrounded by many gentlemen, was Garibaldi, and a few steps away, señor Ledos, with a ruler in his hand and fighting to get loose from Dr. Douglas (a famous doctor in Lima) and others who were holding him down. Both of them had blood on their faces.
What had happened? On saying goodbye to me after I had given him directions to Ledos’s office, Garibaldi had rushed to the calle de las Mantas and asked a passerby to point out Ledos’s office to him.
He was there, pen in hand, settling a bill, and in the back of the shop a clerk was busy opening a box of merchandise.
Garibaldi had in his left hand an issue of the newspaper and in his right his cane. A counter separated him from his adversary, who was writing in a large portfolio or file.
“Are you the riffraff who has written this slander about Carlos Alberto and Italy?” Garibaldi asked him in correct French.
“Riffraff, no; the one who wrote that, yes,” don Carlos answered arrogantly.
The illustrious Italian did not wait to hear more, and dealt the French polemicist two blows with his cane, and the latter, with a nimbleness that belied his age, leapt over the counter with a ruler in his hand.
The caning that Garibaldi gave the irascible journalist to keep him from hitting him in the head with the ruler was not very gentle.
Two merchants of the neighborhood intervened, and succeeded, with no little effort, in separating the adversaries.
Don Antonio Malagrida, a wealthy Italian merchant of the day, in whose house, of recent construction, he had had Garibaldi as a guest when he had just arrived from Callao, appeared on the scene and led his excited companion away by the arm. Malagrida’s house was at the corner of Palacio and Polvos Azules, with large shops in the lower part.
III
Fysquet’s conversation with Bolívar, while it may be as laconic as mine with Garibaldi, had many fewer consequences. Fysquet’s did not end with a naval battle; it was pure alarm or complete nonsense.
Do you believe that if Garibaldi had not spoken with me, and if I had not had the unconscious indiscretion to give him the address of old Ledos, blood would have flowed? Let it be acknowledged that the conversation between Garibaldi and yours truly is destined to go down in history.
1Francisco de Miranda (1750–1816), also known as the “Precursor” of Latin American Independence, assumed dictatorial powers during Venezuela’s First Republic (1811–1812). When he ceded power to superior Spanish forces, Simón Bolívar arrested him and turned him in to the royalists before going into exile in New Granada.—Ed.
2The necessary changes having been made [Latin].
3Guiseppe Garibaldi (1807–1882) lived in Brazil and Uruguay between 1836 and 1848. In Uruguay, he distinguished himself as head of the Italian Legion, and fought against the Argentinian dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas. After his failure to hold Rome against Neapolitan and French forces in 1849, Garibaldi retreated and went into exile in Tangier, Staten Island, and Peru.
Consolación
I
Reader, are you hunchbacked?
If, to your misfortune, the hand of the Creator has placed on your shoulders that bulky sugar loaf known as a hump, throw away this page without reading it, and I swear to you that you will not have lost much.
It has always been said that hunchbacks are sarcastic and evilminded, and that the protuberance they carry about is a depository of venomous satires and biting blasphemies. God keep me from accepting such an opinion, since I am someone who has known one of these unfortunates who had the heart of an angel buried beneath so rough and deformed an exterior. Andrés was like a beautiful diamond mounted in an iron setting.
II
Andrés was 19. I have never seen a gaze more gently languid than his, in eyes as blue as a cloudless sky. His words had something of the perfume of innocence, and his smile was as tender as a maiden’s. We friends of his never hear him voice a complaint about Fate, and when we had a feeling, whether slight or serious, to tell him about, one of those infernal disappointments that break one’s heart string by string, the words that came to his lips were always ones of blessing, peace, and consolation. There was in his voice an echo suggestive of a profound melancholy that moved us, and after hearing him our distress disappeared. That is why his friends called him “Consolación.”
III
Youth without love is like a fountain without murmurs. Love for that age of life is what aroma is to a flower, what blue is to the sky. Take away from youth that divine fire and you will have robbed it of its illusions, you will have taken away its faith and turned the world into an infinite space where deep shadows reign.
Andrés loved Cesarina in silence. Never did the lad’s lips dare to declare the passion that was consuming him, because he feared that his love would become an object of mockery. Can a deformed being not long for the bliss of having another soul that understands his? Perhaps not. A woman’s exquisite sensibility sees the sublime as her ideal, paying little attention to what is beautiful.
Cesarina did not understand the treasure of love buried in Andrés’s heart.
One afternoon we noted that Andrés’s face was paler than usual.
“Are you sick?” we asked him.
“Yes. Heartsick,” he answered.
There was such intimate pain in his voice that it startled us.
“Could you be in love?”
Consolación looked at us, trying to make his face register as great an air of indifference as possible, and replied:
“Can a hunchback be in love?”
“Then what’s the matter, Andrés?”
The usual thing...my friend...the usual thing, my hump!”
But we saw that Andrés was so deeply affected that we understood that he had just received one of those wounds to his soul for which there is no balm on earth.
What had happened?
Consolación had just declared his love to Cesarina, who gave a merry, resounding peal of laughter, and addressing three girls who were friends of hers standing in a hallway in her house, she said:
“Shall I let you in on a bit of news?”
Andrés looked at her in terror.
“What is it?” the friends asked as one.
“I can’t help laughing... you’ll never guess... Andrés is in love!” And the happy chorus burst into laughter because it could not imagine that a hunchback had the passions of a man.
As I was coming downstairs from Andrés’s rooms I heard a pist
ol shot.
VI
That night there was a ball at Cesarina’s. When I entered her salon she was in the arms of a young gallant who was leading her in the seductive turns of a Polish dance.
I approached her and said in her ear:
“Andrés has just died of love for you.”
“How utterly mad of him!” she said with a smile.
And drawn away by her partner, she was lost in the confusion of the ball.
That young woman who was so beautiful had a heart of ice.1
1This article, in rough draft in 1851, is a faithful reminiscence of this tragic event that took place in my days as a schoolboy. I had forgotten it, but by chance there came to my hand the small periodical in which it had appeared more than half a century ago. I reread it with intimate affection, and for that reason I include it in this book [Author’s note].
Appendix Listing of the Peruvian Traditions by
Historical Period
PRECOLUMBIAN
“Palla–Huarcuna”
“The Inca’s Achirana”
CONQUEST AND EARLY COLONY (SIXTEENTH CENTURY)
“The Incas Who Played Chess”
“The Scapegoat”
“Three Historical Questions Concerning Pizarro”
“The Knights of the Cape”
“Don Alonso the Brawny”
“Friars’ Work!”
“The Demon of the Andes”
“The Judge’s Three Reasons”
“The Magistrate’s Ears”
“The Letter Sings”
COLONIAL PERIOD AND VICEROYS
(SEVENTEENTH THROUGH NINETEENTH CENTURY)
“Friar Gómez’s Scorpion”
“Friar Martín’s Mice”
“A Mother’s Love”
Peruvian Traditions Page 28
