The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter

by Katherine Anne Porter

  Finding himself the chief obstacle to that freedom of the press which had now become his main object in life, Lizardi proceeded to multiply his offenses. Freemasonry had been creeping in quietly from France by way of Spain. It was the nightmare of the Church everywhere and two Popes had issued bulls against it: Clement XII in 1738, Benedict XIV in 1751. The alarmed clergy in Mexico republished these bulls in 1821, and by way of response Lizardi wrote a pamphlet called plainly “A Defense of the Freemasons.” He used arguments that were in the main those of a good Christian, an informed Catholic and a fairly good student of the Bible. It was also a heated, tactless and illogical performance, and the Church simply came down on him like a hammer. Nine days after the pamphlet was published, Lizardi was publicly and formally excommunicated by the board of ecclesiastical censorship, and the notice was posted in all the churches.

  So it was done at last, and The Thinker passed a little season in hell which made all his former difficulties seem, as he would say, “like fruit and frosted cake.” He was kept more or less a prisoner in his own house, where by the rules no member of his own household was supposed to speak to him, or touch him, or help or serve him in any way.

  It is improbable that this state of affairs ever existed in that family, but the neighbors would not speak to his wife or daughter, they had great hardships procuring food, and no servant would stay in the house. When he ventured out certain persons drew aside from him; at least once a small mob gathered and threatened to stone him; a group of friars also threatened to come and beat him in his own house, and he advised them defiantly to come well prepared. They did not come, however. He had no defenders for no one would defend an excommunicated man. His wife went to appeal to the Vicar-General, who would not allow her to approach or speak, but waved her away, shouting, “In writing, in writing,” since it was forbidden to speak to any member of his family.

  Lizardi, announcing that he was “as Catholic as the Pope,” which in fact he does not seem to have been, began to defend himself. It was a sign of the times that he could still find presses to print his pamphlets. He appealed to Congress to have the censure of the Church lifted within the prescribed legal period, and asked that body to appoint a lawyer to defend him in the secular courts, but nothing was done in either case. He continued to harry the government, giving sarcastic advice to Iturbide, and recorded with pride that after he had been cut off from human kind by his excommunication his friends were more faithful than ever. It is true he did enjoy some rather furtive moral support from radical sources, but he was bold as if he had all society on his side. He wrote a second defense of the Freemasons, wrote a bitter defense of his entire career and beliefs in the famous “Letter to a Papist,” and dragged on his miserable life somehow until 1823, when Iturbide was overthrown by General Antonio López de Santa Ana, head of a “Federalist” party which pretended to found a Republic based on the best elements of the American and French models. It turned out to be another dictatorship which lasted for about thirty years, with Santa Ana at its head. The Catholic Church was still the only recognized religion, a blow to Lizardi, but he took hope again. The appearance of the written Constitution deceived him momentarily, and as unofficial uninvited member of the Federalist party he began again agitating for all those reforms so dear to his heart: Freedom of the press, first, last and forever, compulsory free education, religious liberty, liberty of speech and universal franchise, and naturally, almost as a result of these things, justice, sweet justice, for everybody, regardless of race, class, creed or color.

  Almost at once he found himself in jail again.

  He gives his account of it as follows, tongue in cheek: “In the month of June (1823), I was imprisoned for writing an innocent little paper called ‘If Congress Sits Much Longer We Shall Lose Our Shirts.’ I described a dream I had in which a set of petty thieves were debating the best way of robbing us. . . they denounced me. . . on the strength of the title alone, arrested me and I was forced to labor again in my own defense.” (“Letter to a Papist.”)

  This must have blown over, for on the 20th of that same June he was again prisoner in St. Andrés’ hospital, but this was probably one of those dreary mischances which befall poor people unable to keep up with the rent: at any rate he insulted the landlady and she threw him out of the house, lock, stock, and barrel, accusing him of defamation of her character. He got out of this, too, and in revenge wrote a poem called “Epithalamium” in which he seems to have married off the judge and the landlady with appropriate ribaldry; but they could do nothing as he mentioned no names.

  By then no printer would publish for him: he appears to have got hold of a press of his own, but the authorities forbade newsboys to sell his papers in the streets. At last he left the city for a while, but there was no fate for him in such a case except death in exile. He returned and late in December, 1823, he wrote a letter to the ecclesiastical board of censorship, saying he would no longer attempt to defend himself by civil law, and asked for absolution. This was granted and the documents were published in a periodical in January, 1824.

  “Time will mend all things,” he wrote at about this time, “in effect, today this abuse will be remedied, tomorrow, another. . . in eight or ten years everything will go as it should.” He lived by, and for, this illusion, but these are the words of a mortally weary man. He had never been strong and he was already suffering from the tuberculosis of which he was to die. He had at this time an intimation of approaching death.

  He began a small bi-weekly sheet called The Yokel and the Sacristan, and in June, 1825, a number of this was pronounced heretical. He was given eight days in which to make a reply, and asked for three months, which was not granted. He allowed himself even a little more time than he had asked for, then made an evasive and unsatisfactory reply. He was not pursued any further about this.

  The reason may have been that Lizardi had quarreled successfully, even triumphantly, just five months before, with the Bishop of Sonora. This Bishop had issued a manifesto pronouncing the new Federalist Constitution of Mexico Anti-Catholic (in spite of that clause legalizing the Church alone which had so nearly broken Lizardi’s spirit). The Bishop argued for the divine right of Kings, and said that God had been deprived of his rights. Lizardi replied with a defense of the republican form of government, in his usual animated style. The public response to him was so great a governmental commission waited upon the Bishop, escorted him to Acapulco and put him on board a ship which returned him to Spain for good. And Santa Ana’s government suddenly gave Lizardi a pension of sixty-five pesos a month “to reward him for his services to the revolution, until something better could be found.” The something better was the editorship of the official organ of the new government, called The Gazette, at a salary of 100 pesos a month. For the times, this was not a bad income for a man who had never had one and this short period was the only one of his life in which Lizardi was free from financial misery. He was at once pestered by his enemies who coveted no doubt the fortune he had fallen into, and though he went on with the job for a year or two, in the end he quarreled with everybody and was out of favor again. . . .

  So it went, to the end. The rest of the history has to do with suits for defamation, plays about to be produced and failing, troubles with the censors, suppressions rather monotonously more of the same. “Let the judges answer whether they are fools or bought men,” he wrote, when they found for his enemy in a slander trial. He maintained this spirit until the end. He wrote publicly denying that he had ever yielded to the ecclesiastical censors, or asked for absolution. The fact is clear that if he had not done so, the sentence of excommunication would never have been lifted. He boasted of his prudence in the business, and hinted at secret, important diplomatic strategy. Let it go. In the end, it was a matter of yielding, or of starving his family and himself to death.

  In 1825, General Guadalupe Victoria, then President, proclaimed the end of slavery. One might have thought this would please Lizardi, and perhaps it did in a m
easure. But at once he discovered that the proclamation referred only to Negro slaves, and to the outright buying and selling of human flesh. It did not refer to the slavery of the Indian, which he found as bitter and hopeless under the Creole Republic as it had been under the Spanish Viceroys. . . . He pointed out this discrepancy, and insisted that it should be remedied. By that time, he had such a reputation for this kind of unreasonableness, the new government decided to ignore him as far as they were able. He was dismissed from consideration as a crack-brained enthusiast.

  By the end of April, 1827, Lizardi knew that death was near. Someone reported on his state of health: he was “a mere skeleton.” Lying in bed, he wrote and had printed his “Testament and Farewell of The Mexican Thinker.” At some length, and with immense bitterness, he repeated for the last time his stubborn faiths, his unalterable beliefs, his endless opposition to every form of social, political, and human wrong, to every abuse of power and to every shade of dishonesty, particularly the dishonesty of those in power. He still considered himself as Catholic as the Pope, but he could not admit the infallibility of His Holiness. He still did not believe in the apparitions of saints, calling them “mere goblins.” He was as good a patriot as ever, but he was still no party man, and he could not condone in the republican government those same abuses he had fought in the days of the Empire. With sad irony he willed to his country “A Republic whose constitution denies religious freedom; a Cathedral on which the canons would at the first opportunity replace the Spanish coat of arms; an ecclesiastical chapter which ignores the civil law altogether; streets full of stray dogs, beggars, idle police; thieves and assassins who flourish in criminal collusion with corrupt civil employees,” and so on as ever, in minute detail, no evil too petty or too great for attack, as if they were all of one size and one importance. I think this does not argue at all a lack of the sense of proportion, but is proof of his extraordinary perception of the implicit relationship between all manifestations of evil, the greater breeding and nourishing the lesser, the lesser swarming to support and confirm the greater.

  He advised the President of the Republic to get acquainted with the common people and the workers, to study his army and observe the actions of his ministers; and he desired that his wife and friends should not make any loud mourning over him; they were not to light candles around him, and they were to bury him not in the customary friar’s robe, but in the uniform of a soldier. Further, he wished that his wife would pay only the regular burial fees of seven pesos, and not haggle with the priest, who would try to charge her more for a select spot in the cemetery. He wished that his epitaph might be: “Here lies the ashes of The Mexican Thinker, who did what he could for his country.”

  For long days and nights he strangled to death slowly in the wretched little house, number 27, Fuente Quebrado (The Broken Fountain), with his wife and young daughter watching him die, unable to relieve his sufferings with even the most rudimentary comforts, without medical attendance, without money, almost without food. He called two priests to hear his final confession, wishing them to be witnesses for each other that he had not died without the last rites; but he put off receiving Extreme Unction because he hoped the ritual might be attended by a number of former friends who believed him to be a heretic. The friends for some reason failed to arrive for this occasion. Lizardi lingered on, hoping, but no one came; and on June 27, still hoping, but refusing the ceremony until his witnesses should arrive, he died. Almost at once it was rumored abroad that he died possessed of the devil. The friends came then, to see for themselves, and his pitiable corpse was exposed to public view in the hovel where he died, as proof that the devil had not carried him off.

  The next day a few former acquaintances, his family and a small mob of curious busybodies followed the body of Fernández de Lizardi to the cemetery of San Lázaro, and buried him with the honors of a retired Captain. Neither the epitaph that he composed for himself, nor any other, was inscribed on his gravestone, for no stone was ever raised. His wife died within four months and was buried beside him. His fifteen-year-old daughter was given in charge of a certain Doña Juliana Guevara de Ceballos, probably her godmother, or a female relation, who seems to have handed her over to the care of another family whose name is not known. This family removed to Vera Cruz shortly, and there Lizardi’s daughter died of yellow fever.

  So the grave closed over them all, and Mexico almost forgot its stubborn and devoted Thinker. The San Lázaro cemetery disappeared, and with it his unmarked grave. His numberless pamphlets disappeared, a few into private collections and storerooms of bookshops; a great many more into moldering heaps of wastepaper. In effect, Lizardi was forgotten.

  His novel, his one novel that he had never meant to write, which had got itself suppressed in its eleventh chapter, is without dispute The Novel of the past century, not only for Mexico but for all Spanish-speaking countries. It was published in full in 1830, three years after Lizardi’s death, and there were eight editions by 1884. In spite of this, in 1885 there appeared an edition, “corrected, explained with notes, and adorned with thirty fine illustrations,” and announced as the second edition, though it was really the ninth.

  After that, no one troubled any more to number editions correctly or not. Until the recent disaster in Spain, a big popular press in Barcelona reprinted it endlessly at the rate of more than a million copies a year, on pulp paper, in rotten type, with a gaudy paper cover illustrating some wild scene, usually that of the corpse-robbing in the crypt. In Mexico I used to see it at every smallest sidewalk book stall; in the larger shops there were always a good number of copies on hand, selling steadily. It was given to the young to read as an aid to manners and morals, and for a great while it must have been the one source of a liberal education for the great mass of people, the only ethical and moral instruction they could have, for Lizardi’s ideas of modern education got no foothold in Mexico for nearly a century after him.

  It is not to be supposed that anybody ever read a picaresque tale for the sake of the sugar plums of polite instruction concealed in it, but Lizardi had the knack of scattering little jokes and curious phrases all through his sermons, and he managed to smuggle all his pamphlets into the final version of El Periquillo. They were all there, at great length; the dog in the strange neighborhood, the dead who make no noise, the monkey dressed in silk; with all his attacks on slavery, on bullfighting, on dishonest apothecaries and incompetent doctors; his program for enlightened education, his proposals for cleaning the city in time of plague; against the vicious and mercenary clergy, the unscrupulous politicians; against gambling, against—ah well, they are all there, and the trouble for the translator is getting them out again without leaving too many gaps. For try as he might, by no art could the good Thinker make his dreary fanatic world of organized virtue anything but terrifying to the reader, it was so deadly dull. But once these wrappings are stripped from the story, there is exposed a fine, traditional Rogue’s Progress, the history of a true pícaro, a younger brother of Guzman de Alfarache, as Dr. Beristain said, or of Gil Blas. He has English relations too—Peregrine Pickle, Roderick Random, Tom Jones, all of that family of lucky sinners who end well. In the best style, more things happen to El Periquillo than might reasonably happen to one man, events move at top speed, disasters pile up; but he comes through one way or another, shedding his last misadventure with a shake of his shoulders, plunging straightway into the next. Like all his kind, he is hard and casual and thickskinned and sentimental, and he shares their expedient, opportunist morality, which always serves to recall to his mind the good maxims of his early upbringing when his luck is bad, but never once when it is good.

  The typical pícaro also is always the incomplete hero of his own story, for he is also a buffoon. Periquillo is afflicted with the itch, he loses his trousers during a bullfight in the presence of ladies, he is trapped into the wrong bed by the malice of his best friend, he is led again and again into humiliating situations by wits quicker than his own.
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  Living by his wits, such as they are, he is a true parasite, attaching himself first to one then another organism to feed upon. He is hardly ever without a “master” or “mentor” or “patron” and this person is always doing something for him, which El Periquillo accepts as his right and gives nothing, or as little as possible, in return.

  Only once does he feel real gratitude. After leaving the house of the Chinese Mandarin, improbable visitor from the Island Utopia, whom Periquillo has succeeded in gulling for a while, he has been beaten and called a pimp by three girls. None of his other disgraces could equal this, so he gets drunk and goes to hang himself. He fails of course, goes to sleep instead, and wakes to find himself robbed and stripped to the shirt by wayside thieves. He is rescued by a poor old Indian woman who clothes and feeds him. In an untypical rush of tenderness, he embraces and kisses the unsightly creature. This is almost the only truly and honestly tender episode in the book, uncorrupted by any attempts to point a moral, for Lizardi’s disillusionment with human nature was real, and based on experience, and most of his attempts to play upon the reader’s sentiments ring false.

  As El Periquillo’s adventures follow the old picaresque pattern, so do those of the other characters, for they are all pretty much fairly familiar wares from the old storehouse. But the real heroes of this novel, by picaresque standards, are some of El Periquillo’s comrades, such as Juan Largo, and the Eaglet. One is hanged and one dies leading a bandit raid, neither of them repents or ponders for a moment, but goes to his destined end in good form and style. Juan Largo says, “A good bullfighter dies on the horns of the bull,” and El Periquillo answers that he has no wish to die a bullfighter’s death. Indeed, he wants no heroics, either in living or dying. He wants to eat his cake and have it too and to die at last respectably in a comfortable bed surrounded by loving mourners. He does it, too. A thoroughly bad lot.