Heavens on Earth

by Carmen Boullosa

  Moreover, my Mama was mine and even without taking into account what I have already said, she was upright and sensible and everything she said was that of a well-disposed, good and honorable woman. They kept me from seeing her because the Franciscans decided that mothers were the only women who could come to visit the students and that no aunt or other female relative could visit unless the mother or father were not alive. As far as they were concerned, my mother was not my mother, so, without thinking twice about it, without taking into account that she was the only person who visited me and that my false parents had not even set foot in Tlatelolco to see me the entire year I had been there, and that she, my non-Mama in their eyes, was my only visitor, they took her away from me. The Franciscans did not give much thought to those who had their real mothers either: those boys were lucky to have the chance to see their mothers just once a month, on the first Sunday. But what they did not cut out were the visits from the men, and they increased those of the fathers by quite a bit. My false father’s visits gave me very little happiness, and I did not even dream that my false mother would take the time to come to see me, which did not bother me because I did not have any desire to see them myself, neither him nor her.

  My Mama was so beautiful that I have no doubt that they gave this order so that they would not have to look at her, because it would hurt them to look at a woman so beautiful. But comparing our wounds side-by-side—that of the friars, in the flesh of lust and mine in the tender soul of a child—which should they have considered? Mine, without a doubt. For their wound, prayers and continence and nightly flagellation was enough because the Franciscan friars who lived in Tlatelolco were saintly; while for my wound, neither prayers, nor continence, nor the nightly flagellation brought me any peace. Moreover, my wound was born of separation, theirs was born before separating me from her. Theirs was a wound that did not deserve consideration or even discussion, given that its nature was of the same origin as sin. Mine, created by the absence of my Mama, was an innocent wound because the bond that binds a mother to her child is good. They will say that our bond was unusual, and this is true. Our love and the closeness of our relationship was annoying to some. It is possible that the people of Tezcoco—my relatives (whose son I was replacing)—sent me to the Franciscans not so much to keep their son close as to separate me from my Mama. Now that I think about it, it is possible. There is no way to know. I never really had a relationship with them.

  Without comparing my mother to the holiest Virgin, as I am incapable of such heresy, I think they were wrong about everything because my Mama was incapable of invoking evil and she would have been embarrassed to know that she aroused the shadow of an evil thought in anyone. A song comes to mind:

  Surely, my muse,

  It must be for grand purpose

  that you take us by hand

  Through vain movement of the vain world.

  We might lose the allure

  For heavenly things,

  For it is eternal error

  To adore the things of Earth.24

  In addition to my sorrow at experiencing Franciscan law in a chapter that was most painful to me, there were only a few weeks I was able see her on Sundays. Our weekly visits lasted only one year, one eternal year that congealed inside of me as the worst year of my life. After those awful 365 days had passed, I was not allowed to see her anymore. From then, until the Colegio was left in the hands of the Indians, I lost the good fortune of seeing Mama. When I got her back, during the time the Indians were the poor custodians of the Colegio de la Santa Cruz, she had only a short time left to live due to circumstances that I do not want recount here because it shames me now that I am unable to ever show her again the intense affection that—I do not want to repeat—bound me to her. Nevertheless, on the one hand, a black infantile anger made me blame her unjustly for our separation—since I had lost all closeness with her because she did not read or write and since she did not talk to anyone but me, as I said, I seldom knew much about Mama’s life—and on the other, after hearing the Franciscans constantly saying that women were the seeds of evil, this is where I placed her. In light of the Franciscan’s words, she seemed to me to be a strange being, foreign to me, and my life. When I saw her again, although my heart was, its own way, filled with joy to see her as much as it had been when I was a child, I did not show it and instead punished her for a crime that was not hers, overlaying my punishment with a false Franciscan purity believing that I was being faithful to the law by being short and stingy in expressing my love to her. At that time, she was no longer as beautiful as she had once been. She was sad and very sick. Her only joy, she told me herself, was in thinking that, educated by the friars and seeing how things were among the Indians, maybe her son might achieve some glory: a good position, something which justly should have belonged to me given the status of my family. Because I had been born noble, she told me once again, I should not die suffering the hardships of a macehual. When she died, she was worse off than a macehual, young and aged at the same time, deceived by the only thing that was important to her—by imagining that I would not end up being an Indian in these now unhealthy lands.

  The only joy my Mama might have had at the end dissolved in light of my coldness. I did not want her near me, I did not want to look her in the eyes. I do not know if it hurt me to look at her or if I was angry, but my caprice removed her from my sight forever because I think she did not want to fight for her life when she saw that she no longer mattered to her son. She had lost him forever. In spite of this, knowing her nature as a dreamer, I know that she continued, until her last moment, dreaming of the good life she imagined for me.

  Her dream did not seem so fantastic then, though it had something of fantasy. What should have happened was that, finding herself free of me, rather than surrendering to pain and illness, she should have found a man who would love her for her nobility and beauty. But that practice, and it was a practice, was outside of her nature as a dreamer. Instead, I know she would have recorded every detail of the dream she dreamt for me in her imagination. I do not think that she would have planned for her son what I ended up dreaming for myself sometime later—that I would dedicate myself with honor to the honest life of letters. “Ambition extinguishes curiosity, these two things are contrary to each other.” In my fantasies, I put myself in the place of the curiosity, whereas my mother put me in the place where ambition is satisfied. They will say that place does not exist because “such are the ambition and arrogance that reign in the human heart that they are not satisfied with the whole world; instead they are enriched with longing and thirst for gold.”25

  Precisely what she might have imagined for me I do not know, although I can conjecture where it would lead—to honor, power, and wealth—but I will not deal with that here. I do, however, want talk to you about what I imagined for myself. I can even describe the routine I glimpsed in my dream: at six in the morning I would be in the chapel to attend daily mass. During the half hour that remained after mass, we would devour some bread for breakfast before we would need to be at the University at seven o’clock. From opposite sides of the city of Mexico (and us coming from Tlatelolco), students would depart in a plethora of colors of academic hoods and gowns. Those from the Colegio de San Pedro and San Pablo would come from farther away than we do and arrive wrapped in their dark brownish-gray gowns and wearing their long purple academic hoods. The students from the Colegio Real de San Ildefonso set off from the north side of the main plaza to the University and basically mark the path as they walk in the blue gowns and blue and purple hoods of grammar and art, respectively. Those from the Colegio de Cristo come from the Calle de Donceles in their purple gowns and green hoods. Those from the Seminary cross the intersection that separates the Catedral del Palacio de los Virreyes to continue on the sidewalk in their purple gowns and blue hoods, before arriving at the last corner and from there crossing Plaza del Volador diagonally, until they arrive at the University. From the opposite side and from the far
thest distance south arrive the students from the Colegio de San Juan de Letrán wearing white hoods and purple gowns; the students of the Colegio Mayor de Santa María de todos los Santos come from the opposite corner behind the University dressed in a replica of the student habit of the Colegio de Santa Cruz de Vallodolid in Spain, which was a dark brownish-gray gown with a wheat colored hood. Then when we are all very close to the University, just about to enter into it, we would join with those wearing civil robes, religious habits, and the vestments of doctors and teachers, walking two by two as we had on our way in. I direct myself toward the Generales, where I would have a reading of the Decretales with the chair of Prima de Cánones and a reading on something from either the Digestos or the Esforzado with the Prima de Leyes.

  Once we finished our morning classes it would be time for us to return directly, since it would be prohibitive to stay longer at the University. The rest of the Colegios returned in the afternoon to take two more hours of lessons, but given the distance that separated us from the University, we would receive the last two lessons of the day from our teachers in our Colegio.

  But my mother’s dream (the one I did not share), as well as my own, would be denied in time, both turning into vain illusions. Mine became a false dream because when the Colegios were incorporated into the University, its doors were not open to the Colegio de Santa Cruz. There was no doubt that we were the best and most outstanding students, but since we were Indian…Was reality not enough to contradict their beliefs about our nature? The University did not accept the Colegio of the Indians even though we were nobles (as was later dictated by the orders of Palafox). In addition to their ideas about Indians, they had a good reason to close the doors of the University to us: we were better versed in the arts and grammar than others who had been accepted there. I am deducing this, even though it might seem to be senseless and foolish nonsense, because the Spaniards (the “Christians,” as they are called in the surrounding lands, those outside of Tlatelolco and beyond of Mexico City) do not want the Indians to have any advantage over them. Whenever they can, they say that the Indians are less intelligent, that they are like children, but the reason they did not let us enter the University was because we were their betters, and these lands do not forgive those who are better. In these lands, those who serve the most are usually respected the least…If I were a poet I would say that this is the Heaven of Envy. Or is that the law across the entire world? Of course the world cannot be expected to lack the essence of evil because its very being is a river of sins. Even so, there is no reason to surrender to it, or to its pleasures, fame, or power, or to any of its deceptive enchantments. Moreover, the world does not forgive when it is not taken into consideration. It shows no mercy and avenges itself cruelly.

  Since the world maintains a strange relationship with nature, it is crueler at certain points in the equinox, while in others it is more tolerant or punishes with less rigor; it has less of a taste for vengeance depending on the deeds of men and the times. I never left these lands but I can attest that none are crueler than these are today. Regarding the Hispanic, the exudations of his nature gives these lands an acidic bitterness. Two of my companions left here, and their lives were very different.

  One was Pedro Juan Antonio, an Indian student of the Colegio de Tlatelolco who was especially well versed in the authors of the classics. Although he was younger than I, and therefore arrived at the Colegio at a time when the studies were less brilliant, he was attended to by the teachers as if it were the Colegio of better times. Due to his special assiduousness, he was educated by Fray Andrés de Olmos, who died in 1571; Fray Juan de Gaona, who died earlier, in 1560; Fray Francisco de Bustamante, a great preacher, who died in 1562; the wise Juan Foscher; and Sahagún, who died quite old, but still lucid, scarcely four years ago, in 1590. He had more teachers, but I am thinking about the most famous ones who were the most devoted to his education. Pedro Juan Antonio went to Spain in 1568, when he was 30 years old. At the University of Salamanca, he studied Civil and Canonical Law. In 1574 he published a Latin grammar in Barcelona titled Arte de la lengua latina, which we insisted that someone bring us a copy of; but it was all for naught, because though it was a book over there, here it was reduced to simply lines scribbled by an Indian.

  The second one I am thinking about is my contemporary, Don Antonio Elejos, another author who wrote books about the brain itself. Thus, he helped not only the Franciscans, which is what we all did. I, myself, thanks to the facility that God gave me to translate anything from the Latin and the Spanish languages into the Mexican language, attending more to the meaning than the letter, wrote and translated a variety of things for Fray Juan Bautista, amounting to more than thirty quires of paper, and although it might be wrong of me to say (and I only dare to do so because others have already said it and because it is true), I assisted Fray Alonso de Molina in writing the Arte y vocabulario mexicano and Father Gaona in writing the Diálogos de la paz y tranquilidad del alma, and I was also the scribe for Fray Juan Bautista’s Vocabulario eclesiástico, and for a large part of the Vanidades of Estela, the Flos sanctorum or Vidas de santos, the Exposición del Decálogo, in addition to other treatises and books, but I will not mention any more, although it would be closer to the truth.

  But we were talking about Fray Elejos, who is more deserving than I, because in addition to having taught Theology, he wrote two works, as yet unpublished, each of which we have a copy of here at the Colegio: one volume of sermons, Homilia sobre los Evangelios todo el año, and the other a catechism in the Pima language titled Doctrina Cristiana de la lengua pima. He wrote the latter in the Pima language because he was taken very young to the province of Zacatecas, and those lands are not burdened by the hate of these lands, which are as abundant in bad feelings as in water. In Zacatecas, in addition to being an author, as I mentioned, he was received into the order of San Francisco despite the fact that he is an Indian.

  Why was Elejos a priest, why was Pedro Juan Antonio the author of two long books, why were both professors of Theology, and recognized as such? (Why was I a teacher of Theology to many but never given the title of Professor of Theology?). Because Elejos and Pedro Juan Antonio fled from here, because they did not remain in the Valley of Anáhuac to feed the insatiable belly of this evil world, which is eager to feed on those who do not pay it even the slightest respect. Because although Zumárraga was humble and other Franciscans were devoted to the humble faith of those little brothers, they found a way to avoid injuring the world, they found a way to obey it, and when they did not (I saw it with my own eyes), they also lost and had to pay the World with their quota of pain at these terrible equinoxes.

  What is left of me? What of Fray Melo? What of Fray Juan García? Of the latter there is more left than what I once was, for his intelligence, his fierce mind was something of which I have never seen the equal. Fray Juan García had the most brilliant mind (and still does, this he has not lost, in fact it appears it has become even more so), and his culture and knowledge are unmatched in these lands and are probably unrivaled in other less vengeful lands. What is left of him? His crazy brain, which by dint of working has managed to avoid the fetid emanations of these humid and cruel lands. As for the rest of his body, there is not a centimeter of healthy flesh, even if he is still beautiful. What I do not know is whether this is virtue, because part of the anger directed toward him was also because of his beauty. Why did he not leave here? Why did they stay? I do not know why the two friends stayed here, like holy Sebastians, allowing the weapons of envy and spiritual pestilence of these lands to pierce them and lodge in their flesh. Those who left here were saved, little by little, like Elejos and Pedro Juan Antonio.

  As for the rest of us: intelligence, fidelity, and knowledge are not easily forgiven; and even less so if one does not surrender to the world its quota of veneration, if one is not a seeker of fame or foreign treasures, a desirer of riches, or a narrow-minded voluptuary. On the other hand, gossip, now that I remember, does not
suffice as payment or satisfaction for the world, as if saying bad things about one’s fellow man were a spiritual activity and not vile and mundane, for I never knew anyone to be more of a gossip than Fray Melo (forgive me if I offend his person in saying so). If you wanted to hear bad things said about your fellow man, no tongue could wag like his could. Oh, wicked Fray Melo, you have lost this too. The spark of your intelligence has faded with your corporeal suffering.

  The Franciscans will put the two friars in their sack of saints. They will say that it was divine will that left them to the torment of their bodies. In my opinion, they lie in saying this. Those two friars are that way because the poison and envy do not allow the existence of their two great talents.