The Lady in Blue

by Javier Sierra

  “Which means the thieves know everything,” Zsidiv said quietly.

  “That’s not the problem. There’s no doubt that a very powerful organization has infiltrated itself among us, and they are seeking our ruin. There exists a fifth column that is trying to pull down the labor of centuries.”

  “Father! You aren’t accusing anyone at this table, are you?” exclaimed Giancarlo Orlandi.

  “Don’t get carried away. The column of which I speak operates behind the back of Holy Mother the Church. It has at present been able to take possession of a document that all of us considered under control and even forgotten, in which the techniques used to create false apparitions of the Virgin and other prodigies such as the voice of God are explained through the use of acoustical vibrations.”

  “Good Lord! Can that be possible?”

  Balducci looked in horror at Father Cormack.

  “It is indeed.”

  “And what would occur if the deception were uncovered?”

  “We would fall into tremendous disrepute. Imagine it: we would appear to be the creators of apparitions by means of ‘special effects.’ Our followers would feel betrayed and would wander away from the protection of Holy Mother the Church . . .”

  “Now I understand why they called me here,” Balducci said just above a whisper. “They want me, as Prefect of the Council for the Laity, to convince Christianity of the authenticity of these apparitions. Is that not the case?”

  “Not exactly. The damage is irreparable, and the hostile force that stole the documentation has already taken steps to expose the truth, as terrible as it is.”

  “So then?”

  “Your mission will be to let that information out into the world in small doses so that it does not have so traumatic an effect when our enemies make it public, for we seriously fear that the matter is already out of our hands.”

  “And how will I do it?”

  “That’s what we must agree upon. But I have several ideas. For example, you can ask someone to write a novel, film a television series, shoot a movie . . . whatever! They could use a version of our propaganda. As is well known, when the truth is disguised as fiction, it for some reason ends up being less credible.”

  Monsignor Zsidiv stood up from his seat, beaming in triumph.

  “I have a proposal. Baldi, before he disappeared, spoke with a journalist to whom he leaked certain details about Chronovision that were later published in Spain.”

  “We remember that,” Cormack cut in.

  “Why don’t we simply invite this journalist to write the novel you propose? When all is said and done, he already possesses certain elements with which he can begin to weave the story. He could even title it something like The Lady in Blue . . .’ ”

  The Prefect of the Holy Office was smiling broadly.

  “A good point of departure. You think like an angel,” Cormack said to Zsidiv, completely taking him by surprise.

  Zsidiv smiled to himself. Indeed, it was the first time in history that an angel had come to occupy such a powerful position in the Vatican, and had even managed to impose his point of view. But neither Cormack nor the others at the meeting knew it. Zsidiv thought about the bitter confusion in which Baldi must have been floundering these past hours during his seclusion in Segovia. He regretted having to trick the man, sending him on a search for documents that he himself had had in his control for a long time, but he couldn’t let others in the church take advantage of what he knew. He intended to free Baldi that very night, allowing him to return to his post in Venice. By this point Baldi would have already learned about Zsidiv’s angelic lineage, so the Cardinal would now propose that the Venetian join their cause, putting his technical knowledge in the service of the truth.

  As regards Carlos Albert, it gave Zsidiv pleasure to consider the many synchronicities that were going to assault him in the future. He was certain the journalist, who had caught the attention of the Ordo Sanctae Imaginis one day by asking uncomfortable questions about Chronovision, would return to believing—at least in angels. And something similar would happen to Jennifer Narody. But none of his joys was as great as that of knowing, from this day forward, that no one of his lineage would be used to deceive his fellow men.

  “Like an angel, you say?” he whispered to Cormack in a mocking tone. “Make that a rebel angel.”

  THE END

  POST SCRIPTUM

  SOME HISTORICAL TIE-INS FOR BUSY READERS

  The last word has yet to be written on the Lady in Blue. For three centuries, history textbooks have overlooked the ecstasies and bilocations of Sister María Jesús de Ágreda, as well as other religious figures of her time, such as Sister María Luisa de la Ascensión, also known as the nun of Carrión. Historians have preferred to stress Ágreda’s other merits: the Lady in Blue’s intense life, her dedication to literature, and her wide-ranging correspondence with the leading political personages of her time, among them King Philip IV of Spain.

  Among all the writings of her maturity, one has become immortal: a voluminous work in eight volumes entitled The Mystical City of God, which she created, as she said at the time, at the express desire of the Virgin. In it she gave an account of the life of Our Lady with such a wealth of detail that it has even in our time inspired motion pictures such as Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. Sister María Jesús devoted seven years of her life to the book, during which time she experienced nine visions and many encounters with angels of flesh and blood. Intrigued by the stories he heard, and after the interrogations carried out by Friar Benavides, Philip IV wrote to the nun for the first time. The date was October 1643.

  The monarch, like his predecessors, decided to confide the secrets of his soul to a highly inspired woman, whose advice was of assistance to him even in important political matters. Sister María Jesús consoled the king on various occasions, offering herself as a kind of “medium” between him and his departed wife, Isabel de Borbón, and between the king and his dead son Prince Baltasar Carlos, “destined,” according to the nun, to Purgatory.

  Sister María Jesús burned the original manuscript of The Mystical City of God in 1643, and began rewriting it in 1655. Over the course of her life she burned many other writings, especially those written during the time of her bilocations in New Mexico, with the resultant loss of precious clues to the origin of her experiences for those of us engaged in historical research. Nevertheless, some were saved, such as the text preserved in the National Library in Madrid (Manuscript No. 9354), entitled “Treatise on the Roundness of the Earth,” in which she gave an account of how our planet looked to her when she was airborne.

  Of all the documents that allude to her adventure, the most important is, without a doubt, the Memorial of Benavides. The first one, printed in 1630, is of great value, for it is the first historical text to describe the territory of New Mexico, and it is currently a required text in the state’s universities.

  With regard to the other actual events depicted in this novel, I should say that the government of the United States did indeed set up a laboratory at Fort Meade whose purpose was to create “psychic spies,” many of whom have for years related publicly and in the first person some of their experiences working for INSCOM. Their accounts have served in large part as a basis on which I built the essential parts of this novel’s intrigue, as did the studies initiated by Robert Monroe, an engineer who died in 1995, who managed to bring us an illuminating vision of the phenomenon of astral travel in his books Journey Out of the Body, Far Journeys, and Ultimate Journey.

  The Chronovision project was also quite real. In fact, at the beginning of the 1990s, I interviewed a Benedictine priest in Venice who had participated in certain experiments whose goal was to “see,” and even to “photograph” the past. That exemplary monk, an expert in pre-polyphony, was named Pellegrino Ernetti. He died in 1994. In the brief interview that I held with him at the Venetian monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore, he limited himself to telling me that Pope Pius XII cla
ssified the experiments as riservatissime. It seems that the Pope believed that widespread dissemination would have changed the course of history. And Ernetti, faithful to the Pope’s wishes, carried his secret to the grave.

  This novel is, then, the fruit of the many different narrative threads I stumbled upon while investigating the legend of the Lady in Blue, well known today in the southwestern United States but practically unknown in Spain. And also the fruit of my obsession with the enigma of space-time “leaps” and of synchronicities. Some threads, once properly connected, allowed me to reach at least one intimate certainty: that in this universe, nothing is due to chance. Not even, reader, the fact that this book has fallen into your hands.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book is a homage to those men who, in 1629, set out to explore the inhospitable territories of New Mexico, carrying with them the most important values of the Old World. That expedition was made up of twelve soldiers, nineteen priests, and twelve laymen. Led by Friar Esteban de Perea, those adventurers of the faith are not generally known to posterity. And I would like to change that. Therefore, I believe that the moment has arrived to remember Antonio de Arteaga, Francisco de Acebedo, Cristóbal de la Concepción, Agustín de Cuellar, Roque de Figueredo, Diego de la Fuente, Martínez González, Andrés Gutiérrez, Francisco de la Madre de Dios, Tomás Manso, Francisco Muñoz, Francisco de Porras, Juan Ramírez, Bartolomé Romero, Francisco de San Buenaventura, García de San Francisco, and Diego de San Lucas. Their names figure in disparate documents and histories that no one reads. May this work provide vindication for their memory.

  Of course, the creator of this book is the Lady in Blue, into whose path I fell on April 14, 1991, in the middle of the heavy snowfall referred to in these pages. I know that she, in some way, is the one who has directed my book to the wise hands of Carolyn Reidy, Judith Curr, and those of my favorite editor, Johanna Castillo, at Atria Books, and who pushed me to write novels at a time when I could only look forward to editing newspaper reports.

  There are many more people behind this work. For example, Tom and Elaine Colchie, my agents in the United States, who went carefully over every page of this work and proposed ingenious solutions to difficulties into which I alone had fallen. And my principal literary agent, Antonia Kerrigan, and her team, whose enthusiasm and efforts were even more charged by the “blue force” of these pages.

  Thanks to the team that also worked on The Secret Supper: Michael Selleck, Sue Fleming, Karen Louis-Joyce, Christine Duplessis, Kathleen Schmidt, David Brown, Nancy Clements, Gary Urda, Dina d’Alessandro, Isolde Sauer, Nancy Inglis, Amy Tannenbaum, and David Gombau.

  For still others, permit me, reader, to guard their anonymity. They have been like angels for me, and everyone knows that with angels you have to let them fly in peace.

  DRAMATIS PERSONAE

  Historical figures play crucial roles in this work of fiction. The following are succinct biographies of the novel’s central characters, in the hope that they will stimulate the curiosity of those readers who have already intuited that The Lady in Blue is much more than a work of fiction.

  Ágreda, Sister María Jesús de (1602–1665). Her secular name was María Coronel y Arana. From an early age she possessed a mysterious, introverted, and highly intelligent personality. To more than a few of her biographers, she seemed to enjoy what was called “inspired learning,” which is another way of saying that she had knowledge of subjects she had never studied.

  When she was only thirteen years old, her parents transformed the family home into a convent. Her mother encouraged her to become a nun, and at sixteen she accepted her destiny. Her mystical experiences began in 1625, when she was twenty-three years old. She bilocated, levitated in front of the other nuns, and participated in many kinds of “manifestations,” or supernatural phenomena; this period coincides with her mysterious evangelization in America. Shortly thereafter, when she turned twenty-five, she was chosen prioress; granted a special dispensation by the Pope, she wrote a life of the Virgin, The Mystical City of God, and began an intense correspondence with Philip IV, the king of Spain. Although her story remains little known, she was doubtless one of the most compelling personalities of Spain’s Golden Age.

  Albert, Carlos. This character was created as a way of giving the reader some idea of the incredible events that took place when I was in the process of documenting The Lady in Blue. He is, in some ways, my alter ego. The haphazard manner with which Carlos stumbled upon María Jesús de Ágreda’s village, as depicted early in the novel, was something I experienced firsthand, and which profoundly affected me.

  Baldi, Giuseppe. Although the character is fictional, he is inspired by the Benedictine priest and exorcist Pellegrino Ernetti (1925–1994), a Venetian professor of pre-polyphony. In May 1972, Ernetti gave a polemical interview to the Italian newsmagazine Domenica del Corriere in which he confessed to having worked on the construction of a machine, known as the Chronovisor, capable of photographing the past. I was, in fact, able to interview him at the Monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice a year before his death. What I learned in that interview inspired major portions of this novel.

  Benavides, Friar Alonso de (c. 1580–1636). Born on the island of San Miguel in the Azores, he was ordained as a priest in 1598 in Mexico. In October 1623, he was placed in charge of the New Mexico region, which was at that time known as the Guardianship of Saint Paul. By the time he was relieved by Friar Esteban de Perea, around 1629, eighty thousand Indians in that region had been successfully converted. After writing his celebrated Memorial for Philip IV, he visited Ágreda in order to interview María Jesús and clarify her involvement in the apparitions of the Lady in Blue in America. April 30, 1631, marked the beginning of a series of encounters between the two that stretched over the course of two weeks. Friar Alonso was later appointed auxiliary bishop of Goa in what was then the Portuguese Indies, but he died during the course of the voyage to his destination.

  Philip IV, king of Spain (1605–1665). María Jesús de Ágreda’s bilocations took place during his reign. In July 1643, Philip himself visited the convent at the foot of the Sierra del Moncayo in Soria, and met with the Lady in Blue for the first time. Six days later the two began a correspondence that lasted until 1665. While there is no definitive proof, it was probably through the mediation of the king that the Franciscans finally identified the Lady in Blue described by the Indians of New Mexico as the nun from Ágreda. It was also on his orders that the Friar Benavides Memorial was printed at the Royal Printing House in Madrid, in 1630. Philip IV had a great appreciation of Sister María Jesús de Ágreda, and his letters to her reveal more about the personality of the monarch than any other document of the time.

  Manso y Zúñiga, Francisco (1587–1656). The Archbishop of Mexico between 1629 and 1634, and the man who put Esteban de Perea in charge of investigating the nature of the apparitions of the Lady in Blue in New Mexico.

  Marcilla, Sebastián (c. 1570–c. 1640). Reader in theology at the Convent of Saint Francis in Pamplona and provincial administrator of the order in Burgos, he was the first member of a religious order to question María Jesús de Ágreda about her “supernatural voyages” to what is now the southwestern United States. Drawing on these conversations, he wrote a letter to the Archbishop of Mexico, sometime around 1627, to inform him of her visions.

  Monroe, Robert (1915–1995). An audio engineer who began to take an interest in what was called out-of-body experiences (OBE), or extracorporeal experiences, when he himself underwent an “astral split” in 1958. After discounting the various possibilities that he was suffering from a cerebral tumor, hallucinations, or an early warning of the onset of imminent mental illness, he began to take a closer look at his situation. He came to the conclusion that the experience, and others that would come later, were produced when his brain “synthesized” a particular sound frequency. In 1974 he founded the Monroe Institute, in Virginia, in order to perform his first investigations under one roof and to devel
op the Hemy-Sync technology, which allowed him to stimulate the brain through sound in order to provoke “astral voyages” at will.

  Perea, Friar Esteban de (c. 1585–1638). Franciscan monk born in Villanueva del Fresno (Badajoz), on the border with Portugal. The son of a distinguished family, he was afforded a rapid rise in the ecclesiastical hierarchy. At the beginning of the seventeenth century he was charged with establishing the Inquisition in New Mexico, the region where he served as custodian in 1629.

  Porras, Friar Francisco de (?–1633). Franciscan missionary who in August 1629 founded the San Bernardino mission in Hopi territory. On that voyage he was accompanied by the friars Andrés Gutiérrez, Cristóbal de la Concepción, and Francisco de San Buenaventura. He died on June 28, 1633, poisoned by “medicine men” at the Awatovi mission.

  Salas, Friar Juan de (?–c. 1650). Franciscan missionary from Salamanca, Spain. In 1622 he founded the San Antonio Mission, in the part of New Mexico today known as Isleta. He administered the mission until the June 1629 arrival of Friar Esteban de Perea, who ordered him to undertake a journey to La Gran Quivira in order to investigate the apparitions of the Lady in Blue.

  Torre, Friar Andrés de la (?–1647). From Burgos, Spain. For twenty-four years, his “great labor,” as he put it, was to be Sister María Jesús de Ágreda’s first confessor. Philip IV intended to make him a bishop, but he refused the privilege in order to remain in close proximity to the nun. He spent his last years at the Monastery of Saint Julian de Ágreda.

  Benavides’s Memorial (1630) In an excerpt from the Memorial written by Friar Alonso de Benavides for Philip IV and published by the Royal Printing House in 1630, an account is given of his interrogation of the Lady in Blue. It is the first historical document that recognizes the surprising involvement of an “attractive young woman” in the evangelization of the Province of New Mexico.