“Shut your traps and to jail with all of you!” he ordered.
And the constables, siding with the gamblers as is usual in such rows, allowed them to escape through the lofts overhead, confining themselves, for the record, to nabbing two of the least quick witted.
Don Diego was overjoyed when, on visiting the jail the next day, he immediately caught on to the fact that one of the prisoners was his rival, the soldier from the Tucumán regiment.
“Hello there, my good man! So you’re something of a gambler as well?”
“What does Your Honor mean? A devil of a toothache was keeping me awake last night, so to see if I could relieve it I went to that gambling house looking for a countryman of mine who always carries with him in his purse a couple of Saint Apollonia’s molars, which are said to cure the toothache as if by magic.”
“I’ll cast a magic spell over you, you rogue,” the judge muttered, and turning to the other prisoner, he added: “The two of you know what the law is: 100 duros’ fine or a dozen lashes. I’ll be back at noon and ...be careful what you decide!”
Our soldier’s fellow prisoner sent a message home and managed to get himself the money for the fine, and when the magistrate returned he found that the prisoner had rounded up the entire sum.
“And what about you, you scoundrel, are you paying or aren’t you?” he asked the other prisoner.
“I haven’t a peso to my name, sir; and Your Honor can decide as he will, but even though they quarter me, they won’t get a quarter of a peso out of me. I beg your pardon, brother, but I’ve no money to give you.”
“Well, running the gauntlet will make good on what you owe.”
“That’s not possible either, Your Honor, for even though I’m a soldier, I come from a well–known lineage and my father is a full 24th part Sevillian. Ask my captain, don Alvaro Castrillón, and Your Lordship will learn that I have a don before my name, as does the king himself, may God keep him.”
“You a hidalgo, don Slyboots? Master Antúnez, give him 12 lashes at once.”
“Be careful what you order, Your Honor, for, by Christ, a Spanish hidalgo is not treated so basely.”
“A hidalgo! A hidalgo! Tell that to me in my other ear.”
“Well then, don Diego,” the soldier replied in a fury, “if that dastardly and cowardly act is carried out, I swear by God and the Virgin that I shall take my vengeance on Your Honor’s ears.”
The magistrate gave him a contemptuous look and left to take a turn about the courtyard of the jail.
Shortly thereafter, Antúnez the jailer, accompanied by four of his familiars or satellites, brought the hidalgo out in shackles and dealt him 12 resounding lashes in the presence of the magistrate. The victim bore the pain without the slightest murmur, and once the flogging was over Antúnez set him free.
“I don’t hold this against you, Antúnez,” the victim of the punishment told him, “but let the magistrate know that from today on his ears belong to me, and tell him that he should take as good care of them for me as if they were my most precious possession.”
The jailer let out a stupid guffaw and muttered to himself:
“This fellow’s brain is addled. If he’s a raving madman the magistrate has only to turn him over to me, and we’ll see if there’s any truth to that proverb that says that punishment makes the madman sane.”
II
Let us pause, friend reader, and make our way into the labyrinth of history, inasmuch as in this series of Traditions we have obliged ourselves to devote a few lines to the viceroy under whose rule our story takes place.
After the tragic fate that befell the first viceroy, don Blasco Núñez de Vela, the court of Spain deemed it best not to send another such high–ranking official to Peru immediately.2For the moment, invested with broad powers and signed blank orders from Charles V, the Licienciate La Gasca arrived in these parts with the title of governor, and history tells us that rather than to arms, he owed his victory over Gonzalo Pizarro to his astuteness and intelligence.
The country once pacified, La Gasca pointed out to the emperor the necessity of naming a viceroy for Peru, and suggested for this office don Antonio de Mendoza, marquis of Mondéjar and count of Tendilla, as a man already experienced in matters of government since he had ruled as viceroy of Mexico.
The marquis of Mondéjar, second viceroy of Peru, made his entry into Lima with modest pomp on September 23, 1551. The viceroyalty had just gone through a long and disastrous war, party passions were rampant, immorality was widespread, and Francisco Girón was preparing to lead the bloody uprising of 1553.3
The omens on the occasion of the viceroy’s taking command were not, certainly, auspicious. His first step was to adopt a conciliatory policy, rejecting—so a historian affirms—the denunciations on which hostilility feeds. “The story is told of him,” Lorente4 adds, “that when a captain once came to him to denounce two soldiers for having gone over to the Indians, living on what they could hunt and making gunpowder for their own exclusive use, the viceroy said to the captain in a stern voice: “Such deeds deserve to be rewarded rather than punished, because I fail to see what crime has been committed if two Spaniards are found living among Indians, eating what they kill with their harquebuses, and making gunpowder for themselves instead of to sell; there is, rather, much virtue in that and an example worthy of being imitated. Go with God, and let no one come to me another day with a tale like that, for it displeases me to hear such stories.”
Would that those who govern always give such a splendid answer to troublemaking courtiers, professional accusers, and plotters of revolts and infernal machinations! The world would be the better for it.
Though he had the very best of intentions, the marquis of Mondéjar managed to carry out very few of them. He sent his son don Francisco to visit Cuzco, Chucuito, Potosí, and Arequipa and draw up a report on the needs of the natives; he appointed Juan Betanzos to write a history of the Incas; he created the guard of halberdiers; he handed down a number of sensible decrees concerning the municipal police of Lima; and he severely punished duelists and their seconds. Duels, even for ridiculous reasons, were the vogue of the period, and many of them took place with the duelists wearing blood–red tunics.
Good don Antonio de Mendoza planned to institute beneficial reforms. Unfortunately ill health dulled his energetic spirit, and death carried him off in July of 1552, after he had served as viceroy for only ten months. A week before his death on July 21, a clap of thunder was heard, accompanied by lightning flashes, a phenomenon seen and heard in Lima for the first time since the foundation of the city.
III
On the following day don Cristóbal de Agüero, for such was the name of the soldier, presented himself before the captain of the Tucumán regiment, don Alvaro Castrillón, and said to him:
“I beg you, sir, to grant me permission to leave the service. His Majesty wants soldiers with honor, and I have lost mine.”
Don Alvaro, who held Agüero in great esteem, brought up several arguments to dissuade him, but all of them were dashed to pieces against the soldier’s unbending resolve. The captain finally granted his request.
The humiliation suffered by don Cristóbal had remained a secret, for the magistrate forbade the jailers to speak of the incident. Perhaps don Diego’s conscience cried out to him that his ceremonial staff as magistrate had served him to take his vengeance on the gambler for having had his amorous overtures rebuffed.
And three months had thus gone by when don Diego received letters summoning him to Lima to take possession of an inheritance, and having obtained permission from the chief magistrate to leave town, he began to make preparations for the trip.
He was taking a stroll through Cantumarca on the eve of his departure when a man with his face muffled in a cape approached him, asking him:
“Is your trip to begin tomorrow, Your Honor?”
“Is that any concern of yours, you most impertinent fellow?”
“Any concern of mine?
I should say so! Seeing as how I must take care of those ears of yours.”
And the man in the cape disappeared down a back street, leaving Esquivel amid a sea of puzzling thoughts.
Early the next morning don Diego began his trip to Cuzco. Once he had reached the city of the Incas, he was on his way to visit a friend that same day, when on turning a corner he felt a hand on his shoulder. He turned around in surprise and came face to face with the man he had ordered lashed in Potosí.
“Fear not, Your Honor. I see that those ears of yours are still in their rightful place, and that pleases me.”
Don Diego was petrified.
Three weeks later, after our traveler had arrived in Guamanga and gone to his room at the inn, there was a knock on the door as darkness fell.
“Who is it?” the magistrate asked.
“Praised be The Most Holy!” the person outside answered.
“May He ever be praised, amen.” And don Diego went to the door.
Neither the ghost of Banquo at Macbeth’s feast, nor the appearance of the statue of the Knight Commander in don Juan’s room caused more astonishment than that experienced by the magistrate on suddenly finding himself confronted by the man flogged in Potosí.
“Calm yourself, Your Lordship. Have those ears of yours suffered no deterioration? Well then, till we meet again.”
Fear and remorse left don Diego speechless.
He reached Lima at last, and while on his first stroll met our ghost of a man, who this time did not say a word to him, but cast a telling glance at his ears. There was no avoiding him. In church and on his strolls the man dogged him like his shadow, his eternal nightmare.
Esquivel was in a state of constant anxiety, and the slightest noise made him give a start. Neither wealth, nor the esteem in which, beginning with the viceroy, the society of Lima held him, nor the city’s banquets, nothing, in short, could calm his fears. The image of his relentless pursuer was forever etched on the pupils of his eyes.
And thus there arrived the anniversary of the scene in jail.
It was ten o’clock at night, and don Diego, having made certain that the doors of his town house were securely locked, was sitting comfortably in a leather armchair, engaged in writing letters by the light of a dim lamp. Suddenly a man stole in through a window in the next room, two sinewy arms held Esquivel fast, a gag smothered his cries, and in a moment strong ropes bound his body to the armchair.
The hidalgo of Potosí was before him, and a sharp dagger gleamed in his hands.
“Your Honor,” he said to him, “the year is up today and I have come in the name of my honor.”
And with diabolical serenity he sliced off the ears of the hapless magistrate.
IV
Don Cristóbal de Agüero managed to get himself transferred to Spain, making a mockery of the pursuit of him ordered by the viceroy, the marquis of Mondéjar. He asked for an audience with Charles V, made him judge of his cause, and was granted not only the sovereign’s pardon, but promotion to captain of a regiment that was being organized to serve in Mexico.
The magistrate died a month later, not so much as a consequence of his wounds as on account of his humiliation at hearing himself called The Man with No Ears.
1The devil frequently appears in the Peruvian Traditions(see for example, “The Countess Who Was Summoned,” “A Mother’s Love,” and “The Black Mass”). In another tradition, “El Alcalde de Paucarcolla,” Palma writes: “We need the Devil; they must return him to us . . . . In the name of a pyrotechnic history and a phosphorescent literature I protest against the supression of the bad enemy. To eliminate the devil is to kill the tradition” (my translation) in Tradiciones peruanas completas(Madrid: Aguilar, 1953), 270-71.—Ed.
2Reference to the defeat and execution of Viceroy Blasco Núñez de Vela at the hands of Gonzalo Pizarro, Francisco Pizarro’s brother.—Ed.
3See “The Knights of the Cape,” note 7.—Ed.
4Sebastián de Lorente (1813–1884), author of Historia del Perú bajo la dinastía Austriaca, 1542–1598 (1863). “The Magistrate’s Ears” is loosely based on a brief anecdote in Lorente’s text.—Ed.
A Heretical Viceroy and a Rascally Bell Ringer
A Chronicle of the Era of the Seventeenth Viceroy of Peru
I
A Thrashing for Ringing a Bell
The church and the convent of the Augustinian Fathers were at first (1551) located at the site where the parish church of San Marcelo stands today, until in 1573 they were moved to the vast area they now occupy, not without a great legal battle and much controversy with Dominicans and Mercedarians who were opposed to the establishment of other monastic orders.
In a short time the Augustinians, because of their ascetic customs and their learning and science, gained a sort of supremacy over the other orders. They acquired very valuable properties, both rural and urban, and their income was so well managed and increased so greatly that for more than a century they were able to distribute 5,000 pesos in alms each year during Holy Week. The most eminent theologians and the most distinguished preachers belonged to this order, and the cloisters of San Ildefonso, a seminary that the Fathers founded in 1606 for the education of their novices, turned out truly illustrious men.
Around the year 1656, a Limeñan named Jorge Escoiquiz, a young man 20 Aprils old, succeeded in persuading the Fathers to allow him to take the habit, but since he showed more inclination toward knavery than toward study, the Fathers, who did not like to have scamps and idlers as novices, tried to expel him. But the scalawag found a patron in one of the outstanding Fathers of the order, and the monks charitably agreed to let him stay and gave him the important post of bell ringer.
The bell ringers of rich convents had as subordinates two slave boys, who wore the habit of lay brothers. So the post was not one to be scorned when the one who held it had, in addition to six pesos’ salary, boarding, lodging, and money earned on the side, assistants under him to give orders to.
In the time of the viceroy and count of Chinchón the town council of Lima created the post of curfew ringer, a position that was done away with a half century later. The curfew ringer had the best job in the guild of bell ringers, for his only duty was to ring the bell in the tower of the cathedral at nine o’clock each night. It was a prestigious post much sought after and earned a salary of a peso a day.
Nor was it an office that allowed sleeping on the job, for if there was and is a demanding post in Lima that requires alertness, it is that of bell ringer, and even more so in colonial days, in which there were any number of religious feasts and the bells were rung for at least three days whenever the mail packet arrived form Spain with the earthshaking news that the royal infante had cut his last tooth or recovered from measles or chicken pox.
The office of bell ringer was not free of risk, as witness the little wooden cross that even now can be seen by the Lima reader, set in the wall of the little square of San Agustín. It so happened that, at the end of the last century, a bell ringer got caught in the framework of the Mónica,1a revolving bell, flew through space with no need for wings, and did not stop until he was dashed against the wall facing the tower.
Until the middle of the seventeenth century the only carriages in Lima were those of the viceroy and the bishop, and four or so calashes belonging to magistrates or nobles of Castile. Philip II, in a royal decree of November 24, 1577, had forbidden the manufacture of carriages or their importation from Spain, giving as his reason for prohibiting the use of such vehicles the fact that, in view of the scarcity of horses, they should be reserved for military purposes. The penalties laid down for offenders was severe. This royal decree, which was not rescinded by Philip III, began to be disobeyed in 1610. Little by little the luxury of having oneself horse–drawn in a carriage began to spread, and it is a well–known fact that by the time of Amat2more than a thousand such vehicles were to be seen on the Alameda de los Descalzos on the day of Our Lady of Porciúncula.3
The bell ringers an
d their assistants, who lived on permanent watch in the towers, had orders to ring the bells whenever the viceroy or the archbishop passed through the little square of the convent, a practice that was continued until the time of the marquis of Castell–dosRíus.4
It seems that the viceroy and count of Alba de Liste, who, as the reader will see farther on, had his reasons for being wary of the clergy, went out one Sunday in his carriage with an escort to pay visits. The sound of a carriage was in those days such an event that families, taking it to be the one that precedes earthquakes, rushed helter–skelter to the doors of their houses.
The carriage had to pass though the little square of San Agustín, but the bell ringer and his helpers were probably out merrymaking and far from the nest, for not a bell clapper in the tower moved. This discourtesy shocked His Excellency, and on speaking of it at his nightly gathering of friends he was indiscreet enough to blame the prior of the Augustinians, who was a personal friend of his, and when the matter had been investigated the bell ringer, rather than confessing that he had not been at his post, said that although he saw the carriage pass by, he did not believe it necessary to ring the bells, for there was no need for the blessed bronzes to rejoice at the passage of a heretical viceroy.
Jorge’s reply was different from that of the bishop don Carlos Marcelo, when in 1621, after being consecrated in Lima, he arrived in Trujillo, his birthplace and his future diocese, and exclaimed: “The bells that are ringing most joyously are doing so because they are members of my family, since they were cast by none other than my father.” And this was the truth.
Jorge’s offense, which might have caused serious discord between the representative of the crown and the Augustinian community, was deemed by the governing body of the Augustinians to merit severe punishment, and the bell ringer’s excuse to be of no avail, for no impertinent bird roosting in a bell tower was called upon to pass judgment on the viceroy’s conduct in his quarrels with the Inquisition.
Peruvian Traditions Page 8