Peruvian Traditions

by Palma, Richardo; Lane, Helen R. ; Conway, Christopher

  When she went to Santo Domingo the next day, very self–satisfied and as if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth, to try to explain to Father Bustamante, a silver–tongue preacher, the little green carriage of the Inquisition was already waiting in the square for her. God save us and defend us!

  I was a youngster who lived nearby, and I will swear till the hour of my death that when the Holy Office searched ña San Diego’s room, they found in a cupboard a blind rabbit, a magnet covered with blond hairs, a doll with pins stuck in it, a dried–up scorpion, a lizard’s tail, an old shoe they said had once belonged to the queen of Sheba, and Jesus safeguard me, a pot full of oil of earthworms with which to to anoint her body and grow feathers, allowing her to take flight after saying, as is customary among that riffraff: “With no help from God or the Virgin!” Please accompany me as I recite a salve to seek forgiveness for the involuntary heresy I have just committed.

  The crafty sorceress remained in prison for something like a year without being willing to confess to a single thing; but where would she have ended up with Father Pardiñas, a priest of great shrewdness who was my confessor and told me everything in confidence? Children, recite an Our Father and a Hail Mary for the soul of Father Pardiñas.

  As I was saying, like it or not, the witch was forced to drink down a mugful of blessed oil, whereupon she began to make faces like a monkey and vomit it all up, that is to say, she confessed everything. The Devil can hold out against anything that is done to him, except making him drink holy oil, which is the blessed remedy to make him talk more than a barber or a leader of a political club at election time. Then ña San Diego declared that for about ten years she had lived (Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!) as the Devil’s concubine. You girls don’t know what concubinage is, and may you never find out. For my insouciance and for having allowed that bad word to escape me, recite a credo as you cross yourselves.

  She also declared that every Saturday night on the stroke of 12, she anointed her body with a witch’s concoction and flew and flew through the air until she reached the top of Ramas hill, where she met other witches and warlocks to dance indecently and hear a Black Mass. Do the two of you not know what a Black Mass is? I’ve never heard one myself, believe me, but Father Pardiñas, may he rest in peace, told me that a Black Mass is one celebrated by the Devil, in the form of a hegoat, with horns three feet long and tips sharper than a mattress maker’s needle. The Host they use is a bit of decaying Christian flesh, which he gives to the others as a communion wafer. Don’t forget, you sleepyheads, to pray tonight to the blessed souls in Purgatory and your guardian angel to keep you safe and defend you from witches who suck the blood of children and make them scrawny.

  I remember it as though it were yesterday. Christ be with me! On Sunday, August 27, 1803, they brought ña San Diego out, riding a donkey and dressed as an obispa, or woman bishop. But since you haven’t seen this costume, I’ll tell you that it was a hat in the shape of a miter and a long sackcloth garment called a sanbenito, on which were painted, amid the fires of Hell, devils, female devils, and large snakes. Gently beat your breast three times.

  Along with ña San Diego there came out another sly wretch of the same breed, as much a witch as she and a woman also sentenced by the Inquisition. Her name was ña Ribero, an old woman skinnier than a tithed hen with the pip. They reached the church of Santo Domingo, and from there were transported to the Beguine convent in Copacabana. The two of them died in that house before their heresy could contaminate the country. May God have forgiven them.

  And I came and went, and they gave me.... nothing, save for some calfskin slippers, others of lead, and others of caramel: I put on the calf skin ones, gave the lead ones to Big Foot,3 and those of caramel I kept for you, Clemente, and for you, Angélica.

  And now, you two youngsters, recite with me a rosary of the fifteen mysteries, and then to sleep with you, after kissing mama’s and papa’s hand, and may God help you and make you saints. Amen, amen, amen.

  1 Ve y compráme un panuelo / para la baba: / en la tienda del frente / los hay de a vara.

  2 Gabriel de Aviles, 37th viceroy of Peru, 1801–1806.

  3 The devil.

  Bolívar’s Justice

  (To Ricardo Bustamante)

  In June of 1824 the liberating army was spread out in the administrative department of Ancachs, preparing to undertake the operations of the campaign that, in August of that year, resulted in the battle of Junín, and four months later the splendid triumph of Ayacucho.1

  Bolívar was residing in Caraz with his staff, the cavalry led by Necochea, the Peruvian division of La Mar, and the battalions Bogotá, Caracas, Pichincha, and Voltíjeros, that had fought so bravely under the courageous Córdova.

  The Lara division, formed by the Vargas, Rifles, and Vendedores battalions, occupied quarters in the city of Huaraz. The officers of these corps were a group of young gallants, as invincibly victorious in the combats of Mars as in those of Venus. Just as they had enlisted to fight heroically against the large and experienced royalist army, so in their life in the barracks they besieged with no less courage and boldness the female descendants of the greedy exiles from Paradise.

  The Colombian officers2 were, then, a reason for heart pangs for the young ladies, for distress to their mothers, and for worry to their husbands since those confounded soldiers couldn’t come across a little face that was halfway appetizing without saying, as did the valiant Córdova later: “Advance at the pace of a victor,” and without taking certain familiarities capable of giving stomach aches to the least suspicious and touchy husband. How confident those liberators were!

  The doors of all the houses were open to them, and it was useless for any of them to be closed, for the officers always had their own way of skinning a cat and entering a house as though it were a conquered fortress. Furthermore, no one dared to treat them coldly, first because they were the latest fashion; and second, because it would have been most ungrateful to turn our noses up at those who came from the banks of the Cauca and the Apure to help us break the siege and share our reverses and our victories; and third, because in the homeland of those days nobody wanted to be taken for a lukewarm patriot.

  Since the Lara division had a regular military band, the officers, who, as we have said, loved partying, went with the band after retreat at eight to whatever house they pleased, and improvised a ball to which the mistress of the house invited her friends in the neighborhood.

  A lady, whom we shall call señora de Munar, the widow of a rich Spaniard, lived in one of the houses near the main square with two daughters and two nieces, all of them girls with reason to aspire to an immediate marriage, for they were good looking, rich, well brought up, and of the old aristocracy of the town. They had what in those days was called salt, pepper, oregano, and cumin, that is to say, the four things that men who came from Spain looked for in the women of the New World.

  Although the señora de Munar, doubtless out of loyalty to the memory of her deceased husband, was a royalist, and a royalist to her fingertips, she was unable to excuse herself one night from receiving in her drawing room the dashing Colombian officers, who at the sound of music gave evidence of wanting to kick up their heels in the aristocratic drawing room.

  As for the young ladies, it is a well–known fact that their hearts leap when there is a prospect of swaying provocatively with a dancing partner.

  The señora de Munar swallowed hard at each flirtatious compliment that the officers addressed to the young ladies of her household, now pinching the niece who was misbehaving by encouraging an officer’s attentions, now calling to order in a low voice the daughter who was paying more attention to the compliments of a liberator than good upbringing requires.

  It was already past midnight when one of the girls, whose charms had aroused the senses of the captain of the fourth company of the Vargas battalion, retired to her room feeling indisposed. The libertine and love–smitten captain, thinking that he was fooling the girl’s Argos of a mot
her, went to look for the dove in her nest. She resisted the importunities of the don Juan, which were probably on the way to going too far, when a hand swiftly seized the sword that the officer was wearing at his waist and sank the blade in his side.

  The one who thus castigated the man who had tried to bring dishonor to a family was the elderly señora de Munar.

  The captain rushed into the drawing room, covering the wound with his hands. His comrades, who were devoted to him, made a great commotion, and after surrounding the house with soldiers and putting everyone with skirts under arrest, took the dying man to the garrison.

  Bolívar was just finishing lunch when the news of this scandal reached him. He immediately mounted his horse and in only a few hours made the journey from Caraz to Huaraz.

  That day his army received the following:

  General Order

  His Excellency the Liberator has learned with indignation that the glorious flag of Colombia, whose safekeeping he entrusted to the Vargas battalion, has been sullied by its members, who should have been more watchful of its honor and splendor, and as a consequence, as an exemplary punishment of the offense, he issues the following orders:

  1. The Vargas battalion will occupy the last place in the line, and its flag shall remain in the hands of the general in command until, by a victory over the enemy, the aforementioned corps erases the infamy that has befallen it.

  2. The body of the offender shall be buried without the prescribed honors, and the blade of the sword that Colombia gave the battalion for the defense of freedom and morality, shall be broken by the quartermaster in the presence of the company.

  Such a general order is worthy of the great Bolívar. Only thanks to it could the cause of independence maintain its prestige and military discipline be reestablished.

  Sucre, Córdova, Lara, and all the Colombian leaders intervened with Bolívar to have him rescind the article whereby the Vargas battalion was disgraced through the fault of one of its officers. The Liberator did not yield for three days, at the end of which he deemed it wisest to give in. The moral lesson had been given, and the continued existence of the first article meant little now. The battalion had effaced the stain of Huaraz by the courage it displayed at Mataré and in the battle of Ayacucho.

  After the Colombian captain had been buried, Bolívar made his way to the house of the señora de Munar and said to her:

  “I salute the worthy matron with all the respect that is deserved by the woman who, in the midst of her frailty, succeeded in finding the strength to save her honor and that of her family.”

  The señora de Munar ceased at that instant to be a royalist, and answered with enthusiasm:

  “Long live the Liberator! Long live the homeland!”

  1Bolívar led patriot armies to victory at the Battle of Junín (August 6, 1824), as did Field Marshal José Antonio de Sucre at the decisive Battle of Ayacucho (December 9, 1824). Ayacucho is considered to be the final battle of the Wars of Independence.—Ed.

  2 “Colombian” in this context refers to soldiers of the Republic of Gran Colombia, which comprised the Audiencia of Quito, the Viceroyalty of New Granada and Captaincy General of Venezuela. After the Wars of Independence, Gran Colombia broke apart into Ecuador, Colombia, and Venezuela.—Ed

  Fifth Series

  Don Alonso the Brawny

  The story is told of the Venezuela general Páez,1the hero of the plains, that in the days of the war to the death with Spain, he took captive a stout Spanish soldier who enjoyed the reputation of being a man of herculean strength. The leader of the patriots said to him:

  “Listen, you clumsy fellow: I’ll spare your life if you succeed in throwing me to the ground.” The prisoner smiled and accepted the challenge, believing victory was certain, but Páez, who for this sort of fight had more cunning and agility than physical strength, managed after two minutes to pin the Spaniard to the ground.

  Then the victor said to him:

  “All right, you tottering wreck, get ready to be shot!”

  To which the soldier replied without turning a hair:

  “That’s to be expected, general: you’ve played with me like a cat with a mouse. So gobble me up now.”

  My readers may guess that Páez found the reply amusing and pardoned the prisoner.

  The royalist army also had a strong man, Major Santalla, whom people say took an ordinary deck of 40 cards, tore it through the middle and said:

  “Many can do that.”

  Then he did exactly the same thing with the 80 bits of bristol board left, saying:

  “Few can do that.”

  And he ended by suddenly tearing in 2 the 160 bits of cards left, exclaiming with a triumphant air: “Only I, Major Santalla, can do that!”

  But when it comes to strong men, Páez, Santalla, and all modern Samsons are suckling babes compared to my don Alonso, about whom a chronicler recounts that when his horse tired, he threw it over his shoulder, without taking off its trappings, and went on his way as though it were nothing.

  * * *

  THE CONQUISTADORS CALLED CAPTION Alonso Díaz, a relative of the governor of Panama don Pedro Arias Dávila, don Alonso the Brawny.

  A resident of Cuzco when the rebellion in support of Almagro the Younger broke out, and very devoted to Marquis Pizarro, don Alonso did not want to leave the city, and remained hidden there conspiring for the cause of the Licentiate Vaca de Castro, sent by the king to put an end to the disturbances in Peru.

  On receiving the news that the royal troops, numbering 800 soldiers, were leaving Guamanga to fight 600 of Almagro’s, don Alonso decided to leave his hiding place and headed for the camp in Chupas, anxious to arrive in time to take part in the battle that took place there on September 16, 1542.

  He had only a few leagues to go to arrive in Vaca de Castro’s camp, when he saw horsemen on spirited steeds coming at full gallop. They were three soldiers that the victor was sending to Cuzco with the news of the defeat of Almagro’s troops.

  Alonso Díaz stopped one of the emissaries, and the latter, on recognizing him as one of the loyal supporters of Pizarro and one of the first conquistadors to come with him to these realms, dismounted, exclaiming:

  “Good news, captain! Long live the king! The tyrant is vanquished.” Don Alonso was so overjoyed on learning the happy news that he threw himself into the soldier’s arms, saying to him:

  “Long live the king! Hug me tight, valiant soldier, hug me tight!” And so close was the embrace and so great the strength with which don Alonso the Brawny hugged him that the soldier cried out and fell dead with a torrent of blood spurting from his mouth.

  Alonso Díaz, who in the battles of the conquest killed not with the sword but by smothering Indians with his strong arms, forgot, in his keen joy at the victory, that his embraces dealt death to the enemy.

  When the involuntary murderer was put on trial, Vaca de Castro found him not guilty, but forbade him in the future, under penalty of death, to embrace anyone, friend or enemy, man or woman.

  Señor de Mendiburu, in the article that he devotes to Alonso Díaz in his Diccionário histórico del Perú, says that a royal decree came from Spain taking away from the braggart the right to embrace. I presume that this royal decree meant the approval of the sentence handed down by Vaca de Castro.

  * * *

  THAT CUNNING COUNTS more than strength, as the proverb has it, is proved by the result of a sword duel between Alonso Díaz and Francisco de Villacastín. The latter was one of the companions of Marquis Pizarro, who professed great affection for him, to the point that he made him one of the first potentates of Cuzco by giving him as a wife a nusta,2 the daughter of Huayna–Capac, called doña Leonor. Through this marriage he came to be Villacastín, lord of Ayaviri, an encomienda that gave him more than 8,000 Indians as vassals.

  Villacastín was a person held in ridicule because of his loyalty. His front teeth were missing, and what caused this imperfection was, in all truth, just cause for laughter. It so happened
that one day don Francisco was wandering through a woods in Panama when a monkey fetched him such a fierce blow with a stone from the top of a tree that it made him spit out four teeth. Villacastín recovered in a moment, drew his crossbow, and managed to kill the monkey that had left him so badly disfigured for life. Ours is a lucky day in which not only false teeth, but even false jaws, abound! If memory serves me well, Garcilaso the historian,3who knew Villacastín and associated with him, recounts the story of the stoning.

  Alonso Díaz, who was a great joker, making fun of Villacastín on one occasion, said to him:

  “Your grace has only the guts to challenging a braggart of a monkey, and came out with teeth lost in eternum.”

  Villacastín was piqued and unsheathed his sword. Don Alonso put himself on guard, and they crossed swords. But don Francisco, though he had less strength and vigor than his adversary, was lighter than he, and after fencing for only a short while, dealt don Alonso Díaz such a fierce blow with his sword that he lay for a week between life and death.

  * * *

  ALONSO DíAZ HAD BEEN implicated as a member of Girón’s faction4 and once that leader had been vanquished and executed, he welcomed the pardon that the Royal Audience had proclaimed in 1554, and thereupon retired to live peacefully in Cuzco, where he was one of the wealthiest residents. But in 1556 the viceroy and marquis of Cañete, fearing new uprisings with Captain Díaz as an agitator, ordered him to be garroted in secret.

  His curiosity aroused, a great friend of His Excellency asked him one day why he had ordered such an outstanding Spaniard killed, and the viceroy answered with a smile:

  “I did it to cure that madman of his mania for embracing, for since his embraces are dangerous and were forbidden him, he went against the royal will, and at a ball was seen, as ten of the most notable residents of Cuzco testify, to embrace a lady who had stood as cosponsor with him at a baptism.