The Lady in Blue

by Javier Sierra

  EXCERPT FROM THE TEXT OF THE MEMOIRS OF FRIAR ALONSO DE BENAVIDES.

  BENAVIDES’S MEMORIAL (1630)

  An excerpt, in old Spanish, from the Memorial written by Friar Alonso de Benavides for Philip IV and published by the Royal Printing House in 1630, in which 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 It is the first historical document that recognizes the surprising involvement of an “attractive young woman” in the evangelization of New Mexico. A translation of the text appears on pages 338 to 339.

  TRANSLATION OF “THE MEMORIAL OF FRAY ALONSO DE BENAVIDES, 1630”

  TRANSLATED BY MRS. EDWARD E. AYER, CHICAGO, PRIVATELY PRINTED 1916.

  MIRACULOUS CONVERSION OF THE XUMANA NATION

  Leaving, then, all this western part, and going forth from the town of Santa Fe, the center of New Mexico, which is in 37 degrees north latitude, traversing the Apache nation of the Vaqueros for more than a hundred and twelve leagues to the east, one comes to hit upon the Xumana nation; which since its conversion was so miraculous, it is just to tell how it was. Years back, when a religious named Fray Juan de Salas was traveling, occupied in the conversion of the Tompiras and Salineros indians –where are the greatest salines in the world, which on that side border upon these Xumanas–, there was a war between them. And when the Father Fray Juan de Salas went back for the poor were good people; and so they became fond of the Father, and begged him that he would go to live among them. And as he was likewise occupied with the Christminister, and not having enough Religious, I kept putting off the Xumanas, who were asking for him, until God should send more laborers. As He sent them in the past year of 1629; inspiring Your Majesty to order the Viceroy of New Spain that he send us thirty Religious. Whom the Father Fray Esteban de Perea, who was their Custodian, brought. And so we immediately dispatched the said Father Salas, with another, his companion, who is the Father Fray Diego López; whom the self-named Indians went with as guides.

  And before they went, we asked the Indians to tell us the reason why they were with so much concern petitioning us for baptism, and for Religious to go to indoctrinate them. They replied that a woman like that on whom we had there painted –which was a picture of the Mother Luisa de Carrión– used to preach to each one of them in their own tongue, telling them that they should come to summon the Fathers to instruct and baptize them, and that they should not to be slothful about it. And that the woman who preached to them was dressed precisely like her who was painted there; but that the face was not like that one, but that she was young and beautiful. And always whenever Indians came newly from those nations, looking upon the picture and comparing it among themselves, they said that the clothing was the same but the face was not, because the face of the woman who preached to them was that of a young and beautiful girl.

  BRIEF CHRONOLOGY OF ACTUAL EVENTS

  April 2, 1602. María Coronel y Arana is born in the village of Ágreda. She will pass into history with the nickname “The Lady in Blue” thanks to the mysterious evangelization of the southwestern United States. She never physically traveled outside her native village.

  July 22, 1629. A group of Jumano Indians arrive at the San Antonio Mission from the interior of New Mexico to ask the Franciscans to bring the Gospel to their village. While the expedition of twenty-nine Indians rests at San Antonio, they relate how a young, mysterious Lady in Blue foretold the arrival of priests to their region. The priests accede to their requests.

  July 1629, a few days later. Friars Juan de Salas and Diego López set out in the company of a band of Jumano Indians in the direction of Cueloce, a Hopi village more than 180 miles from Isleta. There they preach the Gospel and baptize the first of the tribes visited by the Lady in Blue.

  August 1630. Friar Alonso de Benavides arrives in Madrid, the seat of the Spanish government under Philip IV, in order to deliver an account of his assignment as father custodian of the province of New Mexico and of the miraculous conversions he has witnessed. That same summer he begins to write his celebrated Memorial, which will be published by the Royal Printing House.

  April 1631. Friar Benavides meets face-to-face with Sister María Jesús de Ágreda. The encounter takes places in the nun’s monastery in the Spanish village of Ágreda. He becomes convinced that this nun is in fact the Lady in Blue for whom he is searching. Sister María will go so far as to give him the garment she wore when she traveled to America.

  May 1631. Friar Benavides writes a letter to the Franciscan missionaries working in New Mexico, revealing what he has discovered about the Lady in Blue. His message will ultimately be printed in Mexico City, in 1730, under the unwieldy title “Everything taken from the letter that the Reverend Father Friar Alonso de Benavides, at that time Custodian of New Mexico, sent to the monks of the Holy Mission of Saint Paul in that kingdom, from Madrid, in the year 1631.”

  February 12, 1634. Pope Urban VIII receives a version of Benavides’s Memorial with amplifications by the Franciscan, in which he includes the outcome of his conversations with María Jesús de Ágreda and his conclusion that she was the only person responsible for the apparitions of the Lady in Blue in America.

  April 2, 1634. Rome. At the Pope’s express order, Friar Alonso de Benavides delivers a new report on the apparitions of the Lady in Blue in New Mexico to the Holy Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, also known as the Inquisition.

  April 15, 1635. The Inquisition begins its interrogations of Sister María Jesús de Ágreda. The material gathered will be placed in Vatican archives without a proceeding being undertaken against the nun.

  January 18, 1650. The Inquisitors Antonio González del Moral and the notary Juan Rubio arrive at the Ágreda monastery to interrogate the Lady in Blue, who is by now its abbess. Over the course of several days, the nun cooperates with the Inquisition for the second time, describing many of the mystical phenomena she had experienced during her lifetime, among them her bilocations to America. She is never condemned.

  May 24, 1665. María Jesús de Ágreda dies at age sixty-three in the monastery her family had founded. After her funeral rites, her notes, letters, and manuscripts are placed in a strongbox sealed with three locks in order to assure the proper use of her legacy. The notes concerning her visits to America are not among them. She herself burned them years before, when she tried to erase her “manifestations” from her memory. With their destruction, history loses materials of incalculable scientific and cultural value.

  For more information, please visit the website

  www.theladyinblue.net.

  The Lady in Blue

  Javier Sierra

  A Readers Club Guide

  QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION

  1. Javier Sierra takes us through his novel via four main locations as well as two different time frames. How did the 1630s story line in New Mexico enhance your understanding of the 1990s plotlines and threads? At what point did the stories fuse to help you decipher the religious conspiracy theory? Did the plot twists and turns take the path you anticipated? How?

  2. Father Corso’s death was deemed suicide due to “high anxiety.” Do you think that Father Baldi trusted this information, or did he have doubts about the validity of this interpretation and his personal safety as well? Why do you think Corso erased his hard drive in his last minutes on earth? Did he sense the end was near?

  3. Cardinal Zsidiv introduced Father Baldi to Chronovision, and they had a long-standing friendship/business relationship spanning approximately forty years. Although Zsidiv was team leader and project coordinator of the four saints, did Sierra lead you to believe he might not be trustworthy, especially in light of his sudden disappearance when the statue of St. Veronica exploded? How did his existence and the existence of the Chronovision experiment impact the story?

  4. Several apparitions of the Lady in Blue warn the Jumanos of the arrival of the conquistadors. Why is it that so many Jumanos were able to see her and decipher her message? How did her appearances further the spread of Chris
tianity in that region? What did you know about the Jumanos and their conversion to Christianity before reading this novel?

  5. The Franciscan friars in New Mexico are baffled by the ready conversion of the Native Americans to Christianity. They first believed that the Lady in Blue was our Lady of Guadalupe (the Holy Mother). At what point did you comprehend the author’s theory that she was actually a bilocating Spanish nun? Discuss why this theory does or does not ring true to you. Why do you think the legend is well known in the Southwest but not in Europe?

  6. Dr. Linda Meyers tries to explain Jennifer Narody’s dreams with a number of scientific theories like Stendhal Syndrome, a brain tumor, somnimnesia, and Dostoyevsky’s epilepsy. Why do you think she tried so hard to label the problem and find a treatment instead of helping her patient decipher her dreams and work through what they mean? At what point did you figure out that Jennifer Narody herself had been bilocating?

  7. When the “Memorial of Fray Alonso de Benavides” manuscript is stolen from Madrid’s National Library, did you think it was a coincidence that Dr. Meyers had just called the library director, or did you think she was somehow tied to the disappearance? Why did she feel it was her place to call? Were you wondering at all if she was the mysterious woman with the red shoes?

  8. Did you find reporter Carlos Albert’s obsession with the truth unsettling or provocative? Why do you think Mysteries was willing to foot the international bill to unveil the story of the missing ancient document? What made each interviewee trust Albert so? And were you surprised to read in the post scriptum that this character is loosely based on the author? Why or why not?

  9. Why did Father Tejada spend so many years on the beatification of Sister Maria Jesus de Ágreda? When did you figure out that he was one of the four saints? How? Did you believe Tejada’s story of how the Spanish nun’s mystical powers were discovered and how she bilocated more than five hundred times? Is there any other explanation? And, why would her story (and the stories of others like her) be left out of almost every history textbook?

  10. Early in the novel, Carlos Albert finds a chain with a pendant in Madrid. Later we find out the image matches the St. Veronica sculpture that some people (possibly terrorists) attempt to blow up. What did you think the significance of the pendant was going to be? Discuss the significance of the imprint of Veronica found on the Holy Shroud of Turin as well as the cloak worn by the Indian Juan Diego in 1531—neither made by human hand.

  11. When Baldi is kidnapped, did you fear for his safety? Were you surprised to find out who kidnapped him and why?

  12. Now that Corso is gone, the angels’ hope lies in Carlos Albert. Once he interviews Jennifer Narody, reads Benavides’s Memorial, and pulls all the information together, Albert realizes all the connections and synchronicities, and trusts even more in the Programmer. How do you think the story would continue after the ending Sierra provides? Would Albert share his discovery in the pages of Mysteries or in some other way? Or would the theory be silenced by the Pope or others? If so, why?

  A CONVERSATION WITH JAVIER SIERRA

  You have written a number of historical novels, including your recent New York Times bestseller The Secret Supper, which was translated into more than twenty-five languages. What made you decide to switch from journalist to novelist and how are those skills intertwined?

  Since 1987 I have published articles about historical and scientific mysteries. That work allowed me to carefully study many unsolved events, but would leave me feeling unsatisfied because I kept arriving at more questions than answers. I also noticed that most books about unsolved mysteries suffered from a lack of creativity and offered poor scenarios for understanding something that, for example, happened in Egypt four millennia ago or during the raising of the Gothic cathedrals in the Middle Ages. I therefore decided to use my imagination and well-based arguments to solve those mysteries myself. In a way, my novels bring us a step closer to solving old enigmas.

  How do you find topics for your novels? What inspired you to write The Lady in Blue?

  I first heard about the Lady in Blue legend in 1991, when I was working for a monthly Spanish magazine that specialized in mysteries, and I received an assignment to write about modern cases of teleportation. This was not a Star Trek–type assignment, but a serious one about people who experience physical and unexplained displacement from one part of the world to another. For months I collected information on dozens of modern incidents, but also on some historical legends, like the one about the “Lady in Blue of the Plains.” According to this story, a cloistered Spanish nun visited the Southwest of the modern-day United States no less than five hundred times, without ever physically leaving her convent. She had the gift of bilocation. At about the same time I arrived by chance at that same nun’s convent, and I discovered just how rich and exciting her adventure had been. I needed to tell her story in a novel, and so I did!

  The descriptions of the settings in your novels are so apt. Clearly you know Spain, but have you traveled to New Mexico, Los Angeles, or to the sites you describe in Rome?

  Yes, I have. I visited the New Mexico locations mentioned in this book in 1991 and 1997, before writing the novel. The deserts impressed me, as well as the remains of the old Native American settlements. It was in the Gran Quivira ruins where I first saw a kiva. That semi-subterranean sacred chamber pushed my imagination toward the magical rites that the Indians celebrated there long before the arrival of the Spaniards.

  Angels are a theme throughout The Lady in Blue. Have you or has anyone you know seen an angel or thought they might have been touched by one? If so, please describe the experience.

  Angels are a popular theme in every culture. During my time as a journalist, I wrote several pieces about people who claimed to have seen or felt an angel near them. I never had any reason to deny them their experiences, which were so full of magic, synchronicities, and love. My fascination with them led me to include a sort of “secret community” of angels among the flesh-and-blood characters of my novel. But the reader will not be able to identify them until the very end.

  You say in the post scriptum that you are obsessed with the enigma of space-time “leaps” and of synchronicities. How did you become aware of and so intrigued by this subject?

  It was mostly because of my personal experiences. In 1991 I became involved in a long series of strange synchronicities. They started just after the publication of an article I had written, in which I mentioned a certain Spanish nun named María Jesús de Ágreda who had preached to the Native Americans without ever leaving her convent in Spain. One week later I was lost in the nun’s hometown of Ágreda; chance brought me to find her convent, documents she had written in the seventeenth century, and even her preserved body. I soon learned that she possessed the gift of bilocation, and that she visited the American Southwest more than five hundred times between 1622 and 1630. Coincidentally, the magazine I worked for at the time sent me to New Mexico only one month later, and so I began to research this case thanks to these and many other “coincidences.”

  Do you believe that bilocating is possible? Why would history textbooks have overlooked the ecstasies and bilocations of Sister María Jesús de Ágreda and other religious figures of her time? Bilocation is, in fact, scientifically possible. Quantum physics theorists admit that certain elementary particles can be in two places at the same time, so why can’t we? In terms of why textbooks avoid mentioning the mystical side of people such as María Jesús de Ágreda, I think it is because historians prefer not to mention that which is not fully understood by them. However, in doing so, they are losing important sources of information. Maybe my novel will reopen this debate.

  Do you agree that the dissemination of the results of Chronovision would in fact change the course of history?

  The way I see it, not really, but my beliefs regarding Chronovision don’t really matter. What does matter here is what the Vatican believes. Why was it so important to them to hide the results of the Chronovi
sion project? That’s the key question here.

  How do your own religious beliefs affect your novels?

  The Lady in Blue is far more than a thriller; it is also a spiritual novel because it relates its characters’ spiritual quests. Everyone in my book is seeking their own personal Supreme Truth, and the novel shows the many different paths they take to reach it. This mirrors my own perception of religion, for I believe religion to be something quite different from spirituality. The first is a collective experience; the second, a private one. I prefer the latter.

  With the varied plotlines and twists and turns, and the different time frames and locations, did you find it difficult to end The Lady in Blue?

  Not at all. This was a very easy novel for me to write because most of its characters and plots are based on real facts. I simply followed them where they led me, but I added a surprising conclusion of my own.

  Are you working on another novel? If so, where will you take us next?

  I am hard at work on a novel based on an abstract concept: the power of words. Some works, like the Kabbalah, are very much related to this concept, and so I am studying them. Believe me, it’s no easy task!

  TIPS TO ENHANCE YOUR BOOK GROUP

  Use food to set the mood! For example, make the theme of your session “blue.” Serve blue corn chips and salsa, blueberries, and blue margaritas. Or look at sites like www.vivanewmexico.com, www.initaly.com, or www.gospain.com for ideas on authentic fare of the different regions in the novel.

  Have some of your members do extra research before the meeting on topics such as the Jumanos of New Mexico, the Roman sculpture of St. Veronica, or Robert Monroe (e.g., on www.wikipedia.com). Maybe even bring photos to help your members visualize what you’re describing.