In the memorable year of 1810, the eleventh of my life as I understand it, Rosita was paler and sadder than ever. I felt her lips and hands burning when she caressed me, her eyes were brighter than usual, and she coughed frequently. I noticed that she wanted to dedicate herself to her work with more zeal; so that when, at times, she was forced to lay down and rest on the bed, the suffering of her spirits was greater than that from her illness. Another observation that I made, one which could not have escaped me because I knew her habits, alarmed me most of all. She who was always so meticulous about her own personal cleanliness and about the neatness and tidiness of her house, had begun to allow some neglect in her attire, and would wait for María Francisca to come and sweep the room; she even allowed her to cook our frugal meals. The only thing that she never forgot about—my blessed mother!—was the well-being of her son, whom she tried to fool with soft smiles.
Don Francisco de Viedma,1 who would have been our savior before anyone else, had died. Not even he had been able to overcome the loathing that the town felt toward the Spaniards known as the chapetones2; but his death was still lamented by the many lowly people whom he had aided. Our loyal friends Brother Justo and Alejo seemed to want to abandon us little by little. They visited less frequently; since the year before they were both very worried about something that I did not understand. When they ran into each other at our house, they would exchange mysterious words; sometimes they laughed, rubbing their hands together; other times they became gloomy and dejected, and one could see then the frightful transformation in Alejo’s face.
One day I heard Brother Justo, beside himself, say:
“This time it has become truly serious. The affair on the 25th of May was bad enough; but Don Pedro Domingo Murillo,3 now he really knows when the shoe has been tightened. Good God! Albeit from afar, I have finally seen a man!”
Another day he came in completely disheartened, to the point that he did not even extend his hand to Rosita, nor listen to the affectionate words with which she tried to pull him out of his painful dejection. I did not know what to do with the book I had in my hand; then, as if I had committed an error, he said to me severely:
“Get that out of here! … We can no longer read that.”
And getting up right away, as if he were shot from a spring, he took a written scroll out of his sleeve, and added:
“This is what we must read, this and nothing else; and you must memorize it, young man. If you do not, you will lose my respect.”
With my hand shaking, I took the paper (which I have presently before my eyes); I read with much difficulty, corrected and helped along at every step by my teacher, what I can now happily copy down:
Nuestra Señora de La Paz
February 5, 1810
“My Brother: I have been relating our disasters and our sufferings from Chacaltaya to you as they occur. Prepare yourself now to hear what our tyrants persist in calling, with apparent contempt and poorly hidden anxiety, ‘the conclusion of the disturbance of the 16th of July.’
“On the morning of the 29th of January, by order of the authorities, we set out for the public jail where the prisoners were being held to give them their last rites and accompany them to the foot of the infamous gallows where, according to the sentence, ‘they were to be hung as punishment for their abominable crimes and as a lesson to all rebels.’ I was the one who heard Don Pedro Domingo Murillo’s last confession. What a man, my God! What a soul, so superior to those of his common contemporaries! Whence did he manage to gather so much light in this night of heavy darkness in which we live? I will not—I cannot—tell you how he dazzled me with the sublime splendor that he then emitted—only to disappear into the abyss of eternity. There were even moments in which it seemed that I was the penitent and he the confessor. Shaken by his words, my faith wavered … it wavered, my brother, until he himself raised it and left it more radiant than it had been before!
“At noon we went to the place of execution, escorted by two tight files of soldiers, and followed by all the troops, armed in columns. The sentenced were visibly emotional, but they maintained an air of nobility and dignity that imposed respect even among the angriest of their enemies. If any of them had given in to weakness, their leader’s example would have sufficed for them to regain their spirits and even inspire them with pride for dying at his side. For he walked calmly, his head held high above the crowd, as if instead of going to the scaffold, he was heading rather to a stage to pronounce the famous resolution that established the Junta Tuitiva.4
“When we reached the foot of the gallows, I still wanted to provide for him the comforts of our religion; but, with remarkable tranquility and sweetness, he said to me: ‘That’s enough, Father. I am well prepared to answer for my life before the Last Judgment. I have only one duty left to perform of my lofty mission.’ And suddenly straightening up, growing more than a foot (or so it seemed to me from the admiration which he inspired in me), he shouted the following words with a vibrant voice, heard by all and forged forever in my memory: ‘Fellow citizens! The fire that I have ignited will never be put out by the tyrants. Long live liberty!’
“And the sacrifice of the nine martyrs was consummated at once.
“I cannot conclude without relating to you an awful incident that will give you an idea of the wrath and fury of our enemies. When they were raising Don Juan Antonio Figueroa,5 his hands tied behind his back, the rope broke, and this noble Spaniard who had enthusiastically embraced our cause fell heavily to the ground, face down. A sudden cry of horror and compassion arose from the crowd, imploring for mercy. But an officer stepped through the ranks of the soldiers and gave an unbelievable order to those presiding over the sacrifice, which was immediately carried out. The hangman, armed with a knife, beheaded the victim on the stones!
“All of this will bring you infinite pain, as it did me, or perhaps more, as I know the exaltation of your ideas and the exquisite sensibility of your being. Cry, my brother! But do not lose faith nor hope. The redeeming causes of humanity must overcome these tremendous trials of Providence. I believe I have previously warned you of this when I quoted Tertulian6 to you: Sanguis martirum semen christianorum!”7
The paper had only a strange symbol as a signature, which was probably standard.
“He is right,” Brother Justo exclaimed, pacing the room with large steps. “Murillo’s fire will burn throughout the continent! This sacred fire will cleanse the pestilence from the foul air and. . . .”
A slight cough, to which I was accustomed, and a moan of pain, which I was hearing for the first time, drew our attention to the place occupied by my mother. We saw her sitting on her low stool, pressing one of her hands against her chest, while with the other she held a white cloth to her mouth—a cloth from which earlier that very day she had partially unraveled the edges so as to make a fringe and later decorate with fancy hemstitches.
When Brother Justo saw her and noticed a spot of blood on the cloth, he let out a kind of bellow; he ran toward her, lifted her in his arms, and carried her to the dais where he immediately placed her. All of this took only an instant—less, I am sure, than the time it has taken me to report it.
“I have told you not to work, not to kill yourself, woman!” he yelled angrily, and he threw the low stool, the lace pillow, and even the white cloth out to the street—all of which a confused María Francisca went out to retrieve.
“But I am not that sick,” my mother answered, smiling softly like she always did. “Besides, what would become of us?”
This simple observation, before it was even completed, seemed to crush my teacher, who lowered his head to his chest. But it did not take him long to raise it triumphantly, asking:
“What about the money box? Haven’t you yourself confessed to me that it is nearly full?”
“That is impossible,” my mother answered, “that money is to send «him»8 to study at the Universidad de San Francisco Javier and. . . .”
At that moment I could no longer contain myself. Crying, I ran to put my arms around the neck of the heroic mother who was dying silently for me, and I flooded her angelic face with kisses and tears.
Meanwhile, Brother Justo continued what he had been saying:
“I order it, I command it. As your brother, as the priest that I am, I cannot condone this, this kind of suicide; any reasonable man would try to prevent this with all of his strength.”
“And I beg you,” I added for my part. “Yes, I beg you mother, with these tears that you would not want your poor Juanito to continue spilling!”
Rosita—can you imagine how sacred and dear this name is to me when I use it now, on this occasion, instead of simply saying “my mother”?—had no recourse but to give in. The money box was solemnly taken out of the coffer, and Brother Justo anxiously broke it with his hands, spilling its contents on the table. It was not much; there were, however, a few very small gold coins among the silver ones.
From that day on, our affection and insistence forced her to take to her bed. She became a patient, surrounded by all the attention that the art of medicine could offer at the time, which consisted of the priests who were the practitioners of the Hospital of San Salvador. She was looked after not only with solicitude, but also with loving care by our good friends and the women who admired and aided her. I did not leave her side for a single moment. It was then—in the fondest and sweetest of voices that I compare with the cooing of a dove in her nest—that she revealed to me the treasures that she held hidden in her soul. I was able to feel her heavenly spirit, which had descended for some reason unbeknownst to me to one of the most somber places on earth, where it felt—in spite of its love and tenderness toward me—the nostalgia of its lost mansion. But never, ever did she want to reveal to me anything about my origin, nor how it came to be that she found herself lowered to trying to provide for our sustenance with her own hands.
After a month’s time, she said she was so much better, and looked so handsome and lively, that we allowed her to return partially to her lacework. But when I happily told Brother Justo about seeing her so beautiful in the afternoons, he peremptorily repeated, his cheeks a bright crimson, his previous order. Apparently with more scientific knowledge than the Aragonese Father (a famous doctor of the time who was guided by the admirable collection of prescriptions by Doctor Mandouti*), Brother Justo prescribed: milk drawn each morning; a light walk in the sun, at noon; a long reading that I was to give to her in the afternoons of the forgotten Don Quixote; and another reading, a shorter one at night, that she would do herself instead of her long prayers and orations, of one page only from a small book that he himself brought, the Imitation of Christ.
Uncle Alejo heard him, and the next day he showed up at our door with a beautiful black cow.
“Here she is,” he said to us triumphantly. “I have brought her. She is black, for although the Father did not say so, I know that this is the way it should be.”
He had María Francisca fill the glass decorated with flowers with the foamy milk; then he offered it to my mother, and left with the cow, laughing, and returned with it every morning for many days afterward. I also performed my duties with the greatest of pleasure: I read entire chapters out loud and made comments on them, as best as I could, making the patient laugh. Things went so well that after twenty days’ time we believed her to be completely recovered; she was happy and playful, like me.
Calm and content, I went about the town and its outskirts with my mother on her mandatory outings. I began to recognize many notable people by sight, and I noticed strange things that were occurring in the town, which excited my curiosity.
Don Juan Bautista Oquendo, still a young clergyman then, especially drew my attention at first. He must have been endowed with tremendous stamina, for he could be seen everywhere and at all times. He visited the houses of many well-to-do criollos daily, he went to all the stores and marketplaces, and he would stop the most humble-looking people on the streets. He had some joke, or some affectionate words, to introduce himself with a tact which, as I later understood, is unusual in the human heart. And he would conclude by making the same request of everyone, including my mother, to whom he directed himself once, greeting her by the name of “the little nun”:
“Pray, my daughter, for our generous King Don Fernando VII. Teach this rogue, this rascal (and here he gave me a little pat on the back) the love, the obedience, the respect—what am I saying!—the veneration that all of his subjects in these domains, all Christians, must have for him. The excommunicated Napoleon and the irreverent French heretics have stripped him of his throne; they hold him prisoner, martyrize him, and cruelly injure his paternal heart; they want to make us the slaves of the Devil.”
He spoke Quechua with rare perfection (as it had already been much adulturated, tending to become a dialect mixed with Spanish, like today); his sermons in this language, which is so suggestive and persuasive, attracted immense crowds from the general populace to church. When he preached in Spanish, the Spaniards and criollos admired his eloquence, his religious fervor, his loyalty to the monarch; however, to tell the truth, it was already not liked very much for anyone to touch on this last point with any frequency, as it was said to be a delicate subject.
There were other inexhaustible criollo gentlemen and some mestizos who had the same tenacity to excite the loyalty of “the legitimate King, our rightful Lord.” Among the mestizos, none equaled Alejo’s enthusiasm, zeal, and abnegation.
My uncle now came by, very joyous, and shouted from the door:
“Long live the beloved King Fernando!”
To my mother he would say:
“Rosita child, if you do not shout ‘Long live the king!’ like this, like me, using up all the air in this room, you will never fully recover from the cough, which is the only thing that would make us happy.”
Then, addressing me, after having lifted me up and holding me above his head by only one foot, which gave me a pleasant sensation of vertigo, he would continue:
“Let’s go, young man! Long live the king! If not, I’ll drop you to the ground or send you flying across the street to that house over there like a bird.”
Meanwhile, he would be bouncing me up and down so that I thought my head would crash against the ceiling rafters, until I would shout a hundred times: “Long live the king!” And he did not leave in peace the poor María Francisca either, nor any of the simple women of which I have spoken, who looked at him with astonishment and said that he was either crazy or he must have regressed to being a child again.
He was incredibly extreme in his royalist fervor. On Good Friday he went out as a penitent, naked to the waist, with a heavy, enormous cross, a crown with carob thorns, and a horsehair rope or halter around his neck. He flagellated himself in such a way that his back looked like a burning sore, and he did not pass up the occasion to cry out that he was doing this as punishment for his own sins and to offer God this small sacrifice on behalf of the beloved king, who was being martyred even more than him by the sons of Satan. He edified the multitudes who cried loudly when they saw and heard him; all promised that they were willing to die at his side in order to be led to the doors of paradise. But the next day, when he came to see us, he was so healthy and recovered, and he laughed in such a way, that I am of the opinion that the cunning scoundrel performed his caper with cotton soaked in sheep’s blood and that the thorns on the crown were very carefully rounded out.
One day—it must have been in the month of July, for the fields were almost entirely stripped of the abundant crops of the beautiful grains of the Altiplano of Upper Perú—as I accompanied my mother in one of her daily walks around the ravines of the Rocha River that border Calacala, I also witnessed a very curious scene. In the middle of a field of barley, which had been recently visited by the sickles of the colonos who worked for Mr. Cangas, whose manor was very close by, we saw respectable gentlemen, like Don Francisco del Rivero, Don Bartolomé Guzman,9 Don Juan Bautista Oquendo, and others whose names I only learned later, seemingly playing hide-and-seek. They were lying in ambush for I know not whom, and at times they made signs to each other to keep silent; at others, they laughed and covered their mouths with their hands. When they noticed our presence, Brother Justo, to my great surprise, came crawling out from among them on all fours.
“Do not tell anyone that you have seen us, and leave here right away,” he told us—and went back into hiding just as he had come out.
Three days later we learned that the Lord Governor Don José González de Prada had placed Don Francisco del Rivero, Don Esteban Arze, and Don Melchor Guzmán Quitón10 under arrest and sent them to the prison in Oruro. Our friends stopped coming by to visit and even forgot us for many days. Instead, but of course not at all preferable, I made a new friendship, one that displeased my mother very much. I shall tell now of how it came to be.
The street on which we lived was almost always deserted and did not have any paving; our street corner served, therefore, as a meeting place for the lazy and mischievous boys of the neighborhood to play palama. The name of this game must come from the pall-mall played in the Peninsula. It consists of setting up a tall rock on the ground, where a line has been drawn, and trying to knock it down by throwing other flat rocks, as heavy as possible, from a set distance. Every time the rock is knocked over, a point is scored; if none of the players knocks it over, the point is given to the boy whose stone is closest to the line. The game is played to twelve points, although it is often doubled to twenty-four, or even more, depending on the players’ skills.
Among these boys there was one who was fair and blond, known as El Overo,11 as mestizos of that complexion tended to be called. He was the most deft, the loudest, and the most cross of them all; he would get into a thousand quarrels from which he always emerged victorious if he was on equal footing, and from which he could escape with admirable speed if his enemy was considerably stronger. At a safe distance, as a last resort, he would make the most annoying gestures to his pursuers, like the one that consists, for example, of putting your thumb on your nose and waving your other fingers with your hand wide open.
He thought I was agreeable, or as he used to say, “I pleased him.” Several times he circled around my street; he called me from afar to come out to play; he became exasperated trying to get me to participate or be a victim of one of his wild pranks. One morning, when my mother had gone to Mass, leaving me alone—which she seldom did—he took advantage of the long-awaited occasion and entered the house, “through the front door, like a king.”
“Don’t be silly, Don Little Saint,” he said to me, “come have fun like us; leave that big, old book alone. . . . What good is reading for, anyway? I don’t know why my father taught it to me along with other entirely useless things.”
With amazing volubility, prying through everything, he kept rattling off a thousand different things—impossible to remember—without waiting for an answer, until he opened the door that led to the small patio and exclaimed:
“How beautiful! Long live the king! We don’t even have to leave your haunt.”
He set up the palama out there with rocks taken from the kitchen hearth, and he made me play for a while. He slowly taught me a thousand different games, one after the other, proper or improper for boys our age. He had, to this end, tops, balls, teetotums, and a dirty, filthy deck of cards in his pockets. When the both of us were tired, he said to me:
“Let’s go rest in your room.”
We went back in; but his rest consisted in disarranging and moving everything around, without sparing the prints nor the Divine Shepherdess. Suddenly, after looking behind the latter, he let out a scream; he separated the painting further from the wall and pointed to a small bundle that was in a recess in the wall.
“What is it?” he asked.
“I don’t know; I’ve never seen it,” I answered him.
“Well … let’s see it,” he replied.
And without waiting any further, he opened the bundle, which contained only a piece of esparto rope, about one vara long, of an indefinable color between suet and soot. He looked at the strange object with surprise and handed it to me right away.
At that moment my mother arrived; very angry, she said to me:
“Who has dared to rummage through all this? Who is this boy?”
I did not know how to lie; I fell to my knees and told her everything that had taken place. My new friend skipped out to the street, turned his head, and, before completing his escape, yelled:
“Carrasco, old friend!”
These words affected my mother very strongly.