When I was a boy of thirteen I found a packet of letters in my father’s desk. I picked the lock to the drawer one day with one of my mother’s hairpins. Then, to keep my curiosity from being discovered, I took the small desk key one time when my father was sick, and in a distant quarter of Lima I had a stranger make a copy. That way I didn’t run the risk, each time I opened the drawer, of mutilating the lock and having my sin exposed.
The letters had been written in Castilian Spanish in the first decade of the seventeenth century between a man and a woman who did not sign their names but who wrote in exquisite phrases of desire and anguish about their passion for each other. During the years I read and reread these letters, I thought them composed of the most beautiful and, at the same time, the most illicit of human statements. The language of enthrallment was so unrestrained that the images existed for me outside the realm of sin and redemption, beyond the sphere of the Church. Please understand the complication—sometimes in reading the words I found myself with a powerful erection, but I did not consider this state of excitement, the vibrating ventilation of my skin, a violation of the sixth or ninth commandment. I felt my longing took place on another plane. I felt that my desire drew on many human emotions, and so was round, perfectly round and full—hunger, weeping, joy, even a peculiar fleeting anger. The shuddering ecstasy I experienced did not produce for me the sign of a sinful act, which I always imagined as quills sprouting suddenly from my face.
Repeated readings would eventually have broken the letters’ folds and marred them, so I copied each one out, word for word, and hid the copies in the ceiling of the house. I rarely went afterward to that drawer in my father’s desk. When I did, I held what I called the letters of heaven so respectfully my fingers trembled. I wanted desperately to protect a quality in them I understood as purity. I could have memorized them—they were short and there were only nine—but I felt to memorize the letters would have diminished their effect. I was then, too, someone anxious about the lack of substance in memory.
In 1967, when I was eighteen, my father developed cancer. Without health insurance he knew his death was imminent, and so he soon completed the arrangements he wished to make with everyone, loving gestures that put each of us at ease. He spoke with my two uncles, the brothers with whom he ran a tannery, about the disposition of his interest there, including the skiving knives and mallets that had been his father’s. He bestowed small gifts on each of his relatives. And through the generosity of his love, by the breadth of his consideration of us, he steered my mother and my sisters and myself toward a rarefied emotional position. It was as though he were tearing himself neatly out of a book while taking pains to see the page would not be missed. Even as he was dying we began to sense that we were whole without him. We would miss him very much, but he was leaving us with a grief that strengthened us.
When it came my turn to have a private moment with my father, he said without warning, “The letters, Ramón, are the most holy, the most beautiful relics in our family. You must protect them. If you have children, give them to the child who is most drawn to them. If you do not, look among your sisters’ children for the one who should receive them.”
At eighteen I was too old to behave like a child, even before a dying father. I could not openly and fully express the remorse and embarrassment I felt at that moment. I did not know how to beg his forgiveness. I sensed for the first time that my clandestine involvement with the letters had been a sin.
“Who wrote them?” I asked.
“Her name was Isabel, the man was called Martín.”
“Were they relatives who came to Peru?”
“Yes. Isabel’s brother Fernandino is your ancestor on my father’s side, fourteen generations back.”
I thought about that name, Fernandino, and I suddenly felt the quills pressing against the skin of my scalp. “And the man who loved her, Martín—who were his descendants? Are they living here?”
“He did not have any children,” my father answered. After a moment he said, “Is this hard for you, Ramón?”
The quills were now out. I wanted to run far away until I disappeared like an ash in the wind. “Is it Rosa de Lima?” I asked. I felt tears of fright.
“Yes,” he said, reaching for my hand and holding it. “She was Rosa de Lima, he was Martín de Porres.”
I was confounded. “These are the letters of saints!” I blurted.
“They are.”
“But how can you—it is blasphemy, it is blasphemous!”
“No, no, Ramón, it is love. It is the love of Christ. My son, you must already know this in your soul.”
“I know nothing,” I shouted, pulling my hand away, “except that there is a sin here, a terrible sin.” I did not want my feelings to overwhelm me, but I could feel the flush of an emotion akin to rage building inexorably with the evidence of this deception.
“There is no sin here, Ramón. I do not even believe your taking my key and making a copy was a sin. You were the person meant to have these letters.”
“But what were they doing?” I yelled at him. “What were they doing?”
“Whatever was between them, all my life I have believed it was with God’s blessing.”
“Please excuse me, Father, but how can you speak like this on your deathbed!”
“Isn’t it just now, just in this moment, Ramón, that you have changed your mind about what you have read and thought about for so many years? And yet, what has changed? Nothing. Only that another person knows. It is not the discovery of sin that is filling you with insecurity, Ramón, it is the discovery of the intimacy of real people.”
I didn’t know what to answer or what to confirm.
“I’m not asking you to share a knowledge of the letters with anyone, not even for you to turn back to them if you cannot bear it. My only request is that you protect them. In each generation they have had a guardian, someone to protect them from the righteous, from those who support the black-and-white distinctions of the Manichaeans, who indulge their hatred of the body. Do you understand?”
“You are saying that I must protect them from the Church?”
“Yes, but not just the Church.”
I could not imagine how even to approach this task. I moved to the foot of his bed and sat in a chair.
“Ramón,” he implored, “sometimes, after reading the letters, did you touch yourself?”
I could not answer.
“It was the same for me, when I was your age.”
“I did not confess what happened to me as a sin,” I said after a while.
“I know. I didn’t either. This is what I have been trying to make clear. You must not change your feelings now because you know who wrote the letters. Do you see?”
“I will protect them,” I answered. I meant it, but it was as close to speaking a lie as it is possible to come.
I burned my copies of the letters in the hour after I left my father’s room. Rosa de Lima was Isabel de Flores y Oliva, the first person from the New World to be canonized. Her friend was Martín de Porres, a mulatto canonized three hundred years later. It was not the existence of their love but how to believe in its sanctity that troubled and offended me. I did not want to know how such things could be acceptable for saints.
When my father died I came into possession of the desk with the locked drawer, but I did not look at the correspondence again for more than ten years and then only to move it to another place. Occasionally I would recall a sentence, a paragraph, and it would remain with me for days.
In the summer of 1995 I was working in the library at the University of Lima, researching a paper for a scholarly journal on the early architecture of the city. After my father died, I’d gone to Italy to school, then to France and Barcelona for a while before returning to Lima. I married Camilla, whom I had known first in secondary school, and settled into a comfortable marriage with three children. The quiet domesticity of this life contrasted with my passion for work and certain ideas. I had opened a practice as an architect. My principal interests were the use of local Peruvian stone for building, the survival of Inca techniques for working the stone, and what you would have to call my curiosity about non-Euclidean physics—the development among native workmen of a kind of hybrid structural engineering that derived from alternative ideas about what holds things up. In the case of some of the older buildings in Lima, many of my concerns came together—Quechua masons had raised stone walls buttressed in perfectly sound yet wonderfully unorthodox ways.
Over the years of my professional practice I gravitated steadily toward university teaching. I found it satisfying to support the enthusiasm of younger students, and I was always glad to find one or two who were interested in the things I was interested in. During that summer of 1995 I had two such students working for me, Pedro de Ortega and Analilia Valencia. We were studying some peculiarities in seventeenth-century public buildings in Lima and Callao, when—during the course of our library research—I came upon a second set of letters between Rosa and Martín.
The moment I saw them I was certain that no one else knew what they were. Like the first letters these were unaddressed and unsigned, but the handwriting, the idiosyncrasies in punctuation and grammar, were identical. There were twenty-two of them, on the same color and texture of paper, randomly leaved in a dozen folders of unsorted material within a single box—bills of sale, ships’ manifests, and public memoranda—all from the seventeenth century.
The day I discovered the letters I made a thorough search of the only other boxes of unsorted documents on the shelves to satisfy myself there were no others. By then it was after eleven in the evening. I considered concealing the letters and taking them home with me. I had not thought much about Rosa and Martín since that conversation with my father, but here I was again, acting in violation of my principles. I placed the letters in my briefcase and walked out of the library, using my authority as a professor of the university to take advantage.
When I arrived at the house Camilla was already asleep. Our youngest child, Manco, was watching television. I went directly to my study, locked the door, and read each letter carefully. The experience, carrying far into the night, shattered a carapace I had carried unacknowledged for thirty years. These letters were less explicit than the others about sexual ecstasy, but the same overwhelming testimony to the power of the physical body flew up from them. And I could now make a different sense of their meaning. These two people had grown swiftly to accept that ecstatic love was an element of spirituality, that it intensified rather than quenched the light of God. They set forth this belief so boldly it raised the hair on the back of my head.
I sat with the letters until first light, through tears that became fits of weeping, through moments of regret, of terror and resolve, reading again and again sentences in which one or the other recognized the immanence of God in the moisture of rose petals crushed between them or in a burst of wind that entwined their hair. I sat in a state of wonder at their humanity, the fearless, complete acceptance of passion. I trembled as an observer reading at the edge of this embrace, for centuries condemned. What for some couples would have been defiance was for them faith.
The emotional upheaval was an unraveling. I was swept from one corner of my beliefs to another, never remaining long in one place. I was driven on by an awakening of sexual desire, by self-pity as well as courage, by a sense of reprieve and the impulse to abandon—a spiritual revolution. The carefully maintained barrier of my emotional distance with Camilla and others and the strict dichotomies around which my judgments occurred daily without reflection had shrunk by dawn to irrelevancy.
I knew enough of the lives of Rosa and Martín, remembered mostly from the popular but improbable hagiographies of my childhood, to understand how the relationship revealed in their letters might have come about and to accept the plausibility of everything set out in them. Martín was born in 1579, Rosa seven years later. She lived in a house with ten brothers and sisters on Calle de Santo Domingo, adjacent to the Dominican monastery Martín entered as a lay helper when he was fifteen. Rosa’s mother, Maria de Flores, was an irritable, hot-tempered woman. Her father, who participated as a professional soldier in the defeat of the Pizarros at Jaquijahuana, later became superintendent of the silver mines at Quives. Rosa helped support the family by selling flowers she raised in a garden that shared a wall with the monastery gardens Martín de Porres attended.
Rosa was canonized in 1671. Sainthood for Martín did not come until 1962—a delay caused, some say, by the fact that he was dark-skinned. The transcribed testimony of their contemporaries, provided to apostolic tribunals convened at the time of each one’s death, is explicit and almost without contradiction concerning the holiness of each person. The extent of their charity toward the destitute, the injured, the abandoned, was then and remains for us now unfathomable. The infusion of physical comfort and spiritual solace each conveyed to ease every kind of human suffering was so inexplicable, so unearthly, it must be regarded as miraculous. A striking sign of their blessedness is that both Rosa and Martín were repeatedly discovered elevated three or four feet off the ground before the Crucifix in a state of spiritual ecstasy or oblivion.
At the time of their ministries, life for many in Lima was an unmitigated horror. The city teemed with gangs of orphans. Epidemic disease was rampant. The many victims of the depraved and bloody administration of the Spanish viceroyalty lived crowded in hovels throughout the city and swarmed the streets for the garbage and waste on which they survived. Reading records of that time, one is soon confirmed in the belief that this was a period of human derangement—the whipping of Church-owned slaves, the public rape of street urchins. It was into this debilitating and sordid atmosphere that Rosa and Martín were born and in which each developed a sense of God.
Of the two, Rosa was the more reclusive. At the age of thirteen she came to believe adamantly that only by devoting herself to prayer, to the most abject supplication before God, might she find salvation. She cut herself off from human society, embarked on a period of harsh fasts, and regularly beat herself with sticks. Her many chroniclers are at pains to describe her self-flagellation as “masochistic and abnormal,” but looking at the letters and the entirety of her life, I believe her behavior was instead an act of rage against the darkness manifest in the streets around her and which she also saw in herself. Her biographers refer to these seven years as her
“period of aridity.” It was near the end of this time that she met Martín.
The Dominican friar was much more outgoing, a humorous, energetic man, the son of an hidalgo named Juan de Porres and of Anna Velasquez, a Panamanian woman variously described as an Indian and as a free black. Martín lived the impoverished life of a religious abject but was so enthusiastic about human life and so ready with self-deprecating jokes that he confounded those who piously recorded his miraculous cures of the terminally ill. Each day he walked out into the streets of Lima to help whomever he met. Like Rosa, who turned her parents’ home into a hospice for abused prostitutes, Martín brought the most deracinated and wretched back to the monastery, housing them in his own small cell if necessary. His charity was celebrated throughout Lima; the wealthy sought his counsel and showered him with money.
During the months in which the letters were written, in the fall of 1606, I think, Rosa was twenty. She was just entering a period of serenity in her life, a time of transcendent beatitude such as people often imagine to be the equanimity of angels. It lasted until she died in 1617, at the age of thirty-one. Martín would have been twenty-seven in 1606. Among his official duties at the monastery were his responsibilities in the hospital and in the garden, but he spent much of his time in the streets. In a city blighted by ambitious schemes and cruel enforcements, he was for all the pariahs an elevating hand, a sympathetic ear.
Rosa and Martín, lacking a certain cupidity and the designs of power that would have drawn them more completely into the world, nevertheless willingly engaged in its terrors. Against holiness like theirs one has no recourse, no protection. It was part of the reason I broke down that night.
I slept most of the day after my night of reading and catharsis. The following day Camilla and Manco went to Callao to visit his grandmother, and I had the house to myself. I took out the nine letters my father had given me and read them for the first time in many years. I had then a sudden, intuitive sense of the order of all the letters. Assembled along these lines they revealed a clear evolution of psychological and spiritual ideas.
The letters my father gave me seem all to have been among the earliest written. Their composers describe with wonder and joy each other’s smallest physical attributes. They dwell on the blinding ecstasy produced by mere touch—the inside of the wrist, say, lifting the bare flesh of the breast. Rosa writes of the heat and the pressure she experiences straining against him, the sensation of his penetration she feels in her spine, the delirious loss of her mind. Martín writes of the inexplicable tears that wet their faces, the thrill of restraint and hesitation in his tongue drawn across the shuddering currents of her skin. They make love in her garden most often. In their letters they speculate at the way they tear plants from the ground in their ravishment and at her compulsion to ride him like a horse, and they recall how in a kiss Martín had unfurled honey against her teeth and then slowly caressed every part of her mouth he could reach.
In those early letters they seem to affirm not physical passion so much as entry upon a form of reverie both familiar and unknown to them, a capacity for such experience that for them must have been an abiding hunger. In subsequent letters (the majority of these from the library) they explore the meaning of this elevated state, and they consider the unity they have discovered through it—with each other, with jasmine blossoms that fall on them in the garden, and with their spiritual calling, the prayer and ministration that shaped the hours of their daily lives.
It’s my feeling that I have read most of the letters they wrote, that there were few earlier or later ones. The letters originate in the realm of physical sensation, move to a more ethereal realm (though still rooted in the physical), and culminate in what appears to be the completion of an understanding of what they were striving for. I would guess that all of the letters were written during a period of only two or three months, and I see the evidence of this intense companionship most clearly in a change in Rosa’s life. Certain references in the letters suggest that Martín prevailed upon Rosa to cease beating herself. Rosa had as profound an effect, I think, on Martín’s life, though this is harder to discern. If Rosa’s “period of aridity” came to an end during these months, this, too, was possibly the time that Martín acquired the gift that permitted him to speak to animals. Before this, his love had embraced even the most wounded human being; following upon his intimacy with Rosa, the tenderness he exhibited was undiscriminating and unbounded. It extended toward all life.
In what I feel was the final letter, Rosa tells Martín that as a sign of their love, of the “elimination of the barriers that exclude God,” they should regularly place vases of flowers on the garden wall, where the arrangements would be visible to each of them. Indeed, in statements included in testimony taken down by the apostolic tribunals, I’ve found references to the fact that until their last day it was the habit of each of these people to place bouquets of flowers on their common wall, the instances of this noted because no matter what the season, vivid displays of lilies and roses appeared.
The letters of Rosa and Martín have compelled my salvation, but they have also created a dilemma for me. My foremost responsibility, I believe, is to protect them from fanatics, from obliteration or derision. (Curious, how late in life has come the realization of what my father meant.) In the days following my discovery of the letters in the library, however, I developed such an affection toward the world, such a sense of tenderness toward anyone caught in the predicament of life, that I came to view publication of the letters as an urgent matter. By means of this one gesture, I thought, so much of the putrefaction and hypocrisy of evil could be wiped away. I now saw the physical attraction between my students, Pedro and Analilia, not as mundane carnality but as unperfected desire, and within that a potential for pervading love, whether or not they decided to marry. With Camilla, whom I had become so remote from, who had become almost an idea to me, I rediscovered simple sensual pleasure. Perhaps most striking for me was the recovery of a sense of the vastness of the world outside my own concerns and aspirations.
What would seem astonishing to a modern reader of these letters, of course, is that two saints embraced the physical hunger that enveloped them instead of running from it. They took it as a sign of God. Then, riding a wave of passion large enough to drown most of us, they transmuted that clutching, compressing, exhausting physical love into a deeper knowledge of God, achieving a peace in their own lives that they gave away in all the dark corners of Lima.
Even as I saw the good that could come from publishing the letters, however, I knew it was being realistic rather than cynical to see that any such publication in Peru would be suppressed, or so thoroughly undermined that the letters would finally be dismissed as forgeries. The Church would call it blasphemy, Hollywood would beat at the door with money and offer solemn promises. The endurance of these letters through fourteen generations would then culminate in an explosion. They would fall back to the earth like so much confetti.
By some means, however, I intend to release these letters. It is amazing that love like this is the experience of saints, but the apparatus of sainthood and Catholicism, it seems to me, is not essential in the story of these people, only knowledge of the spiritual life to be found at the core of their physical experience. Ecstasy seems directionless to me, but like all passion, it might be directed toward the divine.
I am considering several courses of action. If I forward copies of the letters to a friend in China, a scholar of religion at the University of Wuhan, he could arrange for their publication there. They would then emerge as a kind of heresy and so enjoy that protection. I am also considering paying for their publication in Lima under the auspices of a spurious monastery in Catalonia. Eventually they would be discredited by the Church as a work of fiction, but they would suffer less that way than if the authorities were forced to treat them as a reality.
The letters, of course, have given me my first understanding of the humanity of saints. I’ve written out passages from them on small slips of paper which I meditate upon during Mass. For example, in one letter Martín describes how he wishes to place his lips in a depression above Rosa’s clavicle and draw from it the poisonous residue left by her father’s beatings, which she had endured as a child. In another letter Rosa speaks of the power of memory to kindle desire when presented with a certain scene—the undulating flight of swallows reminds her of the swoon of physical ecstasy, the overlapping songs of finches in the garden at dawn restore the sensation of his first touch.
For now, I will keep the letters I took from the library. I don’t know how to resolve the theft, but it can wait until I see a way through this larger responsibility. I’ve never discussed the letters with Camilla. I have not discussed them with my eldest son, Artaud, though I am actually inclined to pass them on to our middle child, Elouisa. She has a quick, irreverent mind, but she is the most principled person in the family and contains, I suspect, the deepest waters. I consider that it has fallen to me only to have made this additional discovery in the university library, to complete the collection of letters. Now that their meaning is so clear, it may be for Elouisa to determine our next step.
When Camilla and I were courting, I took images from the letters to astonish and impress her. I now believe this the only sin, the one failure of integrity that I persisted in with these letters. It filled me with such shame that I later confessed the sin many times, to be forgiven again and again.
One evening I will ask Camilla to go for a walk with me. I hope to direct us to some place along the Río Rímac, a spot where the other two might once have stood.