Prevod

(To Juana Manuela Gorriti.) We have thought it advisable to change the names of the principal characters in this tale, a venial sin we have committed in The Woman Who Was Summoned and one or two others. Names matter little if care is taken not to falsify historical truth; and the reader will readily guess that we must have had a reason, and a very compelling one, for rechristening our fellow creatures.

I In August 1690, His Excellency Don Melchor Portocarrero Lazo de la Vega, Count of Monclova, Commander of Zarza in the Order of Alcántara, and twenty-third Viceroy of Peru for His Majesty Don Carlos II, made his entry into Lima. Besides his daughter Doña Josefa, his family, and his servants, he was accompanied by several Spanish soldiers from Mexico, whose government he had left on his transfer to these realms. Distinguished among them by his gallant, soldierly bearing was Don Fernando de Vergara, a nobleman from Extremadura and captain of a company of gentlemen lancers; it was said that among the beauties of Mexico he had hardly left behind the austere reputation of a Benedictine monk. Quarrelsome, a gambler, and fond of laying siege to women, he was more than a little difficult to settle down; and the viceroy, who felt a fatherly affection for him, resolved to arrange a marriage for him in Lima, to see whether there was any truth in the saying that a change of state brings a change of habits.

Evangelina Zamora, besides her youth and beauty, possessed advantages that made her the most coveted match in the City of Kings. Her great-grandfather had been, after Jerónimo de Aliaga, Mayor Ribera, Martín de Alcántara, and Diego Maldonado the Rich, one of the conquistadors most generously favored by Pizarro with grants of land in the Rimac valley. The emperor had granted him the right to use the title Don, and some years later the valuable gifts he sent to the Crown earned him the honor of membership in the Order of Santiago. With a century upon his shoulders, rich and ennobled, our conquistador decided he had no further mission in this vale of tears, and in 1604 he packed his bags for the next world, leaving to his entailed estate a fortune in country and city property then valued at a fifth of a million.

Evangelina’s grandfather and father increased the inheritance; and at the age of twenty the young woman found herself an orphan, under a guardian’s protection and envied for her wealth.

The modest daughter of the Count of Monclova and the wealthy young woman of Lima soon formed the warmest of friendships. Evangelina thus had frequent occasion to meet the captain of gentlemen lancers in company at the palace. Being a gallant, he let no opportunity pass to pay court to the maiden; and at last, without confessing the tender feelings the nobleman from Extremadura had awakened in her heart, she listened with secret pleasure to the proposal that she marry Don Fernando. The intermediary was none other than the viceroy, and a properly brought-up young woman could hardly slight so exalted a sponsor.

During the first five years of marriage, Captain Vergara forgot his former dissipated life. His wife and children were his entire happiness: he was, let us say, a model husband.

But one fatal day the devil contrived that Don Fernando should accompany his wife to a family gathering, and that there should be a room where not only was the traditional card game of malilla abarrotada being played, but many devotees of the dice were gathered about a green-baize table. The passion for gambling was merely slumbering in the captain’s soul, and it is hardly surprising that the sight of the dice should have awakened it with greater force. He played, and with such wicked luck that he lost twenty thousand pesos that night.

From that moment, the model husband changed his ways completely and returned to the gambler’s feverish existence. As fortune grew more stubbornly hostile by the day, he was obliged to eat into the estate of his wife and children to meet his losses, plunging into that bottomless abyss known as winning back what one has lost.

Among his companions in vice was a young marquis whom the dice persistently favored, and Don Fernando took it into his head to challenge such extravagant good fortune. Many a night he brought him to supper at Evangelina’s house, and when the meal was over the two friends shut themselves in a room to strip one another of their shirts—a phrase whose precision, in the language of gamblers, is repellent.

Unquestionably, the gambler and the madman are one and the same creature. If anything diminishes the historical stature of the Emperor Augustus in my eyes, it is that, according to Suetonius, he used to play odds and evens after supper.

In vain did Evangelina strive to draw the unbridled gambler back from the precipice. Tears and tenderness, anger and reconciliation were all useless. An honorable woman has no other weapons to wield against the heart of the man she loves.

One night the unhappy wife had already retired to bed when Don Fernando woke her to ask for her wedding ring. It held a diamond of immense value. Evangelina was alarmed, but her husband soothed her fears by saying he merely wished to satisfy the curiosity of some friends who doubted the worth of the precious jewel.

What had happened in the room where the rivals at the gaming table sat? Don Fernando was losing a large sum, and, having nothing left to stake, he had remembered his wife’s splendid ring.

Misfortune is inexorable. A few minutes later the precious jewel gleamed on the ring finger of the victorious marquis. Don Fernando shuddered with shame and remorse. The marquis took his leave, and Vergara accompanied him to the drawing room; but on reaching it he turned his head toward a glazed partition opening onto Evangelina’s bedroom, and through the panes he saw her kneeling before an image of Mary, sobbing.

A dreadful frenzy seized Don Fernando’s mind, and, swift as a tiger, he sprang upon the marquis and stabbed him three times in the back.

The unfortunate man fled toward the bedroom and fell lifeless before Evangelina’s bed. II The Count of Monclova, then a very young man, commanded a company at the Battle of Arras, fought in 1654. His courage carried him into the thickest of the fighting, and he was borne from the field almost dead. He eventually recovered, but lost his right arm, which had to be amputated. He replaced it with a silver-plated one, and this gave rise to the nickname bestowed on him in Mexico and Lima.

The viceroy Silver Arm, whose coat of arms bore the motto Ave María gratia plena, succeeded the illustrious Don Melchor de Navarra y Rocafull in the government of Peru. “Enjoying the same prestige as his predecessor, though with fewer administrative gifts,” says Lorente, “upright in his conduct, devout, conciliatory, and moderate, the Count of Monclova edified the people by his example, and the needy always found him ready to give away his salary and the revenues of his house in alms.”

During the fifteen years and four months of Silver Arm’s government, a length of service no viceroy had attained before or has attained since, the country enjoyed complete peace; the administration was orderly, and magnificent houses were built in Lima. It is true that the public treasury was not particularly flourishing, but this was for reasons unrelated to policy. The religious processions and festivals of those days recalled, in their magnificence and luxury, the time of the Count of Lemos. The arcades, with their eighty-five arches, built at a cost of twenty-five thousand pesos, the town hall, and the palace gallery were works of that period.

In 1694 a monster was born in Lima with two heads and beautiful faces, two hearts, four arms, and two chests joined by cartilage. From the waist to the feet there was little extraordinary about it, and the encyclopedic scholar of Lima, Don Pedro de Peralta, wrote a curious book entitled Deviations of Nature, in which, besides giving an anatomical description of the monster, he strove to prove that it possessed two souls.

After the death of Carlos the Bewitched in 1700, Felipe V, who succeeded him, rewarded the Count of Monclova by making him a grandee of Spain. Ill, in his eighties, and weary of office, the viceroy Silver Arm urged the court to replace him. Without seeing this wish fulfilled, the Count of Monclova died on September 22, 1702, and was buried in the cathedral; his successor, the Marquis of Casteldos Ríus, did not reach Lima until June 1707.

Doña Josefa, the Count of Monclova’s daughter, continued living in the palace after the viceroy’s death; but one night, having already arranged matters with her confessor, Father Alonso Mesía, she lowered herself from a window and took refuge with the nuns of Santa Catalina, taking her vows in the habit of Santa Rosa, whose convent was then under construction. In May 1710 Doña Josefa Portocarrero Lazo de la Vega moved to the new convent, of which she became the first abbess.

III Four months after his imprisonment, the Royal Audiencia sentenced Don Fernando de Vergara to death. From the first he had declared that he had treacherously murdered the marquis in a fit of despair as a ruined gambler. Faced with so frank a confession, the court could do nothing but impose the penalty.

Evangelina used every means in her power to save her husband from a dishonorable death; and amid such anguish the day appointed for the criminal’s execution arrived. Then the devoted and courageous Evangelina resolved, for the sake of her children’s name, to make a sacrifice without parallel.

Dressed in mourning, she appeared in the palace hall while the viceroy, the Count of Monclova, was conferring with the judges, and declared that Don Fernando had killed the marquis under the protection of the law; that she was an adulteress and, having been surprised by her husband, had fled his wrath, while her accomplice met a just death at the hands of the wronged husband.

The frequency of the marquis’s visits to Evangelina’s house, her ring on the dead man’s hand as a token of love, the wounds in his back, the fact that his body had been found at the foot of the lady’s bed, and other small details were grounds enough for the viceroy to credit her revelation and order a stay of execution.

The judge in the case went to the prison so that Don Fernando might confirm his wife’s statement. But scarcely had the clerk finished reading it aloud when Vergara, seized by a thousand conflicting emotions, burst into a dreadful peal of laughter.

The unhappy man had gone mad! A few years later, death spread its wings over the noble wife’s chaste bed, and an austere priest lavished the consolations of religion upon the dying woman.

Evangelina’s four children knelt awaiting their mother’s last blessing. Then the self-sacrificing victim, compelled by her confessor, revealed the terrible secret to them: “The world will forget,” she told them, “the name of the woman who gave you life; but it would have been merciless toward you had your father mounted the steps of the scaffold. God, who reads in the clear glass of my conscience, knows that I forfeited my honor in the eyes of society so that you would never one day be called the children of an executed man.”