Prevod

I suppose, reader, that you are old enough to have spoken with contemporaries of Viceroy Pezuela, and that, when telling you of some bold, manly daughter of Eve, you will have heard them say: She is a woman of pike and lance.

So you have heard the phrase? Then here is its origin, just as it was told to me by a descendant of the heroine. I In one of the houses on Aparicio Street, around the year 1760, there lived a lady named Doña Feliciana Chaves de Mesía.

Doña Feliciana was what people called a woman devoted to her household, and although she was rich enough to bring out her chased silver plate and sacks of silver dollars to air in the sun, she gave no thought to decking herself out, but only to increasing her fortune. She owned an estate in the valleys near the city, as well as the Serrano bakery, and in the courtyard of her house she had two spacious storerooms where she sold flour, sugar, oil, and other everyday goods wholesale.

What times those were! When it came to work, our grandmothers could give the devil himself a lesson, and when a man married, he found in his spouse not merely the missing rib that made him whole, but a business partner who saved him the expense of hiring clerks.

Doña Feliciana’s husband had gone to Ica three years earlier to establish a branch of the Lima firm, leaving his wife in charge of its many business dealings; and as though God delighted in showering His blessings upon this hardworking woman of Lima, every venture she undertook yielded a handsome profit.

But life is not all cakes and sweetmeats in this vale of tears, and just when Doña Feliciana felt most certain that her husband thought of nothing but earning gold doubloons, she received an anonymous letter from Ica informing her, in the minutest detail, that Señor Mesía had a mistress and was spending untold riches on the creature. The woman in question, it added, was not worth a fig and could not hold a candle to Doña Feliciana, who, though a plump, mature lady, was still quite appetizing and did not deserve to have that scoundrel of a husband turn up his nose at her. As the hen in a certain tale remarked: “Lay eggs and eat no wheat? That is no bargain for me.”

The anonymous letter stung the lady’s spirit, and she fell to brooding over Señor Mesía’s infidelity. So persistently did the gadfly of jealousy buzz in her soul that she resolved to take wing, swoop down upon the faithless wretch, and catch him at his monkey business. The trouble was that, in those days, reaching Ica took many days and involved a thousand dangers; and since the storerooms could neither be left shut nor entrusted to the mercy of a clerk, she decided to sell them. This task she entrusted to a Spaniard named Vilches, her compadre and a man in whom she had complete confidence.

In those days transactions were settled very promptly, for people made little use of formalities, and before forty-eight hours had passed, Doña Feliciana saw several bags of a thousand pesos apiece come through her door. She gave Vilches one of them as a reward for his diligence and, with all obstacles cleared away, prepared to leave three days later.

II That night Doña Feliciana reckoned up her accounts and decided that, as soon as God brought the dawn, she would deposit her money and jewels with a merchant of proverbial honesty. But her jealous broodings on the one hand, and her financial calculations on the other, kept her awake, which proved no small piece of good fortune.

It must have been two in the morning, the hour of cats and thieves, when she heard the faint, stealthy sound of footsteps in the rear courtyard. She pricked up her ears and became convinced that someone was applying to a door leading into her bedroom what was then called a cupping glass—not in the jargon of apothecaries, but in that of the sons of Cacus. This operation consisted of burning a hole through the wood.

Doña Feliciana sprang swiftly out of bed and took from a corner of the room a wooden shaft or rod, to the end of which she fitted a sharp iron lance-point. This was the weapon landowners habitually carried when they went out into the countryside.

Thus armed, our heroine took up her watch behind the door. The moment the burning had opened a sizable hole, a head appeared through it. Without so much as calling “Who goes there?” Doña Feliciana drove the iron point into the back of its neck.

The thief gave a deathly scream, and his companions took to their heels. Then the lady raised the alarm, the whole neighborhood was thrown into an uproar, the watch came running, and to everyone’s astonishment they found the honest Vilches at death’s door. He made a full confession and named his partners in the enterprise.

III Everyone sang the praises of Doña Feliciana’s courage, and Lima talked of nothing else. Had there been newspapers, they would have given her a thunderous fanfare in their local columns.

The fame of her exploit had preceded her to Ica, where she arrived one morning armed with shaft and lance-point. Confronting her husband, she said: “Back to Lima, sir, and home with you, unless you want me to do to your precious person just what I did to Vilches, and leave you fit for nothing—not even to sow radishes over.”

Mesía trembled like a man afflicted with the shakes, ordered his mule saddled, and obeyed her command without so much as a murmur. From that day forward she wore the trousers in the house, and he became the most faithful husband mentioned in sacred or profane history, knowing full well that his hide would pay for the first lapse in which madam caught him.

It is no small matter to have a woman of pike and lance for a wife.