Prevod

Until fifty years ago, there existed in Lima an association of women whose faces were all scribbled over with wrinkles and who were more scrawny and bedraggled than a poor man’s louse. Their trade was to whimper and shed tears as big as chickpeas. A wretched profession, and a monstrous one at that! The curious thing was that every member was old as sin, ugly as gossip, and had more than a touch of the witch and the bawd about her. In Spain they were called mourners; but in these kingdoms of Peru they were christened sorrowful women, or weepers.

That the colonial government did its utmost to banish them is proved by an edict regulating mourning which Viceroy Don Teodoro de Croix ordered proclaimed in Lima on August 31, 1786, and which I have had occasion to read in volume XXXVIII of the National Library’s Miscellaneous Papers. Article 12 of the edict reads, word for word: “The employment of weepers or mourners, being as opposed to the principles of our religion as it is contrary to the law, is hereby forever proscribed and abolished, offenders being subject to one month’s service in a hospital, charitable institution, or bakery.” This edict, like so many others, seems to have remained a dead letter.

No sooner did some fellow mortal die leaving enough property to pay for a decent funeral than his executor and relations would scour the streets in search of the most celebrated weeper, who would undertake to hire the goodwives who were to accompany her. According to an ancient miscellany I have consulted, the fee was four pesos for the chief mourner and two for each subordinate. And when the bereaved, putting on a show of generosity, added a few reals to the regular rate, the sorrowful women were obliged to provide something out of the ordinary: they would accompany their weeping with swoons, epileptic convulsions, and bouts of hair-tearing. Together with the so-called torch-bearing poor, who attended with a taper in hand, they waited at the church door for the corpse to enter and emerge, so that they might give free rein to their counterfeit grief.

Say what you will against them, I maintain that they earned their money honestly. Some were so accomplished that you would have thought they carried a warehouse of tears inside them; and very well feigned those tears were, thanks to the expedient of rubbing their eyes with fingers smeared in garlic and onion juice. Often they had known the deceased no better than they knew Musa the Moor, yet they lied with delightful abandon, extolling the dead man’s virtues amid groans and lamentations.

“Oh, oh! So generous and charitable!” And the man in the coffin had been nothing less than a usurer. “Oh, oh! So brave and high-spirited!” The poor wretch had packed his bags for the next world after being frightened to death by goblins and restless souls.

“Oh, oh! So honest, and such a good Christian!” And the deceased, for his knavery and the calluses on his conscience, had deserved to die in an exalted position—that is to say, on the gallows.

Such was the tenor of their jeremiads. Nor did the weepers’ duties end there. The hardest part was still to come: the ceremony of receiving condolences at the dead man’s house for thirty nights. The drawing room and inner sitting room were draped in black and lit by a lantern or glass-shaded lamp covered with tulle that scarcely allowed a glimmer to show through; or else an oil wick was lit, which gave off something like the promise of light, but really served only to make the gloom more terrifying. From seven in the evening, the deceased’s friends would enter the drawing room in silence and take their seats without uttering a word. A mourning reception was, in plain language, a solemn assembly of mutes.

The inner sitting room was headquarters for the petticoats and the fleas. The women friends followed the men’s example in never moving their lips, which, all things considered, must have been a harsh penance for the daughters of Eve. Only the weepers were permitted to blow their noses noisily and let out an occasional “Oh, Jesus!” or a cavernous sigh that sounded like a complaint from the other world.

Ridiculous scenes occurred at these gatherings. Some mischief-maker, for instance, would turn half a dozen little mice loose in the sitting room, and then what screaming, scurrying, shrieking, and stamping there would be!

Fortunately, the reception ended when the clock struck eight, and that was when the women found themselves in a quandary. None wished to be the first to rise. This act was known as “breaking the billy goat.”

At last one of them would resolve to make this display of courage and, approaching the not invariably inconsolable widow, would say: “What can we do? God’s will be done. Resign yourself, my dear, for he is among the saints, resting from this ungrateful world. Do not give way to sorrow, for that is an offense to the Almighty.”

And they would all take their leave with the same litany. When the family returned home from paying their condolences, naturally they laid the widow and her guests on the dissecting table, and the young ladies, wielding the scissors God had given them, cut some exquisite coats for other people’s backs. As for the grandmother or some aunt whose head cold had prevented her from paying her respects to the widow, she would ask:

“And who broke the billy goat?” “Doña Estatira, the notary’s wife.” “It would have to be her, the shameless creature! Well, of course—a woman with the nerve to call herself Estatira!”

Try as I may, I cannot fathom the reason for this backbiting. Good heavens! I suppose a visit cannot last forever, and someone must set the example of making for the door, and there is no offense to God or one’s neighbor in being called Estatira.

Each night the weeper received a pillar-stamped peseta and a cake of chocolate. And let us not forget that this easy money lasted a full month. Only when children died did the weepers have no duties to perform. Naturally! Little angels off to heaven!

But among all the mourners there was one who stood in a class of her own, the supreme example of the breed, who deigned to attend only the funerals of viceroys, bishops, or very exalted personages. She was distinguished by the title of the Good Friday Weeper. The common people called her by another name, which, to spare our lady readers a blush, we shall leave at the bottom of the inkwell.

Thus people would say: “Don So-and-so’s funeral was the very best of the best. Why, my dear, even the Good Friday Weeper was at the church door!”

To my mind there is only one greater profanation than this: the annual outing or pilgrimage to the cemetery undertaken in the great cities in November. It is the vanity of the living, not the sorrow of the bereaved, that adorns the graves that day with flowers, ribbons, and symbolic wreaths. “What would people say of us?” ask the affectionate relations. “We must let everyone see how lavishly we spend.” And I found vanity even in death, says the wisest of books.

On that pilgrimage, the gravestones become objects of ridicule and slander. “Well, now!” says some young whippersnapper to another jackanapes of his own stamp as they inspect the headstones. “Look who’s here… Little Carmencita… Don’t you remember, old fellow? My cousin the banker’s mistress, the one who cost him an arm and a leg… A very charitable girl… and pretty, too, though she painted her eyebrows and pursed her lips to hide a chipped tooth.” “What a lovely wreath they’ve put on Don Melquíades! His wife gave him a finer pair of horns while he was alive.” “Don Junípero has a fine mausoleum! It could be finer still, considering how much he stole when he was minister of finance. What a scoundrel!” “Look at the epitaph they’ve given Don Milón, who was nothing but a donkey with golden shoes and a silver packsaddle. To call that prize blockhead a fountain of learning and wisdom!” “Doña Remedios was a sly old vixen! I knew her very, very well. Why, I almost had a run-in with that henpecked husband of hers!” “I didn’t know the Marquis of Algarrobo had died already. He was a ripe old age when they put him in the ground! Why, he was a contemporary of Pizarro’s spurs!” “Good grief! Here’s a selfless patriot, one of those who give away the wing so they can eat the breast, and know how to profit from every public calamity.”

And that is sample enough of irreverent backbiting. This popular verse fits such slanderers to perfection: My shoe is worn and broken; with what shall I repair it? With the sharp tongues of gossips who spread what is not true.

True sorrow shuns the crowd. To go for an outing to the cemetery on All Souls’ Day to see and be seen, on the principle of “Where are you going, Vicente? Wherever everyone else goes,” as one goes to the bullring, for the novelty and to kill time, is to commit the most repugnant and stupid of sacrileges.

I shall leave the dead in peace and return to the weepers. The Mercedarian fathers, competing with what the Augustinians had done the day before, would carry a platform bearing Christ’s sepulcher in procession on Good Friday. Behind it, surrounded by a throng of devout women, came a disheveled woman, howling and heaping curses on Judas, Caiaphas, Pilate, and all the tormentors. The amusing thing is that, without scandalizing a living soul, she hurled abuse at the Jews so extreme as to call them sons of… the bad word.

At eleven that night, the famous Minerva procession also set out from the Chapel of the True Cross. As everyone knows, it was paid for by the noble descendants of Pizarro’s companions. Pizarro had founded that aristocratic brotherhood and persuaded the Pope to send the church a fragment of the true lignum crucis, a relic the Dominicans still preserve.

But in this procession all was solemnity, as well as splendor and magnificence. The aristocracy never admitted the weepers, leaving that embellishment to the Mercedarians’ popular procession.

Archbishop Don Bartolomé María de las Heras had never relished such buffoonery; and in the first year he attended the procession, which was 1807, he had the platform halted in the middle of the street and ordered the removal of that scandalous woman who, with no respect for the holiness of the day, dared utter filthy obscenities.

Would you believe that the crowd surged forward to prevent it? Well, that is exactly what happened. As if they could allow the procession to be spoiled by removing the weeper!

The astute archbishop smiled and, bowing to the will of the people, ordered the procession to continue on its way; but the following year he firmly forbade the Mercedarians to permit any such profanation.

As for the funeral mourners, they continued to feather their nests for a few years more. As this little sketch shows, if there was a profitable trade in Lima, it was the weepers’. But then came the independent nation with all its attendant impieties, and ever since it has been a dismal thing to die; for when you move to that other neighborhood, you go in the certainty that you will not be properly wept over.

We have replaced the weepers with something worse, if that is possible… with newspaper obituaries.