Prevod

Those were undoubtedly times of religious fanaticism when don Andrés Hurtado de Mendoza, Marquis of Cañete and the king’s master of the hunt, governed these kingdoms of Peru on behalf of His Majesty Philip II. And I say this not because of the abundance of religious foundations, nor the splendor of the festivals, nor because the rich left their fortunes to convents, thereby impoverishing their rightful heirs, nor because, as the conquistadors believed, every crime and abomination weighing on the conscience could be washed away by leaving a handsome bequest for Masses at the hour of death, but because the Church had taken to meddling in anything and everything, and for the merest trifle would clap a major excommunication on a fellow and drive him out of his wits.

Although churches draped in mourning and candles being extinguished were a common sight, our forebears grew ever more awestruck by the dreadful pomp of excommunications. In some of my traditional tales I have had occasion to speak at greater length of the many such sentences hurled against sacrilegious thieves and against magistrates and officers of justice who, in seizing a criminal, dared violate the sanctity of church asylum. Yet all those are mere tomfoolery and heavenly chatter compared with one pronounced in 1561 by Lima’s first archbishop, Friar Jerónimo de Loayza. To be sure, His Most Illustrious Lordship was never sparing with interdicts, censures, and other terrifying measures, as witness the fact that before the Inquisition came to settle in these parts, Señor Loayza held three autos-da-fé. Further proof of my assertion is that he threatened to fling a brickbat from Rome—as the Spanish people called excommunications—at the highest of the high, no less a personage than a viceroy of Peru. Here is the tale:

It is said that when the viceroy don Fernando de Toledo came from Spain, he brought as chaplain to his household and person a somewhat self-absorbed, disputatious, and ill-tempered cleric, whom the archbishop thought fit to imprison, try, and sentence to return to the mother country. The viceroy raised an outcry and declared in a fit of rage that if his chaplain was to be banished, he would not make the voyage alone, but in the company of the archbishop himself. The latter heard of this—for there was bound to be some busybody to carry the gossip—and His Excellency is said to have backed down as soon as word reached him that the archbishop had convened a council of theologians and, as a result, was wearing a frown while lengths of black baize were being secretly stitched together. Abandoned by his patron the viceroy, the little cleric was shipped off to Spain under official custody.

But the excommunication that has put the quill into my hand today was an excommunication with a capital E, and thus deserves a chapter to itself. II The decade from 1550 to 1560 might have lent its name to an entire century in Peru, which we could unblushingly call the century of chickens, bread, wine, oil, and rats. Let us explain.

Tradition has it that the Indians christened chickens hualpa, shortening the name of their last Inca, Atahualpa. Father Blas Valera, a native of Cuzco, says that when the cocks crowed, the Indians believed they were mourning the Inca’s death, and so called the cock hualpa. The same chronicler relates that for many years Spanish hens could not be induced to hatch their eggs in Cuzco, though they did so in the temperate valleys. As for turkeys, they were brought from Mexico.

Garcilaso, Zárate, Gómara, and many historians and chroniclers say that it was about this time that doña María de Escobar, wife of the conquistador Diego de Chávez, brought half an almud of wheat from Spain and distributed it among several settlers, twenty or thirty grains apiece. From the first harvests they sent a few fanegas to Chile and other parts of the Americas.

The arrival of wheat almost coincided with the introduction of rats, or mice, aboard a ship that came to Callao by way of the Strait of Magellan. The Indians called this plague of destructive immigrants hucuchas, meaning “those that came out of the sea.” Fortunately, the Spaniard Montenegro had brought cats in 1537, and it is said that don Diego de Almagro bought one from him for six hundred pesos. Unable to pronounce the Castilians’ mizmiz properly, the natives called them michitus.

And here, by way of illustration, let us note that in the first twenty years of the conquest the minimum price of a horse was four thousand pesos; a cow cost three hundred, a donkey five hundred, a pig two hundred, a goat or sheep one hundred, while a dog might fetch any outlandish sum. On the eve of the battle of Chuquinga, a wealthy captain offered a soldier ten thousand pesos for his horse, a proposal its owner indignantly rejected, saying: “Though I haven’t a single maravedí, I value my companion above all the treasures of Potosí.”

Wine being so scarce that in 1555 an arroba sold for five hundred pesos, Francisco Carabantes brought from the Canary Islands the first cuttings of black grapes to be planted in Peru. In the district of Tacaraca, in Ica, wrote Córdova y Urrutia in 1840, there is to this day a vineyard of black grapes said to be one of those planted by Carabantes, and it still yields an excellent harvest. Oh, human ingratitude! Drunkards forever bless Father Noah, who planted the vines, yet have not a word of thanks for Carabantes, the Noah of our homeland.

Once bread and wine had been obtained, oil was needed. Don Antonio de Ribera probably thought as much, and when he embarked at Seville in 1559, he took care to have a hundred olive cuttings put aboard.

Don Antonio de Ribera was a person of considerable standing in Lima; indeed, he had a coat of arms bearing two wolves and two wolf cubs on a field of gold. He had married the widow of Francisco Martín de Alcántara, the Marquis Pizarro’s brother on his mother’s side, who died beside him in his defense, and she brought Ribera a handsome dowry. He played a prominent part in the conquistadors’ civil wars, and after Girón’s rebellion he went to Spain in 1557, having been appointed Peru’s representative.

Ribera owned the extensive orchard we know in Lima as the Huerta Perdida. He possessed a fortune of three hundred thousand duros, acquired by having his mitayo laborers sell figs, melons, oranges, cucumbers, peaches, and other produce hitherto unknown in Peru. The first pomegranate grown in Lima was carried in procession on the platform used for the Most Holy Sacrament, and is said to have been of phenomenal size.

Unfortunately for Ribera, the voyage, fraught with dangers and mishaps, lasted nine months, and despite all his precautions he discovered on landing that only three of the cuttings could be used; the others were fit for nothing but feeding a bonfire.

He set about cultivating them with great zeal, tending them more carefully than his bags of silver—and his reputation for miserliness was monumental. So that they should never escape his watchful eye for a moment, he planted the three cuttings in a little garden enclosed by stout walls and guarded by two colossal black men and a pack of fierce dogs.

But put your trust in walls like those of Peking, giants like Polyphemus, and hounds like Cerberus, and you will be left looking a fine fool. Those blessed cuttings had more admirers than a pretty girl, and everyone knows that for men enamored of another’s property, whether a daughter of Eve or anything else worth having, there is no obstacle they will not trample down.

One morning don Antonio rose at dawn. He had not been able to close his eyes all the blessed night. He had a sinking feeling, a premonition of some great calamity.

After crossing himself, he made his way to the little garden in slippers and wrapped in his cloak; and his heart gave such a bound that it almost flew out of his mouth along with the round oath he uttered.

“Confound it! I’ve been robbed!” And he fell to the ground in a fit. Indeed, one of the three cuttings had disappeared. That day Ribera beat half the pack of dogs lame, and the whip was anything but idle among the poor slaves, for His Worship’s fury had risen to the very belfry.

Weary of punishments and inquiries, and seeing that his efforts bore no fruit, he went to the archbishop, who was a great friend of his, and told him of his terrible misfortune, beside which the trials of Job were mere song and dance.

But what happened is no fable, my readers; it is perfectly authentic, as the first chronicler you care to leaf through will tell you. That day the bells clamored as never before; and at last, after other imposing ritual ceremonies, His Most Illustrious Lordship the archbishop pronounced a major excommunication against the thief who had stolen the cutting.

But not even that did the trick. The thief must have been some unbeliever or freethinker, one of those who swarm about in this century of gas and steam, the reader will suppose. Well, the reader is very much mistaken.

In those days an excommunication weighed many tons upon the conscience. III Three years passed, and the cutting failed to appear. In truth, Ribera had not the slightest need of it, for he had the good fortune to see the two olive trees the thief had left him multiply, and already had cuttings to sell and give away. I presume that the famous olive groves of Camaná, a land renowned for its olives and for other things I prudently leave unmentioned, since I have no wish to rub the people of Camaná the wrong way, sprang from a shoot of the Huerta Perdida.

One day a gentleman bearing letters of recommendation presented himself to the archbishop. He had just arrived on a ship from Valparaíso that had dropped anchor at Callao, and under the seal of confession he revealed that he was the thief of the celebrated cutting, which he had carried with great secrecy to his estate in Chile, and that, notwithstanding the excommunication, the cutting had taken to its new climate and grown into a splendid olive grove.

Since the matter came to light under the seal of confession, I do not consider myself authorized to put into print the sinner’s name, he being the founder of a highly respectable and wealthy family in the neighboring republic.

All I can tell you, reader, is that the gnawing worm of excommunication kept our man in constant anguish. The archbishop agreed to lift it, but imposed as penance that he restore the cutting with the same secrecy with which he had taken it away.

How did the excommunicated man contrive it? All I can say is that one morning, when don Antonio visited his little garden, he found the traveler there, and at its foot a bag of a thousand duros with an unsigned note asking him, in Christian charity, for forgiveness—which he granted all the more willingly since such gleaming coins had fallen into his lap from the clouds.

The hospital of Santa Ana, whose construction Archbishop Loayza was then undertaking, also received a gift of two thousand pesos, without anyone save His Most Illustrious Lordship knowing the benefactor’s name.

What is certain is that the man who profited handsomely from the affair was don Antonio de Ribera. In Seville the cutting had cost him half a peseta. IV Upon the death of the commander don Antonio de Ribera, a knight of the Order of Santiago, his widow, doña Inés Muñoz, founded the convent of La Concepción in 1573, taking the veil there herself and leaving it her immense fortune.

The portrait of doña Inés Muñoz de Ribera is still to be found in the chancel of the church, and on her tomb one reads: This living heaven, within a narrow sphere, is the resting place of a sun that here lies sleeping, the sun of that great and generous mother, doña Inés de Muñoz y de Ribera. She held the encomienda of Ana-Cuenca, and was the wife of don Antonio de Ribera, who with a graceful hand unfurled the royal standard as the Royal Standard-Bearer.