Thomas A. Janvier

“ At any rate, his wits did work so well that even as she spoke he saw his way out of his difficulty; and in an instant—all a-thrill with joyful eagerness to do Our Lady's bidding, and inspired by the splendor of his vision of her—he set himself to painting the portrait of her, just as his own eyes had seen her in her glory, on the oaken door of his cell.
All the night long, Señor—working by the heaven-light that was brighter than any sunlight, and having in his happy nose the heaven fragrance that uplifted his soul with the sweetness of it—he painted as one who painted in a heaven-sent dream. ”

“ LEGEND OF THE CALLE DE LA MACHINCUEPA
Naturally, Señor, this matter which gave its name to the Calle de la Machincuepa created a scandal that set all the tongues in the City to buzzing about it: every one, of course, blaming the young lady—even though she did it to win such vast riches—for committing so publicly so great an impropriety; but some holding that a greater blame attached to the Marqués, her uncle, for punishing her—no matter how much she deserved punishment—by making her inheritance depend upon so strange and so outrageous a condition ”

“ And so, Señor—all the community standing round about, and the candle of Nuestro Amo being lighted—the Mother Superior said in a grave voice slowly: "Daughter, as in life thou gavest us always an example of humility and obedience, now I order and command thee, by thy vow of obedience, to retire decorously within thy coffin: that so we may bury thee, and that thou mayest rest in peace!"
And then, Señor, before the eyes of all of them, Sor Teresa slowly began to shrink shorter—to the very letter of the Mother Superior's order and command! ”

“ In that same corner it still was, Señor, when the Conde de Revillagigedo—only a little more than a century ago—became Viceroy; and as soon as that most energetic gentleman saw it he wanted to know in a hurry—being indisposed to let anything or anybody rust in idleness—why a bell that needed only a tongue in it to make it serviceable was not usefully employed. For some time no one could tell him anything more about the bell than that there was a curse upon it; and that answer did not satisfy him, because curses did not count for much in his very practical mind. ”

“ All of them—and most obviously the most incredible of them—have the quality that gives to folk-stories in general their serious value: they reflect accurately the tone of thought, and exhibit more or less clearly the customs and the conditions, of the time to which they belong. Among the older people of the City of Mexico, alike the lettered and the unlettered, they still are cherished with a warm affection and are told with a lively relish—to which is added, among the common people, a lively faith. The too-sophisticated younger generation, unhappily, is neglectful and even scornful of them. ”

“ For a moment Don Tristan paused beside the Archbishop—whose mule had stopped short, all in a tremble—and clasped his hand with a hand that was of an icy coldness; then he passed onward—saying in a dismal voice, rusty and cavernous, that for his soul's saving he was fulfilling the vow that he had made to her Ladyship: because the knowledge had come to him that if this vow were not accomplished he certainly would spend the whole of Eternity blistering in hell! Having thus explained matters, not a word more did Don Tristan have to say for himself ”

“ Juan Manuel would say to him: "Señor, you are fortunate above all men, because you know precisely the hour at which you die!" Then he would thrust with his dagger—and then, leaving the dead gentleman lying in the street, he would come back again into his own home. And this bad vice of Don Juan Manuel's of killing people went on, Señor, for a great many years. ”

“ What is most wonderful about this Wailing Woman, Señor, is that she is seen in the same moment by different people in places widely apart: one seeing her hurrying across the atrium of the Cathedral; another beside the Arcos de San Cosme; and yet another near the Salto del Agua, over by the prison of Belen. More than that, in one single night she will be seen in Monterey and in Oaxaca and in Acapulco—the whole width and length of the land apart—and whoever speaks with her in those far cities, as here in Mexico, immediately dies in fright. Also, she is seen at times in the country. ”

“ Then it was, Señor, that the Holy Office most wisely ordered that that devil-possessed and doubly accursed armor should be melted, and refounded into a cross: knowing that the sanctity of that blessed emblem would quiet the curses and would hold the devils still and fast. ”

“ Don Juan thus having done what Doña Sara had set him to do, and what every one of all the architects in the City had declared could not be done even by a miracle, it was evident to the whole world that at the very roots of him was more blazing energy than would suffice for the equipment of a half hundred of ordinary men. Wherefore Doña Sara was well satisfied—her urgence having stirred him to do that great useful work with such masterful vigor—that her urgence equally would arouse him from all of his apathies: and so would recast him into the sort of husband that she desired to have. ”

“ But this spectre of which I now am telling you—that appeared on the Plaza Mayor at noonday, and was seen by everybody—was altogether out of the ordinary: being not in the least a dead person, but a person who wore his own flesh and bones in the usual manner and was alive in them; yet who certainly was walking and talking here on the Plaza Mayor of this City of Mexico in the very self-same moment that he also was walking and talking in a most remote and wholly different part of the world. ”

“ At that time there lived in the street that ever since that time has been called the Street of the Machincuepa a very rich and a very noble Spanish gentleman whose name was Don Mendo Quiroga y Saurez, and whose title was Marqués del Valle Salado. In his beginning he was neither rich nor noble, and not even of good blood: having been begotten by an unknown father and born of an unknown mother; and having in his young manhood gone afloat out of Spain as a common sailor to seek his fortune on the sea. ”

“ LEGEND OF DON JUAN MANUEL [1]
This Don Juan Manuel, Señor, was a rich and worthy gentleman who had the bad vice of killing people. Every night at eleven o'clock, when the Palace clock was striking, he went out from his magnificent house—as you know, Señor, it still is standing in the street that has been named after him—all muffled in his cloak, and under it his dagger in his hand.
Then he would meet one, in the dark street, and would ask him politely: "What is the hour of the night?" And that person, having heard the striking of the clock, would answer: "It is eleven hours of the night." ”

“ Gil Pérez, Señor, took that disposition of him in the same easy-going way that he had taken all the other dispositions of him: save that he grumbled a little—as was to be expected of an old soldier—over having to leave his comfortably idle life in his snug quarters and to go again to his fightings and his guard-mounts and his parades. And so back he went to the Filipinas: only his return journey was made in a slow and natural manner aboard the galleon—not, as his outward journey had been made, all in a moment on devils' wings. ”

“ It is thou who needest much to make thee perfect, that thou mayest be cleansed of thy sins! As for this ship, it is in all other ways so wholly perfect that it needs only to sail." Then said the Mulata: "That it shall do—and very far!" and there was on her face as she spoke to him a most wicked smile. With astonishment he looked at her, and at the ship. "How can that be possible!" he asked. "In this manner!" she answered—and, as she spoke, she leaped lightly from the floor of the prison to the deck of the ship, up there on the wall, and stood with her hand upon the tiller at the ship's stern. ”

“ Therefore the Viceroy rid himself of an affair that was much the same to him as a basket of nettles by turning Gil Pérez over to the Holy Office—and off he was carried to Santo Domingo and clapped into one of the strongest cells.
Most men, of course, on finding themselves that way in the clutches of the Inquisition, would have had all the insides of them filled with terror; but Gil Pérez, Señor—being, as I have mentioned, an old campaigner—took it all as it came along to him and was not one bit disturbed. ”

“ As old age began to creep upon this good gentleman, Señor, and with it the infirmities that came of his loose way of living, he found himself in the world lonely: because, you see—never having perceived any necessity for marrying—he had no wife to care for him, nor children whose duty it was to minister to his needs. Therefore—his brother in Spain about that time dying, and leaving a daughter behind him—he brought from Spain his dead brother's daughter, whom he put at the head of his magnificent household, and equally confided himself in his infirmity to her care. ”

“ Now Doña Beatrice, Señor, was a young lady of a most delicate nature, and her notions about love were precisely the same as those which are entertained by the lady angels. Therefore Don Martín's continual fightings very much worried her: raising in her heart the dread that so violent a person must be of a coarse and carnal nature ”

“ It is well known, Señor, that this Mulata of Córdoba, being a very beautiful woman, was in close touch with the devil. She dwelt in Córdoba—the town not far from Vera Cruz, where coffee and very good mangos are grown—and she was born so long ago that the very oldest man now living was not then alive. ”

“ And these two posted themselves every day in the street in which was Doña María's home—one at the corner of the Calle del Reloj, the other at the corner of the Calle de Santa Catarina—that they might look at her when she came forth from her house; and that she might see them waiting to get sight of her, and so know that they loved her. It was the same custom then, Señor, as it is to-day. In that way all of our polite young men make love. ”

“ Therefore it was known that the raven-devil and Don Rodrigo had beaten the holy image and had drawn blood from it; and that the great devil, the master of both of them, in penalty for their dreadful act of sacrilege, had snatched them suddenly home to him to burn forever in hell. That was the very proper end of them. Never were they seen again either on sea or land.
Naturally, Señor, respectable people declined to live in a house where there had been such shocking doings. Even the people living in the adjoining houses, feeling the disgrace that was on the neighborhood, moved away from them. ”

“ If that is true, Señor, it looks as though all those devils in the bell—which came to it from the Moor and from the devil-forged armor and from Don Gil de Marcadante—still had some strength for wickedness left to them even in their old age. ”

“ In the blaze of burning dwellings the armor becomes white-hot, but he is unharmed. A wise hermit counsels exorcism. With this spiritual weapon the devil-leader is overcome and captured; and within the armor they find—nothing at all! In true folk-story fashion the narrative rambles on with details of the escape and recapture of the devil-armor "a hundred times." In the end, following again the wise hermit's counsel, the armor is cast into a furnace; and then, being melted, is refounded—to the accompaniment of diabolical shrieks and groans of agony—into a cross. ”

“ But he pressed on—you see, Señor, it was the only way to save his soul from blistering in hell through all eternity—until he was come to the Plazuela de Santo Domingo; and there, in front of the chapel of the Espiración, beneath the gallows, he knelt down upon his knees and told his rosary through. ”

“ This story, Señor—it is about the accursed bell that once was the clock-bell of the Palace—has so many beginnings that the only way really to get at the bones of it would be for a number of people, all talking at once, to tell the different first parts of it at the same time. ”

“ The Inquisitor, Señor, who had seen this devil's miracle, immediately lost all his senses and became a madman and was put into a mad-house: where, till death gave peace to him, he raved always of a beautiful woman in a great ship that sailed through stone walls and across the solid land. ”

“ Señor, the devils were angered beyond all endurance by being scalded with the holy water (that being the effect that holy water has upon devils) and so only rang the bell the more furiously in their agony of pain. Then the Señor Alcalde and the Señor Cura perceived that they could not quiet the devils, and decided to give up trying to. Therefore they came down from the belfry together—and they, and everybody with them, went away through the night's blackness crossing themselves, and were glad to be safe again in their homes. ”

“ LEGEND OF THE CALLE DE LA QUEMADA
Not knowing what they are talking about, Señor, many people will tell you that the Street of the Burned Woman got its name because—in the times when the Holy Office was helping the goodness of good people by making things very bad for the bad ones—a woman heretic most properly and satisfactorily was burned there. Such is not in the least the case. ”

“ Now that is a call, Señor, that a priest may not refuse; but because his not joining them would inconvenience his friends, who could not play at their game of malilla without him, he asked the woman why she did not go to the parish priest of the parish in which the dying man was. And the woman answered him that only to him would the dying man confess; and she begged him again for God's mercy to hurry with her, or the confession [Pg 86] would not be made in time—and then the sin of his refusal would be heavy on his own soul when he himself came to die. ”

“ Therefore Doña Sara immediately gave to Don Juan her hand in marriage: and as the Aduana still is standing—and precisely where, faster than a miracle, Don Juan built it—the Señor has only to look at it, and to read the inscription showing Doña Sara's initials, to know both the truth of this curious story and that Doña Sara's choice of a husband was well made. ”

“ Being transplanted, folk-myths are liable to modification by a new environment. The Fiery Cow of the City of Mexico, for instance, not improbably is a recasting of the Basque vaca de lumbre; or, possibly, of the goblin horse, El Belludo, of Grenada—who comes forth at midnight from the Siete Suelos tower of the Alhambra and scours the streets pursued by a pack of hell-hounds. But in her migrations, while given varying settings, La Llorona has remained unchanged. Always and everywhere she is the same: a woman clad in white who by night in lonely places goes wailing for her lost children ”