Not Even the Dead by Juan Goméz Barcena

Author:Juan Goméz Barcena
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Letter

Before they depart, the brothers tell Juan that he will find the city two leagues from where they stand. The word “city” makes him smile. He thinks the brothers must be exaggerating, the way men from the country sometimes do, believing the small hill overlooking their village to be a mountain and the chapel that lacks an altarpiece and parish priest to be a cathedral. That’s precisely what he expects: a chapel awaiting consecration; a village of recently built straw-and-adobe huts, precariously sown right in the middle of Indian territory like a seed that might well bear fruit or just as easily disappear, swallowed up by the frontier dust. Maybe a Franciscan mission. Maybe the first boring of a humble mine, more fertile still in disappointments than silver. But he travels the two leagues and at the end of them he finds the impossible: a real city, which appears to have been founded decades or centuries ago there on the plain. He sees a few straw-and-adobe huts, yes, but also palaces of dressed stone and iron balconies, convents with limewashed walls, a garden where nature appears either domesticated or at least restrained. Emerging from between the rooftops, the two spires of a cathedral, a Christian cathedral, here, in the heart of unconquered lands, here, surrounded by savages and cacti and paramos that not even Pedro de Alvarado’s terrible soldiers had been able to subdue.

It is impossible, he thinks.

It is impossible, he says out loud to no one.

And yet. And yet, he says or thinks, maybe all of this is simply another one of the Padre’s signs. Another mark of his teachings. Who but Juan was capable of bringing Christ’s message to this land of oblivion? What force of will but his could gather the strength of hands that would suffice to erect this immense church, large enough to house any man’s most disproportionate ambitions? And those hands, Juan thinks as he looks around him, are no longer white or Black or Indian, or they are all at once: one need only observe the passersby who stroll up and down the street, men and women who might be Indians and yet at the same time cannot be, not by any means: skin tones he has never seen before, tested alloys of all races imaginable; he sees an Indian with light hair and a Black woman who mightn’t be entirely Black hanging out laundry and a white or almost white man with an also-white wig riding inside a carriage, and chasing the carriage are several children with skin the color of a copper vellón, children who could be the sons and daughters of all or none of those people, as if, willy-nilly, God had mixed up the litters of all His creatures and sent them back to Earth.

He wonders whether this is the world the Padre dreamed of; the equality between the races he preached. A world in which, ultimately, Spanish elements had been imposed in some fashion over the foundations of the indigenous, like an echo that resists fading entirely.

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