An Informal Account, by Amateur Historian, of the Bibliophiles of New Spain
OTIS, MARTHA
An Informal Account, by Amateur Historian, of the Bibliophiles of New Spain MARTHA OTIS Is it true that the dying mothers of the Sephardim whispered on their death beds the secret they had borne...
...Oh, don't I laugh to think of the generations of Carvajal priests, nuns, and lay clergy who have "purified" our blood...
...Perhaps it is not surprising that such fast friends could become such bitter enemies, for it seems that Gaspar and Mateo, when they came together, could not stay out of trouble...
...She reminded Mateo of what Gaspar was so fond of repeating: "People can change their thoughts, their politics, and their loyalties, but books cannot...
...And so the pair adopted a progressively incendiary attitude, a spirit of deliberate, unrepentant rebellion, reading Gaspar's books and finding public places for the digestion of their contents...
...This man, the owner of a pulqueria that the men frequented, recalls the numerous occasions Mateo and Gaspar found for satirizing local poetasters, who competed in tournaments and declaimed their work at public events...
...Not long afterward, Filomena became lover to both men...
...I know the hapless pair too well, and yet Mateo Carbajal and Gaspar de Andrade are nigh 200 years dead, unmentioned by any historian, and will likely never be heard from again...
...An inquisitor of great learning recognized the babblings as Hebrew, and surmised that the jumbled words came from Rabbinical literature...
...Impossible...
...The contingency and puniness of Man bothered Gaspar...
...we discover that besides being an avid reader, Gaspar was an enthusiastic drinker, versifier, and fornicator, and that he soon drew Mateo into deep .ippreciation of these diversions...
...Whatever Mateo saw there, it led him farther and farther down the path of mysticism...
...Through the documentation of the Royal Audicncia...
...I confess to you, Invader of Private Diaries, Historian, Late Inquisitor, Free-Tluhking Carvajal, Christian, Jew, or Whoever You May Be, that the research which began innocently, even arrogantly, out of family pride, has become obsessive...
...Gaspar was held as a dangerous, devil-worshipping rebel and scapegoated for real and rumored slave rebellions that had occurred in the city and the provinces...
...Early Humanists...
...What do I want them to be...
...end, wearing the fiery sanbenito of an unrepentant heretic...
...There is always a danger of what a secret will do if you guard it, and another danger of what it will do if you tell it...
...The two worked alongside each other on the basilica in the center of the city...
...One man says that they argued most often about "the way God made the world and the way they would have made it...
...This poor man was later sentenced to uncompensated labor on a royal galley for his disloyalty...
...Mateo kept the scoldings and fines at bay by entertaining his employer with gossip from the pulquerias, and Gaspar recounted the tales and smart sayings and even some of the many homilies that he had committed to heart from his books...
...And also, "They were two bastards, as arrogant as they were damned...
...Nine years later, their reading habit brought ?? >n the wrath of the Holy Office and the Carvajal line lost another son to the Inquisition...
...I dare you to climb up here, and stand here with me, and be un-terrified...
...Two men whose lives I am convinced are connected to this branch of the Carvajales...
...The two friends learned soon after beginning work for him that their employer had a weakness for a good story, and was a most excellent audience...
...He insisted that Filomena had sent him to see Mateo...
...He is still a modest, humble youth...
...I began to fear that the devil himself had gained hold of his soul...
...This enabled Gaspar to read aloud to his master in his last days of illness and destitution...
...We cannot," said Mateo...
...Nine years after the Spaniard's death, in order to assay it for heretical content, censors seized the entire collection from Gaspar...
...It may seem extreme, Diligent Reader, that the only punishment Gaspar could conceive for the violation of his library was to denounce Mateo before the Inquisition...
...Not even don Carlos de Sigiienza could have kept so much in his memory, nor let it so prettily out his mouth," it was said...
...Mateo would not listen to her warnings, and eventually Gaspar caught him...
...No, Mateo will not call attention to himself for his Jewish blood, nor need trouble rain down on him for any secret he carries...
...Mateo hallucinated harder...
...Mateo did not or could not explain how he had come to know or remember a smattering of ill-spoken Hebrew, nor why he had recognized the Talmud when the wart-faced bookseller had placed it in his hands...
...Upon the Spaniard's death, Gaspar would have used his linguistic skills to his advantage had he been able to find a way to do so...
...Bastard son of a bastard son of Don Malandrino Carbajal el Mozo, he knows or does not know that the "Don" preceding that name refers to an assumed, petty nobility, that "el Mozo" is a diminutive of self-designated importance, and that both affectations are in fact ridiculous inventions designed to throw off the Inquisitors...
...the first round of testimonies led to more arrests, and these to still more, until the accusations spread through the city and the Inquisition applied itself, as it had not applied itself for 10 years, to rooting out conspirators against the Church and the viceroyalty...
...At any rate, it all came to an end, and a fiery one at that, once one man betrayed the other and broke the boiid of friendship...
...Should Gaspar have sold his inherited library, which contained quite a few forbidden works, he would have made quite enough to keep himself in nicer quarters, in better clothes, and free of financial concerns for a long time...
...Gaspar was tall, graceful, and very thin, while Mateo was of average height, well-muscled, and tended toward portliness...
...Does he carry the language of the scrolls...
...I can only hope to escape that worse curse, which is a fear of knowing myself...
...I don't know when, through what inquisitorial convolution of fear and revelation, the secret was buried...
...But the mason himself was under the spell of their charm until called forth to testify...
...Mateo, waiting for the decision of the judges, spent his time in his odd trances, and woke from these still speaking in tongues...
...They even got hold of cosmological works by Copernicus and Kepler, Newton and Galileo— all extremely suspect in the eyes of the Church, though to the great laughter and derision of their peers, Gaspar and Mateo openly and unreservedly endorsed heliocentrism and the laws of planetary motion...
...From this woman we also get a report of what Gaspar and Mateo looked like...
...Together, Mateo and Gaspar built up their infamy and their library...
...I think I admire Mateo and Gaspar most of all because they were good friends and promiscuous readers...
...What Mateo could not read, Gaspar translated...
...Spain fears a general uprising of the mixed-race majority more than she fears heresy...
...Filomena, because her testimony had been so complete and because she had repented so thoroughly of her actions, suffered a public whipping but was allowed to go free...
...Origin, race, and transgressions, their story tortures me for what it will not tell me...
...if not, we will meet again in these pages...
...He and Filomena were said to consult often with self-proclaimed shaman, indios and mestizos from the provinces who wandered into the city...
...T h e city has a stubbornly mongrel, heterodox population in constant threat, according to the chroniclers, of a "racial retrogression...
...The mason gave his testimony freely to the inquisitors...
...Readers tending toward mysticism will no doubt blame Mateo's ancestral memories...
...Immediately the Inquisitorial records were consulted, the death by fire of Leonardo Carbajal recalled, and the surname itself became conclusive, mcrirninating evidence...
...Even in his most drunken screeds or fights, he was always himself...
...Together they divined the near future and looked far into the past...
...Then there were also cowards who, having learnt it, never passed on the truth of their Jewish origin, just as surely as there were loosetongued fools, and New Christians who denounced false converts, and sent them, unrepentant, to the stake...
...he yearned more strongly for this book than any other, but had no money, nor anything to pawn but more books...
...These books were at the very center of Gaspar's world...
...He dug deep into the oldest volumes of the old Spaniard's library, looking for clues to something he would not confess...
...I doubt," the owner of one pulqueria confessed to the Inquisitors, "that any two men, from Potosi to Tenochtidan, spoke with such learning on so many subjects...
...This Jew might well slip into the big city and disappear among unobservant Catholics and other heathens, and if he obeys the king's law, and viceregal commands, he will survive...
...But to me, it is proof of Gaspar's love of these books, his determination to know what they contained, and proof also, as his testimony tells us, of the only love Gaspar ever admitted for another human being, a love reserved solely for the man who, as he says, "bought me off a boat in Veracruz, saving me from the mines of Zacatecas...
...I have found little about him except whai relates direcdy to Mateo's case, but this much is certain: when the two men discovered the unlikely coincidence that both could read, they became fast- Iriends...
...Filomena Jauregui tells one of the oddest episodes, one that demonstrates the lengths to which they would go to experiment with the notions that these books gave them: After reading Don Quixote, Mateo and Gaspar played for a week at chivalry...
...This is my question: does Mateo Carbajal know that he is related to that heretical Carvajal, and that he carries Jewish blood back to the seat of New Spain in the year 1640...
...Once, Filomena procured the illegal peyote and the two hallucinated together for two days...
...Many witnesses say that in spite of so much apparent mania, so much bawdiness, and so many antics, no one had ever seen Gaspar lose control of his temper...
...I do know that he can read Latin and Spanish at least, and that even at this age, his mind has somehow been primed for learning, and for unveiling mysteries of both scientific and spiritual character...
...He could denounce his friend for some pettiness—anything would do and as we have seen there was plenty of easy proof and willing testimony to condemn Mateo a hundred times over...
...But the incident with the wart-faced bookseller had Mateo distraught for weeks...
...The two arrived to work late," he declares, "and left early and took long breaks at midday, an unheard-of insolence," and it would have got them both dismissed had Gaspar and Mateo not been gifted with personal charm as extreme as it was "fiendish...
...These came from Spain, bound into the middle of other, uncensored volumes, or hidden in wine casks or barrels of dried fruit...
...With a little pulque warming their blood and their brains, the challenges, the fights, the bawdy singing and dancing and whoring soon began...
...I could wonder more than I do whether Mateo was visited by a miracle, but I hardly know if it would be a Christian or a Jewish one, or if there is a difference between the two...
...Even Gaspar, with all the languages he spoke, could not understand the things Mateo said, and Mateo feigned upon waking that he did not remember a thing...
...He opened the book—the back cover, not the front—put it in Mateo's hands, and turned a few pages for him, from left to right...
...No one has been burned at the stake in two years, and even that was a minor event relative to the auto-da-fe in which Leonardo Carvajal, brother of Melchor (alias Don Malandrino Carbajal el Mozo), and great-uncle to the youth Mateo, saw hi...
...The book with its broken spine went back into the dirty bag...
...From these inebriate heights, apparently, Gaspar held forth on a wild variety of subjects...
...The Inquisition records, so thorough and rich in local detail, tell us that, in the first days of his sojourn in Mexico City, Mateo was apprenticed to ;i stonemason together with another, older man: Gaspar de Andrade...
...I cannot say...
...I am cursed with the curiosity to know what doesn't concern me...
...Perhaps some jealousy had grown up out of their mutual affair with Filomena...
...His master had over the years amassed an impressive array of religious literature and other treatises...
...They pretended to mistake the lowborn for noblemen, the lurid for the lofty, the defiled for the fair, the repugnant for the beauteous, the malodorous for the fragrant, and the wretched for the fortunate...
...I should think that it is something like a carnival in this chaotic, urban sprawl...
...In any event the story has been a fine distraction from that other family matter that I have so recendy discovered in the archives...
...The fatal falling-out can be traced to several volumes of astrology and palmistry...
...And it was also said, "What a waste of knowledge...
...Upon the man's death, Gaspar won both his freedom and the large library which had once entertained and consoled his dying benefactor...
...The testimony of a woman named Filomena, also implicated in the Inquisition, corroborates that of Mateo...
...So pitiful were his pleadings that the guard outside his cell found a way, through Filomena, to smuggle something in...
...Thus it was that Gaspar consoled himself in his last hours with the slimmest volume from his library, a treatise on the correct moral and spiritual education of young women...
...Filomena Jauregui remembers Gaspar standing up on a table and declaring, at the top of his lungs, "Not one among you is my equal, for you are afraid of equality...
...For years I've researched this fernily, and finally, now, the documents have whispered like a dying mother INTO my ear: Though we live as Christians, the Carvajales came to this continent conversos...
...The official paranoia is another: armed rebellions in the provinces...
...That matter is still a secret, and I do not know when or to whom I shall tell it...
...Heroes of Liberality and Tolerance...
...Does he keep the Sabbath...
...They had no furniture," claims one witness (of admittedly dubious sincerity, being a book dealer himself who very probably sold them some illegal volumes), "only books, which they used as tables and chairs and sleeping mattresses...
...Here is where the records fail us, for they yield nothing more than the dramatic conclusion to these events...
...One man after another came before the Royal Audiencia...
...Gaspar, by all accounts, was the more original versifier, but Mateo set his own lesser poems to music which he "sang in a high, sweetlypleasing voice...
...Then Mateo, for reasons that cannot be read into any testimony, became more serious about astrology and began to design his own almanacs with the help of Filomena, more expert than he...
...He pawned not a single volume, however, which might to another historian show either exceptional self-restraint or lack of judgment...
...Filomena herself, who appears to have lived with the men immediately before their case came before the Inquisition, comments only that scorpions liked to nest among the books, and they all suffered from the stings...
...They of course had no armor, but rode on donkey about the square in front of the basilica, babbling about this and that, bantering with the crowds and laughing as if witless...
...They say I spend too much rime in the archives, that I have begun to invent things, and that I smell of dust and ancient paper...
...Their story begins thus: It is 1640, and Mateo Carbajal is leaving the valley of Cuahnahuac for Mexico City because it is time for him to enter a trade...
...He cried in his cell to see just one of his old master's books, for he felt he would go mad waiting to know if he would live or die...
...They had no way at all to profit from all that they kept in their heads...
...Call it good judgment or something else, but it abandoned him now...
...Perhaps there is some other complicating element to Gaspar's anger about which the documents cannot tell us...
...He was a self-made thinker, possessing a scientific turn of mind at a time when scientists relied upon the rigors of their profession in order to confirm the greatness, the glory, and the all-powerful nature of God—thus the contingency and puniness of Man...
...And if, Idle Reader, their bookishness appears more desperate than wise, if their appetite for learning appears to you manic rather than coherent or admirably openminded, I ask you what would have happened to you had you had no instructor...
...Gaspar favored architecture, sculpture, medicine, mathematics, and military science, while Mateo contributed books on the practical arts such as agriculture, navigation, mining, horsemanship, carpentry, and even cookery...
...Had someone told him about his grandfather's brother, Leonardo Carvajal, who had burned at the stake before him...
...They began to pool their resources, to buy, trade, and steal in order to add to the library...
...For this one, badly-preserved volume the bookseller asked the equivalent of what it had cost Mateo and Gaspar to buy all the books that they had purchased together since the day that they had met...
...Under Spanish law," Gaspar would tell them, "You are all mongrels...
...I write what I haven't found a way to tell myone...
...Gaspar and Mateo were known to draw blood in order to prove that it looked the same, tasted and smelled the same, and "reacted in the same way when you sliced the veins that directed its course, no matter whose veins you sliced...
...Mateo knows or does not know that the long name Don Malandrino Carbajal el Mozo is an alias for Melchor Carvajal, a J ew who escaped the Inquisition in 1610, and who lived long enough to beget several, disparate lines...
...I am happy to do so...
...One woman was later punished by the Holy Office for the lewd and lascivious acts she claimed to have performed for the two men...
...They acquired the work of the Spanish satirist Francisco de Quevedo...
...Apparendy they began in the most crass and dishonest manner, in order to lure young women of loose morals into their arms...
...Or is his true intention to make contact with Jewish brethren in the capital...
...He began to adhere to all things apocryphal and to see, as Filomena laments, "the world and everything in it from a backward angle...
...Perhaps he does not run away from the secret, exacdy, but from the confusion it causes, from the duty it presses upon him...
...A bold nose-thumbing, if you will, for they would not fool a fool, all of which forces one to wonder at the pride which persuaded the man to keep "Carbajal...
...Even tradesmen, maidservants, and then.horror of hor rors.the young maidens themselves, step lively tc the irresistible beat and learn to mouth the mutinous syllables...
...Architecture and engineering, which might have suited Gaspar well, were professions forbidden to free blacks...
...The bookseller left without another word and Gaspar and Mateo remained, drinking and conversing...
...in which 109 people received sentences ranging from heavy fines to banishment from the realm...
...Before he died, this collection also contained secular nonfiction, including history, philosophy, and music...
...His drunken expositions, litanies, and screeds developed a dangerously anthropocentric bias, and subsequently moved into notions, according to one informant, "involving a rearrangement of stars and planets, and ways to outwit God's Holy Will...
...And I ask you, can you infect a man with knowledge, so that his brain is aflame and he wishes to know all there is to know, and then censor that brain, and limit what it can know...
...And that, Promiscuous Reader, is the end of this story of friendship and betrayal and a large library...
...So Gaspar had weighed his few choices and finally apprenticed himself, at the advanced age of 23, to the mild-mannered mason for whom Mateo now also worked...
...In the end, Gaspar went before the Holy Office and denounced Mateo for practicing astrology...
...Sometimes, on the sundown before the Sabbath, he would go into a deep trance, and speak in tongues," Filomena told Inquisitors...
...thus the judges came to the unanimous conclusion that Mateo Carbajal was a crypto-Jew whose heresies, moreover, were beyond his control...
...His claim to illiteracy ("No bozal can read or write, this is commonly known...
...What governs our spirit in 1640...
...I have seen the church records, and can say that among the mothers of this Carbajal brood were the kept women of Spanish and Creole libertines, slaves, servants, freed slave women and widows, women of every extant race known to New Spain...
...there was always a cool and collected part of Gaspar that told him just how far he could take things...
...I can't think who among my living relatives would believe me...
...Readers bought and sold these books on a thriving black market...
...Had he seen his family's past in horoscopes cast backward in time...
...An Informal Account, by Amateur Historian, of the Bibliophiles of New Spain MARTHA OTIS Is it true that the dying mothers of the Sephardim whispered on their death beds the secret they had borne their whole lives...
...It is because I am the only one who wants anything from them that they force me to speak...
...Outside witnesses, called in by the Holy Office when Mateo's case came before the Inquisition, claimed that the two argued frequently and with great belligerence with the other men in the taverns...
...This I have gathered from the testimony of Gaspar de Andrade himself: Gaspar's former master, a peninsular whose life remains a mystery, had bought Gaspar as a small boy and trained him as a house servant Eventually he taught Gaspar math, theology, and languages...
...Licentious African songs and dances are favorite entertainment among the vast populace of laborers and vagrants...
...Only one man accuses Mateo of racketeering...
...Now I have told it here, at least, and time shall prove whether I have told it to my own satisfaction...
...the confessions it forced out of Mateo and Ciaspar and the men and women who knew them...
...Mateo, however, could not let the matter drop...
...It was during this folly that Filomena met them...
...Because she confessed all, even to having held a mirror up to her own private parts, her inquisitors were satisfied, and, after assigning her a severe lashing, let her go...
...Perhaps he goes forth trying to forget something his mother whispered into his ear...
...In 1649, Gaspar de Andrade and Mateo Carbajal met their deaths by fire, alongside 11 others, at the end of a well-attended auto-da-f...
...Had he remembered something from his early childhood...
...Nowhere in New Spain but its capital could they have taken the road to iniquity quite so far, nowhere but in Spain herself might they have been pulled so violendy in line with Catholic doctrine, purged so absolutely of the impure beliefs and practices into which their weaknesses had led them...
...Gaspar had a very black complexion, but there is no comment anywhere on the color of Mateo's skin...
...Illuminati, charm vendors, and seers of omens ply their trades along the stinking canals and back streets of Mexico City, while the nuns amuse themselves with their black slaves, learning their medicinal cures, and even languages, just as Creole children learn certain African words from their nannies' childhood clapping games...
...The Inquisition inventory of the collection lists, as well, belles lettres in seven different languages, including novels, poetry, and drama, chivalric romances, four copies of Don Quixote, pastoral novels, and collections of fables, aphorisms, and proverbs...
...Does he go of free will and clean conscience...
...They made mild profits from Filomena's knowledge, for they soon began to practice both astrology and palmistry, charging for their services, in broad daylight, right in their own crowded living quarters...
...According to you, I should neither read nor write nor think, because I am the wrong color...
...Filomena discovered this and implored Mateo to stop, because this was the one thing that Gaspar would not abide...
...Not long afterward, a wart-faced bookseller, whom no one had ever seen before in that city, showed up at a pulqueria where Mateo and Gaspar were drinking...
...It would be safe to assume so...
...In this same massive spectacle, one man, a poetaster who had won the most recent tournament and who had argued frequendy with Gaspar and Mateo over the poor quality of his verse, was "prohibited, for perpetuity, from reciting his sonnets...
...Mateo, upon seeing the strange script in which the book was printed, drew back, Gaspar recounts, "as if the pages were molten metal...
...And had he been less prideful, because, as one of his mistresses declares, "the attention of his first master, who had loved him as a son, had spoiled him for more work as a servant...
...It was an unwritten, unspoken pact...
...For several years Mateo lived in the same apartment with Gaspar, in a very poor part of the city...
...Mateo accused them...
...Had he predicted his hopeless end while hallucinating on the peyote plant...
...That is no secret, though nobody knows it...
...Gaspar bragged to the Royal Audiencia that in all, his master's original collection had totaled slightly more than 2,000 volumes...
...There was a widespread, macabre fascination with these pagan arts, and for a while they were even incorporated into math courses at the University where adepts designed almanacs...
...Gaspar laughed and turned him down...
...What my obsession for them says about me I am afraid to ask...
...Informers to the Royal Audiencia report that Mateo and Gaspar spent most of their time and their little money in the pulquerias, drinking the thick, fermented cactus juice that makes men so happy...
...They came upon her, carrying some parcel for her mistress, and began to shower her with praises for her smooth, white complexion, which was exactly as dark as Gaspar's...
...Inquisitors are busier than ever trying petty infractions, perjury, blasphemy, and numerous graver crimes which seem to multiply exponentially as the city grows: solicitation in the confessional, sexual perversion, quackery, superstition...
...One of their mistresses said that they were able to make love and recite poetry at the same time, and could, if they chose to, hypnotize a woman by chanting algebraic formulas or random passages of Latin prose, and in her trance, the hypnotized could be persuaded to do anything under the sun...
...If Mateo knows of his Jewish blood, he has less to fear from the Inquisition than his grandfather before him...
...Or had he been a practicing J ew since before coming to the city and meeting Gaspar...
...There is no way to predict what even the tiniest flame of curiosity will ignite, or how Truth will be mutilated in the process of learning...
...Give me books instead," said the bookseller...
...Mateo would cry disdainfully...
...Curious things began to happen...
...Astrology was a pseudo-legitimate science, yet anyone caught casting horoscopes or reading palms was brought before the Holy Office on charges of false prophesy...
...In 1640 the Holy Office sees the king's colonial subjects straying from the faith more easily than they keep it, and has its hands full...
...By that time the collection had expanded to twice its original size...
...Testimonies concur that the friends ran up enormous debts in the pulquerias and ran raffles in order to pay off their debtors in small increments...
...With what was to Gaspar and Mateo unconscionable quiescence, their fellow men assumed their assigned castas as a matter of course...
...Mateo denied neither having Jewish blood, nor practicing the rites of that forbidden creed...
...and mixtures of these so complicated that at some point the various dilutions begin to give the church clerks and census-takers headaches, and one finds a series of little Carbajales with question marks in the race column of the decrepit registry, asterisk'd notes carefully detailing the shape of the nose, the height of the forehead, the different, nuanced shades of beige skin and the tendencies of the hair to curl or lie flat...
...What good is a law that declares men are dogs...
...Out of a bag he pulled an ancient book bound in tattered deerskin...
...They devoured Dante, Petrarch, Guicciardini, Guarini, Sannazaro, Ariosto, Tasso and Castiglione, and, amusing themselves while working at the basilica, often quoted The Book of Live and Witty, Clever and Sententious Sayings by Erasmus, a man despised by the Counter-Reformation...
...Still another witness accuses Gaspar and Mateo of "expounding on matters of justice such as were God's, and God's only, to decide," and a fifth witness marvels that they fought with each other and everybody else "good-naturedly over everything except women, whom they shared or did not share, it was the same...
...For over 1 0 0 years, in secret, we lit the oil lamps on Friday, kept the Sabbath on Saturday, and married others LIKE us who koshered their meat and hid their scrolls and observed our fasts...
...Curiously, rows with third parties often began over random, provocative comments regarding racial categories...
...Indian sorcerers roam the capital...
...another says that they argued, in order of importance, over "the qualities of good pulque, good cooking, good verse, and female beauty...
...He began surreptitiously to pawn some of the books that Gaspar no longer touched, so that the medicine and military science sections of the library began to shrink...
...In his rage, he did not see the obvious fact that he had denounced himself as well...
...When outside witnesses were called to testify, or volunteered their testimonies out of fear that they would be implicated without a chance to defend themselves, the censors soon discovered the life of debauchery and spiritual heresy that the two friends had led...
...While Gaspar swore to the Holy Office that he had inherited the collection but remained ignorant of its contents (he proclaimed illiteracy), Mateo, who was at that time his bitter rival, insisted that Gaspar had indeed read these volumes, page-by-page, more than thrice over...
...Very un-Catholic projects, to my mind, and I see already that Mateo Carbajal will stand out among the tradesmen of the city, that already he is doomed to call attention to himself...
...What is going on in the colony...
...Gaspar wanted to be a knight and Mateo agreed to be his squire, and they treated Filomena as Dulcinea, their lady fair...
...As if it were not enough to be thrown into confusion by discovering—shall I call it my true creed?—Mateo and Gaspar will not let me rest...
...There is never any telling how an education, especially that education embarked upon independendy, and alone, might misfire...
...I ask because I think that surely there is some apprenticeship to be had closer to his birthplace...
...Gaspar was a freed black man, bom in Africa, a real bozal...
...When very drunk," one witness said, "Mateo, the more vulgar of the two, would perform tricks for Gaspar like a trained dog...
...T h e Carbajal offspring were registered in the baptismal records of Tlayacapan, each child's race duly noted in a special column with its insulting epithet, beginning with the mulattos, and descending to the mdias, coyotes, lobos, pardas, mestizos, zambaigas, salte-pa'-atrazes, tente-enel- aires...
...was soon proved false and Gaspar, too, was arrested, the contents of the library seized...
...Who are Mateo and Gaspar...
...There was a great demand for books in the colonies, especially'the ones on the list of the Royal Audiencia...
...Gaspar and Mateo purchased a small collection of guidebooks to these black arts from Filomena Jauregui, who had learned them from her now-deceased mother...
Vol. 27 • February 2002 • No. 1
