8 Teixeira, Ivan (1999). Mecenato Pombalino e poesia neoclássica. São Paulo: Editora da Universidade de São Paulo.
8 Violence in the Land of the Muisca: Juan Rodríguez Freile’s El carnero
Álvaro Félix Bolaños
El carnero as a Book of Brazen Tales
Juan Rodríguez Freile is perhaps, and definitely for the wrong reasons, the most famous colonial writer to emerge from northwestern South America. He is credited with having written a book filled with impudent – if not outright pornographic – stories related to the Spaniards and criollos residing in the main urban centers of the New Kingdom of Granada (today’s Colombia). However, El carnero – as the book has been popularly known for over 350 years – seriously intends to give an accurate report of the first century of Spanish conquest and settlement in the region. It was written between 1636 and 1638, probably during the idle moments provided by Rodríguez Freile’s not-too-demanding schedule as an employee for the local municipal bureaucracy.
A unique and interesting detail about El carnero is that it is the work of an old man who had little at stake in his job as a chronicler and amateur historian. Rodríguez Freile started writing the book when he was 70 years old and without the pressure of an official request. This may explain the pleasure he seems to convey in his writing – the relaxed style of his prose, the casual commentaries, the use of humor, sarcasm, and the frequent moral admonitions he displayed while reporting on both the transcendental and trivial historical events of the New Kingdom of Granada’s first century. This work circulated for 200 years in several different manuscript copies, until the Colombian criollo novelist and cultural promoter Felipe Pérez published it for the first time in Bogotá in 1859. Since then it has been republished over twenty times and has become an important part of the canon of Latin American literature, despite the fact that it was deliberately written as a work of history with no literary pretensions. There is even an English translation by William C. Atkinson, The Conquest of New Granada (1961); however, its scholarly benefit is limited by its severe abridgment.
Rodríguez Freile’s historical sources are similar to those used by most historians of the conquest and colonization working in the New World (Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, Pedro Cieza de León, Juan de Castellanos, Fray Pedro Simón, etc.). They include testimonies by at least one indigenous informant, the author’s own observations of events, legal documents from the local cabildo, and the available histories of the region, either published or in manuscript form, such as those from Juan de Castellanos’s Elegéas de varones ilustres de Indias and Fray Pedro Simón’s Noticias historiales de las conquistas de Tierra Firme en las Indias Occidentales.
Although its reputation as a treatise concerning solely (or mainly) fictionalized stories about European and Euro-American people’s moral transgressions is an exaggeration, the fact remains that El carnero delves into a few scandalous stories (some of which are simply colorful vignettes), and it is on these, quite understandably, that most readers tend to focus. Sexual transgression has thus become a metonymy for the whole book; by combining themes of sex, greed, violence, lust, betrayal, and political manipulation with the stories of shameful celebrities (the O. J. Simpsons and Scott Petersons of colonial Spanish America), a small number of narrative units have allowed most commentators to consider it a text packed with imaginary, brazen stories. Infidelity is their most visible theme, and a few examples are in order.
Among the vignette-like stories is the case of don García de Vargas, a resident of the city of Tocaima (founded in 1544 in Panche Indian territory), who kills his wife in a jealous rage after an absurd misunderstanding. García de Vargas had bumped into a retarded mestizo man (who clumsily communicated with guttural sounds and sign language), and asked him where he was coming from. This colorful fellow, who had just witnessed the slaughter of an enormous steer destined for the marketplace, responded to don García de Vargas’s question with excitement by “putting both hands on his head in the shape of bull horns” (Chapter 16). Don García de Vargas misinterpreted this sign as a scornful reference to his wife’s infidelity, and the aforementioned tragedy ensued.
Among the more elaborate stories is the case of licenciado Gaspar de Peralta. In a male gathering Peralta is amused by a young man (F. de Ontanera) boasting about his wild escapades with a married woman, during one of which the baluster of her bed collapsed. Three days later don Gaspar de Peralta’s wife says: “Dear, call a carpenter to fix one of our bed’s balusters which has been broken” (Chapter 15). After a calculated plot with the help of one of his servants (a Pijao Indian, to be precise), Gaspar de Peralta murders his wife and her lover. There is also the case of Inés de Hinojosa, “a beautiful rich woman,” a sort of black widow, who has several of her husbands murdered by her own lovers before finally being brought to trial and executed: “She was hung from a tree, which still remains today, albeit dried out, more than 70 years later” (Chapter 10). This story has fascinated readers for centuries and has been the subject of two novels (Los tres Pedros en la red de Inés de Hinojosa, 1864, by Temístocles Avella Mendoza; and Los pecados de Inés de Hinojosa, 1986, by Próspero Morales Pradilla), as well as a very popular Colombian soap opera of the late 1980s.
Nevertheless, the most famous and complex case, which, as a paradigmatic narrative, has found its way into both Latin American short-story collections and US graduate students’ reading lists, is that of Juana Garcéa. A freed African slave settled in Santafé (today’s Bogotá), García sets up a profitable business advising women from the white elite on matters of secret love (witchcraft was among her alleged skills). In doing so, she amasses a considerable fortune and soon becomes interested in local political intrigues, furtively posting commentaries about local male politicians in the main plaza. Among her clients is a beautiful young woman who, during her husband’s long absences, “wanted to get pleasure from her beauty as to not let it go to waste” (Chapter 9), and whose unexpected pregnancy requires Juana Garcéa’s intervention. Through witchcraft she reveals to the young lady not only that her husband is going to be away long enough for her to give birth and pass the child off as an adopted orphan, but also that her husband is having an affair with another woman. Upon the husband’s return, and owing to the young wife’s audacious jealousy of his affair, her dealings with Juana García (as well as the great extent of Garcia’s clientele) are exposed. The black woman is denounced as a witch and eventually as the author of the clandestine posters. She is finally put on trial by the Inquisition and deported back to the Caribbean. None of her numerous white clients, however, is ever brought to trial.
On account of these stories, Juan Rodríguez Freile has been identified as a writer who is obsessed with female beauty and the pitfalls of women’s illicit love, and El carnero has been identified as a book about the moral weaknesses of the human flesh. However fascinating these outrageous cases might be, the fact remains that they are but a handful among a long series of narrated events that comprise the history of a century of conquest, settlement, and governmental organization of the New Kingdom of Granada (1538–1638).
There are 21 chapters in El carnero, and although the first one focuses on the origin and identity of the earliest Spanish conquistadors, Chapters 2 through 7 are a careful (albeit highly prejudicial) illustration of the indigenous culture of the area (the Muisca), including the civil war that crippled their resistance to the invading Spaniards. This chapter’s title is a good example of this focus on the indigenous: “Which tells who chiefs Guatavita and Bogotá were, who the ruler of this Kingdom and the Kingdom