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The BRIDGE of SAN LUIS REY
By THORNTON WILDER
AUTHOR OF “THE CABALA” Illustrated by AMY DREVENSTEDT
1928 ALBERT & CHARLES BONI : NEW YORK
Copyright, 1927, by ALBERT & CHARLES BONI, ING.
Published November, 1927 Second printing December, 1927 Third printing December, 1927 Fourth printing December, 1927 Fifth printing December, 1927 Sixth printing December, 1927 Seventh printing December, 1927 Eighth printing January, 1928 Ninth printing January, 1928 Tenth printing February, 1928 Eleventh printing February, 1928 Twelfth printing, March, 1928 Thirteenth printing, April, 1928 Fourteenth printing, May, 1928
MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
To My Mother
Parr ONE:
Parr Two:
Part THREE:
Parr Four:
Parr Five:
CONTENTS
PERHAPS An ACCIDENT
THE MARQUESA DE MONTEMAYOR
ESTEBAN
UncuLeE Pio
PERHAPS AN INTENTION
PAGE
15
27
89
143
211
ILLUSTRATIONS
FACING PAGE
Ерт PLATE Frontispiece SeconD PLATE 36 THIRD PLATE | 64 FourtH PLATE 76 Firrm PLATE 90 SixrH PLATE 112 SEVENTH PLATE 148 Еснтн PLATE 172 Nıntu PLATE 204
TENTH PLATE. 220
I PART ONE:
PART ONE: PERHAPS AN ACCIDENT
N Friday noon, July the twentieth,
1714, the finest bridge in all Peru
broke and precipitated five travellers
into the gulf below. This bridge was on the high- road between Lima and Cuzco and hundreds of persons passed over it every day. It had been woven of osier by the Incas more than a century before and visitors to the city were always led out to see it. It was a mere ladder of thin slats swung out over the gorge, with handrails of dried vine. Horses and coaches and chairs had to go down hundreds of feet below and pass over the narrow torrent on rafts, but no one, not even the Viceroy, not even the Archbishop of Lima, had descended with the baggage rather than cross by the famous bridge of San Luis Rey. St. Louis
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THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY
of France himself protected it, by his name and by the little mud church on the further side. The bridge seemed to be among the things that last forever; it was unthinkable that it should break. The moment a Peruvian heard of the acci- dent he signed himself and made a mental calcu- lation as to how recently he had crossed by it and how soon he had intended crossing by it again. People wandered about in a trance-like state, muttering; they had the hallucination of seeing themselves falling into a gulf.
There was a great service in the Cathedral. The bodies of the victims were approximately col- lected and approximately separated from one an- other, and there was great searching of hearts in the beautiful city of Lima. Servant girls returned bracelets which they had stolen from their mis- tresses, and usurers harangued their wives an- grily, in defense of usury. Yet it was rather strange that this event should have so impressed the Limeans, for in that country those catas-
16
PERHAPS AN ACCIDENT
trophes which lawyers shockingly call the “acts of God” were more than usually frequent. Tidal waves were continually washing away cities; earthquakes arrived every week and towers fell upon good men and women all the time. Diseases were forever flitting in and out of the provinces and old age carried away some of the most ad- mirable citizens. That is why it was so surprising that the Peruvians should have been especially touched by the rent in the bridge of San Luis Rey.
Everyone was very deeply impressed, but only one person did anything about it, and that was Brother Juniper. By a series of coincidences so extraordinary that one almost suspects the pres- ence of some Intention, this little red-haired Franciscan from Northern Italy happened to be in Peru converting the Indians and happened to witness the accident.
It was a very hot noon, that fatal noon, and coming around the shoulder of a hill Brother Juniper stopped to wipe his forehead and to gaze
17
THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY upon the screen of snowy peaks in the distance, then into the gorge below him filled with the dark plumage of green trees and green birds and trav- ersed by its ladder of osier. Joy was in him; things were not going badly. He had opened several little abandoned churches and the Indians were crawling in to early Mass and groaning at the moment of miracle as though their hearts would break. Perhaps it was the pure air from the snows before him; perhaps it was the memory that brushed him for a moment of the poem that bade him raise his eyes to the helpful hills. At all events he felt at peace. Then his glance fell upon the bridge, and at that moment a twanging noise filled the air, as when the string of some musical instrument snaps in a disused room, and he saw the bridge divide and fling five gesticulating ants into the valley below.
Anyone else would have said to himself with secret joy: “Within ten minutes myself. . . !” But it was another thought that visited Brother
18
PERHAPS AN ACCIDENT
Juniper: “Why did this happen to those five?” If there were any plan in the universe at all, if there were any pattern in a human life, surely it could be discovered mysteriously latent in those lives so suddenly cut off. Either we live by ac- cident and die by accident, or we live by plan and die by plan. And on that instant Brother Juni- per made the resolve to inquire into the secret - lives of those five persons, that moment falling through the air, and to surprise the reason of their taking off.
It seemed to Brother Juniper that it was high time for theology to take its place among the ex- act sciences and he had long intended putting it there. What he had lacked hitherto was a labor- atory. Oh, there had never been any lack of specimens; any number of his charges had met calamity,—spiders had stung them; their lungs had been touched; their houses had burned down
19
THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY
and things had happened to their children from which one averts the mind. But these occasions of human woe had never been quite fit for scien- tific examination. They had lacked what our good savants were later to call proper control. ‘The ac- cident had been dependent upon human error, for example, or had contained elements of proba- bility. But this collapse of the bridge of San Luis Rey was a sheer Act of God. It afforded a perfect laboratory. Here at last one could surprise His intentions in a pure state.
You and I can see that coming from anyone but Brother Juniper this plan would be the flower of a perfect skepticism. It resembled the effort of those presumptuous souls who wanted to walk on the pavements of Heaven and built the Tower of Babel to get there. But to our Francis- can there was no element of doubt in the experi- ment. He knew the answer. He merely wanted to prove it, historically, mathematically, to his con- verts,—poor obstinate converts, so slow to believe
20
PERHAPS AN ACCIDENT
that their pains were inserted into their lives for their own good. People were always asking for good sound proofs; doubt springs eternal in the human breast, even in countries where the Inqui- sition can read your very thoughts in your eyes.
This was not the first time that Brother Juni- per had tried to resort to such methods. Often on the long trips he had to make (scurrying from parish to parish, his robe tucked up about his knees, for haste) he would fall to dreaming of ex- periments that justify the ways of God to man. For instance, a complete record of the Prayers for Rain and their results. Often he had stood on the steps of one of his little churches, his flock kneeling before him on the baked street. Often he had stretched his arms to the sky and de- claimed the splendid ritual. Not often, but sev- eral times, he had felt the virtue enter him and seen the little cloud forming on the horizon. But there were many times when weeks went Ьу... but why think of them? It was not himself he was
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THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY
trying to convince that rain and drought were wisely apportioned.
Thus it was that the determination rose within him at the moment of the accident. It prompted him to busy himself for six years, knocking at all the doors in Lima, asking thousands of ques- tions, filling scores of notebooks, in his effort at establishing the fact that each of the five lost lives was a perfect whole. Everyone knew that he was working on some sort of memorial of the acci- dent and everyone was very helpful and mislead- ing. A few even knew the principal aim of his activity and there were patrons in high places.
The result of all this diligence was an enor- mous book, which as we shall see later, was pub- licly burned on a beautiful Spring morning in the great square. But there was a secret copy and after a great many years and without much notice it found its way to the library of the University of San Marco. There it lies between two great wooden covers collecting dust in a cupboard. It
22
PERHAPS AN ACCIDENT
deals with one after another of the victims of the accident, cataloguing thousands of little facts and anecdotes and testimonies, and concluding with a dignified passage describing why God had settled upon that person and upon that day for His dem- onstration of wisdom. Yet for all his diligence Brother Juniper never knew the central passion of Dona Maria’s life; nor of Uncle Pio’s, not even of Esteban’s. And J, who claim to know so much more, isn’t it possible that even I have missed the very spring within the spring? /
Some say that we shall never know and that to the gods we are like the flies that the boys kill on a summer day, and some say, on the con- trary, that the very sparrows do not lose a feather that has not been brushed away by the finger of God.
23
PART TWO:
THE MARQUESA DE MONTEMAYOR
PART TWO: THE MARQUESA DE MONTEMAYOR
NY Spanish schoolboy is required to
know today more about Dona Maria,
Marquesa de Montemayor, than
Brother Juniper was to discover in years of re- search. Within a century of her death her letters had become one of the monuments of Spanish literature and her life and times have ever since been the object of long studies. But her biogra- phers have erred in one direction as greatly as the Franciscan did in another; they have tried to in- vest her with a host of graces, to read back into her life and person some of the beauties that abound in her letters, whereas all real knowl- edge of this wonderful woman must proceed from
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THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY the act of humiliating her and of divesting her of all beauties save one.
She was the daughter of a cloth-merchant who had acquired the money and the hatred of the Limeans within a stone’s-throw of the Plaza. Her childhood was unhappy: she was ugly; she stut- tered; her mother persecuted her with sarcasms in an effort to arouse some social charms and forced her to go about the town in a veritable harness of jewels. She lived alone and she thought alone. Many suitors presented themselves, but as long as she could she fought against the convention of her time and was determined to remain single. There were hysterical scenes with her mother, recrim- inations, screams and slamming of doors. At last at twenty-six she found herself penned into mar- riage with a supercilious and ruined nobleman and the Cathedral of Lima fairly buzzed with the sneers of her guests. Still she lived alone and thought alone, and when an exquisite daughter was born to her she fastened upon her an idol-
28
THE MARQUESA DE MONTEMAYOR atrous love. But little Clara took after her father; she was cold and intellectual. At the age of eight she was calmly correcting her mother’s speech and presently regarding her with astonish- ment and repulsion. The frightened mother be- came meek and obsequious but she could not pre- vent herself from persecuting Dona Clara with nervous attention and a fatiguing love. Again there were hysterical recriminations, screams and slamming of doors. From the offers of marriage that fell to her, Dofia Clara deliberately chose the one that required her removal to Spain. So to Spain she went, to that land from which it takes six months to receive an answer to one’s letter. The leave-taking before so long a voyage became in Peru one of the formal services of the Church. The ship was blessed and as the space widened between the vessel and the beach both companies knelt and sang a hymn that never failed to sound weak and timid in all that open air. Doña Clara sailed with most admirable composure,
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THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY leaving her mother to gaze after the bright ship, her hand pressing now her heart and now her mouth. Blurred and streaked became her view of the serene Pacific and the enormous clouds of pearl that hang forever motionless above it.
Left alone in Lima the Marquesa’s life grew more and more inward. She became increasingly negligent in her dress and like all lonely people she talked to herself audibly. All her existence lay in the burning center of her mind. On that stage were performed endless dialogues with her daughter, impossible reconciliations, scenes eter- nally recommenced of remorse and forgiveness. On the street you beheld an old woman her red wig fallen a little over one ear, her left cheek angry with a leprous affection, her right with a complementary adjustment of rouge. Her chin was never dry; her lips were never still. Lima was a city of eccentrics, but even there she became its jest as she drove through the streets or shuffled up the steps of its churches. She was thought to be
30
THE MARQUESA DE MONTEMAYOR
continuously drunk. Worse things were said of her and petitions were afloat that she be locked up. She had been denounced three times before the Inquisition. It is not impossible that she might have been burned had her son-in-law been less in- fluential in Spain and had she not somehow col- lected a few friends about the viceregal court who suffered her for her oddity and her wide reading.
The distressing character of the relations be- tween mother and daughter were further embit- tered by misunderstandings over money. The Condesa received a handsome allowance from her mother and frequent gifts. Dona Clara soon became the outstanding woman of intelligence at the Spanish court. All the wealth of Peru would have been insufficient to maintain her in the grandiose style she fancied for herself. Strangely enough her extravagance proceeded from one of the best traits in her nature: she regarded her friends, her servants and all the interesting peo- ple in the capital, as her children. In fact there
3]
THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY
seemed only one person in the world towards whom she did not expend herself in kind offices. Among her protégés was the cartographer De Blasiis (whose Maps of the New World was ded- icated to the Marquesa de Montemayor amid the roars of the courtiers at Lima who read that she was the “admiration of her city and a rising sun in the West”); another was the scientist Azuarius whose treatise on the laws of hydraulics was suppressed by the Inquisition as being too ex- citing. For a decade the Condesa literally sus- tained all the arts and sciences of Spain; it was not her fault that nothing memorable was pro- duced in that time.
About four years after Doña Clara’s departure Doña Maria received her permission to visit Eu- rope. On both sides the visit was anticipated with resolutions well nourished on self-reproach: the one to be patient, the other to be undemonstrative. Both failed. Each tortured the other and was on the point of losing her mind under the alterna-
32
THE MARQUESA DE MONTEMAYOR tions of self-rebuke and the outbursts of passion. At length one day Dona Maria rose before dawn, daring no more than to kiss the door behind which her daughter was sleeping, took ship and returned to America. Henceforth letter-writing had to take the place of all the affection that could not be lived.
Hers were the letters that in an astonishing world have become the text-book of schoolboys and the ant-hill of the grammarians. Dona Maria would have invented her genius had she not been born with it, so necessary was it to her love that she attract the attention, perhaps the admiration, of her distant child. She forced herself to go out into society in order to cull its ridicules; she taught her eye to observe; she read the master- pieces of her language to discover its effects; she insinuated herself into the company of those who were celebrated for their conversation. Night after night in her baroque palace she wrote and rewrote the incredible pages, forcing from her
33
THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY despairing mind those miracles of wit and grace, those distilled chronicles of the viceregal court. We know now that her daughter barely glanced at the letters and that it is to the son-in-law that we owe their preservation.