At the end of a five-mile stroll the stony highway broke forth into a little lake-side town. The church and monastery sacred to Our Lady of Copacabana, roofed with glistening green and yellow tiles, in a square surrounded by heavy walls brilliant with the crimson flor del Inca, nestles in a lap of rocky hills a bit back from the lake and bulks high above the haunts of mere men at its feet. In the days of the Incas this was a holy city, with a certain “idol of vast renown among the Gentiles,” a place of purification whence pilgrims embarked for the ultra-sacred island of Titicaca. The church militant would not have been itself had it lost this opportunity of grafting its own superstitions on those of the aboriginals, and some three centuries ago the present “Virgen de Copacabana” was set up, with the usual marvelous tale of her miraculous appearance in this spot. Her servants have been realizing richly on their foresight ever since. A steady stream of pilgrims pours into the holy city from Peru, as well as Bolivia, and even from further off, the year round, though August 5 and February 2 are the days of chief festival and mightiest crowds. Near the monastery is a large hospicio, a two-story lodging-house for pilgrims, with a great rectangular patio opening through an archway. In the town roundabout is that curious atmosphere of a mixture of piety and commercial advantage common to Rome, Jerusalem, Benares, and Puree, an air of something hard to believe, yet highly advantageous to accept, at least outwardly. The costumes of the populace had grown frankly Bolivian. In several of the shops stocked with sacred baubles, facing the immense grass-grown plaza, women were rolling cigarettes, new proof that I was in Bolivia, for to roll a cigarette in Peru is the exclusive privilege of the government.
The priest of Pomata had given me a note to the superior of the monastery. A doorkeeper led me into pillared cloisters opening on a flower-grown patio and softly into the sanctum of Father Basoberri, deep in conversation with a parish priest who had brought a flock of pilgrims from a neighboring town. Being a European, he created a better impression than the average native churchman. To celebrate my arrival he ordered a servant to uncork a bottle of imported beer and, after the first formalities, had him set me down in the monastery dining-room, where an excellent meal stopped abruptly short of dessert and coffee. The superior conducted me in person to the large brick-and-tile room reserved for distinguished guests, opening on the now bitter-cold expanse of Titicaca, and advised me to fasten the padlock and put the key in my pocket, “for though we are here in a monastery, there are people passing back and forth, and it is safer. Now,” he went on, “if you wish to see the customs of the pilgrims, you have only to mount that stairway.”
I climbed two stone flights in semi-darkness and found myself in a narrow wooden gallery at the back of a large, high chamber suffused with a “dim religious light.” It was painted blue, with a sprinkling of golden stars, as nearly the painter’s visualization of heaven, no doubt, as the crudity of his workmanship permitted him to express. Confession and a contribution to the attendant priests are requirements for admittance to the floor of the church below. At the further end stood the gaudy altar, in its center a glass-faced alcove containing the far-famed Virgin of Copacabana. The figure, scarcely three feet high, was cumbered with several rich silk gowns, laden with gold and jewels, and with a blazing golden crown many sizes too large. Round-about her were expanses of golden-starred heavens, and half a hundred of what looked to a layman like large daggers threatened her from all sides. The original blue-stone idol had been destroyed by the Spaniards, the present incumbent having been fashioned in 1582 by Tito-Yupanqui, lineal descendant of the Incas. He was no artist, but was said to have been inspired by the Virgin herself.
The place was unusually immaculate for the Andes, as becomes a famous shrine where money pours in the year around, and was in striking contrast to the squalor of the surrounding region. The entire floor below was crowded with kneeling pilgrims, weirdly half-lighted by candles, except around the altar, where there was light enough to make priests, acolytes, and the Virgin stand out brilliantly. A week is the customary length of stay for pilgrims, with a ceremony of welcome and one of dismissal, separated by a long series of masses, confessions and purifications—not to mention the ubiquitous fees. It is perfectly well-known throughout the length and breadth of the Andes, as the priest from the neighboring town, having taken me in hand as soon as I appeared in the gallery, whispered above the rumble of the services, that Nuestra Señora de Copacabana is an all-round champion in the miracle line. For instance: Hardly a year back she had picked up a ship about to be wrecked on the coast of Chile and set it out a thousand miles or so into the mill-pond Pacific, merely because one of the sailors had had the presence of mind to call upon her at the height of the storm. The newspapers of the time seem to have covered the service poorly. Or there was the case of the Indian in my cicerone’s own parish who, working in his field far up the side of a mountain sloping swiftly toward Titicaca, suddenly fell headlong down the precipice. He would infallibly have been dashed to pieces on the rocks below, had he not suddenly, halfway down, uttered the name of the Virgin—personally I never knew the mind of an Andean Indian to work with such rapidity—and instantly found himself comfortably seated back in his own field again. The fact should not be lost sight of, however, in rating this marvel that the Aymará husbandman cheers on his labors with an even stronger chicha than that of his Quichua cousins to the north.
The ceremony we were now witnessing was that of dismissing the departing pilgrims. At about two-minute intervals there knelt on the steps of the altar one person, a man and wife, or sometimes a man, wife, and child, always of the same family. An Indian acolyte in red thrust a lighted candle into a hand of each, the chief priest bowed down before the image, while back beside us in the gallery an Indian in a poncho pumped a wheezing melodeon and the choir, consisting of several boys, four old half-Indian women wrapped to the ends of their noses in black mantos, and three merry little girls who managed to keep up a constant gossip and game through it all, knelt on the floor about the instrument and moaned weird hymns. If the pilgrim was of the “gente decente” class, the hymn was in Spanish; if an Indian, it was in Aymará. During the singing, and the chanting of the priest, another acolyte in a still more striking robe stepped forth and covered the kneeling person or persons at the altar with what looked like a richly embroidered blanket. This the priest beside me asserted was the Virgin’s cloak, capable of protecting from all evil, for a certain length of time—varying, perhaps, with the fee.
Then suddenly the cloak was snatched away, the candles were jerked out of the hands of the worshippers, the latter were all but bodily pushed aside, and a priest on the side-lines called out the next name from the list in his hands. This field-manager was startlingly unBolivian in efficiency, keeping things moving with a rush, and calling the next group almost before the acolyte reached for the blue blanket. The attitude of all those professionally connected with the ceremony, was scornful, careless, and hurried—like a New York barber who is convinced there is no “tip” coming. The fifth group to appear, however, was less cavalierly treated. A tall, well-dressed man stepped forward, and an acolyte quickly slipped in front of him a prie-dieu, or prayer-stool with high back, of the style used in church by well-to-do South American women. Then, to my surprise, two young men in riding breeches and leggings, who had been standing near us in the gallery, stumbled over each other in their haste to get down to the floor below and kneel on either side of the older man. “Ese caballero,” whispered the priest beside me, with a distinct tone of pride in his voice, “is a famous lawyer and ex-senator from La Paz, and those are his two sons. They are great devotees of the Blessed Virgin of Copacabana.”
Indians plowing on the shores of Titicaca. Those behind break up the clods with wooden mallets
Sunrise at Copacabana, the sacred city of Bolivia on the shores of Titicaca