Genuine pilgrims are expected to fast on the day they visit Luján. We—for a friend made the journey with me—came nearly carrying out this requirement in spite of ourselves, having missed the train we planned to take and unwisely set out on foot without waiting for the next. For once outside the city limits, it is a long way from Buenos Aires to the next shop or restaurant. Luján is something more than forty miles west of the capital, the usual “boliche” town of the pampas and a slough of mud in this autumn season, the unfinished dull-red brick “basilica” bulking high above it and visible many miles away. The legend, which still finds a surprisingly large number of believers in the Argentine, runs that in the time of the Spanish dominion a community of Spanish monks set out with great ceremony to transport a statue of the Virgin from Buenos Aires to Peru. Arrived at the hamlet of Luján, the cart in which it was being carried stopped. Nothing could induce it to move on. No doubt it was the rainy season and there was excellent reason for its immovability, but the good monks concluded that the Virgin was expressing a desire to remain where she was, and her wishes were respected. A small chapel was erected and her cult perpetuated. When immigration increased and swarms of devout Italians, not to mention the Spanish and Irish, began to settle in the vicinity and make frequent pilgrimages to the shrine, the bishop in charge took it as an indication that the powers of a better world wished the Virgin to be housed in a building befitting her increasing popularity. He undertook the erection, from popular subscriptions, of a “Gothic cathedral” which should be the most imposing in the Argentine, though this, to be sure, is not saying much. It was planned to spend six million pesos, half of which are already gone, and as soon as the walls had been raised the bishop insisted on opening the building, which perhaps is why there is so little suggestion of Gothic about the bare brick, towerless, façade-less, on the whole dismal structure.
Though we might be willing to fast, when there was no choice in the matter, not all the patron saints on the globe could have forced us to wallow through the mile or more of black mud between the station and the “basilica.” For that matter, we noted that even the pious pilgrims who had arrived with us in their gleaming patent-leather shoes climbed unhesitatingly into the comfortable, if tiny, horsecar, and that not one of them gave a suggestion of dropping off to finish the journey on his knees, or even on foot. We were no less astounded, if secretly more pleased, to find that one of the rascals keeping the restaurants tucked away among the many santerías, shops in which are sold tin “saints” which los fieles may carry home to perform their cures by hand, was willing to jeopardize our future salvation by providing us, before we had consummated the object of every visit to Luján, with as much of a repast as one learns to hope for in an Argentine “boliche” town.
Inside the unfinished but already richly decorated “basilica” the curved-stone back of the altar and the stairway rising above it was already carved with the names of those who credited the Virgin with curing them of incurable ailments. There were other less conspicuous places for similar testimonials from those with less mesmerism over the root of evil. About the altar were gathered groups of pilgrims engaged in the preliminary formalities of the faithful who come seeking aid. Peasants still wearing the garb of Lombardy or Piedmont, and no doubt come to ask the Virgin for a little less rain and a better price for their corn, that they might buy the coveted piece of land next their own or send more money to the old people they had left behind in Italy, mingled with richly garbed Porteñas who were praying perhaps for motherhood or the welfare of a lover.
“But where is the statue?” asked my impious companion of a young priest who was marching back and forth committing to memory some password to heaven.
“Why—er,” gasped the startled ecclesiastic, “do you mean the Blessed Virgin?”
“Yes,” returned my companion, carelessly.
“Follow those broad curving stairs and you will find our Blessed Lady of Luján in that little room above the altar,” replied the horrified youth, crossing himself fervently.
Above we found a single worshipper, a working woman dressed in the most nearly whole and spotless gown she possessed, kneeling on the marble floor, to which she bowed her forehead now and then, her eyes fixed on a doll some two feet high overdressed in heavy gilded robes and covered with bracelets, necklaces and girdles of false pearls and diamonds—for the real ones, worth a king’s ransom, are deposited in a safety vault in Buenos Aires and are used only on the anniversary of the Virgin’s halt in Luján. Back of the woman her son of five was climbing high up the iron grill surrounding the chapel, in his own particular effort to reach heaven. I lifted him down before he broke his neck, whereupon he sidled over to the lunch-basket the pair had brought with them and, keeping a weather eye on his devout parent, stealthily drew out a quart bottle of wine wrapped in a newspaper. Setting his teeth in the protruding cork, he tugged at it for some time, like a puppy at a root, drew it at last, and with an eye still on his mother, deep in her communing with the Virgin, gulped down nearly half a liter, re-corked the bottle, and slipped it back into its place.
On the way down we halted to speak with a well-dressed warden, who assured us that he had personally known of “thousands of supernatural cures” performed by the Virgin of Luján.
“Why,” he cried, growing more specific, “I have known many rich ladies to come out here from Buenos Aires on crutches, make a promise to our Blessed Virgin and go back home and—and by and by they would send out the crutches as proof of being cured, and perhaps a diamond necklace to show their gratitude to Our Lady. There is no ailment that Our Lady cannot cure.”