We waited with cramped legs, while the blue sky became black, and mysterious shapes loomed up in an unspeakably vast and lonely country. The Flagellants were still sulking. At last, a light across the river flickered, swung, and started down a distant trail, whose route we traced by an occasional lantern glimmer through masses of trees. A sweet, weird wail floated over to us on a gust of wind. It was the pito, wild and high-pitched flute, making a most dismal, shivery music. The procession twisted and turned toward the river. We crouched uncomfortably by our sand dunes, not daring to make a sound for fear it might be carried on the clear air. Suddenly came a chant, broken, taken up and dropped by voices too weak to modulate. It sounded unevenly, as spurts of energy forced it from tired throats; loud, then a whisper. The chant continued, with an ominous new sound added; a thud, thud, thud, regular and pitiless, the fall of thongs upon flesh. No outcry came; only the chant and the wail of the pito rose louder.
It was a neighboring sect on the way to pay a visit to our morado. Frequently the light was arrested, and the singing stopped. We knew then they were paying their devotions at one of the heaps of stone, rude wayside memorials seen everywhere in this locality, erected by the Mexicans to their dead, some of whom lie in battlefields of France. Then the chant continued, the thud, painful enough only to hear, and the shuffle of feet, in a sort of weary lockstep. Across the river another light flickered and started. Soon, from our hiding-place high over the valley, we could see half a dozen processions, wending up and down through the hills.
A movement from the direction of our morado, and the pito sounded close at hand, accompanied by the uneven creak of a rude cart, filling us with a delightful, terrifying suspense. So close that we could have touched them, passed chanting men, swinging lights. We heard the break of leaden whips on their bare backs, but no groans. It was the procession of the death wagon, on which a skeleton was strapped, a macabre memento mori borrowed from the Middle Ages. The gleaming lantern illumined its ribs as it tottered on its seat in grisly semblance of life.
Suddenly a motor drove up aggressively, and halted straight across the path of the death wagon. The pito and chanting stopped. A crowd quickly gathered, and angry voices made staccato demands. The car remained insolently unmoved, blocking the penitentes’ most private ceremony. The mob was angry beyond bounds at what to the most unsympathetic observer was gross rudeness, but to them was outrageous sacrilege. Pistols were drawn. The increasing numbers of penitentes surrounding the car buzzed like swarming hornets whose nest has been smashed, and who hunt the marauder with vicious intent. Then came a heavy voice from the car, a moment of confusion, and the crowd melted away, muttering but evidently cowed, while the car moved arrogantly forward. Puzzled, we asked for explanations.
“That fellow in the car owns the big store where all those greasers trade. They buy on credit, run in debt, and he takes a mortgage on their ranches or herds of sheep. Some of them owe him two or three thousand. They were all ready to make trouble when they recognized him. He told them he was going to see the show, and if they didn’t like it they could pay what they owed him tomorrow. So they slunk off. He is a German.”
Echt deutsch!
Barbarous as may be this custom of flagellating, there is devout belief behind it. To the ignorant Mexican stimulated by these annual reminders, it is as if, as is literally true, the torture and anguish had occurred to a neighbor in his home town. The faces of the men and women, even of little children witnessing the penitente rites, showed the reality to them of what to most of us is remote as the legend of Hercules. Faith so beautiful and unusual must command respect no matter what arouses it. Yet in black contrast to it is the political and moral corruption said to accompany this dangerous doctrine of expiation. Being especially saintly because of their endurance test, the penitentes during the rest of the year commit murder, adultery, theft and arson with cheerful abandon. Nobody dares oppose them or revenge their excesses, either from pious veneration, fear, or a knowledge of the uselessness of such a procedure. For the Penitentes are whispered to be potent politically. Membership in the sect is kept secret. Many prominent judges and state politicians are said to be Penitentes. If a fellow member is brought to justice, he gets off lightly or goes scot-free, and strange deaths are predicted for enemies, private or public, of the sect. I was even warned not to write of them, for fear their power should extend beyond the state’s borders. Doubtless much of this local fear is exaggerated.
But I predict that what church and legislature have failed to do, the ubiquitous tourist will accomplish. In the more remote hill towns, services still reproduce the incarnadined Passion with all its horrors. Nearer to Santa Fé, the flagellants withdraw closer and closer into their morados. Without an audience to sympathize, pain and torture become less tolerable. No man, however sincere he believes himself, turns Stylites unless his pillar stands in the market place.
Ten miles from this strange Good Friday we passed an equally strange Easter in the Indian pueblo of San Ildefonso, whose many generations of Catholicism do not prevent invoking the gods who have given service even longer than the Christian’s deities. They shake well and mix them, somewhat after the fashion of my colored laundress who confessed she always wore a hoodoo charm:—“Of course I’se a good Christian, too, but the Bible says, don’t it, the Law’d he’ps them as he’ps they-selves?”
Somewhat in this spirit, Easter Sunday was chosen for the Rain Dance which was to end a long drought. For miles we passed buckboards carrying large Indian families endimanchées with rainbow hues; Indian bucks on little neat-footed ponies, their square-chopped raven hair banded with scarlet or purple, wearing short gay velvet shirts, buttoned with silver shells bartered from the Navajos, white cotton trousers, or the more modern blue overalls, henna-colored moccasins, silver buttoned on their tiny feet. Their necks and waists were loaded with wampum and turquoise-studded silver, their faces rouged.