self-pity as well as courage, by a sense of reprieveand the impulse to abandon—a spiritual revolution. The carefully maintained barrier of my emotional distance with Camilla and others and the strict dichotomies around which my judgments occurred daily without reflection had shrunk by dawn to irrelevancy.
I knew enough of the lives of Rosa and Martín, remembered mostly from the popular but improbable hagiographies of my childhood, to understand how the relationship revealed in their letters might have come about and to accept the plausibility of everything set out in them. Martín was born in 1579, Rosa seven years later. She lived in a house with ten brothers and sisters on Calle de Santo Domingo, adjacent to the Dominican monastery Martín entered as a lay helper when he was fifteen. Rosa’s mother, Maria de Flores, was an irritable, hot-tempered woman. Her father, who participated as a professional soldier in the defeat of the Pizarros at Jaquijahuana, later became superintendent of the silver mines at Quives. Rosa helped support the family by selling flowers she raised in a garden that shared a wall with the monastery gardens Martín de Porres attended.
Rosa was canonized in 1671. Sainthood for Martín did not come until 1962—a delay caused, some say, by the fact that he was dark-skinned. The transcribed testimony of their contemporaries, provided to apostolic tribunals convened at the time of each one’s death, is explicit and almost without contradiction concerning the holiness of each person. The extent of their charity toward the destitute, the injured, the abandoned, was then and remains for us now unfathomable. The infusion of physical comfort and spiritual solace each conveyedto ease every kind of human suffering was so inexplicable, so unearthly, it must be regarded as miraculous. A striking sign of their blessedness is that both Rosa and Martín were repeatedly discovered elevated three or four feet off the ground before the Crucifix in a state of spiritual ecstasy or oblivion.
At the time of their ministries, life for many in Lima was an unmitigated horror. The city teemed with gangs of orphans. Epidemic disease was rampant. The many victims of the depraved and bloody administration of the Spanish viceroyalty lived crowded in hovels throughout the city and swarmed the streets for the garbage and waste on which they survived. Reading records of that time, one is soon confirmed in the belief that this was a period of human derangement—the whipping of Church-owned slaves, the public rape of street urchins. It was into this debilitating and sordid atmosphere that Rosa and Martín were born and in which each developed a sense of God.
Of the two, Rosa was the more reclusive. At the age of thirteen she came to believe adamantly that only by devoting herself to prayer, to the most abject supplication before God, might she find salvation. She cut herself off from human society, embarked on a period of harsh fasts, and regularly beat herself with sticks. Her many chroniclers are at pains to describe her self-flagellation as “masochistic and abnormal,” but looking at the letters and the entirety of her life, I believe her behavior was instead an act of rage against the darkness manifest in the streets around her and which she also saw in herself. Her biographers refer to these seven years as her
“period of aridity.” It was near the end of this time that she met Martín.
The Dominican friar was much more outgoing, a humorous, energetic man, the son of an hidalgo named Juan de Porres and of Anna Velasquez, a Panamanian woman variously described as an Indian and as a free black. Martín lived the impoverished life of a religious abject but was so enthusiastic about human life and so ready with self-deprecating jokes that he confounded those who piously recorded his miraculous cures of the terminally ill. Each day he walked out into the streets of Lima to help whomever he met. Like Rosa, who turned her
I knew enough of the lives of Rosa and Martín, remembered mostly from the popular but improbable hagiographies of my childhood, to understand how the relationship revealed in their letters might have come about and to accept the plausibility of everything set out in them. Martín was born in 1579, Rosa seven years later. She lived in a house with ten brothers and sisters on Calle de Santo Domingo, adjacent to the Dominican monastery Martín entered as a lay helper when he was fifteen. Rosa’s mother, Maria de Flores, was an irritable, hot-tempered woman. Her father, who participated as a professional soldier in the defeat of the Pizarros at Jaquijahuana, later became superintendent of the silver mines at Quives. Rosa helped support the family by selling flowers she raised in a garden that shared a wall with the monastery gardens Martín de Porres attended.
Rosa was canonized in 1671. Sainthood for Martín did not come until 1962—a delay caused, some say, by the fact that he was dark-skinned. The transcribed testimony of their contemporaries, provided to apostolic tribunals convened at the time of each one’s death, is explicit and almost without contradiction concerning the holiness of each person. The extent of their charity toward the destitute, the injured, the abandoned, was then and remains for us now unfathomable. The infusion of physical comfort and spiritual solace each conveyedto ease every kind of human suffering was so inexplicable, so unearthly, it must be regarded as miraculous. A striking sign of their blessedness is that both Rosa and Martín were repeatedly discovered elevated three or four feet off the ground before the Crucifix in a state of spiritual ecstasy or oblivion.
At the time of their ministries, life for many in Lima was an unmitigated horror. The city teemed with gangs of orphans. Epidemic disease was rampant. The many victims of the depraved and bloody administration of the Spanish viceroyalty lived crowded in hovels throughout the city and swarmed the streets for the garbage and waste on which they survived. Reading records of that time, one is soon confirmed in the belief that this was a period of human derangement—the whipping of Church-owned slaves, the public rape of street urchins. It was into this debilitating and sordid atmosphere that Rosa and Martín were born and in which each developed a sense of God.
Of the two, Rosa was the more reclusive. At the age of thirteen she came to believe adamantly that only by devoting herself to prayer, to the most abject supplication before God, might she find salvation. She cut herself off from human society, embarked on a period of harsh fasts, and regularly beat herself with sticks. Her many chroniclers are at pains to describe her self-flagellation as “masochistic and abnormal,” but looking at the letters and the entirety of her life, I believe her behavior was instead an act of rage against the darkness manifest in the streets around her and which she also saw in herself. Her biographers refer to these seven years as her
“period of aridity.” It was near the end of this time that she met Martín.
The Dominican friar was much more outgoing, a humorous, energetic man, the son of an hidalgo named Juan de Porres and of Anna Velasquez, a Panamanian woman variously described as an Indian and as a free black. Martín lived the impoverished life of a religious abject but was so enthusiastic about human life and so ready with self-deprecating jokes that he confounded those who piously recorded his miraculous cures of the terminally ill. Each day he walked out into the streets of Lima to help whomever he met. Like Rosa, who turned her
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