parents’ home into a hospice for abused prostitutes, Martín brought the most deracinated and wretched back to the monastery, housing them in his own small cell if necessary. His charity was celebrated throughout Lima; the wealthy sought his counsel and showered him with money.
During the months in which the letters were written, in the fall of 1606, I think, Rosa was twenty. She was just entering a period of serenity in her life, a time of transcendent beatitude such as people often imagine to be the equanimity of angels. It lasted until she died in 1617, at the age of thirty-one. Martín would have been twenty-seven in 1606. Among his official duties at the monastery were his responsibilities in the hospital and in the garden, but he spent much of his time in the streets. In a city blighted by ambitious schemes and cruel enforcements, he was for all the pariahs an elevating hand, a sympathetic ear.
Rosa and Martín, lacking a certain cupidity and the designs of power that would have drawn them more completely intothe world, nevertheless willingly engaged in its terrors. Against holiness like theirs one has no recourse, no protection. It was part of the reason I broke down that night.
I slept most of the day after my night of reading and catharsis. The following day Camilla and Manco went to Callao to visit his grandmother, and I had the house to myself. I took out the nine letters my father had given me and read them for the first time in many years. I had then a sudden, intuitive sense of the order of all the letters. Assembled along these lines they revealed a clear evolution of psychological and spiritual ideas.
The letters my father gave me seem all to have been among the earliest written. Their composers describe with wonder and joy each other’s smallest physical attributes. They dwell on the blinding ecstasy produced by mere touch—the inside of the wrist, say, lifting the bare flesh of the breast. Rosa writes of the heat and the pressure she experiences straining against him, the sensation of his penetration she feels in her spine, the delirious loss of her mind. Martín writes of the inexplicable tears that wet their faces, the thrill of restraint and hesitation in his tongue drawn across the shuddering currents of her skin. They make love in her garden most often. In their letters they speculate at the way they tear plants from the ground in their ravishment and at her compulsion to ride him like a horse, and they recall how in a kiss Martín had unfurled honey against her teeth and then slowly caressed every part of her mouth he could reach.
In those early letters they seem to affirm not physical passionso much as entry upon a form of reverie both familiar and unknown to them, a capacity for such experience that for them must have been an abiding hunger. In subsequent letters (the majority of these from the library) they explore the meaning of this elevated state, and they consider the unity they have discovered through it—with each other, with jasmine blossoms that fall on them in the garden, and with their spiritual calling, the prayer and ministration that shaped the hours of their daily lives.
It’s my feeling that I have read most of the letters they wrote, that there were few earlier or later ones. The letters originate in the realm of physical sensation, move to a more ethereal realm (though still rooted in the physical), and culminate in what appears to be the completion of an understanding of what they were striving for. I would guess that all of the letters were written during a period of only two or three months, and I see the evidence of this intense companionship most clearly in a change in Rosa’s life. Certain references in the letters suggest that Martín prevailed upon Rosa to cease beating herself. Rosa had as profound an effect, I think, on Martín’s life, though this is harder to discern. If Rosa’s “period of aridity” came to an end during these months, this, too, was
During the months in which the letters were written, in the fall of 1606, I think, Rosa was twenty. She was just entering a period of serenity in her life, a time of transcendent beatitude such as people often imagine to be the equanimity of angels. It lasted until she died in 1617, at the age of thirty-one. Martín would have been twenty-seven in 1606. Among his official duties at the monastery were his responsibilities in the hospital and in the garden, but he spent much of his time in the streets. In a city blighted by ambitious schemes and cruel enforcements, he was for all the pariahs an elevating hand, a sympathetic ear.
Rosa and Martín, lacking a certain cupidity and the designs of power that would have drawn them more completely intothe world, nevertheless willingly engaged in its terrors. Against holiness like theirs one has no recourse, no protection. It was part of the reason I broke down that night.
I slept most of the day after my night of reading and catharsis. The following day Camilla and Manco went to Callao to visit his grandmother, and I had the house to myself. I took out the nine letters my father had given me and read them for the first time in many years. I had then a sudden, intuitive sense of the order of all the letters. Assembled along these lines they revealed a clear evolution of psychological and spiritual ideas.
The letters my father gave me seem all to have been among the earliest written. Their composers describe with wonder and joy each other’s smallest physical attributes. They dwell on the blinding ecstasy produced by mere touch—the inside of the wrist, say, lifting the bare flesh of the breast. Rosa writes of the heat and the pressure she experiences straining against him, the sensation of his penetration she feels in her spine, the delirious loss of her mind. Martín writes of the inexplicable tears that wet their faces, the thrill of restraint and hesitation in his tongue drawn across the shuddering currents of her skin. They make love in her garden most often. In their letters they speculate at the way they tear plants from the ground in their ravishment and at her compulsion to ride him like a horse, and they recall how in a kiss Martín had unfurled honey against her teeth and then slowly caressed every part of her mouth he could reach.
In those early letters they seem to affirm not physical passionso much as entry upon a form of reverie both familiar and unknown to them, a capacity for such experience that for them must have been an abiding hunger. In subsequent letters (the majority of these from the library) they explore the meaning of this elevated state, and they consider the unity they have discovered through it—with each other, with jasmine blossoms that fall on them in the garden, and with their spiritual calling, the prayer and ministration that shaped the hours of their daily lives.
It’s my feeling that I have read most of the letters they wrote, that there were few earlier or later ones. The letters originate in the realm of physical sensation, move to a more ethereal realm (though still rooted in the physical), and culminate in what appears to be the completion of an understanding of what they were striving for. I would guess that all of the letters were written during a period of only two or three months, and I see the evidence of this intense companionship most clearly in a change in Rosa’s life. Certain references in the letters suggest that Martín prevailed upon Rosa to cease beating herself. Rosa had as profound an effect, I think, on Martín’s life, though this is harder to discern. If Rosa’s “period of aridity” came to an end during these months, this, too, was
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