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222  11 Sleeping with Corpses, Eating Hearts, and Walking Skulls: Criollo’s Subjectivity in Antonio de la Calancha and Bartolomé Arzans de Orsúa y Vela1 Leonardo García-Pabón There is a peculiar building in Evora, Portugal: a chapel built with human bones. In the seventeenth century, the cemeteries of the area had run out of space and were overflowing with human remains. Three Franciscan monks thought that to recover burial space and, at the same time, preserve these osseous remains they could build a chapel with the bones. This architecture of skeletons and skulls—a relocated cemetery, a virtual space for the afterlife—was conceived as a place where we could enter and feel, for a few but intense moments, how ineluctably we are headed to become bones and skulls, similar to those in the walls and ceiling of the chapel. So this chapel was built as a place of prayer and meditation on our ephemeral life. “Nós ossos que aqui estamos pelos vossos esperamos ” (We, the bones in here, for your bones, are waiting) reads the legend at the door of the chapel. This may well be one of the most extreme examples of the Catholic Baroque’s particular obsession with death as the final reality of human life. Approximately a century later, in the Andean area, a narrative was being developed: the legend of the Manchay Puytu (the pot of fear). The legend tells the story of an Indian or a mestizo priest who has a love relationship with a Creole or Indian woman—the protagonists’ ethnic belonging changes accord- SLEEPING WITH CORPSES 223 ing to the version of the legend. When she unexpectedly dies, he refuses to accept her death. Blinded by pain and grief, he digs up her body, carries the corpse to his bedroom, and tries to bring her back from the kingdom of death. When he discovers that this is impossible, he removes one of her leg bones to make a quena (an Indian flute), and then composes a most sad and disturbing melody on the quena that he plays inside a cántaro (a pot).2 The corpse of the loved one must be metonymically treated to become a residue, a relic—not of saintliness, but of the unsolvable conflict between desire and death, and its cultural inscription /sublimation in art. In this macabre tale, love, death, Catholicism, and art are mixed, creating another extreme moment of the Baroque—the Baroque created in Latin America, with its particular take on death. These two examples of the views and understandings of death in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are representative moments of the baroque that spread from Spain and Portugal to the New World. Both examples show a similar mechanism: they put on stage that which is supposed to be buried. Bones and corpses surface to remind us of those attractions—such as death or love—that we cannot escape. In different contexts and with different goals, the unburied is placed in front of our eyes to let us see what we are really made of—dust, shadows, nothing—and confront it with some of the most powerful life forces: our loves and desires. I mention these examples because they are the borders that demarcate a symbolic field in which the Criollos of the New World, caught between the culture of the Old World and the realities of the New, developed a philosophy about death. On the one hand, following one of the dominant types of Christianity developed in Europe, which emphasized the ephemeral, miserable, and vane aspects of life (Caro Baroja 135), the Criollos perceived death as the ultimate reality of life. This perception of death was strongly emphasized by artists and thinkers in the European seventeenth century as well as in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the Spanish colonies. It became one of the most representative aspects of the Baroque in both Spain and the New World. As Sor Juana put it in her best-known sonnet, life and beauty were seen as “un engaño colorido” (a colored treachery) that in reality, “bien mirado” (rightly seen) was “cadáver, polvo, sombra, nada” (corpse, dust, gloom, nothingness).3 On the other hand, the eighteenth century witnessed a powerful resurgence of Indian population and a cultural renaissance, which lead to the rebellions of Tupac Amaru and Tupac Katari. This Indian renaissance was accompanied by an inquiry into both the historical reasons for the fall of the...

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