Books: Generals, Saints & Goblins

THE KNIGHTS OF THE CAPE, AND OTHER STORIES OF RICARDO PALMA—Translated by Harriet de Onis—Knopf ($2.50).

Bloodshed and treachery, in delicate balance, had brought Marquis Don Francisco Pizarro, discoverer and conqueror of Peru, a long way from herding swine under the oaks of Estredemadura.

There had been, for example, the terrible hardships he and his 13 companions had gone through to spy out the Inca empire (and the side deal with Charles V to cut Pizarro’s 13 companions out of most of the loot). Now, at 70, Don Francisco was weary of bloodshed and treachery. In his garden the first fig tree of New Castile had just borne fruit. When the enemies he had left alive conspired against him, he invited them to his palace for half a dozen figs and some friendly advice. The rebels answered the invitation by breaking into his house and cutting his throat.

The death of Francisco Pizarro is told in the story that gives The Knights of the Cape its name. Peru’s Ricardo Palma, who called his stories Tradiciones Peruanas was a tradition and a classic himself before he died in 1919 at the age of 86. He had fought against the Spanish at Callao and against the Chileans at Miraflores. He was once editor of the great Prensa in Buenos Aires, and returned to Lima to rebuild the National Library which the Chileans had pillaged.

The 38 stories in The Knights of the Cape picture heroes, generals, saints, friars, noblemen and noblewomen, devils and goblins. Only the devils and goblins really work at their trades. The heroes are always engaged in rascality, the generals swindle the tradesmen, the friars gorge themselves, the saints drive hard bargains in horseflesh, the nobility tomcats around Lima’s midnight streets.

All these stories, of course, are about things which happened long ago and far away from Good Neighbor Peru (regarded as one of the South American nations most friendly to the U.S.). The tales were chosen by the author and screened by the translator to accent the quaint and unusual. Yet Ricardo Palma, if he has a U.S. counterpart, was his country’s Washington Irving. His tales merely serve to accent the vastly different heritages of two Western Hemisphere nations. His own countrymen relish Palma’s brigands and cutthroats because they are heirs to the tradition that life is a grim, bitter joke and had best be laughed at. Sample Palma ironies:

¶Miguel de Santiago, an artist of Quito, has been released from prison, where he went for slashing off his wife’s ear. (For one thing, she had let dirt fall on a painting he had finished and left to dry.) As penance, the artist is going to paint a religious picture. He binds a pupil to the cross, but the expression the master wants is not quite right until he thrusts a lance through the model’s body. Santiago’s Christ of the Agony is offered in evidence at his trial for murder, and the judges decide that the painting outweighs the crime.

¶General Jerónimo Valdés, last of the Spanish generals to oppose the victorious Bolivar and Sucre, impresses a slave into his army for the defense of Arequipa. The slave’s owner comes to claim him, and offers as proof of the slave’s loyalty to Spain the fact that he had once thrown a rock and struck General Sucre in the chest. Valdés has the slave shot and ex plains to the owner that being a general is a tough enough calling without the complication of civilians throwing rocks.