“Neither Santa Claus nor Pope God remember the poor”: Christmas according to Peruvian writers

As an initiatory Christmas text, Tauro points to the auto sacramental “Colloquio to the Nativity of the Lord”, composed in Lima by the nun Josefa Francisca de Azaña y Llano (Abancay, 1696 – Cajamarca, 1748), called Sor Juana María among the Capuchin nuns, who writes: “The voice of admiration resounds throughout the world, because when the Word takes flesh a thousand contradictions come together. Every deity is humbled, and a Child is seen, more than a man; and his Mother, although she is married, enjoys Virgin honors.”

After a long time jump, Taurus finds new testimonies in the generation of romantic writers of the second half of the 19th century, such as José Antonio de Lavalle, José Gálvez, Ricardo Palma or Mariano José Sanz, a poet of marked mystical inspiration and melancholic sensitivity. “Individualists and lovers of the people, the romantics see Christianity as the religion of man and the people, and thus they surprise it in the foreboding appearance of its founder and in the words of his message. They orient their preference towards Christmas, because it seems more vital and affirming than passion, more encouraging and luminous than silent submission to cruelty,” says the anthologist.

Later, a more cosmopolitan generation of authors would offer a more modern look at the ways of celebrating Easter. And among them, it is Abraham Valdelomar who left us, with his epistolary essay “Paschal Letter” or his poem “The Absent Brother at the Easter Dinner”, both published in 1916, the most moving texts. In addition to the nostalgic retelling and family fictions, with that same spirit of modernity, local writers disseminate the Easter traditions of the most influential European metropolises, such as Paris or London. Thus, the journalist, critic and film entrepreneur Don Federico Larrañaga, elaborates on “Father Christmas”, a kind old man born among a forest of snow-covered pine trees on the hill of Montmartre, and the writer and journalist Alaida Elguera visits the village of Santa Claus in the arctic to take statements: “All the gifts fit in my magic sack, and in my sleigh of 12 little deer I go around the world in one night. Well, since in some places it is daytime, while in others it is dark, I have extra time.” Likewise, perhaps influenced by “The Nutcracker” by ETA Hoffmann, Angélica Palma, the famous daughter of the traditionalist, wrote in 1930 “The Luck of Toys”, a story for children in which, from her display case, toy merchandise imagines luck. that they will have in the childish hands of their future owners.

The social criticism

A clear influence of Dickens’ “Christmas Carol” is manifested in the remarkable story of the same name by the modernist writer Enrique A. Carrillo, who recounts the regret of a provincial businessman who is forced to remain in Lima facing the debts generated by a failed business. , away from his family on Christmas Eve. Harassed by loan sharks, vacating his apartment at the Bolívar Hotel to move to a modest and dark hostel, his sad protagonist tries to escape the hubbub of the parties in the cruel capital. Far from all melancholy, in the funny story “Christmas Night,” Leonidas Yerovi develops in verse the anxious dialogue of the young man who courts a clever neighbor, distressed by the baby Jesus that he dropped from her birth. Pure mischief in which the writer suggests to us the dalliances that every festivity, religious or pagan, suggests. “If you invite me to seat you when I return, tender and loving, what is for next year I offer you a birth,” promises the snubbed lover.

In Alberto Tauro’s account, the pen of José Carlos Mariátegui could not be missing, who in his essay “Divagaciones de la Navidad”, published at the end of 1925 in the magazine “Mundial”, celebrates the ritual dimension of these holidays and contrasts the recollection familiar and intimate that the ideologue warned in Europe and the United States, to the street bustle of the classic Lima Christmas Eve.

Other examples of Christmas fiction would be disturbing to current sensibilities. For researcher Marcel Velásquez, a story that reveals the sinister character of our modernity is “King Herod,” a little-known story by Lastenia Larriva de Llona. “The story tells of a desire of an elite Lima girl who rejects dolls because she has become infatuated with having an indigenous child as a talking toy,” he explains. Thus, the story reveals servile relationships in all their horror and splendor: “But tell me, Lolita, my daughter, why do you want an ugly little mountain, like the one your godfather sends you? Don’t you have so many beautiful and elegant ladies and girls there? Dolores asked, pointing to her wrists. “I want the cholito because it is made of meat and it is alive: a little serranito like the one my cousin Rosita has, who does everything she wants,” writes the author in this text, published in 1919 as part of her book “Cuentos ”, the first book of stories in the modern sense written by a Peruvian writer, as the writer José Donayre Hoefken warns. At the end of the story, a moral fable and the girl’s repentance seeks to put things in order, as the violence and uprooting involved in having a “cholito” as a gift is revealed. According to the vision of the time, the conflict is resolved by inviting the mother and sister of the indigenous child to live in the wealthy Lima house, and participate in the capital’s modernity.

In the story “La Pascualina”, part of the book “Taita Cristo” (1964), Eleodoro Vargas Vicuña addresses the vicissitudes of rural life and the desire of young people to leave the farm, seeking opportunities in the towns. His story shows the differences in the ways of living Christmas between both worlds, suggested in the anguish of two girls and an innocent doll that would end up generating a tragedy. “Neither Santa Claus nor Pope God remember the poor,” says the narrator.

Among closer literary examples, we find the production for children of the novelist Oscar Colchado Lucio, and author of the endearing “Cholito”, who lives one of his adventures days before Christmas. The boy helps a woman look for her son, while mysterious attacks on the flocks begin to occur in the community, which the little protagonist manages to solve. What does not find a solution are the emergencies that occur in one of Fernando Ampuero’s most celebrated stories, “Weird Bitter,” which exposes the chaos experienced the night before Christmas in the Emergency Room of the Casimiro Ulloa Hospital. Among the numerous victims treated, doctors saved a Santa Claus stabbed by piranhas, frustrated suicides, beaten women, children with burns, shot police officers, injured drunks, passengers who were victims of murderous vans, among other cases assisted. In contemporary fiction, the author suggests, Christmas Eve seems more like a battlefield strewn with Christmas trees. “After childhood, as we know, Christmas tends to make us sad and even nostalgic. But today it makes us angry, since the corpses of Palestinians and Israelites are piling up just a stone’s throw from Bethlehem and Jerusalem. “These are not good times in those parts,” the writer tells us, thinking about the painful present.

We could add to the list poems by César Vallejo, Sebastián Salazar Bondy, Martín Adán, Juan Parra del Riego, or José Watanabe and, however, we are left with little knowledge of the Christmas examples in centuries of literary tradition. Perhaps we can find an answer in the essentially secular point of view of our community of authors, which explains their little interest in religious questions. The writer and critic José Carlos Yrigoyen imagines that, if our authors have not taken advantage of their celebratory spirit, perhaps it is due to what Ribeyro believed, that happiness is not a fruitful topic for those who write. And if they have not tried to show through it the inequality and injustice in the country, it may be due to the fear of falling into miserabilistic facilitation. Who knows. If we look for subjective answers, we could agree with Mariátegui when he wrote: “Some snow and some cold in these days of December would make us men a little more sentimental.”