The War Of The End Of The World - Mario Vargas Llosa [27]
Maria Quadrado’s cave became a shrine, and along with the Calvary, the place most frequently visited by pilgrims. As the months went by, she began little by little to decorate it. She made different-colored paints from the juice of plants, mineral powders, and the blood of cochineal insects (used by tailors to dye garments). Against a blue background meant to represent the firmament, she painted the objects associated with Christ’s Passion: the nails driven into the palms of His hands and His feet; the cross He bore on His back and on which He died; the crown of thorns that pierced His temples; the tunic of His martyrdom; the centurion’s lance that penetrated His flesh; the hammer with which the nails were driven in; the lash that whipped Him; the sponge from which He drank the sour wine; the dice with which the impious soldiers played at His feet; and the purse with the pieces of silver that Judas was given as payment for His betrayal. She also painted the star that guided the Three Kings and the shepherds to Bethlehem and a Sacred Heart transpierced by a sword. And she made an altar and a cupboard to store veils for the use of the penitents and give them a place to hang ex-votos. She slept at the foot of the altar on a straw pallet.
Her goodness and devotion made her beloved of the townspeople of Monte Santo, who adopted her as though she had lived there all her life. Soon children began to call her godmother and dogs commenced to allow her to enter houses and yards without barking at her. Her life was devoted to God and serving others. She spent hours at the bedside of the sick, bathing their foreheads with water and praying for them. She helped midwives care for women in childbirth and watched over the little ones of neighbor women obliged to be absent from their homes. She willingly offered to do the most thankless tasks, such as aiding old people too helpless to attend to calls of nature by themselves. Girls of marriageable age asked her advice about their suitors, and boys courting a girl begged her to intercede with their sweetheart’s parents if the latter were reluctant to consent to the marriage. She reconciled estranged couples, and women whose husbands tried to beat them because they were lazy or to kill them because they’d committed adultery hastened to take shelter in her cave, knowing that with her as their protectress no man in Monte Santo would dare lay a finger on them. She ate whatever was given her out of charity, so little that the food left in her grotto by the faithful was always more than enough, and each afternoon found her sharing what was left over with the poor. She also divided among them the clothes that had been given her, and in fair weather and foul no one ever saw her wearing anything but the esparto-cloth sack full of holes in which she had arrived.
Her relationship, on the other hand, with the missionaries of the Massacará mission, who came to Monte Santo to celebrate Mass in the Church of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, was not a warm one. They kept warning people against the wrong sort of religiosity, the sort that escaped the control of the Church, pointing out as an example the Pedras Encantadas, in the region of As Flores, in Pernambuco, where the heretic João Ferreira and a group of proselytes had sprinkled the aforementioned stones with the blood of dozens of persons (among them hers), believing that in this way they would break the spell that had been cast upon King Dom Sebastião, a ruler of Portugal who had mysteriously disappeared while on crusade against the Moors, who would bring back to life those who had met their death in the final battle and lead their way to heaven. To the missionaries of Massacará, Maria Quadrado represented a borderline case, verging on heresy. She for her part knelt as the missionaries