Whispers from the Past: Finding Peace in Mortality — Epoche B2
A cold building on Calle Londres The church of San Francisco stands at the top of the Alameda in Santiago de Chile, and the museum off its cloister holds fifty-four seventeenth-century canvases of the life of Saint Francis; I went in to sit down for ten minutes and stayed an hour, mostly looking at skulls. I had gone to Santiago for work and had one free afternoon, which I spent doing the thing I always do in an unfamiliar city: walking until my feet complained and then sitting down in the first quiet building I could find. The streets behind the church turned out to be the strangest part of the day, for a reason I did not understand until later. Barrio París-Londres is two short cobbled streets of European-style townhouses, laid out from 1922 on land that had been the Franciscan friars' orchard, and it takes about four minutes to walk the whole of it. Then you step back onto an eight-lane avenue and the twentieth century resumes. Inside, the church is colder than the street and smells of wax and old wood. San Francisco is the oldest surviving building in the city — the stone church was begun in the 1580s — and the claim is really a claim about earthquakes. Santiago sits above the boundary where the Nazca plate slides beneath the South American one, and the record of what that produces is unambiguous: the earthquake of May 1647 flattened most of the colonial city, and further shocks in 1730, 1822 and 1906 took down what had been rebuilt. San Francisco survived each time in part and was patched each time; the tower you see now is a nineteenth-century replacement, built by the Chilean architect Fermín Vivaceta in 1857 after its predecessors fell. "Oldest surviving" means the walls kept standing while nearly everything around them did not. The canvases in the cloister museum were not painted in Chile. They came from the workshops of Cusco, over two thousand kilometres north in the Peruvian Andes, and were carried south; the series is attributed to the Cusco painter Juan Zapaca Inga and dated to the 1680s. José de Mesa and Teresa Gisbert's two-volume history of Cusco painting established how those workshops operated, and the mechanism matters for what follows: the painters, largely indigenous and mestizo, worked from European engravings sent out from Antwerp and Seville, copying compositions print by print and then adding local conventions of their own, most visibly the flat gold patterning applied over finished robes. What arrived in Santiago was therefore a European visual argument, transmitted on paper, executed in the Andes. What the paintings are saying Having described where the pictures came from, I should say what is actually in them, because that is what kept me on the bench. What I had not expected was how much of colonial religious art is preoccupied with dying. Skulls held in the hand or set on a desk, hourglasses with the sand nearly through, candles just snuffed with the smoke still rising, flowers already past their best. This is a fixed vocabulary with a name. Memento mori is Latin for "remember that you must die", and each object in the list encodes one step of that reminder: the skull is what you will become, the hourglass is that the time is finite and running, the extinguished candle is that the end is abrupt rather than gradual, the wilting flower is that the same decay is going on in everything that currently looks alive. The related term is vanitas , from the opening of Ecclesiastes — "vanity of vanities, all is vanity" — where the Latin vanitas means emptiness rather than conceit: not that worldly things are shameful, but that they do not last. Baroque Europe systematised these symbols in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and because the Cusco workshops were working from European prints, the whole apparatus travelled intact to a continent where its makers had their own, quite different funerary traditions. It is not a subtle message and it was not intended to be. Four minutes away, a second kind of dying Now the reason those two streets were the strangest part of the day, and the turn this essay actually rests on. The barrio is protected as a zona típica under Chile's national monuments law, Ley 17.288 of 1970, which is why it looks preserved. At Londres 38 — a house you would walk past without noticing, on the street named after London — the Chilean secret police, the DINA, ran a detention and torture centre from late 1973, in the months after the coup that overthrew Salvador Allende. The people held there were interrogated and many were never seen again. What the state did at that address was established in public by the National Commission for Truth and Reconciliation chaired by Raúl Rettig, whose 1991 Informe de la Comisión Nacional de Verdad y Reconciliación documented more than two thousand deaths and disappearances by name. Outside the building, the names and ages of those taken there and never returned are now set into the paving stones, so that you read them with your feet. So within a four-minute walk there are two ways of handling death. One is a room of paintings that will not let you look away from it, commissioned by people for whom the reminder was the point. The other is a house designed so that what happened inside it would leave no record at all, and which required a national commission and thirty years to become sayable. I am not proposing that the paintings would have prevented anything. But it does make the modern preference concrete: the twentieth century's characteristic move was not to argue with death but to put it somewhere it could not be seen. Why would anyone want this on the wall? My first reaction in the museum, before any of that, was straightforwardly modern: this is morbid, and the people who commissioned it were living in a world so short of medicine and so full of plague that they had no choice but to make peace with death. We, by contrast, have arranged our lives so that we can decline the subject entirely. That arrangement