ON
Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all
Peru broke and precipitated five travellers into the gulf below.
This bridge was on the highroad between Lima and Cuzco and hundreds
of persons passed over it every day. It had been woven of osier by
the Incas more than a century before and visitors to the city were
always led out to see it. It was a mere ladder of thin slats swung
out over the gorge, with handrails of dried vine. Horses and
coaches and chairs had to go down hundreds of feet below and pass
over the narrow torrent on rafts, but no one, not even the Viceroy,
not even the Archbishop of Lima, had descended with the baggage
rather than cross by the famous bridge of San Luis Rey. St. Louis
of France himself protected it, by his name and by the little mud
church on the further side. The bridge seemed to be among the
things that last forever; it was unthinkable that it should break.
The moment a Peruvian heard of the accident he signed himself and
made a mental calculation as to how recently he had crossed by it
and how soon he had intended crossing by it again. People wandered
about in a trance-like state, muttering; they had the hallucination
of seeing themselves falling into a gulf.
There was a great service in the
Cathedral. The bodies of the victims were approximately collected
and approximately separated from one another, and there was great
searching of hearts in the beautiful city of Lima. Servant girls
returned bracelets which they had stolen from their mistresses, and
usurers harangued their wives angrily, in defense of usury. Yet it
was rather strange that this event should have so impressed the
Limeans, for in that country those catastrophes which lawyers
shockingly call the "acts of God" were more than usually frequent.
Tidal waves were continually washing away cities; earthquakes
arrived every week and towers fell upon good men and women all the
time. Diseases were forever flitting in and out of the provinces
and old age carried away some of the most admirable citizens. That
is why it was so surprising that the Peruvians should have been
especially touched by the rent in the bridge of San Luis Rey.
Everyone was very deeply
impressed, but only one person did anything about it, and that was
Brother Juniper. By a series of coincidences so extraordinary that
one almost suspects the presence of some Intention, this little
red-haired Franciscan from Northern Italy happened to be in Peru
converting the Indians and happened to witness the accident.
It was a very hot noon, that
fatal noon, and coming around the shoulder of a hill Brother
Juniper stopped to wipe his forehead and to gaze upon the screen of
snowy peaks in the distance, then into the gorge below him filled
with the dark plumage of green trees and green birds and traversed
by its ladder of osier. Joy was in him; things were not going
badly. He had opened several little abandoned churches and the
Indians were crawling in to early Mass and groaning at the moment
of miracle as though their hearts would break. Perhaps it was the
pure air from the snows before him; perhaps it was the memory that
brushed him for a moment of the poem that bade him raise his eyes
to the helpful hills. At all events he felt at peace. Then his
glance fell upon the bridge, and at that moment a twanging noise
filled the air, as when the string of some musical instrument snaps
in a disused room, and he saw the bridge divide and fling five
gesticulating ants into the valley below.
Anyone else would have said to
himself with secret joy: "Within ten minutes myself...!" But it was
another thought that visited Brother Juniper: "Why did thin happen
to those five?" If there were any plan in the universe at all, if
there were any pattern in a human life, surely it could be
discovered mysteriously latent in those lives so suddenly cut off.
Either we live by accident and die by accident, or we live by plan
and die by plan, And on that instant Brother Juniper made the
resolve to inquire into the secret lives of those five persons,
that moment falling through the air, and to surprise the reason of
their taking off.
* * * * * * *
It seemed to Brother Juniper that
it was high time for theology to take its place among the exact
sciences and he had long intended putting it there. What he had
lacked hitherto was a laboratory. Oh, there had never been any lack
of specimens; any number of his charges had met calamity,—spiders
had stung them; their lungs had been touched; their houses had
burned down and things had happened to their children from which
one averts the mind. But these occasions of human woe had never
been quite fit for scientific examination. They had lacked what our
good savants were later to call proper control. The accident had
been dependent upon human error, for example, or had contained
elements of probability. But this collapse of the bridge of San
Luis Rey was a sheer Act of God. It afforded a perfect laboratory.
Here at last one could surprise His intentions in a pure
state.
You and I can see that coming
from anyone but Brother Juniper this plan would be the flower of a
perfect skepticism. It resembled the effort of those presumptuous
souls who wanted to walk on the pavements of Heaven and built the
Tower of Babel to get there. But to our Franciscan there was no
element of doubt in the experiment. He knew the answer. He merely
wanted to prove it, historically, mathematically, to his
converts,—poor obstinate converts, so slow to believe that their
pains were inserted into their lives for their own good. People
were always asking for good sound proofs; doubt springs eternal in
the human breast, even in countries where the Inquisition can read
your very thoughts in your eyes.
This was not the first time that
Brother Juniper had tried to resort to such methods. Often on the
long trips he had to make (scurrying from parish to parish, his
robe tucked up about his knees, for haste) he would fall to
dreaming of experiments that justify the ways of God to man. For
instance, a complete record of the Prayers for Rain and their
results. Often he had stood on the steps of one of his little
churches, his flock kneeling before him on the baked street. Often
he had stretched his arms to the sky and declaimed the splendid
ritual. Not often, but several times, he had felt the virtue enter
him and seen the little cloud forming on the horizon. But there
were many times when weeks went by ... but why think of them? It
was not himself he was trying to convince that rain and drought
were wisely apportioned.
Thus it was that the
determination rose within him at the moment of the accident. It
prompted him to busy himself for six years, knocking at all the
doors in Lima, asking thousands of questions, filling scores of
notebooks, in his effort at establishing the fact that each of the
five lost lives was a perfect whole. Everyone knew that he was
working on some sort of memorial of the accident and everyone was
very helpful and misleading. A few even knew the principal aim of
his activity and there were patrons in high places.
The result of all this diligence
was an enormous book, which as we shall see later, was publicly
burned on a beautiful Spring morning in the great square. But there
was a secret copy and after a great many years and without much
notice it found its way to the library of the University of San
Marco. There it lies between two great wooden covers collecting
dust in a cupboard. It deals with one after another of the victims
of the accident, cataloguing thousands of little facts and
anecdotes and testimonies, and concluding with a dignified passage
describing why God had settled upon that person and upon that day
for His demonstration of wisdom. Yet for all his diligence Brother
Juniper never knew the central passion of Doña María's life; nor of
Uncle Pio's, not even of Esteban's. And I, who claim to know so
much more, isn't it possible that even I have missed the very
spring within the spring?
Some say that we shall never know
and that to the gods we are like the flies that the boys kill on a
summer day, and some say, on the contrary, that the very sparrows
do not lose a feather that has not been brushed away by the finger
of God.
