Death Comes for the Archbishop, resumen

El resumen de la novela de Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop, o “La Muerte Viene por el Obispo”.

La narración se basa en dos figuras históricas contando sus vidas como clérigos católicos en Nuevo México. La narración tiene digresiones frecuentes. El narrador es en la tercera persona omnisciente. Cather incluye muchas historias ficticias de personajes históricos reales, incluyendo a Kit Carson, Manuel Antonio Chaves y el Papa Gregorio XVI.

En el prólogo, el Obispo Montferrand, un obispo francés que trabaja en el nuevo mundo, solicita tres cardenales en Roma para la recién creada diócesis de Nuevo México.

La acción entonces cambia al personaje principal, el obispo Jean Marie Latour, que viaja con el padre José Vaillant, de Sandusky, Ohio, a Nuevo México. En el momento de la partida Cincinnati es el final de la línea de ferrocarril al oeste, por lo que Latour debe viajar en barco hasta el Golfo de México, y desde allí por tierra a Nuevo México, un viaje que lleva un año entero.

The Trip

El viaje del padre Latour en aquellos días es sacrificado: enfermedades, sed, peligros de ataques de bandidos, indios, etc. Se sustenta en el sacrificio de Jesús para seguir adelante. Del clásico de Willa Cather Death Comes for the Archbishop.

On a long caravan trip across Texas this man had had some experience of thirst, as the party with which he travelled was several times put on a meagre water ration for days together.  But he had not suffered then as he did now.  Since morning he had had a feeling of illness; the taste of fever in his mouth, and alarming seizures of vertigo.  As these conical hills pressed closer and closer upon him, he began to wonder whether his long travel from the mountains of Auvergne were possibly to end here.  He reminded himself of that cry, extracted from his Saviour on the Cross, "J'ai soif!"  Of all our Lord's physical sufferings, only one, "I thirst," rose to His lips.  Empowered by long training, the young priest removed himself from his own consciousness and meditated upon the anguish of his Lord.  The Passion of Jesus became for him the only reality; the need of his own body was but a part of that conception.

His mare stumbled, breaking his mood of contemplation.  He was sorrier for his beasts than for himself.  He, supposed to be the intelligence of the party, had got the poor animals into this interminable desert of ovens.  He was afraid he had been absent-minded, had been pondering his problem instead of leading the way.

Death Comes for the Archbishop

Death Comes for the Archbishop es una novela de Willa Cather publicada en 1927. Trata sobre los intentos de un obispo y de un cura de establecer una diócesis en New Mexico. Cather concibió la idea de la novela en un viaje al sur en 1912.

One afternoon in the autumn of 1851 a solitary horseman, followed by a pack-mule, was pushing through an arid stretch of country somewhere in central New Mexico.  He had lost his way, and was trying to get back to the trail, with only his compass and his sense of direction for guides. The difficulty was that the country in which he found himself was so featureless--or rather, that it was crowded with features, all exactly alike. As far as he could see, on every side, the landscape was filled up with monotonous red sand-hills, not much larger than haycocks, and very much the shape of haycocks. One could not have believed that in the number of square miles a man is able to sweep with the eye there could be so many uniform red hills. He had been riding among them since early morning, and the look of the country had no more changed than if he had stood still. He must have travelled through thirty miles of these conical red hills, winding his way in the narrow cracks between them, and he had begun to think that he would never see anything else. They were so exactly like one another that he seemed to be wandering in some geometrical nightmare; flattened cones, they were, more the shape of Mexican ovens than haycocks-- yes, exactly the shape of Mexican ovens, red as brick-dust, and naked of vegetation except for small juniper trees. And the