In his 1611 Treasury of the Castilian or Spanish Language, Sebastián de Covarrubias began his definition of the word duende as follows: “It is one of the spirits of those who fell with Lucifer, of which some fell to the depths, others remained in the airy region, and some [landed] upon the surface of the Earth, as it is commonly held. These tend to be found inside houses and among mountains and in caves, frightening with their occasional apparitions, taking on fantastic shapes.”Footnote 1 Over a century later, the 1732 Diccionario de autoridades was more concise; a duende was simply “a species of hobgoblin or demon that, as the name suggests, ordinarily infests houses.”Footnote 2 Had Enlightenment reduced one of Lucifer's minions to a household sprite?
In recounting the notable events of the year 1653, Potosí native and early eighteenth-century historian Bartolomé Arzáns de Orsúa y Vela included the following story in a huge manuscript he titled Historia de la Villa Imperial de Potosí, composed between 1705 and 1736. The story was separated from the larger entry for the year 1653, translated into English by Frances López-Morillas, and given the title “The Spook” by the North American historian R. C. Padden in his 1975 abridgement of Arzáns, called Tales of Potosí. Here it is in full:
There lived in this city of Potosí a Negro named Antonio Bran de Brizuela, a native of the town and the slave of Don Pedro Brizuela, a rich ore refiner of the Ribera [Potosí’s millstream]. This Negro disturbed the peace of the whole town with his evildoing and depredations. He was called “the Spook” [El Duende], for when the townspeople least expected it he would enter their houses and cause great losses. He was reckless to the last degree, fighting equally well on foot and on horseback, and for this reason he was feared by the Spaniards. The unfortunate womenfolk of the town dared not stir out of their houses from seven o'clock in the evening onwards, for he had raped many on the streets.
One day when President Nestares was standing on his balcony in the public square he saw that this Negro, the Spook, was beating a poor Peruvian stranger to the city; he became very angry, shouting that the Negro must be killed and that he commanded it in His Majesty's name. At once more than two hundred men of various nations appeared in the plaza with swords drawn to attack him. But the Negro (whom everyone believed to be an agent of Satan) defended himself against all those Spaniards with a huge sword he carried, stabbing at all he could reach and moving back step by step until he gained sanctuary in the church of the Society of Jesus. The chief magistrate as well as lesser magistrates had already issued proclamations against his life, for one night he had attacked them all and put them to flight.
At last, when God the supreme judge was weary and no longer willing to suffer the abominations of this sinner, He caused the Negro to pay for them with his life by falling into the hands of the law. And so it happened that one night he plotted with a maidservant for her to hide him under her mistress's bed without the knowledge of anyone so that when all were asleep he might kill that noble lady and steal everything that was in the house.
By divine intervention while the lady was lying in bed and before she had fallen asleep, she heard a noise under the bed; suspecting some evil (but under the pretext of feeling unwell), she got up in her nightgown, went out to the patio, and swiftly and secretly called for the aid of some neighbors; for though this lady was married her husband was away from the city on that occasion. Several men went in and, not knowing who was there, surrounded the bed with weapons in their hands, whereupon the Spook attacked them like a fearsome wild beast, with dagger in hand, threatening death to the white men. They struck at him again and again and at last captured him; tying him hand and foot, they notified the chief magistrate, Don Luis Pimentel, who came posthaste and took him to jail. After providing him with a confessor the chief magistrate had him garroted. At daybreak his body appeared hanging from the balcony of the cabildo, to the considerable satisfaction of the whole city.Footnote 3
López-Morillas's translation captures Arzáns's rhythm and tone, but the title Padden chose (his translation of the word duende) is strange. Arzáns did not give a title to this “tale.” It was simply among the last of 1653's most memorable occurrences (next came Potosí’s cross-dressed “Warrior Maidens,” as Padden dubbed them).
For Arzáns, El Duende was no “spook.” He was Covarrubias's demon, a fearless fallen angel who roamed the city unchecked, stabbing men and violating women, appearing inside houses in the dead of night. Antonio Bran de Brizuela, we are told, terrorized Potosí. More humanly, Arzáns calls El Duende “a native of the town,” a Potosí creole, although the surname Bran suggests he was a native of Upper Guinea, or identified with slaves from this region of West Africa. Was there ever such a man as El Duende in seventeenth-century Potosí?
I read Tales of Potosí with rapt fascination as a college student and despite the wild stories of witches’ sabbaths, gangland slayings, and mineshaft miracles that Padden had culled from Arzáns's monumental History, the story of El Duende stuck with me. It was as fantastic as it was awful. Despite the derogatory connotations, “The Spook” seemed a potentially ironic name for such an outsized villain, a twist on racist notions of fear and loathing.
The tale was a cipher, too, because there seemed to be so little known about people of African descent in Potosí, even at its height around the turn of the seventeenth century, or in this case at the start of its steep decline, when the mines of the Cerro Rico faltered, indigenous workers grew scarce, and refinery owners fell deep into debt, circa 1650.Footnote 4 Arzáns mentions “Afro-potosinos” only sparingly, usually as unnamed and barely noticed servants, making El Duende stand out even more. Peter Bakewell's rich 1988 biography of Potosí silver merchant and mining entrepreneur Antonio López de Quiroga, who arrived in the Andes from Galicia in 1648, addressed the issue of Potosí’s black presence briefly after starting his own tale of Potosí with the execution of an enslaved man not unlike the legendary hell-raiser El Duende in 1657.Footnote 5
After reading Bakewell, I wondered if Arzáns's El Duende had been inspired by the life and times of this ill-fated slave, Juan Luis Osorio, since he had confessed to numerous murders and assaults before his hideous execution (more hideous than usual in that the executioner climbed onto his shoulders to speed strangulation). But even if El Duende was a figment of Arzáns's imagination, what was the reader of his brief “tale,” tucked into the end of an already eventful and baleful year, expected to take away as lesson?
What the Officials Declared
I found myself running out of time while in the Archive of the Indies in Seville during a short research trip in 2012. I had come to tie up loose ends after a not-quite-long-enough summer visit in which I had become obsessed with the calamitous Potosí mint scandal that broke in 1649.Footnote 6 Potosinos with access to the mint machinery had been debasing coins for nearly a decade, causing havoc for the Spanish treasury and upsetting global exchanges as far away as the pepper fields of Java. Arzáns describes the scandal's prosecutor at length in the chapters preceding the story of El Duende and he labels him the third divine scourge that brought the Imperial Villa to its knees (“scourge one” was the so-called Basque-Vicuña War of the early 1620s and “scourge two” was the great flood of 1626).
To sort out “scourge three” I was rifling through dozens of bundles of mid seventeenth-century audits and criminal cases instigated by the “president” identified by Arzáns in the opening passage, Dr. Francisco de Nestares Marín. The latter had served as an inquisitor in Galicia and later Valladolid prior to being named Inspector-General of the Potosí Mint and also President of the Audiencia of Charcas, the regional circuit court based in nearby Chuquisaca. On my last day in the archives, I came across a curious item.
At the back of a large pile of documents that included the residencia or investigative audit of Potosí corregidor Juan de Velarde y Treviño were papers relating to the brief tenure of his replacement, don Luis de Sotomayor Pimentel, the magistrate named by Arzáns.Footnote 7 The small batch of papers consisted of appeals of Pimentel's judicial decisions in 1651 and 1652 regarding persons who came into his custody. The first pertained to an enslaved man who was apprehended and sent to work in the royal mint after his master had failed to repay a debt for his purchase price. President Nestares Marín stepped in and brokered a settlement in 1652. Next was the case of a shoemaker jailed for his master's debts, followed by a dispute over the retail price of 1,000 baskets of coca leaf.
Last was a wrongful death suit filed on Wednesday, October 2, 1652 (at four in the afternoon, according to the alert scribe) by don Pedro de Brizuela. This is the name of El Duende's master, as given by Arzáns, mentioned above.Footnote 8 If the scribe's date could be trusted, Arzáns was off by one year in his Historia, as he placed events in 1653. Speaking in the past tense, Brizuela said he was the owner of the slave Juan Peres, “who by an evil name they called El Duende” (por mal nombre llamaban el Duende). He went on to say that Peres had been apprehended in a scuffle one night in early April 1652 and sentenced to death and executed that same night. Already we see parts of Arzáns's tale verified, although the name Antonio Bran does not appear; in its place is that of Juan Peres.
The trouble started on the evening of April 6 when Corregidor Pimentel responded to a complaint. As Brizuela put it, “There had been noise of stone-throwing and of injuries” at the house of one Pedro de Arenas Marrón, along with claims that “the free colored man Nicolás de Contreras had entered with the aim of killing the said Pedro de Arenas and of robbing him.” And it was claimed, said Brizuela, “that my slave was there outside as armed backup [espaldas], along with others who—had the said corregidor not arrived in time—would have put the thing in execution.” Believing thus—that together Contreras and El Duende would have somehow managed to rob and murder Pedro de Arenas Marrón had he not arrived to save the day—Pimentel arrested El Duende and also Nicolás de Contreras, and had both of them executed in the city jail before dawn.
Pimentel denied wrongdoing in enacting summary justice in the wee hours of April 6–7, 1652, but he provided copies of testimonies taken that night, along with the sworn “confessions” of Contreras and El Duende. These testimonies, though brief, suggest sources for Arzáns's quasi-mythical remembering of the story. They also reveal something more: the existence of a quasi-autonomous African-born and African-descended subculture in mid seventeenth-century Potosí that had at least some city elites and royal authorities “spooked.”
The “free black” Nicolás de Contreras may have been a housebreaker with murder in mind, but El Duende's owner Brizuela argued against the idea.Footnote 9 He said that Contreras was widely known to have been the lover of an enslaved mulatto woman who served in the household of Pedro de Arenas Marrón. Called “María mulata” and “la mulata Marota” in these testimonies, she was probably María de Tapia, purchased by Pedro de Arenas in 1649 according to a sale record.Footnote 10 Contreras was known to sneak into the house to sleep with María, and this night was another such occasion: “As she entered while the said Pedro de Arenas was eating supper, putting the black men who attended the table to screen her as they knew full well of the said concubinage and that his having entered he sought no other end, and reason shows it thus, given the hour, which had not even reached nine at night.”
The presumption was that if Contreras had come to kill his girlfriend's master he would have sneaked in later at night, and not at the dinner hour when he could hide behind the comings and goings of others, specifically the household slaves who chose to shield him. Brizuela added that at this time his slave, alias El Duende, was nearby drinking with “other slaves, his friends” at the tavern or pulpería of Diego Rodríguez Chacón. They had all just returned from some sort of standoff at Tiopampa, a plain at the north edge of town, the two “challengers” having patched up their differences.Footnote 11 It is pure speculation, but these men may have been sparring confraternity leaders, perhaps disputing precedence in the previous week's Easter celebrations. Records for Potosí’s non-Spanish confraternities are very scarce, although they are often mentioned in relaciones.
Brizuela called this “the true fact of what happened and nothing more,” yet the interim corregidor had had the gall to “impetuously garrote [El Duende, or Juan Peres], depriving me of my service, he being the best slave there was in this land.” Brizuela said he had been offered 1,000 pesos for El Duende on numerous occasions, and that his slave had no criminal record.Footnote 12 He ended his petition by saying that in addition to justice, he sought compensation for the 1,000 pesos he had lost.
The next page sewn into the file suggests that Brizuela's petition then landed in the hands of President Nestares Marín. The powerful visitador refrained from comment, but in an equivalent of modern bullet formatting he listed the men named as culprits and/or victims in the testimonies: Juan Peres el Duende = murió; Nicolás de Contreras = murió; Juan Michel = ; Juan mulatto = ; un negro que llaman quarterón = ; and otro negro Bracamonte = . The signs without results were Nestares Marín's loose ends. The charge? He wrote: “Having wanted to kill Pedro de Arenas and other causes.” It is dangerous to attach meaning to silences, but this brief notation in Nestares Marín's hand seems to indicate that Potosí’s most punishing and thorough royal investigator to date—Arzáns's third and final divine scourge, thanks to his violent reform of the mint— did not care much about the summary executions of El Duende and Nicolás de Contreras. Like the careful inquisitor he had learned to be in Galicia and Valladolid, he apparently wanted to know more about the men who had gotten away.Footnote 13 Who were they?
Next in the file is the cabeza de proceso or initial testimony from April 6, 1652, that Pimentel had an accompanying scribe write up. It begins by saying that the noises and word of injuries emanating from the corner by Chacón's tavern had been caused by the free black Nicolás de Contreras, who had entered the house of Pedro de Arenas and was caught in bed there with a mulata, and in another wording “in the boudoir or recámara of the said house” “with desire to kill” Arenas and “to steal his silver.” For these purposes he allegedly had “as backup [espaldas] El Duende and others who with arms were gathered outside.”
But Arenas managed to capture Contreras and as he was binding him, Contreras yelled to his companions, which led them to try to break down the door to the house to come to his aid. They allegedly yelled, “We'll set this place on fire! Death to the cuckold Jews inside!” We know from records and testimonies of the Basque-Vicuña conflicts of the 1620s that these were common insults among men of European descent in Potosí.Footnote 14 A slave of Arenas named Vila apparently intervened and got stabbed. This was when Pimentel says he arrived to save the day.
So much for the corregidor's summary. Next is the testimony of the aggrieved householder, 44-year-old Pedro de Arenas Marrón, taken only an hour after the hullaballoo—again, if we may trust the scribe. Here is a close paraphrase of his testimony: Arenas said he was getting undressed for bed when his wife appeared and told him that one of her enslaved black women [negras] said there was a black man [negro] hiding in the boudoir. With this he asked for his sword. At this time his wife called out to a neighbor, the tavern owner Diego Rodríguez Chacón, who came with his sword, and together these men entered the chamber looking for the intruder and found Nicolás de Contreras naked [desnudo] and in bed with the mulata slave. Her name is missing here due to deterioration of the document but later she is called María.
Contreras hid but they found him, and he “tried to defend himself as long as he could,” but the two men bound him and began to whip him and at his first cry there arrived at the door many “black men.” Amid these he heard the voice of El Duende and another creole called Quarterón [quadroon] “who is alcalde of the blacks and compañero of naga [a confraternity?].” And they and the others yelled: “Death to these cuckold Jews! Set fire and light up that house!” And they banged hard on the door, shouting that the man inside, their friend, was being stabbed.
In the midst of this the magistrate Pimentel arrived, with Arenas and Chacón fearing (according to Arenas) that they would be killed “due to the multitude of blacks that were in the street.” The men in the street then allegedly stabbed one of Arenas's slaves as he arrived to intervene. Arenas said that the injured slave was in a Potosí hospital in grave condition. Arenas added that Contreras had said “Sir, do not kill me or tie me up” [Señor, no me mates ni amarres]. Arenas went on to claim that Contreras had not been sleeping with the mulata María but rather that he had taken off his clothes “to dissimulate” once he had been spotted. His real aim was to steal a quantity of silver ingots (piñas) stored in the chamber. His wife had gone to the darkened room and yelled “Negro, man, or whoever you are, get out, don't get yourself caught by my husband!” [Negro, hombre, o quien eres, sal fuera, no te coxa mi marido.] Arenas claimed that this was when Contreras stripped off his clothes to act like a surprised lover. Arenas said the “other blacks” knew of this planned theft, and were outside “as [armed] backup.”
An hour and a half after the event, 36-year-old neighbor Juan Sánchez Condeso testified. He offered a more complex story. Sánchez said he had been in his house, which abutted the patio of the widow Juana Martínez, when someone banged on his door and told him to come out. He went immediately to Chacón's tavern where he found eight or ten black men, and also his [apparently Chacón's] wife and Pedro de Arenas's wife “quite stirred up and afflicted” [muy turbadas y afligidas], and here he learned of the black man hiding in the Arenas residence. He and the women went to the door of Arenas's house, but the female slave inside said she had been told by her master not to open up for anyone.
So Sánchez said he grabbed a neighbor, Juan Pérez de Guzmán, and they went around back to climb a wall and jump across a roof to get to Arenas's patio, where they found Arenas and Chacón with “a black being forcibly bound” [un negro mecho amarrado]. They were about finished with tying him up for a whipping. Sánchez asked what for, and Arenas—here called Marrón—said it was because he had entered the house to rob and kill. And once the intruder received the first lashes, Marrón had said to him: “Come here, Negro. Didn't you say you had come in here to kill me?” [Ven acá negro, no dixo este que me avias entrado a matar], “to which he responded in fear …” [Torn page!].
And then Sánchez said he went outside and was wounded in the right eye as “the blacks” tried to break down the door. He said also that he recognized El Duende by his voice and also the black “alcalde” El Cuarterón. Sánchez concluded his testimony by identifying El Duende as the ringleader, the one who yelled various injurious words and oaths. After El Duende's remarks about “cuckold Jews,” he allegedly said “Whippings take place on Saturday [En sábado azotan].” Sánchez added that the men backed off, only to return “in greater force” [con más fuerza].
What the House Slaves Saw (or Said they Saw)
Next to testify was Arenas's slave Antonio de Contreras, described as a 26-year-old mulatto. The documents do not suggest he was related to the intruder Nicolás de Contreras. Antonio said that he had just gone to bed near the kitchen at around 9 or 10 p.m., while his master was still eating supper. Suddenly, his female master, Arenas's wife, doña María de Quiñones, came in to tell her husband: “Look, there may be someone in the boudoir” [Mirase que había gente en la recámara]. And since Antonio de Contreras was near the supper table she told him to go call Chacón, the tavernkeeper, which he did, and in the tavern across the street he saw El Duende, “the black” Juan Michel, El Cuarterón “who goes about with the staff of office” [que anda con bara], and a mulatto from the royal mint called Pascual, “and they were drinking with other black men whom this witness did not know.”
Antonio de Contreras said he then returned to the house with Chacón, and with his master Arenas they discovered the “free black Nicolás” under the bed canopy [pabellón] of the mulata slave María. He had at the head of the bed an unsheathed sword, and when he grabbed it, his master asked why he had come into the boudoir, and Nicolás replied “to kill … [page torn].” And then, hearing his cries, the “other blacks” came to break down the door, yelling threats and saying “Let that black go!” At this point the corregidor arrived with his guards and they managed to arrest El Duende and Nicolás de Contreras, taking them off to jail. But before this, one of the men by the door had managed to stab the house slave Juan de Vila when he tried to intervene; he was the one in the hospital.
Next to testify was a slave belonging to Arenas's wife María de Quiñones. She was Magdalena Angola, described as black [negra] and about 30 years old. She said that during supper a black man had entered the boudoir from the back, and that it was her mistress, María de Quiñones, who had heard the noise first and told her to investigate. She found the “free black Nicolás” naked in bed with “his companion” [su compañera] “María mulata,” and with his sword unsheathed at the head of the bed, which is what prompted her to back out of the room.
María de Quiñones alerted her husband, and he and Magdalena Angola's “compañero” (the above-mentioned Antonio de Contreras, who was the immediately previous deponent), went to get the neighbor Chacón. Together, she said, they entered the boudoir and Arenas asked Nicolás de Contreras why he was there and he said: “I will tell the truth: I came in to kill you, sir” [Yo diré la verdad, a matarte entré, señor]. Contreras was quickly disarmed, then bound for a whipping, and this started the ruckus in the street. Magdalena Angola said that she did not know any of the black men who were gathered outside, and when prompted she added that she had declared truthfully, and not simply because she was the slave of Pedro de Arenas Marrón.
Arenas's wife did not testify, but it appears she was never in danger of being killed by Contreras, although Arzáns later claimed that such was El Duende's last plotted crime (his final “abomination”). Arzáns seems to have been obsessed with femicide; his History is peppered with instances of women being abducted and murdered, their corpses discovered by chance in the countryside or beneath houses. The “true” story of El Duende, however, includes only consensual sex, feigned or implied, that is, between Contreras [rather than Juan Peres] and his girlfriend María, and only man-on-man violence. According to testimony, no women were assaulted or killed.
What the Neighbors Saw (or Said they Saw)
Next up was tavern owner Diego Rodríguez Chacón, age 44. He said that around 9:00 p.m. The Ghost and Quadroon, (El Duende and Cuarterón), were in his tavern drinking when a mulatto slave of his neighbor (Antonio de Contreras, introduced above) entered, asking for help. Rodríguez Chacón grabbed his cape and sword and went out to the street, where he found María de Quiñones, who told him to go to her house, which he entered with the mulatto slave, who shut the door behind them. Inside his neighbor's boudoir they found “the free creole Nicolás.” Rodríguez Chacón said nothing about the latter's being questioned, noting only that they took him to the patio where he was bound and whipped. His cries drew the attention of “the blacks” in his tavern across the street, who then gathered to force the door open to help Contreras. Rodríguez Chacón added that when the corregidor arrived everyone escaped except Contreras, who was already bound, and El Duende, who was discovered hiding in the boarding house (aposento) of Juan Rodríguez de Freytas. It is unclear how far away this house was.
Next to testify was shoemaker Gregorio Martínez de Silva, 23. He said his house faced the patio next to the false door of the Jesuit church or Compañía, and that Catalina, a slave of the tavernkeeper Rodríguez Chacón,’ (this is the first mention we have of her) came knocking saying that her master wanted everyone advised of trouble. So Martínez de Silva went to the tavern, where he did not find Rodríguez Chacón, who had left, but did find Chacón's wife, Juana Zapata, talking to her troubled neighbor, María de Quiñones. Martínez de Silva waited at the tavern while two other neighbors climbed into Arenas's patio from the roof around back.
Notably, Martínez de Silva claimed that the black men in the tavern were completely unaware of this activity. He knew because he himself had waited inside by the fireplace with Arenas's slave Juan de Vila, who was later injured. Martínez de Silva said that once the men heard Contreras's cries someone exclaimed: “They're mistreating [maltratando] our friend,” and they all went outside and approached the door, which they kicked and struck “with the swords they carried in their hands.” Then they declared, “El Duende has been wounded! Death to these dogs in this house!” Martínez de Silva says he then ran to the house of the magistrate, leaving Vila to face the crowd, and (apparently looking back) he saw them stick him with a sword “near the genital area” [hacia la berija]. Silva ended his testimony by adding that El Duende appeared to have been captured by chance discovery after everyone fled.
What the Condemned Men Said They Did
Next is the “confession”—described as such in the document—of Nicolás de Contreras, taken later that same night, April 6, 1652, before Corregidor Pimentel and a scribe. Contreras said he was 21, free, and a native of Lima. According to the scribe, the corregidor declared Contreras over the age of 25 and called for the questioning to proceed (a free man under 25 was considered a legal minor). Contreras denied the charge that he had entered Arenas's house to rob and kill. This was a conjugal visit, not the first, with the woman he called “la mulata Marota.” He said he sneaked in, shielded by a mulatto slave belonging to Arenas's brother Lorenzo, who had come over for dinner. He had never stolen anything, but had simply come to sleep with his girlfriend.
Here Nicolás de Contreras added a curious side story only hinted at thus far. He said that he had been with El Duende and others, and that “this evening he had gone with him to El Tio (Tiopampa) to a dispute [a una pendencia] that the above-said had had with a black belonging to Santiago de Laris [a wealthy Basque refinery owner] called Juancho.” And with them was El Duende's friend Juancho Michel (a former mint slave). And the other man, the other Juancho, came accompanied by “the black called Quadroon” [el negro Cuarterón], who is commander of the guard [que es quadrillero], plus a tall black man who belongs to Casanova (presumably the silver merchant recently convicted by Nestares Marín for mint fraud), and a black man from the mint called Gregorio, from the shop floor [hornaza] of Diego Moro. They pulled out their swords and Bracamonte, a black man belonging to don Rodrigo de Campusano, came along with the one belonging to Santiago de Laris (the first Juancho above), and he [Bracamonte] took them by the hands. They made friends, with which they ended the dispute [pendencia].”
“And this confessant then went to the house of Rodrigo Campusano with Bracamonte, Cuarterón, and El Duende, and from there, where he bade them farewell, he went on to the house of Captain Martín Gaspar de Vargas in search of a mulatto slave of his to return some Easter candles (cirios) that he had lent him during Holy Week. He did not find him so he left and went to Chacón's tavern, where he met his “comrades” [camaradas], “and they invited him to share some wine, and having drunk it,” he said goodbye and sneaked into the house across the street to be with his female companion. The last detail Contreras added was to say that the men who had climbed into the patio from the roof went to defend the door with shotguns kept ready in Arenas's house.
Next is the confession, putative, of El Duende. The corregidor asked him to identify himself and state his age. He claimed that he was Juan Peres, a wine-jug maker [botijero], born in Arequipa. Defying the magistrate, El Duende said he was 14 or 15 years old. The corregidor said he was clearly over 30, and ordered the “confession” to go on. According to the scribe, El Duende said he did not know why he had been jailed, nor did he know the persons who had brought him there. He then denied having been in the company of Nicolás de Contreras that night, and he repeated his denial even after having been read Contreras's full statement. Frustrated, the corregidor ordered Contreras brought into the same cell and asked him to repeat his statement, then turned and asked El Duende again where he had been that night and with whom. Again El Duende denied having been in Contreras's company.
Contreras was returned to his cell, and El Duende admitted having been in Chacón's tavern until about 9 p.m. with Juan de Vila (the slave of the householder across the street who was wounded), and Juan Michel, El Cuarterón, “a mulatto [called] Juan who belongs to a gentleman who comes from Cusco and who lives at the inn [tambo] of Las Carangas.”Footnote 15 Asked if he had heard cries, El Duende said no, but he had noticed some Spaniards by the door of Arenas Marrón's house and he went up to it, presumably to peek inside, and as he did so someone stabbed him through an opening in the door, hitting him near the belly button. He denied saying or shouting the “evil” words attributed to him by several witnesses.
The Corregidor Decides the Case
This was the end of it: Corregidor Pimentel declared both Nicolás de Contreras and El Duende guilty, although of what specific crimes he does not say (presumably, based on the claim of Nestares Marín “for having wanted to kill Pedro de Arenas and other causes”—although this claim came later). Pimentel then sentenced both men to an immediate death for disturbing “the public peace and for the example to other persons and especially the blacks of whom there are a great many in this Villa and very insolent and villainous, and in troops and with a rearguard and [with] other [sic] arms they go about at night among the streets committing serious crimes, going out together and causing other troubles that must be stopped.”Footnote 16
For his alleged crimes and presumably for being one of Potosí’s “insolent and villainous blacks,” Nicolás de Contreras was sentenced to be throttled in the municipal jail, after which his body was to be hung from the balcony of the town council building until the corregidor ordered it removed. There would be no appeals, and no mercy. According to the scribe, Contreras was removed from his cell at approximately 3:30 a.m. and immediately garroted “on the bars of the wooden grating of the jail where he was held prisoner until he died naturally according to appearances” [en las verjas de la rexa de madera de la carcel donde esta preso hasta que murió naturalmente al parecer].
Next came the corregidor's death sentence for El Duende, which stated that he had tried to stick his sword through the door of Arenas's house in an attempt to kill the “Spaniards” inside. This was a reversal of El Duende's claim that he had been stabbed in the belly through an opening in the same door, a claim backed by the witness who had heard the cry “El Duende has been wounded!” El Duende was also charged with wounding “the black Vila” although no one had testified that he had done so, and El Duende had claimed to have been with him in the tavern prior to the ruckus at the door. The corregidor claimed, according to the scribe, that he had to “proceed with all haste” (proceder con la brevedad) in order “to halt” [atajar] … and the next words are lost. But it could be that he was only repeating his earlier claims that El Duende's and Nicolás de Contreras's executions were urgent “examples” aimed to “halt” the “armed blacks” allegedly run amok in the streets of the Imperial Villa.
The corregidor Pimentel then added words about El Duende that almost mesh with those penned by Arzáns some 75 years later. It is perhaps more than a slip that he put them in the plural, as if to refer not only to El Duende but also to Contreras and all the other “insolent blacks” of Potosí for which these two men's deaths were to serve as an example:
It is widely known that they [sic] have sparked many disputes in this Villa as a result of grave and atrocious crimes with which they have rendered it and now have it [that is, the city] scandalized and for other disputes they have caused [and thus] in justice and in conservation of the public peace I ordered and now order that the said Juan Peres be given … the garrote of stave and cords against the bars of the jail of this Villa in the customary way until he dies naturally, and he will be placed hanging from the balcony of the town council building.Footnote 17
The notary, Diego de Quiñones Salvador, wrote:
At a quarter after four in the morning, more or less, the black Juan Peres [El Duende] … was placed against the railing of the door that abuts the patio of the public jail of this villa by Juan Grande, Indian executioner, and other Indians, and it is in the place where they customarily deliver the garrote, and binding him, the said executioner, adjusting some cords around his neck and threaded through an opening in the said railing with a stave, he began twisting and gave him the garrote about the neck until he died naturally according to appearances, and I saw him dead, and after the one referred to was executed he was removed from that spot and his body was placed in the chapel of the said jail.
Six months later, the royal inspector-general and circuit court president Francisco de Nestares Marín refused to hear El Duende's master's appeal, saying he had waited too long. The offer to review judgments from the time of Corregidor Pimentel's tenure had been posted in August and it was now October. Pedro de Brizuela tried again, but Nestares Marín held firm. The document is damaged, but on the last page before the record goes blank it appears that the fearsome judge, Arzáns's third great scourge of Potosí, refused to reopen the case of El Duende for the last time in November of 1652. At the time, the royal auditor was deep in the process of cleaning up the corrupt mint. He had issued dozens of death sentences for some of the city's most prominent and wealthy men.
The Ghost Who Would Not Give Up
The garrote might seem to be the end of the story of El Duende, alleged terror of seventeenth-century Potosí, but there is more. Perhaps the archives will yield new details, but for now we are forced to return to Arzáns. R. C. Padden chose not to include Arzáns's two brief postscripts to the story of El Duende in his abridged Tales of Potosí, an understandable decision given that the portion he selected ended with what he reported as an exemplary death and a claim of general satisfaction in the community. The postscripts offer rupture instead of closure; they almost reopen the case.
As I mentioned above, I had wondered after reading Padden's version of the crime and end of El Duende if Arzáns might have heard of an El Duende-like character from a Potosí elder, perhaps from his own father. Don Mateo Arzáns, as we are told in the following passage, had arrived as a youth in Potosí around 1643.Footnote 18 Reading on, it appears Arzáns did in fact learn of El Duende's life and death from his father, but not just in the form of an exemplary or outlandish story. After relating El Duende's “satisfying” execution and immediately after pointing out the alleged “contentment of the entire Villa,” Arzáns offers something more, in a different and much more personal tone. Indeed, it is one of the most intimate passages in the entire million-word Historia:
With the corpse of this black there occurred with my father and lord a strange event [caso] … it was that the sisters of the confraternity of the Misericordia having taken down the body [of El Duende] from the place of execution and having placed it in the old chapel of Our Lady of Mercy, did not bury it that day, as they were occupied in the vespers of the Apostle St. James. At this time, the prior of the confraternity was don Francisco Sandoval, in whose company in those days went my father who (it being the tenth year since his arrival in this villa with my lord grandparents) was eighteen years of age. At midnight, then, they [the sisters] came to notify don Francisco Sandoval that the church or chapel of the Misericordia had a postern [shutter door] open on one of its main doors (which by carelessness of one of its sextons had been left thus). Sandoval, fearing that they might have been robbed, went there accompanied by my father. They arrived at the church and found it open and unlit. The confraternity steward told the others who had gone there with him to go inside and get a candle that was on the main altar, but there was no one who would do such a thing since the body of the condemned was in the middle of the chapel.
My father, being an audacious Andalusian, said with arrogance that he would go and get the candle. He entered, and so as not to stumble onto that body, he kept himself against the wall, arrived at the main altar, took the candle, and with it returned along the same wall. But, as he himself recounted later, not knowing if he erred or if that vanity that he made of his valor carried him toward the body, over which he tripped and fell, joining breast to breast and face to face, and with the blow he caused the dead man to expel all the corrupt blood from his belly out through his mouth, with which [my father's] entire face was covered. He arose disquieted and went out, and those who were gathered, seeing that occurrence, stood greatly astonished. My father would say that the unfortunate trip-up brought upon him a kind of fever that kept him down for three days, from which one clearly deduces the fragility and miserableness, and humiliation that in such cases lay bare the most robust and manly courage … here a token, a little shadow of the other world terrified and enchained the valor of a young man, who in truth (speaking dispassionately) was of quite tested spirit and brave of heart, according to what various persons recounted to me.Footnote 19
Arzáns's father was evidently shaken by this event, or “case,” as the author calls it, and here again—at the risk of pedantry—I stress that word. In the original, it is caso, which I translate as “event,” but it's use here is probably closer in meaning to the English word “case,” in the sense of a mystery, à la Edgar Allan Poe, that remains insoluble despite rational investigation. In tripping over the corpse of El Duende with Arzáns's father, we as readers also get bathed in the dead man's blood. We enter the realm of the uncanny.
In the writings of Arzáns and other baroque Spanish American authors—Juan Rodríguez Freile of early seventeenth-century New Granada comes to mind—certain events or happenings could not be satisfactorily explained or reduced to a moral lesson, which rendered them all the more wondrous and curious and therefore worthy of recounting.Footnote 20 They were puzzles for inquiring minds rather than lessons for children. It may be that the perplexing and fantastical tale of the “wild man” El Duende as told by Arzáns, and likewise the “spooky” postscript misadventure of Arzáns's father with the “ghost's” corpse and body fluids, are not the moral fables they appear to be on the surface, but rather casos, monstrous events that teasingly hint at but refuse to reveal divine will. Arzáns tries at the end to sew up the rupture his father unwittingly created, but it seems he cannot. Such open “cases” as that of El Duende may be what best yokes baroque Spanish American literature to history. It is as if some tales are too true to be good.
We could stop here, but the next bit of narrative in the Historia, with which Arzáns closes this chapter, feels like a continuation, not of the tale but of the rupture:
In this same year another thing happened to [my father] that took him to the point of dying, as it was the cause of a grave accident that befell him. It so happened that as he ordinarily went walking at night (the reason that one experiences notable calamities), he went down along the street of the Company of Jesus with sword and buckler, and passing the cemetery he sensed behind him the sound of footsteps. He turned his head around to see who was following him and saw no one. He continued on his way, and about a block farther down he again sensed the footsteps. And then, as he still did not see who was making them, he moved along with greater care, and arriving a bit farther down at a little bridge over a creek, he there sensed the footsteps, even louder. He spun around angrily, sword in hand, when all of a sudden he saw the shape of a man who attacked him with his weapons, but without the least fear he attacked in turn, it seeming to him that [the shape] absorbed his entire sword, and that shape disappearing, [my father] fell to the ground, and began to eject much blood from his nostrils and taking a long while to come to his senses he went to his house, and with this he ceased to pursue a certain dispute that was underway, which he took to be a bad undertaking and this brought great discredit to his whole household, as it unjustly (due to just one bad report) went against a Church property. Because of this he was given [such] a terrible accident, God permitting it thus so that he would be calmed and recognize the truth, as he did.Footnote 21
Arzáns does not claim any connection, and in fact he seems at pains to interpret each of these postscript casos or mishaps as divine punishments for his then young and foolish father's sin of pride, an explanation he may have heard offered by his father or perhaps other relatives. But by linking the violent death of El Duende with these “spooky” accidents that befell his father immediately afterward, Arzáns seems to challenge us as “fellow Christian” readers. Can we help him put it all together? What if we would like to assert—as the author surely knows he must not, since he his talking about his own father—that the “ghost” of El Duende, or rather his demon, was attempting to inhabit the body of a foolhardy young Andalusian? Might that “fallen angel” who had once turned the “good” slave Juan Peres (or for Arzáns, Antonio Bran) into the terror of Potosí have lived on, desperately homeless once its host had been rendered defunct by Corregidor Pimentel?
And what did it mean to be bathed in the putrid blood of a condemned man and alleged mass murderer and rapist less than 24 hours after his execution? Arzáns does not say, but was this perhaps a terrible, even diabolical, inversion of being bathed by the Blood of the Lamb? And what of the blood ejected from the formerly audacious don Mateo's nostrils after his encounter with the invisible swordsman? Was it tangible evidence of an exorcism or merely a symbolic result of his violent struggle with sin? The author's “father and lord” had been “nearly killed” by these “accidents” (according to Arzáns, these “strange cases”), but might he not also have been nearly possessed, nearly transformed, by his foolish pride into the new incarnation of El Duende?
A Preliminary Autopsy
We may now say with some certainty that a man called El Duende inhabited the Imperial Villa of Potosí in the mid seventeenth century. According to official documents, he was charged with far less egregious crimes than those alleged by the chronicler Arzáns, but he was indeed captured after a housebreaking incident and summarily executed. Here we have contemporary testimonies representing more than one point of view. Yet El Duende's case—his mystery—remains for the most part unsolved. Archival fragments shed light on his last deeds and even offer a few indirect snippets of his last words, but they do not make him any less perplexing a figure than he was in the hands of the eighteenth-century local historian, nor do they answer nagging questions about the seemingly hyper-violent temper of the times. Why was Corregidor Pimentel so quick to have El Duende executed along with Nicolás de Contreras, and why in the middle of the night, and in secret? Put another way, the documents are a precious kind of proof, yet El Duende's arrest and execution remain unexplained by them. At least, they offer no direct explanation.
Was El Duende perceived as an “agent of Satan,” as Arzáns claimed some residents of Potosí believed, or was he instead a misunderstood hobgoblin or poltergeist of the less menacing, household sort? The story I tell here suggests he was simply a headstrong man of African descent, if not birth, between the ages of 15 and 30-plus, whose color and condition, and perhaps bad luck and outspokenness (if not “sinful pride”), got him killed. His master apparently had little control over him. He went about town armed and was respected by his peers and was known to at least some whites by his voice if not his countenance. Other evidence suggests that Potosí was on edge at the time. They city had not yet recovered from the bloody Basque-Vicuña confrontations of the 1620s, and summary executions of alleged vicuña highwaymen had become commonplace. Disturbances rocked the mining camps of the hinterland throughout the 1630s and 1640s. Of these things we have abundant contemporary evidence.Footnote 22
I would venture to guess from the tone as well as the letter of the proceedings late on the night April 6, 1652, that El Duende was summarily executed in a dark jail cell precisely because he was seen as the incarnation of black power in mid seventeenth-century Potosí. I say “black” because we have seen that various men described in the testimonies as mulattos, and one “quadroon,” were lumped together in the end as “insolent blacks.” El Duende was known as evil, not for any particular misdeed but rather for seeming to threaten the ordinarily divided (but in this case united) white elite's monopoly on violence, expressed by a white householder who sought to punish a free black man for trespass by flogging him on the spot without due process. Some white Potosinos knew El Duende by his voice, and although it is far from clear if he did indeed threaten to burn down Arenas Marrón's house, or call anyone a dog, a Jew, or a cuckold—probably the worst insults a Potosino of any status could level at another at this time—he clearly scared someone. The specter is the larger-than-life El Duende of Arzáns, the sum of all that whites feared from black and brown men. But why did things come to a head in 1652? Enslaved Africans and free men of color were hardly new in Potosí, and a wide range of town council and other documents suggests they did not cower in the corners before this date.
In the midst of an official terror campaign initiated by the former inquisitor Francisco de Nestares Marín in December 1648 to end fraud and corruption in the royal mint (Arzáns's Third Divine Scourge that killed the city once and for all, never to recover its glory), it could be that there emerged a newly racialized fear of loss of control of the city's Afro-descendant population. The problem, perhaps arose in part because the slaves of the mint (at least 150 lived and worked in that cramped prison at this time) were both implicated in the great fraud and busily implicating their masters, some of whom were summarily garroted as a result of this damning testimony. In such tense times, when slaves were turning against their masters, armed “black men,” among them “insolent” slaves like El Duende, could not be allowed to roam freely “after hours,” drinking in taverns and settling scores among themselves as if they were members of Potosí’s many other heavily armed gangs. Black men could not be allowed to play the role of the Imperial Villa's traditional scourge, the footloose soldados, sometimes referred to as vicuñas; they could express no such paisanazgo or ethnic solidarity.
The prison-like Potosí mint had become a locus of racialized fears, as expressed by the corrupt lieutenant corregidor and mint alcalde Fabián Velarde de Santillana in a decree of January 4, 1649.Footnote 23 According to Velarde, certain mint overseers had allowed slaves into the city on Sundays and feast days, but under the new decree any slave who chose to do so faced a penalty of 200 lashes. The decree hints at a vibrant Afro-Potosino community, with the mint slaves central to it. The mint's floor bosses were not to “allow the blacks working in the blank cutting shops [hornazas] of the said mint to go out on Sundays or main feast days because the said blacks stir up the Villa with disputes they have with other black men and black women, from which there results great scandal and tumult.”Footnote 24
In February 1651, something like a prison rumble broke out inside the Potosí mint, now sealed like a powder keg. This “mutiny,” as mint officials called it, occurred on a Sunday, when slaves congregated around the fountain in the enclosed patio. All we have is a brief summary note in the mint's criminal files. Apparently, a fight escalated between the slaves of two rival blank-cutting shops, leaving one man dead from a stab wound. The slaves were allegedly armed with rocks, knives, and other weapons, and officials had to step in and break things up with their “naked swords.”Footnote 25
Arzáns was the one to add the trope or motif of black sexual predation and general danger to white women to the package, by folding the story of the “free black” Nicolás de Contreras into El Duende's own, and also by cutting out the role of Contreras's capturer, the well-armed householder Pedro de Arenas Marrón, and thus leaving Arenas Marrón's fearful wife in bed alone. Together these black men of Potosí, Juan Peres and Nicolás de Contreras, form the distilled or composite El Duende of Arzáns, the spectral comic-book incarnation of what they saw as a black menace.
But the nickname “El Duende” begs us to carry the autopsy just a little further. In a 1676 treatise on duendes published in Madrid, the Spanish Capuchin friar Antonio de Fuentelapeña cast serious doubt on the demonic nature of these minor spirits, which tended to be seen, he said, only by children and horses. Fuentelapeña emphasized the innocence of these easily “spooked” witnesses, citing their “inability to sin.” He argued that duendes were neither good nor fallen angels, as neither sort of angel would engage in the kind of trifling amusements these beings—he calls them animals—were known for. These included, according to Fuentelapeña, lawn bowling and counting money.Footnote 26
And, alas, they were not proper ghosts either. First, because the spirits of the dead were known by all good Catholics to be busy settling accounts with God in Heaven, Hell, or Purgatory, and second because dead souls were incapable of rattling dishes, books, and bowling pins, or braiding horses’ manes. There is much more, but our learned Capuchin guide to the spirit world concludes by informing readers that duendes “are animals engendered by the corruption coming from heavy vapors, which emanate from coops, cellars, and similar dark corners, for lack of habitation, light, and activity, which purify the air.”Footnote 27 By this reckoning, the fearsome and fearless El Duende of seventeenth-century Potosí might have been imagined as the product or embodiment of the city's interior miasmas, a menacing spirit born of the “corruption coming from heavy vapors.” Mad as it may sound, it was not such a great stretch for baroque minds when one recalls Arzáns's relentless cascade of stories of bodies stashed beneath floorboards.
As for attempting to explain the repression turned on flesh-and-blood black men in mid seventeenth-century Potosí—of which El Duende's and Nicolás de Contreras's executions seem to have been an exemplary part—the machinations of President Nestares Marín may have been the spur, but we may need to cast a wider net to gain a better sense of the shifting, or at least temporarily uncertain, temper of the times. The diary of Lima-based soldier Josephe de Mugaburu, composed between 1640 and 1686, lists numerous incidents involving the city's large African and Afro-descendant population, many of them violent, but others festive or even miraculous.
One entry may be of special interest here. It is from July 1649, in the Robert Ryal Miller translation, published, as was Padden's edition of Arzáns, in 1975, and it is charged with all of the qualities just named:
On Wednesday, the 14th of this month, the greatest atrocity in the world occurred in this city. A Negro of the Terranova tribe killed a Negress of this same tribe with a kitchen machete, chopping her body into pieces. Then he wounded the licenciate Isidro, a priest, eleven times, all fatal blows, and cut the fingers off his hands, leaving him for dead. He then entered another house and killed an Indian man and woman. He wounded the owner of the house, his wife, and a twelve-year-old child, inflicting three large wounds on the young girl. En route to the corral, he met another Indian woman and split her head open, leaving her seriously injured. Then the Negro climbed to the rooftops with a halberd in his hand that he had seized from a man whom he hit in the left arm with the machete, inflicting a large wound. On the rooftops he killed a mestizo blacksmith before the latter had time to confess, running the halberd through his body four times, and with the machete he split his head, spilling his brains.
And in all this fracas was Juan Pascual, a minister of justice. Not being able to catch him [the Negro], they brought a security guard, and with the shot fired he did not fall, but with another discharge which Jose Vejete fired in his face, he fell on the rooftops, where they captured him. While they were tying him up, the roof caved in with all the people. They took him to the city jail where the Negro asked for confession and after having confessed, he died. Then the judge, don José de Mendoza, had him hung in the porticoes of the city council [building], where he was left until the afternoon. In the afternoon the justice ordered that he be dragged through the usual streets. They dragged his body on the ground as far as the Islas drainage ditch where he had committed the crime, and from there they took him to the plaza where they prepared a noose and hung him for twenty-four hours. The judge then ordered that they have him quartered, and they placed his head and his hands where he had committed the crime.Footnote 28
This mass murder in Lima predating El Duende's capture and execution does not appear to have sparked a general decree regarding “armed blacks.” The main weapon was a kitchen machete, after all, not a “huge sword.” But according to Mugaburu, there was on September 5, 1653, enacted a general ban on slaves bearing edged weapons of any kind, and it was meant to apply to the whole viceroyalty. Such decrees abound in the colonial record, but Mugaburu takes special care to note that this decree was enacted, and carried out publicly, at least in Lima, right down to the viceroy's own retinue.Footnote 29 The viceroy's lackeys were ceremoniously disarmed. Was the ghost of seventeenth-century Potosí, El Duende, rattling his chains?
Perhaps he was, but we need to go back a bit: we skipped a step in the autopsy. Let us go back to Potosí and to the case of El Duende. During my investigations of the royal mint crisis, I realized I had glossed over the charge that El Duende's “compañero,” Nicolás de Contreras, had entered Pedro de Arenas Marrón's house and boudoir not to be with his girlfriend but to “steal some silver ingots stored there.” Is there any reason to think that such a charge was warranted? As it happened, on that very morning, April 6, 1652, another Afro-potosino, the town crier Gaspar, announced that the city's coinage would be devalued posthaste. And I found in the Potosí town council records that a ban on black and mulatto men bearing arms was issued in the Villa Imperial on March 3, 1651—over a year before El Duende's drumhead trial and execution, and soon after the mint riot.
The wording of this earlier decree includes a few specifics beyond prohibiting any of the city's “enslaved or free blacks from going about with swords.” One of them is a tantalizing clue that would seem to lead to El Duende's connections to slaves of the mint: the “notification to the Treasurer of the Royal Mint to order that neither by day nor by night should the blacks of the said mint be allowed to go out because they form bands [cuadrillas] to engage in thefts and provoke disputes.”Footnote 30 Even so, the penalty was not death, but 200 lashes plus a 50-peso fine for the master. It was an expansion of the February 1649 decree. A follow-up decree from March 21, 1651, added mulattos and zambos to the list.
We must stop here, as it seems there is no end to this strange case. The “Ghost” of seventeenth-century Potosí won't stop playing tricks.
