604 JERUSALEM
A Letter to a Friend in South America
By
Arthur A. Baer

Read Before
The Chicago Literary Club

May 9th, 1949

Most Esteemed Senor:

I address you as a friend and send you greetings from the United States. My very best wishes to Senora and to Juliata. How are the babies?

I have imposed on your kindness so often before, may I today beseech your aid in a matter especially important to me, in which I feel certain that you will have some interest, enough, I hope, to intrigue your cooperation.

Let me explain.

You may remember the Sunday afternoon a year ago when we four sat in the lounge of your club overlooking the brilliant Plaza de Armas and you were stirred to talk of the early days in your city, of your long journey by ship to London as a boy, around the Horn, of your betrothal to the lovely daughter of the house of Rey del Castro and of Julia's voyage to Paris for her trousseau. We were sitting near a great sideboard, hand-carved of cedar, which completely filled one side of the large room and when I voiced my admiration, Julia said, "Yes, I like it also. It came from my father's house. Papa gave it to the club. We had two of them, just alike."

I thought then, warmed by the nostalgia of your reminiscences, appreciating your knowledge of the city and of its past, that perhaps I might try (ineptly, alas!) to write a sketch of 604 Jerusalem against the history and background of the city, not at all in a scholarly fashion, of course, but with a little flavoring of old documents and letters and of gossip of the town.

I must explain that I belong to the Chicago Literary Club, which has had an honorable history for seventy-five years. This is an important span of time in Chicago, if not in Peru. The members of the club are all distinguished men of parts (except myself) who spend their days in business or in the professions of law, education and (like yourself) medicine, and who enjoy getting together for an evening of talk, small or large, on some subject apart from the activities of the day. They are all courteous and generous men, but have established a program, cruel in the extreme, of obliging one of their members, at whatever painful cost to himself, to read a paper at each of their weekly meetings. As you may have surmised by this time, fate has pointed her skinny finger at me and I must prepare a paper.

The paper, fortunately, may be on any possible subject, but it must be original, although as a new member I have observed that it may be well packed with quotations. Moreover, no matter what its quality, it must cover in reading time not less than forty-five minutes. It is because of this requirement that I am writing to you, Doctor. My meager material could easily be communicated in ten minutes. I need your gracious help to expand it agreeably for thirty-five minutes more.

I received from you at Christmas a delightful water-color done by your son Roberto, of the street entrance to 604 Jerusalem. It suggests the high plastered wall, dingy yellow, splotched with stain, smeared with Apra slogans, overhung with gorgeous rosy-hued bougainvillea, and shows, just beyond the great carved wooden doors, the iron-grilled gate at the top of a short flight of worn stone steps and then an intriguing glimpse of the garden within.

I would like to write my paper about Tia Bates, about Tia in her establishment at 604 Jerusalem, better known as the Quinta Bates, and about the Quinta as set in the dazzling white city of Arequipa, and about Arequipa as set in the desert of southern Peru, a desert whose shifting dunes merge so gradually into great shale hills, and soon the hills are barren forbidding mountains and then become the cordillera of the Andes.

You know this background so intimately. I beg of you to write me about these fascinating things, about the history of your famous family in Arequipa, about Senora's family, the Rey del Castro, perhaps a story or two of the political underground in Arequipa, which has played so important a part in the history of Peru.

Some few things I already know, as who does not? For instance, shall we mention the origin of the name of the city? The valley of Arequipa was discovered early in the thirteenth century by Mayta-Capac, who was the fourth Inca. He, being head of a great nation, was convinced that the benefits of his rule should be extended to more slaves. He set out to convert the unsubdued to his religion of the Sun God, beginning with the Aymara tribes of the plateau of Tiahuanacu in the high sierra. Successful there, he traversed the double chain of the Andes above the sources of the Apurimac and in turn subjugated the Indians who lived in the environs of Pari Huanacocha, just under the fifteenth degree. When he had completed these two expeditions, he was continuing along the foot of the western cordillera when he chanced upon the spot where the sierra of Velilla opened upon a large valley, which was then uninhabited and was called Coripuna, or the Plain of Gold.

His followers were delighted with the beauty of the valley and the gentle temperature, in much contrast to the harsh winds and weather of the altiplane. They asked for permission to remain.

"Since the place pleases you," said the Inca, "ari quepay!," the Quechua words meaning "Yes, remain here!"

This is the legend chronicled in the seventeenth century by Garcilaso de la Vega, and he adds that three thousand of the Inca's followers remained and peopled the lovely valley.

Another story has it that fresh fish were brought up for the royal Incan table from the sea to the great city of Cuzco high in the Andes, by runners, the trip being made in the interest of freshness, in twenty-four hours and that the exhausted Indian runners begged for the privilege of resting in this sheltered half-way spot. The Inca, probably preferring young kid to sea-fish anyway, consented: "Yes, rest awhile!"

Arequipa is a half-way station today, for travelers from Lima or from Santiago de Chile, on their way to Puno and Cuzco and La Paz in the high sierra, stop overnight in Arequipa before embarking on the trains or autocarrils of the Southern Railway for the steep climb to the top of the world. This must have had some bearing also on the early beginnings of the Cuinta Bates, as a much-needed overnight lodging.

But Tia, the subject of my proposed composition, although she takes advantage of the situation, filling her pension with tourists in flight, does not much relish the fact that the real goal of the travelers is Macchu Picchu. She would like Arequipa to be thought of as a satisfying destination.

"Tia," I said to her one day, "you have been to Cuzco. How did you like it?"

"My boy," she replied, fixing me with her clear blue eyes, "I have known thousands of people who have gone up to Cuzco, but I only remember two who said that they would like to go back."

Shall I try to recall, at this distance, what Arequipa is like? If I am in error, please correct me. It lies on the western slope of the Andes, about six hundred miles south of Lima and sixty miles inland from the Pacific part of Mollendo. The altitude is over seven thousand feet. The valley is green and fertile, through irrigation from the waters of its river called Chili.

The city is dominated by the great mountains, Picchu Picchu to the east, Chachani to the north and the white-crested Misti in the center, all over eighteen thousand feet.

One of the books which I found in your library, The Old and the New Peru, by Marie Wright, describes the Misti in these words:

"It is the Misti that dominates the scene. The grandeur and simplicity of this noble peak lie not only in its altitude, over nineteen thousand feet, but in its clear-cut conical form and in the mantle of snow that perpetually crowns its summit."

"The Misti," she writes, "has its legends. Ages ago when it was a monster of destructive passion, scorching with its hot breath and poisoning with its lava all the beautiful things of the valley, the Children of the Sun complained to their celestial father, beseeching him to stifle the evil genius and save them from its malevolence. The Sun, the father of goodness, irritated by the monster's wickedness, drowned it in its own liquid fire and sealed the top of the cerro with a wafer of snow, more impenetrable than granite, so that the monster might nevermore be able to breathe, in case some evil spirit were to try to bring it back to life."

"Another legend says that St. Thomas, when preaching in this region, was so indignant at the presumption of this thing of fire and destruction, that he threw his sandal into its crater, whereupon the colossus was calmed and made incapable of any further mischief."

"The beautiful valley," she adds, "released from slavery to the whims of a cruel tyrant, has ever since shown gratitude to heaven for its salvation by rendering every service to mankind that abundant fertility could compass."

These grandiose phrases of Mrs. Wright refer of course to legendary times and although the Indians of the vicinity revere and fear the great peak El Misti, the actual author of all the evils that have befallen the Spanish city of Arequipa is the volcano Huayna-Putins of the nearby valley of Moqueha.

The most violent eruption of Huayna-Putina took place in 1609. The first signs of the volcanic tempest were hollow rumblings beneath the earth's crust. The subterranean disturbances, accompanied by ear-splitting claps of thunder, were followed by torrents of rain, which continued to fall for fourteen days. Then the volcano began to eject cinders, stone and sand, in such measures and to much an extent, that the light of the sun was obscured. This frightful tempest continued for forty-five days. The city of Arequipa was completely destroyed and as well as its valley, was covered with a thick bed of ashes. The neighboring rivers, obstructed by sand and stones, changed their courses, leaving upon their banks thousands of dead fish, the corruption of which occasioned a pestilence in the surrounding countryside. Beyond Cuellos, at the mouth of the valley, the waters of the sea, to a distance of ten miles, were turned to a grayish color. And Lima, the royal capitol, at a distance of more than six hundred miles, could count, by the reports which from minute to minute shook the earth, every throe of the agony suffered by Arequipa.

The conquistadores who established Spanish rule in Arequipa were obviously not sensitive to the impending dangers of seismic disturbances, for they picked Arequipa as a most healthful spot. Pizarro's formal request for authorization set forth that in the ten months that the Spaniards had lived there, none of their number had died, though they formed a considerable settlement.

Am I correct in stating that the first Spanish visitors to the Arequipa valley, after two centuries of Inca rule, were the soldiers of Amalgio, Hernando Pizarro's leading comrade and later his bitterest rival, on their way from Peru to Chile? I believe Amalgio himself is said to have passed through the valley on his return from Chile in 1536. In that year, on the fifth of July, one Pedro Auzures de Campo Redondo destroyed the Indian village and established a Spanish settlement. In March of 1539, Pizarro himself proposed to the King of Spain that he prescribe for the village of Arequipa a "domingo bravo." At about this same period, the Padre Valverde, the same who offered the great benefits of the Christian faith to the unfortunate Atahualpa at Cajaviaroa, in vain mentioned in his writings "a land which they called Arequipa." At this time there were probably only scattered groups of farmers in the vicinity, although the padre does mention an early seat fixed in the suburb of San Lazaro.

Doctor, do you think this could be where the old church of San Lazaro now stands, on the right bank of the river, at the foot of the steep street called Callejon Cristales?

We all know that the founding of the city was finally proclaimed on the fifteenth of August, 1540, in the name of Hernando Pizarro, by the robust Captain Garci Manuel de Carvajal, in full ceremony and in the presence of about a hundred fully accoutered Castilians, among whom were Fransisco Villafuerte and Juan de la Torre, both Gentlemen of the Golden Spur, and the verbose chronicler Pedro Pizarro. The good Captain, on this great occasion, laid out the Plaza de Armas, and designated the site of the church on the north side of the plaza. He signed the minutes of the august proceedings and instructed the town crier, one Pedro Tres, to proclaim, to the sound of trumpets that here was now established La Villa Hermosa de le Asuncion de Arequipa, the beautiful town of the Assumption of Arequipa.

The news reached Spain slowly via the tossing caravels. King Charles V, proud of his adventurous conquistadores, quickly produced parchments and heraldry. On the twenty-second of September, 1541, the monarch gave the town the title of city and on October 7 of the same year had the new city?s escutcheon proclaimed as follows:

"An escutcheon embellished: at the bottom of a river and above it a hillock from which issues some smoke in the manner of a volcano; and on the sides of the hillock on one part and on the other some green trees, and above them two lions of gold; all this on a field of red; and on the border eight fleur de lis on a blue field; and for the seal, a helmet closed; and for the emblem, a griffin with a banner in his claws, on which are inscribed the letters of the King's name embellished with foliage and decorations of blue and gold."

Let us skip the sad history of the next three hundred years, the devastating earthquakes of 1582, 1600, 1604, 1609, 1687, 1725, 1732 and 1738, and the great fire which destroyed the cathedral in 1844. Travelers to Peru in the later decades of the nineteenth century speak of the city's unfinished appearance, with most buildings ceasing abruptly just above the first story and looking as if the rest had been shaken off or suddenly abandoned.

But the courageous citizens of Arequipa always cleared away the rubble and the ashes, and rebuilt anew. I remember well the construction of your own casa on the Calle Moral, the walls six feet thick built of the sillar, that white volcanic tufa carried in from quarries below El Misti, and the vaulted ceilings built of the same stone, but now hidden by false flat plaster ceilings for modernity's sake.

Courage and skill have created a beautiful city and all agree that the location is superb. It is called a pearl in an emerald setting, a dove in an emerald nest, the city of the stars and one enthusiast insists that Cervantes wrote of it as "the city of eternal spring."

Surely Cervantes was never in Arequipa. Or was he? We know that in 1590 he tried to get a government post in any one of four great Spanish centers in America, in Mexico, or Guatemala, or Panama, or La Paz, but we do not know that he was successful.

However, one of our contemporary Latin-American writers, press-agenting for Arequipa in the National Geographic of the southern hemisphere, drags in Cervantes in the following paragraph:

"Some curious customs of the Arequipenos have been captured by the camera: the peddler of the shrub called tola, bought in great bundles for firewood; the collector of garbage, who strikes a bell to call the attention of housemaids; the trundling of coffins to the cemetery in brightly decorated wheelbarrows; the cargadores who carry a mountain of straw on their backs and appropriate the center of the street; and the little milk boy with his milk cans panviered on a burrito."

"These," writes the author, "and other things attract the attention of the visitor who, after passing through the interesting streets, will visit the baths of Jesus and will eat picarones in Tingo Maria, and will want to remain here always to enjoy this climate which the great Cervantes eulogized when he said that Arequipa was the city of eternal spring."

I find Saint-Cricq, the Frenchman, one of the most entertaining writers on the subject of Arequipa. You undoubtedly know his book, Doctor, Travels in South America, published in 1875. He is archeologist, sociologist, geographer, historian, art connoisseur and more.

At the risk of making this letter too long, let me quote his happy description of your valley:

"At our feet lay the valley of Arequipa, a profound ravine, some five hundred feet deep, about six miles in breadth, and forty-five miles long. Carpeted with green of various shades, it was dotted at every vantage-point with villages, farms and country-houses, while through its commingled light and shade, meandered two rivers which entered the plain from opposite points, approached each other, lovingly wound their way side by side for a certain distance and at length merged their waters in one full stream. The whole eastern side of the valley was bounded by the first plateau of the Western Andes, that vast pile of snowy heights whose higher pathways seem to scale the heavens. Two sierras, connected with the principal chain of mountains, to which they serve as buttresses, loomed up in front. That on the right, named Picchu-Picchu, was serrated like a saw; the other, on the left, called Chachani, rose perpendicular as a wall. A space of about sixty miles in circuit separated the two masses and from the center of that area, sloping from east to west, sprang in all its native majesty and its unrivalled configuration, the cone of Misti, one of the finest volcanoes which crown the Andes at various points from Tierra del Fuego to the equator."

I am reminded here of my introduction to the Cuinta Bates because the Misti had a part in it, not the great volcano which overshadows the city and glowed that night with the reflected grandeur of a gorgeous sunset as we taxied into the city from the airport, but Tia's Great Dane dog, appropriately named El Misti, who blocked my way at the iron gate.

In a moment, a white-coated Indian servant appeared who said that there were no rooms available. I told him that I had a reservation of two month's standing, but he showed no interest. When our argument developed signs of bursting into flame, I demanded to see Senora Bates.

"She is ill. She is in bed," he answered.

"Take me to her," I ordered, and to my surprise, he did so.

Accompanied by Misti, the Great Dane, we climbed the high steps to the veranda, through the room with the glass roof and paused timidly, all three of us, at the open door of Tia's boudoir. Her room was filled with the members of a large Spanish family, men, women, girls and boys, all of them talking at once, waving their hands, protesting and demanding. It was clear that Tia had said that she could not put them up for the night.

The famous proprietress was sitting up in bed, propped with pillows, very handsome in spite of her years, a white Spanish shawl around her shoulders, and looking like Queen Victoria. When I approached her, I saw that she was wearing a magnificent emerald necklace and that there was a black automatic on the table beside her bed.

She asked the servant in swift Spanish why he had brought me and then shook her head, sadly but firmly.

I approached her bedside.

"Senora Bates," I said, just as firmly, "I wrote you twice from home, in December and in January. I sent you a wire last week from Lima. My bags are piled on the curb and my wife is sitting on them, with a bad cold in her chest. I must have a room."

She shrank a little and gave a desperate glance about the small room, so full of angry Spaniards.

Then she pulled my head down and whispered into my ear. "Si, si, I remember you now. Jim Greenbaum wrote me about you. Be patient. You see, I've already rented more rooms for the night than I have."

Then her eyes twinkled as she said, "My boy, I really am in a hell of a mess."

Manuel obtained lodgings for us for the night at the Hotel Sucre and in the morning we came back early, were unpacked lovingly by Felize and Juanita, and had our breakfast at ease on the roof terrace, under a faded sun umbrella, surrounded by oleanders and climbing geraniums and watched the play of morning light and shadow on the great El Misti.

Does Quinta mean garden, Doctor, or house in a garden? At any rate, on that first perfect day, I loved the garden best. I went down the steep rickety outside stairs directly after eggs and coffee because I heard music on a shepherd's pipe down below, and found sitting at the gate a blind Quechua beggar, playing a most plaintive melody. I remained in the garden. The roses were magnificent. Spring-blooming iris was in flower right next to late fall chrysanthemums. Sweet peas and asters, poinsettia and poppies, bleeding-heart and fuchsia, were all in bloom. There were apples on the apple tree, limes on the lime tree and figs on the fig palm. The spots of grass were green as emerald, although heavily shaded by the willows, the yellow broom trees, the royal palms and two huge Norway maples.

Tell me, Doctor, who planned the garden? Was it Ana Bates herself? The place became a pension about the turn of the century, I believe. At that time, Tia's husband deserted her and in this same compound, Tia, to support herself and her dependents, took in two mining engineers as boarders. She is obviously a born hostess and so her establishment grew and year by year she added a room here and a room there, built another staircase, put a bungalow in the corner of the garden, until today, she has a strange rambling building with charming rooms everywhere, in the basement, on the roof, in the garden and under the stairs.

What is her story? As you and I both know, at about eighty, she is coy about her age. The journalists have reported that she was born Ana Monteith in what was then called Bath-on-Hudson in upstate New York. She went to South America with her father, a railroad engineer, who had an assignment in the Chilean nitrate fields. She lived in mining camps, in lonely Indian villages and in the bleak highlands of Bolivia. She married John Bates, the younger son of one of the great English ship-owning families, who worked at the profession of mining engineering and turned out to be a rather worthless person.

For some time, they lived in Cora Cora, a copper mining town on the western slope of the Andes. The Indians occasionally went on rampages, either from drinking too much chichi or possibly in some vague blind revolt against oppressive Spanish fate.

"They would attack the foreigners," says Tia, "and sometimes killed my friends. They never harmed my family, perhaps because I had always treated them like human beings. One time, I remember strange Indians came from a distant village and we thought it best to hide. After sitting all night in a pool of cold water, in an abandoned mine shaft, I said, ' To hell with this!' and went outside. Nothing happened."

Her life on the puno gave her an insight into the character and mood of the Quechua Indians which has been a source of great satisfaction to her. She is godmother to hundreds of Indian children and probably, as she says, was godmother to their mothers and their grandmothers. Hardly a day goes by at the Quinta without a visit by some somber-faced chola, either bringing a gift of two chickens or perhaps a basket of yams, or a shy request for a little loan, just enough to buy some quinine for the nina, who has a fever.

Tia seems to be sympathetic with their superstitions as well as their physical inadequacies. I sometimes wondered, as I listened to her, whether perhaps, somewhere in her mysterious past, she may have been initiated into the occult secrets and rites of some strange Indian worship. Certainly, despite the complete covering of Peru by the church, there remains a powerful underground of savage paganism.

Her relationship with her Indian servants is interesting. They fear her sharp tongue. Do they also love her? Tomasa, who rules over the kitchen of the Quinta and produces very efficiently and punctually the precise and elegant meals, has been personal servant to Tia for forty years. Tia scolds her, talks about her as an old witch or even worse, gives her the keys of the establishment and relies upon her utterly. Tomasa, big, silent, unsmiling, takes the responsibilities and the vituperation with a shrug, quietly commands her kitchen girls and waiters, and puts Tia to bed when the mistress feels ill.

Manuel, the sober major domo, has been trained by Tia over the years to Swiss perfection. The pension works like a charm under his firm, but gentle hand. The cobblestone walk is swept free of fallen magnolia petals twice daily. The irrigation water is guided to all parts of the garden. The Paul Scarlett vines are trimmed and trained. The beds are made, the tubs are scrubbed; the soft old Indian rugs are shaken out. All this is done unobtrusively, without flurry and the guests are hardly conscious of the machinery of management. They come in from the hot street, fall into the decrepit reed chairs in the garden, demand a pisco sour and Manuel, Felize, Juan, appear from somewhere, produce and serve the refreshing drinks, always giving the impression that they are grateful for the opportunity to serve.

Of course, Doctor, when I write of Swiss perfection, I would imply within the limitations of the town and country. The water shuts off at eight every evening. The first floor guests, who trot out at night over the cold flagstones to the detached communal toilet and bath, probably recall with a pang the comforts of home, but is the air at home suffused with the fragrance of night-blooming jasmine? The basement rooms are cold and damp and the muchachos sometimes toss in stones through the windows on the steep back street, but for compensation there is painted on the wall a faded copy of a sixteenth century Spanish Madonna. The salon is frigid after dinner, for wood is scarce in Arequipa and only a few sticks are rationed each evening for the fireplace. But the guests huddle together, frowned upon by the grim suit of Spanish armor in the shadow and there is high talk of Macchu Picchu and Huancayo and the jungle and the desert and the sea.

What made this charming and simple place one of the four-starred hostelries of the world? It is a comfortable quiet lodge at the gateway to a tremendous historic monument, where travelers may relax as they come and go. It is ideally situated, a rambling house in a beautiful garden, a fascinating Peruvian city, a rich verdant valley, surrounded by desert, on the slope of the high Andes.

But comfort, convenience and climate were not enough. Character was also needed and that was supplied by Tia Bates, the charming, hospitable, scandalous, autocratic, capable, generous, vituperative old lady of 604 Jerusalem. If your looks or credentials do not please her, she has no room for you. She quarrels incessantly with the authorities and defies the jefe to make her conform. She demands your presence at five o'clock tea. She stands on the veranda at the top of the stairs and questions each guest, "Where are you going this afternoon, my boy?" She stops everything and puffing and panting, guides you graciously down the long streets to Tbaney, to help you buy handbags and billfolds. She praises, scolds, wheedles, demands, swears, implies, reminisces, skillfully guides and manages the talk at her royal table in the glass-enclosed dining-room, to her own pleasure, sometimes wicked and sometimes guileless, and is altogether a fascinating woman. It is Tia Bates who has made world-renowned, the pension in the garden in Arequipa.

Of course, I am forced to admit that this opinion is not unanimous. I wrote to Schonbrun, the geologist, in La Paz (you remember him, the thin little man with the square-cut black beard, and his endless sketches of Andean formations?), and his reply said tersely: "What I have to say about Tia Bates cannot be written in a letter."

What calumny! Atrocious!

My friend Montgomery, the Englishman, now on special duty with a Trade Commission in Lima, has written at length and quite frankly.

He says that she is not an American, that her father was Scotch, and that she was born somewhere in Chile.

I quote him:

"We old-stagers out here like myself cannot imagine how she even got an American passport, since she was British on her father's side and by marriage. She had a pretty lonely life in Bolivia. She once lived on the Desaguadero, the only river that flows out of Lake Titicaca, and report has it that she once tried to drown herself and her baby in it. She had three daughters, each of whom died at quite an early age. They were all three married. There remains one granddaughter, Consuela by name, married to a wealthy New Yorker, and the mother of two fine boys. Tia, with the faltering memory of old age, has skipped a generation, and thinks of Consuela as her daughter and of the two boys as grandsons."

"I first met Tia Ana about thirty years ago, at which time she was already living apart from her husband, and was running the Quinta and everyone else who came within her orbit. She and Juan had separated, and I do not know the details as to why, and cannot judge the case anyway, first from lack of information, and secondly, that no one is ever in a position to judge such cases."

"But when Juan's common-law Indian wife died, he came crawling back to the Quinta and Tia built a little bungalow for him in the corner of the garden, where he died about two years later. He had an illegitimate son, whose wife brings the babies to see Tia on their birthdays. Tia graciously calls them her grandsons, gives them a handful of centavos and some sugar-coated picarones, at the same time directing Tomasa to ' pay this woman what we owe her for mending the stockings.' The dark little fellows are named Raleigh and Nelson."

"It was when she got to the Quinta that she started making for herself the fantastical reputation she has, which is entirely in opposition to the facts and has mostly been brought about by idealistic American tourists and people who were professional writers and who made copy out of anything sensational, irrespective of what the truth was."

"Well, now for her reputation as a wonderful woman! Tia is and always has been a fickle and capricious woman, with a vivid personality. Strong physically, very good looking, she was of the stuff that famous courtesans are made of. In fact, she has expressed to me that had she her life to live over again, she would choose to be one! But I think it takes more than Tia ever had."

"And actually, as regards her capacity as a hostess, she entirely lacks any ordinary qualification. She cannot keep order of any kind in her affairs; her accounts do not and never did exist. She has no knowledge of cooking. She is forgetful, vain and vituperative when found out."

"She has had the artist's need of a fresh audience all her life. She has been able to display herself at the top of her form to the various celebrities who have, in the nature of things, usually stayed quite a short time in her pension, during which time she has played her charms of wit and physical attractiveness for all they were worth, and hence her reputation."

"But go to the people who have known her over a number of years and you get a different story. She has been a very selfish woman. She is very much aged now and entirely unrepentant to boot. I am afraid her end will be lonely indeed."

"I admit freely her charm, when in one of her good moods. She is like the rest of us, part good and part bad. The difference is, that because of her vivid personality, these show up in greater contrast than in most other people and hence the wrong impressions, on both sides, that people have received."

"I can only repeat what I said to her once, ' Tia, there are times when you are almost a great woman, but at others you are mostly an old devil.'"

So ends the Englishman's letter and I have a feeling that his liver has gone back on him, I am sure you agree with me, Doctor, that his report is tainted with what may be jealousy or even something worse, and that it is better to think of Senora Bates as the grand old lady of Jerusalem Street.

Do two things for me, dear friend.

Take a walk tonight at twilight under the portales that border the Plaza, look up through the palms and the waters of the fountain to the cathedral towers outlined against the blue sky and the snow-mantled crags of Chachani and say a prayer for me and my paper.

Then, on the practical side, sit down at that enormous desk in your office, the one on which Julia has placed the large silver ewer and the silver basin in which all her babies were baptized, and write me something definite and positive and real about the Quinta Bates and the town of Arequipa, so that there may be some substance in my article and so that my associates in the Literary Club will not feel prompted to comment when I read it to them, "Well, he did fairly well with very little material!"

Alice joins me in sending our love to you and to Senora and to the others. We have received the announcement of Guillermo's marriage and are as pleased and proud as you are.

Write soon, dear friend.

Hasta la vista,

Arthur Baer