OMO-0250 — Don Goyo and the Jerusalem of Stone
Chronicles, Sketches, and Portraits
Don Goyo and the Jerusalem of Stone
A Chronicle of a Horse, Fifteen Monasteries, and a Volcano That Has Kept Secrets for Five Hundred Years
A Chronicle of a Horse, Fifteen Monasteries, and a Volcano That Has Kept Secrets for Five Hundred Years
Et ego Ioannes vidi sanctam civitatem Ierusalem novam descendentem de caelo a Deo.
Revelation 21:2
Fecerunt itaque civitates duas amores duo.
Saint Augustine, De civitate Dei, XIV, 28
PROLOGUE
The Old Man Who Smokes
We Mexicans have a habit of addressing familiarly what ought to make us tremble. We make death out of sugar and write our name on its forehead; we seat the devil in the Christmas shepherds' play, to lose every December to a shepherd with a staff; and a mountain more than five thousand meters high, carrying in its memory eruptions capable of burying entire towns, we call Don Goyo, like the difficult neighbor who smokes in his entranceway and says hello only when he feels like it.
It is not irreverence. It is the Mexican form of reverence. We are truly familiar only with what we love, and we fully love only what we fear a little.
In the villages on its slopes they say that Don Goyo sometimes comes down in the form of an old man, asks for tortillas or a cigarette, calls himself Gregorio Chino Popocatépetl, and appears in dreams to the tiemperos, those men and women of an ancient calling who speak with clouds, ask for water, and turn away hail. Every March 12, the day the old calendar honored Saint Gregory the Great, they climb up to bring him their offering: flowers, food, music, and, of course, tobacco. To the saint belongs the Mass; to the volcano, the birthday. No one in the mountains has seen a contradiction in this, and I shall not be the one to explain it to them.
Beside him sleeps, since before calendars existed, a white woman who never answers him. The ancients called her Iztaccíhuatl; the muleteers, the Sleeping Woman. He keeps watch over her with a torch that never goes out. Some loves are declared in an afternoon, and others demonstrated in ten thousand years of smoke.
From that watch, Don Goyo contemplates something that must seem as extraordinary to him as it does to us. On his slopes stand fifteen sixteenth-century monastic complexes. They are enormous, severe, bewildering buildings: they have fortress walls, atriums the size of a main square, medieval-monastery cloisters, and bell towers that seem determined to dispute the mountain's right to dominate the horizon. Some retain battlements. Others, murals where angels carry the nails and crown of thorns, where saints of one order converse with those of another, where fantastic beasts peer out and, against all geographical logic, the coast of Japan appears.
They were erected by Franciscans, Dominicans, and Augustinians, and erected—it should be said from the first page—with the hands, skill, and sweat of the Indigenous peoples surrounding them. In December 1994N the world inscribed fourteen of them on the World Heritage List; in 2021 the one in Tlaxcala was added. Fifteen monasteries, three orders, three states of the Republic, five centuries. And a volcano that awoke from decades of drowsiness on December 21, 1994, only days after UNESCO signed the record. Volcanologists will say it was coincidence. Some in the mountains maintain that he heard the news.
I decided to visit them. But I did not want one of those modern excursions where you get out of the car, photograph a façade, hear three dates, buy an ice, and return convinced you have understood the sixteenth century. I wanted to travel the roads, stop in the villages, hear their bells, enter the churches, lay my hand on the stone. And, wherever possible, do it on horseback.
Because the automobile turns distance into an obstacle to overcome, and the horse restores it to the condition of experience. Some landscapes can be understood only at the speed at which they were first seen: the pace of an animal that also grows tired, also thirsts, and also stops, without being asked, before what deserves to be seen.
I saddled him in the charro style, because one does not visit the sixteenth century in an English saddle, and named him Rocín. I know the name is a piece of conceit. A rocín is, strictly speaking, a horse of little worth, and Don Quixote's was called Rocinante precisely because that was what he had previously been. But every horse carrying a man too fond of ideas acquires by that fact alone a Cervantine dignity and a patience no philosopher deserves. Rocín, moreover, knew the limits of the undertaking better than I: where there was a trail, he was in charge; where there was a highway, ravine, someone else's boundary, or the volcano's exclusion zone, he climbed into the trailer with the resignation of a canon who accepts, out of obedience, traveling second class.
That was when Don Goyo decided to intervene.
“So you've come to see my monasteries?”
I was not surprised to hear him. Anyone who spends several hours looking at a volcano ends up attributing opinions to it, and this one's proved numerous.
“All fifteen,” I replied.
“And what are you looking for?”
“To know why they look like fortresses.”
He released a long, irritated fumarole.
“Poor man. Half a millennium of history, and you come asking about some battlements.”
“I also want to know whether they represent the heavenly Jerusalem.”
There was a silence of ash.
“That's another matter,” he finally said. “I've been looking for that one since before you.”
“Will you come with me?”
“I can't move. My lady sleeps here beside me, and I haven't left her alone since before you people invented clocks.”
“Then you're not much use to me.”
“I'm useful for the only thing that matters. I'll teach you how to look, which is a good deal harder than walking.”
Rocín snorted. I took it as a yes.
PART ONE
The Men Who Arrived with Bells
I
Tlaxcala, or the Stage-Set Jerusalem
Don Goyo wanted us to begin with Tlaxcala, which was the last to arrive on the list and the first to arrive in history.
“Before you see what the friars built,” he told me, “you have to understand the world they came to. And that world cannot be understood without Tlaxcala.”
There is a comfortable way to tell the conquest of Mexico: two peoples fought, one won, the other lost, and ever since, Mexicans have been obliged to choose sides whenever someone brings it up after lunch. The drawback of that version is that it cannot withstand the second question. In the territory we now call Mexico there were dozens of lordships, each with its alliances, resentments, tributes, and borders. Tlaxcala had spent generations resisting Mexica power, surrounded, without salt or cotton, and when it decided to ally itself with Cortés, it acted neither as spectator nor victim, but as what it was: a republic of warriors practicing politics. The Tlaxcalans supplied the fighters, the porters, the refuge after the Noche Triste, and later the four hundred families who set out in 1591 to settle the north. The Emperor knew how to recognize it: in 1535 he granted the city a coat of arms, a favor that, according to Motolinía, had been granted to no other Indigenous town.
“You see?” said Don Goyo. “History begins to get interesting when we stop treating people of the past as though they had been born to illustrate our prejudices.”
The old Franciscan monastery of Our Lady of the Assumption stands on a hill above the city, and one climbs to it without haste, as one should climb toward anything worthwhile. The bell tower stands apart from the church, upright and separate, like a sentry who preferred not to enter. And inside the church, above our heads, stretches a wooden coffered ceiling in the Mudéjar tradition, whose interlacing patterns multiply into stars until the roof becomes a handmade firmament. You look up and understand why the ancients called a church's covering heaven: it is not a metaphor, but an ambition.
That geometry had come from far away. It had formed over centuries on the Peninsula, where wood learned to speak with an Arabic accent without ceasing to pray in Latin, and had crossed the ocean in the memory of a few carpenters and the imagination of a few friars. But the wood did not carve itself.
“Who really made this monastery?” I asked.
“The question is poorly framed,” Don Goyo replied. “Who conceives, who directs, who pays, and who carves are different matters. Great works need them all, and small historians always settle on one.”
Then, with his gaze, he led me to the square.
“They built it once down there.”
“Built what?”
“Your Jerusalem.”
And he told me what Motolinía, then guardian of that house, recorded with a witness's wonder. At Corpus Christi in 1539, to celebrate the peace the Emperor and the king of France had signed at Nice, the Tlaxcalans decided to stage the conquest of Jerusalem. They raised a holy city in the square, with its towers and walls. Two armies besieged it, those of Spain and New Spain, with reinforcements from France and Hungary, because when a people begins to dream it spares no expense. On one side of the field, the Pope and his court prayed for victory. There were assaults, reverses, and miracles, and the army that distinguished itself most was that of New Spain, protected by the angels and Saint Hippolytus, the saint of the day on which Tenochtitlan had fallen. In the end the defenders surrendered, asked for baptism, and the Pope ordered them baptized. Before recounting the performance, the friar wrote a sentence that belonged not to a chronicler but to a prophet: may God fulfill that prediction in our days.
“It lasted an afternoon,” Don Goyo said. “Then they dismantled it, as everything made for a festival is dismantled.”
“Then that's not the one I'm looking for.”
“No. That one rose in a few weeks and fell in a day. The one you're seeking, if it exists, took longer to build and takes longer to fall. But notice who dreamed it first.”
“The friars?”
“The friars wrote it. The Tlaxcalans built it, besieged it, won it, and baptized it. Remember that when someone tells you the Indians only watched.”
I looked again at the square, now empty, and it seemed to me that the air still held the dust of that siege.
“And the Jerusalem of stone?”
“Don't rush ahead. Even Dante didn't reach Paradise in the first canto.”
Rocín, who had not read the Divine Comedy, received the reference with absolute indifference.
II
Huejotzingo, or Twelve Men against Immensity
In Huejotzingo Saint Michael the Archangel awaited us, and he has a reputation for not losing battles.
Before we concerned ourselves with the walls, Don Goyo wanted us to enter the room called De profundis. On its walls are painted the first twelve Franciscans who arrived in 1524, led by Friar Martín de Valencia. They landed at San Juan de Ulúa and walked barefoot to Mexico, a rather eloquent way of introducing themselves. When they arrived, Cortés knelt before them and kissed their habits in front of the Indigenous lords, who could not quite understand how the man who had brought down an empire prostrated himself before twelve ragged men. That genuflection was perhaps New Spain's first sermon, and it contained not a single word. One of the twelve heard people murmuring motolinía as he passed, which in Nahuatl means “poor”; he asked its meaning, and from then on wanted no other name.
“Twelve men,” I said. “It seems a disproportionate undertaking.”
“Undertakings of the spirit always begin disproportionately,” Don Goyo replied. “The means are small and the ends immense. That is why the world judges them madness until it can no longer ignore them.”
The number, of course, was not innocent. There were twelve apostles; there are twelve foundations of the Jerusalem Saint John saw descending from heaven. And the letter of obedience with which their minister general dispatched them spoke of the Lord's vineyard and the laborers hired at the eleventh hour. Those men believed they had arrived at the world's evening. They came to work the last hour of the day, with the holy haste of someone who knows the sun is setting.
They brought a doctrine, a liturgy, a discipline, and an intellectual tradition matured over centuries. They did not, however, bring the languages, the maps, or knowledge of institutions they had to learn to understand on their knees. Evangelization required interpreters, schools, catechisms, vocabularies, images, theater, and a patience rarely found in heroic accounts. There was holiness and there was clumsiness; there was charity and there was abuse; there was preaching and learning in both directions. The lords of Huejotzingo, incidentally, knew this very well: in 1560 they wrote to the king, in their own language, to remind him that they had received the Spaniards and friars peacefully, and to complain that they were now burdened with tributes. They were Christians, and they were litigants. There is no contradiction: faith has never taken from anyone the right to demand justice.
The church preserves a sixteenth-century main altarpiece on which the Flemish artist Simón Pereyns worked. Don Goyo could not resist the temptation to gossip.
“That man had his differences with the Holy Office. They say he paid his penance with his brush.”
“It doesn't seem a bad punishment.”
“For a painter, it's the only one that turns into glory.”
An artist from Antwerp working in New Spain, Nahua builders erecting a church in the European tradition, Castilian religious preaching in American languages, and a volcano watching it all. Anyone imagining the sixteenth century as a collection of isolated regions should spend a morning in Huejotzingo.
We went out into the atrium. At its four corners await the posa chapels, carved with angels holding the instruments of the Passion, Saint Francis's cord, and the shield of the five wounds. Processions passed that way and stopped at each chapel, alighting as a bird alights before continuing its flight. Some scholars think they also served to gather catechumens; others, that they held the remains of principal lords. What is certain is that the architecture was made not only to be seen, but to be traversed: to walk, pray, learn, and gather beneath a sky that was, literally, the church's roof.
“Why didn't they simply build bigger churches?” I asked.
“Because intelligence consists not in enlarging an old solution, but in finding a new one. They had multitudes and no naves capable of holding them. So they took the church into the open air.”
In that answer lies one of the keys to New Spanish architecture. The great atriums, the open chapels, and the posa chapels were not a copy of Europe, but a pastoral invention: the form faith found when it had to speak to a whole people at once.
Before leaving, we contemplated again the battlements crowning the walls.
“Now then,” I said. “What were they for?”
“To make you ask that question,” he replied. “We'll discover the rest. A battlement can look like a defense and not be one, and it can serve one purpose and signify something else. No interpretation, however beautiful, excuses us from looking at the stones.”
The old man was beginning to seem a rather competent historian. With the advantage of never consulting his watch.
III
Calpan, or the Angels at the Corners
San Andrés Calpan preserves Mexico's most beautiful posa chapels, and one says it without fear of exaggeration because the stones take care of proving it.
Each of the four is dedicated to a mystery: Our Lady of Sorrows, the Passion, the Annunciation, and the Last Judgment. In the last, Christ appears in majesty between a lily and a sword, mercy on one side and justice on the other, while below, tiny figures emerge from their tombs at the resurrection of the dead. The model was surely a European engraving some friar had in his cell; the hand that translated it into stone was Indigenous. José Moreno Villa called that art tequitqui, a Nahuatl word meaning “tributary,” and was right without intending a theology: the carver pays his tribute, but the tribute also bears the mark of the one paying it. Calpan's reliefs are flat, intense, a little stiff, and absolutely unforgettable. They have the gravity of what is learned late and spoken forever.
There is more. The friars staged the Last Judgment in Nahuatl, with actors rising from mock sepulchers, and someone passing this chapel saw not merely a stone copied from an engraving: he remembered a performance in which his neighbor might have acted. Theater again.
“Was it a kind of catechism in stone?” I asked.
“Largely. But don't forget that the catechism teaches through propositions, while art also moves the imagination and affections. A pope who knew about these things said it long ago: what writing is to those who can read, painting is to those who cannot.”
“Who?”
“Gregory the Great”—and he said it with a pride I had not seen in him—“my saint.”
Christianity is not a religion of disconnected ideas. Its doctrine refers to events that occurred in history, to bodies, to places, to a God who allowed Himself to be seen. If the Word became flesh, the image has a right of citizenship in the church: it does not replace what it represents; it recalls it, teaches it, and offers it for contemplation. A religion that worships an incarnate God cannot distrust stone; it can only ask it to speak the truth.
We walked slowly through the atrium. I thought of the generations that had passed those corners: children learning their first prayers, old people repeating the same path for the fourth, fifth, hundredth time, processions that had worn the paving with bare feet.
“Architecture also preserves movements,” Don Goyo said.
“How can it preserve them?”
“By building the places where they are performed again.”
I understood then that an atrium is not an empty space, but an arranged space: a place prepared to receive human acts that, repeated over generations, become tradition. What is repeated with love ceases to be routine and becomes an inheritance.
In the village they told me that the first Castilian walnut trees in the district were planted in the friars' orchard, and that this is where the walnut in chile en nogada comes from. I could not verify it, nor did I want to. Some stories deserve to be true even if they cannot be proved, and this one has, at least, the advantage of being delicious.
IV
Tochimilco, or the Fountain That Knew about Politics
In Tochimilco, water welcomed us.
The old Franciscan monastery of the Assumption looks toward a square where a monumental sixteenth-century octagonal fountain still survives, once fed by an aqueduct bringing water from the volcano's slopes. Don Goyo was visibly pleased.
“It's mine,” he said.
“The fountain?”
“The water. Today we're going to talk about politics.”
“At a fountain? I expected something more solemn.”
“That's the problem with people who talk a lot about politics: they prefer grand words to necessary works.”
I approached the fountain. Its existence presupposed knowledge of leveling, labor organization, materials, rules of distribution, and centuries of maintenance. None of that is secondary. A community needs water to drink, sow, wash, and live. Religious life does not suppress those needs or turn them into ecclesiastical matters; the temporal order has its own ends and requirements. But a Christian society cannot disregard them without betraying itself.
Saint Thomas wrote it in his treatise on government: whoever founds a city must seek, before anything else, healthy air and wholesome water, because without them no good life is possible, nor even life. And the ordinances Philip II issued in 1573 for founding towns in the Indies repeated the same advice in a notary's prose. The common good is not the sum of particular interests, but the set of conditions—justice, peace, material sufficiency—that allows persons and families to live as their nature requires. A fountain does not realize the common good by itself. But it serves it in a way no speech has equaled.
“You see?” Don Goyo said. “Political philosophy can also begin with an irrigation ditch.”
“And end in a dispute over water.”
“Which is usually more useful than ending in a dispute over who gave the prettiest speech.”
Tochimilco is one of the towns closest to the crater, and its inhabitants know well the other face of the mountain's generosity. I pointed this out to him.
“I send them water and, now and then, ash,” he admitted. “Nobody's perfect.”
A civilization is not built with churches alone. It needs roads, aqueducts, institutions, and work. Spiritual greatness does not excuse material obligations: it orders them. As we watched water fall onto stone, I understood that the water descending from the mountain had participated in these towns' history as much as the bells, and with considerably less noise.
PART TWO
The Mountain, Man, and Order
V
Tetela del Volcán, or Saint Thomas under Don Goyo's Gaze
Tetela del Volcán lives so close to the mountain that there Don Goyo ceases to be landscape and becomes neighborhood. He is visible from the square, the cornfields, the doorway of every house, with the excessive presence of relatives who never entirely leave.
The old monastery of Saint John the Baptist preserves cloister murals where the saints of the order appear with the serenity of those who have finished arguing. Among them is Saint Thomas Aquinas. I stopped before the Angelic Doctor with the slightly pedantic familiarity of someone who has spent half his life reading his articles.
“Here is the man who could best explain all this to us,” I said.
“Provided you don't make him say what he never said,” Don Goyo replied. “That vice is very common among his admirers.”
He was right. Saint Thomas did not know these monasteries, write about battlements, or have a theory of American atriums. But his philosophy allows us to understand what was attempted here. For him, things have natures, and their perfection consists in attaining the ends those natures require. Not everything serves the same purpose. A church is not a palace, a monastery is not a city, civil authority is not ecclesiastical authority, and contemplative life does not delegitimize the work of those who sow, trade, or govern. But those distinct realities can be ordered to one another without being confused, like the instruments of an orchestra that need not sound alike to sound together.
The Dominicans had arrived in New Spain in 1526, and they carried Saint Thomas in their blood. In those same years, at Salamanca, another Dominican, Francisco de Vitoria, dared ask aloud by what titles the Indies were governed. He did so in 1539, the same year the Tlaxcalans besieged their stage-set Jerusalem. Some years history seems to write in two columns: enthusiasm in one, examination of conscience in the other. Peoples that preserve only one become fanatical or cynical.
“Then the monastery was the center of everything,” I said.
“Of many things, yes. But don't confuse the spiritual center of a people with the absorption of its entire life. A heart that also wanted to be the hands and feet would not be more of a heart, but a monster.”
A Christian civilization does not require all institutions to become monasteries. It requires each to know what it is, what it exists for, and toward what it is ordered, without losing sight of man's ultimate end. Order is not uniformity; it is the harmony of what is diverse.
I looked again at the walls. They had been raised by men who understood stones, mortars, slopes, and earthquakes. Their work belonged entirely to the material world and was destined entirely for worship. In that union of matter, intelligence, and purpose lay precisely its mystery.
“Stone doesn't pray,” I said.
“No,” Don Goyo replied. “But it can serve those who pray. Which is more than many who talk do.”
Outside, the mountain remained motionless. Or at least had the courtesy to appear so.
VI
Hueyapan, or the Mountain That Teaches Humility
Hueyapan is high, and you notice it in your lungs before the map. The slopes, the morning cold, and the severity of the roads remind us that evangelization happened not only in cities with chroniclers, but in mountain villages reached by one's legs and inhabited through patience.
The old Dominican monastery of Saint Dominic de Guzmán is small, and makes no apology for it. Around it Nahuatl is still spoken, and in the houses wool dyed with mountain plants is woven on backstrap looms, with the same calm with which a rosary is prayed. The friars who arrived here had to obtain materials, organize work, secure supplies, learn the language, and sustain, year after year, a minimal community in a maximal place.
“All that seems rather complicated,” I observed.
“It was.”
“The chronicles tell it so easily.”
“Chronicles have the advantage that paper weighs less than stone.”
In the mountains the relationship between man and territory is seen without adornment. No one chooses where to live in absolute freedom: one lives where there is water, soil that can be planted, a road, and a tolerable climate. Religious architecture had to accommodate that reality, yet introduced into it a presence that forever changed the way the landscape was seen. A bell tower in the mountains is a sentence written on the horizon: someone lives here, and that someone prays.
In the atrium an old man asked me for a light. He wore an old hat and wool cloak, and had eyes of a clarity that did not match his age. I lit his cigarette. He took a long drag, looked toward the volcano, and told me, without my having asked anything, that one had to come to church even if it was little, because things are not worth what they measure. Then he went uphill, unhurried, and I never saw him again.
“Was that you?” I asked Don Goyo that afternoon.
“I don't smoke other people's cigarettes,” he answered, releasing a fumarole that seemed suspiciously pleased.
I did not insist. In the mountains one soon learns that some questions are impoverished by their answers.
“There are immense buildings,” he said later, “that barely outlive the fashion that produced them. And there are little churches that organize an entire people's memory for five centuries. The importance of a house is measured not by the number of people who fit inside, but by the number of generations who return to it.”
Hueyapan taught me the humility of scale. And also taught me that when the mountain wants to say something, it sometimes sends an old man to ask for a light.
VII
Ocuituco, or the Monastery Where History Lost Its Innocence
In Ocuituco stands the old Augustinian monastery of Saint James the Apostle, the first the order erected in New Spain. The Augustinians had arrived in 1533, and in June of the following year began building here. Don Goyo did not want to present it to me as a pious picture.
“Here we have to talk about something uncomfortable,” he announced.
The town was held in encomienda by Mexico's first bishop, Friar Juan de Zumárraga, who devoted its tributes to maintaining a hospital. The Indigenous people paid through labor on the monastery what they owed in kind, and a dispute soon followed. The bishop accused the friars of raising an oversized house, beginning the monastery before the church, and imprisoning Indigenous people for the work. The Augustinians eventually left, and did not return for years. And in the fall of 1539—that year again—the same Zumárraga, now as apostolic inquisitor and still as encomendero, tried several inhabitants of Ocuituco for celebrating ancient rites and sentenced them to lashes and to being paraded through the town's streets.
What is uncomfortable is not only that abuses occurred. It is who committed them, or who denounced them, or both at once. Zumárraga was the defender of the Indigenous people against the first Audiencia, the founder of the college at Tlatelolco, the man who brought the printing press and maintained hospitals. And he was also the encomendero who litigated over his tributes and the judge who ordered those entrusted to him flogged. The friars who came to preach poverty raised, according to their accuser, too large a house with arms that were not free.
“Did religious men also commit abuses?” I asked.
“Men commit them, even wearing a habit. The habit doesn't make the monk; at most, it binds him.”
“And how should this history be told?”
“Without concealing the evil or denying the good.”
The answer was so simple it seemed impossible to improve. Álvaro d'Ors distinguished authority, which is socially recognized knowledge, from power, which is socially recognized force, and held that a healthy society needs the first to moderate the second. Ocuituco teaches what happens when both are confused in the same hands: the protector becomes a party, the counselor a judge, and the one who should restrain power ends up wielding it with the clear conscience of someone who believes himself authorized.
Serious research must recognize both dimensions of that history: sacrifice, intelligence, charity, and holiness, alongside interests, errors, and conduct incompatible with what was preached. Not to keep a petty account of merits and faults, but to understand the concrete men who made it. Truth does not need protection through omissions. And a civilization is not defended by falsifying its history; it is defended by being able to look at it whole.
From the façade Saint James, the pilgrim apostle, looked at us. I thought of roads, journeys, and the difficulty of transmitting a doctrine without betraying its moral demands.
“Faith is preached with words,” Don Goyo said. “But men end up judging it by the deeds of those who preach it. It is unjust, and inevitable.”
We left Ocuituco without talking. Some places need no brilliant conclusion. It is enough to let their contradictions teach us something.
VIII
Zacualpan de Amilpas, or the Life Missing from the Great Books
We arrived in Zacualpan on a Sunday at dawn, and the square was already full. Before the old Augustinian monastery of the Immaculate Conception, on reed mats and blankets, people offered roasted peanuts, eggs, local fruits, herbs, and little palm figures. And not everything was sold: much was exchanged. Barter survives in Zacualpan, as things survive in villages when no one bothered to forbid them because it occurred to no one that they mattered. In the background, above the awnings, Don Goyo watched over the market with an inspector's air.
I exchanged two pieces of bread for a handful of peanuts and received, as a bonus, a lesson in economics no textbook had given me: the just price exists, and is recognized at a glance when both parties leave happy.
Around the great events there are always thousands of people whose names almost never reach the documents: farmers, masons, muleteers, carpenters, women who sustained their households with an ingenuity no finance minister has equaled, children learning their first prayers, old people preserving the village's stories. The history of the monasteries is theirs too. Perhaps above all theirs.
“Why do we almost never speak of them?” I asked.
“Because papers preserve the decisions of the powerful better than the customs of the humble. But a civilization lives, before anything else, in its customs.”
In the way people work and celebrate. In how they marry, educate their children, resolve disputes, and honor the dead. In Zacualpan they say the friars invented the town's mole; in September the Mojiganga takes to the streets, and in October Our Lady of the Rosary is celebrated. Bells marked events, patronal feasts ordered the calendar, sacraments accompanied existence's decisive moments. But the inhabitants also lived within civil institutions, economic dealings, and family bonds that had their own nature and law. Christian life consisted not in remaining inside the church, but in ordering the whole of existence from it.
“Legal codes arrive late,” Don Goyo said. “The customs were already there. Your age wants to regulate everything and no longer knows how to celebrate almost anything.”
“Then civilization wasn't only in the stones.”
“It never was.”
“Where was it?”
“In the men who raised them, used them, and handed them on. And in those who still come on Sundays to exchange peanuts in front of them.”
I looked at the monastery. It had survived entire generations, and the life that gave rise to it had changed innumerable times. Perhaps that is why old buildings produce such a particular emotion: they let us contemplate something that remains while everything else transforms. They are stone proof that not everything is passing.
PART THREE
The Fortresses and Their Secrets
IX
Yecapixtla, or Whom the Friars Were Defending Themselves Against
Yecapixtla seemed to have awaited us from the beginning of the journey. The old Augustinian monastery of Saint John the Baptist has the monumentality of a border castle: massive walls, buttresses that seem to prop up the sky, battlements at the top. And then, amid so much severity, a Gothic rose window on the façade, open like an eye that cannot quite believe what it sees, and inside, a stone pulpit pierced with medieval tracery. The fortress has lace. That contradiction alone is worth the journey.
“Now then,” I said. “I want an answer.”
“Then you'll have to endure an argument among historians.”
“I'm ready.”
“That's what everyone says before hearing the second hypothesis.”
But before the historians, Don Goyo wanted to talk about himself, a subject on which he never tires.
“I know more about wars than all of them. In 1519 a captain of Cortés, an Ordaz fellow, wanted to climb me to see where the smoke came from; the Emperor later gave him a coat of arms with my image, and I've never seen a peso in royalties. Two years later another, Montaño, lowered himself inside my crater to extract sulfur because they'd run out of gunpowder. So don't talk to me about fortresses: the conquest was also made with my entrails.”
“I didn't know you were an interested party.”
“In this land we all are. Now then, the historians.”
For a long time it was held that fortified monasteries had been designed to protect the friars and their faithful from possible Indigenous uprisings. The explanation seemed reasonable in the uncertain years following Tenochtitlan's fall. But it encountered difficulties. Many apparently military elements could not serve effective defense: battlements too thin, wall-walks without parapets, loopholes looking nowhere. The monasteries stood amid Indigenous populations that had built them with their own hands, and documents proving attacks or defense plans are not plentiful.
George Kubler, in the mid-twentieth century, began to distrust purely defensive explanations. Other scholars proposed symbolic readings: the walls would evoke the Church militant, the battlements a spiritual fortress, the whole enclosure the city protected by God. The interpretation was suggestive, and had in its favor centuries of Christian tradition in which the soul is a castle and the Church a walled city. But an uncomfortable question remained: are there papers allowing that intention to be attributed to the builders?
Javier Gómez Martínez, in his study of mendicant fortresses, proposed viewing the problem through the tensions of early New Spain. The friars dealt not only with Indigenous communities; they also litigated with encomenderos, civil authorities, and the secular clergy, which looked unfavorably upon the orders' power. In certain circumstances a high wall protected against threats quite different from those imagined by traditional historiography, and a battlement could be, before a weapon, a declaration of jurisdiction: we command here.
“Then were they real fortresses?” I asked.
“Some elements may have defended. Others were structural, ornamental, or political. No answer applies equally to all fifteen without examining them one by one.”
“And the heavenly Jerusalem?”
“That too must be studied. But without turning every battlement into a verse of Revelation.”
The sentence made me smile. Don Goyo had a healthy distrust of interpretations too perfect, which usually say more about the interpreter than the interpreted. Yecapixtla taught me that the same form can be useful, beautiful, and meaningful at once, and that the historian's task is not to choose the function he likes best, but to demonstrate which it truly had.
We ate cecina in the square, because in Yecapixtla not eating cecina is a form of heresy. Rocín, who has no opinion about fortresses, settled for a bunch of alfalfa and the shade of an ash tree. Of the three, he was the only one who defended no thesis that afternoon.
X
Atlatlahucan, or the Monsters Entered the Monastery Too
A surprise awaited us in the old Augustinian monastery of Saint Matthew. New Spanish religious architecture was not only severe: it also knew how to amuse itself. Renaissance grotesques unfold across its walls and vaults, foliage curling upon itself, hybrid figures half leaf and half beast, creatures seemingly emerging from a bestiary someone read in a fever. They came from Italy by way of engravings, passed through Spain, and were painted anew here by hands that had already imagined their own monsters before knowing those of others.
“What are those creatures doing in a monastery?” I asked.
“Reminding you that Christianity didn't abolish the imagination. It baptized it.”
Medieval and Renaissance art had developed a universe of overwhelming richness: real and impossible animals, plants, emblems, allegories, prophets, saints, angels, and demons. Not everything had the same function. Some figures taught doctrine; others belonged simply to the craft's decorative repertoire; others admitted diverse readings. The problem begins when the modern observer, with a convert's enthusiasm, wants to find a secret doctrine behind every scroll.
“Then not everything means something?”
“Everything has a reason to be there. But not every reason is theological. Sometimes the painter had an empty space to fill and an engraving at hand.”
A flower can signify a virtue. It can also be a flower. Context decides the difference, not the viewer's desire. Often attributed to Chesterton, though written by one of his interpreters, is the idea that whoever stops believing in God ends up believing not in nothing, but in anything; something similar happens to someone who cannot read a symbol: he ends up seeing them everywhere.
Atlatlahucan also reminded us of its fragility. The earthquake of September 19, 2017 seriously damaged many of Morelos's monasteries, and this was among them. Cracked walls, detached paintings, wounded vaults. Restoration work recovered it and returned it to the community, but the history written for centuries on its walls nearly lost some pages.
Before I said anything, Don Goyo spoke first.
“It wasn't me. That came from farther down, from the plates, from a place where even I don't command. But I had to watch it.”
He kept a silence I had not known in him.
“Even monsters need restorers,” he finally said.
It was difficult to dispute such a statement.
XI
Totolapan, or When the Earth Wanted Its Stones Back
San Guillermo de Totolapan welcomed us with the gravity of buildings that have known recent misfortune. On September 19, 2017, the church's security cameras recorded the exact moment when the main vault fell and the towers crumbled. For months, sun, rain, and clouds entered through the hole in the roof, as though heaven, tired of waiting for the faithful to ascend, had decided to come down to see what was happening.
This monastery holds a story that should be told slowly. In 1543, says Augustinian tradition, Friar Antonio de Roa wanted for his town a crucifix like the Holy Christ of Burgos, and one day an image appeared at the monastery whose origin no one could explain. Ever since it has been called the Appeared Christ. Roa was an ascetic of a kind no longer made: to teach the Indigenous people the Passion, he had them slap and mistreat him, and his hagiographer says they did it reluctantly, because they did not understand how a man could ask to be wounded for love. In Ocuituco some friars were accused of imprisoning Indigenous people for construction; in Totolapan a friar asked the Indigenous people to flog him. The entire history of evangelization fits between those neighboring towns, and whoever wants to tell only one of the two is telling a lie.
The Christ was taken to the capital in the sixteenth century and returned to its town nearly three centuries later. Even today, on the fifth Friday of Lent, pilgrims come to visit it from villages in the southern Valley of Mexico, walking as their grandparents walked.
Don Goyo remained silent.
“Aren't you going to say anything?” I asked.
“This time I'd rather listen.”
I thought of the men who raised those walls: those who hauled the stone, prepared the lime, painted the surfaces, lived and died in those cells. And I thought of the specialists of our time who had to gather the fallen fragments, classify them, study the mortars, reconstruct what could be reconstructed, and honestly mark what could not. Some built, others preserved, others restored. None knew all the others, but their work was stitched into the same undertaking.
That is tradition's deepest dimension. It consists not only in receiving something from the past, but in recognizing that what we receive imposes obligations toward the future. An inheritance is not a gift: it is a commission.
“Do you think the first builders imagined their walls would still matter five hundred years later?” I asked.
“They hoped they would last. No one knows all the consequences of his work, and that's fortunate: if we knew them, we wouldn't dare begin anything.”
In 2025, after years of work, the monastery reopened. The news would have pleased its builders. Though they would surely have been astonished by the paperwork required nowadays to repair a church. They needed only stone, lime, faith, and a guardian with character.
XII
Tlayacapan, or the Children Who Never Quite Left
Tlayacapan is one of those towns where the landscape seems to have more memory than its inhabitants. Hills of capricious shapes surround it, and at its center stands the old Augustinian monastery of Saint John the Baptist.
In 1982, during work on the building, children's burials appeared. The bodies had been preserved by natural mummification, and with them their clothing: some little children were buried in saints' attire, dressed for heaven. They have provisionally been dated between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Not everything is known about them. Yet looking at them is enough to understand that behind every burial there was a family. Someone sewed those clothes. Someone accompanied the body. Someone wept. Someone returned home with a silence that had not been there before.
In Mexico, when a baptized child died, people said he was departing as a little angel. He was dressed festively and, in many villages, his wake was held with music, because faith assured them that the child had entered heaven without a stop along the way. It was not insensitivity. It was hope's most heroic form: singing with a broken heart because one believes, against all evidence, that love does not end on earth.
Don Goyo said nothing. And I thanked him for being silent.
The death of a child has a gravity before which historical explanations fall short. I thought of all the generations who had lived in these monasteries' shadow: children baptized, marriages celebrated, the sick tended, the dead accompanied to burial. A civilization's history cannot be written only with the names of its rulers and founders. It also belongs to those who never left a book, a portrait, or a tombstone. And to those who did not leave even that.
“Shall we go on?” Don Goyo finally asked.
I nodded. Rocín moved slowly, as though he too knew. For a good stretch none of the three said a word.
PART FOUR
The City and Its Roads
XIII
Oaxtepec, or the Garden That Existed before the Monastery
Oaxtepec reminded us that Mexico's history did not begin in 1521. In the mid-fifteenth century, Moctezuma Ilhuicamina ordered a garden made here with plants brought from all the provinces of his lordship, with its springs, banks, and gardeners who knew by heart the virtues of every leaf. When he saw it, he wrote to the Emperor that it was the most beautiful and refreshing garden he had seen, traversed by a gentle river. Coming from a conqueror little given to lyricism, the praise is almost a confession.
Then the Dominicans arrived, and the old monastery of Saint Dominic settled in a territory carrying centuries of human history. The Spaniards did not destroy the garden: they preserved it and placed a hospital beside it. Bernardino Álvarez founded it, a man who had been a soldier, gambler, and brawler before devoting himself to gathering the insane and the sick along New Spain's roads. Years later, in that Hospital of the Holy Cross, lived a hermit from Madrid, a layman without formal education, whom his contemporaries considered a saint. He collected the remedies taught him by Indigenous people and hospital staff in a book he called Tesoro de medicinas, and also wrote, in the silence of his cell, an exposition of Revelation.
“What was his name?” I asked.
“Gregorio,” Don Goyo said, with the voice of someone announcing a relative. “Gregorio López. We Gregorios have a tendency toward contemplation, herbs, and smoke.”
“And Revelation, apparently.”
“In the end, all roads on this journey lead to the same city. You'll see.”
The important observation, however, was another.
“The friars didn't come to an empty land,” he said. “They came to a full land: full of people, knowledge, gods, disputes, and gardens.”
Evangelization involved profound religious, cultural, and political transformations, but those transformations occurred upon societies that existed, knew things, and had their own relationship with the territory. Understanding New Spain requires studying ruptures and continuities together, without the naïveté of believing everything began with the friars or that everything ended with them. In Oaxtepec the botanical knowledge of the ancients passed to the Christian hospital, and from there to a book printed in Mexico a century later. Charity made the bridge.
“What seems more admirable to you?” Don Goyo asked me. “That men transform the landscape, or that they learn to live within it?”
I thought for a moment.
“That they know how to distinguish when one is called for and when the other.”
The old man seemed satisfied. Civilization consists neither in destroying nature to demonstrate mastery over it, nor in renouncing its transformation for fear of touching it. It consists in using its goods with reason, respecting what they are and ordering them to legitimate human ends. A garden is exactly that: nature from which permission has been asked.
XIV
Tepoztlán, or the Dog That Carried Fire
Tepoztlán welcomed us with its steep hills, their shapes so theatrical they look like scenery. At the top of the Tepozteco remain the ruins of the temple of Tepoztécatl, one of the gods of pulque, reached by a stairway that still leaves tourists breathless. Below, in the valley, stands the old Dominican monastery of the Nativity. Don Goyo, from afar, contemplated those crags with the condescension of a grandee of Spain before a provincial gentleman.
The contrast is extraordinary: two religious histories in the same territory, one above and the other below, looking at each other. And history, which has a sense of humor, resolved the dialogue not by a decree but by a theatrical performance. Every year, at the Nativity festivities, the Reto al Tepozteco is staged in Nahuatl: the old lord of the place, now Christian, is challenged by the kings of neighboring towns, who reproach him for abandoning his gods, and he defends himself and defeats them with words. Theater again, as in Tlaxcala and Calpan. This country converted through acting, and keeps acting so as not to forget it converted.
In the monastery are murals and emblems of the Order of Preachers. Among them appears the dog carrying a torch in its mouth.
“What is a dog doing with fire in its mouth?” I asked.
“It's an old image of Saint Dominic. They say that before giving birth, his mother dreamed she carried in her womb a dog with a burning torch that would set the world on fire. The Dominicans made it an emblem, and their name a wordplay: Domini canes, the Lord's dogs.”
“A preaching dog.”
“A reminder that preaching must carry light and not merely make noise. Dogs that only bark abound; those that illuminate, not so much.”
I thought of the number of contemporary speeches that would have improved considerably if their authors had understood that difference.
Then I noticed something, and told him.
“You also carry a torch.”
“For longer than that dog,” he replied. “And nobody has made me a saint.”
“Your torch doesn't preach.”
“No. It keeps watch. Which is the other half of the calling.”
The Dominicans gave study an importance that was anything but ornamental. Preaching required knowing doctrine, arguing, distinguishing, answering objections. Moving people was not enough: one had to teach, and to teach one had to understand. In Tepoztlán that intellectual tradition met a community with a long history and strong character, which did not abandon all its customs at once, because cultural processes rarely obey the simplicity of decrees. Memories persisted, practices changed, resistance occurred, new forms were born.
“Then what does this monastery represent?” I asked.
“An encounter that transformed a people, and whose memory is still debated in Nahuatl every September. Few institutions can say the same.”
Great buildings preserve not only answers. They preserve questions each generation must ask again, preferably aloud and facing the hill.
XV
Cuernavaca, or the Road That Ended in Japan
We reached Cuernavaca believing the journey was nearly over. Don Goyo seemed amused.
“There's still a surprise to come.”
The old Franciscan monastery of the Assumption, one of the first the order erected and now a cathedral, preserves on the walls of its nave a painting no one would expect to find here: the martyrdom of Saint Philip of Jesus and his companions in Japan. It remained hidden for centuries beneath layers of later decoration, and reappeared in the twentieth century when the cathedral was renovated and someone scraping a wall found behind it a ship, a crowd, and a row of crosses.
We had traveled through towns of Tlaxcala, Puebla, and Morelos; we had spoken of Franciscans, Dominicans, and Augustinians. And suddenly Nagasaki appeared.
“What is Japan doing in Cuernavaca?” I asked.
“Reminding you that the Church's history doesn't end where your map ends.”
On February 5, 1597, twenty-six Christians were crucified in Nagasaki. Among them was a young Franciscan born in Mexico City, who had been rather restless as a boy, sailed to Manila, was shipwrecked on the Japanese coast while returning to his homeland, and died far from it with a spear in his side. He was the first saint born in Mexico. His story began in America, passed through the Philippines, and ended in Japan, because New Spain was not the end of the world but its crossroads. The galleon crossed and recrossed the Pacific, and the return route that made it possible had been discovered in 1565 by an Augustinian friar, Andrés de Urdaneta, a brother in habit of those who raised half the monasteries we had visited.
The paintings show vessels, figures, landscapes, and the execution itself, with a gravity requiring no adjectives. It is a story of faith, journeys, and death. But also of communications between continents: trade routes crossing the ocean, religious traveling to Asia, artists familiar with diverse traditions, news of events thousands of leagues away that someone in Cuernavaca considered worthy of painting on his church wall so they would not be forgotten.
“Now you understand,” Don Goyo said, “that these monasteries aren't a history enclosed around a mountain.”
It was true. The volcano had been our geographical center, but could not be the limit of our understanding. The monasteries belonged to a network of roads, institutions, beliefs, and persons that crossed oceans. And the Jerusalem we sought began to change meaning before my eyes: it was not a city at a point on a map, but a community whose vocation exceeded all borders. A Mexican crucified in Japan and painted in Morelos is rather eloquent proof that Christendom was never a neighborhood.
PART FIVE
The Jerusalem of Stone
XVI
The Walls of the City That Descends from Heaven
We had visited fifteen monastic complexes. We had seen churches with fortress outlines, atriums capable of receiving a whole people, chapels for resting processions, altarpieces, fountains, cloisters, and graves. We had spoken of disputes and charity, engineering and doctrine, theater and earthquakes. The question that gave the journey its name remained to be answered.
“Why Jerusalem?” I asked.
“Because now you can hear the answer without confusing it with a legend,” Don Goyo said. “Open the book.”
Revelation describes the new Jerusalem descending from heaven, adorned as a bride. It has a great, high wall, twelve gates guarded by twelve angels, and twelve foundations bearing the names of the twelve apostles. Its plan is a perfect square; its measurements, an arithmetic of fullness. But then come three sentences that change everything. The first: the seer says he saw no temple in it, because its temple is the Lord God and the Lamb. The second: the city needs neither sun nor moon, because God's glory illuminates it and its lamp is the Lamb. The third: its gates will never close, because there will be no night there.
I stayed silent for a good while.
“Then the city the friars wanted to evoke with churches is a city without a temple.”
“Exactly. They built churches to announce a place where they will no longer be needed. That's how true things are: they point beyond themselves.”
“And it's a walled city whose gates are always open.”
“There's the answer to your question about battlements, or at least the only one that interests me. A wall with open gates isn't a defense. It's a definition. It serves not to keep anyone out, but to make clear where one is inside.”
I thought of the atriums we had seen, enclosed by battlemented walls and opened by arches without gates. I thought of Tlaxcala's square, where an entire people had besieged a stage-set Jerusalem only to end by baptizing its defenders. I thought of Huejotzingo's twelve, arriving to work the eleventh hour, and Motolinía asking God to fulfill the prediction in his days. I thought of Gregorio López writing about Revelation in his cell at Oaxtepec. Those men lived with their gaze fixed on history's end, not like someone fearing a catastrophe, but like someone awaiting a wedding. Some historians have studied that hope deeply, seeing in New Spanish monasteries an architecture of city, temple, and stage: stone wanting to be liturgy, and liturgy wanting to be proclamation.
Saint Augustine had explained in The City of God that two loves founded two cities: love of God to the contempt of self, the heavenly; love of self to the contempt of God, the earthly. They are not two territories separated by customs posts, but two communities defined by what they love. Throughout history their citizens live intermingled, in the same streets and sometimes the same heart, and their definitive separation belongs only to God's judgment. Thus the heavenly city cannot simply be identified with any kingdom, monastery, era, or temporal civilization, however great it may have been. Whoever confuses Jerusalem with his own country ends up worshiping his country; whoever separates it completely from history ends up no longer awaiting it.
“Then,” I asked, “can we call these monasteries Jerusalem?”
“You can say Christian architecture expresses spiritual realities through material signs. Walls can recall protection; gates, access; foundations, permanence; battlements can come from a military, ornamental, or symbolic repertoire, and to know what they were in each building one must study each building. What you cannot say is that all fifteen were laid out as a single program to represent Revelation. The documents do not support that much.”
“Then our Jerusalem of stone is an interpretation.”
“It is a literary image founded upon a true theological tradition. And such an image is worth more than a hundred invented certainties.”
“It doesn't seem a very poetic answer.”
“Poetry doesn't improve by forcing history to lie.”
He was right. Beauty does not require abandoning truth; quite the contrary. When an image illuminates a reality without deforming it, it attains a dignity arbitrary fantasy never achieves. What is beautiful and false lasts as long as a theatrical performance. What is beautiful and true remains.
XVII
The City Ordered toward a Center
We returned then to the most important question: what those men had wanted to build.
It is not enough to answer churches, or monasteries. Religious establishments formed part of an entire reorganization of common life. Around them towns were laid out with their church, atrium, square, and government houses. The Indigenous people governed themselves in their own republics, with a governor, alcaldes, and councilors elected from among themselves, and gathered in confraternities, neighborhoods, trades, and mayordomías with their festivals, funds, and disputes. New Spain was not a block, but a fabric: a community of communities, each with its law, customs, and way of serving the good of all.
Architecture made those relationships visible. The church occupied the highest place; the atrium gathered the faithful; the cloister ordered religious life; the square and royal houses attended to other needs, equally legitimate. Roads connected the towns and fountains supplied them. Each thing in its place, and all looking, in one way or another, toward the same point.
“And what was that point?” I asked.
“For the friars, God, who is man's ultimate end. But don't forget that political life also has its own ends, temporal and legitimate. The bell tower isn't in place of the town council, but above it. Which isn't the same thing.”
I thought of Saint Thomas and his distinction of orders: not to confuse the spiritual with the temporal, not to reduce one to the other, yet to recognize a hierarchy between them, because man is one and his life cannot be split in two without breaking. The common good is not a philosophers' abstraction, but the criterion that allows us to judge whether a society is well or badly ordered: whether its institutions serve the perfection of persons and communities, or whether persons and communities have ended up serving their institutions.
It was not a perfect organism. No historical society is, and those claiming to be usually are the worst. There were abuses, disputes, hunger, epidemics that emptied entire towns. But there existed a conception of order that allowed things to be placed in relation, and for that very reason allowed them to be judged. The lords of Huejotzingo could write to the king because they believed justice existed above tribute. Zumárraga could accuse the friars and the friars Zumárraga because both accepted the same tribunal of conscience. A society that has lost its center does not commit fewer injustices: it simply loses the place from which it might recognize them.
Christian civilization was not an accumulation of churches. It was an immensely complex historical reality, made of institutions, customs, laws, families, schools, trades, artistic traditions, forms of authority, and a faith that permeated everything without replacing everything. Popocatépetl's monasteries do not contain that civilization by themselves. But they allow some of its principles to be seen in stone.
Bells and Time
We had spoken much of space: walls, atriums, roads, and cities. Something deeper remained.
“Listen,” Don Goyo said.
A bell sounded in the distance. I did not know which town it came from. Perhaps one we had visited; perhaps another hidden among the ravines.
For centuries the bell organized these towns' public life. It called to Mass, announced festivals, tolled for the dead, warned of fire, summoned the council. And in many places it was also rung against storms, to ward off hail threatening the harvest. I pointed this out to Don Goyo, who laughed with a short fumarole.
“In these mountains,” he said, “the bell ringer and the tiempero spent centuries disputing the same cloud.”
Then I realized something that had been before me from the beginning. In Spanish the same word, tiempo, serves for weather and for time. The tiempero cares for the weather that falls from heaven; the bell orders the time that passes over the earth. Our language, wiser than we are, has always suspected the two are related, and that neither rain nor hours entirely belongs to us.
The bell introduced a public dimension of time. Not everything depended on each person's watch: there was a shared calendar. Advent and Christmas, Lent and Holy Week, Easter, Corpus Christi, patronal festivals, the month's saints. And intertwined with it, the earth's cycles: the rains, sowing, harvest, dry seasons. Human life unfolded within several rhythms at once, and the bell gave voice to all of them.
I recalled the letter with which their minister general had dispatched the twelve Franciscans. They believed they were arriving at the eleventh hour, at the world's evening, with the working day about to close.
“That eleventh hour has proved rather long,” I said.
“For God a thousand years are like a day,” Don Goyo replied. “And for me too, though there's no merit in my case: I'm made of stone. What's admirable is that you, who last so little, have learned to live as if every evening might be the last and every work must last forever. That contradiction is the most Christian thing I've seen.”
Then he asked me:
“What difference do you find with your time?”
“That now we can measure every second with extraordinary precision.”
“And does that mean you know better what to do with it?”
I did not answer. The question was too good.
Our age has perfected the instruments for measuring time and almost entirely forgotten the art of ordering it. We know the exact hour in any city on the planet and do not know what truly deserves our hours. We have replaced the bell with the notification, which also sounds, but summons no one: it merely interrupts. The bell did not by itself resolve the problem of meaning. But publicly, several times a day, it recalled that life has dimensions not reducible to work or consumption.
“Perhaps,” I said, “a civilization is also recognized by what it reserves its time for.”
“And by what it considers worthy of celebration,” Don Goyo added. “Tell me what feasts a people keeps, and I'll tell you what it loves.”
EPILOGUE
Don Goyo's Last Bell
I do not know whether Rocín understood any of our journey. I suspect not. Though I must acknowledge that, of the three, he was the only one never to confuse a philosophical question with an immediate need. When hungry, he sought grass; when thirsty, water; when tired, he stopped. And when he thought we had devoted too much time to a façade, he expressed his disagreement with a clarity many university professors would envy. In the order of ends, Rocín was an impeccable Thomist: he never took a means for an end, nor an end for a means.
We had visited fifteen monasteries, but what I took home could not fit into fifteen buildings. I took Tlaxcala's stage-set Jerusalem and Cortés kneeling before twelve barefoot men; Calpan's Christ between lily and sword; Tochimilco's water and Saint Thomas in Tetela's cloister; the old man who asked me for a light in Hueyapan; Ocuituco's bishop and friars accusing one another before the same God; Zacualpan's barter beneath the volcano's gaze; Yecapixtla's rose window, Atlatlahucan's monsters, Totolapan's fallen vault, Tlayacapan's little angels; Oaxtepec's hermit commenting on Revelation amid his herbs; Tepoztlán's torch-bearing dog and the martyrs of Nagasaki painted on a wall in Cuernavaca.
Fifteen places. Fifteen memories. A single question: what makes a civilization deserve to be remembered?
Don Goyo stayed silent for a good while. Evening descended over the mountains, clouds began gathering around his summit, and in the distance the towns lit their first lights.
“Do you know what surprises me about you?” he finally asked.
“What?”
“That you build things meant to outlive you.”
I thought of the Indigenous masons who raised those walls without signing them; the friars who died without seeing their works finished; the painters whose names were lost; the farmers who worked the surrounding lands; the women who brought their children for baptism; those married beneath those vaults; the old people who heard the same bells for decades; the restorers who, after the earthquake, gathered fragments of paintings made by men dead for five hundred years. All participated in a history none could contemplate whole.
“Perhaps we build,” I replied, “because we want to hand something to people we don't yet know.”
“Perhaps.”
“And you? What have you learned from us in all these centuries?”
The old man released a small fumarole.
“That you can raise admirable works and destroy them with bewildering ease.”
“That's not very encouraging.”
“I've also seen that after destroying them, some return to rebuild them. No other creature I know does that. Ants rebuild by instinct. You do it out of fidelity.”
I looked at the towns. I thought of the monasteries wounded by earthquakes, the communities determined to recover their churches, the years of scaffolding and patience. And I understood that stubbornness held a lesson. A civilization is not preserved by monuments alone. It needs men able to recognize the value of what they have received, distinguish the essential from the accessory, correct errors, transmit what they know, and preserve just institutions; men who understand that not everything old deserves to remain, nor is everything new progress. Stones may outlive those who carved them. But they cannot by themselves transmit the meaning of what they represent. For that they need men who know how to read them.
“Then,” I asked, “what was those monasteries' true fortress?”
Don Goyo seemed to choose his words carefully.
“I don't know in every case. Some walls may have defended; others wanted to say something; many did both. But there's something you can affirm.”
“What?”
“That their builders believed some things were worthy of remaining.”
The answer moved me, not because it settled the historians' controversies, but because it restored architecture to its human dimension. Building is an act of trust in the future. Raising a wall presupposes believing someone will need it tomorrow. Planting a tree is imagining a shade someone else will enjoy. Founding a school is trusting men who have not yet learned. And building a church is dedicating matter, labor, and intelligence to a worship expected to continue when its founders are gone. Those buildings still stand not because their builders escaped history, but because subsequent generations found reasons to preserve them. Permanence is not a gift of stone: it is a renewed decision by men.
“And Jerusalem?” I asked for the last time.
Don Goyo turned his gaze toward the horizon.
“Jerusalem isn't on my slopes. Nor can it be confused with any city made by men. But there are buildings that remind us man wasn't made only to inhabit the earth.”
Then I dared tell him what I had been thinking for days.
“In that city there will be no night. Your torch won't be needed.”
He took time to answer. For the first time on the whole journey, it seemed the old man was not sure whether to laugh.
“I know,” he finally said. “That's why I hold it. One keeps vigil while it is night. The day dawn breaks, I'll gladly extinguish it, and my lady will awake.”
He said no more, and neither did I. Some sentences are not commented upon; they are kept.
I contemplated the outlines of the monasteries still distinguishable among the towns: battlements, bell towers, walls, crosses. And I thought perhaps that was the journey's most just image. A mountain recalling creation's immensity. A horse restoring the human measure of distances to the traveler. And fifteen monasteries raised by generations who believed existence must be ordered toward something greater than themselves. Not all their builders were saints. Not all their decisions were right. Not all their buildings meant the same thing. But their works remained as testimony to a time when stone, labor, and faith agreed to endure.
And I understood that the protagonist of this story was not the volcano, nor the horse, nor even the buildings. It was man. That strange being who is born knowing so little, lives a very brief time, and yet can raise works that traverse centuries. Who needs water and bread, but also beauty and truth. Who founds cities and then asks about their destiny. Who knows death and still builds for those to come. Who inhabits the earth and cannot stop looking toward heaven.
Then a bell rang. A single one, distant. I did not know which town it came from, nor wanted to discover it. Its sound spread through the evening and was lost among the ravines. Don Goyo released one last fumarole, and I had the impression that after five hundred years of hearing those bells, the old man still found something in them worthy of attention. Perhaps because the mountain knows the fragility of what we build better than we do. Perhaps because it has seen too many generations pass. Or perhaps because from its height it can contemplate at once what we find so hard to bring together: the smallness of our works and the greatness of the ends to which we can dedicate them.
Rocín began to walk. The road was darkening. Volcanoes have that advantage over chroniclers: they need not find a good ending; remaining is enough. We, however, must say goodbye.
As we descended toward the town, I thought I had set out seeking fortresses and returned with a much more serious question. Not what those walls defended, but what we must defend. Because stones can preserve the memory of a civilization, but only men can preserve what made it worthy of memory.
Behind us, Don Goyo, the old man who smokes, remained in his place with his torch held high, keeping watch over the sleeping woman. Like someone who knows that every vigil, however long, ends in a morning. ●
Documentary and Methodological Note
This chronicle is an original literary work. The dialogues with Don Goyo, the figure of Rocín, the old man asking for a light in Hueyapan, and the philosophical conversations are fictional devices. The itinerary brings together the fifteen components of the property inscribed by UNESCO, but does not describe an actual horseback journey or establish a continuous equestrian route between them: highways, ravines, private properties, and areas restricted by volcanic activity lie between them.
The traditions about Don Goyo—his appearance as an old man, the name Gregorio Chino Popocatépetl, the tiemperos, and the March 12 offering—belong to the region's popular religiosity and are recorded as such, without asserting their supernatural reality. The coincidence in December 1994 between inscription on the World Heritage List and the resumption of volcanic activity is real; what “is maintained in the mountains” is literary license.
The relationship between the monasteries and the heavenly Jerusalem is a historiographical interpretation, supported by the first Franciscans' eschatology and studies of New Spanish architecture and theater, which must be distinguished from established architectural facts. The work uses it as a literary and theological axis without attributing to the fifteen buildings a common iconographic program that has not been demonstrated documentarily. Likewise, the fortress question is presented as an open debate, with defensive, structural, symbolic, and jurisdictional functions that must be examined case by case.
Primary Sources
- Revelation 21 (Vulgate); Saint Augustine, De civitate Dei, XIV, 28; Saint Thomas Aquinas, De regno, on founding cities; Gregory the Great, letter to Serenus of Marseille, on images.
- Friar Toribio de Benavente, Motolinía, Historia de los indios de la Nueva España: Corpus Christi festivities of 1539 in Tlaxcala, the staging of the conquest of Jerusalem, the grant of a coat of arms in 1535.
- Obedience and instruction of Friar Francisco de los Ángeles to the twelve Franciscans (1523).
- Philip II's ordinances on discovery, new settlement, and pacification (1573).
- Letter of the lords of Huejotzingo to the king (1560).
- Francisco Losa, Vida del siervo de Dios Gregorio López (1613); Gregorio López, Tesoro de medicinas.
Studies
- George Kubler, Mexican Architecture of the Sixteenth Century (1948).
- John McAndrew, The Open-Air Churches of Sixteenth-Century Mexico (1965).
- Javier Gómez Martínez, Fortalezas mendicantes. Claves y procesos en los conventos novohispanos del siglo XVI (1997).
- John Leddy Phelan, The Millennial Kingdom of the Franciscans in the New World (1956).
- Jaime Lara, City, Temple, Stage: Eschatological Architecture and Liturgical Theatrics in New Spain (2004).
- Robert Ricard, La conquista espiritual de México.
- José Moreno Villa, La escultura colonial mexicana (1942), origin of the term tequitqui.
- Antonio Rubial García, “Santiago de Ocuituco: la organización económica de un convento rural agustino a mediados del siglo XVI,” Estudios de Historia Novohispana, 7 (text); and “Cuando las ovejas actuaron. El teatro náhuatl en el siglo XVI,” Revista de la Universidad de México (2001) (text).
- Beatriz Aracil Varón, on evangelizing theater and the Conquest of Jerusalem of 1539 (text).
- Jennifer Scheper Hughes, Biography of a Mexican Crucifix: Lived Religion and Local Faith from the Conquest to the Present (2010), on Totolapan's Appeared Christ and Friar Antonio de Roa (chapter).
- Julio Glockner, Los volcanes sagrados. Mitos y rituales en el Popocatépetl y la Iztaccíhuatl (1996).
- Álvaro d'Ors, on the distinction between auctoritas and potestas.
Institutional Sources
- UNESCO: Earliest 16th-Century Monasteries on the Slopes of Popocatépetl. International recognition, architectural features, fifteen components, and the 2021 extension.
- INAH: records of the complexes and their dedications; Huejotzingo's Local Museum of Evangelization; research on the children's burials at Tlayacapan; Cuernavaca's cathedral and the mural of the martyrs of Nagasaki; 2024 studies on the management and conservation of the complex.
- INAH Morelos, El Tlacuache, no. 1203 (2025), on Ocuituco's monastery of Saint James the Apostle (text).
Documentary Record
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