Part 10
Don Vicente Riva Palacio's metrical version of this legend seems to be composite: a blending of the primitive myth with a real tragedy of Viceregal times. Introductorily, he tells that for more than two hundred years a popular tale has been current in varying forms of a mysterious woman, clad in white, who runs through the streets of the City at midnight uttering wailings so keen and so woful that whoever hears them swoons in a horror of fear. Then follows the story: Luisa, the Wailer, in life was a woman of the people, very beautiful. By her lover, Don Muño de Montes Claros, she had three children. That he might make a marriage with a lady of his own rank, he deserted her. Through a window of his house she saw him at his marriage feast; and then sped homeward and killed--with a dagger that Don Muño had left in her keeping--her children as they lay sleeping. Her white garments all spattered with their blood, she left her dead children and rushed wildly through the streets of the City--shrieking in the agony of her sorrow and her sin. In the end, "a great crowd gathered to see a woman garroted because she had killed her three children"; and on that same day "a grand funeral procession" went with Don Muño to his grave. And it is this Luisa who goes shrieking at night through the streets of the City even now.
My friend Gilberto Cano is my authority for the version of the legend--the popular version--that I have given in my text. It seems to me to preserve, in its awed mystery and in its vague fearsomeness, the very feeling with which the malignant Aztec goddess assuredly was regarded in primitive times.
THE END
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1: See Note I.]
[Footnote 2: See Note II.]
[Footnote 3: See Note III.]
[Footnote 4: See Note IV.]
[Footnote 5: See Note V.]
[Footnote 6: See Note VI.]
[Footnote 7: See Note VII.]
[Footnote 8: See Note VIII.]
[Footnote 9: See Note IX.]
[Footnote 10: "La Cruz del Diablo," with other stories of a like sort by Becquer, all very well worth reading, may be read in English in the accurate translation recently made by Cornelia Frances Bates and Katharine Lee Bates under the title _Romantic Legends of Spain_ (New York, Thomas Y. Crowell & Co.); and in the original Spanish, with the assistance of scholarly notes and a vocabulary, in the collection prepared for class use by Dr. Everett Ward Olmsted under the English title _Legends and Poems by Gustavo Adolfo Becquer_ (Boston, Ginn & Co.).]
* * * * *
Transcriber's note:
Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_).
Small capital text has been replaced with all capitals.
The carat character (^) indicates that the following letter is superscripted (example: S^ntiago). If two or more letters are superscripted they are enclosed in curly brackets (example: D^{or}).
Minor typographical errors have been corrected without note. Irregularities and inconsistencies in the text have been retained as printed.
The illustrations have been moved so that they do not break up paragraphs, thus the page number of the illustration might not match the page number in the List of Illustrations.
The cover for the eBook version of this book was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.
The list of drawings is incorrect. There is no drawing in the book for LEGEND OF THE CALLE DEL PUENTE DEL CLÉRIGO _Facing p._ 14, but the reference to it has been left in place.
End of Project Gutenberg's Legends of the City of Mexico, by Thomas A. Janvier