Folk Tales of Bolivia — Part 2 brings one more of the traditions and legends of Bolivia collected and shaped by José Manuel Aponte in Tradiciones bolivianas (La Paz, 1909), in a fresh English translation made for this programme. Aponte — schoolteacher, man of letters, and remembered in Bolivia as a founder of its children's literature — gathered his tales from the chronicles and the oral memory of the country and wrote them in his own voice; the story is told as he shaped it.
Disclosure: this performance is narrated by AI-generated voices.
The Santo-Cristo Stands Surety. Potosí, in the days of its silver: Don Cándido, a frugal merchant who has saved fifty thousand pesos bag by bag, is lured by a smiling friend — the tale itself names him a Mephistopheles — into a gaming house, and in a single night loses everything he owns. In despair he weighs letting himself die of hunger, and turns from it: he takes a neighbour's counsel, hears mass, and begs a loan of fifty thousand pesos from the millionaire Quiroz, offering as his only surety the silver Santo-Cristo that crowns Quiroz's great cabinet of alms drawers. Quiroz accepts the Surety. Cándido works for a year without rest, falls a few thousand short on the day the term falls due, and comes four days late to repay — to be told that the Surety has already paid: at the very day and hour of the maturity, the lost vein of Quiroz's Cotamito mine was struck.
A note on the telling: the gaming house is the tale's engine of ruin and is told as a warning; the ruined merchant's despair is contemplated and refused, never enacted. The chronicle opening repeats the old chroniclers' counts for Potosí — the robberies and the dead and wounded of a year of street brawls, and the mitayo Indians brought by force to the mines, where they perished by the thousand — kept as Aponte wrote them, in condemnation as much as in record.
From Tradiciones bolivianas (1909) by José Manuel Aponte — public domain. Fresh translation from the Spanish for KacheliTV. Music: gentle instrumental bed under the narration.
KacheliTV — world classics, read aloud.
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