Folk Tales of Bolivia continues with two traditions and legends of Potosí from a new source for this shelf: La villa imperial de Potosí (Buenos Aires, 1905) by Julio Lucas Jaimes, the chronicler who wrote as "Brocha Gorda." They are read here in a fresh English translation made for KacheliTV, by Bruno.
Disclosure: this performance is narrated by AI-generated voices.
In How the Devil Proved Himself a Master Architect, the rich curaca of Yocalla will give his daughter Chasca Ñusta to the poor young Calca only if, in one year, the suitor lays a bridge over the town's impassable ravine. On a night of thunder Calca makes his bargain in the gorge — and the Devil himself cuts the stones and raises the arch before cockcrow, stone by stone, until one stone is wanting at the crown, and someone is sitting on the place where it should go. In The Devil's Cave and the Gorge of Saint Bartholomew, Jaimes tells how the shadow man Umphurruna split the black gorge in two and carried off Sapállay, Innocence herself, and how the people of Potosí answered by setting Saint Bartholomew and Saint Lucy at the cave's mouth — beside which, every twenty-fourth of August, the Cchutillo festival still comes down the gorge in procession.
A note on the tales as written. The second is a place-legend told as belief: the carrying-off of Sapállay is the town's own account of how its gorge and its cave came to be feared and then guarded, and it is read as Jaimes reports it. The battle of Vitichi is named once, in a clause, as the reason a street of Potosí carries General Mitre's name; nothing of the battle is told. The Devil of these legends is the folk Devil of the old city — a bargainer outwitted at the last stone and a mischief kept out by two saints at a cave mouth — and no rite or practice is described in a way that teaches one.
Chapters:
00:25 How the Devil Proved Himself a Master Architect
18:42 The Devil's Cave and the Gorge of Saint Bartholomew
From La villa imperial de Potosí (Buenos Aires, 1905) by Julio Lucas Jaimes — public domain; English translation made for KacheliTV. Music: gentle instrumental bed under the narration.
KacheliTV — world classics, read aloud.
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