c’est dans mon lit dans la paix de ma chambre au coenraetsstraat que je termine Isabelle Allende’s Zorro – ou elle re-invente la légende de Zorro d’une façon magnifique. L’histoire commence en Alta California et ses missions espagnoles.
“Let us begin at the beginning, at an event without which Diego de la Vega would not have been born. It happened in Alta California, in the San Gabriel mission in the year 1790 of Our Lord. At that time the mission was under the charge of Padre Mendoza, a Fanciscan who had the shoulders of a woodcutter and a much younger appearance than his forty well-lived years warranted. […] The natives of the coast of California had a network of trade and commerce that had functioned for thousands of years. Their surroundings were very rich in natural resources, and the tribes developed different specialties. The Spanish were impressed iwth the Chumash economy, so complex that it could be compared to that of China. The Indians had a monetary system based on shells, and they regularly organizes fairs that served as an opportunity to exchange goods as well as contract marriages.
Those native peoples were confounded by the mystery of the crucified man the whites workshipped, and they could not understand the advantage of living contrary to their inclinations in this world in order to enjoy a hypothetical well-being in another. In the paradise of the Christians, they might take their ease on a could and strum a harp with the angels, but the truth was that in the afterworld most would rather hunts bears with their ancestors in the land of the Great Spirit. Another thing they could not understand was why the foreigners planted a flag in the ground, marked off imaginary lines, claimed that area as theirs, and then took offense if anyone came onto it in pursuit of a deer. The concept that you could posses land was unfanthomable to them as that of dividing up the sea.
In their letters to the director of missions in Mexico, the friars complained, “The Indians prefer to live unclothed, in straw huts, armed with bow and arrow, with no education, goverment, religion or respect for authority, and dedicated entirely to satisfying their shameless appetites, as if the miraculous waters of baptism had never washed away their sins.” The Indians’ insistence on clingign to the their customs had to be the work of Satan – their was no other explanation – which is why the friars went out to hunt down and lasso the deserters and then whipped their doctrine of love and forgiveness into them.”
But then Padre Mendoza receives news that several tribes led by a warrior wearing a wolf’s head had risen up against the whites…