October 25, 1998

No Jail Could Hold Him

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The adventures of a Mexican friar who played a notable role in history.

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First Chapter: 'The Memoirs of Fray Servando Teresa de Mier'

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By FREDERICK LUCIANI

THE MEMOIRS OF FRAY SERVANDO TERESA DE MIER Edited by Susana Rotker. Translated by Helen Lane. 242 pp. New York: Oxford University Press. $30.

n Dec. 12, 1794, a young Dominican friar gave an impassioned sermon to a distinguished audience in Mexico City. Fray Servando Teresa de Mier proposed a remarkable thesis: nearly a millennium and a half before the arrival of the Spaniards, the Apostle Thomas had preached the Gospel in the New World, although the Indians later lapsed into idolatry. Moreover, the image venerated in Mexico as the Virgin of Guadalupe did not date from her 1531 appearance to the Indian Juan Diego. It was impressed on St. Thomas's cape and left in Mexico by the apostle to be rediscovered with the advent of the European colonizers.

The mistaken idea of a pre-Hispanic evangelization was not new, but the Virgin of Guadalupe corollary was. And with winds of revolution blowing from North America and France, the entire thesis had political implications. Mier's generation of enlightened Creoles (born in the colonies of unmixed European blood), chafing under colonial rule, was eager to revise Mexican history and identity according to its own designs on power. Church authorities took the sermon as a provocation. They detained the friar, revoked his license to preach and sentenced him to a 10-year monastic imprisonment in Spain.

Thus began Mier's quarter-century of wanderings in Europe and the Americas, punctuated by many incarcerations and jailbreaks, flights across borders, intellectual congress with great minds and misadventures enough for several lifetimes. His pro-independence agitation became more overt, and he was hounded by an Inquisition that had become an instrument of political containment. His tribulations did not end when independence came; he ran afoul of Iturbide, the self-proclaimed Mexican Emperor, and suffered imprisonment again before his final vindication in a free and constitutional Mexico.

Mier is a foundational figure of his nation, and scholars have pored over his political writings. But his life, more than his thought, has captivated readers ever since his autobiographical writings were gathered and published in this century. These served as the basis for ''Hallucinations,'' a novel by the Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas. Now a significant portion of Mier's memoirs has been well translated by Helen Lane, and readers in the English-speaking world can become directly acquainted with a figure whose life was almost as bizarre as it was in Arenas's fantastic vision.

The greater part of the translated memoirs recounts Mier's experiences in Napoleonic Europe from 1800 to 1805. For all the bitterness of years in exile, in prison or on the run, and in search of maddeningly elusive legal vindication, the memoirist's tone is often one of ironic amusement. Mier was a born adventurer, and he narrates his jailbreaks and time on the lam with brio. His sense of humor is sharp and ribald; he never passes up an opportunity to insert a salty story. As a memoirist, as in life, he was also well served by a curious and tolerant nature, the origin of some of the most agreeable pages of his story -- like those that evoke his amiable sojourn with the Jewish community of Bayonne.

Mier was a man of the world, a combative showman, a bit of a rogue. His memoirs cover much geographical but no psychological terrain. His sense of self, in fact, seems rudimentary. He insists, a bit irritatingly, on his noble birth, his guileless nature (this from an accomplished escape artist) and his softheartedness: ''So as not to crush little ants underfoot it is my habit to hop lightly from one foot to the other when I am on the road.'' His sufferings do not evoke existential musings or expressions of faith. He survived prison, apparently, by plotting, not by praying.

The memoirs offer vivid appraisals of regions of France, Italy and Spain that the beleaguered friar came to know. Italy and France inspire a certain admiration, but Spain draws unrelenting scorn. Its priests are ignorant, its Queen is a trollop, its people are brutalized and degenerate, its institutions are corrupt. Madrid is a dirty backwater where in winter, Mier asserts rather improbably, ''the cold is greater than in any other country of Europe, except Petersburg.'' In the heat of summer, ladies promenade in the streets with their breasts entirely exposed. The hallways of apartment houses are littered with sewage and copulating couples.

Mier's vision of great men and events seems, at times, similarly impaired. Of his cohabitation in Paris with Simon Rodriguez -- Bolivar's tutor, an important figure for South American independence -- he tells us mostly that his roommate got all the credit for their collaboration on a Spanish translation of Chateaubriand's ''Atala.'' The eminent Baron von Humboldt, whom Mier also met, is mentioned in passing as someone who agreed with his thesis about St. Thomas. He devotes a sole paragraph to the Battle of Trafalgar, into which he blundered by boarding the wrong boat while fleeing to Portugal. Admittedly, he wrote at little temporal distance from events. Even so, how could he have such a tin ear for the music of history?

Perhaps he did not write for the ages. He wrote in prison, in the midst of his nation's struggle for independence. His spirit, fundamentally cheerful, lucid and generous, was blighted by decades of lost battles. That, surely, is what restricts his historical vision, distorts his perceptions and at times mires his autobiographical narrative in self-serving polemic. When he rails against his persecutors, he is shouting in a bureaucratic echo chamber made of paper.

Mier failed to record important periods of his life: his time in Catalonia among volunteers battling Napoleon in 1808, his residence in England from 1811 to 1816 and his travels in a United States whose government Mexico was to emulate. Moreover, he made little effort to explain his own evolution as a political thinker and historical player. That is a task for a new biography, one very much called for. For now, these entertaining memoirs offer a lively portrait of their author. They are as eccentric, partisan and slippery as Fray Servando himself.

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Frederick Luciani is an associate professor of Spanish at Colgate University.

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