visceral stories

Those who died in the odor of sanctity transferred the fame of their miraculous powers to their viscera, phalanges, members and other parts of their body, and for this reason they were dismembered and distributed in sanctuaries and churches, a heart inside a gold breastplate embroidered with precious stones. , an arm or a leg in silver armor, a finger in a goldsmith's thimble.

It happened even to the humblest of God's servants, like Saint John of the Cross, or to the most learned, like Saint Teresa.

But it also happens with embalmed lay saints, like Eva Perón;

or with the almighty presidents when they claim eternity beyond their death;

or with the emperors, when their bodies, or their viscera, are useful, even centuries later, in electoral terms.

Let's go by parts.

On the morning of August 6, 1875, the president of Ecuador Gabriel García Moreno, of the conservative side, who would soon begin his third term in office, was returning on foot to the National Palace, after having received communion in the church of Santo Domingo, when He was shot and killed with machetes by a group of conspirators from the liberal side.

The next day the corpse presided over his own funeral.

Dressed in the parade uniform of the supreme commander, the feathered bicorne on his head and the sash on his chest, he appeared seated in the presidential chair at the main altar of the cathedral, while the deans sang the office of the dead and the protocol was followed. of state funerals dictated by himself.

That photo is out there, proof that the novelist is not lying.

Made up to hide the paleness of death, his eyebrows repainted, his eyes half-closed and his mouth grotesquely open, behind him stands a guard of grenadiers, with their tall bearskin caps, openwork bayonets and strangely dressed in forensic aprons.

There were unsuccessful attempts to canonize García Granados, a devout Catholic.

Buried in the cathedral of Quito, the ups and downs of politics led to fears of desecration, and the body was secretly moved from one hiding place to another, until it ended up in the church of Santa Catalina de Siena, where it was discovered, one hundred years later. of his death, in a crypt on the right side of the main altar.

The heart, which had been removed to preserve it as a relic, was hidden separately in a column in the cloister of the Good Shepherd, along with that of the Archbishop of Quito, Monsignor José Ignacio Checa y Barba, who died after drinking the poisoned wine from the chalice in the office of Good Friday of 1877. Matter also that reality gives to the novelist.

And here is the other story.

In the church of the brotherhood of Our Lady of Lapa, in Porto, the heart of Don Pedro de Alcántara, King of Portugal, and Emperor of Brazil after the proclamation in 1822 of the independence of this immense American colony that it was by itself a continent, a unique case in the history of Latin America of a monarch revered as a hero.

Don Pedro, exiled from Brazil, died in 1834 in the Royal Palace of Queluz in Portugal, consumed by tuberculosis.

But before that, he dictated his famous open letter to the Brazilians: “Slavery is an evil, and an attack against the rights and dignity of the human species, but its consequences are less harmful to those who suffer captivity than to the Nation whose laws they allow it.

It is a cancer that eats away at their morality.”

And he arranged for his heart to remain in the church of Lapa, while his body was buried in the Royal Pantheon of the Braganza dynasty, in the church of San Vicente de Fora.

In 1972, when celebrating the 150th anniversary of the independence of Brazil, the military dictatorship, evoking his fame as a "soldier king" and not that of an enemy of slavery, managed to have the emperor's bones transferred from Portugal, paraded with great pomp throughout the country before being buried in the imperial mausoleum in Ipiranga, São Paulo, where he proclaimed Brazil free from the yoke of Portugal.

He then waged a campaign in which he was forced to get off the horse at each stage, suffering from diarrhea.

If the dictatorship managed to get hold of the bones of the "soldier king", now President Jair Bolsonaro, who does not hide his longing for the military regime at all, has managed to get the Oporto City Council to loan him Don Pedro's heart on the occasion of the celebrations of the second centenary of independence.

Bolsonaro, who is seeking re-election, proclaims that he feels immortal, that only God kicks him out of power, and threatens a coup if he loses.

The presidential elections, in which he is behind Lula Da Silva in the polls, are on October 2, and the celebration of independence on September 7.

The heart will be transported on a Brazilian Air Force plane, and Bolsonaro will surely receive it at the airport to take advantage of it electorally, and triumphantly display the ballot box at rallies.

Great opportunity for such a visceral man.

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