Santa Lucia de la Virgen

An excerpt from The Servants of Gods, Ecks Ridgehead's first completed novel

In 1621 Juan Cuenca, Bishop of Cádiz, concerned at the lack of religious ministry on La Locura, ordered Sister Lucia Morales to move to the island from her convent in Cádiz in order to ensure that the word of God did indeed reach all corners of the Spanish empire. On her arrival, she found that La Locura had no church, and so she immediately petitioned the Bishop for the necessary funds to build one. He was happy to acquiesce, and, on receipt of the money in 1622, she arranged for its construction. She remained on La Locura for 35 years, until her death in 1656, and she spent her time on the island zealously ministering to the mismatched collection of emigrants that had made La Locura their home.

Two things marked Sister Morales out from other Catholic missionaries. The first thing was the visions that she experienced in her autumn years, and the second was her voracious sexual appetite and complete disregard for the vow of celibacy imposed upon all other nuns. Her forbidden sexual liaisons, tentative and by necessity secretive in Cádiz, became flagrant on La Locura, far as it was from the eyes of the convent, and if Bishop Cuenca had known of her proclivities he would surely never have sent her so far from his watchful eye. She spent much of her time on her back in her small cabin, receiving a steady stream of gentlemen visitors who convinced themselves that by doing it with a nun they were actually bringing themselves closer to God. Eventually she contracted syphilis from a Portuguese sailor, and, after an initial ulcerous manifestation, it sank deep into her body and hid inside her brain, where it took root and grew until, some years later, it drove her insane.

As she advanced in years her growing insanity did not hinder her missionary work, however. When she was not holding her own private communion with the men of the island, she would wander barefoot tolling a small bell and singing nonsensical songs about Jesus, or she would strip naked and perform scenes from the Bible. Indeed, a few years after her death, when the first priest came to the island, he was puzzled to see the men of the island stare into the middle distance with misty-eyed nostalgia during the biblical stories of his sermons.

In 1639, though, she received her first vision. Shortly after the cobbler Luis Romero had left her cabin, crossing himself and grinning broadly, the blessed Virgin appeared before her in a ray of light as she lay crumpled and sweaty upon her bed, entirely unclothed and legs still akimbo. Following her visitation, Sister Morales got herself dressed, marched into the Plaza Mayor and proclaimed to anyone who would listen her prediction that Portugal would regain its independence from Spain the very next year. Incredulous merchants hurried the news to the ear of king Felipe IV, but he merely scoffed, and her prediction was long forgotten by the first of December, 1640, when the people of Portugal rose up in a revolution, throwing off Spain’s yoke and installing João IV on the Portuguese throne.

In subsequent years, right up until her death, Sister Lucia Morales received regular visitations from the Virgin. A shrine was built beside her cabin, at which the islanders prayed to the Virgin for predictions relating to themselves, but the noises coming from the adjacent shack meant that the shrine eventually had to be moved for the sake of decency. Over the years Sister Morales warned of a great fire in London, a revolution in France, the discovery of a new land deep in the south seas, and of numerous, terrible wars. The inhabitants of the island were duly amazed by these impressive portents, but were actually far more interested in the quality of next year’s harvest than in the outcome of a struggle between the peasants and the bourgeoisie in 18th century Bourbon France. Still, they humoured the nun and kept on visiting her and bringing gifts to the shrine of the Virgin in the ultimately vain hope that she might bring predictions that were actually of some use to them.

News of the visions and her predictions eventually reached the Vatican, and the Pope sent an emissary to investigate, but Rome recoiled and distanced itself when this emissary reached the island and learned of Lucia’s promiscuity and syphilitic madness. As such she was not officially canonised on her death, and the title of Santa Lucia de la Virgen was bestowed upon her unofficially by the islanders themselves, largely so that they could justify holding a fiesta each year on the anniversary of her death.

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