# Legends of the City of Mexico/Callejón del Padre Lecuona (Notes)

Layout 2
NOTE VII
LEGEND OF THE CALLEJÓN DEL PADRE LECUONA
By a natural confusion of the name of the street in which the dead man was confessed with the name of the priest who heard his confession, this legend frequently is told nowadays as relating not to Padre Lanza but to Padre Lecuona. An old man whom I met in the Callejón del Padre Lecuona, when I was making search for the scene of the confession, told me story in that way—and pointed out the house to me in all sincerity. Following that telling, I so mixed the matter myself in my first publication of the legend. Who Padre Lecuona was, or why the street was named after him, I have not discovered. Probably still another legend lurks there. Señor Riva Palacio tells the
Where the Dead Man was Confessed
​story as of an unnamed friar "whom God now holds in his glory," and assigns it to the year 1731. The motive of the story is found in Spain long before the oldest date assigned to it in Mexico. The wicked hero of Calderon's play, La devotion de la Cruz, is permitted to purge his sinful soul by confession after death. The Padre Lanza whose name has been tacked fast to the story—probably because his well-known charitable ministrations to the poor made him a likely person to yield to the old woman's importunities—was a real man who lived in the City of Mexico, greatly loved and respected, in the early years of the nineteenth century. Señor Roa Barcena fixes the decade 1820-1830 as the date of his strange adventure with a dead body in which was a living soul.
Aside from minor variants, two distinct versions of this legend are current. That which I have given in my text is the more popular. The other, less widely known, has for its scene an old house in the Calle de Olmedo—nearly a mile away from the Callejón del Padre Lecuona, and in a far more ancient quarter of the City. Concisely stated, the Calle de Olmedo version is to this effect:
Brother Mendo, a worthy and kind-hearted friar, is met of a dark night in the street by a man who begs him to come and hear a dying person confess. The friar wears the habit of his Order, and from his girdle hangs his rosary. He is led to a house near by; and finds within the house a very beautiful woman, richly clad in silks, whose arms are bound. That she is not in a dying state is obvious, and the friar asks for an explanation. For answer, the man tells him roughly: "This woman is about to die by violence. I must give ​her death. As you please, wash clean her sinful soul—or leave it foul!" At that, he yields, and her confession begins. It is so prolonged that the man, losing patience, ends it abruptly by thrusting forth the friar from the house. Through the closed door he hears shrieks and tries to re-enter; but the door remains closed firmly, and his knocking is unheeded. He finds that his rosary no longer is at his girdle. In order to recover it, and to allay his fears for the woman's safety, he calls a watchman to aid him by demanding in the name of the law that the door shall be opened. No response is made from within to their violent knocking; and an old woman, aroused by it, comes out from a nearby dwelling and tells them that knocking there is useless—that through all her long lifetime she has lived beside that house, and that never through all her long lifetime has that house been inhabited. The watchman—holding his lantern close to the door, and so perceiving that what she tells is verified by the caked dust that fills its crevices and that clogs its key-hole—is for abandoning their attempt to enter. The friar insists that they must enter: that his rosary is within the house; that he is determined to recover it; that the door must be forced. Yielding to him, the watchman forces the door and together they enter: to find a yellowed skeleton upon the floor; scattered around it scraps of mouldering silk; in the eye-sockets of the skull cobwebs—and lying across that yellowed skeleton is the friar's rosary! Brother Mendo covers his face with his hands, totters for a moment, and then falls dying as he exclaims in horror: "Holy God! I have confessed a soul from the other life!" And the crowd of neighbors, by that time assembled, cries out: ​"Brother Mendo is dead because he has confessed the dead!"