PERSPECTIVE ON PERU : Misery Is Ripe for Miracles : The depth of despair in a chaos-afflicted country may be measured by the people’s embrace of statues that weep.

Miracles occur mostly to unhappy people, and magic is often the ultimate refuge of the weak. As prosperity brings an environment of order, it lightens the burdens of chance and uncertainty that weigh so heavily upon the less fortunate. And as affluence dissipates the fog of fate, so is the realm of miracle-working dissolved. The supernatural thrives only below a certain income bracket.

No wonder, then, that there have been so many purported miracles lately in Peru--not counting last year’s surprising electoral victory of President Alberto Fujimori, in itself a strong challenge to rational explanation. Statues of the Virgin have cried in this unhappy land, and a Brazilian medicine man named Joao Texeira, who claims to heal the sick by incarnating in himself the spirits of St. Ignatius of Loyola and some 19th-Century Brazilian doctors, came to Lima and brought forth a tumultuous response of mingled hope and despondency.

After several years of steady economic decline, Peru’s per-capita income is roughly what it was in 1955. But things are actually much worse now. Ten Peruvians die every day as a result of the nation’s internal war, and there are no signs that the political violence will abate. The outbreak of a cholera epidemic five months ago, which grievously taxed the nation’s resources and caused about $1 billion in canceled exports and other economic damage, was followed by several earthquakes that resulted in severe loss of life and property in the nation’s northeast. After that, the country was certainly ripe for miracles.

In April, a statuette of the Virgin of Fatima began to shed what appeared to be tears at the home of Alicia de Villena in the seaside neighborhood of Carmen de la Legua. The 64-year-old retired schoolteacher proclaimed the event miraculous, and a steady trickle of neighbors gave way to a flood of urban pilgrims and modern media. Lima’s Channel 5 sent a reporter whose lugubrious voice, trained by many years of reporting every newsworthy funeral, had earned him the nickname “the Bishop.” In endless interviews, the Bishop and Mrs. Villena recounted the cases of blind people suddenly noticing light and color, the deaf who heard voices, the paraplegic who walked. Sra. Villena also said that when she was alone, the Virgin would smile, move her head slightly and, especially after a day of dense humanity packed around her, exude a smell of roses.

Perhaps by coincidence, the same TV station had sent its star reporter to Brazil to interview the spiritist medicine man, Texeira. Peruvians were amazed when they saw Texeira at work, maintaining to cure while possessed by the spirit of either his saint or one of his dead Brazilian doctors. He certainly isn’t possessed of Louis Pasteur’s spirit. Sometimes he heals by laying his hands or just his heavily hypnotic gaze on the sufferer, but at others he decides on immediate surgery. This he performs with a kitchen knife, afterward stitching the usually superficial cut with a sewing needle and common thread. He was shown lightly cutting a woman’s belly and then, without washing the knife, scratching the cornea of another patient, who appeared to be in a deep trance, as had the previous one. “Sterilization is astral,” was the way it was explained to me later by Dr. Sonia Maria Texeira (no relation), who works with Joao.

When it was announced that Texeira would come to Lima, expectation became frenzied hope. At the small municipal gym in a lower-middle-class neighborhood where he would perform his miraculous cures, a multitude of the sick crowded around, several days in advance. Stretching many blocks, this extraordinary gathering spent day and night in the endless line, nursing its collective hopes. The sick, the lame, the hurting, the terminally ill--all had the pained look of urgent hope for relief, for deliverance. This assembly seemed in almost every way a medieval event of shared pain and faith, except that it had this century’s Third World demography. Texeira (or St. Ignatius) had sent word requesting his patients to bring mineral water that he would magically turn into medicine, so thousands of one-liter bottles were clutched as the personal weapons of this desperate infantry.

Texeira’s performance was a thorough disappointment. He healed only for a day and a half, with nary a mass miracle. Most of the few fortunates who reached Texeira, after passing in the middle of two rows of entranced, white-clad mediums, left the place as sick as they had come. Many of those who proclaimed a cure turned out to be either hysterics or exhibitionists. An old lady threw down the same crutches she had thrown two days before at Sra. Villena’s place. When a journalist loudly remembered her as the beneficiary of the previous miracle, she picked up one of the crutches, held it as a club and ran after him, shouting “Communist!”

For the next few days, detachments of the damned searched for Texeira all over the city, wherever rumor situated him--a wealthy suburban residence, a bath house. In the end, Texeira left the country after performing his most celebrated cure: President Fujimori moved a finger that was convalescing from a minor fracture suffered some weeks ago.

Fujimori, be it for reasons of faith or political convenience, invited Texeira to return as an official guest in the near future, then visited the Virgin’s shrine. Meanwhile, die-hard skeptics looked on happily as scientists and even a priest reproduced the tear-shedding phenomenon in every kind of statuette, including pre-Columbian pottery. Unfazed, Sra. Villena announced imminent portents.

And so it was that a few days ago, on a sunny afternoon, the Virgin of Fatima statuette went out in procession. Then, as the clouds that had briefly covered the sun were dispelled by the wind, the brilliant light of a Peruvian late autumn shone on the glass case that housed the statuette. “Miracle!” shouted the 5,000 people assembled, raising their arms to heaven and to TV cameras, as the tremulous voice of “the Bishop” echoed theirs. And indeed they were right, as, no matter how quotidian, there is much of a miracle in a glorious sunset.