Communing With the Jesuits

The sky over Cordoba is bright enough to undo the visual integrity of solid things. Its light penetrates the contours of buildings, diminishes giant trees, even shrinks the mountains emblematic of this heartland province of Argentina. Only the church at Santa Catalina seems to have the earthly solidity to resist this force. Its Baroque towers rise over the small plaza in front, casting shadows as dark as the sky is bright. Within this shade you can discern every pediment, every architectural curl in the stone, every stain time has put on it.

The church dominates Estancia Santa Catalina, 12 miles up a gravel road from the nearest village, as assuredly as it did 31/2 centuries ago, when it was the center of all life, temporal and spiritual, for the colonial estancia, or farm. The galleries at the base of the church extend into walls that engirdle the tanning and weaving shops, the orchard, the graveyard with its tombs rich in aristocratic bones, the humble dwellings where laborers slept. These were African slaves shipped against their will to the New World and kept here. They labored first for the Jesuits, then for the Diaz family, which has owned this property for 227 years and whose descendants still inhabit its somber rooms.

The fountain out front has a wide basin. The reflection in it of the church against the sky weakens the power of both light and shadow. This seems the more genuine image, maybe because we visitors are not accustomed to such vivid contrasts as are found here.

My wife, Susana, and I were on a mission of sorts, taking a break in our annual visit to family, to tour the Jesuit estancias of Cordoba province. This is a popular activity in Argentina, akin to Californians planning a weekend around a visit to one of the missions. All five estancias are within 50 miles of the city of Cordoba and can be visited in two to four days’ driving. We were going slowly. Santa Catalina, built in 1622, was our third stop. We were looking for more than charming architecture: We were in search of the spirit of Florian Paucke. Paucke, born in the Central European region of Silesia, was a candidate for priesthood in the Society of Jesus when, in 1752, the order sent him to a mission called San Javier in the Chaco region of what is now northern Argentina’s Santa Fe province.

The Society of Jesus accepted only the best and most talented missionary candidates, young men of deep faith and religious zeal who also were endowed with intellectual gifts. They went off to places more exotic than anyone in Europe might dream of--India, Japan, the Indian nations of North America, the jungles of Mesoamerica, the Amazon, the mountains and open pampas of the Southern Cone. They brought millions of souls into the Christian faith, and they wrote meticulous journals and sent back to Europe copious reports on botany, geology, ethnography, linguistics.

Paucke reflected this high quality. An accomplished artist and musician, he sketched his new world in detail and formed an Indian choir that traveled as far as Buenos Aires to sing. In 1767, King Charles III of Spain expelled the Society of Jesus from his American dominions, which stretched from California to the tip of Patagonia, encompassing nearly all of South America. Paucke was among an estimated 1,000 Jesuits forcibly returned to Europe. There he composed a memoir, in German, lavishly illustrated by his sketches of the indigenous Mocobi people and their customs, and a profusion of plant and animal life new to European eyes.

The four-volume memoir, “Hacia alla y para aca . . . “ (“We went there joyous and happy, and returned embittered and sad”), was not published in its entirety--and in Spanish--until the 1940s. Susana came upon it in an archive in Santa Fe and, captivated, had it photocopied. The extraordinary illustrations drew me into the fold, and a few years ago Susana and I went to San Javier and from there to Austria, to the Cistercian monastery in Zwettl, to see the original text of Paucke’s memoir. We also went to Prague, where he studied, and the Czech town of Jindrichuv Hradec, where he died.

Upon their return to Europe, many Jesuits wrote about their experiences. Martin Dobrizhoffer’s “An Account of the Abipones,” a tribe north of the Mocobi region, was a bestseller in the 18th century and is still a classic.

These men created “the Jesuit Republic of South America,” what some admirers perceived, from a great remove, as a utopia. It was neither, though it did introduce some notion of European social and civic organization among the indigenous people. Rather, it was an immense evangelical crusade that had as its aims the Christianization of the South American Indians and their rescue from exploitation by the settlers pouring in from Spain and Portugal in the aftermath of the Conquest.

The Jesuits gathered the Indians--baptized or not--into mission communities, called reducci-nes in Spanish. These were orderly, productive, autonomous, and administered mostly by the Indians. Sanctioned by the Spanish crown, they flourished despite the enmity of European settlers who wanted access to Indian labor.

At the time of the Jesuits’ expulsion, more than 30 reducciones were in the ecclesiastical province of Paraquaria, an area now occupied by Paraguay, Uruguay, Argentina and parts of Brazil and Bolivia. They sheltered more than 100,000 Indians.

To this day, historians aren’t sure why Charles III expelled the Jesuits. His reason, he said, was between himself and his God, or words to that effect. Envy and fear of the Jesuits’ power certainly fueled royal displeasure, fed by rumors spread by enemies of the Jesuits, not a few within competing religious orders. The Jesuits, it was said, had secret silver mines in the missions and were stealing the king’s treasure; they planned to declare their “state” independent of the Spanish crown and raise a new flag in America.

None of this was true: There were no mines, no treasure, no serious sentiment for rebellion. Nevertheless, the Jesuits were ordered to leave behind their work of 160 years, often escorted from the missions suddenly and, in many cases, in the early morning dark. After the expulsion, all the holdings of the Jesuits, including hospitals, seminaries and libraries, were turned over to other orders or were sold. The ideal state vanished.

The estancias of Cordoba were a major part of the underpinnings of the “Jesuit republic.” Today, most are museums; only Santa Catalina is privately held.

I had pictured the estancias as monumental, standing in vast fields, so I was surprised to find Alta Gracia, the first on our itinerary, at the center of the small, noisy town of that name, 25 miles southwest of Cordoba.

Estancia Alta Gracia was built in 1643, a mix of Italian Renaissance and Spanish Baroque. The large residence has a long gallery that embraces a wide patio, which opens onto the town plaza, shaded by palm and plane trees.

The residence is a museum, full of artifacts of the Jesuit era--old blacksmith equipment, some faded tack, religious paintings and statues, vestments and altar furnishings. Next to the residence is the church and, next to that, a 17th century workshop, which is now a kindergarten. Across the street is an artificial lake, or reservoir, called the tajamar. It is an element of every estancia, one that demonstrates the missionaries’ genius for mechanics.

Water for the tajamar of Alta Gracia was--and still is--supplied over a stone aqueduct from an arroyo three miles away. The water poured through stone chutes into the estancia buildings, where its force was used to grind grain, provide for the kitchens and carry away human waste.

The tajamar at Alta Gracia is a municipal amenity, its stout stone walls a place for picnicking and meeting friends. The tajamar at Estancia Jesus Maria, in the town of that name, is a green pond shaded by billowing willows, a serene retreat without the communal busyness of Alta Gracia.

This is not to suggest that Alta Gracia is a city that never sleeps. Immediately after noon it began to shut down for siesta so quickly that we had to dash about to find some lunch. Before leaving Alta Gracia, we visited the last home of Spanish composer Manuel de Falla (1876-1946), who fled here from Francisco Franco’s Spain in 1939. In the summertime, he had as a neighbor a few blocks away a pale teenager who grew up to be as famous as he, but for accomplishments of a different sort: Ernesto “Che” Guevara, whose parents hoped the dry Cordoban air would alleviate his asthma.

Susana is a native of Argentina. We met in Maryland when she was a Fulbright scholar, and after our marriage we moved to Argentina, where our first two children were born. We try to visit there at least once a year.

We have a lot of family to see on each trip, and this time we were accompanied on Cordoba ourquest by Susana’s sister, Clarita, and her husband, Oscar.

Early on our second day, Oscar maneuvered his Peugeot up the Sierras Chicas, a north-south range in northern Cordoba province, over a road that has been a challenge since the days of colonial mule trains. Up we crawled, shooting gravel at every turn, the mountains falling away to the right and left. During the stuttering ascent, Clarita, green-gilled with acrophobia, asked what could be worth it.

She had her answer when we rounded a small nob and saw the chapel at Candonga against the flank of another mountain.

The chapel was built for the Jesuits in 1730, adjacent to the privately held Estancia Santa Gertrudis, a stopover on the Camino Real, the royal road over the Andes to Peru. The chapel emerged from the long grass of this breezy high country, shimmering white, with a square bell tower, a wide arch over its entrance and a blunt gallery off the side. A copper-colored stream rushed between the chapel and the old estancia residence, which is a restaurant now, sitting in a dreamlike meadow where six horses cropped the grass nearby. It was so quiet I could hear their teeth click.

I passed into the chapel yard through a stone wall. The chapel was locked, and I felt more disappointed than I would have expected. Two workmen said the caretaker would return in an hour and suggested we have coffee in the restaurant. It was still early, but we found the place so delightful that we ordered lunch.

The chapel doors were open when we returned. The inside was as austere as the outside, but of a different aesthetic. There were no pews, which made it seem larger than it was. Two prayer benches waited before the wooden altar table, which held a few religious objects. One was a statue of the adolescent Jesus, which the caretaker said had been brought here by the Jesuits.

The ceiling of the shallow nave was painted a soft, uneven blue, the shade of cue chalk. It filled the entire space for worship with a bluish nimbus. Maybe it was this strange color of the air, or the stark, perfect beauty of this edifice and its setting, but I found myself entertaining thoughts of Utopia, that fascination with the ideal posited by Plato and popularized in the 16th to 18th centuries. To the Europeans, Utopia was real, and it awaited discovery in America.

Apart from the Sierras, the roads through Cordoba province rise and fall gently and curve broadly, following an undulating landscape full of surprises: lovely vistas of deep green forest speckled by brilliant red bougainvillea, the glint of a silver lake in the distance. The roads are well-marked, maintained and uncrowded, except around Cordoba city.

At Ascochinga, 40 miles north of C-rdoba, we checked in at the Hotel Parque, a collection of grand, decaying buildings with verandas set among huge trees in majestic rows. The Parque had an immense double room with indifferent plumbing, but it featured a wide porch with a view of the Gatsby-esque grounds.

Before reaching the hotel, we stopped at a roadside encampment called Quebracho. It was an iguana farm, so we bought iguana grease; it’s good for the skin, they say. The next morning I coaxed Oscar’s car up the gravel road to Estancia Santa Catalina. There was no town, just a scattering of dwellings. “We don’t have enough people for a soccer league,” said the young man who showed us around the church.

Under the Jesuits, the estancias powered their local economy, and communities naturally developed around them. Why had this not happened here? Maybe because this estancia had been in the possession of the Diaz family since 1774; maybe this discouraged other potential investors or settlers.

But the Diazes have taken care of the estancia and kept its church open. Perhaps it was this family’s devotion to this monument, their attentiveness to its history, that made Santa Catalina more interesting to me and brought me closer to what it represents. Or maybe it was the music.

I was waiting for the others outside the gate when the music reached me through a stone arch off to my left. It came lightly, like a floral scent, a fine congestion of notes set free in the air by an ethereal choir. It was the Kyrie of a Mass, and the voices were young and poised and clearer than the air itself, and it had the effect that certain music, heard at the right moment, can have. Everything stopped for me.

Susana and I have been visiting ancient venues of human habitation for years. We’ve been to the Incan and Mayan cities. I’ve seen the ruins of the Essenes in Qumran, picked up a stone near the caves where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found. I once had a stone carving from the ruins of Great Zimbabwe; I used to rub it now and then, Aladdin-like, hoping to draw from it a message brought along by the glacial stream of history.

I had picked up a stone that morning in Santa Catalina; it was warm in my hand, and as I wondered about the secrets I knew it held, I heard the music. Maybe what followed was simply the product of auto-suggestion, or simple hope, but suddenly the modern insistence on relevance, the excessive importance we ascribe to contemporary matters, evaporated utterly and a brilliant reality exploded in my mind. I had heard sacred music before in Argentina. I accepted its high-mindedness, and I knew of its usefulness in the conversion of the Indians. But I never felt the passion in its gentle tropes. Now, in this place, before this church redolent of those rarely celebrated times, I finally understood the profound meaning of that humanitarian outreach that had illuminated this world a long, long time before I came into it. It was an ineffable knowledge, but I knew it would remain with me all my life. Such was the epiphany of this agnostic.

Beyond the arch, a large tree spread its branches over a patio. A young man stood in its shade and gestured toward the tables. “Beer,” I said.

“But it’s not the hour,” Clarita said. “It’s time for coffee.”

I had been driving most of the day. “Beer,” I insisted.

The proprietor sat down with us and told us about his work on the huts that stood behind us, four or five of them, about 10 by 15 feet square. He gestured toward the two he had already whitewashed. That’s when I saw where the music was coming from: a CD player perched in an open window.

He hoped to rent the huts to tourists. Slaves used to live in them, he said. There were 521 slaves when the Diazes acquired the estancia. “The Jesuits paid them,” he said. The Jesuits had forbidden slavery on their holdings from the beginning. But their strategy to protect the South American Indians, it seems, yielded an unintended consequence: The more Indians were removed from the settlers’ reach, the more Africans were imported to do the work. Full of good intentions, the missionaries lived with an antithetical dualism: The Africans were paid, but they were not free.

Changing the subject, I asked about the music. “Zipoli,” the man said. Domenico Zipoli was another extraordinary missionary, very much in the mold of Paucke and Dobrizhoffer. He was a composer acclaimed throughout Europe when he abandoned secular life and joined the Society of Jesus in 1716. A year later he was in Cordoba completing his studies for the priesthood. He died of tuberculosis at Santa Catalina in January 1726. He composed many works during his years here, most of them lost in the confusion after the order’s expulsion.

From Santa Catalina we drove back down to Ascochinga and a few miles farther east to Estancia Jesus Maria. This was the center for the Jesuits’ wine production. It has an ethnographic museum full of prehistoric artifacts and exhibits that trace the migrations of two of the larger linguistic groups of South America, the Guarani and the Guaycurues.

We then moved on to Estancia Caroya, which was the first one built, in 1616. Its products sustained the Colegio Nacional de Monserrat, still flourishing in Cordoba as one of Argentina’s elite high schools. After the expulsion, Caroya was run by the Franciscan order. During the 19th century War of Independence, the insurgent Argentines installed an arms factory there and added a watch tower to the usual complement of buildings. These include a cloister, the tajamar and a small chapel with a severely beautiful interior of dark gray stone. It reminded me of a chapel that I had visited in Iceland, the interior of which seemed to continue the cold volcanic black and ash-gray landscape outside. But here, again, contrast was strong: The exterior of this chapel was all hot sunlit fields, bursting forth yellow and green.

In 1876, Estancia Caroya accommodated immigrants from Europe. Settlers from France, Italy, Switzerland and Germany, and Jews fleeing pogroms set up agricultural colonies throughout Argentina. Some flourished, some withered; others grew into industrial towns.

Caroya attracted people from Friuli in northern Italy, who brought a unique notion of municipal planning. Most towns are built on grids or grow irregularly around a central point. In Caroya, the straight line ruled. For more than a century the town developed along a single main street, arrow-straight through the grassland.

When I drove onto this street, I found myself beneath a cathedral nave formed by giant plane trees. It was, in every other respect, an ordinary main street, with shops and houses, small businesses, restaurants and gas stations. A block or two to the right or left, and you were in the country again, among cows, horses and tall wheat.

The trees, judging from their girth and height, were as old as the town. They rose on both sides and interlaced above where they admitted only a scattershot of sunlight, which fell onto the street like golden stones.

After about five miles of this, and with no end in sight, we stopped for lunch. I asked the waiter in an Italian restaurant (the restaurants in Caroya are Italian), about the street outside.

“Eleven kilometers,” he said abruptly. He had been asked before.

He advised us where to buy the locally made salami and the local wine, what I consider the finest grappa west of the Mediterranean.

In 1941, Estancia Caroya was declared a national monument. The salami deserves nothing less. tourism officials in Argentina suggest that visits to the Jesuit estancias begin with the Manzana Jesuitica, in Cordoba City, the headquarters for the order’s missionary operations in the 17th and 18th centuries. They probably are right, if only because it’s easier to absorb the significance of something large and complex by moving from the general to the specific: get a broad picture of the enterprise first, then investigate its concrete expressions.

All around the provincial capital lies evidence of the Jesuits’ presence: the order’s oldest church is there, finished in 1650; the National University of Cordoba, the country’s oldest, built in 1610; the Colegio Nacional de Monserrat and the Novitiate, where Paucke, Dobrizhoffer and Zipoli prepared for their missions.

But because we were driving up after visiting friends in the southern part of the province and came upon Alta Gracia before we reached the capital, we planned our itinerary contrary to the official advice. We saved Cordoba City for last.

Cordoba City is more than a center of religious history; it is Argentina’s second city and one of its oldest, founded in 1573. More than 1.5 million Argentines live in this industrialized metropolis, home of the country’s automobile industry. It is a busy place, full of attractions such as the museum for contemporary and traditional art, and one for theater and music; there is even a weather museum.

Many of the city’s nonreligious edifices also recall colonial times: the Viceroy’s House, for instance, which contains the Provincial Historical Museum, and the Old Cabildo, or town hall.

Cordoba has heavy traffic, but planners have favored pedestrians and barred vehicles from many streets. It is a walker’s city, especially around the Manzana, where small restaurants are tucked here and there in the shade of fine neoclassical and modern buildings.

Because we began our tour midstream and used up much of our time, we missed a lot in Cordoba City--the ancient Jesuit crypt, a subterranean church--and we never made it to Estancia Candelaria, which is in the mountains to the west of our route. But we gained something by doing things the way we did. When we left, we had good reasons to come back.

Guidebook: Touring Cordoba

Telephone numbers and prices: The country code for Argentina is 54; the city code for Cordoba is 351. All prices are approximate and computed at a rate of about $1 to 1 Argentine peso. Room rates are for a double for one night. Meal prices are for two, food only. Getting there: Connecting service from Los Angeles to Cordoba is available on Aerolineas Argentinas and LAN Chile. There are no nonstop flights. Comfortable, inexpensive overnight buses run between Buenos Aires and Cordoba, departing from the terminal next to Retiro Train Station in Buenos Aires.

Where to stay: Amerian Cordoba Park Hotel, 165 Blvd. San Juan; telephone 420-7000, fax 424-5772, www.amerianhoteles.com.ar/Cpark/cpHome.htm. This upscale hotel offers modern accommodations, a pool and restaurant. Rates: $108 to $138.

Panorama Business Hotel, Marcelo T. de Alvear 363; tel. 410-3960, fax 410-3990. Located in the city center, the hotel has more than 100 rooms, a pool, sauna and gym. Rate: $100, with complimentary breakfast.

Complejo Hotel de la Canada, Marcelo T. de Alvear 580; tel. and fax 421-4649, www.hoteldelacanida.com.ar. Located in downtown C-rdoba. Rates: $80 to $94. On the estancias route, in the mountains of Ascochinga: Hotel Parque, tel. and fax 2549-2020, www.hotel-parque.com.ar. Not overly comfortable, but certainly grand if you like large rooms that overlook beautifully tended grounds. Swimming, tennis and golf available. Rate: $50.

Where to eat: The emblematic Argentine restaurant is the parilla, specializing in grilled meat. In Cordoba, try La Barrella de Miguel, 968 San Juan, tel. and fax 424-8604; $25. There also is a cluster of inexpensive restaurants and bars on San Jeronimo, and shops along San Martin across Plaza San Martin.

For more information: Argentina Government Tourist Office, 12 W. 56th St., New York, N.Y. 10019; tel. (212) 603-0443, fax (212) 315-5545. Also, Cordoba Tourist Agency, 360 Tucuman, tel. 434-1544, fax 434-1547, or at 360 Mitre Blvd., tel. 433-1980, e-mail: agcortu@arnet.com.ar.