Priestly Proteus

My family’s history demonstrates that a veneer of walking human irony wrapped in flowing black cloth can transmit life in more ways than one. Four generations ago a fair skinned Roman Catholic priest, a Spaniard who had recently made the epic transatlantic sojourn from Espana to darkest Peru by ship, arrived at a northern Peruvian federal district called La Libertad. He journeyed all this distance so he could minister to the pious local populace. This priest’s name was Benjamin Taboada and the fact that he is my great great grandfather and that he sired great great grandchildren from at least ten different matriarchal lines is all the evidence an amateur family genealogist requires in order to understand that old Padre Benjamin had, as it were, peculiarly literal notions about how to spread the seed of his pastoral outreach.

How did the all too literally titled Padre Benjamin go about this? Maybe it was the authoritative black cloth he sported or the extended gaze of his celebrated blue eyes in a society tragically subservient to the notion that blue eyes and fair skin are necessarily the epitome of human beauty. Perhaps it was the exotic cluck of his guttural Castilian accent. Possibly the sheer mental acuity that is required of any classically trained Roman Catholic priest combined with a wanton recklessness that was specifically part of his moral DNA helped to make him such a perversely successful Lothario. Most likely a convergence of different such factors cumulatively left it so that Padre Benjamin experienced little difficulty in intellectually seducing and physically bedding many provincial and naive young women in the sundry hamlets that dot La Libertad.

At the geographical epicenter of La Libertad is my family’s ancestral hamlet Paranday. My father’s bloodline traces its way multiple generations into the past through Paranday’s outskirts until antiquity’s mists permanently obscure the named identities of my forebears. Paranday is just one of the isolated villages in the region at large where my priestly ancestor lived out one of those subversively ironic examples from real life that illustrate the way nomenclature can pun itself silly: for indeed “Padre” Benjamin left a minor galaxy of padre-less runts in his genetic wake.

Notably, Benjamin did not move into the homes of any of the female parishioners with whom he became physically intimate to play either the official or unofficial role of a husband, father, or titular head of household. The reasons for this were three fold and interconnected. One was due to the sheer number of liaisons Benjamin carried on simultaneously. Two, all other things being equal, a priest from this time could survive many unpriestly personal faults and foibles, but no priest could become legally married and still remain a priest. Three, Benjamin’s renegade local priest status notwithstanding, his ministerial mandate was to run the parish circuit of his day. In other words, since the provincial Catholic parishes were so miniscule in the size of their congregations and so physically spread out over a dispersed geographical area, this meant no individual local parish among them could retain the services of a full time priest. Thus Benjamin was required to travel an infinite loop of different parishes every two to three days at a time in order to discharge his more conventional priestly duties before he would again be on the road in donkey powered transit to another distant hamlet’s church. If anything, this itinerant life style helped facilitate for Benjamin the Don Juan alter ego that he pursued so notoriously.

The notoriety piece puzzled me some ninety years later as I would quiz my by now elderly parents regarding how Benjamin got away with his proto-Wilt Chamberlain lifestyle (well, proto-Wilt Chamberlain for an ordained priest anyway). “Why didn’t the Church catch on and bust him for having all these babies with all these women?” I bewilderedly asked. My parents maintained that the local auxiliary bishop sinverguenzas (Spanish for shameless ones) in the regional capital city of Trujillo and federal capital Lima surely knew of Benjamin’s sexual shenanigans, but systematically looked the other way.

My parents claimed that “el Vaticano” itself would “probably” have taken some punitive action if properly apprised of Benjamin’s Priests Gone Wild routine, but back then “there was no such things as phones or faxes” to expeditiously send word back across the Atlantic Ocean to the Vatican vicars of what was happening in geographical boondocks like La Libertad. Besides, my parents added, Benjamin was not the only such rogue priest in the frontier hinterlands. Rascally minded and acting priests apparently abounded in the region at large and together they constituted an old padre network that protected its members from any sort of organized backlash for their decidedly unchaste misdeeds up and down the Andean countryside.

“Church prerogative”, my father answered when I commented to him that it still felt as if Benjamin had taken the word brazen to an absurdly comic level. Priests back then, my dad elaborated, were held in such high local esteem that they were referred to as “Doctor” at least as often as “Padre” by deferential village believers. In addition, he added, the Church at this time owned large lots of land in the countryside. Catholic clergy leveraged this land wealth in ways that helped them maintain their power and prestige. My father surmised that most likely old Benjamin supported a good number of his pious paramours with the granting of minor land grants from larger Church property lots that allowed these single mothers to maintain a measure of subsistence living for themselves and their children.

So Benjamin, who died around the year 1920, lived out a long life in La Libertad as an unchaste priest. In so doing it came to be that my dad’s grandfather Eliseo Taboada and his nine locally known half brothers and sisters sprinkled throughout different villages in La Libertad like so many cherries in a pitcher of sangria, were raised by their respective mothers without a real father’s presence in their lives. Fatherlessness was the prevailing legacy of the moment and it was into fatherlessness that Eliseo marched through the provincial childhood of his day. As future writings will show, fatherlessness was destined to be a recurrent fact of life for the next next three family generations.