More About Making Up History

Annamaria on Monday

Michael Cooper’s guest blog last week got me to thinking about that tenuous relationship between fact and fiction.   Mike pointed out how historical novelists play with and fill in the “little pools” of missing or ambiguous information in the historical record.  Then, a couple a days ago, Jeff reported that, once again, his fiction had predicted future facts.

From time to time, I have experienced something strangely between these two sensations.  I have invented an aspect of my story’s historical setting and only later found out that what I had fabricated was actually the truth.

Here is an example:

The Internet was not even a figment of Cerf and Kahn’s imaginations when I began researching City of Silver, some time around 1992 (the historical record is sketchy about this).  At that point in time, I had no choice but to learn my setting, Potosi’s history the old fashioned way, by digging around for dusty volumes.  Mostly, that meant starting my search in the card catalogue of the New York Public Library.  Selections from it blessedly often led me to the bibliographies of historian authors, which led me to other source materials.

While I filled my notebooks with what I was learning, I began thinking over a vague notion of a plot.  The inspiration for the murder mystery was a question my husband had asked me when we were visiting a cloistered convent for Spanish noblewomen in Potosi: “Why would a noblewoman want to lock herself away in a place like this?”  I, his convent-school-educated wife came up with five reasons.  Over the next few days, my imagination turned those reasons into five women.  When I needed a plot for my novel, those women showed up again, and they had a problem with a locked-room murder.

David's photograph of the convent's cloister

A gratuitous photo of one of Potosi'd beautiful churches,
included to show you why I fell in love with the place.

But the research was frustrating.  Most of what I wanted to read was available only in Spanish.  Well may you wonder why a person who cannot read Spanish wanted to write a historical novel about a Spanish-speaking city.  You’d be right if you suspected that she might be a bit daft.

What I needed to read was the Historia de la Villa Imperial de Potosi by Bartolomé Arzáns de Orsúa y Vela.  There was a copy of that rare and splendid chronicle just uptown at the Columbia University library.  But I didn’t know how to read it.   The Library of Congress offered pay-dirt in the form of a book with translations of many of Arzans’ juiciest tidbits: Tales of Potosi, edited, with an introduction by R. C Padden.  I went to Washington to read it.

Once there was an Internet, I was able to find and buy my own copy.

Meanwhile, my sub-plot—which now revolved around a true counterfeiting scandal—was stalled because I had no sources in English to explain it to me.  There was nothing else for it.  I found a Spanish-speaking doctoral candidate at Columbia and engaged her to translate eight chapters of Arzans.  While she was at that task, I went ahead writing the mystery plot, which now involved the most powerful man in the city, based the real guy—Alcalde Francisco Gomez de la Rocha.  I knew very little about the historical Potosino mayor at that point, but I decided my fictional character would be a villain and that he would use poison to get rid of his enemy.  The imaginary man really began to take shape in my mind after I made that choice.

 

Eventually, about a month later, my translator delivered fifty-four pages of Arzans in English.  And there on page 29 was this sentence.  “In September 1651, Rocha decided to kill the President with venomous powders.”

The model for my villain actually was a poisoner.   

Just a coincidence for sure.   But still, it gave me gooseflesh.