Carpenter

In Buenos Aires lived a carpenter, and his name was Jose Vespaciano. He was tall and slender with dark brown eyes and chestnut hair and beard; people who saw him walk the mean streets in his curious, loose robes of white sometimes started, and felt for their beads. He looked like--well, no matter whom-- but it was not well to pass a man like that without a sign.

One day a crone was taken sick in the Calle Margaritas Cervantes, where Vespaciano lived. He cured her by repeating a formula, which his neighbors whispered to each other afterward with frightened glances. But there was no fright in the woman. She worshiped him and came to his patio the next night with a crippled friend. The women were joined by an old man and a boy, and every evening after that, when twilight enchanted the Calle Margaritos Cervantes, a grotesque company came up the blue street one by one and knocked on the door of Jose Vespaciano.

Some of them were old, with peaked brown faces gouged and distorted by the wild turmoil in their heads; some were boys who admired the carpenter because of his sorrowful eyes and comely figure; others peddlers and harlots, cripples scabrous with loathsome diseases, twitching paralytics, and mahogany-faced bushmen who had heard of Vespaciano and had come down from the hills. To them he talked of what had been revealed to him; some he healed, using the same formula with which he had raised his first patient, and it came to the ears of certain authorities that this formula was "Take up thy bed and walk." A few of Vespaciano's apostles were taken, questioned, and so the thing came out. They thought he was the Christ. . . .

Jose Vespaciano was arrested immediately. The charge was vague, but obviously the thing to do with a man who said he was Christ was to take him in custody. It was indicated by every precedent. To the policemen who apprehended him, the judge before whom he was arraigned, the thieves in the jail where he was lodged, Vespaciano admitted, indeed flagrantly proclaimed that he was the Christ, returned to earth as he had promised. Clearly, then, he was guilty of whatever it was that he was guilty of. Last week he went to prison.

In vain his disciples clamored for his liberty; in vain they pointed out that without anything but water, mystic words and prayers, he had cured members of his faithful band of dreadful ills. Scientists explained that he was harmless; the annals of abnormal psychology are filled with such examples of monomania. Said a doctor who examined him: "I sincerely believe that if he lived during the twelfth century he would have been heralded as a saint, but as it is he is seized as a lunatic."