St. Martin de Porres walks down to the flooding Rímac at Lima

LIMA, Viceroyalty of Peru, 1634 AD — The Rímac rose so high this year that it burst the wall built to hold it. The water wrecked much of the church of las Cabezas, a short distance from the bank. It came out on the bank where Saint Martin de Porres grew up. He is the barber-surgeon of the Dominican convent of the Rosary, on the other side of the water. He crossed to the flooded church, and from there he went out to the river. Tradition holds that the water went back down into its channel.

The Rímac divides Lima in two. On the south side are the Plaza Mayor, the cathedral and the convent of the Rosary. On the north side, where the church of las Cabezas stands, is San Lázaro, a district outside the city proper. People in Lima call it Abajo el Puente (below the bridge). The bridge is the stone one the city finished in 1610 AD, after the Rímac carried away the one that stood there before it. A hospital for lepers was built on that bank in 1563 AD, with the parish church of San Lázaro beside it. A quarter of black, mulatto and indigenous families grew up around the two of them, outside the city’s central grid of streets. Since the beginning of this century it has taken in Africans newly brought into the city as slaves, along with free black families and slaves who have run from their masters.

St. Martin de Porres was born in Lima in 1579 AD, the son of don Juan de Porres, a Spanish gentleman, and Ana Velázquez, a freed black woman from Panama. His mother lived on Malambo street, in the house of doña Francisca Vélez Miquel, who had given her a home, and the two of them placed the boy with a barber to learn the trade. He heard as many Masses as he could at the parish of San Lázaro. Once he was working as a barber he never asked anyone for the usual fee, and he gave to the poor whatever people chose to pay him.

At fifteen he applied to the Dominicans. The law in Peru barred the descendants of Africans and Indians from the religious orders. But the prior of the Rosary had watched him work with a razor and with medicines, and he took him into the house as a donado (a lay tertiary living in the community, bound by no vows). He lived that way for nine years before he was allowed to profess, in 1603 AD, at twenty-four. The convent then put its infirmary in his charge, and he has worked there since as barber, surgeon and infirmarian. He is in his mid-fifties now.

The water was standing inside the nave of las Cabezas when he got there. A crowd had come down to the church, and the people had its images and its valuables in their arms, ready to carry them out. He would not let them take anything, and told them the river would do the church no further harm.

Then he left them there and went out to the water. According to longstanding Catholic Tradition, he took three stones into his hand. He called on the Most Holy Trinity, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. He threw the first stone upstream, the second downstream and the third into the middle of the current. The river went back down into its channel at once and stayed inside it.