In our kitchen, beside the entranceway to our home, there hangs a small retablo. My family and I pass by it several times a day. Compressed into this piece of tin’s 6 x 4 inches is a typical scene: a miracle is occurring. At what could be the foot of any one of the Chihuahuan Desert’s innumerable intermittent mountain ranges, a man in simple white garments, his sombrero hanging on his back, his bared head bowed, extends with both hands a lit candle. Atop a platform-like cloud, the Virgin of Guadalupe hovers resplendent in the blue sky above him. Beneath this tableau is an inscription painted with what must have been a very fine-tipped brush by an exceedingly careful hand. In a few lines, the voto suscepto is plainly stated. The offering is being made to Our Lady in gratitude for the restoration of this man’s eyesight after a period of blindness. The lower right corner bears the date 1 Abril 1970.
A remarkable operation is at play in this little item. It is an expression of the most private circumstance imaginable—short, that is, of death itself—the radical intimacy of a miraculous encounter, here affirmed bodily in the renewal of vision. Yet this object is anything but hermetic. The retablo exists solely for the unique moment of public display when it is placed beside the altarpiece. In truth, it is this painting and not the candle it depicts that serves as the votive. No wonder, then, at the marvelous directness of the text which exposes so matter-of-factly an event which exceeds language. The impossible has occurred, and what can one do but reduce it to a bit of plainspoken exposition? It is a display of utmost humility.
But like the candle that one day finds itself lit in sacred offering, the retablo also begins as an item of commerce. This one, like any other, was made not by the healed himself but by an artisan employing his talents in a cottage industry. The sheet metal was purchased from the local hardware store, the brushes from the stationery shop. The image is generic, the cheapest in the retablista's catalog, applicable to any miracle performed by this Marian apparition. Had this customer survived a horse kick or car crash the price might have been doubled to render the episode. And the words come easily enough if the customer cannot provide them himself, but the patron is forewarned with a routine acknowledgment: the artist's spelling is rather poor; for lack of schooling he had to teach himself to read and write. For this painter the narration of miracles is rote, a day job, a living, albeit one he sets himself to with devout attention. A thousand times this hand has penned the prayer of another, has put the name of the other in place of his own, and a thousand times this hand has collected the agreed-upon pesos for its efforts. In the end, the payment is in a sense as meaningless as the production or the identity of the one who produced it. The retablista’s role is crucial for his having crafted the conduit of gratitude that is to be placed at the holy site, but the conduit’s meaning emerges only in the emptying out and never in the filling up—and in the culminating moment of communication between human and divine, when the retablo is at last displayed at the altar, this meaning promptly expires. Thus, like the flickering candle left to diminish into waxen formlessness, the object is deserted.
In this rite a perfectly intelligible system has been arranged, anyone can readily grasp its fleeting meaning, its inversion of the confessional, thanks given for miracles rather than forgiveness asked for sins, the exultant and the contrite, the public and the private, polar mitigations of communication's inherent embarrassments. In the final instant the ancient law of abandonment secures the ritual fast, and the thing that has acted as conveyor is free to pass from the sacred realm to the secular. For the span of a breath, the ex-voto possesses an incantatory power—the descendant of a mediumistic technology 10,000 years old, a technology of axe hoards and cracked shields, earthen pits and bog deposits—and then it moves on, less ephemeral but more fragile in its corporeal uselessness. From the sociological category of “folk religion” the retablo moves into the aesthetic category of “folk art,” and, in this case, onto a wall in a little house where there lives a happy family of three. We care for it now, this miracle made apparent.