by Jeff McMahon
As you know, some people just say "San Luis" and drop "Obispo." They do this, I guess, to avoid the labial gymnastics obispo requires, but they're giving up more than they know.
Just look at obispo. It mirrors itself. It twists like a spiral staircase or a strand of DNA. If you slice obispo into three equal parts, you get a little sentence: Ob is po.
The meaning remains elusive, but perhaps we shouldn't look too deeply. Maybe it just means "ob is po." You know, like "dog is god." It's a Zen thing.
Furthermore, obispo springs from the tongues of ancients. It has the same meaning in Spanish that bishop has in English. Both words descended from the Greek word episkopos, which means "overwatcher." If we drop obispo, who will watch over us?
What will distinguish us from the San Luises in Arizona, Colorado, Argentina, Bolivia, Columbia, Venezuela, Cuba, Guatemala, Peru, and the Dominican Republic? What if the locals abbreviated their town names in San Luis al Medio, San Luis de la Paz, San Luis Potosi, or San Luis Rey? Then where would we be?
I won't even discuss "de Tolosa." That would be asking too much of you in one column. Instead, let us reflect upon the whole--San Luis Obispo de Tolosa--and how fitly it flies over this green and gold riviera.
It is a mountainous and valley-crossed mouthful of words, hilly and cut with rivers. It drops in cliffs and slices in beaches to the sea. Condors soar over its i's. Dark water laps its edges.
Would we have such pride in our home if it had another name? Would we watch over this land if some English-speaking fop had named it with a belch, like Oxnard or Turlock? A rose by any other name may smell as sweet, but how would this village smell today had Junipero Serra named it for some other servant of God?
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1997 marked the 700th year since the death of Saint Louis, the Bishop of Toulouse, the man whose bones wear our name. It marked the 225th year since Fray Junipero Serra rang a bell beside a creek and lent this spot that name.
Despite such auspicious anniversaries, despite a legacy so long of tooth, Louis' Aug. 19 feast day will likely go unobserved again in San Luis Obispo. Many years have passed since the Mission clergy did Louis any favors. They have their Founders Day celebration, but that has much to do with Serra and nothing to do with Louis.
The city and county that bear Louis' name have forgotten him, except for an old painting that hangs in the Mission shadows and a private dinnertime reflection by the Franciscans at San Miguel.
Nor do the paparazzi chase him in Valencia Spain, in the old capital of the kingdom of Aragon where he lingers.
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San Luis Obispo smiles lipless across the nave of the cathedral of Valencia. His eyes have gone 703 years between blinks, and across their hollow gaze have shuffled the feet of 23 generations. Kingdoms have come and kingdoms have gone.
His skull, brown with time, rests behind a window set into the chest of his sculpted likeness. A few feet below, his ribs cross his leg bones in a glass box framed in gold.
Thin Valencian light falls into the chapel from high alabaster windows. A wrought iron fence holds back the faithful and the curious, but a stand of votive candles just behind the black bars offers saintly communication. They are electric votives--white plastic candles with flame shaped bulbs that ignite when a coin drops.
If our namesaint's 13th Century eyes can see, he must think it a miracle when those lights ignite. Enough of a miracle, perhaps, that he does not care so many remain dark.
A lone votive glowed in the Chapel of San Luis Obispo on the day I arrived at the Cathedral of Valencia. It was not easy to find the old boy. I checked behind the altar first, a most sacred place in a cathedral, and found the withered left arm of Saint Vincent the Martyr. On the right side of the nave I found San Francisco de Borja. In the museum I found the Holy Grail (one wonders how Christ acquired such a richly jeweled wine cup) and two gloomy masterpieces by Francisco Goya.
Nor could I find Louis in the cathedral gift shop. You can't buy a postcard of Louis from the moustachioed nun who tends the shop. Nor do they have a prayer card for Louis. No statuette. No medal to hang from the neck. Such things they sell aplenty for dozens of saints, even for saints with no connection to Valencia, but not for our Louis.
You've got to feel for San Luis Obispo. He never wanted to be an obispo, much less a san. He just wanted to be Luis, a monk in brown robes who prayed and fed the poor and tended the sick and played now and then a game of chess.
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Louis of Anjou, as he was known in life, entered the world at Brignoles, Provence in 1274. His father was Charles the Lame, king of Naples. His great aunt was Saint Elizabeth of Hungary. His great uncle was King Louis IX of France, who led two Crusades and became the most famous Saint Louis, the one who gave his name to the city in Missouri.
These stately connections gave Louis of Anjou nothing but trouble. He spent seven years--age 14 to 21--as a captive in a castle in Barcelona. There he played enough chess to become the game's patron saint, perhaps to indulge the chess-like plot of his own life.
The king of Aragon had captured Charles the Lame during a naval battle over control of Sicily. When Louis' grandfather died, Charles the Lame became a captive king. Checkmate.
Charles signed a treaty that traded Sicily for his freedom. He handed over his eldest three sons--Charles III, Louis, and Robert--as hostages to insure the deal.
Franciscan friars watched over the boys during their captivity. Records of Louis' life tell us he liked these friars. He liked them a lot. He arranged to have them sleep in his quarters. Meanwhile, his indifference to women set the example for other saints:
"St. Aloysius Gonzaga's extreme modesty in avoiding all relations with the opposite sex was apparently imitated from the conduct of his patron, St. Louis of Anjou," according to Alban Butler's "Lives of the Saints."
Louis' older brother died in captivity, leaving Louis in line for the throne of Naples. A 1295 treaty set him free and decreed that he marry Blanche, the princess of Aragon. This marriage would unite the warring kingdoms, but Louis wanted nothing to do with Blanche. He renounced the crown of Naples, spurned Blanche, and declared that he wanted to become a monk.
Louis' younger brother Robert got the princess and the kingdom.
More headaches awaited the newly liberated Louis. He wanted to be a friar like his friends in Barcelona, but that idea appalled his family. Pope Boniface VIII agreed that Louis' blood was too blue to flow beneath the brown robes of a mendicant.
Louis retired to Naples to sulk, where he befriended a poor scholar named Jacques DuÈse (Duese resurfaces later in a big way). Meanwhile, Boniface agreed to allow Louis into the priesthood, but only if he served as bishop in the French city of Toulouse. Louis complained, but consented.
Bishop Louis wore the brown monk's habit anyway. He replaced the gold-plated and jeweled dinnerware in the bishop's dwelling with pewter and wooden bowls. He invited 25 of Toulouse's poorest to dine at his table each night, and he begged in the streets.
If Louis were in San Luis Obispo today, he would probably hang out on Broad Street and ask for change.
This may have been passive aggressive behavior designed to punish his family and snub the Pope, but it helped Louis' case for sainthood later. It also caught him a fever. He resigned as bishop after only six months and died at Brignoles at age 23 on Aug. 19, 1297.
Nineteen years later, Louis' buddy from Naples, Jacques DuÈse, became Pope John XXII. He canonized Louis in 1317 while Louis' mother was still alive and Louis' brother Robert still reigned in Naples. Destiny soon made Louis a saint loved by all of Europe. The 14th and 15th Centuries were his salad days, when San Luis Obispo de Tolosa was second in popularity only to St. Francis of Assisi. So it is written.
Fame is a fickle thing, and no one knows it better than Louis of Anjou. Valencia soon forgot about Louis when Vincent the Martyr, their native son, won sainthood. The Anjou family gradually lost its power and connections. And so Louis became a minor saint, a footnote to history who "rests" these days in a side chapel on the left of the nave of the municipal cathedral in Valencia Spain.
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But Junipero Serra, he remembered Louis. Serra remembered him in September 1772, two weeks after his feast day, and attached his name to a spot on a creekbank that became a grass and mud hut that became a mission that became a city.
What is in a name? Is it a coincidence that this city, hooded with brown mountains, is so known for its humility that the Los Angeles Times once called it "a working class Santa Barbara"? A coincidence that San Luis Obispo is so chaste that it undermined its most notable and prosperous event -- Mardi Gras -- just to keep its men from getting drunk and its women from getting topless? A coincidence that San Luis Obispo is so persnickety that it refuses to go big and become the next Los Angeles, no matter what riches the developers sloop to its threshold?
San Luis Obispo: a monk among saints, a monk among cities.
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San Luis Obispo smiles lipless across the nave of the cathedral of Valencia. His eyes have gone 703 years between blinks, and across their hollow gaze have shuffled the feet of 23 generations. Kingdoms have come and kingdoms have gone.
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