A Digression on Divorce
The San Sebastian Chronicles, Part XXIV
At this point, reader, I should take the time to enlighten you as to the subject of this portion of the conversation between Beatriz and me, concerning in particular the old Etruscan term tur capra thruna. It concerns the topic of divorce.
Continued from…
It is no secret that it is the position of the Catholic church that there can be no divorce, for the marriage is a holy union in the image of that between Christ and His church, and just as He in Heaven cannot be separated from Her on Earth, so he on Earth cannot be separated from her whom he has wed. For those uncertain of this, look only the the words of the marriage rite itself, Til death do you part…, and, What God has joined together let no man break apart…, and so forth. And San Sebastian is, without a doubt, a Catholic country. In that respect, she and her people have, for the most part, endeavored to comport themselves with the church’s teachings, though those teachings on the indissolubility of marriage for any reason differ from not only those of most of the Protestants, which would stand to reason, but those also of the Eastern Orthodox, the somewhat more strict Oriental Orthodox, the and most other religions.
However, it is also true, as I have mentioned, that we Sebastianos are not Romans at heart or in blood. Rather, we are descended from the ancient and native tribe of the Etruscans, or at least those among them who refused to submit to and intermarry with the Romans after the Second Battle of Lake Vadimo, nearly two hundred years before Christ’s birth. Those unconquered ones fled to the northern mountains where the nation of San Sebastian was born, though it was not called that until much later, for reasons that should be obvious (i.e., there was no Saint Sebastian, the person, until nearly six hundred years thereafter, and the people that would become Sebastianos would not recognize Saint Sebastian as their patron until much later than that. [There is also much irony, not spoken of until late hours, in the erstwhile Etruscans’ adoption of a Roman from Gallia Narborensis as their patron and namesake, but that is now neither here nor there.])
In the dark days of Rome’s prehistory, divorce may have been socially prohibited, destabilizing as it necessarily is for familial alliances, children’s loyalties, inheritances, and the like. (Leaving aside contentions as to entrenchment of patriarchy and such other gender-specific theories of which I’ve recently become acquainted.) But such concerns are more pressing when one’s society is only barely clinging to what we might call civilization. So once the Romans had made for themselves a more stable, more rich little kingdom, the clarity and increasingly reliable projections of personal profit and happiness became more important to them than such abstract and messy concerns as jealousies and families and one’s children. So, even by the time of the war with the Etruscans, divorce for the Romans was a private affair and no more disrespectable, so long as carried out properly, than having a penchant for strange hats or an unconcealed collection of dried insects. So as not to sound blinded by my own patriotism, I will admit that this was the case with the later Etruscans too. Among those proto-Sebastianos with means, changing spouses every seven to fifteen years was an integral part of social climbing and economic and political maneuverings.
Yet in spite of its ubiquity among the Romans and their Imperial denizens, beginning with the reign of Theodosius I divorce was well and thoroughly stamped out in Christendom by around 1000 A.D., even among the civil authorities, which by that time had nothing whatever to do with marriage. Or so we were taught by Father Koblenza and his Jesuit brethren. But in our little Etruscan enclave, divorce lived on, a token of us Sebastianos resisting, as we had and would for so long, not only the Romans, but their culture, religion, and social mores.
Yet as the centuries wore on, our little Rasnan state found itself surrounded by Catholic princes, counts, and electors on all sides, and we were swarmed with missionaries. As it is sung in a later verse of our national anthem:
Priests preached in our pagan plazas
Franciscans roamed our roads
Dominicans drove across our districts
Benedictines bowed on our boughs
Pauline Fathers prayed on our precipices
There were Minims in our homes
And so, before we knew it, we were Catholics too. You could say the Good News converted us all, and that was perhaps true for many among us in those times. But also, as it sometimes goes with these things, our conversion was helped along by the conversion of the last of our old chieftains, Prince Gotto, who, we are told, had fallen in love with a Catholic widow named Carolinia, a noblewoman whose orthodoxy was hardened by fighting Cathar heretics in her late husband’s duchy in Occitania. Anyone can surmise that Gotto’s continued practice of the Etruscan religion, with its pantheon of Gods, holy groves, divinations, and strangely ancient funerary rites, was viewed with increasing suspicion and hostility in Europe’s Christian noble courts. And certainly Carolinia was having none of it. So upon Gotto’s conversion before his wedding to Carolinia, our country was renamed and it could be said our conversion was complete. (As well our tradition of absentee sovereigns was begun, as Gotto decamped for Monpellier.) But that was only a few hundred years ago; we were then only new recruits in church terms. Not much more reliable in our faith than had been the Swedes or Estonians. So once brought to heel, we were kept on a short dogmatic leash for a long while. It helped that we had been insulated from the Cathars, the Waldensians, the Hussites, the Calvinists, and other followers of the heterodox and heretics (if you don’t count the Jesuits).
Priests in the those old days of San Sebastian were of a hard sort, intolerant of dissent and any kind of perceived moral laxity. And for the most part, Sebastianos accepted their discipline, probably in large part to distinguish themselves from the perceived licentiousness of their Germanic and Italian neighbors, with their mistresses and foul tongues.
But all along there remained the matter of divorce. Sebastianos kept getting divorced. Wives kicked out their husbands, husbands left their wives, both spouses left the same house each claiming they did so first. When this was illegal, after Gotto’s conversion, it was done in living rooms and clandestine meetings at lawyers’ offices. Or it was done in Protestant Switzerland. Or, later, in one of the Eastern Orthodox domains within a few weeks’ journey across the Adriatic. (There was also a bustling market for proper annulments among the gentry and otherwise ecclesiastically connected. These were particularly common among those who informed on the clandestine divorcees.)
Some say our propensity to leave marriages behind was due to Sebastiano women having always been too strong willed, such that they become intolerable after six or ten years. Some say it is due the to tendency among Sebastiano wives’ mothers to rule out certain vacation destinations because of rumors of saber-rattling by the Tsar or the Habsburgs or the Croatians or the Ottomen, to the ever mounting consternation of their sons-in-law. Others say it is the men that are to blame, that they spend too much time traveling on business to locales rife with prostitutes, or that they are too fond of Bergamot liqueur and elderberry schnapps, or that they are immature beasts incapable of sublimating their whims, whimsies, wants, wiles, vices, drives, and dalliances for the good of the marital and familial unit. Perhaps too it has to do with Etruscan habits of independency ingrained in us since mankind first set foot on the Apennine Peninsula. Maybe it is the lewd temptations of modern liquor advertisements.
I think it has much to do with the fact that Sebastianos are insulated by geography and their own hearty Etruscan constitutions from plagues and other swampy diseases — not to mention the reduction in fatal accidents and murders resulting from the improved manufacturing processes and regulations and robust civil law enforcement mechanisms of the modern industrial state — with the result that we simply live too long. In Christ’s time and before it was a rare marriage that did not come to an end within twenty years due to one spouse or the other succumbing to the plague, leprosy, a mule kick, choleric water, highway robbery, unknown infection, or some fever or palsy or another (the outlying lucky [or unlucky] Methuselahs and Moseses of Old Testament times notwithstanding). So it was then a much less fraught undertaking to issue vow to stay with one person “until death do you part,” for it was almost certain that the day of one or another of the newlyweds’ demise would almost certainly be only a decade or two away!
This reasoning is bolstered still more when one considers the relative safety of childbirth in these times and the startling vitality of modern children. In that regard, until only very recently in Christendom was it not an outright miracle for childbirth to not kill the wife before the sixth child, at the outside. So too with the children’s survival; advances in modern midwifery and tubercular inoculations means that children the world over, but specially in dry, alpine, non-malarial San Sebastian, have an outright remarkable tendency to survive into adolescence. Even in lo those olden days when most wives entered into marriage shortly after puberty, the historical trend of the preponderance of most children to die before their sixth birthday meant that most families ended up with no more than four children at the funeral of the first parent who shook off the mortal coil. In the gleaming, antiseptic world of Anno Domini 1912, on the other hand, it seems every family that has not yet given up on the Catholic family prohibitions in practice if not in principle is ridden with swarms of healthy children. Six. Eight. Ten. Thirteen. It is a testament to man being made in God’s image that in such families the mother does not eat the last two or three.
One hears rumors of new salves, swabs, vulcanized rubber domes, and oiled lamb innards that couples might resort to — and some fantasize of pills! — that could render the sexual act less likely to result in lovable, beautiful, clingy, crying, expensive, eternally famished children. But until such a fantastical day comes, thanks to doctors and soap Sebastiano couples remain positively rife with healthy children, at least half of whom would likely lie beneath the churchyard but only twenty years ago. And, as a consequence, at least half the time the barristers involved will tell you if you ask that it is the over-bitten ankles that end the marriage. In that case, one wonders how many couples who have invoked the law of tur capra thruna would have done so had they had only one or two or three happy and healthy little ones. [As for the farmers to whom children are free labor and those lucky few couples whose love burns forever, cheers to them! But for the remainder, methinks we just plain live too long to expect many of us to stay married until death’s embrace; it is just too far away. — ed.]
Of course, my opinion, being that of an observer and not a participant, is subject to the vanes. Perhaps it — Sebastianos’ divorcey habit, that is — has to do with climate. I’ve heard the theory. It goes as such: In the high mountain valleys of San Sebastian, it is not at all uncommon to find oneself snowbound with one’s spouse in a small farmhouse for three or even four or five months of the year. By the time of the thaw, how can one expect not to need some time apart? And after a decade or two, it is easy then to see that needed time apart might stretch to the following winter. Deepest regrets, dear, a typical letter might go, but due to snows I will be unable to return home for the winter. Love to the children. I will send for my effects — Sincerely, H. Hotel du Longchamps, Trieste. After all, how many stories are there to be conveyed? How many books to be summarized? Jokes to be told? (To say nothing of the farts!)
So, just as the climate and geography of San Sebastian is to blame for the vast majority of Sebastianos having birthdays nine months after the deepest winter snows, I believe the same forces have long contributed to the tendency of Sebastiano husbands and wives to get sick of one another and eventually vamosz, for good or for a good while: They are seeking greener pastures both literal and figurative. And this trend has only been exacerbated in recent times as our little country has gotten richer, travel far faster, and hoteliers and landlords far less scrupulous.
Thus, such was the nuptial situation when hordes of Jesuits began to descend on San Sebastian after the order’s suppression in much of Europe from the mid-1700s and its papal abolition in 1773.
Continued…
