The Imbunche

The trial opened at Ancud in the winter of 1880. The defendants were thirty-four men of the Chiloé archipelago. The charge was association with a society the prosecution called the Recta Provincia, and the islanders called, simply, the brujos. The court was a regional court. The judge was a mainlander. The depositions ran into the following year.

One of the men deposed was Mateo Coñuecar. He was seventy years of age. He was a farmer from the parish of Quicaví, on the eastern shore of the great island, where the cave was said to be. He testified at length. He testified that he had been a member of the order for thirty years, that the order kept its meeting house in the cave above the village, and that the cave kept a doorman.

The doorman was the Imbunche.

The court had not, at the opening of the trial, heard the word. By the close of Coñuecar’s deposition the word was in the record.

On the making

The making was described by Coñuecar in plain terms.

A male infant was taken, in the first months of life, from the household of a parishioner who had been put under the order’s influence. The taking was done at night and the family was made to believe the child had died. The child was carried to the cave. The making was performed by an officer of the order whom Coñuecar named the Deformer.

The Deformer began with the joints. Every joint of the infant was broken in sequence, beginning with the smallest. The arms were folded back along the spine and bound there with cord. The head was turned, by means of a tourniquet drawn tight over hours, until the face looked rearward over the shoulder blades. The tongue was split along its length with a blade and the two halves bound apart. The skin of the back was opened in a single long incision, and one arm, having been broken at every joint, was buried under the skin and sealed there with a paste of leaves the order kept for the purpose.

The work was recorded as taking the better part of a year.

The infant was fed, throughout, on the milk of a black cat. The cave was kept warm by a fire of coligue reed. The making, when it was finished, did not produce a corpse. It produced the doorman the cave required.

On the duty of the doorman

The duty was simple.

The Imbunche stood at the threshold of the cave. It did not leave. It could not, the joints having been bound past the use of walking. It did not speak in any language a person of the parish could understand, the tongue having been split. It greeted the officers of the order at the entry by a sound the depositions described only as a low moan, continuous, the cadence of which the officers had learned to read. By the moan the officers were warned of trespass on the path below. By the moan, also, the officers were known to one another in the dark.

Coñuecar testified that he had seen the doorman of the Quicaví cave on four occasions across the thirty years. He testified that the doorman, on each occasion, had been the same. He testified that the doorman did not appear to age. He was asked, by the court, how old the doorman would have been. He gave a number. The number was higher than the years of any man then living in the parish.

The court took the testimony down. The court did not return to the cave.

On what the order returned to the family

The order, in certain cases, was said to return to the family a token. A bundle, the size of an infant, wrapped in the cloth in which the child had been carried out. The bundle was buried in the parish cemetery in the usual rite. The family was told nothing further. The bundle was not opened.

The court record does not say what the bundle contained. The record says only that, where a family had received one, the family did not, in later years, hear from the order again.

The depositions ran to the close of the following spring. The convictions were entered against the named officers. The convictions were appealed to Santiago and were, in the appeal court, set aside on the ground that the offences described did not correspond to any article of the penal code. The men were released. The cave above Quicaví was not entered by the court.

The archive holds no position on whether the doorman remained at the cave after the trial. The archive observes only that a court of the Republic took down a deposition of seventy years’ standing, and that the deposition described a making, and that the making, in the deposition, required a child, and that the child, in the deposition, was not returned.