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Book 4: The Night at Pecos
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Death Comes for the Archbishop, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Spirituality vs. the Material World
Friendship and Compromise
Humanity’s Relationship with Nature
Colonialism, Industry, and Loss
Memory, Death, and Afterlives
Summary
Analysis
After a chilly, uncomfortable night, Latour wakes up early. Latour and Jacinto share a loaf of bread and pot of black coffee and get on the road by four a.m. But despite their early start, the men still get caught in a snowstorm, with flakes so thick that the landscape around them becomes impossible to see. Eventually, Jacinto instructs Latour to leave the mules, and the two men set off on foot to some mysterious location.
The fact that these unnamed mules are left to die makes it even more salient that Latour chose not to bring Angelica and Contento on this trip. The foreshadowing is clear: just as those symbolic animals are spared this snowstorm, Latour, Vaillant and their friendship will make it out alive.
Themes
After an exhausting hour, the men arrive at their destination: a cave that looks like stone lips, protected from the storm. Jacinto helps Latour get into the cave, which is freezing cold and feels like a gothic church. The only light comes from a gap nearly 20 feet above them. But despite these harsh surroundings, Jacinto is in no rush to make a fire. Instead, he sits down, solemn; when Latour wonders why he does not make a fire, Jacinto explains that he has regrets about bringing the priest here. “This place is used by my people for ceremonies and is known only to us,” Jacinto admits. “When you go out from here, you must forget.”
While Latour’s missionary mindset leads him to convert everyone he can, Jacinto wants privacy and separation in his own faith—something priests like Latour and Vaillant continually infringe on. It is also important to note that this cave feels like a natural cathedral: it is made of stone (which symbolizes all things holy and ancient), and it has a gap for light at the very top, forcing patrons’ gaze skywards just like a cathedral would.
Themes
Jacinto then begins to build a fire on the already-existing fire pit, warming Latour and purifying the cave’s bad smell. At first, Latour thinks the loud vibrating noise in his head is a swarm of bees—but when he asks Jacinto about it, Jacinto uses his knife to dig a hole in one of the clay walls. Latour listens through the hole and hears rushing water, a river “moving in utter blackness under ribs of antediluvian rock.” Latour reflects that this sound is “terrible.”
The word “antediluvian” appears again here, once more signaling something prehistoric and epic. But this time, rather than being excited about his proximity to god’s “first Creation,” Latour finds it “terrible”—perhaps because, even though Latour recognizes the holy power of this place, he also must know that this cave exists beyond his own religious schema.
Themes
Latour brings out bread and goat cheese, surreptitiously drinking a sip of whisky. As they eat, Jacinto reveals that he feels lucky to have made it; when they first set out, he was not sure whether he could find this place. When the two men say goodnight, Latour resolves to stay up and listen to the river again. But Jacinto spends the whole night against the rock, pressed as close to the hole in the wall as he can get.
Though Latour distances himself from the more outwardly greedy members of his settler-colonial community, he, too, wants to possess the places and symbols that mean so much to Jacinto (as evidenced by his desire to listen to the river in secret).
Themes
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The next day, Jacinto and Latour walk to the cabin where Vaillant is staying. When they arrive, Kit Carson has beaten them to the punch, coming to tend to his friend. Fortunately, Vaillant is doing better; as soon as he can ride a horse, he will be ready to go back to Santa Fé. But though Latour keeps his promise to Jacinto, never telling anyone about the cave, he cannot stop thinking about it, often with a strange sense of horror (though the cave saved his life). Latour also becomes convinced that “neither the white men nor the Mexicans in Santa Fé understood anything about Indian beliefs or the workings of the Indian mind.”
The cave itself—and Latour’s intense, inexplicable feelings of horror at his time there—remains one of the great mysteries of the novel. What is clear, however, is the sense of alienation it creates in Latour; though he has now spent several years in New Mexico, and much of his time there with Jacinto, Latour must come to terms with the fact that he has very little access to the inner lives of most of his parishioners.
Themes
Kit Carson knows a white trader named Zeb Orchard who is thought to be an expert in matters of indigenous religion. But when Latour asks about the rumors (the everlasting fire, the snake), Orchard makes it clear that he, too, is in the dark; all he remembers is seeing a young indigenous woman be afraid that her baby would be fed to a snake. Latour expresses his admiration for the tribes’ devotion to their customs, and Orchard agrees, noting that Catholicism will never fully erase the old traditions.
Unlike Vaillant, who sees religion and conversion in fairly black-and-white terms, Latour understands that complete Catholic dominance will be next to impossible in a region where such vibrant faiths already exist. It is also worth noting that Latour’s main source of information about indigenous tribes is Kit Carson, whose biases are a matter of historical fact.
Themes
