Narrative
Las tres tazas
Not translated into English
José María Vergara y Vergara · 1863
Synopsis
Three cups served one after another, and three ages of the same city. The first is of chocolate: in 1813, a marquise of Santafé offers refreshment to the general who is leaving for the south with his army, in a colonial house with vast courtyards. Then come the Spanish reconquest and its reprisals, then Bolívar, and with the officers of the British Legion coffee replaces chocolate. The third cup is of tea, in a capital that dresses and speaks in the English manner, where the one who tells the story still looks for those with whom he drank the first.
Context
The text appeared in 1863 in a collection to which it gave its title, at the time when El Mosaico brought together the writers of customs sketches each week around a cup of chocolate. It is dedicated to Ricardo Silva, another member of the group, and signed with a pseudonym. The author included it in the Museo de cuadros de costumbres that he put together in 1866, an anthology that fixed the genre for the country. What the text calls into question is not Europe but its intrusion: the civil war of 1860 to 1863 had just undone the old society of the city, and these pages are written in the knowledge that they describe a world that is passing.
Who it is for
About thirty pages in Spanish, with no French translation. Three tableaux rather than a story; the allusions assume some familiarity with the civil wars of the century.
Prizes and reception
Regarded by critics as the masterpiece of Bogotá costumbrismo and as the most frequently reprinted page by its author, both in his lifetime and in the anthologies that followed.