Who is Veronica in Gabriela Mistral's poem La huella?

Question

The first stanza in Gabriela Mistral's poem La huella ("The footprint") mentions or appears to address a certain Veronica. The translation of that stanza follows below:

Of the fugitive man
I have only the footprint,
the weight of his body,
the wind that carries him.
Neither signs nor name,
neither the country nor the village;
only the wet shell
of his footprint;
only this syllable
that the sand captured
and the Earth —Veronica
that babbles it to me!

There is a Saint Veronica, who "captured" Christ's face on her veil. The Spanish language also has urban legend involving the name "Veronica" ("Bloody Mary" in English), whose relevance to the poem is questionable.

Is the poem's Veronica an allusion to Saint Veronica? If yes, what does this say about the fugitive? (One of the later stanzas mentions the fugitive's daughter, which does not seem to fit the idea that Veronica is Saint Veronica.) If no, what does Veronica's name stand for?

Answer 1

Yes, the reference here is almost certainly to Saint Veronica. In Catholic tradition she was a woman who encountered Christ on his way to Calvary, and offered him her veil so that he could mop his face. When he handed the veil back, an image of his face had been miraculously imprinted on the material.

The word "Veronica" is not connected with the fugitive, but is an adjective attached to the noun "Earth", forming the neologism "Earth-Veronica" ("la Tierra-Verónica"). In his work Sobre neologismos en la poesía de Gabriela Mistral (Litterae Hispanae et Lusitanae, Max Verlag, München) Rodolfo Oroz noted that such neologisms are very common in the work of Mistral, including, for example, árbol-ceiba, tierras-Agar and muerte-niña.

The Chilean critic Ana María Cuneo commented in her article La sobredeterminación semántica en el poema "La huella" de Gabriela Mistral that the term "tierra-Verónica" refers to how the Earth was acting as a blank canvas, collecting the footprints of the man:

"Earth-Veronica" ... derives from the use of the word "footprint" [earlier in the verse] insofar as the imprint of the face of Christ remains on the canvas of Veronica. In the same way the Earth is a white canvas on which the mark of the men who painfully walk on it is engraved. The earth is trampled by the existence of man.

She also notes that "la Tierra Verónica" is the first in a sequence of three descriptions of the Earth in the poem, the other two being "la vieja Tierra" and "la Tierra blanca" in which the word "Tierra" ("Earth") is juxtaposed with a single-word adjective.