Mexico

  In the next five days the Spaniards destroyed more than two thousand Altomec statues, burned nearly half a mile of tanned animal hides on which the history of the city had been recorded, and eradicated almost all visible signs of culture. During the first of these days Fray Antonio, caught up in a religious frenzy, led the rampaging troops, but on the morning of the fourth day, when much had already been lost, Lady Gray Eyes and her little granddaughter came before the priest and by means of an interpreter indicated that he was to come with them. They led him to a crypt in the palace containing the most valuable codices—those now in the Vatican—and urged that these records of the Altomecs be saved. All that I have related about my Indian ancestors, their triumphs and their defeats, has been taken from those few precious records that Lady Gray Eyes managed to rescue.

  This was the year 1527, the year in which Lady Gray Eyes arranged her truce with Fray Antonio Palafox and deposited with him the parchment bearing the portrait of the Virgin and Child. Thanks to the intervention of the queen, the pacification of the Altomecs was speedy, and before the end of the year Fray Antonio had completed his fortress-church and started the mass conversion of the people, but he was disturbed by the refusal of Lady Gray Eyes to be baptized in the blood of the Lord or to permit her granddaughter to undergo the rite. Obstinately she insisted, “I have been a Christian for six years,” and she explained how the parchment had effected her conversion.

  Fray Antonio, a purist, reasoned, “But that’s impossible. There were no priests here at the time.”

  “We won’t argue about it,” she replied, and although she was instrumental in making her people undergo formal baptism, she forswore the rite for herself.

  One day Fray Antonio asked her, “If you were powerful enough to make your generals surrender the city—”

  “We did not surrender,” she argued.

  “I mean, if you were strong enough to end the war, why didn’t you do so sooner?”

  “For a very good reason,” she explained. “Our men are warriors. My father was the bravest of all the Altomec generals, and if we had surrendered cravenly, we would now be living in shame. But we fought you to a truce, and now we are free to live with honor.”

  One day she added a strange observation: “Men are men and they are happiest when they live as men. Our men wanted to test themselves against the Spaniards, and they did.”

  Fray Antonio asked, “What did you do during the long weeks of the siege?”

  The queen replied, “Each morning, when the drum sounded, I spread the parchment on the floor and knelt before it with my granddaughter, and we prayed.”

  “At the same moment I was praying, too,” the young priest confided. “What did you pray for?”

  “For your victory,” the queen said simply.

  “Then why did you not end the siege sooner?” the priest repeated in some irritation.

  “Because there is a proper time for all things, and unless you had spent an appropriate amount of blood and courage winning this city, you would not have appreciated it when you took it.”

  “I see.…” he said simply, and then shifted to a familiar argument: “Lady Gray Eyes, at the next services you must be baptized.”

  “That occurred a long time ago,” she replied. “In blood.”

  “True baptism is in the love of the Lord,” he argued.

  “I have known that love for seven years,” she replied. “It was in such love that I gave you the city when your soldiers proved powerless to take it.”

  “Let me at least baptize the child,” the priest pleaded. “She will have a long life in this city and therefore ought to be a Christian.”

  “She is already a Christian,” the queen insisted.

  “Who made her so?” the priest demanded.

  “I did.”

  Her negative attitude on the matter was fortified one afternoon as she walked through her city and came upon a group of young girls laughing with Spanish soldiers and apparently waiting for a minor priest. “What are you doing?” she demanded.

  “We are waiting to be baptized,” the girls said.

  “Why?” she inquired.

  “Because we desire to have babies with the Spaniards,” the girls explained, “but they refuse to sleep with us unless we are baptized.”

  The queen was not pleased to hear this, and the more she saw young girls undergoing baptism so that Spaniards would accept them as sexual partners, the more determined she became that her granddaughter, still far from marriageable age, would not be baptized.

  “You are not to look at Spanish men,” she warned the girl constantly. When Fray Antonio came to her house, the old palace of the Altomec kings, to argue over the child’s soul, Lady Gray Eyes ably rebuffed him. “We were Christians years ago,” she insisted during one visit, “and the only remaining reason for baptism does not apply to my granddaughter.”

  “What reason are you referring to?” the priest asked.

  “So that she might sleep with a Spaniard,” Lady Gray Eyes elaborated.

  The priest slapped his forehead and exclaimed, “Is that the only reason you can see for baptism?”

  “If one is already a Christian—yes,” the queen replied.

  Fray Antonio now switched to the question that had for some time been plaguing him. “I see that your granddaughter wears many ceremonial bracelets,” he observed.

  “Girls always do,” the queen replied.

  “But these are of silver,” the priest continued smoothly.

  “The royal family always wore silver,” Lady Gray Eyes explained.

  “Where did they get it?” Fray Antonio asked, trying to mask his excitement.

  “I never knew,” the queen replied.

  “But surely … you must have heard …”

  “Doubtless the king knew, but—”

  “Did the Altomecs have a mine?”

  “This was the sort of thing that would never concern me,” the queen replied, and no amount of subsequent questioning could dislodge her from her placid indifference to the matter. She quickly perceived, we know from what her granddaughter later wrote, that the young priest was inflamed with a lust for silver and she was determined to use this as a leverage against him, but no one ever learned whether or not she ever knew where the mines were. Her granddaughter, when she later wrote of these matters, was of the opinion that the queen did know, but if so she kept the secret.

  The reason why most chroniclers suspect that Lady Gray Eyes did indeed know was that when Fray Antonio made an impassioned plea to the Altomecs for enough silver to cast a statue of the Virgin in that metal, the queen thought this an excellent idea and quickly the necessary ore appeared, from what sources Antonio never discovered.

  When he applied pressure for further supplies to send to Spain, he encountered opposition. “Why should we Altomecs send silver to a king in Spain?” the queen asked suspiciously.

  “Because he is the greatest king in Christendom,” Antonio explained.

  “He is not our king,” Lady Gray Eyes retorted.

  “But he is. You are all his children.”

  “Our king is God, who is in heaven,” the queen replied, and no more silver was forthcoming, a fact that was intensely upsetting to the priest.

  For two years Fray Antonio concentrated on building his first edifice in Toledo, and it represented his dual responsibilities: winning land and slaves for the king, winning souls for God. He did force Altomecs to become the king’s slaves, but he allowed them to work only on building the cathedral, which, under his constant supervision, became a rugged fortress-church with walls as thick as a man is tall and doors studded with bolts to ward off murderous Altomecs. For the Spanish soldiers a little wooden church was hidden safely inside the fort, within the square, and this accounted for the name of the construction, the fortress-church. Today, of course, the church has vanished but the fortress remains, and along the south wall you can still see one of the famous memorials of the pacification of Mexico. It is the
austere outdoor altar, constructed in the simplest lines by Altomec Indians whom Fray Antonio had taught to use the chisels he had imported from Spain. In the early years of the occupation it was considered too dangerous to admit Indians into the heart of a fortress-church lest they rise in sudden revolt and massacre the Spaniards, but at the same time the priests never lost sight of the fact that they were in Mexico to convert the Indians, so the compromise of the outdoor altar was conceived. To this altar, through the solid wall, was cut a narrow tunnel just wide enough for one priest to pass to the outdoor chapel, where in the open air there might be assembled four or five thousand Indians who had come to hear the message of Jesus. Under these precautions, if the Indians did rebel they could murder the priest who officiated before them, but they could not force their way into the fortress through the narrow tunnel, which could be easily blocked from within.

  Furthermore, whenever the priest conducted worship from his outside altar, a company of soldiers manned the battlements above him, so that if trouble erupted the armed men could fire point-blank into the crowd. For the first eleven years of his service in Toledo, this soldier-priest never led his Indians in prayer without the assurance of some twenty armed men ready to spray musket fire among the worshipers.

  But it was neither the fort nor the altar that occupied Fray Antonio’s principal energies. He constantly took detachments of his soldiers into the hills, searching for the silver that he knew to be there, and constantly the prize eluded him. When Bishop Zumárraga came from Mexico City to inspect the fortress-church, he was so impressed with the way in which Fray Antonio had subdued the old pagan city that he wished to take the young man back to the capital with him. “We need your energies,” Zumárraga explained.

  Fray Antonio demurred modestly, saying, “My work is with the Altomecs.”

  With the bishop safely back in the capital, Fray Antonio was free to resume his obsessive search for the mines, but he met with no success. What made his failure the more galling was that from time to time his Altomec converts would appear with pieces of pure metal such as the one he had first seen or with silver bangles, and it infuriated him that they knew the secret of the mines while he did not.

  Then in 1529 matters in Spain’s Toledo took a dramatic turn. In mid-summer Fray Antonio received word that his father had finally been judged guilty by the Holy Inquisition and, because of the gravity of his heresy against the financial stability of the empire—a sin that furthermore smacked of Lutheranism—had been burned at the stake in the public square of Salamanca. He had, a friend related, been strangled before the fires reached him.

  For some weeks Fray Antonio moved in a kind of daze. His first thoughts were not of his father but of the little garden of flowers that the Palafoxes had nourished over many generations. He saw the bright blooms crowded out by weeds and in the cathedral a yellow robe of shame bearing his father’s name and the proscription against all Palafoxes for as long as time should last. He then thought of his brother, Timoteo, and what would happen to him, and for several nights he prayed that the fiery young fellow might control his temper. He hoped that Timoteo had already slipped into the army, for if he had not, entrance now would be impossible and the boy would be reduced to beggary or brigandage. Finally he thought of himself, and of how his career in the Church had been permanently blasted by this decision of the Holy Office. He could remain a priest, but he would never gain preferment. It was then that he resigned himself to spending the rest of his life in Mexico, lost in the obscurity of its Toledo with no hope of ever again seeing Leticia; but it was also then that he reaffirmed his belief that the good name of his family might be salvaged by the silver he was determined to find.

  Lady Gray Eyes, who had always studied Fray Antonio with interest, saw with some apprehension the significant changes that were taking place in the priest. Where he had once been lively of step and eager for the problems of a new day, he was now dispirited and listless. He seemed particularly afraid of the couriers who brought letters from the capital, and she suspected that he was awaiting bad news to follow on what he had already received. He lost pleasure in conversions, and he took his troops for extended trips into the mountains, always seeking the silver mines that eluded him.

  One day upon his return to the fortress-church she went to his quarters and asked him bluntly, “Fray Antonio, what has happened?” and on the spur of the moment he blurted out the story of his father’s execution in Salamanca. The look of shock that came over the face of the Altomec woman surprised him.

  “Do you mean,” she said in a whisper, “that in Spain they burn people alive?”

  “Yes,” he confessed uncomfortably.

  “But the Virgin …” she asked, pointing to the statue that graced his bleak wall.

  “They do it to protect Her,” he tried to explain.

  With penetrating eyes the Indian woman looked at him and asked quietly, “So in your country they do exactly what we did in ours?”

  “Oh, no!” the young priest protested vehemently. “Even though it was my own father they did it to, I have to admit that it was done to protect …”

  “The same as we did,” the woman replied, looking right at the priest, and at this moment a kind of absolute equality was established between the two, so there was never again any further discussion of baptism.

  Because Timoteo Palafox had been safely in the army before his father was executed for heresy, he escaped the generations-long punishment meted out to all members of the heretic’s family. But although he could remain in service, he could never be promoted to officer or hold any rank of distinction. In 1529, still unaware that his father had suffered the extreme penalty for his liberal ideas, he reached Mexico City in his bright uniform of ensign, an ambitious and courageous young soldier with an alert mind. Announcing confidently that he was on his way to join his brother in Toledo, he was surprised when Captain Cortés gave different orders: “The Indians in Oaxaca, a big settlement to the south, are proving troublesome. Assemble a company of men and pacify them.” Timoteo wanted to turn down this unchallenging task, but Hernán Cortés was not a governor to whom one could offer objections.

  It was therefore to distant Oaxaca that Fray Antonio had to travel to greet his brother, and when he joined him in the mean adobe hut being used as headquarters, he learned that Timoteo had been aboard ship so long in getting to Mexico that he did not know of his father’s burning at the stake.

  “Terrible news, brother. Father’s enemies were remorseless. They hounded him till the Inquisition had to condemn him.”

  “Burned?” Timoteo screamed.

  “Mercy was shown. He was strangled before the fires were lit.”

  For several minutes Timoteo stormed about the hut, the veins in his neck bulging, and then, choking as the words came out, he swore: “We shall revenge that evil deed. His yellow robe will hang in Salamanca proclaiming our disgrace, yours and mine, but by the strength of God …”

  “Don’t blaspheme.”

  “By God’s strength working in your right arm and mine, we’ll cleanse our father’s name and ours. Swear to it, Antonio,” and in that steaming jungle hut the brothers prepared to take that oath. Standing erect, each man held aloft his badge of office, Antonio his Bible, Timoteo his sword, and swore the vow uttered by the soldier: “We will purify the name of Palafox. Whatever it requires, we will pay the price. That stain will be removed.” They lowered their arms and gritted their teeth as if preparing for battle.

  Antonio produced a cloth bag he had smuggled from Toledo and emptied its contents upon a rickety table.

  “Silver?” Timoteo asked.

  “The purest, I’m told. These are the bullets we’ll use.”

  Timoteo, fiery and ready to act, carefully tossed the pellets from hand to hand as if weighing them. “Where was this found?”

  “I don’t know,” the priest replied.

  The young officer grabbed his brother by the surplice and shouted, “Then why did you bring me here?
”

  “To find the mines,” Antonio said coldly, unfolding a rough map showing Toledo and the high valley of which it was a part. “The silver seems always to reach us from this area,” and with the prescience that marked so much of his work in Mexico he stabbed at the exact spot where the Mineral was later to be discovered.

  “Then that’s the land we have to have,” Timoteo growled, pacing up and down the narrow room.

  “That’s my intention,” the priest agreed. “This poor land I’ve already sequestered for the Church.” He indicated those barren portions from which the flakes of silver seemed never to come. “These better lands you must secure for our family when you get to Toledo.”

  “How can I get to Toledo?” Timoteo stormed. “Captain Cortés has sent me here.”

  “Captain Cortés assigned me to the capital,” Antonio replied coldly, “but I reached Toledo. You must do the same.”

  That night the two brothers drafted six different letters to Cortés, but each seemed lacking in persuasive force. Finally, toward dawn, Fray Antonio decided that Timoteo should send a simple, soldierly appeal, which he proceeded to dictate while Timoteo wrote:

  Esteemed Captain,

  Since my devout brother, the renowned Fray Antonio, has worked so diligently to bring peace to the Altomecs and glory to your rule, I, Ensign Timoteo Palafox, do petition that I be dispatched with a small troop to protect my brother in his saintly duties among the unconverted.…”

  The petition succeeded, and in late 1530 Timoteo, now reduced to the ranks because of his father’s disgrace, was summoned to Mexico City, where Captain Cortés personally delivered the good news, but the great conquistador did not show enthusiasm as he told the nervous young applicant, “Your petition is granted to go to Toledo to serve as your brother’s strong right arm.” Before Timoteo could exult, the ruler of Mexico added: “Do not write letters home about this appointment. I’ve received instructions from Seville following your father’s disgrace.” He snapped out the words as if he loathed them and their source. “I’ve been ordered to demote you, Palafox. You can never again occupy an officer’s rank in the armies of Spain.”