Mexico

  “Permission to sit down?” the young soldier asked weakly.

  “Granted. And I’ll give you one ray of hope. As an ordinary soldier you can still achieve much, with valor, determination, obedience to command. By being a model for others less intelligent.”

  “But what will I be called if I’m allowed no rank?”

  The two soldiers discussed this for some moments, and it was Cortés who recalled a title once used in the Spanish armies, a word that could be translated into English as something like “sergeant,” so that when Timoteo marched west to look for the silver mine of Toledo, he was no longer an ensign destined to become a general; he was plain Sergeant Palafox, burning with anger, hatred and a determination to find the wealth that would buy back his family’s reputation.

  As soon as the sergeant reached Toledo, he initiated his search for the mine. Accompanied by only a few other soldiers, he tramped riverbeds and climbed hills from which he could look down on his brother’s fortress-church. He found nothing, and was infuriated by the fact that whenever he came upon Indians in their small outlying villages, a few women in the mean huts were sure to be wearing silver bangles.

  “Ask her where she got them,” he would shout at his interpreter.

  “They were given her.”

  “By whom?”

  “She says her uncle.”

  “Fetch him!” but when the old man was brought, and even tortured, he would not tell how he had obtained the bracelets and earrings. Enraged, Timoteo would want to lay waste the village to uncover the secret source of the silver, but would be restrained by the other soldiers.

  Timoteo had been rampaging through the countryside for less than a month when Fray Antonio was approached one day by a nine-year-old Indian girl he recognized. It was Stranger, who screamed: “They’ve taken my grandmother!” and she led the priest to the barracks, where he found Timoteo and four soldiers torturing Lady Gray Eyes, who was strapped prone to a bench.

  “What are you doing?” the priest thundered.

  “She knows where the silver is,” Timoteo snapped.

  “Let her go!” his brother shouted, and the woman was unbound. As she struggled to her feet and rubbed her shoulders to relieve the pain, she did not thank the priest but smiled at him with a kind of rueful satisfaction.

  “You may go,” Fray Antonio said.

  “You are acting just as we used to,” the queen said as she took her granddaughter by the hand.

  In 1532, Timoteo, urged by his brother to find the silver but forbidden by Fray Antonio’s piety from using the tortures that might have uncovered it, undertook an expedition to that Valley-of-the-Dead from which the Altomecs had launched their conquest of City-of-the-Pyramid, and here he found more silver bangles than in any other previous area, which convinced him that he was close to the mines he sought. But the Indians in the valley proved wholly intractable. Perhaps on orders from Lady Gray Eyes they refused to speak of silver; they would provide no food, nor would they work for the Spaniards; and finally one young warrior knocked Timoteo down when the latter tried to take his wife.

  In retaliation, Sergeant Timoteo Palafox lined up his soldiers and marched down the middle of the valley, killing everyone he encountered and setting fire to every home. Some Altomecs, of course, escaped to the hills, but more than six hundred Indians were killed that day, and from their arms and legs nearly two thousand silver bangles were recovered.

  When Timoteo returned to Toledo, he marched his troops into the fortress-church and threw the booty before his brother with the words “Now we’re beginning to find silver somewhere.” Secret messengers had sped before him to inform Lady Gray Eyes of the massacre, and she was at the side of the priest when his brother delivered the bangles, so that the young soldier’s reception was not a pleasant one.

  “You wanted silver!” Timoteo shouted defensively.

  “But not this way,” Fray Antonio replied. “Not by massacring hundreds.”

  “Getting silver is not easy,” Timoteo argued.

  “But these were Indians that I had baptized,” the priest cried in anguish. “They were part of us.”

  “They were savages,” Timoteo said, “and they attacked us.”

  “They did not!” Antonio thundered.

  “Do you believe her?” the soldier demanded. “Rather than your own brother?”

  Fray Antonio, realizing that it was unseemly to fight with his brother before an Altomec witness, said calmly, “There must be no more slaughters, Timoteo.”

  “They know where the silver is,” the sergeant replied ominously. At this, Lady Gray Eyes smiled, causing Timoteo to shout, “Brother, get her out of this city. She’s poisoning you.”

  The extent to which Lady Gray Eyes was influencing the priest was not to become evident for some years, but Timoteo was correct in his estimation of the situation, and he became her avowed enemy as she became his.

  For four more years Sergeant Palafox probed the hills for silver and found nothing. Each time he trudged back to the fortress-church his gaunt, stoop-shouldered brother would pace up and down before him as he washed, storming, “While you fail, our family continues in disgrace.”

  “Brother,” Timoteo would reply, “I have looked until I’m weary and there is no silver.”

  “It’s right around us,” Antonio would cry in frustration.

  “They must be bringing it in from the north,” Timoteo reasoned.

  “No!” Antonio would shout. “Don’t ever say that. It’s here, under our feet.”

  Finally, one day in 1536, after such a scene Timoteo replied quietly, “All right. If it’s out there, you find it. I’ll guard the fortress.” And during most of that year the residents of Toledo saw their thin, scholarly priest astride a donkey riding into the hills looking for a treasure that he was destined never to find.

  Upon his return from one such fruitless expedition Fray Antonio was ablaze with an idea that in the long run was to prove even more important in establishing the fortunes of the Palafox family than the later discovery of silver. He called his brother to his room and while he washed he explained excitedly, “Timoteo, you must marry a girl from Spain, one with a name so proud that our father’s disgrace will be submerged. You must bring her here, and for a wedding gift we’ll petition the king for a quarter of a million acres. The land will be legally ours, and one day we’ll find the mines.”

  “It’s a good idea,” the soldier said, “but I don’t know any girls in Spain.”

  “I do!” the priest cried, “and she’s of such exalted reputation the king will have to grant us the land.” Summoning an Indian artist, he directed the man to paint a likeness of Timoteo, which he enclosed in a letter addressed to the marquis of Guadalquivir with a message our family still owns:

  It seems highly unlikely that a girl as well born and as beautiful as Leticia should still be unmarried, but on the chance that she is, I am writing to request her hand for my brother, Captain Timoteo Palafox. Frankly, esteemed sir, my father was burned as a heretic in Salamanca and there is every reason for you to refuse to ally your noble family …

  “Should you mention that?” Timoteo asked.

  “With the marquis, it may prove the deciding point,” Antonio replied, without informing his brother of the marquis’s liberal views.

  In his impetuous desire to find his brother a proper wife who could enhance the family fortunes, Antonio did not pause to reflect upon the terribly wrong thing he was doing: bringing a woman he had loved to Mexico not for the real reason—that he wanted her to be near him again—but for the ostensible reason that he sought a bride for his brother. He could not foresee the anguish this must bring him.

  But having made one daring move, he found courage to make another: He drafted a second letter to the king himself:

  And so, Sire, in view of the warlike nature of the Altomecs, whose constant incursions threaten Your Majesty’s lands, and in view of my constant desire to win these difficult pagans to God, I humbly beseech
that these rebellious areas be made part of the dowry of the marquis of Guadalquivir’s daughter, he being the one who served you so gallantly in your fight against the Moors. If this is done, I assure you that I shall see to it that troops under my control will bring peace, tranquillity and the love of Jesus Christ to this part of your realm.

  When this extraordinary letter reached Spain, the king was faced with a dilemma: if he approved of the marriage and the land grant, he ran the risk of infuriating the Dominican leaders of the Inquisition, which had condemned the Palafoxes; but if he denied the petition he would be rejecting one of the men he trusted most and upon whom he had relied in the times of decision, the marquis of Guadalquivir. He could not reach a decision until he restudied Fray Antonio’s plea, and then he grasped the nub of the problem: “The priest promises he’ll bring new lands under my control and new souls to Jesus Christ. Petition granted. Let the marriage and the dowry go forward.” In this duplicitous way the Palafox brothers grabbed their first sizable section of land.

  The royal decree authorizing the grant reached Toledo long before Leticia arrived, for her departure from Seville was delayed by protests lodged by the parents of the minor nobleman she had married eight years earlier. He had been a handsome young fellow with an important position in the army, but while on service in the king’s dominions in the Netherlands he lost his life in a daring sortie against the Protestant armies. Now his parents wanted his widow, Leticia, and her children to remain with them in Spain.

  She had startled them by saying boldly: “The children can stay with you. I shall go to Mexico,” and not even her father’s caution against this rash judgment dissuaded her. Her arrival in Toledo was further delayed by other considerations imposed by her various relatives, but her dowry was delivered according to the king’s schedule.

  When the lines of deed were to be officially drawn, Fray Antonio dominated the proceedings to ensure that any lands suspected of containing silver fell into the Palafox personal holdings, while those that had already proved barren went to either the Church or the king. By this stratagem Sergeant Palafox gained possession of enormous stretches of promising land around Toledo plus the virtual ownership of some nine thousand Indians, whom he considered as his slaves and treated as such.

  One of the first Spaniards in Mexico to be aware of the power to be gained from land and Indians, Timoteo caused six iron brands to be forged in the form of a large letter P, and he carried these to all parts of his new estate, where they were placed in fires until white-hot, after which they were pressed against the right cheeks of all the Altomecs belonging to him. So for two generations men in Toledo could point to the right cheeks of Indians and say with certainty, “That one belongs to Palafox.”

  It was Lady Gray Eyes who brought this barbarous behavior to Fray Antonio’s attention. Dragging a badly scarred peasant woman before the priest, she showed him the distorted face still bloated and discolored from the branding. Antonio, drawing back in horror, asked: “What happened to her?”

  “Your brother,” Gray Eyes said with obvious revulsion.

  “He struck her?”

  “Branded her—with a hot iron. Your family initial. That big P.”

  She spoke calmly and dispassionately, but there was a sadness in her voice and at one point she observed, “When I lay hidden in the cellar with my son’s pregnant wife, waiting for Stranger to be born, we used to study the parchment showing your gods and pray for their arrival, because they were the gentlest deities we had ever imagined. When I saw how your men killed, I thought, They must have left their gods in Spain. But then I learned that the people there had burned your father.…”

  For the first time she told Fray Antonio of how she and the Altomec women had slipped out at night to destroy the Mother Goddess, to whom people had been sacrificed by burning. Looking at him with dark accusing eyes, she cried dolefully, “Six years before you came to this city, we had cleansed ourselves of abominations like the burning of people. Why have you not ended them in Spain?”

  Her question was so devastating that Fray Antonio rushed from the room and issued a chain of orders: “Go to the villages. Collect every branding iron with that shameful letter. When you have them all, report to me.”

  On a day in June he ordered a great fire to be lit and melted all the cruel irons.

  In late 1537 the beautiful young widow Leticia de Guadalquivir arrived in Veracruz, whence she made the long upland journey to Toledo, where on a bright sunny morning under a sky that was an impeccable welcoming blue she faced the brothers. At that moment she was more alluring than she had been when Antonio had known her as a self-willed girl in Seville. The years had softened her, made her more of a woman, and the tragedy of her husband’s death had given her maturity, but Antonio could see from the imperious manner in which she surveyed her surroundings that she was still determined to be mistress of her own world.

  When she moved forward toward the brothers, she went automatically toward Antonio as if to resume their love affair of years ago, but the priest flashed a warning signal with his eyes and an almost imperceptible shake of his head. With a half-smile she turned away from Antonio and moved almost gaily toward Timoteo. “You must be the handsome young man in the painting they sent me,” she said, and with the elegant ease she had perfected even as a young girl, she kissed him on the cheek.

  That afternoon, with scores of Indians watching and approving, the couple went into the fortress-church, where Fray Antonio was waiting to marry them. I can visualize the three of them as they stood there together on that fateful day, for I often heard about it from my Palafox relatives. My mother-in-law, Doña Isabel, from the Spanish branch, liked to describe the scene: “Four hundred years ago, it seems like only yesterday. Antonio the priest, tall and slim and dark, a solemn man Palafox, short, rugged, with a grinning countenance, always a soldier. And between them this radiant woman, thirty years old maybe. How tangled their emotions must have been. They say in our family that when the time came for Fray Antonio to recite the marriage ritual he almost fainted, but his brother reached out and steadied him. ‘Not here,’ the soldier whispered, and the marriage was solemnized.” My mother-in-law always ended with that strange word, adding: “What no one noticed at the time was that when Father Antonio ended the marriage ceremony he cried in a firm voice: ‘Captain Palafox, you are now wed to Leticia.’ He had no right to use that word ‘Captain,’ for Timoteo had surrendered any claim to an officer’s rank, but from that moment on he was Captain to everyone. Just as Timoteo had stolen the Palafox lands, so now Antonio stole the name Captain. We’re a bold, clever lot, Norman.”

  On the night of the wedding Lady Gray Eyes told her granddaughter, who was then seventeen, “These brothers have done an evil thing, Stranger.”

  “What?” the lissome girl with long braids asked, anxious to learn all she could about the Spaniards.

  “The priest has summoned for his brother a girl with whom he was once in love,” the wise old woman explained.

  “Did he tell you that?”

  “Not in words.”

  “What did you see?”

  “The moving forward, the drawing away,” the queen said, and tears came into her eyes. “These Spaniards make life so hard for themselves. They love a system of gods they can never sustain. They adhere to principles they can never understand.”

  “Why doesn’t the priest take the girl, if he’s the one who loves her?” Stranger asked.

  “For a Spaniard that would be too simple,” the queen replied. And in the succeeding days they watched.

  What I am about to relate does not, of course, appear in the chronicles of either the Spaniards or the Altomecs, but it is very much a part of my family tradition, and I heard it first from my own mother, who was certainly not given to idle chatter. For three years, from 1537 to 1540, Fray Antonio Palafox lived in a kind of hell. He was deeply in love with his brother’s wife, whom he had known intimately in Seville; yet he himself had officiated at her weddin
g to his brother and it was with his words that her marriage had been solemnized.

  Like King David, he found himself dispatching his general to strange battlefronts, hoping that the enemy would slay him so that Timoteo’s wife could revert to him; yet even when the captain was miles from Toledo and Leticia was alone in the fortress-church and obviously eager for the priest to visit her, he could not bring himself to violate his brother’s marriage. He would meet Leticia inside the fortress and she would intimate that he would be welcomed in her chambers that night; against his will he would recall the night he had spent with her in the Moorish garden in Seville and he would suffer an agony of desire, but he could never bring himself to approach her room. As soon as Captain Timoteo’s horse could be heard whinnying at the fortress gate, the priest would mount his donkey and leave by another exit.

  Antonio would go searching for silver, and the Indians of remote areas saw him often in those years, a tall, graying, handsome priest of forty-two. He had once been the most commanding figure among the Spaniards, but he was now irresolute, alone and driven by conflicting desires. On one such trip he camped in Valley-of-the-Dead, hoping that Altomec survivors of his brother’s massacre might slaughter him in revenge, but the Indians knew him as their friend and fed him. Next day he startled them by lining them up and washing their feet. Through tears he pleaded for their forgiveness, which they had already granted. Later, when he wandered off into the hills, they kept scouts watching over him, and when news of his unusual behavior reached Toledo, Captain Palafox thought he might have to send his crazy brother back to Spain.

  But Lady Gray Eyes had contrary plans, and when word sped through the fortress that the mad priest was returning on his donkey, she ran to the walls and looked down on his forlorn figure. He was gaunt from hunger, and sunken-eyed with confusion. His long legs dragged in the dust, and his donkey was in command. Carefully she watched as he dismounted, went to the refectory for food, and repaired to his quarters for a bath. When he reappeared shaven and once more a priest, she kissed her granddaughter on the forehead and whispered, “Now.”