“This is for the slaves who have been dragged here from all directions like herds of beasts, branded on the face; and this one for those who fall by the wayside carrying the enormous loads to maintain the mines.”
“And this one, Lord, for the perpetual conflicts and skirmishes of us Spaniards, which always end with the torture and murder of Indians.”
Kneeling before the crosses, Motolinía prays: “Forgive them, Lord. I entreat you to forgive them. I know too well that they continue worshiping bloody idols and that if before they had a hundred gods, with you they have a hundred and one. They can’t distinguish the Host from a grain of corn. But if they deserve the punishment of your firm hand, they also deserve the pity of your generous heart.”
Then Motolinía crosses himself, shakes his habit, and starts back down the hill. A little before Ave Maria time, he reaches the monastery. Alone in his cell, he stretches out on his pallet and slowly munches a tortilla.
(60 and 213)
1536: Machu Picchu
Manco Inca
Sick of being a king treated like a dog, Manco Inca rises against the men with hairy faces. On the empty throne Pizarro installs Paullo, brother of Manco Inca and of Atahualpa and of Huáscar.
On horseback at the head of a large army, Manco Inca lays siege to Cuzco. Bonfires blaze around the city and arrows of burning tinder fall in a steady rain, but hunger strikes the besiegers harder than the besieged, and Manco Inca’s troops withdraw after half a year amid war cries that split the earth.
The Inca crosses the Urubamba River valley and emerges among the high, fogbound peaks. Stone steps lead him to the secret mountaintop hideaway. Protected by parapets and fortified towers, the fortress of Machu Picchu wields supremacy beyond the world.
(57 and 76)
1536: Valley of Ulúa
Gonzalo Guerrero
Victorious, Alonso de Avila’s horsemen withdraw. On the battle-field, among the losers, lies an Indian with a beard. His nude body is an arabesque of ink and blood. Golden symbols hang from his nose, lips, and ears. An arquebus shot has split his forehead.
His name was Gonzalo Guerrero. In his first life he had been a sailor from the port of Palos. His second life began a quarter century ago when he was shipwrecked on the Yucatan coast. Since then he has lived among the Indians. He was a chief in peacetime and a captain in war. He had three children by a Maya woman.
In 1519, Hernán Cortés sent for him.
“No,” said Gonzalo to the messenger, “look at my kids, how pretty they are. Just leave me some of those green beads you’re carrying. I’ll give them to my kids and tell them: ‘My brothers sent you these toys, from my country.’”
Long afterward, Gonzalo Guerrero has fallen defending another country, fighting beside other brothers, the brothers he chose. He is the first conquistador conquered by the Indians.
(62 and 119)
1536: Culiacán
Cabeza de Vaca
Eight years have passed since Cabeza de Vaca was shipwrecked on Mal Hado Island. Of the six hundred men who sailed from Andalusia, a few deserted along the way and the sea swallowed many; others died of hunger, cold, or Indians, and four, just four, now reach Culiacán.
Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Alonso del Castillo, Andrés Dorantes, and Estebanico, black Arab, have crossed all America on foot from Florida to the shores of the Pacific. Naked, shedding their skin like snakes, they have eaten wild grasses and roots, worms and lizards, and anything they could find alive until the Indians gave them blankets and prickly pears and ears of corn in exchange for their miracles and cures. Cabeza de Vaca has brought more than one dead Indian back to life with his Paternosters and Ave Marias and healed many sick ones making the sign of the cross and blowing on the place where they hurt. From league to league grew the fame of these miracle workers; multitudes came out to greet them on the roads, and villages sent them on their way with dance and song.
In Sinaloa, as they made their way south, appeared the first traces of Christians. Cabeza de Vaca and his companions found buckles, horseshoe nails, hitching posts. They also found fear: abandoned fields, Indians who had fled into the mountains.
“We’re getting warm,” said Cabeza de Vaca. “After such a long walk, we’re close to our people.”
“They aren’t like you,” the Indians said. “You come from where the sun rises and they from where it sets. You heal the sick and they kill the healthy. You go naked and barefoot. You aren’t greedy for anything.”
(39)
1537: Rome
The Pope Says They Are Like Us
Pope Paul III stamps his name with the leaden seal, which carries the likenesses of St. Peter and St. Paul, and ties it to the parchment. A new bull issues from the Vatican. It is called Sublimis Deus and reveals that Indians are human beings, endowed with soul and reason.
(103)
1538: Santo Domingo
The Mirror
The noonday sun makes the stones smoke and metals flash. Uproar in the port. Galleons have brought heavy artillery from Seville for the Santo Domingo fortress.
The mayor, Fernandez de Oviedo, supervises the transportation of culverins and cannons. Under the lash, blacks haul the cargo at top speed. The carts creak under their load of iron and bronze, and other slaves come and go through the turmoil, throwing buckets of water on the flames that spurt from overheated axles.
Amid the bustle and pandemonium, an Indian girl is searching for her master. Her skin is covered with blisters, each step a triumph as her scanty clothing tortures her skin. Throughout the night and half the day, from one scream to the next, this girl has endured the burns of acid. She herself roasted the guao tree roots and rubbed them between her hands to make a paste, then anointed her whole body, from the roots of her hair to the soles of her feet, because guao burns the skin and removes its color, thus turning Indian and black women into white ladies of Castile.
“Don’t you recognize me, sir?”
Oviedo shoves her away; but the girl insists in her thin voice, sticking to her master like a shadow, as Oviedo runs shouting orders to the foremen.
“Don’t you know who I am?”
The girl falls to the ground and from the ground keeps asking: “Sir, sir, I bet you don’t know who I am?”
(166)
1538: Valley of Bogotà
Blackbeard, Redbeard, Whitebeard
A year ago Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada, black beard, black eyes, went in search of the springs of gold at the source of the Magdalena River. Half the population of Santa Marta went after him.
They crossed swamps and lands that steamed in the sun. When they reached the banks of the river, not one of the thousands of naked Indians who were brought along to carry the guns and bread and salt remained alive. As there were no longer any slaves to hunt down and catch, they threw the dogs into vats of boiling water. Then the horses, too, were cut into bits. The hunger was worse than the crocodiles, snakes, and mosquitos. They ate roots and leather straps. They quarreled over the flesh of any man who fell, before the priest had even finished giving him passage to Paradise.
They continued up the river, stung by rains and with no wind in the sails, until Quesada decided to change course. El Dorado must be on the other side of the mountains, he had concluded, not at the river’s source. So they walked across the mountains.
After much climbing, Quesada now approaches the green valleys of the Chibcha nation. In the presence of seventy scarecrows eaten up with fever, he raises his sword, takes possession, and proclaims that he will never again obey his governor’s orders.
Three and a half years ago, Nicolás de Federmann, red beard, blue eyes, left Coro in search of the earth’s golden center, on a pilgrimage through mountains and plains. His Indians and blacks were the first to die.
When Federmann reaches the peaks where they tangle with the clouds, he sees the verdant valleys of the Chibcha nation. One hundred and seventy soldiers have survived, ghosts dragging themselves along wrapped in deersk
ins. Federmann kisses his sword, takes possession, and proclaims that he will never again obey his governor’s orders.
Three long years ago Sebastián de Benálcazar, gray eyes, white beard either from age or from road dust, sallied forth in search of the treasures that the city of Quito, emptied and burned, had denied him. Of the multitude that followed him, one hundred and sixty exhausted Europeans and not one Indian remain. Leveler of cities, founder of cities, Benalcázar has left behind him a trail of ashes and blood and new worlds born from the point of his sword: surrounding the gallows, the plaza; around the plaza, church, houses, ramparts.
The conquistador’s helmet gleams on the crest of the cordillera. Benalcázar takes possession of the green valleys of the Chibcha nation and proclaims that he will never again obey the orders of his governor.
From the north has come Quesada. From the east, Federmann. From the south, Benalcázar. Cross and arquebus, sky and soil: After so many crazy wanderings, the three rebel captains descend the cordillera slopes and meet on the plain of Bogota.
Benalcázar knows that the chiefs of this place travel on golden litters. Federmann hears the sweet melodies that breezes play on the sheets of gold hanging from temples and palaces. Quesada kneels at the shore of the lake where native priests covered with gold dust immerse themselves.
Who will end up with El Dorado? Quesada, the Granadan, who says he got here first? Federmann, the German from Ulm, who conquers in the name of the banker Welser? Benalcázar, the Cordoban?
The three armies, ulcerated skin and bones in rags, size up each other and wait.
Then the German bursts out laughing, doubles up with mirth, and the Andalusians catch the contagion until the three captains collapse, floored by laughter and hunger and what brought them all there, that which is without being and arrived without coming: the realization that El Dorado won’t be anybody’s.
(13)
1538: Masaya Volcano
Vulcan, God of Money
From the mouth of the volcano Masaya came in other times a naked old woman, wise in many secrets, who gave good advice about corn and war. Since the Christians arrived, say the Indians, the old woman refuses to leave the burning mountain.
Many Christians think the Masaya is a mouth of hell and that its flare-ups and everlasting fiery smoke announce eternal chastisements. Others assert that this incandescent smoke cloud, visible for fifty leagues, is produced by gold and silver being melted and purified, seething in the belly of the mountain. The more the fire blazes, the purer they become.
The expedition has been in preparation for a year. Father Blas del Castillo rises very early and hears the confessions of Pedro Ruiz, Benito Dávila, and Juan Sanchez. The four implore forgiveness with tears in their eyes and begin the march at daybreak.
The priest is the first to go down. He climbs into a basket, helmet on head, stole on chest, and cross in hand, and reaches the huge esplanade that surrounds the mouth of fire.
“It isn’t hell but paradise!” he proclaims, black with ashes, as he sticks the cross among the stones. Immediately his companions follow him down. From above, the Indians also send down pulley, chains, cauldrons, beams, bolts …
They submerge the iron cauldron. From the depths come neither gold nor silver, nothing but sulphur slag. When they dip the cauldron in deeper, the volcano eats it up.
(203)
1541: Santiago de Chile
Inés Suárez
Some months ago Pedro de Valdivia discovered this hill and this valley. The Araucanians, who had discovered the hill thousands of years earlier, called it Huelén, which means pain. Valdivia baptized it Santa Lucía.
From the crest of the hill Valdivia saw the green earth between arms of the river and decided that the world contained no better place to dedicate a city to the apostle Santiago, who accompanies the conquistadors and fights for them. He cut the air with his sword to the four cardinal points of the compass and so was born Santiago of the New Frontier. Now it is enjoying its first summer: a few houses of mud and sticks, roofed with straw, a plaza at the center, stockade all around.
A mere fifty men have remained in Santiago. Valdivia stays with them on the banks of the Cachapoal River. At break of day, the sentry sounds the alarm from the top of the stockade. Squadrons of natives are approaching from all four sides. The Spaniards hear the war cries, and immediately a downpour of arrows falls on them.
By noon some houses are nothing but ashes, and the stockade has fallen. They are fighting body to body in the plaza. Then Inés runs to the hut that serves as prison. There, the guard is standing watch over seven Araucanian chiefs whom the Spaniards captured some time ago. She suggests, implores, orders him to cut their heads off.
“What?”
“Their heads!”
“What?”
“Like this!”
Inés seizes his sword, and seven heads fly through the air. Those heads turn the besieged into pursuers. Taking the offensive, the Spaniards invoke not the apostle Santiago but Our Lady of Good Help.
Inés Suárez, the woman from Malaga, had been the first to sign up when Valdivia started recruiting at his house in Cuzco. She came to these southern lands at the head of the invading forces, riding alongside Valdivia, sword of stout steel, coat of fine mail, and ever since she marches, fights, and sleeps with Valdivia. Today she has taken his place.
She is the only woman among the men. They say: “She’s macho” and compare her with Roldán or El Cid, while she rubs oil on the fingers of Captain Francisco de Aguirre. They have stuck to his sword hilt and cannot be prised off although, for today, the war is over.
(67, 85, and 130)
1541: Rock of Nochistlán
Never
They had seized even his mule. Those who now eat off his silver service and tread his carpets had thrown him out of Mexico with fettered feet.
Ten years later they, the officials, summon the warrior back. Alvarado leaves off governing Guatemala and comes to chastise Indians in these ungrateful lands that he conquered along with Cortes. He wants to push on north to the seven golden cities of Cíbola, but this morning, at the height of the battle, a horse falls on him and throws him down a cliff.
To Mexico Pedro de Alvarado has returned, and in Mexico he lies. His helmet hangs from a branch, and his sword has fallen among the brambles. Don’t sheath me without honor can still be read on the steel blade.
(81)
1541: Old Guatemala City
Beatriz
Pedro de Alvarado had married Francisca, but Francisca was struck down by the orange-blossom tea that she drank on the road to Veracruz. Then he married Francisca’s sister, Beatriz.
Beatriz was waiting for him in Guatemala when she learned she had been two months widowed. She decked her house in black inside and out and nailed up doors and windows so that she could cry her heart out in private.
She weeps looking in the mirror at her nude body, which has dried up from so much waiting and now has nothing left to wait for, a body that no longer sings, and she weeps through her mouth, which can only sob: “Are you there, my darling?”
She weeps for this house that she hates and this land that is not hers and for the years spent between this house and the church, from Mass to Mess and from baptism to burial, surrounded by drunken soldiers and Indian servants who make her sick. She weeps for the food that upsets her and for him who never came, because there was always some war to fight or land to be conquered. She weeps for all the tears she has shed alone in her bed, when a dog’s bark or a rooster’s crow made her jump and she learned, all alone, to read the darkness and listen to the silence and make drawings in the air. She weeps and weeps, broken up inside.
When she finally emerges from seclusion, she announces: “I am the governor of Guatemala.”
She cannot govern for long.
The volcano vomits a cataract of water and stones that drowns the city and kills whatever it touches. The flood keeps advancing toward Beatriz’s house, while she runs to th
e chapel, goes to the altar, and embraces the Virgin. Her eleven maids embrace her feet and each other while Beatriz cries: “Are you there, my darling?”
The torrent destroys the city that Alvarado founded and, as it roars ever louder, Beatriz keeps crying out: “Are you there?”
(81)
1541: Cabo Frío
At Dawn, the Cricket Sang
It had been silent ever since they took it aboard in the port of Cadiz, two and a half months of silence and sadness in its little cage, until today its cry of joy rang out from bow to stern and woke everybody up.
“A miracle! A miracle!”
There was just time for the ship to alter course. The cricket was celebrating the approach of land. Thanks to its alarm, the sailors were not dashed to pieces against the rocks of the Brazilian coast.
Cabeza de Vaca, chief of this expedition to the River Plate, is very knowing about such matters. They call him Alvar the Miracle Worker since he crossed America from coast to coast reviving the dead in Indian villages.
(39)
1542: Quito
El Dorado
For a long time Gonzalo Pizarro’s men have been trekking deep into the jungle, in search of the gold-skinned prince and the groves of cinnamon. They have found snakes and bats, armies of mosquitos, swamps and rains that never stop. Night after night lightning flashed the way for this caravan of naked men huddled together by panic.
Skin and bones and sores, they are arriving this afternoon at the outskirts of Quito. Each one recites his name in order to be recognized. Of the expedition’s four thousand Indian slaves, none has returned.