To write this letter is to weep. Words, images, tears of rage. The Indians are the natural owners of this realm and the Spaniards, natives of Spain, are strangers here in this realm. The apostle Santiago, in military uniform, tramples on a fallen native. At banquets, the plates are heaped with miniature women. The muleteer carries a basket filled with the mestizo children of the priest. Also it is God’s punishment that many Indians die in mercury and silver mines. In all Peru, where there were a hundred not ten remain. “Do you eat this gold?” asks the Inca, and the conquistador replies: “This gold we eat.”
Today, Guamán finishes his letter. He has lived for it. It has taken him half a century to write and draw. It runs to nearly twelve hundred pages. Today, Guamán finishes his letter and dies.
Neither Philip III nor any other king will ever see it. For three centuries it will roam the earth, lost.
(124, 125, and 179)
1616: Madrid
Cervantes
“What news do you bring of our father?”
“He lies, sir, amid tears and prayers. All swelled up he is, and the color of ashes. He’s already put his soul to rest with the notary and with the priest. The mourners are waiting.”
“If only I had the balsam of Fierabrás … Two swallows of that and he’d get well right away!”
“And him going on seventy, and dying? With six teeth in his mouth and only one hand that works? With the scars from all them battles, and insults, and jailings? That balls stuff wouldn’t do nothing for him, sir.”
“I don’t say two swallows. Two drops.”
“ltd be too late.”
“He’s dead, you say?”
“Dying, sir.”
“Take off your hat, Sancho. And you, Rocinante, lower your head. Ah, prince of arms! King of letters!”
“What’ll we do without him, sir?”
“Nothing that doesn’t do him homage.”
“Where’ll we be putting ourselves, so all alone?”
“We’ll go where he wanted to go but couldn’t.”
“Where’s that, sir?”
“To set right whatever is crooked on the shores of Cartagena, in the ravines of La Paz and the woods of Soconusco.”
“Nice places to get your bones ground up.”
“You must know, Sancho, my brother of so many roads and rides, that in the Indies glory awaits the knight-errant thirsting for justice and fame …”
“Well, it’s been a while since we got beaten up …”
“… and their squires are rewarded with huge, never-explored kingdoms.”
“Wouldn’t there be some a bit closer?”
“And you, Rocinante, in the Indies horses are shod with silver and champ on gold bits. They’re regarded as gods!”
“A thousand beatings ain’t enough for him. He wants a thousand and one!”
“Shut up, Sancho.”
“Didn’t our father say that America is a refuge for scoundrels and a sanctuary for whores?”
“Shut up, I tell you!”
“Whoever embarks for the Indies, he said, leaves his conscience on the pier.”
“So we’ll go there to clean off the honor of him who fathered us as free men in prison!”
“Can’t we just mourn him here?”
“Do you call such treachery homage? Ah, villain! We’ll take to the road again. If he made us to sojourn in the world, we’ll take him through the world. Reach me my helmet! Shield on arm, Sancho! My lance!”
(46)
1616: Potosí
Portraits of a Procession
Magic mountain of Potosí: On these high and hostile plains that offered only solitude and cold, the world’s most populated city has been made to bloom.
Lofty silver crosses head the procession, which advances between two lines of banners and swords. On silver streets ring out the silver hooves of horses decked with velvets and pearl-studded bridles. For confirmation of those who rule and consolation of those who serve, silver passes in parade, gleaming, confident, strutting, sure that there is no space on earth or in heaven it cannot buy.
The city is dressed up for a fiesta; balconies display hangings and heraldries; from a sea of rustling silks, foam of lace, and cataracts of pearls, the ladies watch and admire the cavalcade that moves with a din of trumpets, shawms, and harsh drums. A few gentlemen have a black patch over an eye and lumps and wounds on their foreheads, which are signs not of war but of syphilis. Kisses and flirtations keep flying from balconies to street, from street to balconies.
Masked figures of Selfishness and Greed appear. Greed, from behind a mask of snakes, sings as his horse performs caprioles:
Root of all evils
They call me, and I never tire
Not to satisfy desire.
Selfishness, black breeches, black gold-embroidered doublet, black mask beneath black, many-plumed cap, answers:
If I have conquered love
And love conquers death, all agree
Nothing is stronger than me.
The bishop heads a long, slow army of priests and hooded penitents armed with tall candles and silver candelabra; then the heralds’ trumpets impose themselves on the peal of church bells announcing the Virgin of Guadelupe, Light of the patient, Mirror of justice, Refuge of sinners, Consolation of the afflicted, green Palm, flowered Staff, luminous Rock. She appears on waves of gold and mother-of-pearl, in the arms of fifty Indians; stifled by so much jewelry, she observes with astonished eyes the turmoil of silver-winged cherubs and the spectacular display of her worshipers. On a white steed comes the Knight of the Burning Sword, followed by a battalion of pages and lackeys in white liveries. The knight hurls his hat into the distance and sings to the Virgin:
Brown as is my lady fair,
so much beauty she betrays
heaven and earth stand in a daze.
Lackeys and pages in purple livery run behind the Knight of Divine Love, who comes mounted at a trot, Roman-style horseman, purple silk coattails flying in the wind: he falls to his knees before the Virgin and lowers his laurel-crowned head, but when he puffs out his chest to sing his couplets, a volley of sulphur smoke erupts. The devils’ float has invaded the street, and no one pays the smallest attention to the Knight of Divine Love.
Prince Tartar, worshiper of Mohammed, opens his bat wings, and Princess Proserpine, hair and trains of snakes, hurls from on high blasphemies that the retinue of devils applaud. Somewhere the name of Jesus Christ is pronounced, and the Inferno float blows up with a big bang. Prince Tartar and Princess Proserpine jump through the smoke and flames and fall as prisoners at the Mother of God’s feet.
The street is covered with small angels, halos, and wings of sparkling silver, and violins and guitars, zithers and shawms sweeten the air. Musicians dressed as damsels celebrate the arrival of Mercy, Justice, Peace, and Truth, four elegant daughters of Potosí raised on litters of silver and velvet. The horses pulling their float have Indian heads and breasts.
Then comes the Serpent, coiling and weaving. On a thousand Indian legs the enormous reptile slithers along, now to the light of flaming torches, instilling fear and fire into the festivities and showing defiance and combat at the feet of the Virgin. When soldiers cut off his head with axes and swords, from the Serpent’s entrails emerges the Inca with his pride smashed to pieces. Dragging his fantastic robes, the son of the Sun falls to his knees before the Divine Light. The Virgin sports a robe of gold, rubies, and pearls the size of chickpeas, and the gold cross on her imperial crown shines brighter than ever over her astonished eyes.
Then the multitude. Artisans of every trade, and rogues and beggars who could draw a tear from a glass eye: the mestizos, children of violence, neither slaves nor masters, go on foot. The law prohibits them from having horses or weapons, as it prohibits mulattos from using parasols, so that no one can conceal the stigma that stains the blood to the sixth generation. With the mestizos and mulattos come the quadroons and the half-black, half-Indian zambos and the rest of the mixtu
res produced by the hunter and his prey.
Bringing up the rear, a mass of Indians loaded with fruits and flowers and dishes of steaming food. They implore the Virgin for forgiveness and solace.
Beyond, some blacks sweep up the litter left by all the others.
(21 and 157)
1616: Santiago Papasquiaro
Is the Masters’ God the Slaves’ God?
An old Indian prophet spoke of the free life. Clad in traditional raiment, he went through these deserts and mountains raising dust and singing, to the sad beat of a hollow tree trunk, about the ancestors’ feats and the liberty lost. The old man preached war against those who had seized the Indians’ lands and gods and made the Indians themselves burst their lungs in the Zacatecas’ mines. Those who died in the necessary war would revive, he announced, and old people who died fighting would be reborn young and swift.
The Tepehuanes stole muskets and fashioned and hid bows and arrows, because they are bowmen as skilled as the Morning Star, the divine archer. They stole and killed horses to eat their agility, and mules to eat their strength.
‘ The rebellion broke out in Santiago Papasquiaro, in the North of Durango. The Tepehuanes, the region’s most Christian Indians, the first converts, trampled on the Host; and when Father Bernardo Cisneros pleaded for mercy, they answered Dominus vobiscum. To the south, in the Mezquital, they smashed the Virgin’s face with machetes and swigged wine from the chalices. In the village of Zape, Indians clad in Jesuit surplices and bonnets chased fugitive Spaniards through the woods. In Santa Catarina, they used their clubs on Father Hernando del Tovar while saying to him: Let’s see if God saves you. Father Juan del Valle ended up stretched on the ground naked, with his sign-of-the-cross hand up in the air, the other hand covering his never-used sex.
But the insurrection didn’t last long. On the plains of Cacaria, colonial troops struck the Indians down. A red rain falls on the dead. The rain falls through air thick with powder and riddles the dead with bullets of red mud.
In Zacatecas the bells ring out, summoning to celebratory banquets. The owners of mines sigh with relief. There will be no shortage of hands for the diggings. Nothing will interrupt the prosperity of the realm. They will be able to continue urinating tranquilly into tooled silver chamberpots, and nobody will prevent their ladies from attending Mass accompanied by a hundred maids and twenty damsels.
(30)
1617: London
Whiffs of Virginia in the London Fog
Dramatis personae:
The King (James I of England, VI of Scotland). He has written: Tobacco makes a kitchen of man’s interior parts, dirtying them and infecting them with a sort of oily and greasy soot. He has also written that anyone who smokes imitates the barbarous and beastly manners of the wilde, godlesse, and slavish Indians …
John Rolfe. English colonist in Virginia. One of the most distinguished members of that peculiar people marked and chosen by the finger of God … for undoubtedly He is with us—as Rolfe himself defines his countrymen. With seeds brought to Virginia from Trinidad, he has produced good mixtures of tobacco on his plantations. Three years ago he sent to London in the hold of the Elizabeth four casks full of leaves, which have launched the recent but already very fruitful tobacco trade with England. It can well be said that John Rolfe has put tobacco on the throne of Virginia, as a queen plant with absolute power. Last year he came to London with Governor Dale, seeking new colonists and new investments for the Virginia Company and promising fabulous profits for its shareholders; for tobacco will be to Virginia what silver is to Peru. He also came to present to King James his wife, the Indian princess Pocahontas, baptized Rebecca.
Sir Thomas Dale. Governor of Virginia until last year. Authorized the marriage of John Rolfe and Princess Pocahontas, first Anglo-Indian marriage in Virginia’s history, on the understanding that it was an act of high political convenience that would contribute to the peaceful supply of grains and hands by the native population. However, in his request for permission, John Rolfe did not mention this aspect of the affair; nor did he make any mention of love, although he did take pains to deny emphatically any unbridled desire toward his handsome eighteen-year-old fiancée. Rolfe said he wished to wed this pagan whose education hath been rude, her manners barbarous, her generation accursed, … for the good of this plantation, for the honour of our countrie, for the glory of God, for my own salvation, and for the converting to the true knowledge of God and Jesus Christ, an unbeleeving creature …”
Pocahontas. Also known as Matoaka when she lived with the Indians. Favorite daughter of the great chief Powhatan. After marrying Rolfe, renounced idolatry, changed her name to Rebecca, and covered her nudity with English clothes. Wearing crown hats and high lace collars at the neck, she came to London and was received at court. She spoke like an Englishwoman and thought like an Englishwoman; she devoutly shared her husband’s Calvinist faith, and Virginia tobacco found in her the most able and exotic promoter it needed to plant itself in London. She died of an English disease. Sailing down the Thames en route to Virginia, while the ship awaited favorable winds, Pocahontas breathed her last in the arms of John Rolfe at Gravesend in March of this year 1617. She was not yet twenty-one.
Opechancanough. Uncle of Pocahontas, elder brother of the great chief Powhatan. He gave the bride away in the Protestant church at Jamestown, a bare wooden church, three years ago. Spoke not a word before, during, or after the ceremony, but Pocahontas told Rolfe the story of her uncle. Opechancanough had once lived in Spain and in Mexico; he was then a Christian known as Luis de Velasco, but no sooner was he back in his country than he threw his crucifix, cape, and stole in the fire, cut the throats of the priests who accompanied him, and took back his name of Opechancanough, which in the Algonquin language means he who has a clean soul.
Some Globe Theatre actor has put this story together and now asks himself, confronting a mug of beer, what he will do with it. Write a love tragedy or a moral play about tobacco and its evil powers? Or perhaps a masquerade with the conquest of America as its theme? The play would have a sure success, because all London is talking about Princess Pocahontas and her fleeting visit here. That woman … a harem all by herself. All London dreams of her nude among the trees, with aromatic flowers in her hair. What avenging angel ran her through with his invisible sword? Did she expiate the sins of her pagan people, or was her death God’s warning to her husband? Tobacco, illegitimate son of Proserpine and Bacchus … Does not Satan protect the mysterious pact between that weed and fire? Smoke that makes the virtuous giddy, isn’t it the breath of Satan? And the hidden lechery of John Rolfe … And the past of Opechancanough, formerly known as Luis de Velasco, traitor or avenger … Opechancanough entering the church with the princess on his arm … Tall, erect, silent …
“No, no,” concludes the indiscreet hunter of histories as he pays for his beers and walks out into the street, “This story is too good to write. As the gentle Silva, poet of the Indies, used to say: ‘If I write it, what do I have left to tell my friends?’”
(36, 159, and 207)
1618: Lima
Small World
The owner of Fabiana Criolla has died. In his will he has lowered the price of her freedom from 200 to 150 pesos.
Fabiana has spent the night without sleeping, wondering how much her guaiacum-wood box full of powdered cinnamon would be worth. She does not know how to add, so she cannot calculate the freedoms she has bought with her work through the half century that she has been in the world, nor the price of the children who have been made on her and taken from her.
With the first light of dawn, the bird comes and taps its beak on the window. Every day the same bird announces that it is time to wake up and get going.
Fabiana yawns, sits up on the mat, and inspects her worn-down feet.
(31)
1618: Luanda
Embarcation
They have been caught in the hunters’ nets and are marching to the coast, tied to each other at th
e neck, as drums of pain resound in the villages.
On the African coast, a slave is worth forty glass necklaces or a whistle with a chain or two pistols or a handful of bullets. Muskets and machetes, rum, Chinese silks, or Indian calicoes are paid for with human flesh.
A monk inspects the column of captives in the main square of the port of Luanda. Each slave receives a pinch of salt on the tongue, a splash of holy water on the head, and a Christian name. Interpreters translate the sermon: Now you are children of God … The priest instructs them not to think about the lands they are leaving and not to eat dog, rat, or horse meat. He reminds them of St. Paul’s epistle to the Ephesians (Slaves, serve your masters!) and Noah’s curse upon the children of Ham, who remained black through centuries of centuries.
They see the ocean for the first time, and the enormous, roaring beast terrifies them. They think the whites are taking them to some remote slaughterhouse to eat them and make oil and fat from them. Hippopotamus-hide whips drive them onto enormous canoes that cross the breakers. In the ships they face fore-and-aft guns with lighted fuses. The fetters and chains keep them from throwing themselves into the sea.
Many will die on the voyage. The survivors will be sold in the markets of America and again branded with hot irons.
They will never forget their gods. Oxalá, at once man and woman, will be disguised as St. Jerónimo and St. Barbara. Obatalá will be Jesus Christ; and Oshún, spirit of sensuality and fresh waters, will turn into the Virgins of Candelaria, the Conception, Charity, and Pleasures and will be St. Anne in Trinidad. Behind St. George, St. Anthony, and St. Michael will lurk the lances of Ogum, god of war; and inside St. Lazarus, Babalú will sing. The thunders and fires of fearsome Shangó will transfigure St. John the Baptist and St. Barbara. In Cuba, Elegguá will continue having two faces, life and death, and in southern Brazil, Exú will have two heads, God and the Devil, to offer the faithful Solace and vengeance.