In the dim light of the Vatican, fragrant with oriental perfumes, the pope dictates a new bull.
A short time has passed since Rodrigo Borgia, of Xátiva, Valencia, took the name Alexander VI. Not a year yet since the day he bought for cash the seven votes he was short in the Sacred College, and could change a cardinal’s purple for the ermine cape of the supreme pontiff.
Alexander devotes more time to calculating the price of indulgences than to meditating on the mystery of the Holy Trinity. Everyone knows that he prefers very brief Masses, except for the ones his jester Gabriellino celebrates in a mask in his private chambers, and everyone knows that the new pope is capable of rerouting the Corpus Christi procession to pass beneath a pretty woman’s balcony.
He is also capable of cutting up the world as if it were a chicken: he raises a hand and traces a frontier, from head to tail of the planet, across the unknown sea. God’s agent concedes in perpetuity all that has been or is being discovered, to the west of that line, to Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon and their heirs on the Spanish throne. He entrusts them to send good, God-fearing, erudite, wise, expert men to the islands and mainlands discovered or to be discovered, to instruct the natives in the Catholic faith and teach them good customs. Whatever is discovered to the east will belong to the Portuguese crown.
Anguish and euphoria of sails unfurled: in Andalusia Columbus is already preparing a second voyage to the regions where gold grows in bunches on the vines and precious stones await in the craniums of dragons.
(180)
1493: Huexotzingo
Where Is the Truth? Where Are the Roots?
This is the city of music, not of war: Huexotzingo, in the valley of Tlaxcala. In a flash the Aztecs attack and damage it, and take prisoners to sacrifice to their gods.
On this evening, Tecayehuatzin, king of Huexotzingo, has assembled the poets from other areas. In the palace gardens, the poets chat about the flowers and songs that come down to earth, a region of the fleeting moment, from within the sky, and that only last up there in the house of the Giver of life. The poets talk and doubt:
Can it be that men are real?
Will our song
Still be real tomorrow?
The voices follow one another. When night falls, the king of Huexotzingo thanks them and says good-bye:
We know something that is real
The hearts of our friends.
(108)
1493: Pasto
Everybody Pays Taxes
Even these remote heights far to the north are reached by the Inca Empire’s tax collector.
The Quillacinga people have nothing to give, but in this vast kingdom all communities pay tribute, in kind or in labor time. No one, however far off and however poor, can forget who is in charge.
At. the foot of the volcano, the chief of the Quillacingas steps forward and places a bamboo cylinder in the hands of the envoy from Cuzco. The cylinder is full of live lice.
(57 and 150)
1493: Santa Cruz Island
An Experience of Miquele de Cuneo from Savona
The shadow of the sails spreads across the sea. Gulfweed and jellyfish, moved by the waves, drift over the surface toward the coast.
From the quarterdeck of one of the caravels, Columbus contemplates the white beaches where he has again planted the cross and the gallows. This is his second voyage. How long it will last he doesn’t know; but his heart tells him that all will come out well, and why wouldn’t the admiral believe it? Doesn’t he have the habit of measuring the ship’s speed with his hand against his chest, counting the heartbeats?
Belowdecks in another caravel, in the captain’s cabin, a young girl shows her teeth. Miquele de Cuneo reaches for her breasts, and she scratches and kicks him and screams. Miquele received her a while ago. She is a gift from Columbus.
He lashes her with a rope. He beats her hard on the head and stomach and legs. Her screams become moans, the moans become wails. Finally all that can be heard are the comings and goings of sea gulls and the creak of rocked timbers. From time to time waves send a spray through the porthole.
Miquele hurls himself upon the bleeding body and thrusts, gasps, wrestles. The air smells of tar, of saltpeter, of sweat. Then the girl, who seems to have fainted or died, suddenly fastens her nails in Miquele’s back, knots herself around his legs, and rolls him over in a fierce embrace.
After some time, when Miquele comes to, he doesn’t know where he is or what has happened. Livid, he detaches himself from her and knocks her away with his fist.
He staggers up on deck. Mouth open, he takes a deep breath of sea breeze. In a loud voice, as if announcing an eternal truth, he says, “These Indian woman are all whores.”
(181)
1495: Salamanca
The First Word from America
Elio Antonio de Nebrija, language scholar, publishes here his “Spanish-Latin Vocabulary.” The dictionary includes the first Americanism of the Castilian language:
Canoa: Boat made from a single timber.
The new word comes from the Antilles.
These boats without sails, made of the trunk of a ceiba tree, welcomed Christopher Columbus. Out from the islands, paddling canoes, came the men with long black hair and bodies tattooed with vermilion symbols. They approached the caravels, offered fresh water, and exchanged gold for the kind of little tin bells that sell for a copper in Castile.
(52 and 154)
1459: La Isabela
Caonabó
Detached, aloof, the prisoner sits at the entrance of Christopher Columbus’s house, He has iron shackles on his ankles, and handcuffs trap his wrists.
Caonabó was the one who burned to ashes the Navidad fort that the admiral had built when he discovered this island of Haiti. He burned the fort and killed its occupants. And not only them: In these two long years he has castigated with arrows any Spaniards he came across in Cibao, his mountain territory, for their hunting of gold and people.
Alonso de Ojeda, veteran of the wars against the Moors, paid him a visit on the pretext of peace. He invited him to mount his horse, and put on him these handcuffs of burnished metal that tie his hands, saying that they were jewels worn by the monarchs of Castile in their balls and festivities.
Now Chief Caonabó spends the days sitting beside the door, his eyes fixed on the tongue of light that invades the earth floor at dawn and slowly retreats in the evening. He doesn’t move an eyelash when Columbus comes around. On the other hand, when Ojeda appears, he manages to stand up and salute with a bow the only man who has defeated him.
(103 and 158)
1496: La Conceptión
Sacrilege
Bartholomew Columbus, Christopher’s brother and lieutenant, attends an incineration of human flesh.
Six men play the leads in the grand opening of Haiti’s incinerator. The smoke makes everyone cough. The six are burning as a punishment and as a lesson: They have buried the images of Christ and the Virgin that Fray Ramon Pane left with them for protection and consolation. Fray Ramon taught them to pray on their knees, to say the Ave Maria and Paternoster and to invoke the name of Jesus in the face of temptation, injury, and death.
No one has asked them why they buried the images. They were hoping that the new gods would fertilize their fields of corn, cassava, boniato, and beans.
The fire adds warmth to the humid, sticky heat that foreshadows heavy rain.
(103)
1498: Santo Domingo
Earthly Paradise
In the evening, beside the Ozama River, Christopher Columbus writes a letter. His body creaks with rheumatism, but his heart jumps for joy. The discoverer explains to Their Catholic Majesties that which is plainly evident: Earthly Paradise is on the nipple of a woman’s breast.
He realized it two months ago, when his caravels entered the Gulf of Paria. There ships start rising gently toward the sky … Navigating upstream to where the air has no weight, Columbus has reached the farthest limit of the Orient.
In these the world’s most beautiful lands, the men show cleverness, ingenuity, and valor, and the extremely beautiful women wear only their long hair and necklaces of many pearls wound around their bodies. The water, sweet and clear, awakens thirst. Winter does not punish nor summer burn, and the breeze caresses what it touches. The trees offer fresh shade and, within arm’s reach, fruits of great delectability that arouse hunger.
But beyond this greenness and this loveliness no ship can go. This is the frontier of the Orient. Here waters, lands, and islands end. Very high and far away, the Tree of Life spreads its enormous crown and the source of the four sacred rivers bubbles up. One of them is the Orinoco, which I doubt if such a great and deep river is known in the world.
The world is not round. The world is a woman’s tit. The nipple begins in the Gulf of Paria and rises to a point very close to the heavens. The tip, where the juices of Paradise flow, will never be reached by any man.
(53)
The Language of Paradise
The Guaraos, who live in the suburbs of Earthly Paradise, call the rainbow snake of necklaces and the firmament overhead sea. Lightning is glow of the rain. One’s friend, my other heart. The soul, sun of the breast. The owl, lord of the dark night. A walking cane is a permanent grandson; and for “I forgive,” they say I forget.
(17)
1499: Granada
Who Are Spaniards?
The mosques remain open in Granada, seven years after the surrender of this last redoubt of the Moors in Spain. The advance of the cross behind the victory of the sword is slow. Archbishop Cisneros decides that Christ cannot wait.
“Moors” is the Christian Spaniards’ name for Spaniards of Islamic culture, who have been here for eight centuries. Thousands and thousands of Spaniards of Jewish culture have been condemned to exile. The Moors will likewise get the choice between baptism and exile; and for false converts burn the fires of the Inquisition. The unity of Spain, this Spain that has discovered America, will not result from the sum of its parts.
By Archbishop Cisneros’s order the Muslim sages of Granada troop off to prison. Lofty flames devour Islamic books—religion and poetry, philosophy and science—the only copies guarding the words of a culture that has irrigated these lands and flourished in them.
From on high, the carved palaces of the Alhambra are mute witnesses of the enslavement, while its fountains continue giving water to the gardens.
(64, 218, and 223)
1500: Florence
Leonardo
He is just back from the market with various cages on his back. He puts them on the balcony, opens the little doors, and the birds make off. He watches the birds lose themselves in the sky, fluttering joyously, then sits down to work.
The noon sunshine warms his hand. On a wide board Leonardo da Vinci draws the world. And in the world that Leonardo draws appear the lands that Columbus has found toward the sunset. The artist invents them, as previously he has invented the airplane, the tank, the parachute, and the submarine, and he gives them form as previously he has incarnated the mystery of virgins and the passion of saints: He imagines the body of America, which still doesn’t have that name, and sketches it as new land and not as part of Asia.
Columbus, seeking the Levant, has found the West. Leonardo guesses that the world has grown.
(209)
1506: Valladolid
The Fifth Voyage
Last night he dictated his last testament. This morning he asked if the king’s messenger had arrived. Afterward, he slept. Nonsense mutterings and groans. He still breathes, but stertorously, as if battling against the air.
At court, no one has listened to his entreaties. He returned from the third voyage in chains, and on the fourth there was no one to pay attention to his titles and dignities.
Christopher Columbus is going out knowing that there is no passion or glory that does not lead to pain. On the other hand, he does not know that within a few years the banner that he stuck for the first time into the sands of the Caribbean will be waving over the empire of the Aztecs, in lands yet unknown, and over the kingdom of the Incas, under the unknown skies of the Southern Cross. He does not know that with all his lies, promises, and ravings, he has still fallen short. The supreme admiral of the ocean sea still believes he has reached Asia from the rear.
The ocean will not be called the Sea of Columbus; nor will the new world bear his name, but that of his Florentine friend Amerigo Vespucci, navigator and pilot master. But it was Columbus who found dazzling color that didn’t exist in the European rainbow. Blind, he dies without seeing it.
(12 and 166)
1506: Tenochtitlán
The Universal God
Moctezuma has conquered in Teuctepec.
Fire rages in the temples. The drums beat. One after another, prisoners mount the steps toward the round, sacrificial stone. The priest plunges the obsidian dagger into each breast, lifts up the heart, and shows it to the sun, which rises above the blue volcanoes.
To what god is the blood offered? The sun demands it, to be born each day and travel from one horizon to the other. But the ostentatious death ceremonies also serve another god who does not appear in the codices nor in the chants.
If that god did not reign over the world, there would be no slaves nor masters nor vassals nor colonies. The Aztec merchants could not wrest a diamond for a bean from the defeated peoples, nor an emerald for a grain of corn, nor gold for sweetmeats, nor cacao for stones. The carriers would not be crossing the immensity of the empire in long lines with tons of tribute on their backs. The common people would dare to put on cotton tunics and would drink chocolate and audaciously wear the forbidden quetzal feathers and gold bracelets and magnolias and orchids reserved for the nobility. Then the masks hiding the warrior chiefs’ faces would fall, the eagle’s beak, the tiger’s jaws, the plumes that wave and sparkle in the air.
The steps of the great temple are stained with blood, and skulls accumulate in the center of the plaza. Not only so that the sun should move, no; also so that that secret god should decide instead of man. In homage to that god, across the sea inquisitors fry heretics on bonfires or twist them in the torture chambers. It is the God of Fear. The God of Fear, who has rat’s teeth and vulture’s wings.
(60)
1511: Guauravo River
Agüeynaba
Three years ago, Captain Ponce de León arrived at this island of Puerto Rico in a caravel. Chief Agüeynaba opened his home to him, offered him food and drink and the choice of one of his daughters, and showed him the rivers from which gold was taken. He also gave him his name. Juan Ponce de León started calling himself Agüeynaba, and Agüeynaba received in exchange the name of the conquistador.
Three days ago the soldier Salcedo came alone to the banks of the Guauravo River. The Indians offered their backs for him to cross on. When they reached midstream, they let him fall and held him down against the river bottom until he stopped kicking. Afterward they laid him out on the grass.
Salcedo is now a glob of purple contorted flesh squeezed into a suit of armor, attacked by insects and quickly putrefying in the sun. The Indians look at it, holding their noses. Night and day they have been begging the stranger’s pardon, for the benefit of the doubt. No point in it now. The drums broadcast the good news: The invaders are not immortal.
Tomorrow will come the rising. Agüeynaba will head it. The chief of the rebels will go back to his old name. He will recover his name, which has been used to humiliate his people.
“Co-qui, co-qui,” cry the little frogs. The drums calling for struggle drown out their crystal-counterpoint singsong.
(1)
1511: Aymaco
Becerrillo
The insurrection of chiefs Agüeynaba and Mabodamaca has been put down and all the prisoners have gone to their deaths.
Captain Diego de Salazar comes upon the old woman hidden in the underbrush and does not run his sword through her. “Here,” he says to her, “take this letter to the gover
nor, who is in Caparra.”
The old woman opens her eyes slightly. Trembling, she holds out her fingers.
And she sets off. She walks like a small child, with a baby-bear lurch, carrying the envelope like a standard or a flag.
While the old woman is still within crossbow range, the captain releases Becerrillo. Governor Ponce de León has ordered that Becerrillo should receive twice the pay of a crossbowman, as an expert flusher-out of ambushes and hunter of Indians. The Indians of Puerto Rico have no worse enemy.
The first arrow knocks the old woman over. Becerrillo, his ears perked up, his eyes bulging, would devour her in one bite.
“Mr. Dog,” she entreats him, “I’m taking this letter to the governor.”
Becerrillo doesn’t know the local language, but the old woman shows him the empty envelope.
“Don’t do me harm, Mr. Dog.”
Becerrillo sniffs at the envelope. He circles a few times the trembling bag of bones that whines words, lifts a paw, and pees on her.
(166)
1511: Yara
Hatuey
In these islands, in these Calvaries, those who choose death by hanging themselves or drinking poison along with their children are many. The invaders cannot avoid this vengeance, but know how to explain it: the Indians, so savage that they think everything is in common, as Oviedo will say, are people by nature idle and vicious, doing little work. For a pastime many killed themselves with venom so as not to work, and others hanged themselves with their own hands.
Hatuey, Indian chief of the Guahaba region, has not killed himself. He fled with his people from Haiti in a canoe and took refuge in the caves and mountains of eastern Cuba.
There he pointed to a basketful of gold and said: “This is the god of the Christians. For him they pursue us. For him our fathers and our brothers have died. Let us dance for him. If our dance pleases him, this god will order them not to mistreat us.”