A hasty conspiracy of silence was woven around Pizarro, whom everyone feared, but the despicable thing he had done during the battle circulated in whispers through taverns and wherever else men gathered. There was no one who didn’t know and talk about it, and so I was able to verify all the details, though I never found my husband’s remains.
From that day, I have been haunted by the near certainty that Juan did not receive a Christian burial, and that his soul is wandering in pain, seeking repose. Juan de Málaga followed me on my long journey to Chile; he was with me as we founded Santiago; he held my arm when I executed the caciques, the Indian chieftains; and he made fun of me when I wept out of rage and love for Valdivia. Still today, forty years later, he appears from time to time, although my eyes are failing now and I often confuse him with other ghosts from the past.
My large house in Santiago, with its patios, stables, and garden, occupies an entire block. Its walls are adobe, very thick, and oak beams support the high ceilings. There are many hiding places for errant spirits, demons, or Death, which is not a hooded skeleton with empty eye sockets, as the priests tell us to frighten us, but a large, roly-poly woman with an opulent bosom and welcoming arms: a maternal angel. I get lost in this mansion. It has been months since I’ve slept, I miss Rodrigo’s warm hand on my belly. At night, when the servants have gone to bed and no one is up but the outside guards and a chambermaid who stays awake in case I need her, I roam through the house with my lamp, examining the large rooms with lime-whitened walls and blue ceilings, straightening the paintings and flowers in the vases, and peeking into the birdcages. Actually, I go looking for Death. At times I have been so close to her that I have caught her scent of freshly laundered clothing, but she is clever, and a tease. I cannot catch her, she slips away and hides among the multitude of spirits that inhabit this house. Among them is poor Juan, who followed me to the ends of the earth, with his rattling, unburied bones and bloody brocade rags.
It was in Cuzco that the last traces of my first husband vanished. I have no doubt that his body, clad in Hernando Pizarro’s princely attire, was the first thing the victorious soldiers carried away at the end of the battle, before the Indians swooped down from the hills to make off with the spoils of the vanquished. The Spaniards must have been surprised when they found the man beneath the helmet and armor was not the enemy commander but an anonymous soldier, and I suppose that they grudgingly obeyed the order to hide what had happened, because the last thing a Spaniard forgives is cowardice. However, they hid it so well that they completely swept away any trace of my husband’s passage through life.
When the marqués gobernador, Francisco Pizarro, learned that the widow of Juan de Málaga was going around asking questions, he wanted to meet me. He had built a palace in la Ciudad de los Reyes, and from there lorded it over the empire with pomp, perfidy, and an iron hand, but at that moment he was visiting Cuzco. I was received in a salon decorated with carved furniture and Peruvian rugs of rich wool. The top of the large table, the chair backs, the goblets, the candelabra and spittoons were solid silver. There was more silver in Peru than iron. Several courtiers, clustered in the corners, somber as vultures, were whispering and moving papers around to look important. Pizarro was dressed in black velvet, a tightly fitted doublet with slashed sleeves, a white ruff, a thick gold chain upon his chest, gold buckles on his shoes, and a sable cape thrown over his shoulders. He was a man of about sixty, haughty, with sallow skin, a graying beard, sunken eyes with a suspicious gleam in them, and a disagreeable falsetto voice. He offered his brief condolences for the death of my husband, without mentioning his name, and then in an unexpected gesture handed me a pouch of money so that I could survive “until you can find a ship back to Spain.” At that very instant, I made an impulsive decision, one I have never regretted.
“With all respect, Your Excellency, I do not plan to return to Spain,” I announced.
A terrible shadow flashed across the face of the marqués gobernador. He walked to the window and for a long while stood contemplating the city laid out at his feet. I thought he had forgotten me, and I had started toward the door when suddenly he spoke to me again, without turning around.
“What did you tell me your name is, señora?
“Inés Suárez, Señor Marqués Gobernador, at your service.”
“And how do you intend to make a living?”
“Honestly, Excellency.”
“And discreetly, I hope. Discretion is greatly appreciated here, especially in women. The city officials in the ayuntamiento will find you a house. Good day, and good fortune.”
That was all. I realized that if I wanted to stay in Cuzco, I had better stop asking questions. Juan de Málaga was dead and I was free. I can say with all certainty that my life began that day. The years that preceded it were merely training for what was to come.
I beg you to have a little patience, Isabel. You will soon see that this disorderly narrative will come to the moment when my path crosses that of Pedro de Valdivia and the epic I want to tell you about begins. Before that, I had been an insignificant seamstress in Plasencia, like the hundreds and hundreds of hardworking women who came before and will come after me. With Pedro de Valdivia I lived a life of legend, and with him I conquered a kingdom. Although I adored Rodrigo de Quiroga, your father, and lived with him thirty years, the only real reason for telling my story is the conquest of Chile, which I shared with Pedro de Valdivia.
I established myself in Cuzco, in the house the ayuntamiento lent me in accordance with instructions from Marqués Gobernador Pizarro. It was modest, but decent, with three rooms and a patio, well situated in the center of the city, and always fragrant because of the honeysuckle climbing the walls. They also provided me with three Indian servants, two of whom were young; the older woman had adopted the Christian name of Catalina, and she turned out to be my best friend. I began to practice my trade as a seamstress, a skill much appreciated among the Spaniards, who were having a hard time trying to make do with the few things they had brought from Spain. I also treated soldiers who had been crippled or badly wounded in the war, most of whom had fought at Las Salinas. The German doctor who had traveled with me in the caravan from Ciudad de los Reyes to Cuzco often called on me to help him with the worst cases, and I, in turn, always brought Catalina, for she knew many remedies and enchantments. A certain rivalry grew between Catalina and the doctor that did not always benefit their unfortunate patients. She was not interested in learning anything about the four humors that determine the state of bodily health, and he scorned sorcery, although at times it worked very well. The most difficult part of my work with them were the amputations, something that has always turned my stomach, but it had to be done because once flesh begins to rot there is no other way to save the life of the patient. In any case, very few survive those operations.
I know nothing at all about Catalina’s life before the Spaniards arrived in Peru. Suspicious, mysterious, she never spoke of her past. She was short and square, the color of a hazelnut, and her two thick braids were tied behind her back with strands of bright wool. Her eyes were dark as charcoal, and she smelled of smoke; she could be in several places at the same time, and disappear in a sigh. She learned Spanish, she adapted to our customs, she seemed satisfied to live with me, and a couple of years later she insisted on accompanying me to Chile. “I wanting to go with you, then, señorayy,” she begged me in her singing speech. She had agreed to be baptized in order to avoid problems, but she had not abandoned her beliefs. Just as she prayed the rosary and lighted candles at the altar of Nuestra Señora del Socorro, she recited her prayers to the Sun. This wise and loyal companion taught me about Peru’s medicinal plants and their curative properties, which were very different from those in Spain. The good woman maintained that illness occurs when demons and malign spirits creep into bodily orifices and take shelter in the abdomen. She had worked with Inca medicine men who knew how to drill holes in the skulls of their patients to relieve migraine headac
hes and dementias, a procedure that fascinated the German doctor but that no Spaniard was willing to undergo
Catalina knew how to bleed the sick as well as the best surgeon, and she was expert in purges that alleviated colic and bloating, but she made fun of the German’s pharmacopoeia. “You just killing with that, then, tatay,” she would tell him, smiling, and revealing teeth black from chewing coca, and he ended by losing faith in the renowned remedies he had struggled so hard to bring from his country. Catalina knew powerful poisons, aphrodisiac potions, and herbs that created inexhaustible energy, along with others that induced sleep, stopped bleeding, and eased pain. She was magic. She could talk with the dead and see the future. At times she drank a concoction brewed from several plants that transported her to another world, where she was given advice by the angels. She did not call them angels, but she described them as transparent, winged beings able to strike a man dead with the fire of their gaze. They had to be angels. We were careful not to mention these matters in the presence of others; they would have accused us of witchcraft and of trafficking with the Evil One. It is not amusing to end up in the dungeon of the Inquisition. Many of those poor wretches burned at the stake for less than we knew. I have seen people die in that way, and I can testify to the cruelty of that torture.
Naturally, Catalina’s spells did not always give the expected result. Once she tried to eject the spirit of Juan de Málaga, which was always around the houses, bothering us, but all that happened was that several hens died that same night, and the next day a two-headed llama appeared in the center of Cuzco. The animal fanned the discord between Indians and Spanish, because the former believed the llama was the reincarnation of the immortal Inca Atahualpa, and the latter ran it through with a lance to prove just how little immortal it was. An altercation ensued that left several Indians dead and a Spaniard wounded. Catalina lived with me many years; she looked after my health, she warned me of danger, and she guided me in important decisions. The one promise she did not keep was to stay with me through my last years. She died and I live on.
I taught the two young Indian girls the ayuntamiento sent me to mend, wash, and iron clothes, as I had done in Plasencia, another service greatly appreciated at that time in Cuzco. I had a clay oven built in the patio, and Catalina and I began making empanadas. Wheat flour was very dear, but we learned to make them with cornmeal. They never had time to cool after they came from the oven because the smell spread throughout the neighborhood and people came running to buy them. We always put some aside for beggars and the disabled, who were fed from public charity. The strong aroma of meat, fried onion, cumin, and baked dough soaked into my skin so deeply that I have never lost it. I will die smelling like an empanada.
I was able to make a bare living, but in that expensive and corrupt city a widow was hard pressed to rise out of poverty. I could have married, since there were many desperate unmarried men, some rather attractive, but Catalina always warned me against them. She often read my fortune with her beads and divining shells, and always told me the same thing: I would live a long life and I would become a queen, but that future was linked with the man in her visions. According to her, it was none of the ones who came knocking at my door, or hounded me when I went out. “Patience, mamitayy, your viracocha will be coming,” she promised.
Among my suitors was the self-important Lieutenant Núñez, who had not given up on his quest to get into my petticoats, as he indelicately put it. He could not understand why I dismissed his petitions, since I no longer had a husband to use as an excuse. It had been confirmed that I was a widow, as he had assured me from the beginning. He had it in his head that my refusals were a kind of flirtation, and so the more intractable my rebuffs, the more he fancied me. I had to forbid him to let his mastiffs into my house; they terrorized my servants. Trained to subdue Indians, when they smelled the girls they began to tug at their chains, snarling and barking and showing their teeth. Nothing entertained the lieutenant so much as setting his beasts against the Indians, and he continued to ignore my pleas, and burst into my house with his dogs as he did everywhere he went. But one day his hounds waked with a green foam frothing from their snouts, and a few hours later they were stiff as boards. Their master, enraged, threatened to kill whoever it was who had poisoned them, but the German doctor convinced him that they had died of the plague and that he must burn their bodies immediately to prevent contagion. Núñez complied, fearing that the first victim would be himself.
The lieutenant’s visits became more and more frequent, and, as he also stalked me through the streets, my life became a hell. “This white man, then, señorayy, he is not understanding with words. I say good that he go dying, like the dogs of him,” Catalina announced. I preferred not to pursue further what she meant by that. On one of his visits, Núñez arrived, as always, with his macho scent and gifts I didn’t want, filling my house with his noisy presence.
“Why are you tormenting me, my beautiful Inés?” he asked for the hundredth time, putting his arm around my waist.
“Do not make so bold, señor,” I said, pulling away from him. “I have not given you permission to treat me in this familiar fashion.”
“Well, then, my distinguished Inés. When shall we wed?”
“Never. Here are your shirts and breeches, mended and clean. Look for another washerwoman, because I do not want you in my house. Good-bye!” And I pushed him toward the door.
“Good-bye, you say, Inés? Good-bye? You do not know me, woman! No one insults me, and least of all a whore!” he shouted from the street.
It was the quiet hour of dusk when my neighbors gathered to wait for the last empanadas to come out of the oven, but I did not have the spirit to tend to them. I was trembling with anger and shame. I distributed a few empanadas to the poor so they would not go hungry, and then I closed my door, which usually I kept open until the cool of night fell.
“He is a pest, then, mamitayy, but do not hit the top. This Núñez, he will be bringing good luck,” Catalina consoled me.
“The only thing that man can bring me is misfortune, Catalina! A blustering, vindictive man is always dangerous.”
Catalina was right. Thanks to the ominous lieutenant, who went and sat himself down in a tavern to drink and boast about what he was going to do to me, that same night I met the man of my destiny, the one Catalina was constantly predicting would come along.
The tavern consisted of a low-ceilinged room in which a few window slits let in barely enough air to breathe. It was run by a good-hearted man from Andalucia who always gave credit to soldiers short of funds. For that reason, and because of the music—a black man playing some sort of stringed instrument and another with a drum—the place was very popular. The happy sounds of the clients contrasted with the somber figure of a man drinking alone in one corner. He was sitting on a bench before a small table on which he had spread out a sheet of yellowed paper and weighed it down with a carafe of wine to keep it from curling up. He was Pedro de Valdivia, Gobernador Francisco Pizarro’s field marshal and hero of the battle of Las Salinas. He was by then one of the wealthiest encomenderos in Peru. In payment for his services, Pizarro had allotted him, for his lifetime, a silver mine in Porco, a fertile and productive hacienda in La Canela valley, and hundreds of Indians to work them.
And what was the famed Valdivia doing at that moment? Not calculating the amount of silver extracted from his mine, or the count of his llamas or sacks of maize; he was studying a map Diego de Almagro had hurriedly sketched in prison before his execution. Valdivia was bedeviled by the idea of triumphing where Adelantado Almagro had failed—in the far south of the hemisphere. It was yet to be conquered and populated, the one remaining place where a military man like himself could achieve glory. He did not want to live in the shadow of Francisco Pizarro and comfortably grow old in Peru. Neither did he intend to return to Spain, however rich and respected he might be. He was even less attracted to the idea of rejoining Marina, who had been faithfully waiting for years and
never tired of calling him home in her letters, which always abounded with blessings and reproaches. Spain was the past. Chile was the future. The map showed the routes Almagro followed on his expedition and the most difficult points: the sierra, the desert, and the areas in which enemies were concentrated. “No one can go any farther south than the Bío-Bío river; the Mapuche will stop him,” Almagro had repeated several times. Those words were like a thorn in Valdivia’s side. I would have gone farther, he thought, although he never doubted the adelantado’s courage.
That is what he was doing when above the noise of the tavern he heard the loud voice of a drunken man, and then, despite himself, listened to what the blusterer was saying. He was talking about someone to whom he planned to give a well-deserved lesson, a certain Inés, a prideful woman who dared defy an honest lieutenant serving the most Christian Emperor Charles V. The name sounded familiar to Valdivia, and he deduced that Núñez was talking about the young widow who washed and mended clothes in her home on Templo de las Vírgenes. He had not called on her services—he had his own Indian girls for that—but he had seen her a few times in the street and in church, and had noticed her because she was one of the few Spanish women in Cuzco. He had wondered how long a woman like that would be alone. On a couple of occasions he had followed some distance behind her for a few blocks, merely to enjoy the movement of her hips—she walked with the strong strides of a Gypsy—and to catch the reflection of the sun on her coppery hair. It seemed to him that she radiated assurance and strength of character, qualities he demanded in his captains but nothing he had ever thought he would appreciate in a woman. Up to that time, he had been attracted to sweet, fragile girls who awakened his desire to protect them; that was why he had married Marina. There was nothing vulnerable or innocent about this Inés. She was, in fact, intimidating: pure energy, like a contained cyclone, yet that was the very thing that made him notice her. At least that is what he later told me.