The Auraucan war created a famine. No one could cultivate the land because the first thing both Indians and Spaniards did was burn the plantings and kill the cattle of the other side. After that came a drought and the chivalongo, or typhus, which had a terrible mortality rate. Then as additional punishment came a plague of frogs, which poisoned the earth with a pestilent slobber. During that terrible period, the few remaining Spaniards survived on what they took from the Mapuche, while the Indians, thousands and thousands of them, wandered faint through the barren fields. Lack of food is what led them to eat the flesh of their fellows. God must know that those miserable people did not do it to sin, but because they had to. One chronicler, who in 1555 fought in the campaigns in the south, wrote that the Indians bought quartered humans, just as they would llama meat. Hunger . . . anyone who has not suffered it has no right to pass judgment. Rodrigo de Quiroga told me that in the hell of the steaming jungles of Los Chunchos, Indians ate their comrades. If necessity forced Spaniards to commit that sin, he did not mention it. Catalina, however, assured me that we viracochas are no different from any other mortal; some dug up the dead to roast the thighs, and went out to hunt the valley Indians for the same purpose. When I told Pedro, he cut me off short, trembling with indignation, for it did not seem possible to him that any Christian would do something so despicable. I had to remind him that because of me, he ate a little better than the rest of the colony, and that he was not in a position to criticize anyone. All you had to do was see the crazed joy of a person who had caught a mouse on the banks of the Mapocho to understand how a man can sink to cannibalism.
Felipe, or Felipillo, as the young Mapuche was called, turned into Pedro’s shadow, and came to be a familiar figure in the town. He was the mascot of the soldiers, who were entertained by the way he could imitate the governor’s gestures and voice—not out of any desire to mock him, but because he admired him. Pedro pretended not to notice, but I know that he was flattered by the boy’s silent attention, and by how promptly he did his bidding. Felipe burnished Pedro’s armor with sand, sharpened his sword, oiled his belts and straps if he could get his hands on a little fat, and, especially, he looked after Sultan as if he were his brother. Pedro treated the boy with the jovial indifference one bestows upon a faithful dog. He did not have to talk to him, Felipe divined his taita’s desires. Pedro ordered one of the soldiers to teach the boy to use a harquebus, “So he can defend the women of the house in my absence,” he said, which offended me, because I was always the one who defended not only the women, but the men as well.
Felipe was a contemplative boy, very quiet, able to spend hours without moving, like an elderly monk. “He is lazy, like all his race,” they said of him. Using the pretext of the Mapudungu classes—a nearly intolerable imposition on him, since he scorned me for being a woman—I learned a good part of what I know about the Mapuche. They believe that the Blessed Earth provides; people take what they need and no more and give thanks for it, they do not accumulate goods. Work is beyond comprehension, since there is no future. What good is gold? The earth does not belong to anyone, the sea does not belong to anyone; the mere idea of possessing it or dividing it always provoked waves of laughter from the usually somber Felipe. People do not belong to others, either. How can the huincas buy and sell people if they do not own them? Sometimes the boy went two or three days without speaking a word, surly, and not eating, and when asked what was the matter, the answer was always the same: “There are content days and there are sad days. Each person is master of his silence.” He did not get along well with Catalina, who did not trust him, but they told each other their dreams, because for both the door was always open between the two halves of life, night and day, and the divinity communicated with them through their dreams. To ignore such clear messages leads to great misfortunes, they assured me. Felipe never allowed Catalina to read his fate with her divining beads and shells; he had a superstitious fear of them, just as he refused to try her medicinal herbs.
The servants were forbidden to ride the horses, under threat of a lashing, but an exception was made in Felipe’s case; he was the one who fed them, and was able to tame them without violence, speaking Mapudungu into their ears. He learned to ride like a Gypsy, and his prowess caused a sensation in our sad village. He sat the animal as if he were a part of it, moved to its rhythm, never whipping it. He did not use a saddle or spurs, and guided the horse with a light pressure of his knees, holding the reins in his mouth so that he would have two free hands for his bow and arrow. He could mount the horse when it was running, swing around and ride backward, or hang onto it with legs and arms so that he was galloping with his chest tight to the animal’s belly. The men gathered around, but no matter how hard they tried, they were never able to imitate him. Sometimes he disappeared for several days on his hunting excursions, and just when we had given him up for dead at Michimalonko’s hand, he would return with a string of birds over his shoulder to enrich our tasteless soup. Valdivia was uneasy when Felipe disappeared. More than once he threatened him with the whip if he left again without permission, but he never carried out his threat because we were happy to have the bounty of his hunts.
The bloody tree trunk where the lashings were carried out stood in the center of the plaza, but Felipe did not seem to have any fear of it. He had grown to be a slim adolescent, tall for someone of his race, pure bone and muscle, with an intelligent expression and astute eyes. He could shoulder more weight than any of the adult men, and he cultivated an absolute scorn for pain and death. The soldiers admired his stoicism, and some, to entertain themselves, liked to put him to the test. I had to forbid their challenging him to pick up a live coal in his hand, or to drive thorns soaked in hot chili into his skin. Winter and summer he swam for hours in the always frigid waters of the Mapocho. He informed us that icy water strengthens the heart, which is why Mapuche mothers submerge their babies as soon as they are born. The Spaniards, who fled from bathing as they would from fire, would climb up on the wall to watch him swim, and to make bets about his endurance. Sometimes he stayed under the rough waters of the river for as long as several Our Fathers, and just when the watchers began to pay off their bets, Felipe would appear, safe and sound.
The worst thing about those years was the sense of helplessness and loneliness. We waited for help to come without knowing whether it would ever arrive; everything depended on Captain Monroy’s success. Not even Cecilia’s infallible network of spies could pick up any news of him and the five brave men with him, but we had no illusions. It would have been a miracle if that handful of men had slipped past hostile Indians, crossed the desert, and reached their destination. Pedro told me, in the privacy of our conversations in bed, that the true miracle would be for Monroy to find help in Peru, where no one wanted to invest money in the conquest of Chile. The gold trappings on his horse would impress the curious, but not the politicians and merchants. Our world was reduced to a few square blocks inside an adobe wall, to the same ravaged faces, to days with no news, to an eternal routine, to sporadic forays on horseback to look for food or to repel a group of daring Indians, to rosaries, processions, and burials. Even masses had been reduced to a minimum; we had only half a bottle of wine left to consecrate, and it would have been sacrilege to use chicha. At least we did not lack for water, because when the Indians prevented us from going to the river, or when they blocked the Incas’ irrigation ditches with stones, we dug wells. My talent as a dowser was not needed; wherever we dug there was water in abundance. We had no paper to write down the proceedings of the town council, or the judicial sentences, so we used strips of hide; but in a careless minute the starving dogs ate them, so there are few official records of the hardships of those years.
Wait, and then wait some more. That was how those days went by. We waited for Indians, weapons in hand, we waited for a mouse to fall into our traps, we waited for news of Monroy. We were captives inside the town, surrounded by enemies, half dead with hunger, but we took a certain pride in o
ur misfortune and poverty. For festivals, the soldiers wore their full set of armor over bare skin or, at best, skin cushioned by mouse or rabbit fur, because they had no clothing to wear underneath—but the armor gleamed like silver. González de Marmolejo’s one last cassock was stiff with mending and filth, but to celebrate mass he wore over it a piece of lace altar cloth saved from the fire. None of us women had decent skirts, but Cecilia, the other captains’ wives, and I spent hours combing our hair, and we painted our lips pink with the bitter fruit of a bush that, according to Catalina, was poisonous. No one died from it, but it is true that it turned our bowels to water. We always talked about our miseries in a joking tone because serious complaints would have been a sign of weakness. The Yanaconas did not understand this very Spanish form of humor; they went around like beaten dogs, dreaming of going home to Peru. Some of the Indian women ran off to offer themselves to the Mapuche, with whom at least they would not go hungry, and none returned. To prevent others from imitating them, we spread the rumor that they had been eaten, although Felipe maintained that a Mapuche is always happy to add another wife to his family.
“What happens to them when their husband dies?” I asked in Mapudungu, thinking of the mortality rate among warriors after a battle.
“What must be done: the oldest son inherits them all, except his mother,” he answered.
“And you, my lad, aren’t you about ready to marry?” I asked as a joke.
“It is not the moment for me to steal a woman,” was his very serious reply.
In the Mapuche tradition, Felipe had told me, the groom-to-be, with the help of his brothers and friends, steals the girl he desires. Sometimes the party of young raiders would burst into her house, tie up the parents, and carry the struggling girl away; but then later, if the girl accepts the “proposal,” the suitor sets things right by paying his future in-laws the proper sum in animals and other goods. In this way, the union is formalized. A man can have several wives, but he must give the same to each one, and treat them all equally. Often a man marries two or more sisters, so they don’t have to be separated. González de Marmolejo, who often came to my Mapudungu lessons, explained to Felipe that such unbridled licentiousness was ample proof of the presence of the devil among the Mapuche, who without the holy water of baptism would roast in the coals of hell. The boy asked the priest if the devil was also among the Spaniards, who took a dozen Indian girls without paying their parents with llamas and guanacos, as should be done, and then in addition beat them, and did not give them all equal treatment, and, whenever it suited, exchanged them for new ones. Perhaps Spaniards and Mapuche would meet in hell, he suggested, where they would keep on killing one another throughout eternity. I had to run stumbling from the room to keep from laughing in the venerable priest’s face.
Pedro and I were made for doing, not idling. The challenge of surviving another day, and keeping the morale of the colony high, filled us with energy. Only when we were alone did we allow ourselves to be discouraged; but it did not last long because soon we would be making fun of ourselves. “I would rather be eating mice here with you than dressing in brocade at court in Madrid,” I would tell him. “Let’s put it this way,” he would reply. “You would rather be Señora Gobernadora here than be a seamstress in Plasencia.” And we would fall onto the bed in each other’s arms, laughing like children. We were never more united; we had never made love as passionately and knowingly as we did during that time. When I think of Pedro, those are the moments I treasure. That is how I want to remember him, the way he was at forty, emaciated from hunger but with a strong, determined spirit, and filled with dreams. And I could add that I want to remember him in love with me, but that would be redundant because he always was, even after we separated. I know that he died thinking of me. The year of his death, 1553, I was in Santiago and he was fighting in Tucapel, many leagues away, but I knew so clearly that he was seriously wounded, and dying, that when they brought me the news several weeks later, I shed no tears. I had already cried myself out.
In mid December, two years after Captain Monroy had left on his dangerous mission, as we were preparing a modest Christmas celebration with songs and an improvised crèche, an exhausted man caked with dust appeared at the gates of Santiago. He was nearly refused entrance because at first the sentinels didn’t recognize him. He was one of our Yanaconas; he had been running for two days and had managed to reach the town by slipping unseen through forests filled with enemy Indians. He was one of the small group Pedro had left on the coast in the hope that help would come from Peru. Bonfires laid on a high cliff were kept ready to be lighted the instant a ship was sighted. And at last, the lookouts who had been scanning the horizon for an eternity saw a sail and euphorically sent the arranged signals. The ship, captained by one of Pedro de Valdivia’s old friends, held the long-awaited aid.
“That you must be bringing men and horses to be carrying the cargo, then, tatay. This is what the viracocha of the ship is sending to tell you,” panted the Indian, at the end of his strength.
Pedro and several captains galloped off in the direction of the beach. It is difficult to describe the jubilation that spread through the town. Our relief was so great that hardened soldiers wept, and our anticipation so consuming that no one paid any attention to the priest when he called for a mass of thanksgiving. The entire population of the town was up on the wall with their eyes on the road, even though we knew that it would take several days for the visitors to reach Santiago.
Horror was the overwhelming expression on the faces of the new arrivals when they first saw Valdivia and his men on the beach, and then later, when they reached Santiago and we went out to welcome them. That gave us an approximate measure of the magnitude of our misery. We had grown accustomed to looking like skeletons, to our rags and filth, but when we realized how they pitied us, we were profoundly shamed. Though we had done our best to spruce ourselves up, and to us Santiago looked splendid in the brilliant light of summer, we, and it, made a lamentable impression upon our guests. They wanted to give Valdivia and the other captains clothing, but there is no greater insult to a Spaniard than charity. What we could not pay was written down as a debt, and Valdivia signed for everyone since we had no gold. The merchants who had contracted the ship in Peru were well satisfied; they had tripled their investment and were sure that they would be repaid. Valdivia’s word was more than enough guarantee. Among them was the same merchant who had lent Pedro money in Cuzco—at a usurer’s interest—to finance the expedition. He had come to collect his money, multiplied many times over, but he had to agree to a fair settlement when he saw the state of our colony. Otherwise, he realized, he would not recoup anything. From the ship’s cargo, Pedro bought me three linen blouses and one of fine batiste, everyday skirts and some of silk, work boots and dress shoes, soap, orange blossom cream for my face, and a bottle of perfume: luxuries I thought I would never see again in my lifetime.
The ship had been sent by Captain Monroy. While we were undergoing our trials and tribulations in Santiago, he and his five companions had gotten as far as Copiapó, where they had fallen into the hands of the Indians. Four soldiers were massacred on the spot, but Monroy, riding his gold-adorned steed, and one other man, had survived through an unexpected stroke of good fortune. They had been saved by a Spanish soldier who had fled from the law in Peru and had been living in Chile for several years. He had lost two ears for thievery and had run from all contact with people of his race and taken refuge among the Indians. The punishment for stealing is amputation of a hand, a custom that had prevailed in Spain since the time of the Moors, but when it was a soldier’s hand, it was deemed preferable to cut off the nose or ears; in that way the accused could fight again.
This unexpected savior had intervened and convinced the Indians not to kill the captain, whom he supposed was very wealthy, judging from all the gold, or his companion. Monroy was a likable man and he had a silver tongue; he got along so well with the Indians that they treated him more as a fr
iend than as a prisoner. After three months of agreeable captivity, the captain and the second Spaniard successfully escaped on horseback, but without the imperial trappings, naturally. The story goes that during those months Monroy had won the heart of the chief’s daughter and had left her pregnant, but that may well be the captain’s boast, or a popular myth—there are more than enough of those among us. The fact is that Monroy reached Peru and obtained reinforcements, gained the interest of several merchants, sent the ship to Chile, and himself started out overland with seventy soldiers and would arrive months later. This Alonso de Monroy, gallant, loyal, and of great courage, died in Peru a couple of years later under mysterious circumstances. Some say he was poisoned, others that he died of the plague or a spider bite, and there are those who believe he is still alive in Spain, to which he had returned without a word to anyone, weary of war.
The ship brought us soldiers, food, wine, weapons, munitions, clothing, household goods, and domestic animals—that is, all the treasures we had dreamed of. Most important of all was contact with the civilized world; we were no longer alone in the farthest corner of the planet. The five Spanish women who had come with them, wives or relatives of soldiers, added to the numbers of our colony. For the first time since leaving Cuzco, I could compare myself to women of my own race, and see how much I had changed. I decided to put aside my man’s boots and clothing, to comb out my braids in favor of a more elegant hairdo, to indulge my face with the orange blossom cream Pedro had given me, and, not least, to cultivate the feminine graces I had discarded years before. Enthusiasm again swelled the hearts of our little community; we felt capable of confronting Michimalonko, or the Devil himself should he show up in Santiago. This must be what that unyielding cacique perceived from afar, because he did not attack the city again, though often we had to fight him if we went outside the walls, and chase him back to his pukaras. In each of those encounters, so many Indians were killed that one had to wonder where more came from.