That night was the true beginning of our love; what had gone before was practice. In the months that followed we learned to know and give pleasure to each other. My love for Rodrigo was different from the desire I had felt for Juan de Málaga and my passion for Pedro de Valdivia; it was a mature, joyful sentiment, without conflict, that became more intense with the passing of time . . . until I could not live without him. My solitary trips to the country came to an end; we were apart only when the demands of war called Rodrigo away. That man, so serious before the world, was in private tender and playful. He spoiled us; we were his two queens, do you remember? And so the prophecy of Catalina’s magic shells, that I would be a queen, came true. In the thirty years we would live together, Rodrigo never lost his good humor in our home, no matter how grave the external pressures. He shared problems concerning the war, matters of government and politics, his fears, his cares, but none of it affected our relationship. He had confidence in my judgment, sought my opinion, listened to my counsel. I never had to tread lightly to avoid offending Rodrigo, as I had with Valdivia—and as one usually must with men in general, who tend to be prickly regarding their authority.
I suppose you would just as soon I not go into this, Isabel, but I cannot leave it out because it is an aspect of your father that you should know. Before he was with me, Rodrigo believed that youth and vigor were all that was needed at the hour of making love, a very common error. I was surprised the first time we were together in bed; he rushed along like a lad of fifteen. I attributed that to his having waited for me so long, loving me in silence and without hope for nine years, as he had confessed to me, but he was equally awkward on the nights that followed. Apparently your mother, Eulalia, who loved him passionately, had not taught him anything. That task became mine, and once I was over my anger with Valdivia, I took it on with pleasure, as you can imagine. I had done the same with Pedro de Valdivia years before, when we met in Cuzco. My experience with Spanish captains is limited, but I can tell you that those I knew were ill informed in regard to lovemaking, although well disposed to learn. Don’t laugh, daughter, it’s true. I tell you these things just in case. I do not know what your intimate relations are with your husband, but if you have any complaints, I advise you to come to me, for after I’m dead, you won’t have anyone to discuss them with. Men, like dogs and horses, have to be domesticated, but there are not many women capable of doing it, since they themselves know nothing unless they have had a teacher like Juan de Málaga. Besides, women are saddled with inhibitions; never forget Marina Ortiz de Gaete’s famous nightgown with the embroidered keyhole. So you see, ignorance is multiplied, and tends to end the best-intentioned love.
I had been back in Santiago for only a few days, and was just beginning to cultivate pleasure and blessed love with Rodrigo, when the city was awakened early one morning by a sentinel’s trumpet. A horse’s head had been found impaled upon the same stake where so many human heads had been exhibited through the years. A closer inspection had revealed that it was the head of Sultán, the governor’s favorite steed. Everyone who rushed there had choked back a cry of horror. A curfew had been imposed in Santiago, and Indians, blacks, and mestizos were forbidden to go about at night, under threat of a hundred lashes at the whipping post in the plaza, the same punishment applied when they held fiestas without permission, got drunk, or bet on games—all vices reserved for their masters. The curfew eliminated the mestizo and indigenous population, but no one could imagine that a Spaniard could be guilty of such a hideous act. Valdivia ordered Juan Gómez to use torture, as necessary, to find the perpetrator of that outrage.
Even though I had gotten over my hatred of Pedro de Valdivia, I still chose to see him as little as possible. Nonetheless, we inevitably ran into each other, since the center of Santiago is small and our two homes were not far apart, but we did not participate in the same social events. Friends were careful not to invite us at the same time. When we met in the street or the church, we nodded discreetly, nothing more. The relationship between Valdivia and Rodrigo, however, did not change; Pedro continued to place absolute trust in Rodrigo, and he responded with loyalty and affection. I, naturally, was the target of malicious comments.
“Why must people gossip and be so mean-spirited, Inés?” Cecilia asked.
“It bothers them that instead of taking on the role of abandoned lover, I have become a happy wife. They relish seeing strong women like you and me humiliated. They cannot forgive us that we have triumphed when so many others fail,” I explained.
“I don’t deserve to be compared with you, Inés. I am not as bold as you,” Cecilia laughed.
“Courage is a virtue appreciated in a male but considered a defect in our gender. Bold women are a threat to a world that is badly out of balance, in favor of men. That is why they work so hard to mistreat us and destroy us. But remember that bold women are like cockroaches: step on one and others come running from the corners,” I told her.
As for María de Encio, I recall that none of the “best” people received her, despite her being Spanish and the mistress of the gobernador. They treated her like his housekeeper. And the other woman, Juana Jiménez? They made fun of her behind her back, saying that her señora had trained her to perform the pirouettes in bed that she had no stomach for herself. If that was true, I have to wonder what vices she entangled Pedro in; I knew him as a man of healthy, direct sensuality. He was never interested in the curiosities in the little French books Francisco de Aguirre liked to show around, except during the period of poor Escobar, when he wanted to magnify my guilt by picturing me as a whore. And by the way, I should not fail to note in these pages that Escobar did not reach Peru, but neither did he die of thirst in the desert, as had been supposed. Many years later I learned that the young Yanacona who had gone with him had led him by secret paths to the village of his family, hidden among the peaks of the sierra, where both live to this day. Before he left, Escobar promised González de Marmolejo that if he reached Peru alive he would become a priest, because there was no question that God had pointed his finger at him when first he saved him from the gallows and then the desert. He did reach Peru, but did not keep his promise; instead he had several Quechua wives and mestizo children, choosing to spread the holy faith in this more intimate fashion.
But returning to the women Valdivia brought from Cuzco, I knew through Catalina that they prepared him brews of yerba del clavo. It may be that Pedro was afraid of losing his virility, which for him was as important as his courage as a soldier, and that was the reason he drank potions and called on two women to stimulate him.
He was not yet of an age for his vigor to decline, but he did not enjoy good health, and he suffered pain from old wounds. The two women came to a colorful end. After Valdivia’s death, Juana Jiménez disappeared; it was said that the Mapuche captured her during a raid in the south. María de Encio turned into a cruel, evil woman who tortured her Indian serving girls. They say that the bones of those poor girls are buried in the house, which now belongs to the town council, and that at night you can hear their moans . . . but that is another story that I don’t have time to tell.
I kept my distance from María and Juana. I did not intend ever to speak to them, but when Pedro fell from his horse and fractured a leg, they sent for me because no one knew more about those injuries than I. For the first time, I went into the house that had been mine, built by my own hands, and I did not recognize it even though the same furniture stood in the same places. Juana, a Galician woman, short, but well proportioned and with agreeable features, greeted me with a servant’s bow and led me to the room I had once shared with Pedro. There I found María, sniveling and putting wet cloths on the forehead of the injured man, who looked more dead than alive. María rushed to me and kissed my hands, sobbing with gratitude and fear; after all, if Pedro died, her own fate was rather murky. I freed myself from her grasp, delicately, not to offend her, and went to the bed. When I turned back the sheet and saw the leg, broken in two places,
my thought was that the best course would be to amputate it above the knee, before gangrene set in, but I have always been horrified by that operation and did not find myself capable of performing it on a body I had once loved.
I commended myself to the Virgin and set about treating the damage as best I could, aided by the veterinarian and the smith, since the doctor had long ago proved to be a useless drunk. It was one of those terrible fractures, difficult to set. I had to set each bone in place, groping blindly, and only by a miracle did it turn out more or less well. Catalina stupefied the patient with her magic powders, dissolved in liquor, but even in his doped sleep Valdivia bellowed. It took several men to hold him for each of the procedures. I did my job without malice or rancor, attempting to save him suffering, though that was impossible. I can honestly say that I did not even remember his ingratitude. Pedro thought so many times that he would die of the pain that he dictated his will to González de Marmolejo, sealed it, and sent it to be kept under lock and key in the office of the town hall. When it was opened after his death, it stipulated, among other things, that Rodrigo de Quiroga should replace him as gobernador. I recognize that Pedro’s two Spanish concubines tended him diligently, and it is partly owing to their ministrations that he walked again, although he would limp badly for the rest of his life.
Juan Gómez did not have to torture anyone to find the guilty party responsible for the crime of beheading Sultán; within a half hour everyone knew it had been Felipe. At first I could not believe it, because the young Mapuche adored the animal. Once when Sultán was wounded by Indians in Marga-Marga, Felipe took care of him for weeks; he slept with him, fed him by hand, cleaned him, and treated his wounds until he recovered. The bond between the youth and the horse was so strong that Pedro was often jealous, but since no one looked after Sultán as well as Felipe, he chose not to intervene. The Mapuche boy’s skill with horses was legend by then, and Valdivia meant to name him yegüerizo, keeper of the mares, when he was old enough, a very respected office in a colony in which breeding horses was fundamental.
Felipe killed his noble friend by opening the large vein in his neck, so he would not suffer, then cut off his head with a machete. Defying the curfew, and using the cover of darkness, he set the head in the plaza and fled the town. He left his clothing and his few belongings in a bundle in the blood-splattered stable. He left naked, wearing the same amulet around his neck he had worn when he’d arrived years before. I imagine him racing barefoot across the soft earth, filling his lungs with the secret fragrances of the forest—bay, quillai, rosemary—splashing through pools and crystalline streams, swimming icy rivers, with the boundless sky overhead: free at last. Why would he do something so barbarous to the animal he loved? The sibylline explanation from Catalina, who had never liked him, was accurate. “You do not see then, mamitay, that the Mapuche is going back with his own kind?”
I can imagine that Pedro de Valdivia exploded with rage at what had happened, swearing the most horrible punishment for his favorite stable hand, but he had to postpone his vengeance because he had more serious matters at hand. He had just negotiated an alliance with his principal enemy, the cacique Michimalonko, and was organizing a great campaign in the south to subjugate the Mapuche. The aged cacique, on whom the years had left no trace, had recognized the advantages of allying himself with the huincas, seeing that he had not been able to defeat them. Aguirre’s ruthless attacks had left him nearly stripped of warriors; only women and children were left in the north, half of whom were mestizos. Between perishing and fighting the Mapuche of the south, with whom he had had problems in recent times because he had not kept his promise to destroy the Spaniards, he opted for the latter choice; that way he at least saved his dignity and did not have to put his men to working the earth and mining gold for the huincas.
I, however, could not get Felipe out of my mind. To me Sultán’s death seemed a symbolic act. With those blows of the machete he had assassinated the gobernador; following that, there was no turning back, he had broken from us forever and taken with him all the information he had gathered through years of intelligent pretense. I remembered the first Indian attack on the growing town of Santiago in the spring of 1541, and found in it the key to the role Felipe had played in our lives. On that occasion, the Indians had covered themselves with dark mantles and crawled toward the town at night, unseen by the sentinels, just as the troops of the marqués de Pescara had done in Europe with white sheets in the snow. Felipe had heard Pedro tell that story more than once, and had transmitted the idea to the toquis. His frequent disappearances were not casual; they were linked to a fierce determination nearly impossible to imagine in a boy his age. He could leave the town to hunt without being bothered by the hostile forces that held us hostage, because he was one of them. He used his hunting trips as a pretext for meeting with his people and reporting on us. It was he who brought us the news that Michimalonko’s men were gathering near Santiago, he who had helped prepare the ambush to send Valdivia and half our defenders away from the town, and he who advised the Indians of the propitious moment to attack us. And where was Felipe during the attack on Santiago? In the uproar of that terrible day we forgot about him. He had hidden or gone to help our enemies; perhaps he contributed to setting the fires, I don’t know. For years Felipe had devoted himself to studying horses, breaking them and breeding them; he listened attentively to the soldiers’ stories and learned about military strategy; he knew how to use our weapons, from a sword to a harquebus to a cannon; he knew our strengths and our weaknesses. We believed that he admired Valdivia, his taita, whom he served better than anyone else, but in truth he was spying on him, while deep inside he nourished his bitterness against the invaders of his land. Sometime later we learned that he was the son of a toqui, the last of a long line of chiefs, as proud of his warrior ancestors as Valdivia was of his. I imagine the terrible hatred that darkened Felipe’s heart. And now that eighteen-year-old Mapuche, strong, slim as a reed, was running naked and swift toward the humid forests of the south where his tribes awaited him.
His real name was Lautaro, and he became the most famous toqui in the land of the Araucans, a feared demon to the Spaniards, a hero to the Mapuche, a prince of the epic war. Under his command, the undisciplined hordes of Indians were organized, like the best armies in Europe, into squadrons, infantry, and cavalry. To stop a horse without killing it—they were as prized by them as by us—they used boleadoras, two stones tied to the ends of a rope that was thrown around the horse’s hooves to bring it to the ground, or around the rider’s neck to dismount him. Lautaro sent his men to steal horses, and devoted himself to breeding and breaking them, as he bred and trained the dogs. He trained his men and made them into the best horsemen in the world, copies of himself, and the Mapuche cavalry came to be invincible. He replaced the old heavy, clumsy clubs with shorter, more efficient ones. In each battle, he captured the enemy’s weapons in order to use and copy them. He set up a system of communication so efficient that the very last of his warriors received their toqui’s orders instantly, and he imposed an iron discipline, comparable only to that of the celebrated Spanish tercios. He turned women into ferocious warriors, and used children to transport provisions, equipment, and messages. He knew the terrain, and preferred to hide his armies in deep forests, but when necessary he built pukaras in inaccessible sites, where he prepared his people while his spies informed him of each move by the enemy so that he would have the advantage. He could not, however, change his warriors’ bad custom of, after every victory, drinking chicha and muday to the point of insensibility. Had he achieved that, the Mapuche would have exterminated our army in the south. Thirty years later, the spirit of Lautaro continues to lead his armies, and his name will resound through the centuries; we will never defeat him.
We learned about the epic Lautaro a little later, when Pedro de Valdivia marched south to found new cities, with the dream of extending the conquest to the Strait of Magellan. “If Francisco Pizarro conquered Peru wit
h a little over a hundred soldiers to fight the thirty-five thousand men of Atahualpa’s army, it would be embarrassing if these Chilean savages stopped us,” he proclaimed to a meeting in the town hall. He had two hundred well-outfitted soldiers, four captains, among them the valiant Jerónimo de Alderete, hundreds of Yanacona bearers, and, in addition, Michimalonko riding the horse Valdivia had given him and leading his undisciplined, but brave, bands. The horsemen wore full armor, the foot soldiers breastplate and sword, and even the Yanaconas had helmets to protect their heads from the formidable clubs of the Mapuche. The only jarring note in this military panoply was that Valdivia had to be transported on a litter, like a courtesan, because the pain in his fractured leg, not yet completely healed, prevented him from riding. Before setting out, he sent the fearsome Francisco de Aguirre to rebuild La Serena and found other cities in the north, which had been nearly depopulated by the exterminating campaigns that same Aguirre had carried out earlier, and by the mass withdrawal of Michimalonko’s people. Valdivia named Rodrigo de Quiroga to be his representative in Santiago, the one captain unanimously obeyed and respected. Thus, by one of those unexpected turns in life, I was again the gobernadora, a responsibility I have always borne, though the title was not always legitimately mine.
Lautaro flees Santiago on the darkest night of summer, unseen by the sentinels, and unbetrayed by the dogs, which know him. He is running along the banks of the Mapocho, invisible in the high reeds and ferns. He does not use the rope bridge of the huincas, but throws himself into the black waters and swims, with a yell of happiness in his breast. The cold water washes him inside and out, leaving him free of the odor of the huincas. With long strokes, he crosses the river and emerges on the other side, reborn. Inche Lautaro! he yells. I am Lautaro. He waits motionless on the bank as the warm air evaporates the moisture on his skin. He hears the screech of a chon-chón, the spirit with the body of a bird and the face of a man, and replies with a similar call, then feels very close by the presence of his guide, Guacolda. He must strain to see her, although his eyes are already adjusted to the darkness, because she has the gift of the wind; she is invisible; she can pass through enemy lines and the men do not see her or the dogs smell her. Guacolda, five years older than he, his betrothed. He has known her since childhood, and knows that he belongs to her, just as she belongs to him. He has seen her every time he escaped from the town of the huincas to deliver information to the tribes. She was his contact, his swift messenger. It was she who led him to the city of the invaders when he was a boy of eleven, with clear instructions about the role he was to play, learning about the huincas, she who observed from nearby when he attached himself to the priest dressed in black, and followed him to town. In his last meeting with Guacolda, she’d told him to flee on the next moonless night, because his time with the enemy was ended; he knew everything he needed to know and his people were waiting for him. When she sees him arrive that night without his huinca clothing, naked, Guacolda greets him—mari mari—then for the first time kisses him on the lips, licks his face, touches him as a woman touches to establish her claim on him. Mari mari, Lautaro replies; he knows that the moment for love is approaching; soon he will steal Guacolda from her ruka, throw her over his shoulder and run away with her, as is their way. This he tells her, and she smiles, then leads him in a swift race toward the south, always the south. The amulet Lautaro never takes from his neck was given him by Guacolda.