One day, talking with the crew of a schooner anchored in the port, I learned that Juan had sailed for Peru quite some time before, as so many other Spaniards had done when they heard of the riches discovered by Pizarro and Almagro. I bundled up my belongings, took my savings, and since I was unable to get permission to go on my own, arranged to sail south with a group of Dominican priests. I imagine that those priests were associated with the Inquisition, but I never asked them; the mere word terrified me then and terrifies me still. I can never forget seeing heretics burned at the stake in Plasencia when I was eight or nine years old, but I wanted their help in getting to Peru. I went back to wearing my black dresses, and played the role of disconsolate wife. The priests marveled at the marital fidelity that led me through the world searching for a husband who had not sent for me and whose whereabouts I did not know. They could not suspect that my motive was not fidelity but the desire to end the state of uncertainty Juan had left me in. I had not loved him for many years. I barely remembered his face, and feared that when I did see him, I wouldn’t recognize him. But I did not intend to stay in Panamá, where I was exposed to the appetites of idle soldiers and the unhealthful climate.
The voyage by ship lasted more or less seven weeks, skittering across the ocean at the whim of the winds. By then, dozens of Spanish ships were traveling the route back and forth to Peru, but their navigation charts were still a state secret. There were as yet no complete sets of charts, and on each sailing the pilots noted down their observations, from the color of the water and the clouds to any new landmark along the coast—when they were sailing close enough to view it. In that way they updated the routes that would later serve other voyagers. We experienced heavy seas, fog, storms, quarrels among the crew, and other unpleasantness that I will not detail here in order not to stray from my story. It is enough to note that the priests said mass each morning and made us pray the rosary in the evening to calm the seas and the contentious spirits of the crew. All voyages are dangerous. I am horrified when I am on a fragile ship at the mercy of the vast ocean, defying God and nature and far from human aid. I would rather find myself surrounded by savage Indians, as I have been many times, than board a ship again. Which is why I have never been tempted to return to Spain, even at times when the threat of attack by the natives forced us to evacuate cities and run like mice. I have always known that my bones would rest in American soil.
On the high seas I was once again hounded by men, despite the eternal vigilance of the priests. I could feel them circling around me like a pack of dogs. Did I emit the scent of a bitch in heat? In the privacy of my cabin, I washed with saltwater, frightened of that power I did not want because it could work against me. I dreamed of panting wolves, tongues hanging out and fangs dripping blood, ready to pounce on me—all of them at once. Sometimes the wolves had the face of Sebastián Romero. I spent my nights waiting and watching, locked in my cabin, sewing and praying, not daring, for fear of that constant male presence in the darkness, to go out into the cool night air to calm my nerves. I was frightened by that menace, it’s true, but, I must confess, I was also fascinated. Desire was a terrible abyss yawning at my feet, inviting me to leap in and lose myself in its depths. I knew the festiveness and the torment of passion, as I had lived both with Juan de Málaga during the first years of our union. My husband had many faults, but I cannot deny that he was a tireless and captivating lover. That is why I forgave him again and again. Long after I had lost all love and respect for him, I continued to desire him. To protect myself from the temptation of love, I told myself that I would never find another man who could give me as much pleasure as Juan. I also knew that I had to guard against the illnesses men contract and spread. I had seen their effects, and healthy as I was, I feared them as I feared the Devil, since the least contact with the French illness is all that it takes to become infected. Or I might get pregnant. Vinegar-soaked sponges are not totally reliable, and I had so often prayed to the Virgin for a child that she might grant me the favor at the wrong time. Miracles can be inopportune.
These sensible precautions served me well during years of forced chastity in which my heart was snuffed out but my body continued to make demands. In this New World the air is warm, propitious to sensuality; everything is more intense: color, aromas, tastes—even the flowers, with their seductive fragrances, and the fruit, warm and fleshy, provoke lust. In Cartagena, and then in Panamá, I questioned the principles that had guided me in Spain. My youth was passing me by, my life was being wasted. Who cared about my virtue? Who was there to judge me? I concluded that God must be more compliant in the Americas than in Extremadura. If he forgave the abuses committed in his name against thousands of natives, surely he would forgive one poor woman’s weakness.
I was elated when we reached the port of Callao safe and sound and I could leave the ship, where I was beginning to feel crazed. There is nothing as oppressive as the confinement of a ship in the immensity of the fathomless, limitless ocean. “Port” was too ambitious a word for Callao in those years. They say that now it is the most important port in the Pacific, and that incalculable treasures leave from there for Spain, but at that time it was a miserable little pier. From Callao I accompanied the priests to Ciudad de los Reyes, which now is called Lima, not as graceful as the City of Kings. Since I prefer the former, I will continue to refer to it that way. The sky over the city Francisco Pizarro founded in a large valley seemed forever cloudy, and sunlight filtering through the humid air lent it the ethereal aura one sees in the hazy sketches of Daniel Belalcázar. Once there, I made the necessary inquries, and after a few days found a soldier who had known Juan de Málaga.
“You have come too late, señora,” he told me. “Your husband died in the battle at Las Salinas.”
“Juan wasn’t a soldier,” I corrected.
“Here there is no other occupation; even the priests take up the sword.”
The man was frightful looking: a wild beard covered half his chest, his clothing was filthy and in tatters, his teeth had fallen out, and he seemed drunk. He swore to me that he had been a friend of my husband, but I did not believe him. First he told me that Juan was a foot soldier, deep in debt from gambling, and drained by the vices of women and wine, but then he went off on a tangent about a helmet with white plumes and a brocade cape. Then to top off my discomfort, he lunged forward as if to throw his arms around me, and when I pushed him away offered to buy my favors with gold.
Since I had already come so far—from Extremadura to the ancient territories of Atahualpa—I decided that I could afford to make one last effort, so I joined a caravan transporting supplies and a herd of llamas and alpacas to Cuzco. We were in the care of a group of soldiers under the command of a certain Lieutenant Núñez, handsome, boastful, and, it appeared, accustomed to indulging his whims. Traveling with me, in addition to the soldiers, were two priests, a scribe, an auditor, and a German physician, all of us on horseback or mules, or carried in litters by the Indians. I was the only Spanish woman, but some Quechua Indian women with their children were following along behind the interminable string of bearers, carrying food for their husbands. Their clothing of brilliantly colored wool gave an impression of gaiety that was belied by the sullen, rancorous expression of subjected peoples. They were short, with high cheekbones and small almond-shaped eyes, and their teeth were black from the coca leaves they constantly chewed to lift their spirits. I found the children enchanting, and a few of the women attractive, though none of them smiled. They followed us for several leagues, until Núñez ordered them to go back home; then they dropped off one by one, leading their children by the hand.
The bearers were very strong and, though barefoot and laden like beasts, they endured the vagaries of the climate and fatigue of the journey better than those of us riding on horseback. They could trot along for hours without changing their rhythm, silent and abstracted, in a kind of dreamlike state. They spoke only the most basic Spanish, plaintive, singsong, and always as if asking a
question. The barking of Lieutenant Núñez’s ferocious mastiffs, which had been trained to kill, was the only thing that seemed to penetrate their absorption.
Núñez began to harass me the first day of the march, and from then on never left me in peace. Prudently, I tried to hold him at bay by reminding him of my status as a married woman, knowing it did not behoove me to make an enemy of the man, but the farther we went, the bolder he became. He made much of being a hidalgo, something I had difficulty believing, given his behavior. He had made a small fortune, and kept thirty Indian concubines—half in Ciudad de los Reyes and half in Cuzco—“all very obliging,” as he described them. In his town in Spain that would have been scandalous, but it is the norm in the New World, where Spaniards take Indian and black women at will. They abandon most of them after using them for their pleasure, but keep a few as servants, though rarely do they look after the children born of those subjugated mothers. And so these lands are being peopled with resentful mestizos. Núñez told me he would dismiss his concubines once I accepted his proposal, for he had no doubt that I would do just that as soon as I verified that my husband was dead—which he was certain was true. That pompous lieutenant was very like Juan de Málaga in his defects but he had none of the virtues, so why would I love him. And I am not one of those women who trips twice over the same stone.
At that time, the number of Spanish women in Peru could still be counted on one’s fingers, and I knew of none who had come alone, as I had. They were wives or daughters of soldiers, and had come at the insistence of the Crown, which was attempting to reunite families and create a legitimate and decent society in the colonies. Those women wasted their lives behind closed doors, lonely and bored, though well cared for, since they had dozens of Indian women to carry out their least desires. I was told that Spanish ladies in Peru did not even wipe their own bottoms; their servants were charged with that duty.
Since the men in the caravan were not accustomed to seeing a Spanish woman without a companion, they made an effort to treat me with the greatest consideration, as if I were a person of high rank and breeding and not a poor seamstress. In that long, slow journey to Cuzco they tended to my needs, shared their food with me, lent me their tents and mounts, and gave me boots and a blanket woven of vicuña, the finest cloth in the world. In exchange they asked only that I sing them a song or tell them tales of Spain when we camped at night and their hearts were heavy with nostalgia. Without their help, I wouldn’t have made it, for there everything cost a hundred times more than it did in Spain, and soon I had exhausted my last maravedí. Gold was so abundant in Peru that silver was scorned, and essential items—like shoes for horses or ink for writing—were so scarce that the prices were absurd. I pulled a rotten tooth for one of my companions, a quick and simple procedure. All I had needed were pincers and a prayer to Santa Apolonia but he paid me with an emerald worthy of a bishop. It is now set in the crown of Nuestra Señora del Socorro, and is worth more than it was then, since precious stones are not plentiful in Chile.
After several days’ march along the highways of the Incas, across dry plains and mountains, crossing gorges on hanging bridges woven of vines and reeds, and wading through streams and salt pools, upward, always upward, we eventually reached the end of the journey. Lieutenant Núñez, high atop his horse, pointed out Cuzco with his lance.
I have never seen anything like the magnificent city of Cuzco, the umbilicus of the Inca empire, a sacred place where man speaks with the divinity. Perhaps Madrid, Rome, or some of the Moorish cities that have a reputation for splendor can be compared to Cuzco, but I have not seen them. Despite the destruction and vandalism of war, it was a gleaming white jewel beneath a purple sky. I had difficulty breathing and for several days went about short of breath, not because of the altitude and thin air, as I had been warned, but because of the massive beauty of the city’s temples, fortresses, and buildings. I was told that when the first Spaniards arrived there were palaces covered with sheets of gold, though now the walls were bare. At the north edge of the city sits a spectacular construction, Sacsahuamán, the sacred fortress, with its three lines of high, sharply zigzagging walls, the Temple of the Sun, a labyrinth of streets, towers, paths, stairs, terraces, cellars, and dwellings where fifty or sixty thousand people lived in comfort. The name means “satisfied hawk” and, like a hawk, it watches over Cuzco. It was built with monumental chiseled stone blocks put together without mortar, but with such perfection that a thin knife blade cannot be inserted between them. How did they cut those enormous stones without metal tools? How did they transport them so many leagues without wheels or horses? And I wondered, too, how a handful of Spanish soldiers managed so quickly to conquer an empire capable of erecting a marvel like that. The Incas may have been quarreling among themselves, and the Spaniards may have had thousands of Yanaconas to serve them and fight their wars, but their epic achievement still seems inexplicable today. The Spaniards would say, “We have God on our side, besides gunpowder and iron,” grateful that the natives were defending themselves with stone weapons. “When they saw us arrive from the sea on houses fitted with great wings, they believed that we were gods,” they would add, but it is my opinion that they were the ones who spread that very convenient story, and that both the Indians and they ended up believing it.
I walked through the streets of Cuzco, amazed, studying the throngs. Those copper-colored people never smiled at me or looked me in the eye. I tried to imagine their lives before we arrived, when entire families in their colorful clothing walked these same streets, along with priests with gold breastplates, and the Inca, bedecked with jewels and carried in a gold litter decorated with the feathers of fabulous birds, accompanied by his musicians, his pompous warriors, and his interminable train of wives and virgins of the Sun. That complex culture survived, nearly intact, despite the invaders, but it was less visible. An Inca ruler was still enthroned, kept as a pampered prisoner by Francisco Pizarro, but I never saw him because I had no entrée to his sequestered court. Crowds filled the street, but they were silent. For each bearded Spaniard there were hundreds of smooth-skinned natives. The Spaniards, haughty and noisy, lived in a different dimension, as if the natives were invisible, mere shadows in the narrow cobbled streets. Indians stepped aside for the foreigners who had defeated them, but they maintained their customs, beliefs, and hierarchies, with the hope that one day, with time and patience, they would be free of the bearded ones. They could not conceive of their staying forever.
By then the fratricidal violence that had divided the Spaniards in the days of Diego de Almagro had calmed somewhat. In Cuzco, life was beginning again with a slow rhythm, the pace cautious because there was still unvented rancor and tempers were easily heated. The soldiers were keyed up over the merciless civil war, the country was impoverished and chaotic, and the Indians subjected to forced labor were storing up hatred. Our Emperor Charles V had ordered in his royal proclamations that the natives be treated with respect, that they be evangelized and civilized through kindness and good works, but that was not the reality. The king, who had never set foot in the New World, dictated his judicious laws in dark rooms in ancient palaces thousands of leagues away from the peoples he was endeavoring to govern, but never taking human greed into account. Few Spaniards respected his ordinances, least of all the marqués gobernador Francisco Pizarro. Even the lowest Spaniard had Indians for servants, and the rich landowners had them by the hundreds, since the land and the mines were worthless without men to work them. Under the overseer’s whip, the Indians obeyed, although some chose a compassionate death for their families, and then killed themselves.
Speaking with the soldiers, I was able to fit together the pieces of Juan’s story, and to learn, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that he was dead. My husband had reached Peru, after being worn down in his search for El Dorado in the steaming jungles farther north, and had enlisted in the army of Francisco Pizarro. He was not cut out to be a soldier, but he had somehow survived in his encounters with Ind
ians. He obtained a little gold, since gold was everywhere, but again and again he lost it gambling. He owed money to several of his comrades, and a sizable amount to Hernando Pizarro, brother of the governor. To pay off that debt he had been forced to serve as the governor’s lackey, and at his orders had been involved in several questionable activities.
In the battle of Las Salinas, my husband had fought with the victorious troops, where he was given a strange assignment, the last of his life. Before the battle, Hernando Pizarro ordered him to exchange uniforms with him, so while Juan was outfitted in orange velvet and fine armor, the brocade cape Pizarro usually wore, and a white-plumed helmet with a silver visor, his commander was blending in with the infantry, dressed as an ordinary soldier. It is possible that Hernando Pizarro might have chosen my husband because he was tall: Juan was exactly his height. Because his usual garb was so conspicuous, Pizarro expected that his enemies would seek him out during the battle, which is in fact what happened. The extravagant uniform was spotted by Almagro’s captains, who slashed their way toward it with their swords, and taking the inconsequential Juan de Málaga for the brother of the governor, killed him. Hernando Pizarro’s life was saved but that cowardice forever stained his name. His previous military feats were erased at one stroke, and nothing he ever did could restore his lost prestige. The shame of that ruse spilled over onto his fellow Spaniards—friends and enemies—who never forgave him.