City of Silver

by Annamaria Alfieri

  “Run. Run!” he commanded.

  More footsteps followed, but when they reached the other end of the bridge, the Calle San Benito was crowded with people marching in the mascarada. Suddenly, the breathless girls were surrounded by people in colorful disguises and regional costumes. Laughing men and women dressed as historical or mythological characters. Looming next to Gemita was a huge fat man dressed as the infidel Turk. His white, bejeweled turban was askew, and his droopy fake mustache had detached from one side of his face.

  “Smile, laugh,” their escort said. “Pretend you are here to join the merriment.” He glanced often behind him but put his hands on their shoulders and pretended to joke. When they reached the Calle Zarate, he turned them, following a band of revelers to the Plaza del Gato. The heat from a bonfire in the plaza warmed them, and they sat for a moment on one of the stone benches. Candles burned in the windows and on the balconies. Their guardian watched down the street for their pursuers and scanned the other entrances to the plaza. “I think we are safe for the moment,” he said.

  Beatriz gazed up at him. He was a soldier, she was sure, well proportioned, with a proud line to his jaw and black hair that shone in the firelight. There was something about this man, his voice. She ransacked her memory. His hand still lay on her shoulder, like the hand of a guardian angel in a painting in church. Warmth and comfort spread from it and infused her thoughts, which were so powerful that she thought they must perfume the air around her. She was certain he sensed them.

  “Where are you taking us?”

  “To my godmother’s house. Let us go.” He led them to the home of the Marquesa de Otavi. He rang the bell and was immediately let into the outer courtyard. “Don’t tell my aunt about the danger,” the man whispered as he pulled the bell cord. “I don’t want to worry her. Her health is delicate.”

  The Marquesa herself came to the door of her palace to give them welcome and usher them in.

  “Aunt, please shelter these young ladies I found in distress. I will return presently.” He took a sword and a heavy cape from a shelf there in the entryway and quickly left.

  The elegant old lady ushered Beatriz and Gemita to a chamber on the second floor decorated with tapestries from France and Persian rugs. “You are the Tovar girl,” she said to Beatriz. She touched Gemita’s red and puffy eyes. “Lie here on these couches. My maid will bring you some maté.”

  IN A DANK stone cellar, Mother Maria did her best to chant her prayers. She wanted to calm Eustacia, who like her was chained to a wall. “Gloria Patri et Filio—” Her voice cracked. She waited for Sor Eustacia’s beautiful contralto to respond. Pray. They had to pray. Prayer was their only hope.

  “I cannot stay chained to this wall.” Eustacia jerked and beat the heavy iron links against the brick. “I will go mad.”

  Tears flowed from the Abbess’s eyes. Eustacia seemed already mad. “Et Spiritui Sancto.” She chanted the response herself and went on, focusing her thoughts on the words, words that could drive away all thought.

  “Yes,” Eustacia moaned. “This is the way it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be. Men abusing me. Men torturing me.” She continued to beat the chains in an odd bass rhythm to her Abbess’s chant.

  “Et in saecula saeculorum.” Maria Santa Hilda rocked her body. “Et in saecula saeculorum.” She repeated the words over and over, unable to keep away their piercing truth. World without end. Pain without end. Fear without end. Saecula saeculorum. Unending misery. Only death would remove it. Death on the pyre. Death that could lead to the flames of hell. “Credo in unum Deum,” she chanted. “I believe in one God.”

  “I do not believe. Not in a God who allows me to suffer so.”

  Maria Santa Hilda condemned herself. So renowned for her intelligence, she had let her pride blind her. It had taken her too long to see the truth. Now she knew nothing of how the wheels she had set in motion turned. Had Sor Monica found the evidence inside the convent? Had the padre gotten the letter? She might never know. She struggled to focus on prayer. “Sister, please try to quiet yourself. We may yet be released.”

  Eustacia, suddenly still, glared at her and then, like a ghost in a nightmare, stood, her arms weighed down by the chains hanging at her sides. She howled, a deep, crushing cry that sounded as if it came from the bowels of the earth.

  THE LONG DAY of festivities wore on for Nestares. Finally, past midnight, his hosts took him to the Calle de Contraste and the home of Don Francisco Gambarte, the finest house in the city. Its own opulent furnishings had, in the past few days, been augmented with items borrowed from other noble houses of the city—six gorgeous settees and a splendid bed hung with scarlet silk.

  There, after nineteen hours of continuous adulation, Nestares was finally allowed to retire into the arms of Doña Ilena Nieves, the most beautiful, and skillful, of Potosí’s scores of courtesans.

  On Easter Monday night of 1650, Doña Ilena’s task was the ecstasy of the Visitador, but the exhausted Nestares welcomed her soft body as a source of warmth rather than stimulation. In her naked arms, he fell immediately into a deep, nearly comatose sleep.

  In another part of the house, the Cape Verde slave in whose place the beautiful courtesan slept prepared to retire. She thought of the white flesh that yielded to her master and lover. She laid out her best green silk dress for the morning and beside it, in the hopes of the signal from the Alcalde, the packet of deadly herbs she had received from Captain Ramirez.

  Twenty-two

  WELL PAST MIDNIGHT, in the second-floor hall of the convent, at the only small window that overlooked the field next door, the Sister Herbalist had been more than an hour at difficult work. The other sisters would soon rise for the third Nocturne—the last of the prayers during the night. She had to be gone before they assembled.

  She forced her frozen, stinging hands to continue to saw at the lock that she had always thought kept intruders out but that she now realized also kept her in. She pressed her fear into the sawing motion of the rasp, and the lock finally gave way.

  “Vitallina,” she whispered to the big woman who dozed on the floor at her feet, “wake.” She poked her assistant’s flank.

  Vitallina started. “Yes, Sister.” Her voice was thick with sleep.

  “Do you have the red pepper?”

  “Yes. In the sack with the cat.”

  Monica herself carried the vial with the poison and the two flails wrapped in many folds of linen to make sure they pricked no one. They were rolled up in the apron of the maid’s uniform she wore.

  She swung open the iron gate that barred the windows of the upper storage room and looked out on the vacant field behind the rear cloister. Clouds obscured the moon. What little light there was painted a terrifying picture of rocks and shadows and desolation. She climbed out onto the roof.

  A tile let go. She lost her footing and slid to the edge. She did not make a sound. “Throw the rope,” she whispered to Vitallina. “Dear Mother of God, protect us,” she murmured.

  Her assistant tied the rope fast to the window grate and dropped it to her. The Sister Herbalist grasped it. “When I reach the bottom, you follow,” she whispered. She lowered herself to the ground. “Now.”

  Just as Vitallina started down, the distant pealing of the convent bell startled them both. “Hurry,” the Sister Herbalist urged.

  A cracking noise from above stopped Vitallina at the edge of the roof. “It is giving way. The window ledge is rotted,” the big woman whimpered. “I cannot do it.”

  “Close your eyes,” Sor Monica whispered. “I will come to help you.” She grasped the rope and started to climb. The wood above gave a great crack and sounded as if it would have split if Monica had not dropped immediately to the ground.

  “I am going back,” Vitallina called. “I cannot do it.”

  “Please, you must come with me. I hardly know my way around the town. I have never been out alone.”

  “Forgive me.” Vitallina had already climbed back to the
window.

  As Monica waited bereft at the bottom of the outside wall, the rope was pulled up and then dropped back down. At the end of it was the cloth bag containing the dead cat and a packet of ground red pepper, as if they were the ingredients for a bizarre stew. The window closed.

  Monica stood there motionless for the space of a credo. At last, she recovered her own resolve. She took the bag, ran across the Campo del San Clemente, and slipped away into the night.

  THE ALCALDE WAS relentless. He was the most powerful, the richest man in the richest city on earth. He had amassed a king’s ransom. He had tracked the infamous Chocta, found and arrested hundreds of wily Mestizos. No mere silly girls in the company of some effeminate swain would elude him.

  That interfering youth’s friends—typical of their thin noble blood—ran off once they saw they were outnumbered. The priest might know where the girls had gone, but the Alcalde’s guardsmen had come to the point of almost drowning him in the frigid river that powered the mills and still he would not talk. They finally gave up and threw him into the water to certain death.

  The Alcalde sent his men to all parts of the city to look for the girls and their protector. In the meanwhile, Morada set out to learn the identities of those young serenaders. They were strangers to him and therefore most likely had entered the city this morning with Nestares.

  A place under the Alcalde’s heart trembled, a tiny place that seemed like the center of his anger, the source of his rage and power. His essence was evaporating. His life could be over.

  But Spanish men did not think such thoughts. The sons of Conquistadores were fearless.

  The Alcalde gripped the hilt of the sword at his side and with the captain of his guard, his stalwart Carlos, awaited news of the whereabouts of his daughter and her naughty friend.

  He did not have to wait long.

  BEATRIZ AND GEMITA waited in the upper room where the Marquesa had left them. Beatriz examined the appointments. The house was all luxury. She ran her fingers across the polished surface of a beautiful Flemish desk. She picked up a Venetian glass bottle and opened it. It held the same perfume from Arabia that scented the tall stranger’s beautiful taffeta cloak, which lay now over the couch where Gemita reclined.

  “I think this is the antechamber to his bedroom,” Beatriz said. She opened the armario that stood next to the door. It contained a man’s clothing. “Look at this beautiful English hat.” She took it out and put it on.

  “I wouldn’t wear a Protestant hat.” Gemita still dabbed at her nose with the stranger’s linen-and-lace handkerchief.

  Beatriz wished she had been the one to receive it. It would be wrong, but she wanted to keep it, as a token of him. “He must look so dashing in this hat,” she said wistfully.

  Gemita sat up. “I thought you were in love with Domingo Barco.”

  “That’s silly. Where would you learn such a thing?”

  “From Inez. He was her lover. He told her that you fancied yourself in love with him.”

  Beatriz ignored the flush that rose from her chest to her throat. “That is nonsense.” She doffed the hat, swept it across her body, and bowed in the fine gesture of a cavalier. “I would rather be in love with a handsome stranger who smells of perfume from Araby.” His voice. In the shadowy streets, she had not seen him clearly, but she knew his voice from somewhere.

  Gemita tucked his handkerchief in her sleeve. “What is going to happen to us?”

  Beatriz put down the hat. The packet of letters was still tied to her waist with the green ribbon. She undid it. “I don’t know. We must get these letters to the Visitador. They are the only proof that the Abbess is innocent.” A plan began to form in her mind.

  “Do you think the Marquesa’s nephew will come back for us,” Gemita asked, “and help us take the letters to Nestares?”

  “He doesn’t know about the letters.” A nasty suspicion ambushed Beatriz. Suppose that tall, graceful man owed allegiance to the Alcalde. Suppose he had brought them here to keep them out of the way. They would fall into the same trap they hoped to escape. “We must leave here now, Gemita. It is nearly dawn. We must take these letters and go directly to the Visitador.”

  “Are you crazy? Two girls cannot go out in the dark alone.”

  Beatriz took the hat and put it on Gemita’s head. “We will not be two girls.”

  They stripped to their fine linen undergarments and took the stranger’s clothing out of the armario. Their breasts were already bound according to the fashion of the day to make them appear flat-chested. They put on tunics and Neapolitan hose and shoes, doublets, and mail shirts. Gemita refused the English hat, which Beatriz gladly wore, giving her friend a good Spanish one of white beaver. They took two fine Toledo swords, stout bucklers, and pistols for each, which neither knew how to operate.

  “Everything is too big, especially the gloves and shoes,” Gemita complained.

  “Pull the belt tight, like this. Here.” She knotted a sash snugly around Gemita’s waist, took a pair of stockings from the armario shelf, and shoved them into the toes of the boots. She shoved the packet of letters inside her own coat, then slipped out into the dark corridor. Gemita followed.

  The house was silent, but just as they reached the top of the stairs, a sudden pounding sounded at the postern, raising the hall servant, who shouted up the steps, “My lady . . . my lady. It is the Alcalde and his guard.” The Marquesa was nowhere to be seen.

  “My father!” Gemita’s voice shook.

  Beatriz pushed her back through the room where they had dressed and into the adjoining bedchamber. Then she tore a sheet from the bed, tied it to the bedpost, and threw it out the window. While the Alcalde and his henchmen swarmed over the house, the girls they sought slid down the sheet to the roof of a stable and thence to the street.

  Once outside, they had no idea where to go. In an hour or so they could go to the Alcaldía to find Nestares. Until then, where could they shelter themselves?

  They moved quickly away from the Marquesa’s house around to the Calle Zarate. At the deserted corner of the Calle de Santo Domingo, they encountered a cart heaped with skulls, left from the penitential parades of Good Friday.

  “We have to go where boys go and pray we are not discovered,” Beatriz whispered.

  They made their way to the Tianguez, where vendors, scriveners, and sextons gathered during the day and where the bullfighting ring was erected during Christmas. Beatriz had always imagined it was where young men congregated while good girls were safe behind the draperies of their beds.

  In the dark of this awful night, the square was deserted. The weak moonlight and the torches burning on the buildings cast grotesque shadows. A shutter flapping in the wind thudded and echoed off the façades of the dark buildings. The girls went to warm themselves near a dying bonfire. They barely spoke. Beatriz patted Gemita’s shoulder from time to time while they huddled inside their heavy masculine cloaks and waited.

  Suddenly, just as dawn was breaking, three men entered from the Calle de Copacabaña. They drew their weapons and charged toward the two slight young boys who lingered beside the near dead embers in the corner of the square.

  Twenty-three

  AT DAWN, THE bell ringing resumed, continuing the festival to welcome Nestares. The church wardens around the city were taking their turns so that from first light until midnight, the sound of bells could be heard.

  Just as the pealing started, stern soldier-priests entered the secret prison near the Augustinian monastery and unchained the Abbess of the Convent of Santa Isabella de los Santos Milagros and her sister accused. They took the two frightened women to join the procession along the Calle Zarate to the Church of Santo Domingo. Though the Inquisitor General de la Gasca was a man of severely simple and elegant tastes, he had approved this pomp and ostentation for the opportunity of making an impression on the popular mind. The faithful must be shown the rewards of goodness and the punishment of evil.

  Seven Potosino noblemen led the pa
rade, richly dressed, mounted on white horses, and carrying palms of victory. Behind them were the Inquisitor and the officers of the Tribunal, followed by Commissioner DaTriesta and his prisoners, guarded by armed and armored priests.

  Maria Santa Hilda walked beside Sor Eustacia and sought to bear the yellow robe with dignity. She held her head high and forced herself to look at the buildings and into the eyes of the observers as she passed. Blessedly, at this early hour, on the morning after raucous reveling, the streets were nearly empty.

  The Abbess gazed up at the Cerro, barely visible against the dark gray sky. When she had first arrived in the City of Silver, that same year, a large earthquake had destroyed almost the entire city of Cuzco and its surroundings. The night of the earthquake, a ball of fire appeared in Potosí, coming from the hills of Caricari and exploding at the summit of the Muynaypata with such force that it shattered all the pines and knocked down the Indian ranches on the bordering hills. If such an event happened now, what would these men who accused her make of it? That God’s wrath was warning them that they threatened two innocent women? No. They would see in it more proof that these women were instruments of Satan who placed the faithful on the brink of eternal damnation.

  When the marchers reached the church, Maria Santa Hilda took Sor Eustacia to a corner and tried to comfort her. In these past two days, the Abbess had come to believe that Eustacia’s silence and devotion, which the Abbess had always admired, covered a reservoir of anger hotter than the ovens that smelted the ore, in danger of exploding, like the volcanic mountains out in the cordillera. The Abbess understood some of the ingredients of Eustacia’s boiling cauldron of rage, and she forgave her, but she wondered why, with all that she herself had suffered, she was not mad as well.

  Meanwhile, in the main part of the church, the trial of some priests proceeded quickly. From what the Abbess could hear, they were accused of solicitation—the crime of seducing women in the confessional. Presently, five friars left the main church, passed through the vestibule, and exited by the street door. Their hoods covered their faces, and their arms were folded into their sleeves. The cords that they ordinarily kept about their waists were hung around their necks to indicate their guilt. They seemed strong and young, but they marched gravely behind a solemn friar whose face was also covered but who had the frail step of an old man and wore his cord around his waist.