Civilizations

by Laurent Binet

  However, the three ships could not take everyone, particularly since Atahualpa had no intention of leaving behind anything that belonged to him. His plates, his clothes, his animals, his food supplies: all of it had to come. After listening to Anacaona’s explanations, he had decided to take lots of gold with him. Then, according to their rank and usefulness, he personally selected those who would travel with him: the nobility, the soldiers, the functionaries of the Empire (accountants, archivists, seers), the craftsmen, the women … It came to less than two hundred people, and yet even that was beyond the ships’ usual capacity. He also took a few horses, llamas, cuys (for eating), and Atahualpa could not be separated from his puma or his parrots.

  Just before their departure, Higuénamota came to the emperor and begged: ‘Let me come with you.’ Atahualpa understood that she had spent her whole life wondering about the mysterious lands from where the pale-skinned men had come, all those years before. He also saw that she would be a useful asset.

  Finally, the day of their departure arrived. The Quitonians who could not accompany their emperor stood on the beach and wept. Anacaona embraced her daughter. Atahualpa, surrounded by his generals, waved farewell to the island that had welcomed him, with the feeling that he was not likely to see it again any time soon.

  7. Lisbon

  They sailed.

  During the crossing, Higuénamota became Atahualpa’s lover. The young emperor was enchanted by this woman who was old enough to be his mother and who, of her own free will, had left her homeland for tales heard in childhood that she had never been able to forget.

  Together, they pored over the old maps they had found on the ship and tried to decipher them. Atahualpa’s scholars had worked out how to use an instrument that enabled them to navigate using the stars, so the ship never deviated from its trajectory.

  One morning, Ruminahui came to see Atahualpa in his room. The emperor was drinking akha with his mistress. Outside, white birds circled the sky, a sign that land was near. When at last it appeared on the horizon, those weeks spent in intimacy with the emperor had given Anacaona’s daughter a remarkable command of Quechua (the language spoken by Atahualpa, in preference to Aymara, but with a Quito accent).

  They sailed alongside the coast of these new lands. One night, just before dawn, a miracle occurred that terrified the crew: the sea began to swell, even though there was not a breath of wind. It was like a silent hurricane and it almost destroyed the three ships. How cruel it would have been to die only two cable lengths from terra firma, when everything suggested that they had reached their journey’s end. The skill of the captains saved them from this tragic irony.

  They entered the mouth of a gigantic river. A thick stone tower rose up, as if from the water itself, to guard the door of the sea. To their right, green hills hinted at a pleasant land. But to their left, a flooded plain suggested that the angry river had overflowed its banks. A vast white stone edifice, as long as the greatest palaces in Cuzco, ran along the shore. The birds had stopped singing. The new arrivals, spooked by their silence, did not utter a word.

  Atahualpa gave the order to sail close to the tower. Its walls were decorated with sculptures of unknown animals. The crew were particularly intrigued by the head of a tapir with a horn on its snout. But there were also, carved in the stone, those crosses that Higuénamota recognised as the emblems of the foreigners from long ago. So it was that they knew they had reached their destination.

  The ships continued along the shore. The strangest sights unfolded before them. Stone houses in ruins. Fires burning in the hills. Corpses strewn over the ground. Men, women and dogs wandering amid the rubble. The first sounds that they heard in this New World were the barking of dogs and the crying of children.

  The river widened like a lake. The captains had to tack between the half-submerged wrecks of other boats. Finally they discovered a square so large that it was equal in surface area to the fortress of Sacsayhuaman, and across it lay ships of all sizes, with twisted keels, smashed hulls, broken masts. On the left-hand side of the square, a magnificent palace, surmounted by a slender tower, seemed to have collapsed in on itself. They disembarked.

  The square, which had obviously been beautiful until very recently, was now little more than a pond. The sandals they wore sank into the mud and the water came up to their ankles, even the imperial ankles of Atahualpa, who had decided against being carried in his litter, given the treacherousness of the drenched ground.

  They encountered the dazed shadows of men, dressed in rags, moving slowly around the beached boats, staring vacantly as they dragged their feet, sometimes bumping into things like blind men, and when these ghosts saw the visitors, their faces showed no expression, no comprehension, no surprise. From time to time, a sinister creaking noise arose from the city, followed by screams that turned to pitiful wails.

  Although it wasn’t cold, the air bit into their flesh. The Quitonians, used to the bitter remoteness of the Andes, paid no attention to it, fascinated as they were by the desolate sights that greeted their disbelieving eyes. But Higuénamota, who had led them to the end of the world, was a Taíno. She had only ever known two seasons on the islands, one dry and one wet, both of them warm. Atahualpa noticed that her naked body was trembling. The crew was exhausted and on edge after their long voyage. He decided that they should find somewhere to rest. But where in this city of ruins could they find shelter for 183 people, thirty-seven horses, one puma and several llamas? They returned to the white building they had seen downriver – the only building, along with the tower in the middle of the sea, that appeared to be still standing.

  It was a long, angular palace, with slim pointed columns like lances that seemed to act as supports, wide arched windows, symmetrical turrets, and a dome-shaped tower, the chalky stone so elaborately worked that it looked as if it had been carved entirely in bone.

  It was occupied by strange-looking people: men in brown and white robes, the tops of their heads shaved, knelt on the floor with their hands joined and their eyes closed, muttering inaudible sounds. When they at last noticed their visitors, these creatures began running in all directions, like frightened little cuys, crying out as their sandals slapped against the paving stones. One, however, was calmer and braver than the rest: this man, who wore a gold ring on one finger of his right hand, approached to speak with them. Atahualpa asked his mistress if she could understand the man’s language, but she was only able to distinguish a few words – ‘providencia’, ‘castigo’, ‘india’ – amid sentences whose architecture remained obscure, if strangely familiar. She thought that her conversations with the foreigner of long ago must have been lost somewhere in the deep well of memory, and that all that remained to her were a few scattered scraps. However, the creatures, although frightened, seemed harmless. Atahualpa ordered his people to make themselves at home. The animals were brought out of the ships, and men and women moved into an enormous dining hall. Higuénamota, addressing the gold ring, said: ‘Comer’. She saw that the man had understood her. He brought them some food: a hot soup and a sort of biscuit with a crunchy crust and a soft flesh, which they liked very much, perhaps because they were so hungry. They also tasted a black, red-tinted drink.

  And so the long voyage was over at last. All of them – men, women, horses, llamas – had survived the great sea. They had reached the land of the rising Sun.

  Outside, the river was speckled with golden reflections. Or perhaps they were bits of straw floating on the surface.

  Within this palace was a sacred place with translucent patches of red, yellow, green and blue. The ceiling there was like a spider’s web carved into the stone, and even higher than Pachacuti’s palace. At the far end of the building, on a raised platform that was sumptuously decorated – if not entirely covered with gold like the House of the Sun – stood the statue of a very thin man nailed to a cross. The shaved men gathered in this place for fervent devotion, which the Quitonians felt fairly sure was a sort of huaca. But who was this
nailed god? They would find that out soon enough.

  Yet the creatures seemed to be arguing, and the visitors knew that they were the object of these discussions.

  Here and there, the shaved men were clearing away rubble. Atahualpa decided it would be a good idea to have his people help them. And so the Quitonians cleared away rubble too. For anyone from Tawantinsuyu, it wasn’t difficult to guess what had happened here: the earth had trembled and opened up, and then an enormous wave had hit the coast. Atahualpa and his men were all too familiar with this phenomenon. There was even the telltale smell of rotten eggs in the air, brought there by an easterly breeze.

  Atahualpa had chosen a sufficiently vast room for himself and his wives, where his sleeping mat had been put on the floor. He was joined by Higuénamota, who had not found anywhere to hang her hammock, and by his sister-wife, Coya Asarpay. The rest of the group took shelter under the arches of the inner courtyard. Their beasts were kept there too, and the shaved men approached these animals with fearful curiosity, having never seen llamas before. At last they went to sleep, under the watchful eye of Ruminahui, after asking for some more of the black drink.

  8. The Land of the East

  For all their fearfulness, the shaved men could not help being intrigued. Who were these visitors? They admired our clothes, touched our ears, and became embroiled in conjectures. The presence of the women plunged them into a state of extreme agitation, particularly Higuénamota, the sight of whom seemed to blind them like the sun, for they put their hands over their eyes and turned away whenever she passed by. They kept trying to put one of their ugly shrouds around her shoulders, but she just laughed and pushed them away. The Cuban princess wore nothing but the bracelets she had received from her mother, around her wrists and ankles, and a gold necklace that Atahualpa had given her.

  Nevertheless, the shaved man with the ring – who was their chief and who seemed more reasonable than the others – having noticed that Higuénamota understood a little of their language, took her into a room where other shaved men were scratching away at squares of material covered with little black lines. She had seen them before, these talking sheets, kept in leather cases, which filled the room up to its ceiling. The shaved man with the ring unfolded one of these sheets, on which a map was drawn, similar to the ones they had found on the foreigners’ ship. She realised that he wanted to know where she was from. He pointed to a spot on the map labelled Portugal. To the left, there was nothing but a vast emptiness, except for a small island situated lower down.

  Quizquiz took ten men to scout the surrounding area and returned to make his report to Atahualpa: the land was completely ravaged. The city seemed very large and filled with many people. But the inhabitants were all in a daze. Nobody had even noticed the new arrivals. The river was full of fish and the land, when it wasn’t trembling, seemed pleasant. As a sample of the local fauna, Quizquiz had brought back a sort of dwarfish llama that he’d found. They had not observed any birds in the sky.

  Thick clouds from the north burst open and the rain put out the fires that were still burning in the hills. The Quitonians used the hospitality of the shaved men to recover from their fatigue after the long crossing. They noticed that the black drink that their hosts served them became red when it was poured into translucent cups, and this wonder made a great impression on them.

  When Atahualpa judged that his men were sufficiently rested, he ordered that they should, as custom dictated, burn the remains of the food they had brought from Cuba, which they had piously kept in crates. According to protocol, they should also burn the clothes they had brought with them. However, the unprecedented situation in which the former sovereign of Chinchaysuyu found himself – in an unknown land, with no notion of its resources of alpaga or cotton (but not impressed at all by the coarse clothing worn by these people living in a palace) – persuaded him to postpone that part of the ritual.

  They brought the crates from the boats. Atahualpa was carried in his litter to oversee the ceremony. He had wanted it to take place on the riverbank, where the water had finally receded. The usual pomp and circumstance were reduced due to the fugitives’ meagre possessions, but the fallen monarch seemed intent, all the same, on reaffirming the prerogatives of his royal person, despite the fact that nobody had contested them. For this occasion, he had lent Higuénamota his bat-fur coat, because the air was cool. The Cuban princess stood beside him, as did his sister-wife, Coya Asarpay, while little Cusi Rimay and Quispe Sisa sat at his feet. His three generals stood to attention on horseback, axes in hand. After the dances and the songs, a woman was chosen from among the priestesses of the Sun. To the sound of tambourines, she lit the first crate. Instantly, a smell of grilled meat rose into the air, attracting the local inhabitants. They were filthy and in rags; they stared, wide-eyed, at the crates, appearing not to notice the visitors. Nobody would have dared interrupt the ceremony without an express order from Atahualpa, but they all watched the reactions of these new arrivals, who approached the crates in concentric circles. Ultimately, unable to bear it any longer, one of them thrust his hands into the blaze and plucked out a half-chewed bone. He was immediately seized by the soldiers of the guard, who were ready to slit his throat, but Atahualpa made a sign to spare him. That was like a signal for the others. The Quitonians watched speechlessly as the bestial spectacle unfolded. The crates were ripped open and the locals fought, grunting, over their contents. They wolfed down anything they found, protecting their miserable pickings with kicks and punches. Probably more out of surprise than pity, the fallen emperor allowed them to finish their meal. When they had devoured everything, down to the last cuy bone, the people seemed to wake from a fever dream. They looked up, their faces smeared with grease, and finally saw the visitors. And they froze.

  Later, the scene would be immortalised in a famous Titian painting: Atahualpa, young, handsome, imperial in his dignity, a parrot on his shoulder, his puma on a leash, surrounded by his wives; Higuénamota, dressed in a gleaming bronze-coloured coat, her chest bare; Cosi Asarpay, looking disgusted; her little sister, Quispe Sisa, alarmed by the sight of the first Levantines that she had seen close up; all the Quitonians motionless in their beautiful clothes of shimmering colours and geometric patterns; the black, glistening fur of Ruminahui’s horse, and the white horses, manes blowing in the wind, of Quizquiz and Chalco Chimac. At the centre of the image, a Levantine, sitting cross-legged, gnaws at a bone, his lips drawn back, in front of a horrified priestess of the Sun. Another, curious, reaches out to touch the ears of an impassive Inca lord. Still another is kneeling, arms raised imploringly to the sky. All the others bow respectfully to the emperor.

  Of course, Titian wasn’t there to witness the scene, and it didn’t actually happen in precisely that way.

  It is true that one of the Levantines wanted to touch the ear of an Inca lord, but then Atahualpa, without moving from his litter, made a sign to his guard; the men banged their lances against their shields and all the Levantines ran away like vicuñas frightened by thunder.

  News of the visitors’ arrival spread quickly after this. Scruffy Levantines pressed around the shaved men’s palace. Quizquiz, once again, was sent on a scouting mission. He reported that their intentions, though not exactly hostile, did not seem especially friendly. So outings were limited to those that were strictly necessary. After all, the Quitonians were fine, sheltered behind those stone walls. There was an abundance of the black drink and, besides, they didn’t know where else to go.

  9. Catalina

  Days passed: a moon, or perhaps two. The Quitonians imagined staying there until stores of the black drink were exhausted. But history has taught us that few events bother announcing their arrival in advance, a number enjoy eluding all attempts at prediction, while most are content simply to happen.

  Now, it happened that the king of this country came to the palace of the shaved men. He was accompanied by a young blonde woman who was his queen, and by a large retinue of lords and soldiers. The
lords and the queen were dressed with an elegance that the Quitonians had not yet encountered among the other inhabitants, their clothes cut from materials that seemed highly delicate, even if they didn’t rival those of the Incas. The king, however, was dressed in a simple coat and a flat hat, both black to match his beard, and no jewellery but a necklace made of thick metal links, with – hanging from it – a red cross set in a golden ring. The queen’s blonde hair intrigued them more than the king’s beard. To start with, the black beard talked with the chief of the shaved men, and the Quitonians were able to see the deference with which the latter addressed the former, kissing his hands and genuflecting constantly, without ever standing straight (and yet without taking off his sandals).

  Then the king signalled his desire to speak with Atahualpa.

  He said his name was Joao. Hearing this, the Inca turned towards Higuénamota, because that name sounded a little like certain Taíno names.

  If the bearded king was shocked by the princess’s nudity, he did not let it show. He told them that he reigned over the country of Portugal and made ample gestures with his arms, apparently in reference to a vast empire, but the conversation was difficult because Higuénamota only understood a few words here and there. He used the word ‘deus’ a lot, and she didn’t know what it meant. Atahualpa reached his arms out westward to explain where they had come from. Joao seemed puzzled. He said another word: ‘Brasil?’ But the Quitonians didn’t understand that either.