Many Christians think the Masaya is a mouth of hell and that its flare-ups and everlasting fiery smoke announce eternal chastisements. Others assert that this incandescent smoke cloud, visible for fifty leagues, is produced by gold and silver being melted and purified, seething in the belly of the mountain. The more the fire blazes, the purer they become.
The expedition has been in preparation for a year. Father Blas del Castillo rises very early and hears the confessions of Pedro Ruiz, Benito Dávila, and Juan Sanchez. The four implore forgiveness with tears in their eyes and begin the march at daybreak.
The priest is the first to go down. He climbs into a basket, helmet on head, stole on chest, and cross in hand, and reaches the huge esplanade that surrounds the mouth of fire.
“It isn’t hell but paradise!” he proclaims, black with ashes, as he sticks the cross among the stones. Immediately his companions follow him down. From above, the Indians also send down pulley, chains, cauldrons, beams, bolts …
They submerge the iron cauldron. From the depths come neither gold nor silver, nothing but sulphur slag. When they dip the cauldron in deeper, the volcano eats it up.
(203)
1541: Santiago de Chile
Inés Suárez
Some months ago Pedro de Valdivia discovered this hill and this valley. The Araucanians, who had discovered the hill thousands of years earlier, called it Huelén, which means pain. Valdivia baptized it Santa Lucía.
From the crest of the hill Valdivia saw the green earth between arms of the river and decided that the world contained no better place to dedicate a city to the apostle Santiago, who accompanies the conquistadors and fights for them. He cut the air with his sword to the four cardinal points of the compass and so was born Santiago of the New Frontier. Now it is enjoying its first summer: a few houses of mud and sticks, roofed with straw, a plaza at the center, stockade all around.
A mere fifty men have remained in Santiago. Valdivia stays with them on the banks of the Cachapoal River. At break of day, the sentry sounds the alarm from the top of the stockade. Squadrons of natives are approaching from all four sides. The Spaniards hear the war cries, and immediately a downpour of arrows falls on them.
By noon some houses are nothing but ashes, and the stockade has fallen. They are fighting body to body in the plaza. Then Inés runs to the hut that serves as prison. There, the guard is standing watch over seven Araucanian chiefs whom the Spaniards captured some time ago. She suggests, implores, orders him to cut their heads off.
“What?”
“Their heads!”
“What?”
“Like this!”
Inés seizes his sword, and seven heads fly through the air. Those heads turn the besieged into pursuers. Taking the offensive, the Spaniards invoke not the apostle Santiago but Our Lady of Good Help.
Inés Suárez, the woman from Malaga, had been the first to sign up when Valdivia started recruiting at his house in Cuzco. She came to these southern lands at the head of the invading forces, riding alongside Valdivia, sword of stout steel, coat of fine mail, and ever since she marches, fights, and sleeps with Valdivia. Today she has taken his place.
She is the only woman among the men. They say: “She’s macho” and compare her with Roldán or El Cid, while she rubs oil on the fingers of Captain Francisco de Aguirre. They have stuck to his sword hilt and cannot be prised off although, for today, the war is over.
(67, 85, and 130)
1541: Rock of Nochistlán
Never
They had seized even his mule. Those who now eat off his silver service and tread his carpets had thrown him out of Mexico with fettered feet.
Ten years later they, the officials, summon the warrior back. Alvarado leaves off governing Guatemala and comes to chastise Indians in these ungrateful lands that he conquered along with Cortes. He wants to push on north to the seven golden cities of Cíbola, but this morning, at the height of the battle, a horse falls on him and throws him down a cliff.
To Mexico Pedro de Alvarado has returned, and in Mexico he lies. His helmet hangs from a branch, and his sword has fallen among the brambles. Don’t sheath me without honor can still be read on the steel blade.
(81)
1541: Old Guatemala City
Beatriz
Pedro de Alvarado had married Francisca, but Francisca was struck down by the orange-blossom tea that she drank on the road to Veracruz. Then he married Francisca’s sister, Beatriz.
Beatriz was waiting for him in Guatemala when she learned she had been two months widowed. She decked her house in black inside and out and nailed up doors and windows so that she could cry her heart out in private.
She weeps looking in the mirror at her nude body, which has dried up from so much waiting and now has nothing left to wait for, a body that no longer sings, and she weeps through her mouth, which can only sob: “Are you there, my darling?”
She weeps for this house that she hates and this land that is not hers and for the years spent between this house and the church, from Mass to Mess and from baptism to burial, surrounded by drunken soldiers and Indian servants who make her sick. She weeps for the food that upsets her and for him who never came, because there was always some war to fight or land to be conquered. She weeps for all the tears she has shed alone in her bed, when a dog’s bark or a rooster’s crow made her jump and she learned, all alone, to read the darkness and listen to the silence and make drawings in the air. She weeps and weeps, broken up inside.
When she finally emerges from seclusion, she announces: “I am the governor of Guatemala.”
She cannot govern for long.
The volcano vomits a cataract of water and stones that drowns the city and kills whatever it touches. The flood keeps advancing toward Beatriz’s house, while she runs to the chapel, goes to the altar, and embraces the Virgin. Her eleven maids embrace her feet and each other while Beatriz cries: “Are you there, my darling?”
The torrent destroys the city that Alvarado founded and, as it roars ever louder, Beatriz keeps crying out: “Are you there?”
(81)
1541: Cabo Frío
At Dawn, the Cricket Sang
It had been silent ever since they took it aboard in the port of Cadiz, two and a half months of silence and sadness in its little cage, until today its cry of joy rang out from bow to stern and woke everybody up.
“A miracle! A miracle!”
There was just time for the ship to alter course. The cricket was celebrating the approach of land. Thanks to its alarm, the sailors were not dashed to pieces against the rocks of the Brazilian coast.
Cabeza de Vaca, chief of this expedition to the River Plate, is very knowing about such matters. They call him Alvar the Miracle Worker since he crossed America from coast to coast reviving the dead in Indian villages.
(39)
1542: Quito
El Dorado
For a long time Gonzalo Pizarro’s men have been trekking deep into the jungle, in search of the gold-skinned prince and the groves of cinnamon. They have found snakes and bats, armies of mosquitos, swamps and rains that never stop. Night after night lightning flashed the way for this caravan of naked men huddled together by panic.
Skin and bones and sores, they are arriving this afternoon at the outskirts of Quito. Each one recites his name in order to be recognized. Of the expedition’s four thousand Indian slaves, none has returned.
Captain Gonzalo Pizarro kneels and kisses the ground. Last night he dreamed of a dragon that jumped on him, tore him apart, and ate his heart. This keeps him from blinking, now, when they tell him the news:
“Your brother Francisco has been assassinated in Lima.”
(97)
1542: Conlapayara
The Amazons
The battle wasn’t going badly today, St. John’s Day. With bursts of arquebus and crossbow, from their brigantines, Francisco de Orellana’s men were emptying the white canoes coming from shore. But witches were on the warpath. The warrio
r women appeared suddenly, scandalously beautiful and ferocious, and then canoes covered the river, and the ships took flight upstream like scared porcupines, bristling with arrows from stem to stern and even in the mainmasts.
These viragos laughed as they fought. They put themselves in front of the men, females of great attractiveness and charm, and there was no more fear in the village of Conlapayara. They fought laughing and dancing and singing, their breasts quivering in the breeze, until the Spaniards got lost beyond the mouth of the Tapajós River, exhausted from so much effort and astonishment.
They had heard tell of such women, and now they believe it. The women live to the south, in dominions without men, where children born male are drowned. When the body hungers, they make war on the coastal tribes and take prisoners. They return them the next morning. After a night of love, he who went as a boy returns an old man.
Orellana and his soldiers will keep sailing down the world’s mightiest river and reach the sea without pilot or compass or chart. They sail in the two brigantines that they improvised with strokes of the ax in midjungle, making nails and hinges out of dead horses’ shoes and bellows from old shoe leather. They let themselves drift down the Amazon River, through the jungle, without the energy to row, and mumbling prayers: They pray to God to make the next enemies male, however many they may be.
(45)
1542: Iguazú River
In Broad Daylight
Steamy beneath his iron clothing, tormented by bites and wounds, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca dismounts from his horse and sees God for the first time.
Huge butterflies flutter around him. Cabeza de Vaca kneels before the Iguazú waterfalls. The roaring, foaming waters plunge from the heavens to wash off the blood of all the fallen and redeem all the deserts, torrents that turn loose vapors and rainbows, that drag jungles from the depths of the dry earth; waters that bellow, God’s ejaculation, fertilizing the land, eternal first day of Creation.
To come upon this rain of God, Cabeza de Vaca has walked half the world and sailed the other half. To meet it he has endured shipwrecks and sufferings; to see it he was born with eyes in his face. What remains to him of life will be a gift.
(39)
1543: Cubagua
The Pearl Fishers
The city of New Cádiz has fallen, overwhelmed by seaquake and pirates. Previously the whole island had fallen, this island of Cubagua where forty-five years ago Columbus traded the Indians broken dishes for pearls. After so much fishing, the oysters have given out and the pearl divers lie at the sea bottom.
In these waters, Indian slaves were sent down with stones tied to their backs, to reach where the biggest pearls lay, and from sun to sun they swam without a break, gathering the oysters stuck to the rocks and the bottom.
No slave lasted long. Sooner or later their lungs burst: a stream of blood rose to the surface instead of the diver. The men who had caught or bought them said that the sea turned red because, like women, oysters menstruate.
(102 and 103)
1544: Machu Picchu
The Stone Throne
From here Manco Inca has reigned over the lands of Vilcabamba. From here he has waged a long and hard war, a war of burnings and ambushes. The invaders do not know the labyrinths that lead to the secret citadel. No enemy knows them.
Only Captain Diego Méndez could reach the hideaway. He came in flight. On orders from the son of Almagro, his sword had pierced the throat of Francisco Pizarro. Manco Inca gave him asylum. Afterward Diego Méndez stuck a dagger into Manco Inca’s back.
Amid the stones of Machu Picchu, where the bright flowers offer honey to whoever fertilizes them, lies the Inca wrapped in beautiful cloths.
(57)
War Song of the Incas
We will drink from the skull of the traitor
And from his teeth a necklace make.
Of his bones we will make flutes,
Of his skin a drum.
Then we will dance.
(202)
1544: Campeche
Las Casas
For some time he has been waiting, here in the port, alone with the heat and mosquitos. He wanders along the wharves, barefoot, listening to the sea’s rise and fall and the tap of his staff on the stones. No one has a word to say to the newly anointed bishop of Chiapas.
This is the most hated man in America, the Antichrist of the colonial masters, the scourge of these lands. He is responsible for the emperor’s promulgation of new laws that deprive the conquistadors’ sons of Indian slaves. What will become of them without the hands that sustain them in mines and plantations? The new laws take the food from their mouths.
This is the most beloved man in America. Voice of the voiceless, stubborn defender of those who get worse treatment than the dung in the plazas, denouncer of those who for greed turn Jesus Christ into the cruelest of gods and the king into a wolf ravening for human flesh.
No sooner had he landed in Campeche than Fray Bartoloméde las Casas announced that no owner of Indians would be absolved in confession. They answered that here his bishop’s credentials were worthless, as were the new laws, because they had come printed and not in the royal scribes’ handwriting. He threatened excommunication, and they laughed. They roared with laughter, because Fray Bartolomé was well known to be deaf.
This evening the messenger has arrived from the royal city of Chiapas. The town government sends word that there is nothing in its treasury to pay for the bishop’s journey to his diocese and sends him a few coins from the burial fund.
(27 and 70)
1544: Lima
Carvajal
The dawn light gives form and face to the shadows that hang from the plaza lanterns. Some early riser recognizes them with a start: Two conquistadors of early vintage, from among those who captured the Inca Atahualpa in Cajamarca, swing with protuding tongues and staring eyes.
Roll of drums, clatter of hooves: The city jumps awake. The town crier shouts at the top of his lungs, and at his side, Francisco Carvajal dictates and listens. The crier announces that all of Lima’s principal gentry will be hanged like those two and not a house will be spared from plunder if the council does not accept Gonzalo Pizarro as governor. General Carvajal, field commander of the rebel troops, gives a noon deadline.
“Carvajal!”
Before the echo dies away, the judges of the royal tribunal and the notables of Lima have flung on some clothes and rushed in disarray to the palace and are signing, without discussion, the decree recognizing Gonzalo Pizarro as sole and absolute authority.
All that is lacking is the signature of lawyer Zárate, who strokes his neck and hesitates while the others wait, dazed, trembling, hearing or thinking they hear the panting of horses and the curses of soldiers who take the field at short rein, eager to attack.
“Get a move on,” they implore.
Zárate thinks about the good dowry he is leaving for his unmarried daughter, Teresa, and his generous offerings to the Church that have more than paid for another, serener life than this one.
“What is your honor waiting for?”
“Carvajal’s patience is short!”
Carvajal: more than thirty years of wars in Europe, ten in America. He fought at Ravenna and at Pavia. He was in on the sack of Rome. He fought with Cortés in Mexico and with Francisco Pizarro in Peru. Six times he has crossed the cordillera.
“The Devil of the Andes!”
He is a giant who has been known to throw off helmet and cuirass in midbattle and offer his breast. He eats and sleeps on his horse.
“Calm, gentlemen, keep calm!”
“Innocent blood will flow!”
“No time to lose!”
The shadow of the gallows looms over newly purchased titles of nobility.
“Sign, sir! Let us avoid further tragedies for Peru!”
Lawyer Zárate dips the goose-quill pen, draws a cross, and beneath, before signing, writes: I swear by God and this Cross and by the words of the Evangelist Saints that I s
ign for three reasons: for fear, for fear, and for fear.
(167)
1545: Royal City of Chiapas
The Bad News Comes from Valladolid
The Crown has suspended the most important new laws, which set the Indians free. While they lasted, barely three years, who observed them? In reality, even Indians marked free on the arm in vivid red continued to be slaves.
“For this they have told me I was right?”
Fray Bartolomé feels abandoned by God, a leaf without a branch, alone and a nobody.
“They said yes to me so that nothing would change. Now not even paper will protect those who have no more shield than their bowels. Did the monarchs receive the New World from the pope for this? Is God a mere pretext? This hangman’s shadow, does it come from my body?”
Wrapped in a blanket, he writes a letter to Prince Philip. He announces that he will visit Valladolid without waiting for a reply or permission.
Then Fray Bartolomé kneels on the mat, facing the night, and recites aloud a prayer invented by himself.
(70)
1546: Potosí
The Silver of Potosí
Fifty Indians killed for refusing to work in the excavations. Less than a year since the first vein appeared, and already the slopes of the mountain have been stained with human blood. And a league from here the rocks of the ravine show the dark green spots of the Devil’s blood. The Devil shut tight the ravine that leads to Cuzco and crushed Spaniards who passed that way. An archangel hauled the Devil from his cave and dashed him against the rocks. Now the Potosí silver mines have plenty of labor and an open road.
Before the conquest, in the days of the Inca Huaina Cápac, when the flint pick bit into the mountain’s veins of silver, a frightful roar shook the world. Then the voice of the mountain said to the Indians: “This wealth has other owners.”
The Memory of Fire Trilogy: Genesis, Faces and Masks, and Century of the Wind Page 15