there’s a black bird
that sucks
its lump of sugar.
(196)
1553: Potosí
The Mayor and the Gallant
“Don’t sleep alone,” says someone, “sleep with that one.” And points him out. The girl’s favorite is a soldier of fine bearing who has honey in his eyes and voice. Don Diego chews over his despair and decides to await his opportunity.
The opportunity comes one night, in one of Potosí’s gambling dens, by the hand of a friar who has gambled away the contents of his begging bowl. A skilled card sharp is picking up the fruits of his efforts when the cleaned-out one lowers an arm, pulls a dagger out from beneath his habit, and nails the man’s hand to the table. The gallant, who is there out of pure curiosity, jumps into the fray.
All are taken under arrest.
The mayor, Don Diego, has to decide the matter. He faces the gallant and makes him an offer: “Fine or beating.”
“A fine I can’t pay. I am poor, but a gentleman of pure blood and honored lineage.”
“Twelve lashes for this prince,” decides the mayor.
“To a Spanish gentleman!” protests the soldier.
“Tell it to my other ear, this one doesn’t believe it,” says Don Diego, and sits down to enjoy the beating.
When they unbind him, the beaten lover threatens: “I’ll take revenge on those ears of yours, Mr. Mayor. I lend them to you for a year. You can use them for that long, but then they’re mine.”
(167)
1554: Cuzco
The Mayor and the Ears
Ever since the gallant’s threat, Don Diego feels his ears every morning on waking up and measures them in the mirror. He has found that his ears grow when they are happy and that cold and depression make them shrink; that glances and calumnies heat them to bright red and that they flap desperately, like birds in a cage, when they hear the screech of a steel blade being sharpened.
To ensure their safety, Don Diego takes them to Cuzco. Guards and slaves accompany him on the long journey.
One Sunday morning, Don Diego is leaving church after Mass, more parading than walking, followed by the little black boy who carries his velvet hassock. Suddenly a pair of eyes fastens on his ears with sure aim, and a blue cloak flashes through the crowd and disappears, fluttering, in the distance.
His ears feel they have been hurt.
(167)
1554: Lima
The Mayor and the Bill Collector
Before long the cathedral bells will be ringing out midnight. It will mark just a year since that stupid episode that obliged Don Diego to move to Cuzco, and from Cuzco to Lima.
Don Diego confirms for the thousandth time that the doors are bolted and that the people standing guard even on the roof have not fallen asleep. He has personally inspected the house corner by corner, without forgetting even the woodpile in the kitchen.
Soon he will throw a party. There will be bullfights and masquerades, joustings and fireworks, fowls roasting on spits, and barrels of wine with open spigots. Don Diego will knock Lima’s eye out. At the party he will try out his new damask cloak and his new steed with the black velvet gold-studded saddle, which goes so well with the crimson caparison.
He sits down to await the chimes. He counts them. Takes a deep breath.
A slave raises the candelabrum and lights his carpeted way to the bedroom. Another slave takes off his doublet and shoes, those shoes that look like gloves, and his openwork white hose. The slaves close the door and retire to take up their lookout posts until morning.
Don Diego blows out the candles, buries his head in the big silk pillow and, for the first time in a year, falls into an unperturbed sleep.
Much later, the suit of armor that adorns a corner of the bedroom begins to move. Sword in hand, the armor advances in the darkness, very slowly, toward the bed.
(167)
1554: Mexico City
Sepúlveda
The city council of Mexico, cream of the colonial nobility, resolves to send Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda two hundred pesos in gold in recognition of his services and to encourage him in the future.
Sepúlveda, the humanist, is not only a doctor and archpriest, chronicler and chaplain to Charles V. He also shines in business, as witness his growing fortune; and in the courts, he works as an ardent publicity agent for the owners of America’s lands and Indians.
In rebuttal to Bartolomé de las Casas’s assertions, Sepúlveda maintains that Indians are serfs by nature, according to God’s will, and that the Holy Scriptures contain examples to spare of the punishment of the unjust. When Las Casas proposes that Spaniards learn the Indians’ languages and Indians the language of Castile, Sepúlveda replies that the difference between Spaniards and Indians is the same as that between male and female and almost the same as that between man and monkeys. For Sepúlveda, what Las Casas calls abuse and crime is a legitimate system of dominion, and he commends the arts of hunting against those who, born to obey, refuse slavery.
The king, who publishes Las Casas’s attacks, places a ban on Sepúlveda’s treatise on the just causes of the colonial war. Sepúlveda accepts the censure smiling and without protest. In the last analysis, reality is more potent than bad conscience, and he well knows what those in command all know in their hearts: The desire to make money, not to win souls, is what builds empires.
(90 and 118)
1556: Asunción, Paraguay
Conquistadoras
They carried the firewood and the wounded on their backs. The women treated the men like small children: They gave them fresh water and consolation and cobwebs for their bruises. The words of encouragement and of alarm came from their mouths, and likewise the curses that scourged the cowards and pushed the weaklings. They fired the crossbows and guns while the men lay down seeking a bit of shade in which to die. When the survivors of hunger and arrows reached the brigantines, it was the women who hoisted the sails and set the course upriver, rowing and rowing without complaint. Thus it was in Buenos Aires and on the Parana River.
After twenty years Governor Irala has distributed Indians and lands in Asunción. Bartolomé García, one of those who arrived in brigantines from the South, mumbles his protests. Irala has given him only sixteen Indians: he who still carries an arrowhead in his arm and who fought body-to-body against the pumas that jumped over the Buenos Aires stockade.
“What about me? If you’re beefing, what shall I say?” cries Dona Isabel de Guevara.
She also had been there from the outset. She came from Spain to found Buenos Aires together with Mendoza and went with Irala up to Asuncion. For being a woman, the governor has given her no Indians at all.
(120)
1556: Asunción, Paraguay
“The Paradise of Mahomet”
The dice roll. An Indian woman holds up the candle. Whoever wins her takes her naked, for the one who loses her has wagered her without clothes.
In Paraguay, Indian women are trophies of the wheel, dice, or cards, the booty of expeditions into the jungle, the motives for duels and murders. Although there are many of them, the ugliest is worth as much as a side of bacon or a horse. The conquistadors of Indies and Indians go to Mass followed by flocks of women. In this land sterile of gold and silver, some have eighty or a hundred, who by day grind sugarcane and by night spin thread and let themselves be loved, to provide their masters with honey, clothing, children: They help toward forgetting the dream of wealth that reality denied and the distant girlfriends who grow old waiting in Spain.
“Careful. They go to bed with hatred,” warns Domingo Martinez, father of countless mestizos and future monks. He says the Indian women are rancorous and stubborn, always eager to return to the woods where they were captured, and that one can’t trust them with even an ounce of cotton because they hide it or burn it or give it away, that their glory is just to ruin the Christians and destroy whatever there is. Some have hanged themselves or eaten dirt and there are some who deny the breast to their newly
born children. The Indian Juliana killed conquistador Nuño de Cabrera one night and shouted to the others to follow her example.
(73 and 74)
Womanizer Song, from the Spanish Songbook
If the Moors can use
seven women,
Why should Spaniards refuse
to use as many?
Oh, what joy
that Spain is back
on the Moorish track.
To love one is nothing,
To love two is hypocrisy,
To love three and deceive four,
That’s the glory that comes from God!
(196)
1556: La Imperial
Mariño de Lobera
The horse, golden of hide and full of dash, decides direction and pace. If he wants to gallop, he gallops; he seeks open country and romps amid tall grasses, approaches the stream, and backs away; respectfully, without haste, he comes and goes along the dirt streets of the brand-new city.
Riding bareback with a free rein, Pedro Mariño de Lobera parades and celebrates. All the wine there was in La Imperial flows through his veins. From time to time he giggles and makes some remark. The horse turns his head, looks, and approves.
It is four years today since Pedro quit the entourage of the viceroy in Lima and took the long road to Chile.
“I’m four years old,” says Don Pedro to the horse. “Four little years. You’re older and stupider.”
During those years he has seen plenty and fought plenty. He says that these Chilean lands sprout joys and gold the way plants grow elsewhere. And when there is war, as there always is, the Virgin throws out a thick fog to blind the Indians, and the apostle Santiago contributes his lance and white horse to the conquering host. Not far from here nor long ago, when the Araucanian squadrons had their backs to the sea, a giant wave knocked them down and swallowed them up.
Don Pedro remembers and comments, and the horse nods.
Suddenly lightning snakes across the sky and thunder shakes the ground.
“It’s raining,” Don Pedro observes. “It’s raining milk!”
The horse raises his head and drinks.
(130)
1558: Cañete
The War Goes On
With a hundred arrows in his breast, Caupolicán meets his end. The great one-eyed chief falls, defeated by treachery. The moon used to stop to contemplate his feats, and there was not a man who didn’t love him or fear him, but a traitor could do him in.
A year ago treachery also caught Lautaro by surprise.
“And you, what are you doing here?” asked the Spanish leader.
“I come to offer you Lautaro’s head,” said the traitor.
Lautaro did not enter Santiago as a conqueror at the head of his men. His head was brought in from Mount Chilipirco on the longest lance in the Spanish army.
Treachery is a weapon as devastating as typhus, smallpox, and hunger, all of which plague the Araucanians while the war destroys crops and plantings. Yet the farmers and hunters of these Chilean lands have other weapons. Now they know how to use horses, which previously struck terror into them: they attack on horseback, a whirlwind of mounted men, and protect themselves with rawhide armor. They know how to fire the arquebuses they take on the battlefield, and they tie swords to the tips of their lances. Behind moving tree branches, in the morning mist, they advance unseen. Then they feign retreat, so that the enemy horses will sink into swamps or break their legs in concealed traps. Smoke columns tell them which way the Spanish troops are heading: they bite them and disappear. They return suddenly and hurl themselves on the enemy when the sun burns brightest and the soldiers are frying in their armor plate. Horsemen are brought down with the slipknot lassos invented by Lautaro.
What is more, the Araucanians fly. Before going into battle they rub themselves with feathers of the swiftest birds.
(5 and 66)
Araucanian Song of the Phantom Horseman
Who is this
riding on the wind,
like the tiger,
with his phantom body?
When the oaks see him,
when people see him,
they say in a whisper
one to the other:
“Look, brother, here comes
the ghost of Caupolicán.”
(42)
1558: Michmaloyan
The Tzitzimes
They have caught and are punishing Juan Tetón, Indian preacher of the village of Michmaloyan in the Valley of Mexico, and also those who listened and paid heed to him. Juan was going about announcing the last days of an era and the proximity of a year to end all years. At that point, he said, total darkness would fall, the verdure would dry up, and there would be hunger. All who failed to wash baptism out of their hair would turn into animals. Tzitzimes, terrifying black birds, would descend from the sky and eat everyone who had not washed off the mark of the priests.
The tzitzimes had also been announced by Martín Océlotl, who was captured and beaten, dispossessed and banished from Texcoco. He, too, said that there would be no flame at the festival of new fire and the world would end because of those who had forgotten the teachings of the fathers and grandfathers and no longer knew to whom they owed birth and growth. The tzitzimes will fall upon us through the darkness, he said, and devour women and men. According to Martín Océlotl, the missionary friars are tzitzimes in disguise, enemies of all happiness, who don’t know that we are born to die and that after death we will have neither pleasure nor joy.
And the old lords who survive in Tlaxcala also have something to say about the priests: Poor things, they say. Poor things. They must be sick or crazy. At noon, at midnight, and at the dawn hour, when everyone rejoices, they shout and cry. They must have something terribly wrong with them. They are men without any sense. They seek neither pleasure nor happiness, but sadness and loneliness.
(109)
1558: Yuste
Who Am I? What Have I Been?
Breathing is a violent effort, and his head is on fire. His feet, swollen with gout, will no longer walk. Stretched out on the terrace, he who was monarch of half the world is in flight from his jesters and contemplates the dusk in this Estremaduran valley. The sun is departing beyond the purple mountains, and its last rays redden the shadows over the Jeronomite convent.
He has entered many a city as a conqueror. He has been acclaimed and hated. Many have given their lives for him; the lives of many more have been taken in his name. After forty years of traveling and fighting, the highest prisoner of his own empire wants to rest and be forgotten. Who am I, what have I been? In the mirror he has seen death entering. The deceiver or the deceived?
Between battles, by the light of campfires, he has signed more than four hundred loan agreements with German, Genoese, and Flemish bankers, and the galleons have never brought enough silver and gold from America. He who so loved music has heard more of the thundering of guns and horses than sacred lute melodies; and at the end of so much war his son, Philip, will inherit a bankrupt empire.
Through the fog, from the north, Charles had arrived in Spain when he was seventeen, followed by his entourage of Flemish merchants and German bankers, in an endless caravan of wagons and horses. At the time he could not even say good-morning in the language of Castile. But tomorrow he will choose it to say goodbye.
“Oh, Jesus!” will be his last words.
(41 and 116)
1559: Mexico City
The Mourners
The eagle of the Austrias opens his golden wings against the clear sky of the Mexican plateau. On a black cloth, surrounded by flags, glitters the crown. The catafalque renders homage to Charles V and also to death, which has conquered so invincible a monarch.
The crown, an exact replica of the one that adorned the emperor in Europe, has toured the streets of Mexico. On a damask cushion it was borne in procession. The multitude prayed and chanted behind it while the bells of all the churches rang out the death toll. The chief nobles p
araded on horseback in mourning, black brocades, black velvet cloaks embroidered with gold and silver; and beneath a canopy, the archbishop, the bishops, and their spectacular miters broke through clouds of incense.
For several nights the tailors have not slept. The entire colony is dressed in mourning.
In the slums, the Aztecs are in mourning, too. They have been for months, nearly a year. The plague is exterminating them wholesale. A fever never known before the conquest draws blood from the nose and eyes and kills.
(28)
Advice of the Old Aztec Wise Men
Now that you see with your eyes,
take notice.
See how it is here: there is no joy,
there is no happiness.
Here on earth is the place of many tears,
the place where breath gives up
and where are known so well
depression and bitterness.
An obsidian wind blows and swoops
over us.
The earth is the place of painful joy,
of joy that pricks.
But even though it were thus,
though it were true that suffering is all,
even if things were thus on the earth,
must we always go with fear?
must we forever tremble?
must we live forever weeping?
So that we may not always go with groans,
so that sadness may not ever saturate us,
Our Father has given us
smiles, dreams, food,
our strength,
and finally
the act of love,
which sows people.
(110)
1560: Huexotzingo
The Reward
The native chiefs of Huexotzingo now bear the names of their new lords. They are called Felipe de Mendoza, Hernando de Meneses, Miguel de Alvarado, Diego de Chaves, or Mateo de la Corona. But they write in their own Náhuatl and in that language send a long letter to the king of Spain: Unfortunates we, your poor vassals of Huexotzingo …
The Memory of Fire Trilogy: Genesis, Faces and Masks, and Century of the Wind Page 17