He finds nothing that has been saved and was worth saving. The mirror gives back only an empty old man who will die tonight.
(176)
1637: Mouth of the River Sucre
Dieguillo
A few days ago Father Thomas Gage learned to escape from crocodiles. If you zigzag away from them, the crocodiles get confused. They can run only in a straight line.
On the other hand, no one has taught him how to escape from pirates. But does anyone really know how you flee from those stout Dutch ships in a slow, gunless frigate?
Fresh out of the Caribbean Sea, the frigate lowers its sails and surrenders. More deflated than the sails, the soul of Father Gage lies prone. Aboard with him is all the money he has collected in the twelve years he has spent in America warding off sacrilege and pulling the dead out of hell.
The skiffs come and go. The pirates take the bacon, the flour, the honey, the chickens, the fats, and the hides. Also nearly all of the fortune the priest was carrying in pearls and gold. Not all, because they have respected his bed, and he has sewn a good part of his belongings into the mattress.
The pirate captain, a hefty mulatto, receives him in his cabin. He does not offer his hand but a seat and a mug of spiced rum. A cold sweat breaks out on the priest’s neck and runs down his back. He takes a quick drink. He has heard about this Captain Diego Guillo. He knows that he used to do his pirating under orders of the fearsome Pegleg, and is now on his own with a corsair’s license from the Dutch. They say that Dieguillo kills so as not to lose his aim.
The priest implores, babbles that they have left him nothing but the cassock he has on. Refilling his mug, the pirate, deaf and without blinking an eye, tells of the mistreatment he suffered when he was a slave of the governor of Campeche.
“My mother is still a slave in Havana. You don’t know my mother? Such a good heart, poor woman, that it puts you to shame.”
“I am not a Spaniard,” whines the priest. “I’m English.” He repeats it in vain. “My country is not an enemy of yours. Aren’t England and Holland good friends?”
“Win today, lose tomorrow,” says the pirate. He holds a swig of rum in his mouth, sends it slowly down his throat.
“Look,” he orders, and tears off his jacket. He displays his back, the weals left by the lash.
Noises from the deck. The priest is thankful, for they muffle the wild beatings of his heart.
“I am English …”
A vein beats desperately in Father Gage’s forehead. The saliva refuses to go down his throat.
“Take me to Holland. I beseech you, sir, take me to Holland. Please! A generous man cannot leave me this way, naked and without …”
With one jerk the pirate frees his arm from the thousand hands of the priest. He strikes the floor with a cane, and two men come in. “Take him out of here!”
He turns his back in farewell, looking at himself in the mirror. “If you hit Havana anytime,” he says, “don’t fail to look up my mother. Remember me to her. Tell her … Tell her I’m doing fine.”
As he returns to his frigate, Father Gage feels cramps in his stomach. The waves are acting up, and the priest curses whoever it was who said, back there in Jerez de la Frontera, twelve years ago, that America was paved with gold and silver and you had to walk carefully not to trip over the diamonds.
(72)
1637: Massachusetts Bay
“God is an Englishman,”
said the pious John Aylmer, shepherd of souls, some years ago. And John Winthrop, founder of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, says that the English can take over the Indians’ lands as legitimately as Abraham among the Sodomites: That which is common to all is proper to none. This savage people ruleth over many lands without title or property. Winthrop is the chief of the Puritans who arrived in the Arbella four years ago. He came with his seven sons. Reverend John Cotton said good-bye to the pilgrims on Southampton’s docks, assuring them that God would fly overhead like an eagle leading them from old England, land of iniquities, to the promised land.
To build the new Jerusalem on a hilltop came the Puritans. Ten years before the Arbella, the Mayflower arrived at Plymouth, at a time when other Englishmen hungry for gold had already reached the Virginia coasts to the south. The Puritan families are fleeing from the king and his bishops. They leave behind them taxes and wars, hunger and diseases. They are also fleeing from threats of change in the old order. As Winthrop, Cambridge lawyer born into a noble cradle, says, God Almightie in his most holy and wise providence hath soe disposed of the Condition of mankinde, as in all times some must be rich some poore, some highe and eminent in power and dignitie; others meane and in subjection.
For the first time, the Indians saw a floating island. The mast was a tree, the sails white clouds. When the island stopped, the Indians put out in their canoes to pick strawberries. Instead of strawberries they found smallpox.
The smallpox devastated Indian communities and cleared the ground for God’s messengers, God’s chosen, people of Israel on the sands of Canaan. Those who had lived here for more than three thousand years died like flies. Smallpox, says Winthrop, was sent by God to oblige the English colonists to occupy lands depopulated by the disease.
(35, 153, and 204)
1637: Mystic Fort
From the Will of John Underhill, Puritan of Connecticut, Concerning a Massacre of Pequot Indians
They knew nothing of our coming. Drawing near to the fort, we yielded up ourselves to God and entreated His assistance in so weighty an enterprise …
We could not but admire at the providence of God in it, that soldiers so unexpert in the use of their arms, should give so complete a volley, as though the finger of God had touched both match and flint. Which volley being given at break of day, and themselves fast asleep for the most part, bred in them such a terror, that they brake forth into a most doleful cry; so as if God had not fitted the hearts of men for the service, it would have bred in them a commiseration towards them. But every man being bereaved of pity, fell upon the work without compassion, considering the blood they had shed of our native countrymen, and how barbarously they had dealt with them, and slain, first and last, about thirty persons … Having our swords in our right hand, our carbines or muskets in our left hand, we approached the fort …
Many were burnt in the fort … Others forced out … which our soldiers received and entertained with the point of the sword. Down fell men, women, and children; those that scaped us, fell into the hands of the Indians that were in the rear of us. It is reported by themselves, that there were about four hundred souls in this fort, and not above five of them scaped out of our hands. Great and doleful was the bloody sight to the view of young soldiers that never had been in war, to see so many souls lie gasping on the ground, so thick, in some places, that you could hardly pass along. It may be demanded, Why should you be so furious (as some have said)? Should not Christians have more mercy and compassion? But I would refer you to David’s war. When a people is grown to such a height of blood, and sin against God and man, and all confederates in the action, there he hath no respect to persons, but harrows them, and saws them, and puts them to the sword, and the most terriblest death that may be. Sometimes the Scripture declareth women and children must perish with their parents. Sometimes the case alters; but we will not dispute it now. We have sufficient light from the Word of God for our proceedings.
(204)
1639: Lima
Martín de Porres
The bells of Santo Domingo church ring out the death toll. By the candles’ light, bathed in icy sweat, Martín de Porres has delivered up his soul after much fighting against the Devil with the aid of Most Holy Mary and of St. Catherine, virgin and martyr. He died in his bed, with a stone for pillow and a skull at his side, while the viceroy of Lima knelt and kissed his hand and implored his intercession for a small place for him up in Heaven.
Martín de Porres was the offspring of a black slave and her master, a gentleman of pure Spanish linea
ge, who did not impregnate her by way of using her as an object but rather to apply the Christian principle that in bed all are equal before God.
At fifteen, Martín was given to a monastery of Dominican friars. Here he performed his works and miracles. Being a mulatto, he was never ordained as a priest; but embracing the broom with love, he swept out each day the rooms, cloisters, infirmary, and church. Razor in hand, he shaved the monastery’s two hundred priests; he nursed the sick and distributed clean clothes smelling of rosemary.
When he learned that the monastery was hard up for money, he went to see the prior: “Ave Maria.”
“Gratia plena.”
“Your Grace should sell this mulatto dog,” he offered.
He put in his bed ulcerated beggars from the street, and prayed on his knees all night long. A supernatural light made him white as snow; white flames escaped from his face when he crossed the cloister at midnight, flying like a divine meteor, heading for the solitude of his cell. He walked through padlocked doors and sometimes prayed kneeling in the air, far off the ground; angels accompanied him to the choir holding lights in their hands. Without leaving Lima he consoled captives in Algiers and saved souls in the Philippines, China, and Japan; without budging from his cell he pealed the Angelus. He cured the dying with clothes dipped in black roosters’ blood and powdered toad and with exorcisms learned from his mother. With the touch of a finger he stopped toothaches and turned open wounds into scars; he made brown sugar white and put out fires with a glance. The bishop had to forbid him to perform so many miracles without permission.
After matins he would strip and scourge his back with a whip of ox sinews tied in thick knots and cry as he drew blood: “Vile mulatto dog! How long is your sinful life to last?”
With imploring, tearful eyes always begging pardon, the first dark-skinned addition to the Catholic Church’s lily-white sanctoral calendar has passed through the world.
(216)
1639: San Miguel de Tucumán
From a Denunciation of the Bishop of Tucumán, Sent to the Inquisition Tribunal in Lima
With the sincerity and truth with which so sacred a tribunal should be addressed, I denounce the person of the Reverend Bishop of Tucumán, Don Fr. Melchor Maldonado de Saavedra, of whom I have heard things most gravely suspicious in our holy Catholic faith, which are of general currency through this whole bishopric. That in Salta, celebrating confirmations, a comely young girl came and he said to her: “Your Grace is better taken than confirmed”; and in Cordoba this last year of 1638 another came in the presence of many people and lifting his cassock he said: “Get out! I shouldn’t be confirming you from below but from on top”; and with the first one he notoriously cohabited …
(140)
1639: Potosí
Testament of a Businessman
Through the curtains pokes the nose of the notary. The bedroom smells of wax and of death. By the light of the one candle the skull can be seen beneath the dying man’s skin.
“What are you waiting for, you vulture?”
The businessman does not open his eyes but his voice sounds firm.
“My shadow and I have discussed and decided,” he says. And sighs. And orders the notary: “You are not to add or subtract anything. Hear me? I’ll pay you two hundred pesos in birds, so that with their feathers, and the ones you use to write, you can fly to hell. Are you listening? Ay! Each day I live is borrowed time. Every day it costs me more. Write, get going! Hurry up, man. I order that with a fourth part of the silver I leave, there should be built in the small square of the bridge a great latrine so that nobles and plebeians of Potosí may pay homage there every day to my memory. Another fourth part of my bullion and coins to be buried in the yard of this my house, and at the entrance to be kept four of the fiercest dogs, tied with chains and with plenty of food, to guard this interment.
His tongue does not tangle up and he continues, without taking a breath: “And with another fourth part of my wealth, that the most exquisite dishes be cooked and placed in my silver service and inserted in a deep ditch, with everything that remains in my larders, because I want the worms to gorge themselves sick as they will do with me. And I order …”
He wags his index finger, projecting a clublike shadow on the white wall: “And I order … that nobody whatever should attend my funeral, that my body be accompanied by all the asses that there are in Potosí, decked with the richest vestments and the best jewels, to be provided from the rest of my fortune.”
(21)
The Indians Say:
The land has an owner? How’s that? How is it to be sold? How is it to be bought? If it does not belong to us, well, what? We are of it. We are its children. So it is always, always. The land is alive. As it nurtures the worms, so it nurtures us. It has bones and blood. It has milk and gives us suck. It has hair, grass, straw, trees. It knows how to give birth to potatoes. It brings to birth houses. It brings to birth people. It looks after us and we look after it. It drinks chicha, accepts our invitation. We are its children. How is it to be sold? How bought?
(15 and 84)
1640: São Salvador de Bahia
Vieira
The mouth sparkles as it fires words lethal like gunfire. The most dangerous orator in Brazil is a Portuguese priest raised in Bahia, a Bahian to the soul.
The Dutch have invaded these lands, and the Jesuit Antonio Vieira asks the colonial gentry if we are not just as dark-colored to the Dutch as the Indians are to us.
From the pulpit the lord of the word rebukes the lords of the land and of the people: “Does it make me a lord that I was born farther away from the sun, and others, slaves, that they were born closer? There can be no greater departure from understanding, no greater error of judgment among men!”
In the little Ayuda church, oldest in Brazil, Antonio Vieira also accuses God, who is guilty of helping the Dutch invaders: “Although we are the sinners, my God, today it is you who must repent!”
(33, 171, and 226)
1641: Lima
Avila
He has interrogated thousands and thousands of Indians without finding one who is not a heretic. He has demolished idols and temples, has burned mummies; has shaved heads and skinned backs with the lash. At his passage, the wind of Christian faith has purified Peru.
The priest Francisco de Avila has reached seventy-five to find that his strength is failing him. He is half deaf and even his clothes hurt; and he decides not to leave the world without obtaining what he has wanted since he was a boy. So he applies to enter the Company of Jesus.
“No,” says the rector of the Jesuits, Antonio Vázquez.
“No,” because although he claims to be a learned man and great linguist, Francisco de Avila cannot conceal his condition of mestizo.
(14)
1641: Mbororé
The Missions
The mamelukes are coming from the region of San Pablo. Hunters of Indians, devourers of lands, they advance to the beat of a drum, raised flag and military order, thunder of war, wind of war, across Paraguay. They carry long ropes with collars for the Indians they will catch and sell as slaves in the plantations of Brazil.
The mamelukes or bandeirantes have for years been devastating the missions of the Jesuits. Of the thirteen missions in the Guayrá, nothing is left but stones and charcoal. New evangelical communities have arisen from the exodus, downstream on the Paraná; but the attacks are incessant. In the missions the snake finds the birds all together and fattened up, thousands of Indians trained for work and innocence, without weapons, easy to pick off. Under the priests’ tutorship the Guaranís share a regimented life, without private property or money or death penalty, without luxury or scarcity, and march to work singing to the music of flutes. Their sugarcane arrows are futile against the arquebuses of the mamelukes, who test the blades of their swords by splitting children in half and carry off shredded cassocks and caravans of slaves as trophies.
But this time, a surprise awaits the invaders. The king of S
pain, scared by the fragility of these frontiers, has ordered firearms issued to the Guaranís. The mamelukes flee in disorder.
From the houses rise plumes of smoke and songs of praise to God. The smoke, which is not from arson but from chimneys, celebrates victory.
(143)
1641: Madrid
Eternity Against History
The count-duke of Olivares gnaws his fists and mutters curses. He commands much, after twenty years of doings and undoings at court, but God has a stronger tread.
The Board of Theologians has just turned down his project of channeling the Tagus and Manzanares rivers, which would be so welcomed by the plains of Castile. The rivers will remain as God made them, and the plans of engineers Carducci and Martelli will end up in the files.
In France, it is announced that the great Languedoc canal will soon be opened, to join the Mediterranean with the Garonne Valley. Meanwhile, in this Spain that has conquered America, the Board of Theologians decides that he sins against Divine Providence who tries to improve what she, for inscrutable motives, has wished to be imperfect. If God had desired that the rivers should be navigable, he would have made them navigable.
(128)
1644: Jamestown
Opechancanough
Before an English soldier shoots him in the back, Chief Opechancanough asks himself: “Where is the invisible guardian of my footsteps? Who has stolen my shadow?”
At the age of one hundred, he has been defeated. He had come to the battlefield on a litter.
The Memory of Fire Trilogy: Genesis, Faces and Masks, and Century of the Wind Page 27