(101)
1677: Pôrto Calvo
The Captain Promises Lands, Slaves, and Honors
Early in the morning, the army moves off from Pôrto Calvo. The soldiers, volunteers, and draftees are marching against the free blacks of Palmares, who are going about the South of Pernambuco burning canefields.
Fernāo Carrilho, senior captain of the Palmares war, addresses his troops after Mass: “Great as is the host of our enemies, it is a host of slaves. Nature has created them more to obey than to resist. If we destroy them, we will have lands for our plantations, blacks for our service, and honor for our names. The blacks fight like fugitives. We will pursue them like lords!”
(69)
1678: Recife
Ganga Zumba
Thanksgiving Mass in the mother church: the Governor of Pernambuco, Aires de Sousa de Castro, picks up the tails of his embroidered coat and kneels before the throne of the Most Holy. Beside him, covered by an ample cape of red silk, kneels Ganga Zumba, supreme chief of the Palmares federation.
Peal of bells, din of artillery and drums: The governor grants to Ganga Zumba the title of sergeant at arms, and in proof of friendship adopts two of his smallest children, who will take his name. At the end of the peace talks held in Recife between delegates of the king of Portugal and representatives of Palmares, the agreement is drawn up: The Palmares sanctuaries will be emptied. All individuals born there are declared free, and those who have the hot-iron brand will return to their owners.
“But I don’t surrender,” says Zumbí, Ganga Zumba’s nephew.
Zumbí remains in Macacos, capital of Palmares, deaf to the successive groups offering him pardon.
Of the thirty thousand Palmarinos, only five thousand accompany Ganga Zumba. For the others he is a traitor who deserves to die and be forgotten.
“I don’t believe in the word of my enemies,” says Zumbí. “My enemies don’t believe it themselves.”
(43 and 69)
Yoruba Spell Against the Enemy
When they try to catch a chameleon
under a mat,
the chameleon takes the color of the mat
and they can’t tell which is which.
When they try to catch a crocodile
on the bottom of the river,
the crocodile takes the color of the water
and they can’t distinguish him from the current.
When the Wizard tries to catch me
may I take on the agility of the wind
and escape with a puff!
(134)
1680: Santa Fe, New Mexico
Red Cross and White Cross
The knots in a rope of maguey announce the rebellion and indicate how many days to wait for it. The speediest messengers take it from village to village throughout New Mexico, until the Sunday of Wrath dawns.
The Indians of twenty-four communities rise. They are those that remain of the sixty-six that existed in these northern lands when the conquistadors arrived. The Spaniards succeed in suppressing the rebels in one or two villages.
“Surrender.”
“I prefer death.”
“You’ll go to hell.”
“I prefer hell.”
But the avengers of pain advance destroying churches and forts, and after a few days are masters of the whole region. To wipe off the baptismal oils and get rid of the Christian names, the Indians plunge in the river and rub themselves with cleansing amole plants. Dressed up as monks, they drink to the recovery of their lands and their gods. They announce that they will never again work for others, that pumpkins will sprout all over the place, and that the world will be snowed under with cotton.
A noose is drawn around the city of Santa Fe, Spain’s last redoubt in these remote regions. The chief of the Indians gallops up to the walls. He is armed with arquebus, dagger, and sword and wears a taffeta strip he found in a convent. He throws down at the foot of the wall two crosses, a white and a red one.
“The red cross is resistance. The white, surrender. Pick up whichever you choose!”
Then he turns his back on the besieged enemy and disappears in a puff of dust.
The Spaniards resist. But after a few days they raise the white cross. A while back they had come seeking the legendary golden cities of Cíbola. Now they begin the retreat southward.
(88)
1681: Mexico City
Juana at Thirty
After matins and lauds, she sets a top to spinning in the flour and studies the circles it draws. She investigates water and light, air and things. Why does an egg come together in boiling oil and separate in syrup? Forming triangles of pins, she seeks Solomon’s ring. With one eye clamped to a telescope, she hunts stars.
They have threatened her with the Inquisition and forbidden her to open books, but Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz studies the things that God created, which serve me as letters as this universal machine serves me as book.
Between divine love and human love, between the fifteen mysteries of the rosary that hangs about her neck and the enigmas of the world, Sor Juana has set up a debate; and she passes many nights without sleep, praying, writing, when the endless war starts up again inside her between passion and reason. At the end of each battle, the first light of dawn enters her cell in the Jeronimite convent and helps Sor Juana remember what Lupercio Leonardo said, that one can both philosophize and cook supper. She creates poems on the table and puff pastry in the kitchen; letters and delicacies to give away, David’s-harp music soothing to Saul as well as to David, joys of soul and mouth condemned by the advocates of pain.
“Only suffering will make you worthy of God,” says the confessor, and orders her to burn what she writes, ignore what she knows, and not see what she looks at.
(49, 58, and 190)
1681: Mexico City
Sigüenza y Góngora
Since the end of last year, a comet has lit up the sky of Mexico. What evils does the angry prophet announce? What troubles will it bring? Will the sun like the great fist of God crash into the earth? Will the oceans dry up and no drop of water remain in the rivers?
“There is no reason why comets should be unlucky,” says the wise man to the terrified people.
Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora publishes his Philosophical Manifesto Against the Stray Comets That the Empire Holds Over the Heads of the Timid, a formidable indictment of superstition and fear. A polemic breaks out between astronomy and astrology, between human curiosity and divine revelation. The German Jesuit Eusebio Francisco Kino, who is visiting these regions, cites six biblical foundations for his affirmation that nearly all comets are precursors of sinister, sad, and calamitous events.
Kino disdainfully seeks to amend the theory of Sigüenza y Góngora, son of Copernicus, Galileo, and other heretics; and the learned Creole replies: “Would you at least concede that there are also mathematicians outside of Germany, stuck though they may be among the reeds and bulrushes of a Mexican lake?”
The Academy’s leading cosmographer, Sigüenza y Góngora has intuited the law of gravity and believes that other stars must have, like the sun, planets flying around them. Calculating from eclipses and comets, he has fixed the dates of Mexico’s indigenous history; and earth as well as sky being his business, he has also exactly fixed the longitude of this city (283° 23’ west of Santa Cruz de Tenerife), drawn the first complete map of the region, and told it all in verse and prose works with the extravagant titles typical of his time.
(83)
1682: Accra
All Europe Is Selling Human Flesh
Not far from the English and Danish forts, a pistol shot away, rises the Prussian trading post. A new flag flies on these coasts, over the tree-trunk roofs of the slave depots and on the masts of ships that sail with full cargoes.
With their Africa Company the Germans have joined in the juiciest business of the period. The Portuguese hunt and sell blacks through their Company of Guinea. The Royal Africa Company operates for the English Crown. The Frenc
h flag waves from ships of the Company of Senegal. Holland’s Company of the West Indies is doing nicely. Denmark’s enterprise specializing in the slave traffic is also called Company of the West Indies; and the Company of the South Sea lines the pockets of the Swedes.
Spain has no slave business. But a century ago, in Seville, the Chamber of Commerce sent the king a documented report explaining that slaves were the most lucrative of all merchandise going to America; and so they continue to be. For the right to sell slaves in the Spanish colonies, foreign concerns pay fortunes into the royal coffers. With these funds have been built, among other things, the Alcazars of Madrid and Toledo. The Negro Committee meets in the main hall of the Council of the Indies.
(127, 129, 160, and 224)
1682: Remedios
By Order of Satan
He trembles, twists, howls, dribbles. He makes the stones of the church vibrate. All around steams the red earth of Cuba.
“Satan, dog! Drunken dog! Talk or I’ll piss on you!” threatens inquisitor José González de la Cruz, parish priest of Remedios, as he knocks down and kicks the black woman Leonarda before the main altar. Bartolomé del Castillo, notary public, waits without breathing. He clutches a thick bundle of papers in one hand, and with the other he waves a bird’s quill in the air.
The Devil romps contentedly in the charming body of black Leonarda.
The inquisitor swings the slave around with a blow and she falls on her face, eats the dust, and bounces. She raises herself up, and turns, blazing and bleeding, handsome, on the checkerboard tiles.
“Satan! Lucifer! Nigger! Start talking, stinking shit!”
From Leonarda’s mouth come flames and froth. Also noises that no one understands except Father José, who translates and dictates to the notary:
“She says she is Lucifer! She says there are eight hundred thousand devils in Remedios!”
More noises come from the black woman.
“What else? What else, dog?” demands the priest and lifts Leonarda by the hair.
“Talk, you shit!” He does not insult her mother because the Devil has none.
Before the slave faints, the priest shouts and the notary writes; “She says Remedios will collapse! She is confessing everything! I have him by the neck! She says the earth will swallow us up!”
And he howls: “A mouth of hell! She says Remedios is a mouth of hell!”
Everyone cries out. All the residents of Remedios jump about, screaming and shouting. More than one falls in a faint.
The priest, bathed in sweat, his skin transparent, and his lips trembling, loosens his grip on Leonarda’s neck. The black woman collapses.
No one fans her.
(161)
1682: Remedios
But They Stay On
Eight hundred thousand devils. So there are more devils in the air of Remedios than mosquitos: 1,305 devils tormenting each inhabitant.
The devils are lame, ever since the Fall that all the world knows about. They have goats’ beards and horns, bats’ wings, rats’ tails, and black skin. Circulating in Leonarda’s body is more enjoyable to them because they are black.
Leonarda weeps and refuses to eat.
“If God wants to cleanse you,” Father Jose tells her, “He will whiten your skin.”
The plaintive song of cicadas and grasshoppers is that of souls in torment. Crabs are sinners condemned to walk crookedly. In the swamps and rivers live child-robbing goblins. When it rains, the scuffling of devils is heard from caves and crannies, furious because the flashes and sparks they have set off to burn down the skies are getting wet. And the harsh, nasal croak of frogs in the Boquerón fissure: is it foretelling rain, or is it cursing? Does the light that shines in the darkness come from the firefly? Those eyes, are they really the owl’s? Against whom does the snake hiss?
The buzz of the blind nocturnal bat: if it brushes you with its wing, you will go straight to hell, which is down there beneath Remedios; there the flames burn but give no light, and eternal ice chatters the teeth of those who on earth sinned with randy heat.
“Stay back!”
At the smallest alarm, the priest makes one jump into the font of holy water.
“Satan, stay back!”
With holy water lettuces are washed. People yawn with their mouths shut.
“Jesus! Jesus!” the parishioners cross themselves.
There is no house unadorned by strings of garlic, no air that the smoke of sweet basil does not impregnate.
“They have feet but do not reach me, iron but do not wound me, nooses and do not bind me …”
But people stay on. No one leaves. No one abandons the town of Remedios.
(161)
1682: Remedios
By Order of God
The church bells, outlined against the sky, ring for service. All of Remedios turns out. The notary sits in his place to the right of the altar. The crowd presses in through the open doors.
There is a rumor that Father José is to hear testimony from God. It is hoped that Christ will unpin his right hand from the cross and swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
Father José advances to the main altar and opens the tabernacle. He raises the chalice and the host; and before the body and blood of the Lord, on his knees, formulates his request. The notary takes notes. God will show Remedios’s inhabitants where they have to live.
If the Devil spoke through the mouth of Leonarda, Leonardo will be the vehicle for his invincible enemy.
With a bandage, the priest covers the eyes of Leonardo, a boy who does not reach to his waist, and Leonardo dips his hand in the silver pyx in which lie some bits of paper with names of places.
The boy picks one. The priest unfolds it and reads in a very loud voice: “Santa Maria de Guadalupe! Take note, notary!” And he adds triumphantly: “The Lord has had pity on us! He, in His infinite mercy, offers us protection! Up, people of Remedios! The time has come to go!”
And he goes.
He looks behind him. Few are following.
Father José takes everything along: chalice and host, lamp and silver candlesticks, images and wood carvings. But the barest handful of devout women and scared men accompany him to the promised land.
Slaves and horses drag their effects along. They take furniture and clothes, rice and beans, salt, oil, sugar, dried meat, tobacco, and also books from Paris, cottons from Rouen, and laces from Malines, all smuggled into Cuba.
The trek to Santa Maria de Guadalupe is long. Located there are the Hato del Cupey lands that belong to Father José. For years the priest has been seeking buyers for them.
(161)
1688: Havana
By Order of the King
All over Cuba it is the sole topic of conversation. Wherever people gather to gossip, bets are laid.
Will the people of Remedios obey?
Father José, abandoned by his faithful, remains alone and has to return to Remedios. But he continues his war, a stubborn holy war that has found echoes even in the royal palace. From Madrid, Charles II has ordered that the population of Remedios should move to the Hato del Cupey lands in Santa Maria de Guadalupe.
The government’s captain general and the bishop of Havana announce that once and for all the king’s will must be respected.
Patience is giving out.
The people of Remedios continue playing deaf.
(161)
1691: Remedios
Still They Don’t Move
At dawn Captain Pérez de Morales arrives from Havana with forty well-armed men.
They stop at the church. One by one, the soldiers receive communion. Father José blesses their muskets and battle-axes.
They get the torches ready.
At noon, the town of Remedios is a big bonfire. From afar, on the road to his Hato del Cupey lands, Father Jose watches bluish smoke rise from the flaming rubble.
At nightfall, close to the ruins, the people emerge from hiding in the thickets.
> Sitting in a circle, eyes fixed on the continuing clouds of smoke, they curse and remember. Many a time pirates have sacked this town. Some years back they carried off even the chalice of the Most Holy Sacrament, and a bishop was said to have died of disgust—a good thing, they said, that the scapulary hung on his breast at the time. But no pirate ever set fire to Remedios.
By the light of the moon, beneath a ceiba tree, the people hold a town council. They, who belong to this red-soiled clearing in the forest, resolve that Remedios shall be rebuilt.
The women clutch their young to their breasts and stare with the eyes of mother tigers ready to spring.
The air smells of burning but not of sulphur nor of Devil’s dung.
The sounds rising among the trees are voices in discussion and a newly born babe wailing for some milk and a name.
(161)
1691: Mexico City
Juana at Forty
A stream of white light, limelight, sprays Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, kneeling at center stage. Her back is turned, and she is looking upward. There bleeds an enormous Christ, arms open, on the lofty ramp lined with black velvet and bristling with crosses, swords, and flags. From the platform two prosecutors make their accusations.
Everything is black, and black the hoods that conceal the prosecutors’ faces. However, one wears a nun’s habit, and beneath the hood peep out the reddish rolls of a wig: it is the bishop of Puebla, Manuel Fernández de Santa Cruz, in the role of Sister Filotea. The other, Antonio Núñez de Miranda, Sister Juana’s confessor, represents himself. His aquiline nose bulges from beneath the hood, moves as if it wanted to get free of its owner.
SISTER FILOTEA (embroidering on a frame): Mysterious is the Lord. Why, I ask myself, would He have put a man’s head on the body of Sister Juana? So that she should concern herself with the wretched affairs of the earth? She does not deign to approach the Holy Scriptures.
The Memory of Fire Trilogy: Genesis, Faces and Masks, and Century of the Wind Page 31