Catalina

by Markus Orths

  The longer Juan and Catalina listened, the more obvious it became that the Aztec was reciting a heroic poem; while it bore some traces of classical models, the whole thing was transposed to the world of the Aztecs, and the Latin language had been made to reflect, as well as possible, their own reality, their life in the tropical forest. When the Aztec orator had finished, his companions uttered, one after another, a clearly intelligible ‘Salve!“—’Hail!”—and invited the shipwrecked pair to go with them. That same evening saw Juan and Catalina and their hosts sitting together outside their huts, eating food served in pre-warmed pans. The Aztecs wore woven clothes and had their hair tied back. Communication presented no difficulties, and this mystery turned out to have a perfectly clear and simple explanation.

  The people assembled here were the descendants of some Aztec nobles who from 1536 to 1540 had attended the college of Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco. This Franciscan college had been founded with the help of the then viceroy, Mendoza. The Aztec elite was to be educated there by European priests and teachers, who would make the Christian religion comprehensible to them. It had been felt that having been made to undergo baptism, the savages must not be allowed just to copy the ways of Christianity without understanding it in all its true greatness, or to hold on to their own gods in secret, merely replacing their names with those of Christian saints. Or indeed to misunderstand completely, and, for instance, take John the Baptist to be Christ’s superior, because no one could make them see why the baptizer should be of lesser worth than the baptized. Into such a confusion of religious notions a guiding thread must be woven. The aim had been to bring clarity to these Indian ideas of Christianity and spread among the populace an orthodox form of the faith, purged of primitive superstitions. However, this could not be done without the aid of the Aztec elite. Convince them, so the thinking went, and they would help win over the common people too. Why should not the ancient maxim apply here as well as anywhere: ‘What the nobles believe, the peasants will not doubt’?

  And so the teaching began. First the catechism, reading, writing, then Latin—the language of the Church—interpretation of the Bible, textual exegesis, history: ever more subjects in ever more detail. And great was the Franciscans’ astonishment when they saw how quickly the savages learned. You only had to explain a thing to them once and they got it immediately. They mastered reading and writing in no time at all. It was as if they had a matrix inside them which only needed to be filled: they stored everything they saw or heard and could recall it at a moment’s notice. Initially the teachers used crude, didactic exercises involving much repetition and revision, which irritated and offended the Aztecs. So the Franciscans abandoned those methods and instead continually placed mountains of new material before them. Once these members of the Indian elite could read and write, their knowledge expanded like a forest fire. At first the Franciscan Fathers were thrilled with these brilliant students, who made such a refreshing change from the sluggish, apathetic pupils they were used to in Europe, but before long they had reached the point where their reservoir of knowledge was exhausted and they felt they had nothing more to teach the Aztecs—but the Aztecs themselves had no intention of calling a halt to their studies. They had tasted blood. They wanted more—they wanted everything. And as they were being given no new information, they could only satisfy their thirst for knowledge by thinking for themselves.

  They subjected everything the Fathers had taught them to the most thorough scrutiny. As long as this did not extend to sensitive areas of knowledge, the teachers continued to be delighted with the amazing results achieved by their students: suddenly the Aztecs were composing Latin verses, they were improving on the plain language used by Caesar, composing texts in emulation of Cicero that came very close to fulfilling his stylistic ideal, constantly thinking of new and simpler explanations of grammar, and translating and interpreting texts at a bewildering rate. But then their craving for new insights shifted its focus to the domain of faith. Every Biblical passage was read afresh, examined to see whether it might not bear a different interpretation from the one their teachers had sought to convey. The Aztecs found endless new issues to raise, and a time of questioning and correcting began.

  They pointed out to their teachers various incongruities in their sermons or religious teaching. Here it says this, but there it says that. A contradiction. A false conclusion. An obscurity. A mistake. An impossibility. How can this be so? How did you envisage that? The Franciscan teachers saw Holy Scripture being subjected to a hail of questions which they themselves would never have dared to ask. They were having to defend the Bible against wholly unexpected attacks. Often they could offer no answer but ‘That is what is written!“ or ”The Word of God is unfathomable!“ And this pronouncement became their last refuge, the impregnable bastion—or so they thought—of certainty. But it did not satisfy the Aztecs. They persisted with their questions. Wanted to know why everything was as it was. Why they, Aztecs or Mayas, had to discard their own gods in favour of a Christian God who preached forbearance, yet drove the traders out of the Temple; who pardoned the hypocritical thief but consigned the consistent one to hell. Why they were forbidden to sacrifice the hearts of their dead enemies, while being expected to eat the body of the Christian God. Why the ancient patriarchs were allowed to have several wives, but they were not. In short, there was no end to the Aztecs’ questions, and as time went on the conquerors’ enthusiasm for this promising venture began to wane. Weary of having to justify themselves, defeated by the questions, overwhelmed by the Aztecs’ tireless pursuit of certainty, they finally discontinued the whole project. There was too great a risk that the Indians would turn into heretics. The project had failed. The Indians, they said, had not demonstrated appropriate powers of reasoning.

  Juan and Catalina spent several days with the Aztecs, recovering from the hardships of the voyage. It also took them some time to adjust to the climate, which was almost unbearably sultry and humid. Every breath they took was more of an effort, every exertion twice as tiring. Sweat poured off them freely even when they did nothing at all. Then there were the tropical showers, which came from nowhere and ended just as abruptly. And the new, unfamiliar food, which their stomachs had to get used to. Juan and Catalina shared the life of the Aztecs, their cooking, eating and singing, their rituals and ceremonies, and were initiated into the ten commandments of etiquette, which related to insignia, clothes, jewellery and houses. They saw how, when a child was caught telling lies, its lips were pricked with the thorn of an agave; they learned that in Nahuatl, the Aztec language, the word for ‘liars’ was the same as the one for ’Christians‘. But when, after some days, Juan and Catalina were present at a birth—it was a girl—and Catalina asked for a translation of the ritual formulae (’You will be in the heart of the house, you will go nowhere, you will never be a wanderer, you will be the hearthstone, the fire contained within the hearth: here our god has planted you and here he will bury you‘), and then saw a miniature weaving shuttle and loom being placed in the girl’s cradle (for a boy it would have been a little sword and shield), she told Juan that it was time to move on.

  Chapter fourteen

  New World

  Three weeks of steady walking brought them to Veracruz. The city was like a vast building site, expanding greedily into the surrounding land. All around them Juan and Catalina saw Indians or slaves hard at work putting up new buildings, including monasteries and convents to cope with the growing numbers of monks and nuns pouring into the place. Everything was in motion, with never a moment’s pause. The city’s outer districts were engulfed in the din and the clouds of dust produced by the building operations, while the centre was one enormous market place. Blacks and mestizos offered things for sale from big barrows, Spanish and Creole craftsmen sold their wares in booths that were open to the street, and in many places there were also covered stalls under arcades: everywhere there were people urgently trying to find takers for whatever kind of goods they had to sell. Besides all
that, the city was awash with the kinds of activity to be expected in a seaport; the to-ing and fro-ing of ships entering and leaving harbour, the bustle of loading and unloading, of people arriving and departing. Only at night did things quieten down a little, for the districts allocated to the Indians, which were outside the city centre, closed their gates at dusk and their inhabitants were not allowed to come out again until dawn.

  For Juan and Catalina this truly was a New World. At every street corner their noses encountered some unfamiliar smell. Wherever they looked they saw something they had never seen before, starting with the people: it would be some months before Juan and Catalina were reasonably proficient at distinguishing nuances of skin colour. They had to learn the West Indian pigmentocracy, a set of designations that ranked people according to an unspoken hierarchy. The Europeans and the Creoles—people of pure European blood who had been born in the new lands—were at the top of the ladder, for the overriding principle was limpieza de sangre, purity of blood. The despised, pacified Indios, and the negros, whom the Europeans could use as they pleased, were right at the bottom. That much was clear. But in between came the various gradations: the mestizos, half Indian, half white; the mulattos, black half-breeds; the moriscos, not clandestine Muslims as in Spain, but children of a white man and a mulatto woman; then, continuing down the scale, there were the albinos, children of whites and moriscos; the tornatrds (‘turn around’), offspring of a white man and an albina; the tente en el aire (‘stay up in the air’) born to a white man and a tornatrds woman. In the following centuries this would be elaborated still further in an ever-lengthening chain of forms and colours: an Indian man and a tornatrds woman would produce a lobo (‘wolf’); a lobo and an Indian woman a zambaigo; a zambaigo and an Indian woman a cambujo; a cambujo and a mulatto woman an albarazado. An albarazado and a mulatto woman would produce a barcino (‘bundle of straw’); a barcino and a mulatto woman a ‘coyote’; a ‘coyote’ and an Indian woman a chamiso (‘a dark-coloured piece of wood’); a chamisa and a mestizo a mestizo-coyote; and a mestizo-coyote and a mulatto woman an ahi te estas (‘there you are’).

  Surrounded by so much that was unfamiliar, trying not to drown in a quicksand of impressions, Juan and Catalina clung to each other for mutual support. If anything more had been needed to confirm their resolve to travel on together, it would have been this onslaught of the new and unknown. After their many days of silence on the Santa Isabella, their week with the Aztecs, their long march on foot and the bewildering novelty of Veracruz, the two of them finally found an opportunity to talk. They had so much to say to each other that once they started they could hardly stop. The tongue-less sailors, the talking sickness, the two days down in the hold, the card games, the storm, the shipwreck, their survival, the Aztecs—at long last it could all be discussed. Swept along by the very act of speaking, they talked on and on, going further and further back in their memories. Catalina told Juan all about working for her uncle, about her fencing, riding, and fighting, her disastrous failure as an actor, her ride to Seville, the youths, her spell in jail. And Juan? He talked about his mothers death, for the first time. He described his period of mourning and found words which he had never imagined he could find. Those days in Veracruz were spent entirely in revealing themselves to each other. The two of them got closer and closer, but at a certain point this closeness alarmed them and they recoiled as if they had been burnt.

  *

  Their aim was clear: they wanted to go to Potosi, the city of a thousand silver mines, perched at an altitude of nearly fourteen thousand feet, a legend and a myth: the place where Miguel de Erauso had charge of one of the mines. Founded only sixty years earlier, Potosi was by this time one of the world’s most populous cities, bigger than Paris, Seville, Rome or London. Charles I of Spain had accorded Potosi the status of an Imperial City and presented it with a large shield bearing the inscription, “I am rich Potosi, treasure of the world, king of mountains, envy of kings‘.

  Having learned that a carrack was to sail for Panama in a few days’ time, Juan and Catalina agreed with the captain that in return for their passage they would help with loading and unloading and also work on board during the journey, and before long the sailors turned the capstan to haul the ship up onto her anchor, the anchor flukes came free, the wind filled the sails, the vessel gathered speed, and during the crossing Juan and Catalina mended yards and yards of canvas, repaired ropes and fed the goats, pigs and chickens; they reached Panama without any major problems, crossed the isthmus, hopping from the Caribbean to the Pacific coast, and waited for a ship bound for Trujillo; and by now it was September and the mosquitoes had had ample time to hatch.

  In Panama a female Anopheles mosquito came in to land on Juan’s body, plunged her proboscis into his shoulder, and from her salivary glands sent pathogens into his bloodstream that made straight for his liver, where affected cells swelled and burst, so that nothing prevented the pathogen Plasmodium falciparum from entering his blood. Juan contracted the worst form of malaria, Malaria maligna. It began with seemingly harmless symptoms like headache and pains in the limbs, fatigue, vomiting and a slight fever, but then came the first bouts of high fever, with temperatures of over forty degrees, his spleen became enlarged, and the more serious symptoms appeared: cramps, confusion and comatose states, with the brain increasingly affected.

  Once they had arrived in Trujillo, Catalina followed the instructions that Juan gave her in his rare moments of lucidity. She fed and cared for him, took measures to reduce his temperature, treated him with sarsaparilla and earned the money to pay for food and medicines. She quickly found a job with a grocer, Alonso de Urquiza, who owned several shops in Trujillo and the surrounding area. As Urquiza was about to go to Sana for two months to check on his shops there and to arrange for the purchase of new goods, he was pleased to have found a ‘true Spaniard’, as he put it, to whom he could entrust one of his shops in Trujillo while he was away. Shortly before Urquiza’s departure Catalina went to his house, as there were a few final things to settle: he wanted to take her through the lists showing the exact prices of his goods, and give her the black book containing the names of all the customers who were allowed credit. When they had finished Urquiza invited Catalina into the salon for a drink. His wife was waiting there, and they were introduced.

  Happening to look over the woman’s shoulder as she took her hand, Catalina noticed a picture on the wall. An image of Christ, Catalina thought, but already her heart was pounding. A crucified Christ, with a long beard, but there was something wrong about this Christ. The picture certainly showed a crucifixion; the figure on the cross was suffering, and he was bleeding from the wrists. But there was no crown of thorns. And what about that beard? It was much longer than in most representations of the Crucifixion: in fact the beard was the focal point of the whole picture. Nor was that all. Catalina moved closer. Now she was sure of it: the torso was that of a woman. One of her breasts was clearly visible. That was a woman hanging on the cross, a woman with a beard. For the first time ever, Catalina felt that she was not alone.

  “Saint Liberata,” said Urquiza.

  “I suppose you know her story?” asked Urquiza’s wife.

  “No,” said Catalina.

  Urquiza’s wife told her the legend of Saint Liberata, a young girl growing up in Portugal early in the Christian era, in the first few centuries after the death of Our Lord. She was the daughter of the king, a heathen king who naturally wanted to marry his daughter to another heathen ruler, the King of Sicily. However, the daughter was a secretly baptized Christian, and the night before the wedding she prayed to God that He might disfigure her body so that the heathen king would reject her. When the girl awoke next morning there was a beard on her chin. Her ladies fled in terror, and her horrified father could not believe his eyes. He tried to tear the beard from her face, but in vain. When he learned how this had come about he spat upon the daughter who had joined that disreputable sect, and with a single gesture of rejectio
n cast her out of the bosom of the family. He pronounced his verdict: if she chose to pray to that womanish weakling of a God, then let her die as that Jesus had died. And he had his daughter crucified.

  “When was she canonized?” asked Catalina.

  “She wasn’t.”

  “But you called her a saint.”