Catalina

by Markus Orths

  Ana’s eyes filled with tears. Not only her vision but her sense of reality became blurred. She forgot about time and danger, about her husband or any other disturbing possibilities, she was nothing but a body and its responses—until a sound brought her back to herself. Downstairs the door slammed, and she knew that her husband was home and that time had deceived them, had fled by far too quickly. She began to whisper to Francisco. Only now did it strike her that he was still fully dressed; she had no time to be surprised, but told him to slip into the adjoining dressing room; there was a chest there that he could hide in. She wrapped a blanket around herself, tidied her hair as best she could, opened the door to the other room and with a nod of her head urged Francisco to be quick and do as she said. Already she could hear her husband’s tread on the stairs. She could gauge exactly how drunk he was from the sound of his movements.

  Today, she thought, he was quite sober; his footsteps were strangely quiet, not as heavy and resonant as usual. Once more she whispered sharply to Francisco to get a move on, but he had no intention of obeying. He did not go into the dressing room. He got up from the bed with an almost exaggerated display of calm, buckled on his sword, and went and stood in front of the bed in the middle of the room, facing towards the doorway which any moment now would frame the figure of Miguel de Erauso. There he waited, his arms folded on his chest, his face wearing an expression of supreme satisfaction, as though what he had worked towards for so long was finally about to happen, as though at last he was being given a chance to get his own back.

  Ana was reduced to silence. There she stood, with her hair still somewhat dishevelled, with patches of flushed skin on her face and all over her body, which was only inadequately concealed by her nightdress, and with no chance at all of coming up with a plausible explanation for her husband. And now it was already too late, for Miguel de Erauso was entering the room. He saw Francisco by the bed and his wife at the door to the adjoining room, he saw her desperate expression, he saw Francisco’s sneering, spiteful smile mocking him, and in his overpowering rage he reached Francisco in a single bound, so that Francisco barely had time to draw his sword.

  The force of the attack took him by surprise, for the very first blow sent his sword flying across the room. He retreated, stumbled, landed on his back and felt the point of the other’s sword touching his chest. He looked at Miguel, who was standing over him, only needing to plunge the sword home to kill him.

  Miguel was breathing more slowly now. You couldn’t call that a fight, he thought. It would be nothing short of murder. This boy here is no opponent for me. And with a quick flourish as if he were signing a document, Miguel made a deep horizontal cut in Francisco’s chin. Francisco screamed. “Get yourself ready!” said Miguel. “Tomorrow you’re off to Paicabi. Don’t ever show yourself here again! Call yourselves Basques! One hangs on to the bishop’s skirts and goes off to Huamanga, and the other… take yourself off before I change my mind!”

  With a hand to his bleeding chin, Francisco hurried down the stairs, but once he was outside the door he stopped, turned round and whispered to himself, “I’ll be back someday.”

  The next morning he left Conception and rode to Paicabi. From then on he seemed not to know what to do, and so he did the one thing he had learned to do: he imitated whatever he saw around him.

  Chapter twenty-one

  The lieutenant nun

  Any attempt to chronicle the next twelve years of Francisco Loyola’s life would become mired in repetition. His experiences and activities roll like waves through his life, endlessly the same, and from this point on they seem wholly to define what he is. Unconnected with anything so intangible as an inner life, characterized by the flavour of violence and the outwardness of action, they consist solely of card-playing and his military career.

  Francisco spent three years in Paicabi, where, as his memoirs record, he ‘ate, drank and slept in armour’; he played cards, practised and improved his fencing and fighting skills, complied with the prevailing rules and conventions, and blended into the army community and hierarchy. He kept his eyes peeled and copied what he saw. Each soldier lived like all the other soldiers, simply because that was the way all soldiers lived, and man is like a ruminant, endlessly re-chewing the same thing. Watching the others, Francisco Loyola saw what he was expected to do and did it. That had been his way in the convent, and that was his way now. The need to conceal his secret forced him to be not just more manly than a man but also more soldierly than a soldier. The copy turned out sharper than any original: the soldier-by-imitation became the best soldier imaginable, one who himself became a model for others and thereby reinforced the ideology of violence. It is a curious thing: Francisco Loyola rebelled outrageously against his own sex, and yet he adopted the other sex without reservation, obeying the seemingly fixed rules that a man and a soldier had to obey. In this way the supreme rebel was also a supreme conformist.

  After three years the long-awaited battles began, and at last everything he had learned could be put into practice. The simulated killing was filled out with flesh: now there were living targets that reacted to being penetrated by pistol and musket bullets not with a muted, meaningless plop but with sounds genuinely produced by a human throat. There was no need to spare a thought for the targets of these attacks, for the world was divided into two distinct parts, a fact that was endlessly drummed into the soldiers. Everything that was out there, that was alien, that fought against you and made things difficult for you was evil that must be eradicated; the vast, filthy South American stable that you had to clean out, Hercules fashion, until one day at last the fighting would stop—or so they thought, for they did not know then that this would never happen. On the other side was all that was good and right, namely civilization and Christianity, which must be helped to triumph and take root here, and therefore one might risk one’s life with a good conscience in this cause, since the reward, if one died, bore all the traits of Paradise. It was like a surgical transplant: the dead, useless old tissue must be excised from the continent-body once and for all, and replaced by what was new and valid. These Indians absolutely refused to be converted to the truth, to the one and only truth, to what was good for them. They could not get it into their thick skulls that they were being offered peace, prosperity, work and salvation, no, they were stubborn children who would not eat, who spat out anything they did not like the taste of, because in their natural benightedness they had not yet grasped that without food there was no survival.

  The countless battles always followed the same pattern. Out on the open plains the Europeans set up their camps and made their preparations for killing. They cleaned and oiled their muskets thoroughly, stripping them down and re-assembling them, so as to avoid dangerous barrel bursts. Even at night they always kept one hand on their muskets and the other on the hilts of their swords. They spent every free moment sharpening the blades of their weapons, simply to fill the void of waiting; they trained, switched positions, discussed techniques of close combat, exchanged ideas on how best to evade the enemy’s battleaxes, and in the meantime their bodies decayed both inwardly and outwardly, they gave up washing, their skin was reduced to a layer of dirt, their clothes disintegrated—each man wore whatever he chose, uniforms were unknown in those days—and they simply waited for the moment of battle.

  Francisco Loyola was always at the forefront of the fighting. As an embodiment of what the Europeans were trying to achieve he was without equal. When he went into battle against the Indians he threw himself into it heart and soul. He rode straight at them, oblivious of himself. He gave no thought to dying, and this admittedly made him a good fighter. He raged. He cut down everything in his path. It was as if, when he fought, two green scales slid down between his eyes and the world outside; lenses that bathed everything in a poisonous green light. He revelled in every slaughtered enemy, counting aloud as he performed his butchery, and judging each day of battle good or bad according to the number of victims he had dispatched; he
acquired an ever harsher manner and more economical, clear-cut movements, and his voice became rougher, more guttural, through his constant roaring on the battlefield. He quickly rose up through the ranks. In his eyes, his actions glowed with a certain beauty: the stabs and blows seemed to him like benedictions and the clashing of metal like the peal of bells, the shots left trails of incense fumes, the teeming masses of Indians recalled the great processions, and whenever one of the enemy sank to his knees he looked as if he were about to receive the Body of Christ. For Francisco, weapons were instruments from which he coaxed musical notes, a symphony of cries. And in the thick of the fighting, when he looked closely, he thought he could see the presence of death like boiling water flowing around the corpses of the Indians, or like an invisible hand gathering forfeited lives like mushrooms.

  Then came the five great battles on the plain of Valdivia. The Governor of Chile was now Alonso de Sarabia, and the remnants of his army had shrunk to a bare five thousand men. These were difficult days for the heirs of the conquistadors. They just about managed to win the first four battles, but the Indian side was continually reinforced by waves of new arrivals, so that the Europeans lost the fifth and last Valdivian battle and the defeated army was forced to withdraw.

  When Francisco saw his company’s flag being captured by two Indians he charged at the enemy. The flag was by now a mere caricature of itself, torn, dirty and covered in blood, but it had to be saved for the sake of the symbolic power that it possessed. Though Francisco did his best to avoid the arrows, he could not prevent one of them from embedding itself in his leg. Betraying no sign of pain, he caught up with the flag-stealers, swooped down on them like a bird of prey and thrust them from their horses, clawed the flag from the hand of the falling warrior and heard the distant cheer that went up from his own troops.

  This episode won Loyola the rank of lieutenant, the first half of what would eventually become his legendary sobriquet, “the lieutenant nun‘. Now he killed as a member of Alonso Moreno’s company, which soon afterwards was placed under the command of Captain Gonzalo Rodriguez. For more than five years he killed as a lieutenant, all the while hoping to be made a captain himself. He killed in Potosi and Cochabamba, Tucuman and Las Charcas, Mizque and Chuncos. As we rode inland,” he says at one point in his memoirs, “we came upon lush plains with countless almond trees, just like the Spanish plains with their olives and other fruit trees. The governor had taken it into his head that we should grow cereal crops to make up for what we had lost, but the infantry refused. We said that we had not come all this way to be farmers but to conquer and take gold for ourselves, and we would get hold of food along the way.

  “We made all the speed we could, and on the third day we came to an Indian village whose inhabitants immediately took up their weapons, but as we approached they fled in the face of our musket fire, leaving several men behind, dead. Without an Indian guide who knew the region we rode on and took the town, and as we were leaving it again, Bartolome de Alba, who was weary after the assault, took off his helmet to mop his brow, and a devil of an Indian boy, not more than twelve years old, who was perched up in a tree close to the road, shot an arrow at him. The arrow went straight into de Albas eye, and he fell to the ground at once, so badly wounded that he died three days later. We tore the boy into ten thousand pieces. In the meantime more than ten thousand Indians had returned to their village. Eager for battle, we fell upon them again, and butchered so many of them that blood ran like a river across the square, and we chased them to the Dorado and beyond, slaughtering furiously all the way.”

  Just as, in the convent, the watching eyes of the nuns had encouraged Catalina to live like a saint, so now the admiring looks of his fellow-mercenaries spurred Loyola on to do what he had been trained for and what he had an overwhelming urge to do, for his blood-lust grew from day to day, and so, consequently, did the other soldiers’ respect for him. Never flagging, he continually led audacious new raids, heedless of possible losses. Sometimes he seemed to be fighting not against the Indians but for his own soldiers, as if the battle were no more than a performance, a game, for the entertainment of his own men. Nor was he satisfied merely to set an outstanding example. He wanted to enthuse the others, to inspire and lead them. When fresh young recruits, uncertain of what to expect, were sitting, ashen-faced, on their horses, he talked them out of their fears. The novices blossomed under the leadership of Loyola, who knew no fear and hurled himself recklessly into the fray. And when the battle was over the young men forgot that they had ever been afraid. Blotting out the past, they celebrated their victory over the heathens; the dead were left where they lay, and the survivors baptized.

  At the battle of Puren, the commanding officer was killed during an early stage of the fighting, and when the leaderless troops looked for a man to replace him, Loyola was the only possible choice. For the next few months he commanded the company and led the men to great triumphs of killing, culminating in the battle against the Indian chieftain Quispiguaucha, who, despite having gone through the motions of being baptized, was at that time one of the greatest enemies of the realm. Loyola succeeded in taking Quispiguaucha prisoner. Before his heart had stopped pounding from the exertion of the battle he had strung the enemy chieftain up on the nearest tree. This was a mistake, for Loyola had not realized that the governor had really meant it when he gave orders for the chief to be taken captive and on no account killed. He swallowed the governor’s reprimand with bad grace, and when, to cap it all, the governor informed him that he could not depend on people who disobeyed his orders, and that in future it would not be he, Loyola, who would command the company as its captain but instead a man by the name of Casadevante, Loyola exploded. He shouted abuse at the governor, calling him a weakling who had no idea of how things really were out there. This would have been enough to get Loyola arrested, but when he also drew his sword on the governor, and was only restrained from attacking him by the intervention of armed guards, he was instantly thrown into prison, where this time he had to serve a lengthy sentence before being discharged, not just from prison but from the army as well.

  *

  In every free moment of his ten years as a soldier, whenever there was a brief pause that required some diversion to fill it, Francisco Loyola had taken his pay, sat down at a card table and played. And so, when his military career came to such an abrupt halt after the battle of Puren, he was admirably prepared for civilian life: he found it easy to earn his living as a professional gambler. Like the battles in his soldiering days, the card games also followed a set pattern. Francisco watched the cards being dealt, but without touching his own cards and above all without losing the imperturbable calm with which he dominated the whole game. While the other players immediately pounced on their cards, Francisco observed his opponents. He paid close attention to each card that was picked up and whether it was added to the player’s hand with a smile or with a look of annoyance or disgust. Only when all the cards had been dealt did Francisco pick up his own hand. Determined not to let anyone look at his cards, he devised a technique to prevent it, and worked every day on improving his speed: he took only one quick look at his cards, five seconds at the most, and in that time he memorized the suits and values. After that, instead of holding the cards in his hands as the others did, he laid them face down on the table. Then he would place his elbows to left and right of the cards and form his fists into a protective canopy on which he would rest his chin, a position from which he could once more observe the other players at his leisure. Not a single word passed his lips during the game. He soon noticed how often this taciturnity led to victory, for the other players found it extremely disconcerting. At the end of a game it would often happen that Francisco’s opponents, in a combination of disappointment at losing and rage against the arrogantly silent Basque, would reach for their weapons. This led to numerous fights, which Francisco was not averse to. If, in the autobiography of the Lieutenant Nun, you count up the number of opponents killed duri
ng or after a game of cards, you arrive at a significant total. The statement, “I drew my dagger [or sword] and he fell to the ground‘, comes to be a stock formula.

  Why Francisco won all these fights is something of a mystery. Many of his opponents could fight at least as well as he could, and were physically stronger than he was, and Francisco’s particular style of fencing could not always outweigh that disadvantage. However, in those years of fighting, both as a soldier and as a card-player, Francisco seems to have given free rein to his temper. He was the opposite of what Catalina had been. Whereas the girl in the convent had meekly swallowed whatever was done to her, Francisco would not stand for anything at all. He would mete out punishment for the most insignificant trifles, almost, it seemed, inflicting punishment for its own sake. He would never try to avoid danger: on the contrary, he was drawn to any situation that seemed likely to escalate. Even so, a violent temper alone would have made him a less effective fighter. Francisco’s achievement was to combine the energy of his anger with something that might be called serenity. He united mindless, barbarous savagery with the clear-sightedness of supreme detachment. He might draw his sword with fiery cheeks, but he fought with a cool head. Here he did manage to achieve a reconciliation of opposites, and this was the reason for his extraordinary success as a fighter.

  At the end of this period Francisco met a man known as ‘El Cid’, a giant of a fellow whose mere presence could shatter the self-confidence of an opponent at the card table. He always had a group of cronies with him who had proved useful allies in many a card-table brawl. The Cid was not used to losing. When he realized that his card-playing skills were no match for Francisco’s, he plastered a sharklike grin on his face, reached across the table and drew a handful of Francisco’s coins towards him. Acting as if nothing had happened, Francisco played on and won the stolen money back again. This did not disturb the Cid’s composure, and after he had lost the pile of money a second time he made as if to draw it over to his side again, but as the Cid incautiously stretched out his hand, Francisco, with a single movement, skewered it to the table with his dagger, and then leaped up and, pressing down on the dagger with his whole weight, sliced off his opponent’s hand. He then fled from the gaming den before the Cid’s companions could move to stop him.