(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,