Face down in the mud, beneath the rain, he weeps.
Hernando Maravilla had not wept under the two hundred lashes he received in the streets of Lima on the way to the harbor; and not a tear was seen on his face while he received another two hundred here in Santiago.
Now the rain lashes him, drawing off the dry blood and the mud.
“Wretch! That’s how you bite the hand that feeds you!” said his owner, the long-widowed Doña Antonia Nabía, when they brought the fugitive slave back to her.
Hernando Maravilla had escaped because one day he saw a woman who was pretty as a picture and couldn’t resist following her. They caught him in Lima, and the Inquisition questioned him. He was sentenced to four hundred lashes for having said that marriages were made by the Devil and that the bishop was a nothing and that he shat on the bishop.
He who was born in Africa, grandson of a medicine man, son of a hunter, twists himself around and weeps, his back raw, as the rain falls on Santiago de Chile.
(31 and 138)
1583: Tlatelolco Sahagún
Lonelyme, lonelyme, sings the ringdove.
A woman offers flowers to a stone that has been smashed to pieces. “Lord,” says the woman to the stone, “Lord, how you have suffered.”
The old native wise men offer their testimony to Fray Bernardino de Sahagún: “Let us die,” they plead, “since our gods have died.”
Fray Bernardino de Ribiera, native of Sahagún: son of St. Francis, bare feet, patched cassock, seeker of the plenitude of Paradise, seeker of the memory of these vanquished peoples. For more than forty years Sahagún has been traveling through Mexico, the seigniory of Huexotzingo, Tula of the Toltecs, the Texcoco region, to rescue the images and words of times past. In the twelve books of the General History of New Spain, Sahagún and his young assistants have saved and assembled ancient voices, the fiestas of the Indians, their rites, their gods, their way of counting the passage of years and stars, their myths, their poems, their medicines, their tales of remote ages and of the recent European invasion … History sings in this first great work of American anthropology.
Six years ago King Philip II had those manuscripts and all the native codices copied and translated by Sahagún seized so that no original or translation of them should remain. Where have they ended up, those books suspected of perpetuating and publicizing idolatries? No one knows. The Council of the Indies has not replied to any of the despairing author-copier’s pleas. What has the king done with these forty years of Sahagún’s life and so many centuries of the life of Mexico? They say in Madrid that the pages have been used as spice wrappings.
Old Sahagún does not give up. At eighty he clutches to his breast a few papers saved from the disaster and dictates to his pupils in Tlatelolco the first lines of a new work, to be called Divinatory Art. Later he will go to work on a complete Mexican calendar. When he finishes the calendar, he will begin a Náhuatl Spanish-Latin dictionary. And after the dictionary …
Outside, dogs howl, fearing rain.
(24 and 200)
1583: Ácoma
The Stony Kingdom of Cíbola
Captain Antonio de Espejo, who made a fast fortune on the frontier of Mexico, has responded to the siren call of the seven cities of gold. At the head of a few warrior horsemen he has undertaken the Odyssey to the north; and instead of the fabulous kingdom of Cíbola, he has found an immense desert, very occasionally peppered with villages in the shape of fortresses. No precious stones hang from the trees, because there are no trees except in the rare valleys; and there is no more glitter of gold than what the sun draws from the rocks when it beats down hard on them.
In those villages the Spaniards hoist their flag. The Indians still do not know that they will soon be obliged to change their names and raise temples to worship another god, although the Great Spirit of the Hopis told them some time ago that a new race would arrive, a race of fork-tongued men, bringing greed and boast-fulness. The Hopis receive Captain Espejo with offerings of corn tortillas and turkeys and hides; and the Navajos of the high mountains welcome him bringing water and corn.
Beyond, a fortress of rock and mud soars into the purple sky. From the edge of the mesa, the village of the Ácomas dominates the valley, green with cornfields irrigated by canals and dams. The Ácomas, enemies of the Navajos, are famous for their ferocity. Not even Francisco Vazquez de Coronado, who came this way forty years ago, dared go near them.
The Ácomas dance in Captain Espejo’s honor and lay at his feet colored cloths, turkeys, ears of corn, and deerskins.
A few years from now they will refuse to pay tribute. The assault will last three days and three nights. Survivors will have one foot chopped off with a single ax blow, and the chiefs will be thrown over the precipice.
(89)
Night Chant, a Navajo Poem
House made of dawn,
House made of evening light,
House made of dark cloud …
Dark cloud is at the house’s door,
The trail out of it is dark cloud,
The zigzag lightning stands high upon it …
Happily may I walk,
Happily, with abundant showers, may I walk.
Happily, with abundant plants, may I walk.
Happily, on the trail of pollen, may I walk.
Happily may I walk.
May it be beautiful before me.
May it be beautiful behind me.
May it be beautiful below me.
May it be beautiful above me.
May it be beautiful all around me.
In beauty it is finished.
(42)
1586: Cauri The Pestilence
Influenza does not shine like the steel sword, but no Indian can dodge it. Tetanus and typhus kill more people than a thousand greyhounds with fiery eyes and foaming jaws. The smallpox attacks in secret and the gun with a loud bang, amid clouds of sparks and sulfurous smoke, but smallpox annihilates more Indians than all the guns.
The winds of pestilence are devastating these regions. Anyone they strike, they blow down: they devour the body, eat the eyes, close the throat. All smells of decay.
Meanwhile, a mysterious voice ranges over Peru. It treads on the heels of the pestilence and penetrates the litanies of the dying, this voice that whispers, from one ear to another: “Whoever throws the crucifix out of his house will return from the dead.”
(221)
1588: Quito Grandson of Atahualpa
The golden columns, arabesques, and ornamentations sweat gold; the saints and adored virgins in their gilded robes, and the chorus of angels with little golden wings, pray gold: This is one of the houses that Quito offers to him who centuries ago was born in Bethlehem in manger straw and died naked.
The family of the Inca Atahualpa has an altar in this church of St. Francis, in the place of honor in the great transept beside the evangel. At the foot of the altar rest the dead. The son of Atahualpa, who was named Francisco like his father and his father’s assassin, occupies the main tomb. God must have reserved glory for Captain Francisco Atahualpa if God listens, as they say, to the views of those in command with more attention than He pays to the screams of the commanded. The Inca’s son knew how to suppress the native risings in the South. He brought as prisoners to Quito the rebel chiefs of Cañaribamba and Cuyes and was rewarded with the office of this city’s director of public works.