Genesis Read online

  is honorably born in the Indies,

  where the world accompanies him,

  comes to die in Spain

  and is buried in Genoa.

  (64, 183, and 218)

  1602: Recife

  First Expedition Against Palmares

  In the mills that press and squeeze sugarcane and men, each slave’s work is measured as the weight of the cane and the pressure of the crusher and the heat of the oven are measured. The strength of a slave is exhausted in five years, but in only one year the owner will recover the price paid for him. When slaves cease to be useful hands and become useless mouths, they receive the gift of freedom.

  In the mountains of northeastern Brazil hide the slaves who win freedom before sudden old age or early death topples them. The sanctuaries where the fugitives take refuge, in the groves of lofty palms in Alagoas, are called Palmares.

  The governor general of Brazil sends out the first expedition against Palmares. It consists of a few poor whites and mestizos anxious to capture and sell blacks; a few Indians who have been promised combs, knives, and little mirrors; and many mulattoes.

  Returning from the Itapicurú River, the commander of the expedition, Bartolomeu Bezerra, announces in Recife: The core of the rebellion has been destroyed. And they believe him.

  (32 and 69)

  1603: Rome

  The Four Parts of the World

  An illustrated and enlarged edition of Cesare Ripa’s Iconology is published in Rome. This dictionary of symbolic images shows the world as it looks from the north shore of the Mediterranean.

  On top appears Europe, the queen, with her emblems of power. Horses and lances support her. With one hand she holds up the columns of the temple, with the other she holds a scepter. She has a crown on her head and other crowns lie at her feet, amid miters and books and paintbrushes, zithers, and harps. Next to the horn of plenty lie compass and ruler.

  Beneath, to the right, Asia. She offers coffee, pepper, incense. Garlands of flowers and fruit adorn her. A kneeling camel awaits her.

  At one side, Africa, a dusky Moorish woman topped by an elephant’s head. On her breast, a necklace of coral. Around her the lion, the snake, the scorpion, and ears of grain.

  Beneath everything America, a woman with face fearsome to look upon. She wears feathers over her naked olive skin. At her feet she has a newly severed human head and a lizard. She is armed with bow and arrows.

  (125)

  1603: Santiago de Chile

  The Pack

  Santiago’s town council has purchased a new branding iron—of silver—to brand Indian slaves on the face. The governor, Alonso de Ribera, orders that a fifth part of the value of each Araucanian sold at the ports of Valdivia and Arica should go to the costs of war and maintenance of the soldiery.

  One hunting expedition follows another. The soldiers cross the Bío-Bío and do their lashing out at night. They burn and butcher and return with men, women, and children roped around the neck. Once branded, they are sold to Peru.

  The governor raises the spouted wine pitcher and toasts the battles won. He toasts in the Flemish style, like Pedro de Valdivia. First, swig after swig to the gentlemen and ladies who come to his mind. When he finishes with people, he toasts saints and angels; and he never forgets to thank them for the pretext.

  (94)

  1605: Lima

  The Night of the Last Judgment

  Right after Christmas, nature’s heavy artillery blew up the city of Arequipa. The cordillera exploded and the earth vomited the foundations of houses. People were left in fragments under the wreckage, crops burned under the cinders. The sea rose up, meanwhile, and smothered the port of Arica.

  Yesterday, at dusk, a barefooted friar assembled a throng in Lima’s plaza. He announced that this libertine city would collapse in the next few hours, and with it all its surroundings as far as the eye could see.

  “No one will get away!” he howled. “Not the fastest horse nor the swiftest ship will be able to escape!”

  At sunset, the streets are already filled with penitents scourging themselves by torchlight. Sinners proclaim their sins on the corners, and from the balconies rich folk throw silverware and party dresses down into the street. Hair-raising secrets are revealed out loud. Unfaithful wives tear up pavingstones and use them to beat their breasts. Thieves and seducers kneel before their victims, masters kiss the feet of their slaves, and beggars have not hands enough for so much charity. The Church receives more money than in all the Lents in its history. If not seeking a priest to confess to, people seek one to marry them. The churches are crammed with folk who want to nestle within their protection.

  Then the dawn.

  The sun shines on Lima as never before. Penitents look for ointments for their flayed backs, and masters pursue their slaves. Newlyweds inquire for their just-acquired husbands whom daylight has evaporated; people who repented of their sins wander the streets in search of new ones to commit. Sobs and curses are heard behind every door. There is no beggar who hasn’t dropped from sight. The priests have also hidden themselves, to count the mountains of coins that God accepted last night. With the leftover cash, Lima’s churches will buy in Spain the authentic feathers of the archangel Gabriel.

  (157)

  1607: Seville

  The Strawberry

  Captain Alonso González de Nájera, who has lived six years in Chile, remembers and relates.

  He speaks of those who are born amid trumpets and drums, the noble host who wear coats of mail from the cradle and make a wall of their bodies against attacks by the Indians. He insists that rain pulls grains of gold out of the Chilean soil and that the Indians pay tribute with gold they take from the bellies of lizards.

  He also tells of a rare fruit, with the color and form of the heart, which explodes with sweet juices at the touch of the teeth. For vividness, flavor, and scent it could well compete with the most delectable fruits of Spain, although over there in Chile they insult it by calling it a strawberry.

  (66)

  1608: Puerto Principe

  Silvestre de Balboa

  In the mud and palm-frond house of Silvestre de Balboa, clerk of the Puerto Principe town council, the first epic poem in Cuba’s history is born. The author dedicates his royal stanzas to Bishop Altamirano, who four years ago was kidnaped by the French pirate Gilbert Giron in the port of Manzanillo.

  From the kingdom of Neptune rose seals and sea nymphs to the pirate’s ship, sympathizing with the bishop, who would accept nothing in his defense. The people of Manzanillo managed to raise two hundred ducats, a thousand hides, and other provisions, and finally the Lutheran pirate freed his prisoner. To welcome the rescued bishop satyrs, fauns, and centaurs came down to the beach from the woods bringing guanábanas and other delicacies. From the meadows came nymphs loaded with mameys, prickly pears, pineapples, avocados, and tobacco, and petticoat-clad dryads descended from trees with arms full of wild pitahayas and fruit of the birijí and the tall jagua tree. The bishop also received guabinas, dajaos, and other river fish from naiads; and fountain and pond nymphs brought some tasty hicatee turtles from Masabo. When the pirates were ready to collect the ransom, a few lads, the flower of Manzanillo youth, fell on them and valiantly gave them what they deserved. It was a black slave named Salvador who pierced pirate Gilbert Giron’s breast with his lance:

  Oh Creole Salvador, honorable slave!

  May your fame go soaring without end;

  for in praise of soldier so brave

  never should weary the tongue or the pen.

  Filled with admiration and awe, Silvestre de Balboa invokes Troy and compares the Manzanillans with Achilles and Ulysses, after mixing them up with nymphs, fauns and centaurs. But amid all the portentous deities, the people of this village have been humbly immortalized—a black slave who behaved like a hero, and many of this island’s fruits, herbs, and animals that the author calls and loves by their names.

  (23)

  1608: Seville

/>   Mateo Alemán

  Mateo Alemán boards the ship that is sailing for Mexico. To travel to the Indies he has bribed the king’s secretary and demonstrated purity of blood.

  Jewish on both father’s and mother’s sides, with one relative burned by the Inquisition, Mateo Alemán has invented for himself a super-Christian lineage and an imposing coat of arms and incidentally changed his mistress Francisca de Calderón into his eldest daughter.

  The novelist knew how to learn the arts of his character Guzmán de Alfarache, skilled in the business of flamboyant roguery, who changes dress, name, and city to wipe away disgraces and escape from poverty. I must dance to the same tune as all the others, as long as it may last, explains Guzmán de Alfarache in the novel that all Spain is reading.

  (6 and 147)

  1608: Córdoba

  The Inca Garcilaso

  At sixty he leans over the table, wets the pen in the horn inkpot, and writes apologetically. He writes a meticulous and handsome prose. He praises the invader in the invader’s tongue, which he has made his own. With one hand he salutes the conquest as the work of Divine Providence: the conquistadors, arms of God, have evangelized the New World, and tragedy has paid the price of salvation. With the other hand, he bids farewell to the kingdom of the Incas, destroyed before it was known, and invokes it with a nostalgia for paradise. One hand belongs to his father, a captain of Pizarro’s. The other to his mother, Atahualpa’s cousin, whom that captain humiliated and threw into the arms of a soldier.

  Like America, the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega has been born of a rape. Like America, he lives torn to pieces.

  Although he has been in Europe for half a century, he still listens, as if they were something recent, to the voices of his childhood in Cuzco, things received in the mantillas and the milk: in that devastated city he came into the world eight years after the Spaniards arrived, and in that city he drank from his mother’s lips the stories that come down from that distant day when the sun dropped over Lake Titicaca the prince and princess born of his loves with the moon.

  (76)

  1609: Santiago de Chile

  How to Behave at the Table

  They told him of it this morning when they brought the steaming, aromatic chocolate. At one bound, the governor detached himself from the Holland sheets: The king of Spain has decided to legalize the enslavement of Indians captured in war.

  The news took almost a year to cross the ocean and the cordillera. For some time now Araucanians have been sold in the presence of a public notary, and any who try to escape have their tendons cut; but the king’s approval will shut the mouths of a few grumblers.

  “God bless this bread …”

  The governor offers a supper to the people-tamers of these unfriendly lands. The guests drink wine of the country from oxhorns and eat corn bread wrapped in corn leaves, the savory humita favored by the Indians. As indicated by Alfonso the Wise, they pick up with three fingers the strips of chili-peppered meat; and as Erasmus of Rotterdam recommended, they do not gnaw bones or throw fruit peelings under the table. After taking the hot quelénquelén drink, they use a toothpick without either leaving it between the lips or parking it behind the ear.

  (94 and 172)

  1611: Yarutini

  The Idol-Exterminator

  They are smashing Cápac Huanca with pickaxes. The priest Francisco de Avila shouts to the Indians to get a move on. Many idols still remain to be discovered and broken to pieces in these lands of Peru, where he knows no one who refrains from the sin of idolatry. The divine anger never rests. Avila, scourge of sorcerers, never sits down.

  But his slaves, who know, are hurt by each blow. This big rock is a man chosen and saved by the god Pariacaca. Cápac Huanca alone shared with him his corn chicha and his coca leaves when Pariacaca disguised himself in rags and came to Yarutini and begged for something to drink and chew. This big rock is a generous man. Pariacaca froze him and turned him into stone so that the punitory hurricane that blew everyone else away would not take him.

  Avila has the pieces thrown down the cliff. In place of Cápac Huanca he puts up a cross. Afterward he asks the Indians for Cápac Huanca’s history, and he writes it.

  (14)

  1612: San Pedro de Omapacha

  The Beaten Beats

  The symbol of authority, plaited rawhide tipped with cord, whistles through the air and bites. It tears off the skin in strips and splits the flesh.

  Naked, bound to the punishment block, Cristóbal de León Mullohuamani, chief of the Omapacha community, endures the torment. His moans keep time with the whip.

  From cell to stocks, from stocks to lash, the chief lives in agony. He dared to protest to the viceroy in Lima and has not delivered his quota of Indians. He was responsible for the lack of hands to bring wine from the plains to Cuzco and to spin and weave clothing as the magistrate ordered.

  The executioner, a black slave, wields the lash with pleasure. This back is no better or worse than any other.

  (179)

  1613: London

  Shakespeare

  The Virginia Company is meeting great disappointment on the coast of North America, which lacks gold or silver; nonetheless, propaganda pamphlets circulate all over England claiming that the English are trading the Indians in Virginia pearls of Heaven for pearls of earth.

  Not long ago, John Donne was exploring his mistress’s body in a poem as one discovering America; and Virginia, the gold of Virginia, is the central theme of the celebrations of Princess Elizabeth’s wedding. In honor of the king’s daughter a masquerade by George Chapman is performed, which revolves around a great rock of gold, symbol of Virginia or of the illusions of its shareholders: gold, key to all powers, secret of life pursued by the alchemists, son of the sun as silver is daughter of the moon and copper is born of Venus. There is gold in the warm zones of the world, where the sun generously sows its rays.

  In the wedding celebrations for the princess, a work by William Shakespeare is also staged, The Tempest, inspired by the wreck of a Virginia Company ship in the Bermudas. The great creator of souls and marvels locates his drama this time on an island in the Mediterranean that more resembles the Caribbean. There Duke Prospero meets Caliban, son of the witch Sycorax, worshiper of the god of the Patagonian Indians. Caliban is a savage, an Indian of the type Shakespeare has seen in some exhibition in London: a thing of darkness, more beast than man, who only learns to curse and has no capacity for judgment nor sense of responsibility. Only as a slave, or tied up like a monkey, could he find a place in human society; that is, European society, which he has absolutely no interest in joining.

  (207)

  1614: Lima

  Minutes of the Lima Town Council: Theater Censorship Is Born

  In this council it has been stated that, for lack of examination of the comedies presented in this city, there have been said many things injurious to parties and against the authorities and the honesty that is owing to this republic. In order that said improprieties may cease in the future, it behooves us to provide a remedy. And the question having been posed and discussed, it was agreed and so ordered that present and future authors of comedies be notified not to present or have presented in any form any comedy without its first being seen and examined and approved by the person duly named by this council, under pain of two hundred pesos …

  (122)

  1614: Lima

  Indian Dances Banned in Peru

  Wings of condor, head of parrot, skins of jaguar: the Peruvian Indians dance their ancestral Raymi on Corpus Christi day. In the Quechuan language they perform their invocations to the sun at the time of sowing, or pay the sun homage when there is a birth or at the harvest season.

  To the end that with Our Lord’s help occasions for falling into idolatry may be suppressed, and the devil may not continue exercising his deceits, the archibishop of Lima decides that neither in the local dialect nor in the general tongue may dances, songs, or taquies be performed. The archbishop announces terrible
punishments and orders all native musical instruments to be burned, including the dulcet reed flute, the messenger of love:

  By the shore you shall sleep,

  At midnight I will come …

  (21)

  1615: Lima

  Guamán Poma

  At seventy, he leans over the table, wets the pen in the horn inkpot, and writes and draws defiantly. He is a man of hasty and broken prose. He curses the invader in the invader’s tongue and makes it explode. The language of Castile keeps tripping over Quechua and Aymara words, but after all, Castile is Castile for the Indians, and without the Indians Your Majesty isn’t worth a thing.

  Today Guamán Poma de Ayala finishes his letter to the king of Spain. At the start it was addressed to Philip II, who died while Guamán was writing it. Now he wants it delivered into Philip III’s own hand. The pilgrim has trekked from village to village, the author walking over mountains with much snow, eating if he could and always carrying on his back his growing manuscript of sketches and words. The author has returned from the world … He went through the world weeping the whole way and has finally reached Lima. From here he proposes to travel to Spain. How he will manage that, he doesn’t know. What does it matter? No one knows Guamán, no one listens to him, and the monarch is very remote and very high up; but Guamán, pen in hand, treats him as an equal, addresses him familiarly, and explains to him what he should do.

  Exiled from his province, naked, treated as a nothing, Guamán does not hesitate to proclaim himself inheritor of the royal dynasties of the Yarovilcas and Incas and calls himself king’s counselor, first Indian chronicler, prince of the realm, and second-in-command. He has written this long letter out of pride: His lineage stems from the ancient lords of Huánuco, and he has incorporated in the name he gives himself the falcon and puma of his ancestors’ coat of arms, they who ruled the lands of northern Peru before Incas and Spaniards.