Genesis Read online

  (68, 127, 129, and 160)

  1618: Lima

  Too Dark

  The friends toss back their tattered capes and sweep the ground with their hats. Their respects duly paid, they exchange compliments: “That stump of yours, a bloody marvel!”

  “Your chancre—what a masterpiece!”

  Pursued by flies, they cross the empty lot.

  They talk as they pee, backs to the wind.

  “Long time no see.”

  “I been on the run like a fly. Suffering, suffering.”

  “Ay.”

  Lizard takes a crust from his pocket, breathes on it, polishes it, and invites Breadbeggar to be his guest. Seated on a rock, they contemplate the flowers on the thistles.

  Breadbeggar takes a bite with his three teeth and reports: “Up at the courthouse, good handouts … Best damn place in Lima. But the porter threw me out. Kicked me out, he did.”

  “You don’t mean Juan Ochoa?”

  “Satan, more likely name for him. God knows I didn’t do nothing to him.”

  “Juan Ochoa ain’t there no more.”

  “That right?”

  “They chucked him out like a dog. Now he ain’t porter at the courthouse, nor nothing.”

  Breadbeggar, feeling avenged, smiles. He stretches his bare toes.

  “Must’ve been because of his misdeeds.”

  “It wasn’t that.”

  “Because he was too stupid, then?”

  “No, no. Because he’s the son of a mulatto and grandson of a nigger. Too bloody dark.”

  (31)

  1620: Madrid

  The Devil’s Dances Come from America

  Thanks to the corpse of St. Isidro, which slept beside him for the past few nights, King Philip III feels better. This noon he ate and drank without choking. His favorite dishes lit up his eyes, and he emptied the wineglass at a gulp.

  Now he moistens his fingers in the bowl offered by a kneeling page. The pantryman reaches out the napkin to the majordomo of the week. The majordomo of the week passes it to the chief majordomo. The chief majordomo bows to the duke of Uceda. The duke takes the napkin. Bowing his head, he holds it out to the king. While the king dries his hands, the trencherman brushes crumbs from his clothes, and the priest offers God a prayer of thanks.

  Philip yawns, loosens his high lace collar, asks what is the news.

  The duke reports that the Hospital Board people have come to the palace. They complain that the public refuses to go to the theater since the king banned dances; and the hospitals live from the takings of the comedies. “Sir,” the board people have told the duke, “since there have been no dances there have been no takings. The sick are dying. We have nothing to pay for bandages and doctors.” Actors recite verses by Lope de Vega extolling the American Indian:

  Taquitán mitanacuní,

  Spaniard from here to there.

  … In Spain there is no love

  so it seems to me:

  there selfishness is king

  here love’s the thing.

  But what the public wants from America are the kind of salty songs and dances that set the most respectable folk on fire. No use for the actors to make the stones weep and the dead laugh, nor for proscenium arts to draw lightning out of cardboard clouds. “If the theaters stay empty,” say the board people, groaning, “the hospitals will have to close.”

  “I told them,” says the duke, “Your Highness would decide.”

  Philip scratches his chin, investigates his nails.

  “If Your Majesty has not changed his mind … What is banned is banned and well banned.”

  The saraband and chaconne dances make sex shine in the dark. Father Mariana has denounced these dances, inventions of negroes and American savages, infernal in words and in movements. Even in processions their couplets eulogizing sin are heard; and when their lascivious tambourine and castanet rhythms burst forth, the very nuns in the convents can no longer control their feet and the Devil’s ticklings galvanize their hips and bellies.

  The king’s eyes are following the flight of a big, lazy fly among the remains of the banquet. “You—what do you think?” the king asks the fly.

  The duke thinks he is being addressed: “These clownish dances are music for a witches’ sabbath, as Your Majesty has well said, and the place for witches is in the bonfires in the central plaza.”

  The goodies have disappeared from the table, but the smell sticks in the air.

  Babbling, the king orders the fly: “You decide.”

  “Your Majesty’s worst enemy couldn’t accuse you of intolerance,” insists the duke. “Your Majesty has been indulgent. In the time of the king your father, whom God keeps in glory …”

  “Aren’t you the one in command?” babbles Philip.

  “… anyone who dared to dance the saraband got a different reward. Two hundred lashes and a dose of the galleys!”

  “You, I say,” whispers the king and closes his eyes.

  “You”—and a gob of foam, saliva that his mouth always produces to excess, appears on his lips.

  The duke smells a protest and immediately shuts up and withdraws on tiptoe.

  Drowsiness overtakes Philip, heavy eyelids, and he dreams of a plump, nude woman who devours playing cards.

  (186)

  2622: Seville

  Rats

  Father Antonio Vázquez de Espinosa, newly arrived from America, is the guest of honor.

  While the servants serve slices of turkey with sauce, foamy waves break in the air; a high, white sea maddened by storm; and when the stuffed chickens come on, tropical rains explode over the table. Father Antonio relates that on the Caribbean coast it rains so hard that women become pregnant and their children are born waiting for it to stop; by the time it clears, they are already grown up.

  The other guests, captives of the story and the banquet, eat and are silent; the priest has his mouth full of words and forgets the dishes. From the floor, seated on hassocks, children and women listen as if at Mass.

  The crossing from the Honduran port of Trujillo to Sanlúcar de Barrameda has been quite a feat. The ships proceeded bump by bump, tormented by squalls; several ships were swallowed by the angry sea, and many sailors by sharks. But nothing was worse, and Father Antonio’s voice lowers, nothing was worse than the rats.

  In punishment for the many sins committed in America, and because no one bothers with confession and Communion as they should before going aboard, God filled the ships with rats. He put them in the storage holds among the victuals, and beneath the quarterdeck; in the stern saloon, in the cabins, and even on the pilot’s seat; so many rats, and such big ones, that they aroused fear and admiration. Four quintals of bread the rats stole from the cabin where the priest slept, plus the biscuits that were under the hatchway. They wolfed the hams and the sides of bacon in the stern storechest. When thirsty passengers went looking for water, they found drowned rats floating in the containers. When hungry ones went to the hen coop, all they found were bones and feathers and perhaps one sprawling chicken with its feet gnawed off. Not even the parrots in their cages escaped. Sailors kept watch over the remaining water and food night and day, armed with clubs and knives, and the rats attacked them and bit their hands and ate each other.

  Between olive and fruit courses, the rats have arrived. The desserts are intact. No one touches a drop of wine.

  “Would you like to hear the new prayers I composed? Since old ones just didn’t placate the wrath of the Lord …”

  No one answers.

  The men cough, raising napkins to mouths. The women who were on their feet giving orders to the servants have all disappeared. Those listening from the floor are cross-eyed and open-mouthed. The children see Father Antonio with long snout, enormous teeth, and mustachio and twist their necks looking for his tail under the table.

  (201)

  1624: Lima

  People for Sale

  “Walk!”

  “Run!”

  “Sing
!”

  “What blemishes does he have?”

  “Open that mouth!”

  “Is he drunk, or just cantankerous?”

  “How much do you offer, sir?”

  “And diseases?”

  “He’s worth twice that!”

  “Run!”

  “Better not cheat me, or I’ll bring him back.”

  “Jump, you dog!”

  “You don’t get goods like that for nothing.”

  “Make him lift up his arms!”

  “Make him sing good and loud!”

  “This woman, with kids or without?”

  “Let’s see her teeth!”

  They pull them by one ear. The buyer’s name will be marked on the cheeks or forehead, and they will be work tools on the plantations, fisheries, and mines, or weapons of war on the battle-fields. They will be midwives and wet nurses, giving life, and executioners and gravediggers taking it. They will be minstrels and bed-flesh.

  The slave corral is right in the center of Lima, but the town council has just voted to move it. The blacks on offer will be lodged in a barracoon the other side of the Rímac River, beside the San Lázaro slaughterhouse. There they will be far enough from the city for the winds to carry off their rotten and contagious vapors.

  (31 and 160)

  1624: Lima

  Black Flogs Black

  Three African slaves have paraded the streets of Lima with bound hands and a rope around their necks. The executioners, also black, walked behind. At every few steps, a stroke of the lash, up to a total of a hundred; and when they fell down, extra lashes as a dividend.

  The mayor gave the order. The slaves had brought playing cards into the cathedral cemetery, turning it into a gambling den, using gravestones as tables; and the mayor well knew that the lesson would not be lost on the blacks in general who have become so insolent and so numerous, and so addicted to making trouble.

  Now the three lie in the patio of their master’s house. Their backs are raw flesh. They howl as their wounds are washed with urine and rum.

  Their master curses the mayor, shakes his fist, vows vengeance. One just doesn’t play such games with other people’s property.

  (31)

  1624: Lima

  The Devil at Work

  The moon shines bright as the church bells announce one o’clock. Don Juan de Mogrovejo de la Cerda leaves the tavern and starts walking through the orange-blossom-scented Lima night.

  At the Bargain Street intersection he hears strange voices or echoes; he stops and cups his ear.

  A certain Asmodeo is saying that he has moved several times since his ship sailed from Seville. On arriving at Portobello he inhabited the bodies of various merchants who call dirty tricks “deals” and robbery “business.’ and a picklock a measuring stick: and in Panama he lived in a phony gentleman with a false name, who knew by heart how to act like a duke, the routine of a marquis, and the litanies of a count …

  “Tell me, Asmodeo. Did this character observe the rules of modern gentry?”

  “All of them, Amonio. He lied and never paid debts nor bothered himself with the Sixth Commandment; he always got up late, talked during Mass, and felt cold the whole time, which is said to be in the best of taste. Just think how hard it is to feel cold in Panama, which makes a good try at being our hell. In Panama the stones sweat and people say: ‘Hurry up with the soup, it’ll get hot.’”

  The indiscreet Don Juan de Mogrovejo de la Cerda cannot see either Asmodeo or Amonio, who are talking at some distance, but he knows that such names do not occur in the Lives of the Saints, and the unmistakable smell of sulphur in the air is enough to get the drift of this eloquent conversation. Don Juan flattens his back against the tall cross at the Bargain Street intersection, whose shadow falls across the street to keep Amonio and Asmodeo at a distance; he crosses himself and invokes a whole squadron of saints to protect and save him. But pray he cannot, for he wants to listen. He is not going to lose a word of this.

  Asmodeo says that he left the body of that gentleman to enter a renegade clergyman and then, en route to Peru, found a home in the entrails of a devout lady who specialized in selling girls.

  “So I got to Lima, and your advice about operating in its labyrinths would be most helpful. Tell me what goes on in these provincial wilds … Are. the fortunes here honestly won?”

  “If they were, it would be less crowded in hell.”

  “What’s the best way of tempting the businessmen:’”

  “Just put them in business and leave them to it.”

  “Do people here feel love or respect for their superiors?”

  “Fear.”

  “So what do they have to do to get ahead?”

  “Not deserve to.”

  Don Juan invokes the Virgin of Atocha, searches for the rosary he has forgotten, and clutches the handle of his sword as the questioning and Amonio’s quick answers proceed.

  “About the ones who presume to be the best people, tell me, do they dress well?”

  “They could, considering how busy they keep the tailors all year round.”

  “Do they grumble a lot?”

  “In Lima it’s always time for beefing.”

  “Now tell me, why do they call all the Franciscos Panchos, all the Luises Luchos, and all the Isabelas Chabelas?”

  “First to avoid telling the truth, and second so as not to name saints.”

  An inopportune fit of coughing attacks Don Juan at that moment. He hears shouts of “Let’s go! Let’s be off!” and after a long silence he detaches himself from the protecting cross. Shaking at the knees, he moves on toward Merchant Street and the Provincia gates. Of the garrulous pair, not a puff of smoke remains.

  (57)

  1624: Seville

  Last Chapter of the “Life of the Scoundrel”

  The river reflects the man who interrogates it.

  “So what do I do with my crook? Do I kill him off?’

  From the stone wharf his ill-fitting boots go into a dance on the Guadalquivir. This guy has the habit of shaking his feet when he is thinking.

  “I have to decide. I was the one who created him the son of a barber and a witch and nephew of a hangman. I crowned him prince of the underworld of lice, beggars, and gallows-fodder.”

  His spectacles shine in the greenish waters, fixed on the depths as he fires his questions: “What do I do? I taught him to steal chickens and implore alms for the sake of the wounds of Christ. From me he learned his trickery at dice and cards and fencing. With my arts he became a nuns’ Don Juan and a notorious clown.

  Francisco de Quevedo wrinkles his nose to keep his spectacles up. “It’s my decision, and I must make it. There never was a novel in all literature that didn’t have a last chapter.”

  He cranes his neck toward the galleons that lower their sails as they approach the docks.

  “Nobody has suffered with him more than I have. Didn’t I make his hunger my own when his belly groaned and not even explorers could find any eyes in his head? If Don Pablos has to die, I ought to kill him. Like me, he is a cinder left over from the flames.”

  From far off, a ragged lad stares at the gentleman who is scratching his head and leaning over the river. “Some old hag,” the boy thinks. “Some crazy old hag trying to fish without a hook.”

  And Quevedo thinks: “Kill him? Doesn’t everyone know it’s bad luck to break mirrors? Kill him. Suppose I make the crime a just punishment for his evil life? A small dividend for the inquisitors and censors! Just thinking about their pleasure turns my stomach.”

  A flight of sea gulls explodes. A ship from America is weighing anchor. With a jump, Quevedo starts walking. The lad follows him, imitating his bowlegged gait.

  The writer’s face glows. He has found on the decks the appropriate fate for his character. He will send Don Pablos, the scoundrel, to the Indies. Where but in America could his days end? His novel has a denouement, and Quevedo plunges abstractedly into this city of Seville, where men dream o
f voyages and women of homecomings.

  (183)

  1624: Mexico City

  A River of Anger

  The multitude, covering all of the central plaza and neighboring streets, hurls curses and rocks at the viceroy’s palace. Paving stones and yells of Traitor! Thief! Dog! Judas! break against tightly closed shutters and portals. Insults to the viceroy mix with cheers for the archbishop, who has excommunicated him for speculating with the bread of this city. For some time the viceroy has been hoarding all the corn and wheat in his private granaries, and playing with prices at his whim. The crowd is steaming. Hang him! Beat him up! Beat him to death! Some demand the head of the officer who has profaned the Church by dragging out the archbishop; others want to lynch Mejia, who fronts for the viceroy’s business deals; and everybody wants to fry the hoarding viceroy in oil.

  Pikes, sticks, and halberds rise above heads; pistol and musket shots ring out. Invisible hands hoist the king’s pennon on the roof of the palace, and trumpets wail for help; but no one comes to defend the cornered viceroy. The realm’s top people have shut themselves in their palaces, and the judges and officials have slipped away through crannies. No soldier is obeying orders.

  The walls of the prison on the corner do not resist the attack. The inmates join the furious tide. The palace portals fall, fire consumes the doors, and the mob invades the rooms, a hurricane that pulls draperies off the walls, breaks open chests, and devours whatever it meets.

  The viceroy, disguised as a monk, has fled through a secret tunnel to the San Francisco monastery.

  (72)

  1625: Mexico City

  How Do You Like Our City?

  Father Thomas Gage, newly arrived, amuses himself on the Alameda promenade. With hungry eyes he watches the ladies float along beneath the tunnel of tall trees. None wears her fichu or mantilla below the waist, the better to show off swaying hips and a pretty walk; and behind each lady comes a retinue of flashy black and mulatto women, their breasts peeping from their décolletage. Fire and fun, they wear roses on their extra-high-heeled shoes, and amorous words are embroidered on the silk bands around their foreheads.