Genesis Read online

  Now mounted judge and soldiers descend upon Motocintle. Dressed in red tunic and with a white wand hanging from his breast, Judge Juan Maldonado exhorts the Indians to surrender the gold.

  He promises and guarantees them good treatment.

  He threatens them with severities and punishments.

  He puts a few in prison.

  Others he puts in the stocks and tortures.

  Others he forces up the steps of the scaffold.

  And nothing.

  (71)

  1630: Lima

  María, Queen of the Boards

  “Every day more problems and less husband!” says María del Castillo with a sigh. At her feet, the stagehand, the prompter, and the star actress offer consolation and breezes from their fans.

  In the heavy dusk, the guards of the Inquisition took Juan from Maria’s arms and threw him in jail because poisoned tongues said that he said, while listening to the Gospel: “Hey! All there is is living and dying!”

  A few hours earlier, in the central plaza and along the four streets giving onto the merchants’ corner, the Negro Lázaro had announced the viceroy’s new orders concerning comedy playhouses.

  The viceroy, Count Chinchón, orders that an adobe wall must separate women from men in the theater, under pain of imprisonment and fine for anyone invading the territory of the other sex. Also that comedies must ring down the curtain earlier, when the bells toll for prayers, and that men and women must leave by different doors so that the grave offenses being committed against God Our Father should not continue in the darkness of the alleyways. And as if that were not enough, the viceroy has decided that the price of tickets must come down.

  “He’ll never have me!” cries María. “No matter how much he lays siege to me, he’ll never have me!”

  María del Castillo, great chief of Lima’s comedy stage, has kept intact the poise and beauty that made her famous, and after sixty long years she still laughs at the covered ones who wear their shawls over one eye; since both of hers are handsome, she looks, seduces, and frightens with open face. She was almost a child when she chose this magical profession, and she has been bewitching people from the Lima stage for half a century. Even if she wanted to, she explains, she could not now change theater for convent, for God would not want her for wife after three such thoroughly enjoyed marriages.

  Although the inquisitors have left her husbandless and the government’s decrees seek to scare the public, María swears she won’t get into bed with the viceroy.

  “Never, never!”

  Against hell and high water, alone and by herself, she will continue presenting cape-and-sword works in her comedy playhouse behind the San Augustín monastery. Shortly she will be reviving The Nun Lieutenant by the well-known Spanish wit Juan Pérez de Montalbán and will produce two new and very salty plays so that everyone may dance and sing and thrill with emotion in this city where nothing ever happens, so boring that two aunts can die on you in the time it takes to yawn.

  (122)

  1631: Old Guatemala

  A Musical Evening at the Concepción Convent

  In the convent garden Juana sings and plays the lute. Green light, green trees, green breeze: The air was dead until she touched it with her words and music.

  Juana is the daughter of Judge Maldonado, who apportions Indians in Guatemala among farms, mines, and workshops. The dowry for her marriage to Jesus was a thousand ducats, and six black slaves serve her in the convent. While Juana sings her own or others’ words, the slaves, standing at a distance, listen and wait.

  The bishop, seated before the nun, cannot keep his face under control. He looks at Juana’s head bent over the neck of the lute, throat bare, mouth glowingly open, and orders himself to calm down. He is famous for never changing his expression when bestowing a kiss or a condolence, but now this immutable face wears a frown: His mouth twists and his eyelids flutter. His normally firm pulse seems foreign to this hand that tremblingly holds a wineglass.

  The melodies, praises of God or profane plaints, rise into the foliage. Beyond stands the green-water volcano. The bishop would like to concentrate on the cornfields and wheatfields and springs that shine on its slope.

  That volcano holds the water captive. Anyone approaching it hears seethings as in a stewpot. The last time it vomited, less than a century ago, it drowned the city that Pedro de Alvarado founded at its foot. Here the earth trembles every summer, promising furies; and the city lives on tenterhooks, between two volcanos that cut off its breath. One threatens flood, the other inferno.

  Behind the bishop, facing the water volcano, is the fire volcano. By the flames coming from its mouth a letter can be read at midnight a league away. From time to time is heard a thunder as of many guns, and the volcano bombards the world with stones: It shoots out rocks so large that twenty mules could not move them, and it fills the sky with ash and the air with the stink of sulphur.

  The girl’s voice soars.

  The bishop looks at the ground, wanting to count ants, but his eyes slip over to the feet of Juana, which her shoes hide and yet reveal, and his glance roves over that well-made body that palpitates beneath the white habit, while his memory suddenly awakes and takes him back to childhood. The bishop recalls those uncontrollable urges he used to feel to bite the Host in the middle of Mass, and his panic that it would bleed; then he takes off on a sea of unspoken words and unwritten letters and dreams never told.

  After a while, silence has a sound. The bishop notices with a start that for some time Juana has not been singing and playing. The lute rests on her knees and she looks at the bishop, smiling broadly, with those eyes that not even she deserves. A green aura floats around her.

  The bishop suffers an attack of coughing. The anise falls to the ground and he blisters his hands with applause.

  “I’ll make you a mother superior!” he cries, “I’ll make you an abbess!”

  (72)

  Popular Couplets of the Bashful Lover

  I want to say and I don’t,

  I’m speaking without any word.

  I want to love and I don’t

  And I’m loving without being heard.

  I’ve a pain from I don’t know where,

  That comes from I don’t know what.

  I’ll be cured I don’t know when

  By someone whose name I forgot.

  Each time you look at me

  And I at you

  With my eyes I say

  What I don’t say.

  As I don’t find you

  I look, to remind you.

  (196)

  1633: Pinola

  Gloria in Excelsis Deo

  The chigger is smaller than a flea and fiercer than a tiger. It enters by the feet and knocks you out if you scratch. It does not attack Indians but has no mercy on foreigners.

  Father Thomas Gage has been at war for two months, and as he celebrates his victory against the chigger he balances up his stay in Guatemala. If it were not for the chigger, he would have no complaint. The villages welcome him with trumpets beneath canopies of branches and flowers. He has the servants he wants, and a groom leads his horse by the bridle.

  He collects his salary on the dot, in silver, wheat, corn, cacao, and chickens. The Masses he says here in Pinola and in Mixco are paid for separately, as well as baptisms, weddings, and burials, and the prayers he offers upon request against locusts, pests, or earthquakes. Counting in the offerings to the many saints in his charge and those at Christmas and Easter, Father Gage takes in more than two thousand escudos a year, free of dust and straw, in addition to wine and cassock free of cost.

  The priest’s salary comes from the tribute that the Indians pay to Don Juan de Guzmán, owner of these men and these lands. As only the married ones pay tribute and the Indians are quick to nose out and spread scandal, the officials force children of twelve and thirteen into matrimony, and the priest marries them while their bodies are still growing.

  (72 and 135)

 
1634: Madrid

  Who Was Hiding Under Your Wife’s Cradle?

  The Supreme Council of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, watching over purity of blood, decides that in the future there will be an exhaustive investigation before its officials get married.

  All who work for the Inquisition, porter and prosecutor, torturer and executioner, doctor and scullion, must state the two-century genealogy of the chosen woman to obviate marriage with infected persons.

  Infected persons, that is: with liters or drops of Indian or black blood, or with great-great-grandfathers of the Jewish faith or Islamic culture or adherence to any heresy.

  (115)

  1636: Quito

  The Third Half

  For twenty long years he has been the big shot of the realm of Quito, president of the government and king of love, card table, and Mass. Everyone else walks or runs at the pace of his mount.

  In Madrid, the Council of the Indies has found him guilty of fifty-six misdemeanors, but the bad news has not yet crossed the sea. He will have to pay a fine for the shop he has operated for twenty years in the royal audiencia, selling the silks and Chinese taffetas he has smuggled in, and for countless scandals involving married women, widows, and virgins; and also for the casino he installed in the embroidery room of his house beside the private chapel where he received communion every day. The turn of the cards has netted Don Antonio de Morga two hundred thousand pesos just in admissions collected, not counting the feats of his own deft, fleecing fingers. (For debts of ten pesos, Don Antonio has sentenced many Indians to spend the rest of their lives chained to looms in the mills.)

  But the Council of the Indies’ resolution has not yet reached Quito. That is not what worries Don Antonio.

  He stands in his room naked before the tooled gold mirror and sees someone else. He looks for his bull’s body and does not find it. Beneath the flaccid belly and between the skinny legs hangs mute the key that has known the combination to so many female locks.

  He looks for his soul, but the mirror does not have it. Who has stolen the pious half of the man who preached sermons to friars and was more devout than the bishop? And the shine of his mystics eyes? Only darkness and wrinkles above the white beard.

  Don Antonio de Morga moves forward till he touches the mirror, and he asks for his third half. There must be a region where the dreams he once dreamed and has forgotten have taken refuge. There has to be: a place where the eyes, spent from so much looking, will have retained the colors of the world; and the ears, now almost deaf, its melodies. He searches for some taste that has not been broken, some smell that has not vanished, some warmth that the hand can yet feel.

  He finds nothing that has been saved and was worth saving. The mirror gives back only an empty old man who will die tonight.

  (176)

  1637: Mouth of the River Sucre

  Dieguillo

  A few days ago Father Thomas Gage learned to escape from crocodiles. If you zigzag away from them, the crocodiles get confused. They can run only in a straight line.

  On the other hand, no one has taught him how to escape from pirates. But does anyone really know how you flee from those stout Dutch ships in a slow, gunless frigate?

  Fresh out of the Caribbean Sea, the frigate lowers its sails and surrenders. More deflated than the sails, the soul of Father Gage lies prone. Aboard with him is all the money he has collected in the twelve years he has spent in America warding off sacrilege and pulling the dead out of hell.

  The skiffs come and go. The pirates take the bacon, the flour, the honey, the chickens, the fats, and the hides. Also nearly all of the fortune the priest was carrying in pearls and gold. Not all, because they have respected his bed, and he has sewn a good part of his belongings into the mattress.

  The pirate captain, a hefty mulatto, receives him in his cabin. He does not offer his hand but a seat and a mug of spiced rum. A cold sweat breaks out on the priest’s neck and runs down his back. He takes a quick drink. He has heard about this Captain Diego Guillo. He knows that he used to do his pirating under orders of the fearsome Pegleg, and is now on his own with a corsair’s license from the Dutch. They say that Dieguillo kills so as not to lose his aim.

  The priest implores, babbles that they have left him nothing but the cassock he has on. Refilling his mug, the pirate, deaf and without blinking an eye, tells of the mistreatment he suffered when he was a slave of the governor of Campeche.

  “My mother is still a slave in Havana. You don’t know my mother? Such a good heart, poor woman, that it puts you to shame.”

  “I am not a Spaniard,” whines the priest. “I’m English.” He repeats it in vain. “My country is not an enemy of yours. Aren’t England and Holland good friends?”

  “Win today, lose tomorrow,” says the pirate. He holds a swig of rum in his mouth, sends it slowly down his throat.

  “Look,” he orders, and tears off his jacket. He displays his back, the weals left by the lash.

  Noises from the deck. The priest is thankful, for they muffle the wild beatings of his heart.

  “I am English …”

  A vein beats desperately in Father Gage’s forehead. The saliva refuses to go down his throat.

  “Take me to Holland. I beseech you, sir, take me to Holland. Please! A generous man cannot leave me this way, naked and without …”

  With one jerk the pirate frees his arm from the thousand hands of the priest. He strikes the floor with a cane, and two men come in. “Take him out of here!”

  He turns his back in farewell, looking at himself in the mirror. “If you hit Havana anytime,” he says, “don’t fail to look up my mother. Remember me to her. Tell her … Tell her I’m doing fine.”

  As he returns to his frigate, Father Gage feels cramps in his stomach. The waves are acting up, and the priest curses whoever it was who said, back there in Jerez de la Frontera, twelve years ago, that America was paved with gold and silver and you had to walk carefully not to trip over the diamonds.

  (72)

  1637: Massachusetts Bay

  “God is an Englishman,”

  said the pious John Aylmer, shepherd of souls, some years ago. And John Winthrop, founder of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, says that the English can take over the Indians’ lands as legitimately as Abraham among the Sodomites: That which is common to all is proper to none. This savage people ruleth over many lands without title or property. Winthrop is the chief of the Puritans who arrived in the Arbella four years ago. He came with his seven sons. Reverend John Cotton said good-bye to the pilgrims on Southampton’s docks, assuring them that God would fly overhead like an eagle leading them from old England, land of iniquities, to the promised land.

  To build the new Jerusalem on a hilltop came the Puritans. Ten years before the Arbella, the Mayflower arrived at Plymouth, at a time when other Englishmen hungry for gold had already reached the Virginia coasts to the south. The Puritan families are fleeing from the king and his bishops. They leave behind them taxes and wars, hunger and diseases. They are also fleeing from threats of change in the old order. As Winthrop, Cambridge lawyer born into a noble cradle, says, God Almightie in his most holy and wise providence hath soe disposed of the Condition of mankinde, as in all times some must be rich some poore, some highe and eminent in power and dignitie; others meane and in subjection.

  For the first time, the Indians saw a floating island. The mast was a tree, the sails white clouds. When the island stopped, the Indians put out in their canoes to pick strawberries. Instead of strawberries they found smallpox.

  The smallpox devastated Indian communities and cleared the ground for God’s messengers, God’s chosen, people of Israel on the sands of Canaan. Those who had lived here for more than three thousand years died like flies. Smallpox, says Winthrop, was sent by God to oblige the English colonists to occupy lands depopulated by the disease.

  (35, 153, and 204)

  1637: Mystic Fort

  From the Will of John Underhill, Puritan of Conne
cticut, Concerning a Massacre of Pequot Indians

  They knew nothing of our coming. Drawing near to the fort, we yielded up ourselves to God and entreated His assistance in so weighty an enterprise …

  We could not but admire at the providence of God in it, that soldiers so unexpert in the use of their arms, should give so complete a volley, as though the finger of God had touched both match and flint. Which volley being given at break of day, and themselves fast asleep for the most part, bred in them such a terror, that they brake forth into a most doleful cry; so as if God had not fitted the hearts of men for the service, it would have bred in them a commiseration towards them. But every man being bereaved of pity, fell upon the work without compassion, considering the blood they had shed of our native countrymen, and how barbarously they had dealt with them, and slain, first and last, about thirty persons … Having our swords in our right hand, our carbines or muskets in our left hand, we approached the fort …

  Many were burnt in the fort … Others forced out … which our soldiers received and entertained with the point of the sword. Down fell men, women, and children; those that scaped us, fell into the hands of the Indians that were in the rear of us. It is reported by themselves, that there were about four hundred souls in this fort, and not above five of them scaped out of our hands. Great and doleful was the bloody sight to the view of young soldiers that never had been in war, to see so many souls lie gasping on the ground, so thick, in some places, that you could hardly pass along. It may be demanded, Why should you be so furious (as some have said)? Should not Christians have more mercy and compassion? But I would refer you to David’s war. When a people is grown to such a height of blood, and sin against God and man, and all confederates in the action, there he hath no respect to persons, but harrows them, and saws them, and puts them to the sword, and the most terriblest death that may be. Sometimes the Scripture declareth women and children must perish with their parents. Sometimes the case alters; but we will not dispute it now. We have sufficient light from the Word of God for our proceedings.