Faces and Masks Read online

  1711: Murrí

  They Are Never Alone

  There are Indian maroons too. To shut them in under the control of friars and captains, prisons are built. The newly born village of Murrí, in the region of the Chocó, is one.

  Some time back, huge canoes with white wings arrived here, seeking the rivers of gold that flow down from the cordillera; and since then, Indians have been fleeing. Countless spirits accompany them as they journey through forests and across rivers.

  The witch doctor knows the words that call the spirits. To cure the sick he blows his conch shell toward the foliage where the peccary, the bird of paradise, and the singing fish live. To make the well sick, he puts into one of their lungs the butterfly of death. The witch doctor knows that there is no land, water, or air empty of spirits in the Chocó region.

  (121)

  1711: Saint Basil’s Refuge

  The Black King, the White Saint and His Sainted Wife

  More than a century ago, the Negro Domingo Bioho fled from the galleys in Cartagena of the Indies and became warrior-king of the swamplands. Hosts of dogs and musketeers went hunting for him, and Domingo was hanged several times. On various days of great public enthusiasm Domingo was dragged through the streets of Cartagena tied to the tail of a mule, and several times had his penis chopped off and nailed to a long pike. His captors were rewarded with successive grants of land and repeatedly given the title of marquis; but within the maroon palisades of the Dique Canal or of the lower Cauca, Domingo Bioho reigns and laughs with his unmistakable painted face.

  The free blacks live on constant alert, trained from birth to fight, protected by ravines and precipices and deep ditches lined with poisonous thorns. The most important of the refuges in the region, which has existed and resisted for a century, is going to be named after a saint, Saint Basil, whose effigy is soon expected to arrive on the Magdalena River. Saint Basil will be the first white man authorized to enter here. He will arrive with mitre and staff of office and will bring with him a little wooden church well stocked with miracles. He will not be scandalized by the nudity, or ever talk in a master’s voice. The maroons will provide him with a house and wife. They will get him a saintly female, Catalina, so that in the other world God will not wed him to an ass and so that they may enjoy this world together while they are in it.

  (108 and 120)

  The Maríapalito

  There is much animal life in the region where Domingo Bioho reigns forever and a day within his palisades. Most feared are the tiger, the boa constrictor, and the snake that wraps himself around the vines and glides down into the huts. Most fascinating are the mayupa fish that shits through his head, and the maríapalito.

  Like the spider, the female maríapalito eats her lovers. When the male embraces her from behind, she turns her chinless face to him, measures him with her big, protuberant eyes, fastens her teeth in him and lunches off him with absolute calm, until nothing remains.

  The maríapalito is extremely devout. She always keeps her arms folded in prayer and prays as she eats.

  (108)

  1712: Santa Marta

  From Piracy to Contraband

  From the green foothills of the Sierra Nevada, which wets its feet in the sea, rises a belltower surrounded by houses of wood and straw. In them live the thirty white families of the port of Santa Marta. All around, in huts of reed and mud, sheltered by palm leaves, live the Indians, blacks, and mixtures whom no one has bothered to count.

  Pirates have always been the nightmare of these coasts. Fifteen years ago the bishop of Santa Marta had to take apart the organ of the church to improvise ammunition. A week ago English ships penetrated the cannon fire of forts guarding the bay and calmly met the dawn on the beach.

  Everybody fled into the hills.

  The pirates waited. They didn’t steal so much as a handkerchief or burn a single house.

  Mistrustful, the inhabitants approached one by one; and Santa Marta has now become a pleasant market. The pirates, armed to the teeth, have come to buy and sell. They bargain, but are scrupulous in paying.

  Far away over there, British workshops are growing and need markets. Many pirates are becoming contrabandists although not one of them knows what the devil “capital accumulation” means.

  (36)

  1714: Ouro Prêto

  The Mine Doctor

  This doctor does not believe in drugs, nor in the costly little powders from Portugal. He mistrusts bleedings and purges and has small use for the patriarch Galen and his tablets of laws. Luis Gomes Ferreira advises his patients to take a daily bath, which in Europe would be a clear sign of heresy or insanity, and prescribes herbs and roots of the region. Dr. Ferreira has saved many lives, thanks to the common sense and ancient experience of the Indians, and to the aid of the “white handmaiden,” sugarcane brandy that revives the dying.

  There is little he can do, however, about the miners’ custom of disemboweling each other with bullet or knife. Here, every fortune is fleeting, and shrewdness is worth more than courage. In the implacable war of conquest against this black clay in which suns lie concealed, no science has any role to play. Captain Tomás de Souza, treasurer to the king, went looking for gold and found lead. The doctor could do nothing for him but make the sign of the cross. Everyone believed the captain had a ton of gold stashed away, but the creditors found only a few slaves to divide up.

  Rarely does the doctor attend a black patient. In the Brazilian mines slaves are used and scrapped. In vain Ferreira recommends more careful treatment, telling the bosses they sin against God and their own interests. In the places where they pan for gold, and in the galleries below ground, no black lasts ten years, but a handful of gold buys a new child, who is worth the same as a handful of salt or a whole hog.

  (48)

  1714: Vila Nova do Príncipe

  Jacinta

  She hallows the ground she walks on. Jacinta de Siquiera, African woman of Brazil, is the founder of this town of Príncipe and of the gold mines in the Quatro Vintens ravines. Black woman, verdant woman, Jacinta opens and closes like a carnivorous plant swallowing men and birthing children of all colors, in this world still without a map. Jacinta advances, slashing open the jungle, at the head of the scoundrels who come on muleback, barefoot, armed with old rifles, and who, when they enter the mines, leave their consciences hanging from a branch or buried in a swamp: Jacinta, born in Angola, slave in Bahia, mother of the gold of Minas Gerais.

  (89)

  1716: Potosí

  Holguín

  The viceroy of Lima, Don Rubico Morcillo de Auñón, enters Potosí beneath a hundred and twenty triumphal arches of tooled silver, through a tunnel of canvases depicting Icarus and Eros, Mercury, Endymion, the Colossus of Rhodes, and Aeneas fleeing from Troy.

  Potosí, poor Potosí, is not what it once was. Its population down by half, the city receives the viceroy on a street of wood, not of silver. But as in the days of wonder and glory, trumpets and drums resound: pages in gallant liveries light up with wax torches the parade of captains on horseback, governors and judges, magistrates, ambassadors … With nightfall comes the radiant masquerade: the city offers the dust-covered visitor the homage of the twelve heroes of Spain, the twelve peers of France, and the twelve Sibyls. In garish costumes the valiant Cid and Emperor Charles salute him, plus as many nymphs and Arab princes and Ethiopian kings as ever existed in the world or in dreams.

  Melchor Pérez Holguín depicts this day of prodigies. One by one, he paints the thousand personages, and Potosí, and the world’s most generous mountain, in earth and blood and smoke hues lustered with silver, and paints his own image at the foot of the vast canvas: Holguín, eagle-nosed mestizo in his fifties, long black hair streaming from beneath his slouch hat, palette raised in one hand. He also paints two old characters leaning on canes, and writes the words coming from their mouths:

  “So many marvels all at once, who ever did see?”

  “Never saw nothing this grand in a hundre
d and some years.”

  Perhaps Holguín doesn’t know that the marvel is the thing he is creating, believing he is just copying; nor does he know that his work will remain alive when the pomp of Potosí has been blotted from the face of the earth and no one can remember any viceroy.

  (16 and 215)

  1716: Cuzco

  The Image Makers

  Holguín’s mentor, Diego Quispe Tito, died shortly after his eyes died. In the initial fog of blindness he managed to paint his own likeness en route to Paradise, with the imperial tassel of the Incas on his forehead. Quispe was the most talented of the Indian artists of Cuzco. In his works, parrots soar among the angels and alight on a Saint Sebastian riddled with arrows. American faces, birds, and fruits appear smuggled into landscapes of Europe or of Heaven.

  While the Spaniards burn flutes and ponchos in the Plaza Mayor, the image makers of Cuzco find a way to paint bowls of avocados, rocoto chilis, chirimoyas, strawberries, and quinces on the table of the Last Supper, and to paint the Infant Jesus emerging from the belly of the Virgin and the Virgin sleeping on a bed of gold, in the embrace of Saint Joseph.

  The people raise crosses of corn, or adorn them with garlands of potatoes; and at the foot of the altars there are offerings of squashes and watermelons.

  (138 and 300)

  Mary, Mother Earth

  In churches hereabouts it is common to see the Virgin crowned with feathers or protected by parasols, like an Inca princess, and God the Father in the shape of a sun amid monkeys holding up columns and moldings adorned with tropical fruits, fish, and birds.

  An unsigned canvas shows the Virgin Mary in the silver mountain of Potosí, between the sun and the moon. On one side is the pope of Rome, on the other the king of Spain. Mary, however, is not on the mountain but inside it; she is the mountain, a mountain with woman’s face and outstretched hands, Mary-mountain, Mary-stone, fertilized by God as the sun fertilizes the land.

  (137)

  Pachamama

  In the Andean highlands, the Virgin is mama and the land and time are also mama.

  Earth, mother earth—the Pachamama—gets angry if someone drinks without inviting her. When she is extremely thirsty, she breaks the vessel and spills out its contents.

  To her is offered the placenta of the newly born, which is buried among flowers so that the child may live; and so that love may live, lovers bury their knotted hair.

  The goddess earth takes into her arms the weary and the broken who once emerged from her, opens to give them refuge at the journey’s end. From beneath the earth, the dead make her flower.

  (247)

  Mermaids

  In the main portico of the cathedral of Puno, Simón de Asto will carve two mermaids in stone.

  Although mermaids symbolize sin, the artist will not sculpt monsters. He will create two handsome Indian girls, gay charango-players who will love without a shadow of guilt. These Andean mermaids, Quesintuu and Umantuu, in ancient times rose from the waters of Lake Titicaca to make love with the god Tunupa, the Aymara god of fire and lightning, who in passing left a wake of volcanos.

  (137)

  1717: Quebec

  The Man Who Didn’t Believe in Winter

  The way Rabelais told it and Voltaire repeats it, the cold of Canada is so cold that words freeze as they emerge from the mouth and are suspended in midair. At the end of April, the first sun cleaves the ice on the rivers and spring breaks through amid crackings of resurrection. Then, only then, words spoken in the winter are heard.

  The French colonists fear winter more than the Indians, and envy the animals that sleep through it. Neither the bear nor the marmot knows the ills of cold: they leave the world for a few months while winter splits trees with a sound like gunshots and turns humans into statues of congealed blood and marbleized flesh.

  The Portuguese Pedro da Silva spends the winter carrying mail in a dog sled over the ice of the Saint Lawrence River. In summer he travels by canoe, and sometimes, due to the winds, takes a whole month coming and going between Quebec and Montreal. Pedro carries decrees from the governor, reports by monks and officials, offers by fur traders, promises from friends, secrets of lovers.

  Canada’s first postman has worked for a quarter of a century without asking winter’s permission. Now he has died.

  (96)

  1717: Dupas Island

  The Founders

  The map of Canada fills a whole wall. Between the east coast and the great lakes, a few cities, a few forts. Beyond, an immense space of mystery. On another wall, beneath the crossed barrels of muskets, hang the scalps of enemy Indians, darkened by tobacco smoke.

  Seated on a rocking chair, Pierre de La Vérendrye bites his pipe. La Vérendrye doesn’t hear the bawlings of his newly born son as he squints at the map and lets himself go down the torrential rivers that no European has yet navigated.

  He has returned alive from the battlefields of France, where they had given him up for dead from a shot in the breast and various saber wounds. In Canada he has plenty to eat, thanks to the wheat in his fields and his wounded lieutenant’s pension; but he is bored to delirium.

  His wounded legs will travel farther than his wildest daydreams. La Veréndrye’s explorations will make this map look foolish. Heading west in search of the ocean that leads to the China coasts, he will reach places to the north where the musket barrel explodes from the cold when fired, and farther south than the unknown Missouri River. This child who is crying beside him in his wooden cradle will be the discoverer of the invincible wall of the Rocky Mountains.

  Missionaries and fur traders will follow in his footsteps. So it has ever been. So it was with Cartier, Champlain, and La Salle.

  Europe pays good prices for the skins of beavers, otters, martens, deer, foxes, and bears. In exchange for the skins, the Indians get weapons to kill each other, or die in the wars between Englishmen and Frenchmen who dispute their lands. The Indians also get firewater, which turns the toughest warrior into skin and bone, and diseases more devastating than the worst snowstorms.

  (176 and 330)

  Portrait of the Indians

  Among the Indians of Canada there are no paunches nor any hunchbacks, say the French friars and explorers. If there is one who is lame, or blind, or one-eyed, it is from a war wound.

  They do not know about property or envy, says Pouchot, and call money the Frenchmen’s snake.

  They think it ridiculous to obey a fellow man, says Lafitau. They elect chiefs who have no privilege whatsoever; and if one gets bossy, they depose him. Women give opinions and decisions on par with men. Councils of elders and public assemblies have the final word; but no human word has precedence over the voice of dreams.

  They obey dreams as Christians do the divine mandate, says Brébeuf. They obey them every day, because the soul speaks through dreams every night; and when winter comes to an end and the ice of the world is broken, they throw a big party dedicated to dreams. Then the Indians dress up in costumes and every kind of madness is permitted.

  They eat when they are hungry, says Cartier. Appetite is the only clock they know.

  They are libertines, Le Jeune observes. Both women and men can break their marriage vows when they like. Virginity means nothing to them. Champlain has found women who have been married twenty times.

  According to Le Jeune, they do not like working, but they delight in inventing lies. They know nothing of art, unless it be the art of scalping enemies. They are vengeful: for vengeance they eat lice and worms and every bug that enjoys human flesh. They are incapable, Biard shows, of understanding any abstract idea.

  According to Brébeuf, the Indians cannot grasp the idea of hell. They have never heard of eternal punishment. When Christians threaten them with hell, the savages ask: And will my friends be there in hell?

  (97)

  Songs of the Chippewa Indians in the Great Lakes Region

  Sometimes

  I go about pitying myself

  while I am carried by t
he wind

  across the sky.

  • • •

  The bush

  is sitting under a tree

  and singing.

  (38 and 340)

  1718: Sāo Jose del Rei

  The Pillory

  The horde of adventurers level forests, open mountains, divert rivers; and as long as fire evokes a sparkle in the rusty stones, the pursuers of gold eat toads and roots, and found cities under the double sign of hunger and punishment.

  Erection of the pillory marks the birth of each city in the Brazilian gold region. The pillory is the center of everything, and around it will be the houses, and on the hilltops, churches: the pillory, with a crown on top and two iron rings to bind the hands of slaves deserving the lash.

  Raising his sword before it, the count of Assumar is giving official birth to the town of Sāo Jose del Rei. The journey from Rio de Janeiro has taken him four months and on the way he has had to eat monkey meat and roast ants.

  This land makes the count of Assumar, governor of Minas Gerais, panicky and sick. He considers the spirit of revolt second nature for these intractable and rootless people. Here the stars induce disorder, he says; the water exhales uprisings and the earth gives off tumultuous vapors; the clouds are insolent, the winds rebellious, the gold outrageous.

  The count has every runaway slave beheaded and organizes militias to put down black subversion. The raceless ones, neither white nor black, wretched offspring of master and slave, or mixtures of a thousand bloods, are the hunters of fugitive slaves. Born to live outside the law, all they are good for is dying as killers. They, the mulattos and mestizos, are abundant. Here, with no white women, there is no way of complying with the will of the king, who has ordered from Lisbon the avoidance of defective and impure offspring.