Iberia (14 page)

 

five years older. I cannot recall ever having seen a woman so unlike

 

a bride, so ill at ease in chiffon. As she passed my table I smiled,
and she returned the stare of one who had worked very hard and
had come not to a celebration but to a one-day respite, after which
the work would resume. They were not headed for a banquet but
to an ice cream stand, where the groom stood beside the clerk
dispensing the cream and counted out his guests, one at a time,
and each received a small ice cream sandwich costing four cents.
That was fourteen times four or fifty-six cents for his wedding
feast. The country people stood in the sunlight eating their
sandwiches, then climbed back into the truck. ‘Where are you
from?’ I asked one of the men. ‘Medellín,’ he said, ‘we’ve come
here to celebrate.’ He then added gratuitously a statement the
significance of which I would understand later: ‘He came home

 

from Germany to marry her.’

 

The most domineering building on the plaza was the Pizarro

 

palace, an uninspired baroque construction whose baronial shield

 

was unlike any I’d so far seen. Counting its pedestal, it was three

 

stories high, covered the corner of its building and wrapped

 

around a considerable expanse of each wall. ‘I’m glad at least one

 

of the conquistadors returned home to grandeur,’ I said, but Don

 

Ignacio corrected me. ‘That wasn’t the home of the Pizarro you

 

know. It was the palace of Hernando, and his story is perhaps

 

even more interesting.’

 

As I sat in the plaza talking with Don Ignacio and his friends I

 

learned much about the Pizarros of Trujillo. Fiery old Gonzalo

 

Pizarro, who lived to be ninety-eight according to legend,

 

seventy-seven according to history, had been a hero at the

 

conquest of Granada and had also served with that master Spanish

 

soldier known simply as el Gran Capitán, who had disciplined

 

Italy in the age of Columbus. Some claim that the old colonel

 

lived in the castle that dominates Trujillo, others give him a

 

smaller castle in the neighborhood, but the likelihood is that he

 

lived in a house that formerly stood on the site of the present

 

Pizarro mansion. Of one thing we are sure. Between wars he had

 

a penchant for visiting his elderly Aunt Beatriz, who had taken

 

orders in a convent, and after paying his respects to the old lady

 

he liked to climb into bed with one or another of her maids. In

 

this manner he had one son, Francisco, another Juan, and a third
Gonzalo, each by a different mother, plus a daughter María, a
second daughter Francisca, a third Graciana and a fourth Catalina,
all by the mother of his third son. He also had two legitimate
daughters and a son, Hernando Pizarro, a clever and prudent lad

 

who wound up with the big house.

 

There being no future in the Pizarro family for seven bastards,

 

the first two girls became nuns, the last two married men from

 

the region and the three boys became soldiers. When Francisco

 

led his pitiful little army to the conquest of Peru, the first

 

thirty-seven positions were occupied by men from Trujillo, and

 

the five top positions were held by himself, his legitimate brother,

 

his two bastard brothers and a half brother who was the son of

 

his mother but not of the old colonel. The remainder of his army

 

of 167 were from other parts of Extremadura. The manner in

 

which Pizarro led his clan to victory is a saga of heroism and

 

brutality, for it seems inconceivable that so few Spaniards could

 

conquer a land so vast and a civilization so advanced; perhaps

 

only men trained in the hardness of Extremadura could have

 

done it.

 

In the fighting, Pizarro and his illegitimate brothers were

 

usually in the forefront, with legitimate Hernando in the rear

 

looking after business affairs, and in victory the same division of

 

labor was observed. The Pizarro men were well advanced in years

 

for such adventures, Francisco being in his fifties, but their sagacity

 

offset their age and they became rulers of a vast part of South

 

America. Then one by one the bastard brothers fell on evil times;

 

there were betrayals and assassinations, so that it was only the

 

canny bookkeeper Hernando who survived. His brother Francisco

 

had married an Inca princess, Inés Yupanqui, and they had had

 

a lovely daughter Francisca, who was Hernando’s niece and whom

 

he married. In 1629 the grandson of Hernando (and also the

 

great-grandson of Francisco) applied for the right to inherit the

 

title originally granted to the conquistador, and this was approved,

 

so that the house on the square became the seat of the Marqués

 

de la Conquista. To look at its massive shield is to recall the history

 

of both Spain and Peru, for the statues which grace it represent
Francisco, his wife Inés, their daughter Francisca and her husband,

 

canny Hernando, who was also her uncle.

 

Judged from today’s perspective, the conquistadors of

 

Extremadura seem monstrous men devoid of pity, cruel destroyers

 

of civilizations as splendid as their own, and as hard as the barren

 

land from which they sprang. Their crimes against Aztec and Inca

 

can be understood, for the conquistadors were few and the enemy

 

were many; but the callous manner in which they betrayed their

 

fellow Spaniards was appalling. Typical is the history of Pizarro:

 

he did not try to defend his protector Balboa when the latter was

 

hounded to execution by the venality of his friends, but later he

 

found himself accused the way Balboa had been and was

 

assassinated by his friends. To us he seems to have been false to

 

every promise he made, and his offenses against common decency

 

comprise a catalogue; but from Spanish historians the judgment

 

is otherwise, largely because Pizarro did bring into the Christian

 

Church thousands of pagan Indians. As Presbítero Clodoaldo

 

Naranjo wrote in 1929:

Pizarro was the genius brooding over a vast empire, subduing
enemy pueblos, founding cities, organizing institutions, sacrificing
his own interests, loving his soldiers as if they were his sons, exact
in discipline, faithful to his king, yielding to no man in pundonor,
to no man in just administration of the public welfare, to no man
in the high religious propriety of his actions. With the Cross raised
high he commenced his enterprise, with the Cross aloft he founded
his cities, and with the Cross sealed with his own blood he gave
up his life.

Louis Bertrand, leading French expert on Spain, in the fine
historical summary he wrote with the Englishman Charles Petrie,
supports the Spanish judgment:

These conquerors have also been accused of destroying, through
ignorance and barbarism, precious civilisations like those of the
Aztecs and the Incas. This is making civilisation a laughing-stock.
Let me repeat once more: those rudimentary civilisations have
been overestimated in the most ridiculous way, with the object
of lowering and defaming the Spaniards and Catholicism, held as
responsible for this alleged destruction. Can one regard as civilised
the Peruvians, who did not know how to write, and who reckoned
years and centuries by knots tied in cords; or the Mexicans, who
used infantile hieroglyphics for history and chronology; peoples
who had neither draught beasts nor beasts of burden, neither
cows, cereals, nor vines; peoples who were not acquainted with
the wheel, and had not reached the Iron Age; peoples among
whom man was reduced to the role of a quadruped, whose bloody
religion admitted human sacrifices, and who had markets for
human flesh? If the conquistadors destroyed much and practised
needless cruelties—destruction and cruelties which are as nothing
beside those of modern war—they blazed the trail for the
missionaries who saved for history everything that was essential
in those embryonic civilisations, and but for whom we should
know absolutely nothing about pre-Columbian America.

The final judgment, however, is the pragmatic one made by
Mexico, whose citizens, remembering the brutalities of Cortés,
still refuse to permit statues of the conquistador within their
country.

My reflections were broken by Don Ignacio, who ran off to
intercept a friend, whom he brought to our table. ‘Dr. Ezequiel
Pablos Gutiérrez,’ he said, introducing a lively red-headed man
in his early fifties. ‘Medical graduate of Salamanca and alcalde
[mayor] of Trujillo.’

‘How do you like our city?’ the alcalde asked, after introducing
his wife and daughter.

 

‘I’ve fallen in love with that little building over there.’

 

‘The one with the three tiers of arches? That’s my office.’

 

‘You’re lucky,’ I said.

 

‘We’re thinking of converting it into a parador.’

 

‘When it opens, reserve me a room for a month.’ I could
imagine nothing better than to have a room in such a parador
and from it to survey the pageant that unfolded in the plaza.

 

‘Right now we have other plans,’ the alcalde said, ‘so jump in
the car.’ He drove rather spiritedly along a country road leading
east of Trujillo and soon we were in the heart of Extremadura,
the low hills, the flat burning land and here and there the olive
groves.

 

‘I like this land very much,’ I said. ‘I think I must be an
Extremaduran.’

 

‘If a man is tough enough to love this land, he will never forget
it,’ the alcalde said. ‘Never. I see men who go away. Big jobs in
Madrid. Buenos Aires. But always they come back to the barren
soil of Extremadura.’

 

We drove for a dozen miles, it seemed, and Señor Pablos turned
down a lane and headed for what looked like an Arizona ranch
house. ‘This is my ranch,’ he said. ‘I raise fighting bulls here.
Look!’ On the horizon I saw a herd of perhaps thirty sleek black
bulls. In the setting sun they were handsome beasts, watching us
with disdain as they continued their feeding. Between us and them
there appeared to be no fences, but they were so far away that
they presented no danger. ‘They never attack if they’re kept in a
group,’ the mayor explained. ‘Only when they’re alone and
insecure.’

 

Don Ignacio’s car pulled up beside ours and we descended to
enjoy a long, easy evening in the country. I noticed that Señora
Pablos disappeared rather quickly, but her lively daughter and a
young man who obviously hoped to marry her took charge of
bringing horses for those who wanted to ride. Workmen from
the ranch came with reports of what had been happening, and
there seemed to be a good deal of muffled talking and arranging
going on, centering upon a tall, very graceful young man who
had joined the party, but I failed to detect what was under way.

 

After the sun had set, leaving a fine reddish haze over the ranch,
the alcalde said, ‘We’re going to ride back up in the hills. Horses
or automobiles.’ At the head of our column rode six horsemen
from the ranch, but before long they left us and cut across country
toward the bulls we had seen earlier. Without disturbing the bulls
they rode on to a fenced ravine where young heifers were grazing,
and in a neat concentration of effort they cut out eight or ten and
began herding them toward us. I still didn’t understand what was
happening, but at the top of the hill we came upon a clean, pure
little building, totally whitewashed and built in the form of a
circle. It was a private bullring maintained by the alcalde for
testing his animals. The tall young man was a matador, and the
herdsmen were in the process of driving three heifers into the
corrals for testing with the cape.

 

It was almost dark when we finally took our places atop the
wall of the ring, and the red of sunset had been replaced by a
purple that already obscured the hills. Birds who normally nested
in the ring flew gracefully back and forth as if trying to drive us
away. The voices of the herdsmen were guttural as they reassured
the heifers moving into the corrals, and the alcalde was excited
as he directed the opening and closing of gates that shut each
heifer off into its own small pen from which it would later catapult
into the ring. It was so dark that I wondered if it would be possible
to fight the heifers or even to see them.

 

A moment of silence, then the alcalde’s reassuring voice, ‘Open
that one!’ and as the gate to the ring swung open a heifer, from
whom fighting bulls are reputed to inherit their bravery, erupted
into the ring, raised a cloud of golden dust and began charging
at anything that moved. Three workmen without capes provoked
her by jumping out from behind barriers, then ducking back in
as she charged headlong at them. Finally the matador stepped out
with his magenta-and-yellow cape, at which the heifer dashed as
if it were a lifelong enemy. Three times, four times, five, she
doubled back on herself and slashed at the offending cape. In the
darkness she seemed like a mysterious thunderbolt hurtling across
space, and I could understand why it was popularly said that ‘the
cow determines the bull.’ Such fury, if applied to a full-grown
bull of a thousand pounds, with widespread horns and powerful
neck, could make a formidable enemy.

 

The darkness deepened rapidly, so that the moving figures on
the sand, bound together by a swirling cape, became ghostlike
and the shadowy matador as strange a creature as the animal he
was fighting. Birds, startled by the unfamiliar scene, now began
to cry, and from behind the barrier the foreman of the work crew
called out, ‘That’s enough.’ The matador withdrew; a gate was
opened; the heifer leaped at something that moved beyond the
gate; the gate closed and the arena was still.