Ines of My Soul (14 page)

“He is a pest, then,
mamitayy
, but do not hit the top. This Núñez, he will be bringing good luck,” Catalina consoled me.

“The only thing that man can bring me is misfortune, Catalina! A blustering, vindictive man is always dangerous.”

Catalina was right. Thanks to the ominous lieutenant, who went and sat himself down in a tavern to drink and boast about what he was going to do to me, that same night I met the man of my destiny, the one Catalina was constantly predicting would come along.

The tavern consisted of a low-ceilinged room in which a few window slits let in barely enough air to breathe. It was run by a good-hearted man from Andalucia who always gave credit to soldiers short of funds. For that reason, and because of the music—a black man playing some sort of stringed instrument and another with a drum—the place was very popular. The happy sounds of the clients contrasted with the somber figure of a man drinking alone in one corner. He was sitting on a bench before a small table on which he had spread out a sheet of yellowed paper and weighed it down with a carafe of wine to keep it from curling up. He was Pedro de Valdivia, Gobernador Francisco Pizarro's field marshal and hero of the battle of Las Salinas. He was by then one of the wealthiest encomenderos in Peru. In payment for his services, Pizarro had allotted him, for his lifetime, a silver mine in Porco, a fertile and productive hacienda in La Canela valley, and hundreds of Indians to work them.

And what was the famed Valdivia doing at that moment? Not calculating the amount of silver extracted from his mine, or the count of his llamas or sacks of maize; he was studying a map Diego de Almagro had hurriedly sketched in prison before his execution. Valdivia was bedeviled by the idea of triumphing where Adelantado Almagro had failed—in the far south of the hemisphere. It was yet to be conquered and populated, the one remaining place where a military man like himself could achieve glory. He did not want to live in the shadow of Francisco Pizarro and comfortably grow old in Peru. Neither did he intend to return to Spain, however rich and respected he might be. He was even less attracted to the idea of rejoining Marina, who had been faithfully waiting for years and never tired of calling him home in her letters, which always abounded with blessings and reproaches. Spain was the past. Chile was the future. The map showed the routes Almagro followed on his expedition and the most difficult points: the sierra, the desert, and the areas in which enemies were concentrated. “No one can go any farther south than the Bío-Bío river; the Mapuche will stop him,” Almagro had repeated several times. Those words were like a thorn in Valdivia's side. I would have gone farther, he thought, although he never doubted the adelantado's courage.

That is what he was doing when above the noise of the tavern he heard the loud voice of a drunken man, and then, despite himself, listened to what the blusterer was saying. He was talking about someone to whom he planned to give a well-deserved lesson, a certain Inés, a prideful woman who dared defy an honest lieutenant serving the most Christian Emperor Charles V. The name sounded familiar to Valdivia, and he deduced that Núñez was talking about the young widow who washed and mended clothes in her home on Templo de las Vírgenes. He had not called on her services—he had his own Indian girls for that—but he had seen her a few times in the street and in church, and had noticed her because she was one of the few Spanish women in Cuzco. He had wondered how long a woman like that would be alone. On a couple of occasions he had followed some distance behind her for a few blocks, merely to enjoy the movement of her hips—she walked with the strong strides of a Gypsy—and to catch the reflection of the sun on her coppery hair. It seemed to him that she radiated assurance and strength of character, qualities he demanded in his captains but nothing he had ever thought he would appreciate in a woman. Up to that time, he had been attracted to sweet, fragile girls who awakened his desire to protect them; that was why he had married Marina. There was nothing vulnerable or innocent about this Inés. She was, in fact, intimidating: pure energy, like a contained cyclone, yet that was the very thing that made him notice her. At least that is what he later told me.

With the bits of what he could hear—most of the man's remarks were drowned out by the noise of the tavern—Valdivia was able to piece together the plan of the drunken lieutenant, who was shouting at the top of his voice for two volunteers to kidnap the woman by night and bring her to his home. The response to his request was a chorus of loud laughter and obscene jokes, but no one offered to help him. What he was asking was not only cowardly, it was also dangerous. It was all well and good to rape a woman in wartime, and to pleasure himself with Indian women—no one cared what happened to them—but it was something else for a soldier to assault a Spanish widow woman who had been personally received by the gobernador. Better to get that idea out of your head, his fellow drinkers advised Núñez, but he proclaimed that he would have no trouble enlisting strong arms to carry out his proposal.

Pedro de Valdivia kept a close eye on Núñez, and a half an hour later followed him outside. The man was staggering, unaware that anyone was behind him. He stopped a moment at my door, calculating whether he could handle the matter himself, but decided not to run that risk. However much the alcohol was clouding his reason, he knew that his reputation and his military career hung in the balance. Valdivia watched him stumble away, and took up a place at the corner, hidden in the shadows. He did not have long to wait. Soon a pair of stealthy Indians appeared and began to prowl about the house, trying the door and shutters of the windows that faced the street. When they found that they were all locked from the inside, they decided to climb the stone fence, which was only five feet high at the rear. Within a few minutes they had dropped down onto the patio, but not without the bad luck of tipping over and shattering a clay jug.

I am a light sleeper and I was awakened by the noise. For a moment Pedro did nothing, waiting to see how far the two marauders were willing to go, then leaped over the wall behind them. By then I had lighted a lamp and picked up the long knife I used to mince the meat for the empanadas. I was ready to use it, but prayed I wouldn't have to, since Sebastián Romero already weighed heavily on my conscience and it would have been painful to add another death. I went outside to the patio, with Catalina close behind. We were too late to catch the best part of the show, because the caballero had already corralled the two would-be kidnappers and was tying them up with the same rope they had brought for me. It all happened very rapidly, with no apparent effort on the part of Valdivia, who seemed more amused than angry, as if he had interrupted some boyish prank.

The situation was quite ridiculous: I in my nightdress with my hair hanging loose; Catalina cursing in Quechua; a pair of Indians shaking with terror; and an hidalgo dressed in polished leather boots, velvet doublet, silk breeches, with sword in hand, sweeping the patio with the feather on his hat as he bowed in greeting. We both burst out laughing.

“These miserable creatures will not bother you again, señora,” he said gallantly.

“I am not worried about them, caballero, only the person who sent them.”

“He will not be up to any further chicanery because tomorrow he will have to answer to me.”

“You know who he is?”

“I have a good idea, but if I am mistaken, these two will confess under torture whose orders they were obeying.”

At these words, the Indians threw themselves down and kissed the caballero's boots, pleading for his mercy, with the name of Lieutenant Núñez spilling from their lips. It was Catalina's opinion that we should slit their throats right then and there, and Valdivia agreed, but I stepped between the poor Indians and his sword.

“No, señor, I beg you. I do not want dead men in my patio. It would make a mess, and bring bad luck.”

Again Valdivia laughed. He opened the gate and sent the men on their way with a good kick in the rear for each of them, warning them to disappear from Cuzco that very night or face the consequences.

“I fear that Lieutenant Núñez will not be as magnanimous as you are, caballero. He will move heaven and earth to find those men; they know too much and it would not be convenient for him if they talk,” I said.

“Believe me, señora, I have the authority to send Núñez to rot in Los Chunchos jungle, and I assure you I will do just that,” he replied.

At about that point, I realized who he was. He was the famous field marshal, the hero of many wars, one of the richest and most powerful men in all Peru. I had glimpsed him once or twice, but always from a distance, admiring his Arab horse and his innate sense of authority.

That night my life and that of Pedro de Valdivia were defined. We had wandered for years in circles, blindly seeking each other, until finally we met in the patio of that small house on Templo de las Vírgenes. Grateful for his aid, I invited him into my modest parlor. To welcome him, Catalina went to fetch a jug of the wine I always kept in my home. Before vanishing in thin air, as was her custom, she signaled to me from behind my guest's back, and that was how I knew that this was the man she had been seeing in her divining shells. Surprised—I had never imagined that fortune would send me someone as important as Pedro de Valdivia—I studied him from head to toe in the yellow lamplight. I liked what I saw: eyes blue as the skies of Extremadura; a frank, though severe expression; rugged features; a warrior's build; hands hardened by the sword but with long, elegant fingers. Such a man, unmarred, was an unusual prize in the Americas, where so many are marked by horrible scars or by missing eyes, nostrils, even limbs.

And what did he see? A slim, barefoot woman of medium height, with chestnut-colored eyes beneath thick eyebrows and loose, unruly hair, clad in a nightdress of ordinary cloth. Mute, we stared at each other an eternity, unable to look away. Although the night was cool, my skin was burning and a trickle of sweat rolled down my back. I saw that he was shaken by the same hunger; I could feel the air in the room grow heavy. Catalina emerged from nowhere with the wine, but when she saw what was happening, she disappeared and left us alone.

Afterward, Pedro would confess that he did not take the initiative in making love that night because he needed time to calm down, and to think. “When I saw you, I was afraid for the first time in my life,” he would tell me much later. He was not a man for mistresses or concubines, he had no lovers, and he never had relations with Indian women, although I suppose that occasionally he visited the women who sell themselves. In his way, he had always remained faithful to Marina Ortiz de Gaete, to whom he felt indebted for having fallen in love with her when she was only thirteen; he had not made her happy and had abandoned her in order to throw himself into the adventure of America. He felt responsible for her before God. But I had no ties, and even if Pedro had had half a dozen wives, I would have loved him just the same. It was inevitable. He was nearly forty years old, and I close to thirty. Neither of us had time to waste, which is why I set about heading things along the right course.

How did we come to embrace so quickly? Who held out the first hand? Who sought the other's lips for a kiss? Surely it was I. As soon as I could get my voice back and break the charged silence in which we stood and stared at each other, I told him without preamble that I had been waiting for him for a long, long time, that I had seen him in dreams and in the beads and divining shells, and that I was prepared to love him forever—along with a number of other promises. All without holding anything back and without a touch of shyness. Pedro backed away, stiff, pale, until his back was against the wall. What woman in her right mind speaks that way to a stranger? But he did not believe that I had lost my mind, or that I was some common Cuzco whore, because he, too, felt in his bones and in the caverns of his soul the certainty that we had been born to love each other. He exhaled a sigh, almost a sob, whispering my name in a quavering voice. “And I have been waiting for you, forever,” I think he said. Or perhaps he didn't. I suppose that as life passes we embellish some memories and try to forget others. What I am sure of is that we made love that very night, and that from that first embrace we were consumed in the same fire.

Pedro de Valdivia had been forged in the roar and tumult of war; he knew nothing of love but was ready to welcome it when it came along. He lifted me up and in four long strides carried me to my bed, which we fell onto, he atop me, kissing me, nibbling me, desperately struggling to get out of his boots and stockings, his doublet and breeches, with the fumbling ardor of a boy. I let him do it himself, to give him time to get his breath; perhaps it had been a long time since he had been with a woman. I pressed him to my breast, sensing the beating of his heart, his animal heat, his male smell.

Pedro had a lot to learn, but there was no hurry. We had the rest of our lives before us, and I was a good teacher. That, at least, is something I can thank Juan de Málaga for. Once Pedro realized that behind the closed door I commanded, and that there was no dishonor in it, he obeyed me with excellent humor. This took some time, let's say four or five hours, because he believed that surrender was the female's role and domination the male's. He had seen that in his animals and learned it as a soldier, but it was not for nothing that Juan de Málaga had spent years teaching me to know my own body, as well as a man's. I do not propose that all men are the same, but they are quite similar, and with a minimum of intuition any woman can make them happy. The reverse is not true: few men know how to satisfy a woman, and even fewer are interested in doing so. Pedro was wise enough to leave his sword on the other side of the door and surrender to me. The details of that first night are not important, just let me say that we both discovered what real love is. Until then we had never experienced the fusion of body and soul. My relationship with Juan had been carnal, and his with Marina had been spiritual. Ours was complete.