Ines of My Soul (7 page)

“I suppose that Pizarro aligned himself with the Inca's enemies, the way Hernán Cortés did in Mexico.”

“He did. Atahualpa and his brother Huáscar were waging a fratricidal war, and first Pizarro, and then Almagro, who arrived in Peru a little later, took advantage of that to defeat them both.”

Alderete explained that not a leaf stirred in the Inca empire that the authorities did not learn about; the ordinary Indians were all slaves. The Inca used part of the tribute paid him by his subjects to feed and protect orphans, widows, the ancient, and the ill, and also put part aside for bad times. In spite of these advanced social laws, which did not exist in Spain, the people detested the sovereign and his privileged court because they lived only to serve the military and religious castes, the orejones. According to Alderete, it didn't matter to the people whether they were dominated by Incas or Spaniards, and that is why they didn't offer much resistance to the invaders. In any case, Atahualpa's death gave the victory to Pizarro. When the head was cut off the body of the empire, the empire collapsed.

“Those two men, Pizarro and Almagro, bastards both of them, with neither education nor fortune, are a perfect example of what can be achieved in the New World, Pedro. They are not just wealthy beyond imagination, they have also had honors and titles heaped on their heads by our emperor.”

“You hear only about their fame and their wealth, only about the ventures that succeeded: gold, pearls, emeralds, lands, and subjected Indians. No one ever mentions the dangers,” Valdivia argued.

“You are right about that; there is no end to the dangers. It takes men of great character to conquer those virgin soils.”

Valdivia blushed. Did Alderete have doubts about his character? But immediately he reasoned that if that were the case, the man was within his rights, since he himself had wondered. It had been a long while since he had put his courage to the test. The world was moving ahead with giant steps. It was his fate to have been born into a splendid age in which the mysteries of the universe were at last being revealed: not only was the earth round, there were those who suggested that it circled the sun and not the reverse. And what was he doing while all this was happening? He was counting sheep and goats, harvesting cork and olives. Once again Valdivia was aware of how bored he was. He was tired of tending cattle and tilling fields, of playing cards with his neighbors, of masses and rosaries, of reading the same books over and over—nearly all of them banned by the Inquisition—and of several years of obligatory, sterile embraces with his wife. Here before him stood destiny, embodied in that enthusiastic young man, come once more to knock at his door, as it had in the times of Lombardy, Flanders, Pavía, Milan, and Rome.

“When are you leaving for the Americas, Jerónimo?”

“This year, if God wills it.”

“You can count on me,” said Pedro de Valdivia in a whisper, so Marina wouldn't hear. His eyes were on the Toledo sword hanging above the fireplace.

In 1537 I said my good-byes to my family, whom I would never see again, and traveled with my niece Constanza to the beautiful city of Seville, perfumed with orange blossoms and jasmine, and from there down the clear waters of the Guadalquivir to the bustling port of Cadiz, with its narrow cobbled streets and Moorish cupolas. We set sail on Maestro Manuel Martín's ship, a three-master with a tonnage of two hundred and forty, slow and heavy but steady in the water. A line of men loaded on the cargo: barrels of water, beer, wine, and oil; sacks of flour and dried meat, live fowl, a cow, and two pigs to be eaten on the voyage, in addition to several horses, which were worth their weight in gold in the New World. I watched while my carefully tied bundles were delivered to the space Maestro Martín had assigned me.

The first thing I did as my niece and I settled into our small cabin was to set up an altar to Nuestra Señora del Socorro, the Lady of Perpetual Succor.

“You are very courageous to undertake this voyage, Señora Inés. Where will your husband be waiting?” Manuel Martín asked.

“In truth, I do not know, Maestro.”

“What! He will not be waiting in Nueva Granada?”

“The last letter he sent came from a place they call Coro, in Venezuela, but that was some while ago, and it may be that he is no longer there.”

“The Americas are a territory larger than all the rest of the known world. It will not be easy to find your husband.”

“Then I shall look until I find him.”

“And how will you do that, señora?”

“The usual way, by asking.”

“Then I wish you luck. This is the first time I have carried women. I beseech you, you and your niece, to be prudent,” the maestro added.

“What do you mean by that?”

“You are both young, and not at all bad looking. You must know what I am referring to. After a week at sea, the men begin to long for female companionship, and as you two are right here onboard, the temptation will be very strong. And another thing. Sailors believe that women aboard ship attract storms and other misfortunes. For your well-being, and my peace of mind, I would prefer that you and your niece have no dealings with my men.”

The maestro was a stocky Galician with broad shoulders and short legs, a prominent nose, little rodent eyes, and skin weathered like saddle leather by the salt and wind of his years at sea. He had signed on as a cabin boy when he was thirteen, and could count on the fingers of one hand the years that he had spent on terra firma. His rough appearance contrasted with the gentleness of his manners and the goodness of his heart, which would be evident later when he came to my aid at a moment of great need.

It is a shame that I did not yet know how to write, otherwise I would have begun to take notes. Although I did not suspect that my life would be worth telling about, that voyage should have been noted down in detail, since so few people have crossed the salty ocean expanse: lead-colored water teeming with secret life, neverending, terrifying, all foam, wind, and solitude. In this relation, written many years after the events it describes, I hope to be as meticulous as possible, but memory is always capricious, the fruit of all one has lived, desired, and fantasized. The line that divides reality from imagination is very thin, and at my age is no longer interesting, for now everything is subjective. Memory is also colored by vanity. Even with Death sitting in a chair near my table, waiting, I still am influenced by vanity, not just when I rouge my cheeks if visitors are coming, but when I am writing my story. Is there anything more vain than an autobiography?

I had never seen the ocean, and had thought of it as a very wide river, never imagining that I would not be able to see the other shore. I refrained from making comments, in order not to give evidence of my ignorance, and I hid the fear that froze my bones when the ship sailed into open waters and began to pitch and heave. There were seven of us passengers, and all of them, except for Constanza, who had a very strong stomach, were almost immediately seasick. So great was my misery that on the second day I begged Maestro Martín to allow me to take a boat and row back to Spain. He burst out laughing and forced a pint of rum down my throat, which had the virtue of transporting me to another world for thirty hours, at the end of which I revived, sunken cheeked and green. It was only then that I could sip the broth my sweet niece spooned into my mouth.

We had left terra firma behind, and were sailing through dark waters beneath an infinite sky, without shelter of any sort. I could not imagine how the pilot could know where he was in that never-changing vastness, with nothing to guide him but his astrolabe and the stars in the firmament. He assured me that I could rest easy, for he had made the voyage many times and the route was well known to Spaniards and Portuguese, who had been following it for decades. Navigation charts were no longer as closely guarded as they once had been; even the damned English had them now. He made it clear that it was a different matter when it came to charts of the Strait of Magellan, or the Pacific coast. Pilots guarded those with their lives; they were more valuable than any New World treasure.

I never grew used to the motion of the waves, the creaking wood, the grating iron, the incessant flapping of wind-whipped sails. By day I was tormented by the crowded conditions and, especially, the way the men stared at me with the eyes of dogs in heat. I had to fight for my turn to place our olla on the cookstove, as well as for privacy to use the latrine, a large box outfitted with a hole and suspended over the ocean. Constanza, in contrast, never complained, and even seemed content. After a month at sea, supplies began to grow scarce, and water, by now fouled, was rationed. Because the men stole the eggs, I moved the cage with my hens to our cabin, and took them outside twice a day with a string around their legs, like lapdogs being taken for a stroll.

On one occasion I had to use my frying pan to defend myself from a sailor more brash than the others, a certain Sebastián Romero, whose name I have never forgotten because I know we will meet again in purgatory. In the close quarters of the ship, this man seized the slightest excuse to fall against me, blaming it on the waves. I warned him again and again to leave me alone, but that merely excited him further. One night he found me alone in the small area beneath the bridge that served as a kitchen. Before he could get his hands on me, I felt his fetid breath on the nape of my neck and, without thinking twice, I half-turned and thumped him on the head with the frying pan, exactly as I had years ago to poor Juan de Málaga when he threatened to strike me. Sebastián Romero had a softer skull than Juan, and fell sprawling to the deck, where he lay for several minutes as if asleep, while I searched for rags to bandage his head. He did not lose as much blood as one might have expected, though later his face did swell and turn the color of an eggplant. I helped him to his feet, and since neither of us was eager to spread the truth about his injury, we agreed to say that he had banged his head against a beam.

Among the passengers on the ship was a chronicler and sketch artist, one Daniel Belalcázar, who had been sent by the Crown with the assignment of drawing maps and recording his observations. Belalcázar was a man of about thirty-five, slim and strong, with the angular face and dark skin of an Andalucian. He would trot from bow to stern and back again for hours, exercising. He combed his hair back into a short braid and wore a gold earring in his left ear. The one time that a member of the crew made some remark about him, he punched the man in the nose and no one bothered him again.

Belalcázar, who had begun his voyaging as a young man, and who knew the remote coasts of Africa and Asia, told us how on one occasion he was taken prisoner by Barbarrosa, the feared Turkish pirate, and sold as a slave in Algiers, from which he had escaped after two years of great suffering. He always carried a thick notebook wrapped in waxed cloth, in which he wrote his thoughts in little letters that tracked across the page like ants. He entertained himself in sketching the sailors performing their duties, and devoted a great deal of time to drawing my niece. In preparation for life in the convent, Constanza dressed like a novice, wearing a heavy cloth habit she had sewn herself. A triangle of the same cloth, tied beneath the chin, covered half her forehead and all her hair. This horrendous garb, however, was not able to hide her proud carriage or her splendid eyes, black and shiny as olives. Belalcázar first got her to pose for him, then he convinced her to take the scarf off her head, and finally, she agreed to undo her old woman's bun and allow the breeze to toss her black curls. No matter what the documents with official seals say about our family's purity of blood, I suspect that a good dose of Saracen blood runs through our veins. Constanza, liberated from her habit, resembled one of those odalisques on Ottoman tapestries.

A day came when we all felt the gnawing of hunger. That was when I remembered my empanadas, and convinced the cook, a black man from the north of Africa whose face was embroidered with scars, to provide me with flour, lard, and a little dried meat, which I set to soak in saltwater before cooking it. From my own reserves, I took olives, raisins, cooked eggs—minced so that they would go farther—and cumin, an inexpensive spice that adds a particular flavor to a dish. I would have given anything for some onions, the kind that are so plentiful in Plasencia, but there were none left in the ship's stores. I cooked the filling, kneaded the dough, and since there was no oven, prepared fried empanadas. They were a great success, and after that day everyone contributed some part of their provisions for the filling. I made empanadas with lentils, garbanzos, fish, chicken, sausage, cheese, octopus, and shark, and with them earned the gratitude of the crew and the passengers. I earned their respect when, after a storm, I cauterized wounds and set the broken bones of two of the sailors, as I had learned to do in the nuns' hospital in Plasencia.

That was the only event worthy of mention, aside from having escaped from French corsairs lying in wait for Spanish ships. Had they caught up with us, Maestro Manuel Martín explained, we would have met a terrible end, for they were very well armed. When we learned that danger was closing in on us, my niece and I knelt before the image of Nuestra Señora del Socorro and fervently pled for our salvation, and she sent us the miracle of a fog so thick that the French lost sight of us. Daniel Belalcázar said that the fog was already there before we began to pray; the helmsman had only to set a course toward it.

This Belalcázar was a man of little faith, but very entertaining. In the evenings he would delight us with tales of his voyages, and of the things we would see in the New World. “No cyclops, no giants, no men with four arms and the head of a dog, but you most certainly will meet evil-spirited primitives—especially among the Spaniards,” he joked. He assured us that the inhabitants of the New World were not all savages: Aztecs, Mayas, and Incas were more refined than we, he said; at least they bathed and did not go around crawling with lice.