Ines of My Soul (8 page)

“Greed,” he said. “Pure and simple greed. The day we stepped onto the soil of the New World, it meant the end of those cultures. At first they welcomed us. Their curiosity was stronger than their caution, and when they saw that those strange bearded creatures from the sea liked gold, the soft, impractical metal they had such quantities of, they handed it out with both hands. However, our insatiable appetite and brutal pride soon became offensive to them. And why not! Our soldiers abuse their women, they go into their homes and take whatever they want without asking permission, and if anyone dares get in their way, they dispatch him with one thrust of the sword. They proclaim that the land they've so recently come to belongs to a sovereign who lives on the other side of the sea, and they insist that the natives worship a couple of crossed pieces of wood.”

“You must not let anyone hear you talking like this, Señor Belalcázar!” I warned him. “They will accuse you of being a heretic and betraying the emperor.”

“I am simply saying what's true. You will find, señora, that these conquistadors have no shame. They arrive as beggars, they act like thieves, and then they behave as if they were lords of the world.”

Those three months at sea were as long as three years, but they allowed me to develop a taste for freedom. There was no family—except for the timid Constanza—neighbors, or priests to observe me, I did not have to give an accounting to anyone, and so I shed my widow's black clothing and the undergarments imprisoning my flesh. In his turn, Daniel Belalcázar convinced Constanza to put away her nun's habit and wear my dresses.

The days seemed interminable and the nights even longer. The filth, the confinement, the limited, dreadful food, the men's bad humor, all contributed to the purgatory of the crossing, but at least we had escaped sea serpents capable of swallowing up the ship, monsters, tritons, the sirens that drive sailors mad, the ghosts of the drowned, phantom ships, and St. Elmo's fire. The crew had warned us of these and other dangers found at sea, but Belalcázar assured us that he had never seen any of them.

One Saturday in August we sighted land. The water that had been deep and black became clear and blue as the sky. The ship's dory took us to a beach of rippled sand licked by gentle waves. Sailors offered to carry us, but Constanza and I lifted our skirts and waded to shore. We preferred exposing our calves to being slung like sacks of wheat over the men's shoulders. I had never imagined that the water would be so warm; from the ship it looked very cold.

The village where we came ashore consisted of a few cane huts with palm-leaf thatch. The single street was a mud pit, and there was no church—nothing but a wooden cross on a promontory. The few inhabitants of that godforsaken spot were an assortment of sailors between ships, black- and brown-skinned persons, and the Indians. It was the first time I had ever seen the natives of these new lands—poor, nearly naked, miserable people they were. All around us was dense greenery and sweltering heat. The humidity soaked even into one's thoughts, and the implacable sun bore down mercilessly. We could not endure the touch of our clothing, and took off as much as we could: collars, cuffs, shoes, and stockings.

It did not take long to find that Juan de Malága was not there. The only person who remembered him was Padre Gregorio, an unfortunate Dominican priest who had been stricken with malaria and was now a man aged before his time; he was barely forty years old, but he looked seventy. For two decades he had wandered through the jungle with the mission of spreading the Christian faith, and in his wanderings had twice come across my husband. He confirmed that, like many hallucinatory Spaniards, Juan was looking for the mythic city of gold.

“Tall, handsome, a good card player, likable,” he said.

It had to be Juan.

“El Dorado is something the Indians dreamed up to get rid of the foreigners,” the priest added. “Once they go looking for the gold, they end up dead.”

Padre Gregorio offered his hut to Constanza and me. There we were able to rest while the sailors got drunk on a strong palm liquor and dragged the Indian girls, against their will, into the thicket that encircled the little settlement. Despite the sharks, which had followed the ship for days, Daniel Belalcázar steeped in that limpid water for hours. When he took off his shirt, we saw that his back was crisscrossed with the scars of lashings, but he offered no explanation and no one dared ask for one. On the voyage we had noticed that Belalcázar had a mania for washing, something he had learned in other lands. He wanted Constanza to go into the water with him, clothes and all, but I would not permit it. I had promised her parents that I would return her in one piece, not half eaten by sharks.

At sunset the Indians lighted fires of green wood to combat the mosquitoes that descended upon the village. The smoke blinded us and we could barely breathe, but the alternative was worse: the minute we moved away from the fire we were enveloped in a cloud of insects. For dinner we had tapir, an animal that looks like a pig, and a bland pap they call cassava, or manioc—strange tastes, but after three months of fish and empanadas, we thought the meal delicious. We also had our first taste of a foamy beverage made of cacao, a little bitter, in spite of the spices that had been added to it. According to Padre Gregorio, this cacao is so valuable to the Aztecs and other Indians that they use the seeds as we use coins.

That evening we listened to the adventures of Padre Gregorio, who several times had traveled deep into the jungle to convert the Indians. He admitted that in his youth he, too, had followed the terrible dream of El Dorado. He had traveled along the Orinoco, which at times was placid as a lake, but at others, a rushing, angry torrent. He told of enormous waterfalls born of the clouds that crash down in a rainbow of foam, of green tunnels through the forest, of the eternal dusk of vegetation barely touched by the light of day. He described carnivorous flowers that smell like dead meat, and others that are delicate and fragrant, but poisonous. And there are birds of sumptuous plumage, he said, and complete villages of monkeys with human faces that spy on intruders from among the leaves.

“For those of us who come from Extremadura, where it is so stark and dry, nothing but rocks and dust, such a paradise is impossible to imagine,” I commented.

“But it is a paradise only in appearance, Señora Inés. In a hot, swampy, voracious world infested with reptiles and poisonous insects, things decay very quickly, especially the soul. The jungle transforms men into rogues and murderers.”

“Those who go there only out of greed are already corrupted, Padre. The jungle merely brings out in men what is already in them,” Daniel Belalcázar replied, then jotted down everything the priest had to say in his notebook. He had every intention of following the course of the Orinoco himself.

That first night on terra firma, Maestro Manuel Martín and some of the sailors went back to the ship to sleep—to guard the cargo, they said, although it occurs to me that they were afraid of the snakes and insects. Others of us, unable to face the confinement of our cabins again, chose to stay in the village. Constanza, exhausted, fell right to sleep in the hammock we'd been allotted, protected by a filthy mosquito net, but I prepared for several hours of wakefulness. The night was heavy and black, throbbing with mysterious presences, filled with sounds, fragrant, and frightening. It seemed to me that I was surrounded by every creature Padre Gregorio had mentioned: enormous insects, snakes that could kill from a distance, and unfamiliar beasts. However, more than those natural dangers, I was concerned about the wickedness of the drunken men. I could not close my eyes.

Two or three long hours went by, and just as finally I began to doze, I heard something or someone outside the hut. My first suspicion was that it was an animal, but I recalled that Sebastián Romero had stayed ashore, and now that he was not under the thumb of Maestro Manuel Martín, he was a man to be watched. I was not mistaken. Had I been asleep, Romero might have accomplished his purpose in coming, but to his misfortune I was waiting with a small, needle-sharp Moorish dagger I had bought in Cadiz. The only light came from the reflection of coals dying in the fire where the tapir had been roasted. An opening without a door was all that separated us from the outside, and my eyes had become ac customed to the darkness. Romero crawled in on all fours, sniffing like a dog, and approached the hammock where I was supposed to be asleep beside Constanza. He got as far as reaching to pull back the netting, but froze when he felt the tip of my dagger against his neck, just behind his ear.

“You don't learn, do you, you pig,” I said quietly, not wanting to create an uproar.

“Bitch! May the devil take you! You toyed with me for three months, and now you are pretending you do not want the same thing I want,” he growled, furious.

That woke Constanza. Terrified, her cries brought Padre Gregorio, Daniel Belalcázar, and others sleeping nearby. Someone lighted a torch, and among them they dragged Romero from our hut. Padre Gregorio ordered them to tie him to a tree until the madness of the palm alcohol had passed, and there they left him, screaming threats and cursing. As dawn approached, he collapsed from fatigue, and the rest of us could sleep.

A few days later, after taking on fresh water, tropical fruits, and salted meat, Maestro Manuel Martín's ship set out for the port of Cartagena, which was already a thriving center because it was there that the treasures of the New World were loaded on to be taken to Spain. The waters of the Caribbean were as blue and clean as the pools in the palaces of the Moors. The air carried an intoxicating aroma of flowers, fruit, and sweat. The walls of Cartagena, constructed of stone and a mortar made from lime and bulls' blood, gleamed beneath an unrelenting sun. Hundreds of natives, naked and in chains, were transporting large stones, spurred by the whips of their overseers. The large wall and fortress protected the Spanish fleet from pirates and other enemies of the empire. Several anchored ships rocked in the bay, some of them warships and others merchantmen, including one carrying black cargo from Africa to be auctioned in the slave market. It was distinguishable from other ships by the stench of human misery and evil issuing from it.

Compared to some of the ancient cities of Spain, Cartagena was a village, but it had a church, well-laid-out streets, white-painted homes, substantial government buildings, storehouses for cargo, a market, and a number of taverns. The fortress, still under construction, presided over the bay from high atop a hill, its cannons already installed and pointed toward the bay. I noted a variety of people in the streets, and the women, bold and wearing deep décolletage, seemed beautiful to me, especially the mulatto women. After I learned that my husband had been there a little over a year ago, I decided I would stay awhile. In one shop Juan had left a bundle of clothes as pawn, with the promise he would pay the money he owed upon his return.

The one inn in Cartagena did not accept single women, but Maestro Manuel Martín, who knew many people, found Constanza and me a place to rent. It consisted of a fairly large, almost bare room with a narrow window and a door opening onto the street. Its only furnishings were a cot, a table, and a bench on which my niece and I arranged our belongings. My savings were melting away more quickly than I had planned, so I immediately looked for an oven in which I could make empanadas, and made it known that I wanted to offer my services as a seamstress.

Almost as soon as we moved in, Daniel Belalcázar came to call. Our room was crowded with bundles, so he had to sit on the bed, holding his hat. We had nothing but water to offer him, and he tossed down two glasses, sweating. He sat a long while in silence, tongue-tied, studying the tamped dirt floor while we waited, as uncomfortable as he.

“Señora Inés, I have come with the greatest respect to ask for your niece's hand,” he blurted out at last.

Surprise nearly struck me dumb. I had never seen one thing between them that would indicate a romance, and for a moment I thought that the heat must have driven Belalcázar off his head, but the enthralled expression on Constanza's face forced me to reconsider.

“The girl is only fifteen years old!” I exclaimed, horrified.

“Girls marry at an early age here, señora.”

“Constanza has no dowry.”

“The dowry isn't important. I do not approve of that custom, and even if Constanza had the dowry of a queen, I would not accept it.”

“My niece wants to be a nun!”

“She did, but not now,” Belalcázar murmured, and in a loud, clear voice Constanza confirmed what he said.

I explained to them that I lacked the authority to give Constanza away in marriage, even less to some adventurer I knew nothing about. Belalcázar was more than twice her age, a man with no fixed residence who spent his life writing down tomfoolery in a notebook. How did he plan to support her? Did he perhaps intend for her to follow him up the Orinoco to sketch cannibals? Constanza, pink with embarrassment, interrupted me to announce that it was too late for me to object because in reality they were already married in the eyes of God, though not by human law. At that point it dawned on me that while I worked every night on the ship making empanadas, they were doing whatever their hearts desired in Belalcázar's cabin. I lifted my hand to deliver the slap I thought Constanza deserved, but Daniel caught my arm.

They were married the next day in the church in Cartagena, with Maestro Manuel Martín and me as witnesses. They moved into the inn while they made preparations to travel into the jungle, exactly as I had feared.

The first night I spent alone in the rented room a terrible thing happened that I might have managed to avoid if I had been thinking ahead. Although I could not truly afford the luxury of candles—they were very dear—I kept one lit a good part of the night, out of fear of cockroaches, which like to come out in the dark. I was lying on the cot, unable to sleep and barely covered by a thin gown, baking in the heat and thinking of my niece when I was startled by a kick at the door. There was a bolt I could shoot from the inside but I had forgotten to do it. A second kick burst the latch, and I saw Sebastián Romero silhouetted on the threshold. I started to sit up, but he pushed me back down on the bed and then was over me,