With a strange sense of calm, I went to the bedroom door and opened it. As the son and widow tried to enter, I blocked them. “The hacendado is resting. He must not be disturbed until I return with medicine.”
I let them get a peek past me so they could see the chest rise and fall. I quickly stepped out, shutting the door behind me. I put my finger to my lips.
“Shhh. You must be quiet. The slightest noise could kill him. Stay here while I get the medicine from my saddlebags.”
I left the familial flock of vultures watching each other at the bedroom door, each one wondering what he or she should do to snare the inheritance. I quickly went down the stairs and out the front door.
The two vaqueros watching my horse came to attention as I came out.
“It’s a miracle, my sons, a miracle,” I waived the sign of the cross at them. “Kneel, pray, thank God for the deliverance.”
While they knelt, I got into the saddle. “Pray, my sons. Praise God for the miracle!”
I gave Tempest his head and rode low in the saddle as the great stallion carried me away.
LOS CONSPIRADORES
THIRTY
PADRE MIGUEL HIDALGO paused in front of his rectory’s bedroom door and knocked softly. His housekeeper opened the door. “How is she?” he whispered.
“I’m awake,” Marina’s voice called to him from the bed.
He went to her bed and took her hand. As a smalltown priest, he had seen murder and rape, beatings and thievery, sins mortal and venal, but the harm had rarely touched those in his immediate circle. Marina was more than an intelligent woman of indio descent. He thought of her as a daughter. Now, as he stood at her bedside and stared down at her swollen, bruised face, he felt the compassion of the priest but also the rage of a man at those who had done this to her.
“Any word of—” she started to ask.
“No, but that’s for the best. They won’t catch him, that stallion of his can outrun the wind.”
“I’m sorry, padre, all your work . . .”
He sat down on the edge of the bed. “No, not just my work, but your work and the sweat of a hundred others.”
“Did they destroy everything?”
“No, my child, they can’t destroy our will to fight.”
Marina took his hand. “I’m afraid for you. I see something in your eyes that I’ve never seen before. Wrath, padre, the fury of a wolf protecting its cubs.”
Padre Hidalgo rode through the night, leaving Dolores for San Miguel el Grande. He left in the dark to avoid detection, accompanied by two vaquero bodyguards. He would not reach San Miguel until midday. He kept an eye on his back trail the entire way.
He would meet with men who, like himself, understood that New Spain would not be saved by the Sermon on the Mount but by the muzzle of a gun.
He knew Dolores, San Miguel, Guanajuato, Querétaro, Valladolid, and the other towns of the Bajío with a vivid intimacy. Born in the Bajío in 1753, now, at fifty-six years of age, he had spent his entire life in the region. Miguel Gregorio Antonio Hidalgo y Costilla Gallaga Mandarte y Villaseñor was his full name. While he was no respecter of bloodlines, his own was purer peninsular Spanish than most of the Spaniards born in the colony. His father, Cristóbal Hidalgo y Costilla, a native of Tejupilco in the intendency of Méjico, had established himself in Penjamo in the province of Guanajuato as the majordomo of a large hacienda. He married Ana María Gallaga.
His mother had died bearing her fifth child when Miguel was eight. Unlike most men of his time, his father, insisting that his children be educated, had personally taught them to read and write. At twelve, his father sent Miguel and an older brother to Valladolid to study at the Jesuit College of San Francisco Javier. Two years later the king expelled the Jesuit order from New Spain, believing their attempts to educate and promote indios a threat to the gachupines.
Miguel and his brother returned to their family at Corralejo. Unable to resume studies elsewhere, in midterm, Hidalgo went with his father to Tejupilco, the place of his father’s birth, near Toluca. There, the young Miguel came into contact with Otomí indios. Finding the company of indios agreeable, he befriended them and learned their language. Later he would add two more indio tongues to his repertoire of languages, which included Latin, French, and some English.
Soon afterward, his father sent him to the college of San Nicolás Obispo to study theology and prepare for the priesthood. While at the college, his probing intellect and quick wit earned him the nickname El Zorro—The Fox.
After his schooling, he took up teaching, in the end becoming the head of the college. But his liberal notions were in conflict with those of religious authority. After leaving the college, he served as a parish priest for almost a decade before he was driven from that position, too, for voicing opinions inimical to the church hierarchy.
After several years of eluding the Inquisition, he came to Dolores, where his brother Joaquín was the curate. When his brother passed away in 1803, Miguel assumed the role as curate of the town church.
In all his endeavors, his house and life had been a magnet for literary, musical, and social events. Several nights a week he hosted plays, readings, music recitals, or intellectual discussions.
Much to the chagrin of his church superiors, Miguel read French plays aloud, studied French political essays and often conversed in the language. Studying the Torah and the Koran, he learned of the infidel’s singularly tolerant faith and of the many blessings that Jews had bestowed on Spain, the church, and indeed the world. To the church’s increasing consternation, he openly voiced such heresies.
Committed to God’s service since fourteen, he had spent his entire adult life in the church and had never dreamed he would swerve from the path. But now he feared he’d fallen from grace.
The constables and troops had left after devastating his vineyards and facilities, making no attempt to arrest or restrain him. A stranger, however, had stayed behind. Ostensibly a buyer of hides, Hidalgo quickly divined he was not there for animal skins. He recognized that the man was a familiar, a name and profession that, for the padre, had a sinister ring.
Familiars were not priests but members of a hermandad—a brotherhood—known as the Congregation of St. Peter Martyr, named after an inquisitor killed by his victims centuries ago. The secret police of the Inquisition and official protectors of the Holy Office, the hermandad was licensed by both church and law to bear arms. Employed as spies to investigate and apprehend suspects, they often invaded homes late at night to surprise and arrest the accused, then took them to an Inquisition dungeon for “questioning.”
Through its army of the night, the church protected its interests, assisting tyrannical governments to suppress free thought and progressive ideas, burying those liberties deeper than any grave.
Father Hidalgo knew the Inquisition’s methods—how it concocted false charges—and he knew it was investigating him. In the past, at the Inquisition’s instigation, women swore he seduced them, men swore he cheated them in games of chance. Local dignitaries told these hellhounds that he plundered a church dedicated to redeeming the poor and underprivileged. They acted on none of those false charges. They were just a sword to hold over him. Their real concern was that he challenged both church and crown on its treatment of the dispossessed and disenfranchised, on whether the church should dictate what he could read and what his thoughts should be, and on his alleged liberal beliefs.
As he rode, he realized that few men his age, and none in his profession, would have traveled this late at night. Although he might have reached his destination quicker on horseback, he preferred the mule. Mules were more sure-footed, particularly in the dark. Even bandidos avoided night travel; the risk that their mounts would lose their footing and founder was too great.
Angry and depressed at so many years of work destroyed, Hidalgo was willing—even eager—to court the hazards of a night ride. He felt as if he had nothing to lose. The Aztec craftworks had meant everything to him. They were
not just enterprises but living proof that brown-skinned indigenous peoples were as innately able as European-Americans, such as himself.
Watching the viceroy’s men chop down mulberry trees, smash pottery kilns, tear up trellises, and uproot grapevines had left him in morbid shock. Turning his back on the carnage, he had wandered the woods for hours, sometimes praying, sometimes crying, sometimes cursing, trying to fathom what had happened. When he returned to Dolores and heard of the assault on Marina and others of his flock, an uncontrollable rage seared his soul. He was a changed man.
He was a priest whom his superiors in the church had never understood. A man of God, who seldom found the Messiah in men’s “houses of God” but in the hearts and souls of the people he served. A brilliant theologian—he had, in fact, won church honors for his brilliant analyses of religious doctrine—he nonetheless perplexed his superiors.
In truth, the bishops did not care if he deviated spiritually. His burning zeal to improve his parish materially and politically, however, concerned and confounded them. Hidalgo believed the size of a parishioner’s soul was a truer measurement of his or her worth than the size of his or her wallet and that truth, justice, and freedom from tyranny were indispensable to spiritual redemption. His mission to free his parishioners from grinding, soul-destroying lives of forced bondage in the colony’s mines and haciendas left the bishops anxious.
Whether they approved or not, forced labor was the bedrock on which the church’s missions rested, underpinning church missions from the first days of Cortés. From the southernmost regions of South America to Missión San Francisco on the north coast of New California, church-conscripted indios built and fortified church compounds, cleared and cultivated the land.
But Padre Hidalgo had lifted peons above the tilling of corn and mining of ore. In an attempt to break their chains, he had taught them the forbidden arts of manufacturing and commerce.
To justify their oppression by the merchants and grandees, the indio had to be decreed inferior. To their chagrin, Father Hidalgo, in refuting their doctrine, had exposed their fraud. Elevating indios to the economic status of Spaniards would sever their shackles to the land and the mines forever. By offering to free the indio from bondage, Father Hidalgo had threatened to topple a system that maintained the criollo and gachupine in affluence, oppressed the poor of New Spain, and vouchsafed tribute to the crown.
Father Hidalgo now realized Spain would not repudiate that false doctrine until the people of New Spain forced them to, cleansing themselves of terror and tyranny, of lust and lies, of slavery and greed.
“Spain wants slaves, not citizens,” he cried to the night wind.
He wasn’t a young man, yet in his soul the first fires of rebellion against both church and crown—flames that threatened to incinerate all of New Spain—flickered furiously. And he was in contact with others who had grown increasingly impatient at the gachupines’ refusal to share their power and privileges with the less fortunate.
What a fool he had been!
Spain and New Spain’s rulers would never change . . . voluntarily. He knew that now. Their treatment of New Spain’s peons was not unlike a public execution. The executioner first placed a garrote—a circular iron frame—around the condemned person’s throat prior to the hanging. The hangman screwed it tight, bringing the condemned to the point of asphyxiation. Only on the verge of expiration, did the executioner noose the neck and hang the condemned until dead.
In Father Hidalgo’s mind, he saw Spain garroting its peons—strangling them to the very edge of death—but never consummating their demise. The torture continued on and on, in perpetuity, into the torture chambers of hell. Shackled, flogged, and raped, the enslaved peons had no hope of improving their lot or even modifying Spain’s behavior. Spain’s sole goal was infinite exploitation with no end in sight. Nor was the church a candle of hope.
When the padre faced this truth, he felt a spiritual surge. His whole life he had heard priests and parishioners speak of “the hand of God” and “revealed truth.” He believed he’d felt them both at that moment. He’d felt Truth’s divine touch . . . and that Truth would set his people free.
He knew he could not stop the strangling of the people with words.
As a student of history, of the French and American revolutions, he knew that men had to fight for the rights they enjoyed. And as a Bible student, he knew that the Old Testament prophets—Moses, Solomon, and David—were not mere idealists but warriors who turned their words into swords. Cortés had defeated the indios not with words but with musket and cannon, with hurricanes of fire and tidal waves of blood.
The indios had to reclaim their land the same way: with fire and blood. They had no choice. Their rulers—Hidalgo now knew—were neither ignorant nor innocent. They knew what they were doing and would not change.
THIRTY-ONE
SHORTLY AFTER DAWN, Ignacio Allende and his friend, Juan Aldama, left San Miguel for a rendezvous with Father Hidalgo at a rancho north of town. Departing west, they soon doubled back, continually checking their back trail, covering their tracks, keeping an eye out for the viceroy’s spies.
Allende understood the meeting could have cataclysmic consequences, for himself and the colony’s 6 million people. Aldama was less prescient but followed where Allende led.
Both men were the caballeros of fine families, of inestimable breeding and considerable means. Full-blooded Spanish criollos by birth, Allende hailed from San Miguel, where his father, Don Domingo Narciso de Allende, a merchant and owner of a hacienda, died during Allende’s youth. Bequeathing his family a substantial inheritance, a privileged upper-class existence seemed, for Allende, inevitable.
Handsome and charismatic, Allende was renowned for his courage and caballero horsemanship. His strength was legendary: It was said he could hold back a bull by the horns. His reputation for prowess with women rivaled that of his bullfighting, and his drive to succeed seemed irrepressibly relentless. Even when danger loomed. Stepping into a bullring, he once awed a crowd by openly exposing himself to the charging bull, deliberately leaning into its passing horns, leaning so far in that he was knocked down and left the ring with a broken nose.
He married María Agustina de las Fuentes in 1802, and though their union was childless, three other women bore him children.
Drawn to the military, he had served in the Queen’s Dragoons for over twenty years, from age seventeen. He was devoted to its military traditions and camaraderie. Blunt-spoken, aggressive, more competent than many officers above him, he nonetheless failed to rise above captain.
When a Dragoon colonel told him outright that his criollo birth would end all further promotions, adding that people born in the colony were inherently unfit for high command, Allende seethed.
Allende knew of course that if one criollo proved competent in high command, a flood tide of criollos would agitate for promotion. Criollo competence would detonate the myth of gachupine superiority and weaken the gachupines’ hold over New Spain, perhaps wounding it fatally.
Eventually, Allende discussed the situation with other criollos: offhanded talks at first, in taverns, at balls, on a paseo, on horseback. Formal meetings inevitably ensued, till they eventually organized, meeting openly as a “literary society.” Sometimes meeting in Allende’s brother’s house in San Miguel, other times in Querétaro, these group get-togethers, sociopolitical in nature, employed the ruse of a “literary society” as a cover.
Of late, at the meetings these dissatisfied criollos increasingly vented their frustration over gachupine dominance. Allende lived his life by the bullfighter’s creed. To the matador, bullfighting was not a sport but a test of wills in which the matador courted death, deeming it an honorable price for failure. The bulls used in the corridas de toros were not common cattle but were bred in Spain for savage aggression. Called Bos tauros ibericus, violently impulsive, these bulls were instinctively hostile, charging without provocation in tenacious headlong attacks.
To Allende, bullfighting was less a contest between man and bull than a conflict within a man. The bull charged out of bloodlust and aggression, but the bullfighter’s motives were more complex. Did he enter the ring . . . to kill a bull? To prove something to himself? To impress a señorita? To prove something to the crowd?
If he opted for the last, if he battled a beast solely for the crowd, the fighter’s motives were intrinsically impure. Many in the crowd came to see the bullfighter humbled, gored, even killed. Occasionally they were able to shout with glee as a matador disgraced himself by panicking or showing fear or simply by backing away from the bull’s charge.
Entering the ring, a man had to ask himself how far he was willing to go to please the crowd, to earn their adulation, to win the gasp of a beautiful señorita. Would he let the passing horns graze his gut or kiss his cojones? Would he die for the adulation of the crowd, for its praise, money, fame? Would he court bloody death with bravura indifference?
More than anything else, Allende’s experience as an amateur bullfighter had prepared him for New Spain’s moment of truth when he would challenge its people to rise up.
Like most young caballeros, Ignacio Allende had spurned both scholarly and commercial worlds, declining to run his family’s hacienda or its merchant business. His interests ran toward the military, with its weapons, its uniforms, its sense of honor, and its devotion to combat, command, and camaraderie. But unlike many of his friends, his male pride was not diluted by mindless machismo. He observed, analyzed, and prepared, then acted upon carefully reasoned judgments rather than lash out in irrational rage.
He understood at last his ambition to rise in rank and lead an army against Spain’s fiercest foes, such as Napoleon’s France, would be forever thwarted. He now knew this dream of command would only come when he raised his own army.
“What do you know of this priest in Dolores?” Aldama asked.