We had lost a few soldiers, but like ragged shadows came others who had been wandering through fields and mountains, Almagro’s defeated soldiers, who found no friend in Pizarro’s empire. They had been living on charity for years; they had little to lose in the Chile adventure.
We stayed several weeks in Tarapacá, to give Indians and beasts time to put on weight before we started across the desert, which, according to Don Benito, would be the worst part of our journey. He explained that the first part was arduous, but that the second, called the wasteland, was much worse. In the meantime, Pedro de Valdivia rode for leagues, scanning the horizon in hopes of sighting new volunteers. Sancho de la Hoz was supposed to meet us, bringing by sea the promised soldiers and supplies, but there was no sign of our pompous partner.
While I was having more blankets woven, and preparing dried meat, cereals, and other food that wouldn’t spoil, Don Benito was working the blacks from sun up to sundown in the forges crafting munitions, horseshoes, and lances. He also sent out parties of soldiers to look for the foodstuffs the Indians had buried before abandoning their settlement of huts. He had made camp in the safest and most suitable spot, a place where there was shade, water, and hills where he could post his lookouts. The one decent tent was the one Pizarro had given me; made of waxed cloth, it was supported by a strong armature of poles, its two rooms as comfortable, actually, as a house. The soldiers made do however they could, with patched cloths that barely protected them from the weather. Some did not have even that, but slept beside their horses. The camp for the auxiliary Indians was separate from ours, and under constant guard, to prevent them from escaping. At night you could see the hundreds of little campfires where they cooked what food they had, and the breeze carried the lugubrious sound of their musical instruments, which had the power to sadden both men and beasts.
Our camp was near two abandoned villages where we had not found any food, though we had searched it thoroughly. We discovered that these Indians have the custom of living on good terms with deceased relatives: the living in one part of the hut and the dead in the other. In each dwelling, we found a room with well-preserved mummies, dark and smelling of moss: grandparents, women, infants, each with personal belongings, but no jewels. In contrast, in Peru the tombs had been stuffed with precious objects, including statues of pure gold. “Even the dead are hard up in Chile,” the soldiers had groused. “Not a hint of gold anywhere.” To vent their frustration, they tied ropes around the mummies and dragged them behind their galloping horses until the bindings burst open and bones spilled out. They celebrated this accomplishment with screams of laughter, while in the camp fear spread among the Yanaconas. After sunset, a rumor began to circulate among the bearers that the desecrated bones were reknitting, and that before dawn the skeletons would attack us like an army from beyond the tomb. Terrified blacks repeated the tale, which then reached the ears of the Spaniards. Those invincible vandals, who do not even know the word “fear,” burst out sobbing like nursing babes. By midnight, teeth were chattering so loudly that Pedro de Valdivia had to harangue his men and remind them that they were Spanish soldiers, the strongest and best trained in the world, not a clutch of ignorant washerwomen. I myself did not sleep for several nights but passed them in praying because the skeletons were wandering around outside . . . and anyone who says the opposite was not there.
The soldiers, who were bored and discontent, wondered what the devil we were doing camped for weeks in that accursed place instead of marching on toward Chile, as planned—or returning to Cuzco, which seemed even more sensible. When Valdivia was losing hope that reinforcements would arrive, a detachment of eighty men showed up. Among them were several great captains, whom I did not know but whom Pedro had spoken of because they were so famous, men like Francisco de Villagra and Alonso de Monroy. The former was blond, ruddy-faced, and robust, with brash manners and a sneer on his lips. He always struck me as disagreeable because he treated the Indians badly, was miserly, and unkind to the poor, but I learned to respect him for his courage and loyalty. Monroy, who had been born in Salamanca and was a descendant of a noble family, was just the opposite: refined, handsome, and generous. We immediately became friends. Jerónimo de Alderete, Valdivia’s old comrade in arms, who years before had tempted him to come to the New World, was with them. Villagra had convinced them that their best bet was to join Valdivia. “We will do better to serve his majesty, and not wander in lands where the devil runs loose,” he told them, referring to Pizarro, for whom he had no respect. Also in their party was a chaplain from Andalucia, a man some fifty years old, González de Marmolejo, who would become my mentor, as I have mentioned before. This man of the cloth showed signs of great kindness throughout his long life, but I believe he would have made a better soldier than a priest, for he was too fond of adventure, wealth, and women.
For months, these men had been in the terrible jungle of Los Chunchos, in eastern Peru. Their expedition had set out with three hundred Spaniards, but two of every three had perished, and the rest had been turned into starving shadows drained by tropical illnesses. Of their two thousand Indians, not one was left alive. Among the men whose bones had been left in the jungle was the ill-starred Lieutenant Núñez, the man whom Valdivia had sent to rot in Los Chunchos, as he had said he would do when Núñez tried to force his attentions on me in Cuzco. No one could give me specific details about his death; he simply faded into the undergrowth, leaving no trace. I hope he died like a Christian and not in the mouths of cannibals. The hardships Pedro de Valdivia and Jerónimo de Alderete had borne years before in the jungles of Venezuela were child’s play compared with what these men suffered in Los Chunchos under the hot, torrential rains and clouds of mosquitoes: sick and hungry, they had walked through swamps and been chased by savages who ate one another when they failed to catch a Spaniard.
Before I continue, allow me to make special mention of the man who commanded this detachment. He was a tall, very handsome man, with a broad brow, aquiline nose, and brown eyes that were large and liquid, like those of a horse. He had heavy eyelids and a remote, slightly sleepy gaze that softened his face. This I was able to appreciate only on the second day, after the filth that crusted his body had been washed away and the hair and beard that gave him the look of a shipwrecked sailor had been cut. Although he was younger than the other renowned military men in the group, they had chosen him captain of captains because of his courage and intelligence. His name was Rodrigo de Quiroga. Nine years later, he would be my husband.
I took charge of restoring strength and health to the Los Chunchos soldiers, helped by Catalina and several Indian women in my service whom I had trained in the healing arts. As Don Benito said, those poor souls had left the humid, tangled hell of the jungle only to find that the dry, barren hell of the desert lay ahead. Just washing them, cleaning their sores, delousing them, and cutting their hair and fingernails took days. Some were so weak that the Indian girls had to feed them pap by the spoonful. Catalina whispered into my ear the Incas’ remedy for extreme cases, and without telling them what it was—we were afraid it would nauseate them—we gave it to the worst cases. At night Catalina would slip up to a llama and bleed it through a cut in its neck. We mixed the fresh blood with milk and a little urine, and gave it to the sick men to drink. They recovered, and after two weeks were strong enough to join the others.
The Yanaconas readied themselves for the suffering that awaited; they did not know the terrain but they had heard about the terrible desert. Each of them carried a wineskin of sorts around his neck. Some had been made from the skin of an animal’s leg—llama, guanaco, alpaca—skinned off in one piece and turned inside out like a stocking, hair inward, and some from animal bladders or sealskin. Prudently, they dropped in a few grains of toasted maize to disguise the smell. Don Benito organized ways to haul water on a larger scale, using the barrels they’d made, and also skin containers like those the Indians carried. We were aware that the water we were taking would not be enough for s
o many people, but the men and llamas had reached their limits. To top off our woes, the local Indians not only had hidden their foodstuffs, they had also poisoned the wells, as we learned through one of the Inca Manco’s chasquis, who revealed that information under torture. Don Benito had discovered him among our auxiliary Indians and had asked Valdivia’s permission to interrogate him. The blacks used a slow fire to persuade him to talk. I have no stomach for witnessing torture and I went as far away as possible, but the man’s horrible screams, chorused by the Yanaconas’ howls of terror, could be heard a league away. To end the torment, the messenger admitted that he had come from Peru with instructions for the natives of Chile to stop the advance of the viracochas. That is why the Indians had hidden in the hills with the animals they could take with them, after burning their maize. He added that he was not the only messenger, that hundreds of chasquis were running south with the same instructions from the Inca Manco. After he confessed, they burned him to death anyway, to serve as an example. When I berated Valdivia for permitting such cruelty, he was annoyed, and would not listen. “Don Benito knows what he is doing,” he replied. “I warned you before we left that this undertaking is not for the squeamish. It is too late to turn back now.”
How long and how cruel is the road across the desert! How slow and fatiguing our progress! What burning solitudes! The long days went by, one after another, nothing but that harsh landscape: barren land and stone smelling of burned dust and thornbush painted fiery colors by the hand of God. According to Don Benito, the colors indicated hidden minerals, and it was a diabolical joke that none was gold or silver.
Pedro and I would walk for hours and hours, leading our horses by their bridles to save their strength. We talked very little because our throats were burning and our lips were cracked, but we were together, and every step brought us closer, led us inward, to the dream we had dreamed and that had cost so many sacrifices: Chile. As protection, I wore a broad-brimmed hat with a cloth over my face that had two holes for my eyes, and I wrapped my hands in rags because I had no gloves and the sun was making them peel. The soldiers could not bear the touch of the hot armor, but dragged it behind them. The long line of Indians moved forward slowly, in silence, carelessly guarded by the beaten-down blacks, who never lifted their whips. For the bearers, things were a thousand times worse than they were for us. They were used to hard work and little food, to trotting up and down hills fueled by the mysterious energy of the coca leaves, but they could not endure thirst. Our desperation grew as the days passed and we had not found a clean well; the only ones we came across had been polluted by animal cadavers the furtive Chilean Indians had thrown into them. A few of the Yanaconas drank the putrid water anyway, and died writhing on the ground, their intestines on fire.
When we thought we had reached the limits of our strength, the color of the mountains and the ground began to change. The air stood still, the sky turned white, and every sign of life disappeared, from thistles to the solitary birds we had seen from time to time: we had entered the fearsome Despoblado, the wasteland. At the first light of dawn we would start forward; later the sun would be too strong. Pedro had decided that the faster we moved the fewer lives we would lose, though the effort of each step was brutal. During the hottest hours, we rested in a dead landscape, stretched out upon that sea of calcined sand beneath a leaden sun. We would start again about five and keep going until night fell and we could go no farther in the darkness. It was a world of boundless cruelty. We lacked the spirit to set up tents and organize a camp, since it would be for only a few hours. We were not in any danger of being attacked; no one lived in or ventured into these solitudes.
At night the temperature changed abruptly, from the unbearable heat of the day it dropped to glacial cold. We lay wherever we could, shivering, ignoring the instructions of Don Benito, the only one who insisted on discipline. Pedro and I, embraced between our horses, tried to share our bodies’ heat. We were very, very tired. We did not think of making love through all the weeks that part of the journey lasted. Abstinence gave us the opportunity to learn our weaknesses and to cultivate a tenderness that had been superseded by passion. The thing I admired most about that man was that he never doubted his mission: to populate Chile with Spaniards and to evangelize the Indians. He never believed for a minute that we would bake in the desert, as the others said; his resolve never wavered.
Despite the severe rationing Don Benito had imposed, the day came when we ran out of water. By then we were ill with thirst; our throats were raw from the sand, our tongues swollen, our lips covered with sores. Suddenly we would think we heard the sound of a waterfall, and see a crystalline lake bordered with ferns. The captains had to hold the men back by force so they would not die crawling across the sand after a mirage. Several soldiers drank their own urine, and that of the horses, which was meager and very dark. Others, maddened, attacked the Yanaconas and drank the last drops from their llama skins. I think they would have killed them and drunk their blood had Valdivia not kept them in line with strong discipline. That night, in the bright moonlight, Juan de Málaga came again to visit me. I pointed him out to Pedro, but he could not see him and thought I was hallucinating. My husband was looking terrible; his rags were crusted with dried blood and sidereal dust, and his expression was desperate, as if even his poor bones suffered with thirst.
The next day, when we had resigned ourselves to the fact that there was no salvation for us, a strange reptile scurried between my feet. We had not seen any form of life other than our own for many days, not even the thistles that are so plentiful in some stretches of the desert. Perhaps it was a salamander, the lizard that lives in fire. I concluded that however diabolical the little creature might be, it must, from time to time, need a sip of water.
“So now it’s up to us, Virgencita,” I told Nuestra Señora del Socorro. I took the tree switch from one of my cases and began to pray. It was high noon, when the multitude of parched humans and animals was resting. I called Catalina to come with me, and the two of us slowly set out, protected by a parasol, I with an Ave María on my lips, and she with her invocations in Quechua. We walked a good while, perhaps an hour, in ever larger circles, covering more and more ground. Don Benito thought thirst had driven me out of my mind, but he was so drained that he asked a stronger, younger man, Rodrigo de Quiroga, to go look for me.
“For the love of God, señora,” the officer begged me with what little voice he had left. “Come rest. We will put up a cloth to make some shade—”
“Captain, go tell Don Benito to send me some men with picks and shovels,” I interrupted.
“Picks and shovels?” he repeated, astonished.
“And tell him, please, to bring some large jugs and a number of armed soldiers.”
Rodrigo de Quiroga left to advise Don Benito that I was much worse than they had supposed, but Valdivia heard him and, filled with hope, he ordered the field marshal to do as I asked. Not long after, I had six Indians digging a hole. Indians have less resistance to thirst than we do, and they could barely hold the tools, but the soil was loose, and before long they were in a pit neck deep. At the bottom, the sand was dark. Suddenly one of the Indians uttered a hoarse cry and we began to see seeping water. First it was only dampness, as if the earth were sweating, but after two or three minutes there was a small pool. Pedro, who had not left my side, ordered the soldiers to defend the hole with their lives; he feared, with reason, the maddened onslaught of a thousand men desperate for a few drops of water. I assured him there would be enough for everyone, as long as we drank in an orderly fashion.
And so it was. Don Benito spent the rest of the day distributing a cup of water for each individual, then Rodrigo de Quiroga, with the help of some soldiers, spent the night watering the animals and filling barrels and the Indians’ llama skins. The water flowed with some force; it was dark, and had a metallic taste, but to us it seemed as fresh as the fountains of Seville. People attributed the well to a miracle, and called it Virgin’s
Spring in honor of Nuestra Señora del Socorro. We set up camp and stayed on for three days, quenching our thirst, and when we continued, a slight stream was still flowing across the blasted surface of the desert.
“This was not the Virgin’s miracle, Inés, it was yours,” Pedro told me, deeply moved. “Thanks to you, we will make it across this hell safe and sound.”
“I can find water only where there is water, Pedro, I can’t create it. I don’t know whether there will be another spring farther on, and in any case, it will likely not be as free-flowing.”
Valdivia ordered me to get a half-day’s start and look for other sources; I was to travel protected by a detachment of soldiers, with forty auxiliary Indians and twenty llamas to carry the water jugs. The remainder of the caravan would follow in sections, separated by several hours so everyone would not rush at once to drink, should we locate a well. Don Benito designated Rodrigo de Quiroga to command the group that accompanied me. The young captain had earned Don Benito’s total confidence in a short time. He was, furthermore, the one with the best vision; his large brown eyes saw even what wasn’t there. Had there been danger on the hallucinatory desert horizon, he would have been the first to discover it. But there was nothing. I found several sources of water, none as bounteous as the first, but enough to get us through the wasteland alive. One day the color of the ground changed again, and two birds flew overhead.