Juan was one of those handsome, happy men no woman can resist at first, but later wishes another woman would win away because he causes so much pain. He never bothered to be seductive; in fact, he never bothered about anything. Being such a chulo—dressing so well and looking so handsome—was all it took for him to create a stir among the women. From the time he was fourteen years old, the age at which he began to polish his charms, he lived off his conquests. He used to laugh and say that he had lost count of the cuckolded men he had put the horns on, and the number of times he had given a jealous husband the slip. “But that’s all over now that I’m with you, my pretty,” he would add to soothe me, as out of the corner of his eye he would be eyeing my sister. His bearing and his pleasant nature won the admiration of men as well. He was a good drinker and cardplayer, and he had an endless repertoire of racy stories and fanciful plans for making an easy fortune. Soon after I met him, I realized that his mind was focused on the horizon and on tomorrow; he was never satisfied. Like so many men of his time, he fed on the fabulous stories about the New World, where great treasures and honors were within reach of brave men willing to take risks. He believed he was destined for great derringdo, like Columbus, who had set out to sea with courage as his only capital, and who ended up discovering the other half of the world. Or Hernán Cortés, who won the most precious pearl in the Spanish empire: Mexico.
“They say that everything has already been discovered in those parts of the world,” I argued, wanting to discourage him.
“How ignorant you are, woman! There is more to be conquered than what has already been conquered. From Panama on to the south everything is virgin territory, and it contains more riches than all that Suleiman possesses.”
His plans horrified me because it meant we would be separated. Furthermore, I had heard from my grandfather’s own lips, who in turn knew through gossip in the taverns, that the Aztecs of Mexico made human sacrifices. Thousands and thousands of miserable captives formed lines a league long, awaiting their turn to climb the steps of the temples where the priests—wild-haired scarecrows covered with a crust of dried blood and dripping with fresh blood—tore out their hearts with an obsidian knife. Their bodies rolled down the steps and piled up at the bottom, hills of decomposing flesh. The city sat in a lake of blood. Birds of prey, sated with human flesh, were so heavy they couldn’t fly, and carnivorous rats grew to the size of sheepdogs. There was no Spaniard who had not heard these stories, but none of it intimidated Juan.
While I embroidered and sewed from daybreak to midnight, saving for our marriage, Juan spent his days wandering through the taverns and plazas, seducing maidens and whores alike, entertaining the local residents and dreaming of setting sail for the Indies, the only possible destiny for a man of his rigging, he maintained. At times he was gone for weeks, even months, only to return without explanations. Where had he gone? He never said, but since he talked so much about crossing the sea, people made fun of him and called me the “bride of the Americas.” I put up with his erratic behavior with more patience than was sensible because my thoughts were confused and my body flushed, as always happens when I’m in love. Juan made me laugh, he entertained me with songs and wicked poems, he mollified me with his kisses. He had only to touch me to turn my tears to sighs and my anger to desire. How accommodating love is; it forgives everything.
I have never forgotten our first embrace, hidden among the bushes in the woods. It was summer and the earth was pulsing, warm and fertile, filling the air with the fragrance of bay. We left Plasencia separately, to prevent talk, and went down the hill, leaving the walled city behind. We met at the river, and ran hand in hand toward the thicket, looking for a place far away from the road. Juan gathered leaves to make a nest. He took off his doublet and sat me down on it, then, in a leisurely way, instructed me in some of the ceremonies of pleasure. We had brought olives, bread, and a bottle of wine I had stolen from my grandfather, which we drank in naughty sips from each other’s mouths. Kisses, wine, laughter, the warm earth, and the two of us in love. He took off my blouse and bodice and licked my breasts, saying they were firm as peaches, ripe and sweet, although I thought they looked more like hard plums. He explored me with his tongue until I thought I would die of pleasure and love. I remember that he lay back among the leaves and had me get on top of him, naked, moist with sweat and desire, because he wanted me to be the one to set the rhythm of our dance. So, little by little, like a game, without fear or pain, I lost my virginity. At one moment of ecstasy I lifted my eyes to the green canopy of the forest and to the burning summer sky above it, and shouted with pure and simple joy.
In Juan’s absences, my passion cooled, my anger heated up, and I would determine to throw him out of my life, but as soon as he reappeared with some pale excuse and his wise lover’s hands, I would surrender. And so would begin another identical cycle: seduction, promises, submission, the bliss of love, and the suffering of a new separation. The first year went by without our having set a date for the wedding, then a second and a third. By then my reputation had been dragged through the mud; everyone was saying that we were doing wicked things in every dark corner we could find. It was true, but no one ever had proof; we were very cautious. The same Gypsy who had predicted my long life sold me the secret for not getting pregnant: a vinegar-soaked sponge. I had learned, through the counsel of my sister Asunción, and my friends, that the best way to control a man was to deny him favors, but not even a martyred saint could deny pleasure to Juan de Málaga. I was the one who sought opportunities to be alone with him and make love. Anywhere, not just in dark corners. He had an extraordinary ability, which I never found in any other man, to make me happy, in any position and in very little time. My pleasure mattered more to him than his own. He learned the map of my body by heart, and he also taught me to enjoy it alone. “Look how beautiful you are, woman,” he told me again and again. I did not share his flattering opinion, but I was proud of provoking desire in the most handsome man in Extremadura.
If my grandfather had had proof that we were making love like demented rabbits, even in the hidden corners of the church, he would have killed us both. He was very sensitive when it came to questions of honor. That honor was in large measure tied to the virtue of the women of the family, and therefore when the first whispers reached his hairy ears he exploded with rage, and threatened to beat me until I was where I belonged: with other devils. A stain on one’s honor, he said, is cleansed only with blood. My mother stepped in front of him with arms akimbo and that look of hers that would stop a charging bull, and made him see that I was more than ready to be married. All he had to do was convince Juan. So my grandfather enlisted his friends in the Vera-Cruz brotherhood, all influential men in Plasencia, to twist the arm of my recalcitrant sweetheart, who had already been begged many times.
We were married one luminous Tuesday in September, market day in the Plaza Mayor, when the aroma of flowers, fruits, and fresh vegetables spread through the city. Juan took me to Málaga, where we moved into a rented room with windows overlooking the street. I tried to make it pretty with lace curtains and furniture my grandfather made for us in his workshop. Juan came to his role of husband with no wealth but his extravagant ambition, and with the brio of a stallion, even though we knew each other as well as an old married couple. There were days when we never got around to dressing because the hours flew by as we made love. We even ate in bed. Despite the excesses of passion, I soon realized that from the point of view of convenience, the marriage was a mistake. Juan had no surprises for me, he had shown me his character during all those years I had known him, but it was one thing to see his faults from a certain distance and something very different to live with them. The only virtues that I remember were his instinct to make me happy in bed and his toreador’s good looks, which I never tired of admiring.
“This man is not good for much,” my mother warned me one day when she came to visit us.
“As long as he gives me children, the rest doesn?
??t matter.”
“And who is going to provide for the little ones?” she insisted.
“I am, that’s why I have my needle and thread,” I replied defiantly.
I was used to working from sunup to sundown, and I did not lack for customers for my sewing and embroidery. In addition, I made onion- and meat-filled pies, cooked them in the public ovens at the mill, and sold them at dawn in the Plaza Mayor. After a lot of experimenting, I discovered the perfect proportion of lard and flour to obtain a firm, thin, malleable dough. My pies—or empanadas—became very popular, and after a while I was earning more from my cooking than from my sewing.
My mother brought me a gift of a small wood statue of the miraculous Nuestra Señora del Socorro, hoping she would bless my womb, but the Virgin must have had more important matters on her hands, because she ignored my pleas. I had not used the vinegar sponge for a couple of years, but there was no sign of a child. The passion I shared with Juan was becoming a source of vexation for both of us. The more I demanded of him and the less I forgave, the further away he drifted. Toward the end I was almost not speaking to him and he was speaking only to yell. He did not dare hit me, however, because the one time he lifted his fist, I swung my iron skillet at his head, the way my grandmother had with my grandfather, and then my mother with my father—which, they say, was why he left us and we never saw him again. In this respect, at least, my family was different: the men did not beat their wives, only their children. I had barely tapped Juan, but the frying pan was hot and it left a mark on his forehead. For a man as vain as he was, that little burn was a tragedy, but it made him respect me. The welt from the skillet put an end to his threats, but I admit that it did not help our relationship, because every time he ran his finger over the scar, I saw a criminal gleam in his eyes. He punished me by denying me the pleasures that once he had given with such magnanimity.
My life changed; the weeks and months dragged by like a sentence in the galleys, nothing but work and more work, always grieving over being sterile and poor. My husband’s whims and debts became a heavy load that I assumed in order to avoid the shame of facing his creditors. Our long nights of kisses and lazy mornings in bed had ended; our embraces were further and further apart, brief and brutal, like rapes. I bore them only in hopes of a child. Now, when I can look back and observe my whole life from the serenity of my old age, I understand that the Virgin’s true blessing was to deny me motherhood and thus allow me to fulfill an exceptional destiny. With children I would have been tied down, as we women are. With children I would have stayed in Plasencia, abandoned by Juan de Málaga, sewing and making empanadas. With children, I would not have conquered this Kingdom of Chile.
My husband continued to deck himself out like a chulo and spend like a hidalgo, assured that I would achieve the impossible in order to pay his debts. He drank too much and visited the street of the procuresses, where he tended to disappear for several days, until I paid some hefty men to go look for him. They would bring him back covered with lice and limp with shame. I would rid him of the lice and nourish the shame. I stopped admiring his torso and his statuesque body and began to envy my sister, Asunción, married to a man who looked like a boar but who was a hard worker and a good father to his children. Juan was getting bored and I was losing hope, which was why I did not try to stop him when finally he decided to go to the Americas in search of El Dorado, a city of pure gold, where children’s playtoys were topazes and emeralds. A few weeks later, he left in the middle of the night, without a good-bye and with only a bundle of clothing and my last maravedís, which he took from the hiding place behind the hearth.
Juan had succeeded in infecting me with his dreams, even though I had personally never seen any adventurer return from America a wealthy man. To the contrary, they came back miserable, ill, and insane. The ones who made a fortune lost it, and the owners of the enormous haciendas it was said were available there could not bring them home with them. Nevertheless, these and other facts evaporated before the powerful attraction of the New World. Hadn’t carts filled with bars of gold from the Americas been seen in the streets of Madrid? Unlike Juan, I did not believe there was any such thing as a city of gold, or magical waters that bestowed eternal youth, or Amazons who made merry with men and then sent them on their way laden with jewels, but I suspected there was something even more prized to be found there: freedom. In the Americas every man was his own master; he never had to bow to anyone, he could begin anew, be a different person, live a different life. There no one bore his dishonor for years, and even the humblest could rise in the world. “Higher than me, only my plumed cap,” Juan used to say. How could I reproach my husband for that adventure when I myself, had I been a man, would have done the same?
Once Juan left, I returned to Plasencia to live with my mother and my sister’s family, because by that time my grandfather had died. I had become another “widow of the Americas,” like so many others in Extremadura. In accord with custom, I had to dress in mourning and wear a heavy veil over my face, renounce social life, and submit to the watchful eyes of my family, my confessor, and the authorities. Prayer, work, and solitude, that was my future, only that . . . but I do not have a martyr’s nature. If the conquistadors found hard times in the Americas, their wives had it much harder in Spain.
I found ways to slip out of the custody of my sister and my brother-in-law; they feared me almost as much as they feared my mother, and to keep from having to confront me, they did not delve into my private life. They were satisfied as long as I did not create a scandal. I kept serving clients for my sewing and selling empanadas in the Plaza Mayor. I even gave myself the pleasure of attending fiestas. I also went to the hospital to help the nuns with the sick and the victims of plague and knife, because from the time I was young I had been interested in healing, with no idea that later in life that knowledge, along with my talent for cooking and locating water, would be indispensable. For like my mother, I was born with the gift of dousing. Often she and I would go out to the country with a laborer—or sometimes a señor—to show him where to dig his well. It’s easy. You hold a long stick from a healthy tree loosely in your hands and slowly walk across the terrain until the divining rod, sensing the presence of water, dips and points to the ground. That is where to dig. People said that my mother and I could make ourselves rich with that talent because a well in Extremadura is a treasure, but we always did it for nothing. If you charge for that favor, you lose the gift. Much later it would help me save an army.
I waited for several years with very little news of my husband, except for three brief messages that came by way of Venezuela, which the priest read to me and helped me answer. Juan said that he was working hard and encountering danger, that vicious men were everywhere, that he was always looking over his shoulder and had to have his weapon ready anywhere he went, that there was gold in abundance, although he hadn’t seen it yet, and that he would return a rich man and build me a palace and I would live the life of a duchess. In the meantime, my days dragged by, slow, tedious, always in want. I spent only enough to subsist, and hid the rest in a hole in the floor. I did not tell anyone—I did not want to fuel gossip—but I intended to follow Juan in his adventure, whatever the cost, not out of love, which I no longer had for him, not out of loyalty, which he did not deserve, but to follow the lure of freedom. There, far from everyone who knew me, I could take command of my life.
My body burned with impatience. My nights were a hell. I tossed and turned in bed, reliving the joyous embraces with Juan in the days when we desired each other, hot even in the depths of winter and furious with myself and the world for having been born a woman and being condemned to the prison of tradition. I brewed sleeping potions following the advice of the nuns at the hospital, but they had no effect. I tried prayer, as the priest urged, but I was unable to finish an Our Father without straying into dark thoughts, because the Devil, who weaves his way through every part of life, was venting his cruelty on me.
“You nee
d a man, Inés. You can do anything if you’re discreet,” my mother sighed, always the practical one. For a woman in my situation, it was easy to get a man, starting with my confessor, a bad-smelling, lascivious priest who wanted us to sin together in his dusty confessional in exchange for indulgences that would shorten my days in purgatory. Vicious old man; it never happened. If I had wanted, men would never have been in short supply. Occasionally, pricked by the devil’s pitchfork, I would embrace a man, but only out of need; there was no future for me there. I was tied to the ghost of Juan, and condemned to solitude. I was not truly a widow. I could not marry again; my role was to wait. Only wait. Wouldn’t it be better to face the perils of the sea and savage lands rather than grow old and die without having lived?
Finally I obtained a royal permit to embark for the Americas, after negotiating for years. The Crown protected matrimonial ties and tried to reunite husband and wife in order to populate the New World with legitimate Christian families, but they did not rush to their decisions. Things move very slowly in Spain. They issued permits to married women to join their husbands only if a family member or another respectable companion went with them. In my case, that person was Constanza, my fifteen-year-old niece, the daughter of my sister, Asunción, a timid girl with a religious vocation, whom I chose as being the healthiest member of the family. The New World is not for the delicate. We did not ask her, but from the fit she threw, I have to believe that she was not attracted by the prospect of the journey. Her parents put her in my care with a promise, written and sealed before a scribe, that once I was reunited with my husband, I would send her back to Spain and would provide the dowry for her to enter a convent—a promise I was not able to fulfill, not for lack of honor on my part, but on hers, as will be seen later. To obtain my papers, two witnesses had to swear that I had no tainted blood—that I was not a Moor or a Jew, but an old Christian. I threatened the priest with revealing his lust before the Ecclesiastic Tribunal, and coerced him into writing a testimony of my moral quality. With my savings I bought what I needed for the journey, a list too long to detail here, although I remember it perfectly. Enough to say that I took food for three months, including a cage of chickens, in addition to the clothing and household utensils I needed to establish myself in the Americas.