“I have never built a boat, Excellency.”
“Then pray that this one doesn’t sink, my friend, because you will make the first voyage,” the governor told him, and said good-bye, very content with his project.
For the first time, Pedro was excited about the idea of the gold. He could imagine the faces of people in Peru when they learned that Chile was not as godforsaken as was said. He would send them a sample of the gold on his own boat. That would cause a sensation that would attract more colonists, and Santiago would be the first of many prosperous and populous cities. As he had promised, he let Michimalonko go free, and bid him farewell with a great show of respect. The Indian galloped away on his new mount, hard put to hide his laughter.
On one of his evangelizing excursions, which up to that moment had not been fruitful—the natives of the valley had shown a stunning indifference to the benefits of Christianity—González de Marmolejo returned with an Indian boy. He had found him wandering along the shore of the Mapocho, thin and covered with filth and scabs. Instead of running away, as the Indians did every time they saw him in his worn and dirty cassock, cross held high, the boy began to tag along after him like a dog, not saying a word, his burning eyes watching the priest’s every move. “Scat, youngster! Shoo!” the chaplain shouted, making menacing gestures with the cross, but the boy paid no attention, and instead followed him all the way back to Santiago. Lacking another solution, the chaplain brought him to my house.
“What do you want me to do with him, Padre? I have no time to raise troublemakers,” I told him. The last thing I needed was to become fond of a child of the enemy.
“You have the best house in the city, Inés. This poor little fellow will do well here.”
“But . . . !”
“What do God’s commandments tell us, Inés?” he interrupted. “We must feed the hungry and dress the naked.”
“I do not remember that commandment, but if you say so. . . .”
“Put him to work taking care of the hogs and the hens. He is very docile.”
My thought was that the padre could very well raise him himself, that was why he had a house and a woman; after all, this little Indian might grow up to be an altar boy. I could not, nevertheless, deny the chaplain; I owed him too many favors, among them giving me lessons. I could already read, on my own, without any help, one of Pedro’s three books, Amadis of Gaul, which was filled with love and adventures. I didn’t yet dare try the other two, El Cid, which was nothing but battles, and a book by Erasmus, Enchiridion Militis Christiani, a manual for soldiers that did not interest me in any way. The chaplain had other books I hoped to read one day—they, too, I’m sure, banned by the Inquisition.
So the youngster stayed with us. Catalina cleaned him up and we found that he wasn’t covered with dried blood after all, only mud and red clay. Except for a few scratches and bruises, he was sound. He was about eleven or twelve years old, very thin, with his ribs poking out, but strong; a mat of black hair, stiff with filth, crowned his head. He was nearly naked. He wore an amulet on a leather cord around his neck, and when we started to take that off he tried to bite us. I was so deeply involved in the tasks of founding the town that I forgot all about him, but two days later, Catalina reminded me he was there. She said that he hadn’t moved from the fenced pen where we had left him, nor had he eaten anything.
“So what are we doing with him, then, mamitayy?”
“We will send him back to his people; that would be best.”
I went to see him and found him sitting inside the fence, motionless, as if sculpted in wood, with his black eyes fixed on the hills. He had tossed aside the blanket we’d given him; he seemed to like the cold and rain of winter. I explained to him with signs that he could go, but he didn’t move.
“Well, he is not caring to go, then. Only to stay he is caring,” sighed Catalina.
“So let him stay.”
“And who will be watching to the savage, then, señorayy? Thieves and slackers are these Mapuche.”
“He’s only a boy, Catalina. He will leave; he has nothing to do here.”
I offered the boy a corn tortilla, and he did not react, but when I handed him a gourd of water he seized it with both hands and drank the water with loud slurps, like a wolf. Contrary to my predictions, he stayed. Until we could sew something to fit him, we dressed him in an adult-size poncho and trousers cinched tight at the waist. We cut his hair and deloused him. The next day he began to eat with a voracious appetite, and soon he began to come out of the hen yard and wander through the house, and then through the town, like a lost soul. He liked animals better than people, and they responded to him. The horses ate from his hand, and even the fiercest dogs, trained to attack Indians, wagged their tails when they saw him. At first he was chased out of everywhere he went; no one wanted a strange little Indian boy under his roof, not even the good chaplain, who had so often preached to me about Christian duties, but soon everyone grew accustomed to having him around, and he became invisible, coming and going through our houses, always silent and attentive. The Indian serving girls gave him treats, and even Catalina ended up accepting him, though grudgingly.
It was at this point that Pedro returned, exhausted and sore from the long journey, but very content. He had brought the first samples of gold, good-size nuggets taken from the river. Before meeting with his officers, he put his arms around my waist and led me to the bed. “In truth, you are my soul, Inés,” he sighed, kissing me. He smelled of horses and sweat; he had never seemed so handsome, so strong, so my own. He confessed that he had missed me, that each time it was more difficult to leave me, even for a few days, and that when we were apart he had bad dreams, premonitions, the fear that he would not see me again. I undressed him as if he were a child. I sponged him off with a wet cloth, kissed his scars one by one, from the large horseshoe shape on his hip and the hundreds of scratches and nicks of war that covered his arms and legs, to the small star on his temple, the result of a childhood fall. We made love with a new, slow tenderness, like a pair of grandparents. Pedro was so drained by those demanding weeks that he submitted to me like the meekest virgin. Sitting astride him, making love to him slowly, so that his pleasure would build gradually, I admired his noble face in the light of the candle: broad brow, prominent nose, feminine lips. His eyes were closed and his smile was tranquil; he had surrendered to me completely. He seemed young and vulnerable, different from the hardened and ambitious man who had left weeks before leading his soldiers. At one moment during that night, I thought I glimpsed the silhouette of the Mapuche boy in the corner, but it may have been only the play of the shadows.
The next day, when Pedro came back from his meeting with the council, he asked me who the young savage was. I explained that the chaplain had foisted him off on me, and that we assumed he was an orphan. Pedro summoned him, looked him over from head to toe, and liked what he saw. Perhaps the boy reminded him of himself at that age, equally as intense and proud. Realizing that the boy did not speak Spanish, he called for a tongue.
“Tell him he can stay with us, on the condition that he become a Christian. He will be called Felipe. I like that name; if I had a son of my own, that is what I would call him. Do we agree?” Valdivia asked.
The boy nodded. Pedro added that if he caught him stealing, he would first lash him and then drive him out of the city. He could consider himself fortunate at that, because anyone else in the town would cut off his right hand with a hatchet. Understood? Again the boy nodded, without a word, and with an expression that was more irony than fright. I asked the tongue to propose a deal: if he taught me his language, I would teach him Spanish. Felipe was not in the least interested. Then Pedro sweetened the offer: if he would teach me Mapudungu, he would have Pedro’s permission to look after the horses. The boy’s face immediately lit up, and from that instant he adored Pedro, whom he called Taita. He called me, formally, chiñura—for señora, I suppose. We had our agreement. Felipe turned out to be a good teacher, an
d I an apt pupil, so thanks to him I became the only huinca able to understand the Mapuche, but it would take nearly a year. I just wrote, “understand the Mapuche,” but that is a fantasy. We will never understand one another; there is too much accumulated resentment between us.
It was still midwinter when two of the soldiers Pedro had left in Marga-Marga came racing into Santiago at a full gallop. Badly wounded, they were near collapse, streaming rain and blood, their horses barely able to stand. They told us that Michimalonko’s Indians had rebelled, and had killed many of the Yanaconas and blacks and nearly all the Spanish soldiers; they were the only ones who had escaped with their lives. There was not a nugget of gold left. They had also killed the men on Concón beach and scattered their hacked-up bodies across the sand, and reduced the boat under construction to a heap of burned wood. We had lost twenty-three soldiers in all, and an uncounted number of Yanaconas.
“Damn Michimalonko, that Devil’s spawn! When I catch him I will have him impaled alive!” roared Pedro de Valdivia.
We had not yet absorbed the impact of that news when Villagra and Aguirre arrived to confirm what Cecilia’s spies had warned her of weeks before: thousands of Indians were grouping in the valley. They were arriving in small parties of armed men in war paint, hiding in the forests, in the hills, underground, in the clouds themselves. Pedro decided, as he always did, that the best defense was to attack. He selected forty soldiers of proven valor and at dawn the next day rode off at top speed to teach the Indians at Marga-Marga and Concón a lesson.
In Santiago, we felt abandoned and vulnerable. Francisco de Aguirre’s words defined our situation: we were at the ass end of the world, surrounded by naked savages. We had no gold and no boat; the disaster was total. Chaplain González de Marmolejo called us together for mass and delivered an exalted harangue about faith and courage, but he could not lift the spirits of the frightened populace. Sancho de la Hoz seized the excuse of the rebellion to blame Valdivia for our suffering, and so increased to five the number of his followers, among them, the malcontent Chinchilla, one of the twenty who had joined the expedition in Copiapó. I had never liked that man, for I judged him to be dishonest and cowardly, but I had never dreamed that he was a hopeless fool as well. His idea was not original—to assassinate Valdivia—though this time the conspirators did not have five identical daggers; those were well hidden at the bottom of one of my trunks. So sure was Chinchilla of the genius of his plan that he had a few drinks too many, dressed up as a clown, with bells and rattles, and went out and leaped about in the plaza, imitating the gobernador. Of course Juan Gómez immediately arrested him, and as soon as he showed him a few tourniquets, and explained on which part of the body he would apply them, Chinchilla peed his breeches and informed on his co-conspirators.
Pedro de Valdivia returned with greater haste than he had left; his forty soldiers were not remotely a large enough force to confront the unexpected numbers of warriors who kept arriving in the valley. He had managed to rescue the poor Yanaconas who had survived the massacres at Marga-Marga and Concón and taken cover in the dense undergrowth, faint with hunger, cold, and terror. He had met several enemy parties, which he had been able to scatter and, thanks to luck—which up to that point had never failed him—had taken three caciques prisoner and brought them to Santiago. With them, we had seven hostages.
For a town to be a town, you have to have births and deaths, but apparently in Spanish towns you must also have executions. We witnessed the first ones in Santiago that same week, after a brief trial—this time with torture—in which the conspirators were sentenced to death without appeal. Chinchilla and two others were hanged and their bodies exposed to the wind and the enormous Chilean vultures for several days on the top of Santa Lucía hill. A fourth man was beheaded in prison; he used his titles of nobility to escape being hanged like a commoner. To everyone’s surprise, Valdivia again pardoned Sancho de la Hoz, the principal instigator of the revolt. That time, in private, I opposed his decision, because the documents from the king were no longer pertinent. De la Hoz had signed a paper renouncing his claim to lead the conquest of Chile, and had acknowledged that Pedro was the legitimate governor. But that agitator had already given us too much trouble. I will never know why Pedro saved his neck one more time. He refused to give me any explanation, and by then I had learned that with a man like Pedro, it is best not to insist. That year of disappointments and setbacks had embittered him, and he easily lost control. I had to keep my mouth shut.
In the most splendid natural setting in the world, in the depths of the cold forests of southern Chile, in the silence of fragrant roots, bark, and branches, in the haughty presence of the volcanoes and peaks of the cordillera, beside emerald lakes and foaming rivers of melted snow, the Mapuche tribes joined together in a special ceremony, a conclave of ancients, heads of clans, toquis, lonkos, machis, warriors, women, and children.
Day after day they came to the forest clearing, an enormous hilltop amphitheater the men had already outlined with branches of araucaria and canelo; sacred trees. Some of the families had traveled weeks through the rain to get there. Groups that arrived early had set up huts—rukas—so attuned to nature that even from a short distance they could not be detected. Those who arrived later improvised leaf shelters—ramadas—and hung their wool blankets. At night they all prepared food they exchanged with others and drank chicha and muday, but in moderation, so they would not tire themselves. They visited to catch up on news told in long, solemn, poetic narratives repeating the histories of their clans memorized from generation to generation. Talk, talk, talk; that was the important thing. In front of each shelter a small fire was kept burning and smoke drifted in the mist that rose from the earth at the first light. The flickering fires illuminated the milky landscape of dawn. The young men returned from the river where they had been swimming in frigid water, and painted their faces and bodies in ritual colors of yellow and blue. The caciques donned their blankets of embroidered wool, sky blue, black, white; hung around their necks their toquicuras, the stone hatchets that were symbols of their power; stuck heron, ñandú, and condor feathers in their headdresses, while the machis burned aromatic herbs and prepared the rewe, the spiritual ladder they climbed to speak with Ngenechén.
We offer you this trickle of muday, it is the custom, to nourish the spirit of the Earth, which is always with us. Ngenechén made the muday, he made the Earth, he made the canelo, he made the kid and the condor.
The women braided their hair with bright yarn: the maidens sky blue, the married women red; they adorned themselves with their finest blankets and silver jewelry, while the children, also dressed for a festival, quiet and serious, sat in a semicircle. The men formed a single body like wood, proud, pure muscle, black hair held back in woven headbands, their weapons in their hands.
With the first rays of the sun, the ceremony began. The warriors ran around the amphitheater yelling and brandishing their weapons to the tempo of drums and flutes, frightening away the forces of evil. The machis sacrificed several guanacos, after asking their permission to offer their lives to the Great Father. They poured a little blood on the ground, tore out the animals’ hearts, smoked them with tobacco, then divided them into small pieces to be shared among the toquis and lonkos, in that way communing among themselves and with the Earth.
Ngenechén, this is the pure blood of the animals, your blood, blood that you give us so that we may live and move about. Great Father, with this blood we are pleading that you will bless us.
The women began a melancholy chant as the men filed into the center of the amphitheater and danced, slow and heavy, pounding the ground with naked feet to the sound of the kultrun drums and trutrucas.
And you also, Mother of the People, we greet you. Earth and the people are inseparable. Everything that happens to the Earth happens also to the people. Mother, we beg you to give us the piñon that sustains us, we beg you not to send too much rain, for the seeds will rot, and the wool, and we ask you pleas
e not to make the earth tremble or the volcanoes spit, because it awes the herds and frightens the children.
Then the women entered the circle and danced with the men, moving their arms, heads, and blankets like great birds. Soon the dancers felt the hypnotic effect of kultruns and trutrucas, of the rhythmic beat of feet on the damp earth, of the powerful energy of the dance, and one by one they began to utter visceral howls that gradually merged into a long cry: Oooooooohm—which echoed in the mountains and moved their spirit. No one could escape the spell of that Ooooooooohm.
We are asking you only, Great Father, that if it pleases you, you aid us in every moment here on this earth, and in this time that we are going through, we ask that you hear us. We are asking, Great Father, that you do not abandon us, that you do not cause us to feel our way in the darkness, that you give great strength to our arms to defend the land of our grandfathers.
The music and the dance came to a stop. The rays of the morning sun were sifting through the clouds, tinting the mist with golden dust. The most ancient of the toquis, wearing a puma skin around his shoulders, stepped forward to speak first. He had traveled an entire moon to be here, to represent his tribe. There was no hurry. He began in the most remote times, the story of Creation, how the snake Cai-Cai stirred up the sea and the waves were threatening to swallow the Mapuche, but then the serpent Treng-Treng saved them, carrying them to the peak of the highest hills that it made grow and grow. And the rain fell in such abundance that those who did not manage to climb to the hills perished in the flood. And afterward, the waters receded, and men and women occupied the valleys and the forests, never forgetting that the trees and the plants and the animals are their brothers, and that they must care for them, and that every time branches are cut to make a shelter, they are thanked, and when an animal is killed to eat, it is asked forgiveness, and is never killed for the sake of killing. And the Mapuche lived free in the blessed land, and when the Incas from Peru came, the Mapuche joined together to defend themselves and defeated the Incas, and did not let them pass the Bío-Bío, which is the mother of all rivers, but her waters were stained with blood and the moon was red in the sky. And a time passed, and the huincas came along the same roads as the Incas. Many came, and they smelled very bad, they could be smelled at two days’ distance, and they were thieves; they had no country and no land, they took what was not theirs, women, too, and they wanted the Mapuche and other tribes to be their slaves. And our warriors had to drive them out, but many died, because their arrows and lances could not pierce the metal clothes of the huincas, while they could kill from afar with nothing but noise, or with their dogs. No matter, they were driven out. The huincas themselves left, cowards that they were. And several summers and several winters passed, and other huincas came, and these, the ancient toqui said, wish to stay; they are cutting trees, raising their rukas, sowing their maize, and planting their seed in our women, and thus are born children who are neither huincas nor people of the earth. And from what our spy tells us, they intend to take over the entire land, from the volcanoes to the sea, from the desert to where the world ends, and they want to found many towns. They are cruel, and their toqui Valdivia is very clever. And I say to you that never have the Mapuche had enemies as powerful as these bearded ones from far away. Now they are but a small tribe, but more will come, because they have houses with white wings that fly across the sea. And I now ask our people what we must do.