After Rodrigo de Quiroga had walked through the ruin of Santiago, and delivered his assessment of the losses to Monroy, he came to see me. Instead of the demented basilisk he had left in the infirmary only shortly before, he found a more or less presentable woman, as sane as ever, treating the many wounded.
“Doña Inés . . . all thanks to the Most High . . .” he murmured. He was so spent that he was about to burst into tears.
“Take off that armor, Don Rodrigo, and let us take care of you,” I replied.
“I thought that . . . God in Heaven! You saved the city, Doña Inés. You sent the savages running . . .”
“Don’t say that, it’s unfair to these men who fought so bravely, and the women who backed them up.”
“The heads . . . they say that all the heads landed with the eyes looking toward the Indians and they took that as a bad augury, and that was why they ran off.”
“I do not know what heads you are talking about, Don Rodrigo. You must be confused. Catalina! Here, woman! Help this man off with his armor!”
I had time to weigh my actions during those hours. I worked without taking a breath all through the first night and the next morning, tending the wounded and trying to save what we could from the burned houses, but one part of my mind was in constant dialogue with the Virgin, asking her to intercede in my favor for the sin I had committed, and also with Pedro. I did not want to imagine his reaction when he saw the destruction of Santiago and learned that he no longer had the seven hostages, and that now we were at the mercy of the savages, and had nothing with which to negotiate. How could I explain what I had done, if I myself did not understand? To tell him that I had gone mad, and didn’t remember what happened, was an absurd excuse. I was embarrassed, besides, to think of the grotesque spectacle I had presented in front of his captains and soldiers. Finally, at about two o’clock on the afternoon of September 12, fatigue caught up with me and I slept a few hours, lying on the floor beside Baltasar, who had come dragging back at dawn with bloody jaws and a broken leg.
The next three days went by in a breath. I worked along with everyone else to clear away debris, put out fires, and fortify the plaza, the one place where we could defend ourselves from another attack, which we assumed was imminent. Catalina and I also scratched through burned furrows and the ashes of the plantings, looking for anything edible to throw into the soup. Once we had disposed of Aguirre’s horse, there was very little food; we had returned to the times of the communal pot, except that now it consisted of water with whatever herbs and tubers we could dig up.
On the fourth day, Pedro de Valdivia arrived with his detachment of fourteen cavalry; the foot soldiers were following behind as quickly as possible. Riding Sultan, the governor entered the ruin that we had once called a town, and with one glance absorbed the magnitude of the destruction. He rode along streets where weak columns of smoke were still rising, marking the sites of former houses, and into the plaza, where he found our meager populace in rags, hungry and frightened. The wounded were stretched out on the ground, bound with filthy bandages, and his captains, as ragged as the least of the Yanaconas, were helping wherever there was need. A trumpeter signaled the governor’s entrance, and those able to stand up, calling on their last reserves of strength, formed lines to greet the captain general.
I stayed back, half hidden behind some canvas. From that vantage I saw Pedro, and my soul gave a leap of love and sadness and weariness. Pale with concern, Valdivia dismounted in the center of the plaza and, before embracing his friends, took in the devastation, looking for me. I took one step forward, to show him I was still alive. Our eyes met, and then his expression and his color changed. He spoke to the soldiers in that tone of reason and authority no one could resist. He praised the courage of each one, especially those who had died fighting, and gave thanks to the apostle Santiago for having saved the rest. The city was not important; they had strong arms and hearts to rebuild it from the ashes. We would have to begin again, he said; that was not a cause for discouragement but, rather, a challenge to spirited Spaniards, who never knew defeat, and to the loyal Yanaconas. “Santiago, and Spain!” he shouted, raising his sword in salute to Saint James. “Santiago, and Spain!” his men responded in a single disciplined voice, but in their tone was deep dejection.
That night, lying on the hard ground with a sliver of moon overhead and nothing to cover us but a filthy blanket, I wept with fatigue in Pedro’s arms. He had already heard several accounts of the battle, and of my part in it. Contrary to what I had feared, however, he was proud of me, and so, according to what he told me, was every soldier in Santiago, for they would have perished without me. The versions he had heard were exaggerated, and in them, I have no doubt, lay the origin of the legend that I had saved the city.
“Is it true that you yourself decapitated the seven caciques?” Pedro had asked me as soon as we were alone.
“I don’t know,” I answered honestly.
Pedro had never seen me cry. I am not a woman given to easy tears, but that first time he did not try to console me, he merely stroked me with the distracted tenderness that was one of his ways. His profile was like stone, his mouth hard, his gaze fixed on the sky.
“I am very afraid, Pedro,” I sobbed.
“Of dying?”
“Of everything. Not so much of dying . . . I have years before I get old.”
He laughed quietly at the joke we shared: that I would bury several husbands and would always make a desirable widow.
“The men want to go back to Peru, I’m sure of that, though none of them dares say so; it would make them look like cowards. They feel defeated.”
“And you? What you do want, Pedro?”
“To found Chile with you,” he replied without a second thought.
“Then that’s what we will do.”
“That we will do, Inés of my soul.”
My memory of the distant past is very vivid. I could tell step by step everything that happened in the first twenty or thirty years of our colony in Chile, but I don’t have time for that. Death, that gentle mother, is calling, and I want to go with her and rest at last in Rodrigo’s arms. I am surrounded by ghosts of the past: Juan de Málaga, Pedro de Valdivia, Catalina, Sebastián Romero, my mother and my grandmother, buried in Plasencia, and many others. Their outlines become more solid every day, and I hear their voices whispering in the corridors of my house. The seven beheaded caciques must be well settled in heaven, or in hell, because they have never come to haunt me. I am not daft, as the very old often are; I am still strong and have a good head on my shoulders, but I have one foot in the grave, and because of that I can observe and hear what others cannot perceive.
You get uneasy, Isabel, when I talk like this; you counsel me to pray. That will ease your soul, you say. My soul is already calm; I have no fear of dying. I had none then, when it was reasonable to have it, and less now, when I have lived longer than my time. You are the only one holding me in this world. I confess that I am not at all eager to watch my grandchildren grow up and suffer; I would rather go with the memory of their childish laughter. I pray out of habit, not as a remedy for anguish. My faith has never failed me, but my relationship with God has been changing with the years. Sometimes, not thinking, I call him Ngenechén, and I confuse the Virgen del Socorro with the blessed Mother Earth of the Mapuche—but I am no less a Catholic than before, God forbid! It is just that Christianity has worn a little thin, the way good wool cloth does after a lot of wear.
I have only a few weeks to live. I know that because at times my heart forgets to beat, I feel dizzy, I fall, and I no longer have any appetite. It is not true that I am trying to starve myself just to exasperate you, as you accuse me, daughter, but because food tastes like sand and I can’t swallow it. That is why I take sips of milk for nourishment. I am thin, I admit; I look like a skeleton with skin stretched over it, as I did in the times of hunger—except that then I was young. A skinny old woman is pathetic; my ears have become enormous and
the least breeze blows me off my feet. Any moment now I will fly away. I must cut this account short, otherwise too many dead will be left in the inkwell. My dead. Nearly all my loved ones are dead. That is the price for living as long as I have.
FIVE
The Tragic Years 1542–1549
FOLLOWING THE DESTRUCTION OF SANTIAGO, the town council met to decide the fate of our small colony, now threatened with extinction. Before the idea of returning to Cuzco—which the majority approved—could prevail, Pedro de Valdivia imposed the weight of his authority and rolled off a string of difficult to keep promises to win the argument for staying. The first, he decided, would be to send to Peru for help, then to fortify Santiago with a wall like those in European cities to discourage enemies. The rest would be solved along the way, but we should have faith in the future. There would be gold, silver, grants of land, and encomiendas of Indians to work it, he assured the meeting. Indians? I cannot imagine what Indians he was thinking of, because the Chileans had shown no signs of cooperation.
Pedro ordered Rodrigo de Quiroga to collect all the gold available, from the coins a few soldiers had saved through a lifetime and carried hidden in their boots to the one goblet in the church and the pittance sieved from the beds at Marga-Marga. He gave it all to the blacksmith, who melted it down and fashioned a complete set of trappings for a horseman: bit and stirrups for the horse, and spurs and sword guard for the rider. Our courageous Captain Alonso de Monroy, outfitted with pure gold to impress and attract colonists to Chile, was sent across the desert to Peru with five soldiers and the only six horses that were not wounded or down to pure bone. González de Marmolejo gave them his benediction, and we escorted them some distance and then said good-bye with heavy hearts because we did not know whether we would ever see them again.
That was the beginning of two years of indescribable hardships. I do not want to remember those years, just as I would like to forget the death of Pedro de Valdivia, but one cannot control memory, or one’s nightmares. A unit of soldiers was formed to take turns standing guard day and night, as the others, turned into laborers and masons, sowed seed, rebuilt houses, and raised the wall to protect the city. We women worked side by side with the soldiers and Yanaconas. We had very little clothing left after the fire; the men worked in a kind of loincloth like the savages wear, and we women, modesty forgotten, in a shift. Those winters were very harsh, and everyone fell ill except Catalina and me. We had hides like a mule, González de Marmolejo always said, amazed. We had no food except what grew naturally in the valley: piñon nuts, bitter fruit, and roots, which all of us ate—humans, horses, and penned animals alike. The handful of seeds I had saved from the burning were used for planting, and the next year we harvested several bushels of wheat, which we again planted, so we did not see a loaf of bread until the third year. Bread, food for the soul. How much we missed it!
Now that we had nothing of interest to trade with the curaca Vitacura, he turned his back on us, and the sacks of maize and beans that we had once easily obtained were no longer available. Our soldiers had to raid Indian villages to steal grain, birds, blankets—whatever they could find—like bandits. I suppose that Vitacura’s Quechuas were not wanting for anything, but the Chilean Indians destroyed their own plantings, determined to die of starvation if that would also mean the end of us. Driven by hunger, they migrated toward the south. The valley, once seething with activity, was emptied of families, but not warriors. Michimalonko and his legions never gave us a moment’s peace, ever ready to attack with the speed of lightning and then fade away into the forests. They burned what we planted, they killed our animals, they attacked if we went out without armed protection, so that we became prisoners inside the walls of Santiago. I do not know how Michimalonko fed his men, because the Indians had stopped planting. “They eat very little; they can go months with only a little grain and piñons,” Felipe, the Mapuche boy, informed me, and added that the warriors wore a little bag around their necks containing a handful of toasted grain; they could live for a week on that.
With his habitual tenacity and optimism, which never waned, the governor forced his exhausted and ailing people to work the ground, make adobe blocks, build the fortified wall and moat around the town, train for war, along with a thousand other duties, because he maintained that sloth is more debilitating than hunger. It was true. No one would have survived his dejection had he had time to think about his luck . . . but there was no time; everyone worked from dawn till late at night. And if there were hours to spare, we prayed; you can never pray too much. Block by block the great wall—as high as two men—grew around Santiago; board by board the church and the houses rose from the ground. Stitch by stitch we women mended the colony’s tatters, which we did not wash for fear that they would fall into shreds in the water. We wore more or less “decent” clothing only for special occasions, for we had those, too, not everything was lamenting; we celebrated religious festivals, weddings, and sometimes a baptism. It was painful to see the wan faces of the population, the sunken cheeks, the clawlike hands, the dispiritedness. I was so thin that when I lay on my back in bed, my hip bones, ribs, and clavicle protruded, and I could feel my internal organs just beneath my skin. Outwardly I grew hard, my body dried up, but my heart softened. I felt a maternal love for those hapless people. I dreamed that my breasts held milk enough to feed them all. The day came when I forgot my hunger; I grew accustomed to the sensation of emptiness and lightheadedness that at times made me hallucinate. I did not see visions of roast pig with an apple in its mouth and a carrot up its ass, the way some of the soldiers did, who talked of nothing but food; my visions were of landscapes hazy with mist, where the dead walked. It occurred to me to veil misery by taking great pains to be clean, since we had water in abundance. I initiated a campaign against lice, fleas, and filth, but the result was that the mice, cockroaches, and other insects we put in the soup began to disappear . . . so we stopped soaping and scrubbing.
Hunger is a strange thing; it depletes energy, it slows and saddens us, but it clears the mind and whets the sexual appetites. The men, pathetic, nearly naked skeletons, relentlessly chased the women, and they, on the verge of starvation, were always pregnant. In the midst of famine, infants were born in the colony, although few of them survived. Of the first babies born in Santiago, several died during those two winters and the rest were nothing but bones, swollen bellies, and the eyes of old men. Cooking the thin soup shared by Spaniards and Indians came to be a much greater challenge than Michimalonko’s surprise attacks. We boiled water in great cauldrons, threw in the herbs available in the valley—rosemary, bay, boldo, maiten—then added anything we had: a few handfuls of maize or beans from our reserves, which were rapidly dwindling, potatoes or tubers from the forest, an assortment of grasses and roots, and mice, lizards, crickets, and worms. By order of Juan Gómez, the constable of our small colony, I was given two soldiers armed day and night to prevent what little we had in the storeroom and the kitchen from being stolen, but a handful of maize or a few potatoes always managed to disappear anyway. I said nothing about these pitiful thefts, otherwise Gómez would have had to beat the servants as punishment and that would only have worsened our situation. We had enough suffering already, we did not need to add more. We tricked our stomachs with brews of mint, linden, and matico. If a domestic animal died, we used every scrap of it: we covered ourselves with its hide, used the fat in candles, made jerky from the meat, put the viscera in the stew, and saved the hooves for tools. We cooked the bones to give flavor to the soup, and boiled them again and again, until they dissolved in the cauldron like ashes. We boiled pieces of dried hide for children to suck on and ease their hunger. The pups that were born that year went directly into the pot as soon as they were weaned; we could not feed more dogs, but we did everything possible to keep alive the ones we already had; they were our first line of attack against the Indians. That is how my faithful Baltasar was saved.
Felipe was a born marksman; where he put his ey
e, his arrow followed, and he was always eager to go hunting. The smith made him iron-tipped arrows that were more effective than chipped stone, and the boy returned from his excursions with hares and birds, and sometimes even a mountain cat. He was the only one who dared go out to hunt alone; he blended into the forest, invisible to the enemy. The soldiers went out in groups, and in those numbers could not have caught an elephant, had there been any in the New World. Similarly, defying danger, Felipe would bring back armloads of grass for the animals, and thanks to him, though scrawny, the horses were on their feet.
It pains me to tell it, but I suspect that at times cannibalism was practiced among the Yanaconas, and perhaps even among some of our desperate men—just as thirteen years later it would be among the Mapuche, when hunger spread through the rest of the territory of Chile. The Spaniards used that excuse to justify the need to conquer, civilize, and convert them to Christianity, since there is no greater proof of barbarity than cannibalism. Before our arrival, however, the Mapuche had never fallen that low. In certain, very rare, instances they would devour the heart of an enemy in order to absorb his power; but that was a ritual, not a custom.