City of Silver (5 page)

The Bishop stroked his ecclesiastical ring. He hated DaTriesta when he was right.

The Commissioner went on. “I’ve heard also about a heretical Indian woman who demanded that her husband be brought back from the dead.”

The Bishop turned to the window. “Just an overly emotional woman—like all of them.”

Across the plaza, the door to the balcony opened and three members of the Cabildo—the City Council—filed out. The Alcalde’s powerful form paused on the threshold. The Bishop opened his window wider. Wind ruffled his lank gray hair as he cocked his head to hear.

BEFORE GOING OUT to read the proclamation, the Alcalde Francisco Rojas de la Morada took pen and paper and scratched out a single sentence. He dropped the quill on the long oak table, lifted the page, and blew on it before folding it and handing it to a liveried footman by the door. “Take this to the Abbess of the Convent of Los Milagros. She is standing on the steps of the
cathedral,” he whispered, though the members of the Cabildo were unlikely to overhear him. They filled the room with chatter.

He turned his face away and struggled to gain control of himself.

Pellets of grief burned in his heart. For these past three weeks, he had been unable to still his own mind and soothe his hurt. He gulped rich pastries at dinner every night despite the Lenten fast. He went over and over his accounts, tallying his wealth three or four times a day. He changed his clothes every few hours, wearing more and more elaborate dress until his friends began to taunt him to reveal the name of his new mistress. In fact, not even Doña Laura’s beauty and skill could distract him.

On the afternoon before Inez disappeared into the convent, she had sat with him in his study at home, as she so often had. It was a place ordinarily forbidden to women, but he had welcomed her there from the time she was four years old. At first to sit on his lap and tickle him with his quill. In those days, she had often stood on the chair behind him while he worked on his accounts. Many times she had fallen asleep with her arms around his neck and her head on his shoulder. He would reach behind and hold her to him and walk her gently and deposit her, still sleeping, into the arms of her nurse.

As the years passed, she sat across from him, her bright eyes shining with intelligence and understanding as he explained to her the workings of his affairs. But on the afternoon before she ran away, those blue eyes shone instead with challenge and resolve. Her persistence had shocked and angered him. Suddenly, they were battling, and she was defying him.

Regret overwhelmed him. He was right not to have given in to Inez, but he should have held his temper, reasoned with her. She responded to logic. In this way, she was like a man.

He had no son of his dreams, tall and deadly with a sword. He always consoled himself with the thought that no son could
have been more fearless and clever than his Inez, and a son might one day grow to challenge him. He had not expected a daughter to do such a thing. But now that Inez had, even this seemed only natural for a creature like her. She was female, but strong-willed like him, and despite the weakness of her sex, a girl of her quality of mind would have her own ideas.

“I will go to Buenos Aires,” she had said. “I will establish myself there. It will give us a foothold in another place. That way—”

“Are you insane?” he had shouted.

She remained cool. Her blue eyes looked upon him as if he were her little sister who needed to be cajoled into playing a game Inez’s way. “Father, you still think of Potosí as the center of the universe, but given what you have told me about the currency, it will not always be that way. If I go to Buenos Aires—”

“Buenos Aires! It is backwater. Nothing of importance happens there. And how can you go there without your family?”

“I am—”

“You are stupid. Exactly like your mother!” His breath quickened. No words could have injured her more.

She glared at him.

He kept his countenance stern, but he felt his heart tumble down a mountain.

He had thought she would shout. She looked as if she might slap him. But then her gaze left his face. She rose and said calmly, “Very well, Father.”

That evening and the next morning, it was as if the argument had never happened. Then that night, she disappeared into the convent, where she had been ever since.

Why had he let his blood flare? He should have charmed her. She was a girl, after all. Daughters were hardly worth the notice of a man like him. Now, for three weeks, he had suffered without her. No one but Inez could be a comfort to him in his
home. Certainly not his droning wife or that silly little Gemita. He got nothing out of those boring, frivolous females.

His noble wife, Ana, had brought him social position and a dowry of twenty-five thousand pesos. He had cultivated those seeds into a vast fortune—the greatest in the city. His wife took and spent the wealth he bestowed on her without one thought to the intelligence, determination, and fearlessness it took to amass it. Only his Inez understood, as well as any son would have, that his fortune was more than a mere means to luxurious ends. It was the measure of him as a man. Inez delighted in the details of his work, offered her own clever suggestions, some of which had paid off handsomely. She admired him. Why had she suddenly decided on this ridiculous scheme of leaving Potosí?

It must have been the influence of the Abbess, who meant well enough, or that meddling priest. Who was that sanctimonious Jesuit to preach about money and how it was gotten? He and his fellow men of the Compañia de Jesus prayed in a golden church.

The burning pain under the Alcalde’s heart flared again. There had been moments when he had looked into Inez’s eyes and caught—What? A fleeting glimpse of something that seemed to belie her love. It never lasted long enough to see, just to sense. He dismissed the thought as he would an unworthy supplicant begging in his patio. How had he become so enthralled to the love of a daughter? It was unseemly for a man of power. Yet he saw clearly how bleak his days would be if Inez never returned.

Morada approached the stained-glass window, where, unobserved from outside, he could survey the dense crowd in the plaza. The women’s bright silk mantles stood out like jewels against the deep black of the men’s attire. His friends and supporters stood fast together near the massive brick-and-stone bulk of the Mint, every man proud and stoic. Among the group of overdressed Creoles who lingered near them were five or six old campaigners, with sun-burnished skin and masses of gray
hair that made them look like statuary carved from the rocks of the Cerro. Even their hats were the color of earth—tan vicuña—the headgear that had identified their side in the bloody civil war. Morada had fought beside them in his youth against the Basque bastards who still controlled more than their share of the city’s wealth and power.

On the other side of the sloping plaza, between the Mother Church and the ornate façade of the theater, the opposition Basques held the highest ground. In the center, Antonio de Bermeo y de Novarra Tovar, that snob who gave himself such airs because of his noble lineage. Morada did not have a famous bloodline like Tovar’s, but his father, Juan de la Morada, had fought with Pizarro. The son of a Conquistador was as good as any son of a womanish old
conde
who had stayed behind in Spain.

The Alcalde de la Morada allowed himself a sad smirk. That Basque Tovar had willingly sent his daughter, Beatriz, to the convent. Put her in that prison on purpose. It was an oddly comforting thought: that his chief rival’s only child was with his and that Tovar also was without the bright eyes and animated conversation of his daughter at his dinner table.

If the proclamation Morada was about to read delivered the hardships it threatened, his great consolation would be that it would harm his enemies as much as it harmed him. More, since his own wealth was in pure silver ingots and very well hidden. Seven million pesos. A huge fortune. He had sent a train of Indian porters into the country every night for the past month. Everyone suspected they carried silver, but no one knew where they went. Only his most trusted supporters—men he owned body and soul—knew where his fortune lay.

Felipe Ramirez, the Assayer of the Mint, touched Morada’s arm. “It is time,” he said. Ramirez was short and stout, but no one would be better at one’s side in a fierce fight.

Morada straightened his cloak and carefully folded back the
right side to reveal the golden silk of its lining and the gold-and-silver embroidery of his doublet. The work had been done in Genoa and the garment tailored to his measurements in Lima by the Viceroy’s own tailor.

“I am ready,” he said. He followed Ramirez to the door. He paused until the crowd in the plaza focused completely on him. Then he took up the proclamation that had arrived from Lima yesterday and stepped out on the breezy balcony.

He held the parchment aloft and then read: “By the hand of Don García Sarmiento y Sotomayor, Count of Salvatierra, sixteenth Viceroy of Perú. His most Gracious and Roman Catholic Majesty Felipe the Fourth sends greetings to his subjects in the city we are pleased to call our Villa Imperial of Potosí. Know ye that for some time we have had the wish and determination to settle many matters of disturbance to our city, by reason of its great importance to the service of God and the increase of our Holy Catholic faith and to the welfare of all our subjects, especially those resident there in the Villa Imperial. False coins, coins of alloy, yet stamped with the royal seal and minted in Potosí, are abroad in the world. This is an affront to the Royal Person of the King as well as a threat to the holy work of His Majesty in defending our Holy Faith. His Royal Majesty has therefore appointed Doctor Francisco de Nestares, President of the Charcas, as Visitador General, to exhaust all means which may appear conducive to find and prosecute the bandits with no respect for God or royal justice, to ensure the peace and tranquillity of the Villa Imperial, and to prevent interference with the King’s revenues.

“Visitador Nestares will immediately begin to inform himself in minute detail what aspects of the silver industry are not being carried out in conformity with royal orders, and in all that he finds make correction, giving rules and instructions by which the mining and refining and minting of silver are in the future to be governed, to that end, without injury to the silver industry,
the correction of all abuses which may have grown up in its management. The King has deemed it convenient to his royal service that Visitador Nestares shall arrive in Potosí no later than the Monday following Easter in the year of Our Lord 1650. I, the King.”

The crowd stood in stunned silence for a few heartbeats and then erupted in a hundred exclamations. “Can it be true, then, that our money is false?” “It is what the Portuguese from Brazil have been saying.” “Oh, dear Lord, we will be ruined.” “So soon?” “Monday?” “That’s only four days from now.” “Why did we not have more warning?” “How can he arrive so soon?”

Morada knew the answer to the last question. Though ordinarily they would know months or at least weeks in advance of the arrival of a royal Commissioner, this time they were given only four days’ warning. The Viceroy and the Crown hoped to catch the citizens of Potosí off guard.

The Alcalde held up both his hands until he could again be heard. “To welcome the King’s emissary, we will have two weeks of celebration.” The city was world famous for the extravagance and beauty of its festivities—banquets, masked balls, bullfights, processions. Everyone in the plaza prayed they would be able to mount a welcome lavish enough to turn the head of Visitador Nestares. Or he would certainly ruin them.

Morada grasped the hilt of his sword and, feigning a complete absence of emotion, strode inside.

A HARQUEBUS SHOT’s distance away, in the corner of the square beyond the massive whitewashed granite hulk of the Mint, which more than the cathedral dominated the aspect of the city, Father Junipero Pimentel watched from in front of the rose-colored stone monastery where he lived—the Compañia de Jesus. The slight, tense Jesuit understood the exclamations of the crowd both in lilting, excited Spanish and in worried, staccato Aymara.

They talked only of silver. They craved it like a drug. Even
the Indians. This great city existed only because of the ore torn from the hellish mountain with the blood of God’s poorest creatures, brought to the mills across the canal where more forced laborers extracted the silver, which was then carried under guard here to the Mint. Behind these four-foot-thick walls, the silver was formed into ingots or stamped into irregular coins marked with the coat of arms of the King of Spain: reales, pieces of eight, the pirates called them.

Llamas and mules carried one-fifth of the coins, the tribute due King Philip, over the Andes to the coast, where they were loaded onto galleons and shipped to Panama. Thence across the isthmus to the Ca rib be an, and on to Spain. That is, if English or Dutch pirates did not take the ships on their way.

A hundred years ago, Indians and Spaniards both got rich from the mines. Some wealthy citizens of this city were descended from those first, fortunate Indians. But Spanish greed had triumphed. Now, armed soldiers walked the roof of the Mint to ensure that no silver went into the pockets of the workers, who more likely than not would die in the course of their labors. The conscripted, more like slaves than workers, walked under guard to Potosí in columns from villages hundreds of miles away, where their relatives played funeral marches for them as they left. Conventional wisdom said that without their forced labor—the
mita,
as the system of recruitment was called—Potosí would fall; and without Potosí, Perú would fall; and without Perú, Spain would fall; and without Spain, the Catholic Church would fall. Protestants would rule the world. A terrifying thought. Would God allow such a calamity? Or was this theory just a sanctimonious rationalization to support greed that wanted cheap labor?

The people of Potosí were capable both of passionate devotion to the Holy Mother Church and of enormous greed. They competed in their devotion and especially in their extravagance. Don Jerónimo Andrade dressed himself and his bodyguard of
eighteen in capes so laden with silver embroidery that they could barely walk. Don Juan Sarmiento once gave a party for three hundred that lasted the entire forty days from Easter until Ascension Thursday. Don Bartolomé Alameda trumped them all when he paid ten thousand pesos, the price of a hacienda in Spain, for a single fresh fig.