Ines of My Soul (42 page)

“In this imperial banquet, my beautiful Doña Inés, only one thing is lacking,” he concluded, his glass held high and his eyes misty with emotion.

“Say no more, Your Mercy,” I replied.

At that moment you came in, Isabel, dressed in organdy, wearing a flower and ribbon wreath on your head and carrying a silver tray covered with a white linen napkin on which was one empanada for the gobernador. Loud applause celebrated the moment, because everyone remembered the lean times, when we made empanadas from anything we had at hand, including lizards.

After the meal there was a ball, but Valdivia, who had been a lively dancer, with a good ear and natural grace, did not take part, blaming his refusal on the old hip injury. Once the guests had gone and the servants had distributed the remains of the banquet among the poor, who had come from the Plaza de Armas to listen to the sounds of revelry, after the house was closed up and the candles extinguished, Rodrigo and I fell, exhausted, into bed. I laid my head on his chest, as I always did, and slept without dreaming for six hours, which for me, a chronic insomniac, is an eternity.

The gobernador stayed in Santiago for three months. During that time, he made a decision that he had surely thought over carefully: he sent Jerónimo de Alderete to Spain to deliver sixty thousand gold pesos to the king, the
quinto
owed to the Crown, a ridiculous sum when compared to the gold-laden galleons that sailed from Peru. He carried letters for the monarch with assorted petitions; among others, that he, the gobernador of Chile, be granted a marquisate and also the Order of Santiago. Valdivia had changed; he was no longer the man who prided himself on disdaining titles and honors. Worse, once a person repelled by slavery, he requested permission to import two thousand black slaves without paying the tax. The second part of Alderete's mission was to visit Marina Ortiz de Gaete, still living in the modest home in Castuera, give her money, and invite her to come to Chile to act as gobernadora at the side of her husband, whom she had not seen for seventeen years. I would give anything to know how María and Juana welcomed that news. I regret highly that Jerónimo de Alderete did not get back with a positive answer. He was gone nearly three years, as I recall, partly because of the delays of crossing the ocean, and partly because the emperor was not a man given to haste. During his return, as he crossed the isthmus of Panama, the captain contracted some tropical plague, and was dispatched to a better life. He was a very good soldier and loyal friend, that Jerónimo de Alderete. I hope that history will reserve the place for him he deserves. In the meantime, Pedro de Valdivia had died without learning that finally he had been granted the favors he requested.

When Marina Ortiz de Gaete received her husband's invitation to travel to this kingdom, which she imagined as another Venice—who could know why—along with the seven thousand five hundred gold pesos for her expenses, she bought herself a gilded throne, an imperial wardrobe, and came to Chile accompanied by an impressive retinue that included several members of her family. The poor woman came all that way to learn she was a widow, and additionally, that Pedro had left her as poor as a church mouse. To crown her bad fortune, before six months had passed, all of her nephews, whom she adored, had died in the war with the Indians. I can only pity her.

In those months that Pedro de Valdivia was in Santiago, we saw each other very little, and always at social gatherings where there were many other people; malicious eyes followed our every move, hoping to surprise some gesture of intimacy, or attempting to divine our sentiments. In this city no one could take a step without being spied on and criticized. Why did I put that in the past? Now, in 1580, people gossip as devotedly as ever. But though I had spent the most intense years of my youth with Pedro, I felt strangely indifferent toward him; it seemed that the man I had loved with desperate passion was a different person. Shortly before he announced his return to the south, where he planned to visit new cities and continue his search for the elusive Strait of Magellan, González de Marmolejo came to see me.

“I wanted to tell you, daughter, that the gobernador has asked the king to name me bishop of Chile,” he told me.

“Everyone in Santiago knows that, Padre. Tell me why you have really come.”

The priest laughed. “How bold you are, Inés!”

“Come on, speak, Padre.”

“The gobernador wishes to talk with you privately, daughter, and clearly it cannot be in your house, or in his, or in a public place. We must maintain appearances. So I offered him my residence. . . .”

“Does Rodrigo know about this?”

“The gobernador does not think it necessary to bother your husband with such trifles, Inés.”

I found the messenger, the message, and the secrecy suspicious, so I told Rodrigo that same day, to avoid problems, and from him learned that Valdivia had asked his permission to meet me alone. Why, then, did he want me to hide it from my husband? And why hadn't Rodrigo mentioned it to me? I suppose that the former wanted to put me to the test, but I do not believe that of the latter; Rodrigo was not capable of such deviousness.

“Do you know why Pedro wants to talk with me?” I asked my husband.

“He wants to explain why he acted the way he did, Inés.”

“That was more than three years ago! And he's coming with explanations now? I find that very strange.”

“If you don't want to talk with him, I will tell him that myself.”

“It doesn't bother you that I will be alone with him?”

“I trust you completely, Inés. I would never insult you with jealousy.”

“You do not act like a Spaniard, Rodrigo. You must have some Dutch blood in your veins.”

The next day I went to the home of González de Marmolejo, after mine, the largest and most luxurious in Chile. The priest's fortune was obviously of miraculous origin. His Quechua housekeeper received me, a very wise woman who knew a lot about medicinal plants, and such a good friend she did not have to hide from me that she had for years lived as wife with the future bishop. She led me through several salons linked by double doors, carved by an artisan the priest had had brought from Peru, to a small room where Marmolejo had his desk and most of his books. The governor, elegantly dressed in a dark red doublet with slashed sleeves, greenish breeches, and a black silk cap with a dashing plume, came forward to meet me. The housekeeper discreetly withdrew and closed the door. When I found myself alone with Pedro, my heart raced and I could feel blood pounding in my temples. I thought I would not be capable of meeting the look in those blue eyes whose eyelids I had often kissed as he slept. However much Pedro had changed, at some moment he was the lover I had followed to the ends of the earth. Pedro put his hands on my shoulders and turned me toward the window, to observe me in the light.

“You are so beautiful, Inés! How can it be that time does not change you?” he sighed.

“You need spectacles,” I told him, stepping back from his grasp.

“Tell me that you're happy. It is very important for me to know that.”

“Why is that? Perhaps a bad conscience?”

He smiled, then he laughed, and we both took a deep breath of relief; the ice was broken. He told me in detail about the trial in Peru, and La Gasca's sentence; the idea of wedding me to someone else had come to him as the only way to save me from exile and poverty.

“When I proposed that solution to La Gasca, it was a dagger in my breast, Inés, and I am still bleeding. I have always loved you. You are the only woman in my life; the others are nothing. Seeing you married to someone else causes me unbearable pain.”

“You were always jealous.”

“Don't mock me, Inés. I suffer from not having you with me, but I am happy that you are rich and that you have married the finest hidalgo in this kingdom.”

“That day when you sent González de Marmolejo to bring me the news, he hinted that you had chosen someone for me. Was it Rodrigo?”

“I know you too well to try to impose anything on you, Inés, least of all a husband,” he answered evasively.

“Then for your peace of mind, I will tell you that your inspiration was excellent. I am happy, and I love Rodrigo very much.”

“More than me?”

“I no longer love you with that kind of love, Pedro.”

“You are sure of that, Inés of my soul?”

Again he took my shoulders and pulled me toward him, seeking my lips. I felt the tickle of his blond beard and the warmth of his breath; I turned my face and softly pushed away from him.

“The thing you always most appreciated about me, Pedro, was loyalty. I still have it, but now I owe it to Rodrigo,” I told him, sadly, because I sensed that at that moment we were saying good-bye forever.

Pedro de Valdivia set out once again to continue his conquest and to take reinforcements to the forts and seven recently founded cities. Several mines with rich veins had been discovered, and they had attracted new colonists, including some from Santiago who chose to leave their fertile haciendas in the Mapocho valley and take their families to the mysterious forests in the south, dazzled by the prospect of gold and silver. Twenty thousand Indians were working the mines, and the production was almost as good as it was in Peru. Among the colonists who left was our constable, Juan Gómez, but Cecilia and his children did not go with him. “I am staying here in Santiago. If you want to bury yourself in those swamps, you go,” Cecilia told him, never imagining that her words were a foreshadowing.

When Rodrigo de Quiroga said good-bye to Valdivia, he advised him not to take on more than he could handle. Some of the forts were maintained by only a handful of soldiers, and several of the cities had no protection.

“There is no danger, Rodrigo, the Indians have given us very few problems. The territory is won.”

“It seems strange that the Mapuche, whose reputation for being unconquerable reached us in Peru before we ever began the conquest of Chile, have not put up the battle we expected.”

“They have realized that we are too powerful an enemy, and have dispersed,” Valdivia explained.

“If that is the case, it is a good turn of events, but be on your guard.”

They embraced each other with real affection, and Valdivia left without a concern for Quiroga's warning. For several months we had no direct news of him, but we heard rumors that he was living the life of a Turk, lolling on pillows and growing fat in the house in Concepción he called his “winter palace.” It was said that Juana Jiménez was hiding the gold from the mines, which was transported on large trays, to avoid having to share it or declare it to the king's officials. And jealous tongues added that between the gold he had amassed, and that still in the Quilacoya mines, Valdivia was wealthier than Charles V himself. That shows how quickly people judge their neighbors. I remind you, Isabel, that when Valdivia died, he did not leave a maravedí. Unless Juana Jiménez, instead of being kidnapped by Indians, as everyone believed, had stolen that fortune and escaped somewhere, Valdivia's treasure never existed.

Tucapel was the name of one of the forts built to discourage the Indians and protect the gold and silver mines, although no more than a dozen soldiers were posted there, and they spent boring days staring at the surrounding forest. The captain in charge of the fort suspected that the Mapuche were plotting something, even though the relationship between Spaniards and Mapuche had been peaceful. It was always the same Indians who brought provisions once or twice a week to the fort, and the soldiers, who by then recognized them, usually exchanged friendly greetings in sign language. There was, nevertheless, something in the Indians' attitude that motivated the captain to take several of them prisoner and, under torture, extract information about a great uprising the tribes were planning. I myself would swear that the Indians confessed only what Lautaro wanted the
huincas
to know, because Mapuche have never yielded under torture. The captain requested reinforcements, but Pedro de Valdivia attached so little importance to that information that all he sent to the Tucapel fort in the way of aid was five soldiers on horseback.

It was spring 1553 in the aromatic forests of Araucanía. The air was warm and the five soldiers rode through clouds of translucent insects and waves of birdsong. Suddenly an infernal racket broke the idyllic peace and the Spaniards found themselves surrounded by hordes of attackers. Three of them were run through with lances but two managed to whirl around and gallop at breakneck speed toward the closest fort to seek help.

In the meantime, the Indians who always brought the foodstuffs appeared in Tucapel, greeting the soldiers with the most docile air in the world, as if they knew nothing about the torture their fellows had endured. The soldiers opened the gates of the fort and allowed them to come in with their bundles. Once inside, the Mapuche unwrapped the packs, pulled out hidden weapons, and assaulted the soldiers. Once recovered from their surprise, the Spaniards flew to get swords and breastplates and defend themselves. In the next minutes a large number of Mapuche were slaughtered, and many were taken prisoner, but the stratagem was successful, for while the Spaniards were occupied with the Indians inside the fort, thousands had surrounded it. The captain rode out with eight of his men to take them on, a courageous but futile decision, for the enemy was far too numerous. At the end of a heroic battle, soldiers with any life remaining retreated to the fort, where the unequal battle continued the rest of the day, until finally, as it grew dark, the attackers fell back. Six soldiers were left in the Tucapel fort, the only surviving Spaniards, along with numbers of Yanaconas and prisoners. The captain took a desperate step to frighten away the Mapuche, who were waiting to attack again at dawn. He had heard the legend of how I had saved the town of Santiago by throwing the heads of their caciques toward the Indian warriors, and decided to duplicate that move. He had the captives decapitated, then threw their heads over the wall. In response came a long roar, swelling like a terrible wave on a stormy sea.