Mexico (58 page)

From the troops came the shout "It is a miracle!" And when the woman reached Fray Antonio, who had been wondering how long he could sustain the courage of his army, he knelt before the banner, bringing it down to his lips and kissing it, as each new governor of Toledo has been required to do for the past four hundred years.

The occupation of the city was arranged by interpreters, and the woman summoned from within the walls the military leaders, who ratified the arrangements not as a surrender, for they remained willing to fight, but as a decision between equals. Before noon that day Fray Antonio led his soldiers to the pyramid, which he and the woman climbed, accompanied by sixteen Spanish veterans and about fifty Altomec women. At the top of the pyramid the Spaniards and the Indians ransacked the temples, smashed the drum, and with the aid of long poles tumbled the hideous idols down the face of the pyramid.

In the next five days the Spaniards destroyed more than two thousand Altomec statues, burned nearly half a mile of tanned animal hides on which the history of the city had been recorded, and eradicated almost all visible signs of culture. During the first of these days Fray Antonio, caught up in a religious frenzy, led the rampaging troops, but on the mornin
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f the fourth day, when much had already been lost, Lady Gray Eyes and her little granddaughter came before the priest and by means of an interpreter indicated that he was to come with them. They led him to a crypt in the palace containing the most valuable codices--those now in the Vatican--and urged that these records of the Altomecs be saved. All that I have related about my Indian ancestors, their triumphs and their defeats, has been taken from those few precious records that Lady Gray Eyes managed to rescue.

This was the year 1527, the year in which Lady Gray Eyes arranged her truce with Fray Antonio Palafox and deposited with him the parchment bearing the portrait of the Virgin and Child. Thanks to the intervention of die queen, the pacification of the Altomecs was speedy, and before the end of the year Fray Antonio had completed his fortress-church and started the mass conversion of the people, but he was disturbed by the refusal of Lady Gray Eyes to be baptized in the blood of the Lord or to permit her granddaughter to undergo the rite. Obstinately she insisted, "I have been a Christian for six years," and she explained how the parchment had effected her conversion.

Fray Antonio, a purist, reasoned, "But that's impossible. There were no priests here at the time."

"We won't argue about it," she replied, and although she was instrumental in making her people undergo formal baptism, she forswore the rite for herself.

One day Fray Antonio asked her, "If you were powerful enough to make your generals surrender the city--"

"We did not surrender," she argued.

"I mean, if you were strong enough to end the war, why didn't you do so sooner?"

"For a very good reason," she explained. "Our men are warriors. My father was the bravest of all the Altomec generals, and if we had surrendered cravenly, we would now be living in shame. But we fought you to a truce, and now we are free to live with honor."

One day she added a strange observation: "Men are men and they are happiest when they live as men. Our men wanted to test themselves against the Spaniards, and they did."

Fray Antonio asked, "What did you do during the long weeks of the siege?"

The queen replied, "Each morning, when the drum sounded
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I spread the parchment on the floor and knelt before it with my granddaughter, and we prayed."

"At the same moment I was praying, too," the young priest confided. "What did you pray for?"

"For your victory," the queen said simply.

'Then why did you not end the siege sooner?" the priest repeated in some irritation.

"Because there is a proper time for all things, and unless you had spent an appropriate amount of blood and courage winning this city, you would not have appreciated it when you took it."

"I see....." he said simply, and then shifted to a familiar argument: "Lady Gray Eyes, at the next services you must be baptized."

"That occurred a long time ago," she replied. "In blood."

4True baptism is in the love of the Lord," he argued.

"I have known that love for seven years," she replied. "It was in such love that I gave you the city when your soldiers proved powerless to take it."

"Let me at least baptize the child," the priest pleaded. "She will have a long life in this city and therefore ought to be a Christian."

"She is already a Christian," the queen insisted.

"Who made her so?" the priest demanded.

"I did."

Her negative attitude on the matter was fortified one afternoon as she walked through her city and came upon a group of young girls laughing with Spanish soldiers and apparently waiting for a minor priest. "What are you doing?" she demanded.

"We are waiting to be baptized," the girls said.

"Why?" she inquired.

"Because we desire to have babies with the Spaniards," the girls explained, "but they refuse to sleep with us unless we are baptized."

The queen was not pleased to hear this, and the more she saw young girls undergoing baptism so that Spaniards would accept them as sexual partners, the more determined she became that her granddaughter, still far from marriageable age, would not be baptized.

"You are not to look at Spanish men," she warned the girl constantly. When Fray Antonio came to her house, the old palace of the Altomec kings, to argue over the child's soul, Lady Gray Eyes ably rebuffed him. "We were Christians years ago," she insisted during one visit, "and the only remaining reason for baptism does not apply to my granddaughter."

"What reason are you referring to?" the priest asked.

"So that she might sleep with a Spaniard," Lady Gray Eyes elaborated.

The priest slapped his forehead and exclaimed, "Is that the only reason you can see for baptism?"

"If one is already a Christian--yes," the queen replied.

Fray Antonio now switched to the question that had for some time been plaguing him. "I see that your granddaughter wears many ceremonial bracelets," he observed.

"Girls always do," the queen replied.

"But these are of silver," the priest continued smoothly.

"The royal family always wore silver," Lady Gray Eyes explained.

"Where did they get it?" Fray Antonio asked, trying to mask his excitement.

"I never knew," the queen replied.

"But surely . .. you must have heard . .."

"Doubtless the king knew, but--"

"Did the Altomecs have a mine?"

'This was the sort of thing that would never concern me," the queen replied, and no amount of subsequent questioning could dislodge her from her placid indifference to the matter. She quickly perceived, we know from what her granddaughter later wrote, that the young priest was inflamed with a lust for silver and she was determined to use this as a leverage against him, but no one ever learned whether or not she ever knew where the mines were. Her granddaughter, when she later wrote Qf these matters, was of the opinion that the queen did know, but if so she kept the secret.

The reason why most chroniclers suspect that Lady Gray Eyes did indeed know was that when Fray Antonio made an impassioned plea to the Altomecs for enough silver to cast a statue of the Virgin in that metal, the queen thought this an excellent idea and quickly the necessary ore appeared, from what sources Antonio never discovered.

When he applied pressure for further supplies to send to Spain, he encountered opposition. "Why should we Altomecs send silver to a king in Spain?" the queen asked suspiciously.

"Because he is the greatest king in Christendom," Antonio explained.

"He is not our king," Lady Gray Eyes retorted.

"But he is. You are all his children."

"Our king is God, who is in heaven," the queen replied, and no more silver was forthcoming, a fact that was intensely upsetting to the priest.

For two years Fray Antonio concentrated on building his first edifice in Toledo, and it represented his dual responsibilities: winning land and slaves for the king, winning souls for God. He did force Altomecs to become the king's slaves, but he allowed them to work only on building the cathedral, which, under his constant supervision, became a rugged fortress
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church with walls as thick as a man is tall and doors studded with bolts to ward off murderous Altomecs. For the Spanish soldiers a little wooden church was hidden safely inside the fort, within the square, and this accounted for the name of the construction, the fortress-church. Today, of course, the church has vanished but the fortress remains, and along the south wall you can still see one of the famous memorials of the pacification of Mexico. It is the austere outdoor altar, constructed in the simplest lines by Altomec Indians whom Fray Antonio had taught to use the chisels he had imported from Spain. In the early years of the occupation it was considered too dangerous to admit Indians into the heart of a fortress-church lest they rise in sudden revolt and massacre the Spaniards, but at the same time the priests never lost sight of the fact that they were in Mexico to convert the Indians, so the compromise of the outdoor altar was conceived. To this altar, through the solid wall, was cut a narrow tunnel just wide enough for one priest to pass to the outdoor chapel, where in the open air there might be assembled four or five thousand Indians who had come to hear the message of Jesus. Under these precautions, if the Indians did rebel they could murder the priest who officiated before them, but they could not force their way into the fortress through the narrow tunnel, which could be easily blocked from within.

Furthermore, whenever the priest conducted worship from his outside altar, a company of soldiers manned the battlements above him, so that if trouble erupted the armed men could fire point-blank into the crowd. For the first eleven years of his service in Toledo, this soldier-priest never led his Indians in prayer without the assurance of some twenty armed men ready to spray musket fire among the worshipers.

But it was neither the fort nor the altar that occupied Fray Antonio's principal energies. He constantly took detachments of his soldiers into the hills, searching for the silver that he knew to be there, and constantly the prize eluded him. When Bishop Zumarraga came from Mexico City to inspect the fortress-church, he was so impressed with the way in which Fray Antonio had subdued the old pagan city that he wished to take the young man back to the capital with him. "We need your energies," Zumarraga explained.

Fray Antonio demurred modestly, saying, "My work is with the Altomecs."

With the bishop safely back in the capital, Fray Antonio was free to resume his obsessive search for the mines, but he met with no success. What made his failure the more galling was that from time to time his Altomec converts would appear with pieces of pure metal such as the one he had first seen or with silver bangles, and it infuriated him that they knew the secret of the mines while he did not.

Then in 1529 matters in Spain's Toledo took a dramatic turn. In mid-summer Fray Antonio received word that his father had finally been judged guilty by the Holy Inquisition and, because of the gravity of his heresy against the financial stability of the empire--a sin that furthermore smacked of Lutheranism--had been burned at the stake in the public square of Salamanca. He had, a friend related, been strangled before the fires reached him.

For some weeks Fray Antonio moved in a kind of daze. His first thoughts were not of his father but of the little garden of flowers that the Palafoxes had nourished over many generations. He saw the bright blooms crowded out by weeds and in the cathedral a yellow robe of shame bearing his father's name and the proscription against all Palafoxes for as long as time should last. He then thought of his brother, Timoteo, and what would happen to him, and for several nights he prayed that the fiery young fellow might control his temper. He hoped that Timoteo had already slipped into the army, for if he had not, entrance now would be impossible and the boy would be reduced to beggary or brigandage. Finally he thought of himself, and of how his career in the Church had been permanently blasted by this decision of the Holy Office. He could remain a priest, but he would never gain preferment. It was then that he resigned himself to spending the rest of his life in Mexico, lost in the obscurity of its Toledo with no hope of ever again seeing Leticia; but it was also then that he reaffirmed his belief that the good name of his family might be salvaged by the silver he was determined to find.

Lady Gray Eyes, who had always studied Fray Antonio with interest, saw with some apprehension the significant changes that were taking place in the priest. Where he had once been lively of step and eager for the problems of a new day, he was now dispirited and listless. He seemed particularly afraid of the couriers who brought letters from the capital, and she suspected that he was awaiting bad news to follow on what he had already received. He lost pleasure in conversions, and he took his troops for extended trips into the mountains, always seeking the silver mines that eluded him.

One day upon his return to the fortress-church she went to his quarters and asked him bluntly, "Fray Antonio, what has happened?" and on the spur of the moment he blurted out the story of his father's execution in Salamanca. The look of shock that came over the face of the Altomec woman surprised him.