Ines of My Soul (2 page)

He died in this house, in my arms, on a warm summer afternoon. I saw Death, a little fuzzy, but unmistakable, as truly as I see the writing on this page. Then I called you, Isabel, to help me dress him, since Rodrigo was too proud to exhibit the decay of his illness before the servants. Only you, his daughter, and me, did he allow to outfit him in full armor and studded boots. Then we sat him in his favorite armchair, with his helmet and sword on his knees, to receive the sacraments of the Church and leave this earth with his dignity intact, just as he had lived. Death, which had not left his side and was waiting discreetly for us to finish our preparations, wrapped Rodrigo in her maternal arms and then made a sign to me to come receive my husband's last breath. I leaned over him and kissed him on the lips, a lover's kiss.

I could not fulfill Rodrigo's wish to be sent off without a fuss; he was truly the most loved and respected man in Chile. The entire city of Santiago turned out to weep for him, and from other cities in the kingdom arrived countless expressions of grief. Years before, the populace had come out into the streets to celebrate his appointment as governor with flowers and harquebus salvos. We buried him, with the honors he deserved, in the church of Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes, which he and I had had built to the glory of the Most Holy Virgin, and where soon my bones, too, will rest. I have left enough money to the Mercedarios that for three hundred years they can devote a weekly mass to the rest of the soul of the noble hidalgo Don Rodrigo de Quiroga, valiant soldier of Spain, adelantado, conquistador, and twice gobernador of the kingdom of Chile, caballero of the Order of Santiago . . . my husband. These months without him have been eternal.

I must not get ahead of myself. If I do not narrate the events of my life with rigor and harmony, I will lose my way. Chronicles must follow the natural order of happenings, even though memory is a jumble of illogic. I write at night, on Rodrigo's worktable, with his alpaca mantle wrapped around me. The fourth Baltasar watches over me, the great-grandson of the dog that came with me to Chile and lived beside me for fourteen years. That first Baltasar died in 1553—the same year Valdivia was killed—but he left me his descendants, all enormous, with clumsy feet and wiry coats.

This house is cold, despite carpets, curtains, tapestries, and the braziers the servants keep filled with live coals. You often complain, Isabel, that the heat here is suffocating; it must be that the cold is not in the air but inside me. That I can write down these memories and thoughts with paper and ink is owing to the good graces of the priest González de Marmolejo, who took the time, amid his labors of evangelizing savages and consoling Christians, to teach me to read. In those years, he was a chaplain, but later he became the first bishop of Chile, and also the wealthiest man in this kingdom. When he died, he took nothing with him to the tomb; instead, he left a trail of good works that had won him the people's love. At the end, Rodrigo, the most generous of men, always said that one has only what one has given.

We should begin at the beginning, with my first memories. I was born in Plasencia, in the north of Extremadura, a border city steeped in war and religion. My grandfather's house, where I grew up, sat at the distance of a harquebus shot from the cathedral, which was called La Vieja—the Old Lady—out of affection, not fact, for it had been there only since the fourteenth century. I grew up in the shadow of its strange tower covered with carved scales. I have never again seen it, or the wide wall that protects the city, the esplanade of the Plaza Mayor, the dark little alleys, the elegant mansions and arched galleries, or my grandfather's small landholding, where my sister's grandsons still live.

My grandfather, a cabinetmaker by trade, belonged to the Brotherhood of Vera-Cruz, an honor far above his social condition. Established in the oldest convent of the city, that brotherhood walked at the head of the holy week processions. My grandfather, wearing white gloves and a purple habit girdled with yellow, was one of the men chosen to carry the holy cross. Drops of blood spotted his tunic, blood from the flagellation he inflicted upon himself in order to share Christ's suffering on the road to Golgotha. During holy week the shutters of houses were closed to block out the light of the sun, and people fasted and spoke in whispers. Life was reduced to prayers, sighs, confessions, and sacrifices. One Good Friday my sister, Asunción, who was then eleven, awoke with the stigmata of Christ on the palms of her hands, horrible open sores, and with her eyes rolled up toward the heavens. My mother slapped her twice, to bring her back to this world, and treated her hands with wads of spiderwebs and a strict diet of chamomile tea. Asunción was kept in the house until the wounds healed, and my mother forbade us to mention the matter because she did not want her daughter paraded from church to church like a monster from the fair. Asunción was not the only stigmatized girl in the region. Every year during holy week some girl suffered the same thing. She would levitate, emit the fragrance of roses or sprout wings, and at that point she would become the target of exuberant devotion from believers. As far as I know, all of them ended up in a convent as nuns except Asunción who, because of my mother's precautions and the family's silence, recovered from the miracle without consequences, married, and had several children, among them my niece Constanza, who will appear later in this account.

I remember the processions because it was in one of them that I met Juan, the man who would be my first husband. That was in 1526, the year Charles V wed his beautiful cousin Isabella of Portugal, whom he would love his whole life long, and the same year in which Suleiman the Magnificent, with his Turkish troops, penetrated into the very heart of Europe, threatening Christianity. Rumors of the Muslims' cruelties terrorized the populace, and even then we thought we could see those fiendish hordes at the walls of Plasencia. That year religious fervor, whipped up by fear, reached the point of dementia.

In the procession, I was marching behind my family like a sleepwalker, light-headed from fasting, candle smoke, the smell of blood and incense, and the clamor of the prayers and moans of the flagellants. Then, in the midst of the crowd of robed and hooded penitents, I spied Juan. It would have been impossible not to see him since he was a handsbreadth taller than any of the other men. He had the shoulders of a warrior, dark, curly hair, a Roman nose, and cat eyes, which returned my gaze with curiosity.

“Who is that?” I pointed him out to my mother, but in reply received a jab of her elbow and the unequivocal order to lower my eyes. I did not have a sweetheart because my grandfather had decided that I would remain unmarried and take care of him in his old age, my penance for having been born in the place of a much desired grandson. He did not have money for two dowries, and had decided that Asunción would have more opportunities to make a good alliance than I because she had the pale, opulent beauty that men prefer, and she was obedient. I, on the other hand, was pure bone and sinew, and stubborn as a mule besides. I took after my mother and my deceased grandmother, who were not noted for sweetness. It was said that my best attributes were my dark eyes and filly's mane, but the same could be said of half the girls in Spain. I was, however, very skillful with my hands; there was no one in Plasencia and its environs who sewed and embroidered as tirelessly as I. With that skill, I had contributed to the upkeep of my family from the time I was eight, and I was saving for the dowry my grandfather did not plan to give me. I was determined to find a husband because I preferred a destiny of tilting with children to life with my ill-tempered grandfather.

That day during holy week, quite the opposite of obeying my mother, I threw back my mantilla and smiled at the stranger. So began my love affair with Juan, a native of Málaga. My grandfather opposed it at the beginning, and our home turned into a madhouse. Insults and plates flew, slammed doors cracked a wall, and had it not been for my mother, who put herself between us, my grandfather and I would have murdered each other. I waged such protracted war that in the end he yielded, out of pure exhaustion. I do not know what Juan saw in me, but it doesn't matter; the fact is that soon after we met we had agreed to marry within the year, a period that would give him time to find work and for me to add to my meager dowry.

Juan was one of those handsome, happy men no woman can resist at first, but later wishes another woman would win away because he causes so much pain. He never bothered to be seductive; in fact, he never bothered about anything. Being such a chulo—dressing so well and looking so handsome—was all it took for him to create a stir among the women. From the time he was fourteen years old, the age at which he began to polish his charms, he lived off his conquests. He used to laugh and say that he had lost count of the cuckolded men he had put the horns on, and the number of times he had given a jealous husband the slip. “But that's all over now that I'm with you, my pretty,” he would add to soothe me, as out of the corner of his eye he would be eyeing my sister. His bearing and his pleasant nature won the admiration of men as well. He was a good drinker and cardplayer, and he had an endless repertoire of racy stories and fanciful plans for making an easy fortune. Soon after I met him, I realized that his mind was focused on the horizon and on tomorrow; he was never satisfied. Like so many men of his time, he fed on the fabulous stories about the New World, where great treasures and honors were within reach of brave men willing to take risks. He believed he was destined for great derringdo, like Columbus, who had set out to sea with courage as his only capital, and who ended up discovering the other half of the world. Or Hernán Cortés, who won the most precious pearl in the Spanish empire: Mexico.

“They say that everything has already been discovered in those parts of the world,” I argued, wanting to discourage him.

“How ignorant you are, woman! There is more to
be
conquered than what has already been conquered. From Panama on to the south everything is virgin territory, and it contains more riches than all that Suleiman possesses.”

His plans horrified me because it meant we would be separated. Furthermore, I had heard from my grandfather's own lips, who in turn knew through gossip in the taverns, that the Aztecs of Mexico made human sacrifices. Thousands and thousands of miserable captives formed lines a league long, awaiting their turn to climb the steps of the temples where the priests—wild-haired scarecrows covered with a crust of dried blood and dripping with fresh blood—tore out their hearts with an obsidian knife. Their bodies rolled down the steps and piled up at the bottom, hills of decomposing flesh. The city sat in a lake of blood. Birds of prey, sated with human flesh, were so heavy they couldn't fly, and carnivorous rats grew to the size of sheepdogs. There was no Spaniard who had not heard these stories, but none of it intimidated Juan.

While I embroidered and sewed from daybreak to midnight, saving for our marriage, Juan spent his days wandering through the taverns and plazas, seducing maidens and whores alike, entertaining the local residents and dreaming of setting sail for the Indies, the only possible destiny for a man of his rigging, he maintained. At times he was gone for weeks, even months, only to return without explanations. Where had he gone? He never said, but since he talked so much about crossing the sea, people made fun of him and called me the “bride of the Americas.” I put up with his erratic behavior with more patience than was sensible because my thoughts were confused and my body flushed, as always happens when I'm in love. Juan made me laugh, he entertained me with songs and wicked poems, he mollified me with his kisses. He had only to touch me to turn my tears to sighs and my anger to desire. How accommodating love is; it forgives everything.

I have never forgotten our first embrace, hidden among the bushes in the woods. It was summer and the earth was pulsing, warm and fertile, filling the air with the fragrance of bay. We left Plasencia separately, to prevent talk, and went down the hill, leaving the walled city behind. We met at the river, and ran hand in hand toward the thicket, looking for a place far away from the road. Juan gathered leaves to make a nest. He took off his doublet and sat me down on it, then, in a leisurely way, instructed me in some of the ceremonies of pleasure. We had brought olives, bread, and a bottle of wine I had stolen from my grandfather, which we drank in naughty sips from each other's mouths. Kisses, wine, laughter, the warm earth, and the two of us in love. He took off my blouse and bodice and licked my breasts, saying they were firm as peaches, ripe and sweet, although I thought they looked more like hard plums. He explored me with his tongue until I thought I would die of pleasure and love. I remember that he lay back among the leaves and had me get on top of him, naked, moist with sweat and desire, because he wanted me to be the one to set the rhythm of our dance. So, little by little, like a game, without fear or pain, I lost my virginity. At one moment of ecstasy I lifted my eyes to the green canopy of the forest and to the burning summer sky above it, and shouted with pure and simple joy.

In Juan's absences, my passion cooled, my anger heated up, and I would determine to throw him out of my life, but as soon as he reappeared with some pale excuse and his wise lover's hands, I would surrender. And so would begin another identical cycle: seduction, promises, submission, the bliss of love, and the suffering of a new separation. The first year went by without our having set a date for the wedding, then a second and a third. By then my reputation had been dragged through the mud; everyone was saying that we were doing wicked things in every dark corner we could find. It was true, but no one ever had proof; we were very cautious. The same Gypsy who had predicted my long life sold me the secret for not getting pregnant: a vinegar-soaked sponge. I had learned, through the counsel of my sister Asunción, and my friends, that the best way to control a man was to deny him favors, but not even a martyred saint could deny pleasure to Juan de Málaga. I was the one who sought opportunities to be alone with him and make love. Anywhere, not just in dark corners. He had an extraordinary ability, which I never found in any other man, to make me happy, in any position and in very little time. My pleasure mattered more to him than his own. He learned the map of my body by heart, and he also taught me to enjoy it alone. “Look how beautiful you are, woman,” he told me again and again. I did not share his flattering opinion, but I was proud of provoking desire in the most handsome man in Extremadura.