Ines of My Soul (31 page)

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 eye, 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.

The Auraucan war created a famine. No one could cultivate the land because the first thing both Indians and Spaniards did was burn the plantings and kill the cattle of the other side. After that came a drought and the
chivalongo
, or typhus, which had a terrible mortality rate. Then as additional punishment came a plague of frogs, which poisoned the earth with a pestilent slobber. During that terrible period, the few remaining Spaniards survived on what they took from the Mapuche, while the Indians, thousands and thousands of them, wandered faint through the barren fields. Lack of food is what led them to eat the flesh of their fellows. God must know that those miserable people did not do it to sin, but because they had to. One chronicler, who in 1555 fought in the campaigns in the south, wrote that the Indians bought quartered humans, just as they would llama meat. Hunger . . . anyone who has not suffered it has no right to pass judgment. Rodrigo de Quiroga told me that in the hell of the steaming jungles of Los Chunchos, Indians ate their comrades. If necessity forced Spaniards to commit that sin, he did not mention it. Catalina, however, assured me that we
viracochas
are no different from any other mortal; some dug up the dead to roast the thighs, and went out to hunt the valley Indians for the same purpose. When I told Pedro, he cut me off short, trembling with indignation, for it did not seem possible to him that any Christian would do something so despicable. I had to remind him that because of me, he ate a little better than the rest of the colony, and that he was not in a position to criticize anyone. All you had to do was see the crazed joy of a person who had caught a mouse on the banks of the Mapocho to understand how a man can sink to cannibalism.

Felipe, or Felipillo, as the young Mapuche was called, turned into Pedro's shadow, and came to be a familiar figure in the town. He was the mascot of the soldiers, who were entertained by the way he could imitate the governor's gestures and voice—not out of any desire to mock him, but because he admired him. Pedro pretended not to notice, but I know that he was flattered by the boy's silent attention, and by how promptly he did his bidding. Felipe burnished Pedro's armor with sand, sharpened his sword, oiled his belts and straps if he could get his hands on a little fat, and, especially, he looked after Sultan as if he were his brother. Pedro treated the boy with the jovial indifference one bestows upon a faithful dog. He did not have to talk to him, Felipe divined his taita's desires. Pedro ordered one of the soldiers to teach the boy to use a harquebus, “So he can defend the women of the house in my absence,” he said, which offended me, because I was always the one who defended not only the women, but the men as well.

Felipe was a contemplative boy, very quiet, able to spend hours without moving, like an elderly monk. “He is lazy, like all his race,” they said of him. Using the pretext of the Mapudungu classes—a nearly intolerable imposition on him, since he scorned me for being a woman—I learned a good part of what I know about the Mapuche. They believe that the Blessed Earth provides; people take what they need and no more and give thanks for it, they do not accumulate goods. Work is beyond comprehension, since there is no future. What good is gold? The earth does not belong to anyone, the sea does not belong to anyone; the mere idea of possessing it or dividing it always provoked waves of laughter from the usually somber Felipe. People do not belong to others, either. How can the
huincas
buy and sell people if they do not own them? Sometimes the boy went two or three days without speaking a word, surly, and not eating, and when asked what was the matter, the answer was always the same: “There are content days and there are sad days. Each person is master of his silence.” He did not get along well with Catalina, who did not trust him, but they told each other their dreams, because for both the door was always open between the two halves of life, night and day, and the divinity communicated with them through their dreams. To ignore such clear messages leads to great misfortunes, they assured me. Felipe never allowed Catalina to read his fate with her divining beads and shells; he had a superstitious fear of them, just as he refused to try her medicinal herbs.

The servants were forbidden to ride the horses, under threat of a lashing, but an exception was made in Felipe's case; he was the one who fed them, and was able to tame them without violence, speaking Mapudungu into their ears. He learned to ride like a Gypsy, and his prowess caused a sensation in our sad village. He sat the animal as if he were a part of it, moved to its rhythm, never whipping it. He did not use a saddle or spurs, and guided the horse with a light pressure of his knees, holding the reins in his mouth so that he would have two free hands for his bow and arrow. He could mount the horse when it was running, swing around and ride backward, or hang onto it with legs and arms so that he was galloping with his chest tight to the animal's belly. The men gathered around, but no matter how hard they tried, they were never able to imitate him. Sometimes he disappeared for several days on his hunting excursions, and just when we had given him up for dead at Michimalonko's hand, he would return with a string of birds over his shoulder to enrich our tasteless soup. Valdivia was uneasy when Felipe disappeared. More than once he threatened him with the whip if he left again without permission, but he never carried out his threat because we were happy to have the bounty of his hunts.

The bloody tree trunk where the lashings were carried out stood in the center of the plaza, but Felipe did not seem to have any fear of it. He had grown to be a slim adolescent, tall for someone of his race, pure bone and muscle, with an intelligent expression and astute eyes. He could shoulder more weight than any of the adult men, and he cultivated an absolute scorn for pain and death. The soldiers admired his stoicism, and some, to entertain themselves, liked to put him to the test. I had to forbid their challenging him to pick up a live coal in his hand, or to drive thorns soaked in hot chili into his skin. Winter and summer he swam for hours in the always frigid waters of the Mapocho. He informed us that icy water strengthens the heart, which is why Mapuche mothers submerge their babies as soon as they are born. The Spaniards, who fled from bathing as they would from fire, would climb up on the wall to watch him swim, and to make bets about his endurance. Sometimes he stayed under the rough waters of the river for as long as several Our Fathers, and just when the watchers began to pay off their bets, Felipe would appear, safe and sound.

The worst thing about those years was the sense of helplessness and loneliness. We waited for help to come without knowing whether it would ever arrive; everything depended on Captain Monroy's success. Not even Cecilia's infallible network of spies could pick up any news of him and the five brave men with him, but we had no illusions. It would have been a miracle if that handful of men had slipped past hostile Indians, crossed the desert, and reached their destination. Pedro told me, in the privacy of our conversations in bed, that the true miracle would be for Monroy to find help in Peru, where no one wanted to invest money in the conquest of Chile. The gold trappings on his horse would impress the curious, but not the politicians and merchants. Our world was reduced to a few square blocks inside an adobe wall, to the same ravaged faces, to days with no news, to an eternal routine, to sporadic forays on horseback to look for food or to repel a group of daring Indians, to rosaries, processions, and burials. Even masses had been reduced to a minimum; we had only half a bottle of wine left to consecrate, and it would have been sacrilege to use chicha. At least we did not lack for water, because when the Indians prevented us from going to the river, or when they blocked the Incas' irrigation ditches with stones, we dug wells. My talent as a dowser was not needed; wherever we dug there was water in abundance. We had no paper to write down the proceedings of the town council, or the judicial sentences, so we used strips of hide; but in a careless minute the starving dogs ate them, so there are few official records of the hardships of those years.

Wait, and then wait some more. That was how those days went by. We waited for Indians, weapons in hand, we waited for a mouse to fall into our traps, we waited for news of Monroy. We were captives inside the town, surrounded by enemies, half dead with hunger, but we took a certain pride in our misfortune and poverty. For festivals, the soldiers wore their full set of armor over bare skin or, at best, skin cushioned by mouse or rabbit fur, because they had no clothing to wear underneath—but the armor gleamed like silver. González de Marmolejo's one last cassock was stiff with mending and filth, but to celebrate mass he wore over it a piece of lace altar cloth saved from the fire. None of us women had decent skirts, but Cecilia, the other captains' wives, and I spent hours combing our hair, and we painted our lips pink with the bitter fruit of a bush that, according to Catalina, was poisonous. No one died from it, but it is true that it turned our bowels to water. We always talked about our miseries in a joking tone because serious complaints would have been a sign of weakness. The Yanaconas did not understand this very Spanish form of humor; they went around like beaten dogs, dreaming of going home to Peru. Some of the Indian women ran off to offer themselves to the Mapuche, with whom at least they would not go hungry, and none returned. To prevent others from imitating them, we spread the rumor that they had been eaten, although Felipe maintained that a Mapuche is always happy to add another wife to his family.

“What happens to them when their husband dies?” I asked in Mapudungu, thinking of the mortality rate among warriors after a battle.

“What must be done: the oldest son inherits them all, except his mother,” he answered.

“And you, my lad, aren't you about ready to marry?” I asked as a joke.

“It is not the moment for me to steal a woman,” was his very serious reply.

In the Mapuche tradition, Felipe had told me, the groom-to-be, with the help of his brothers and friends, steals the girl he desires. Sometimes the party of young raiders would burst into her house, tie up the parents, and carry the struggling girl away; but then later, if the girl accepts the “proposal,” the suitor sets things right by paying his future in-laws the proper sum in animals and other goods. In this way, the union is formalized. A man can have several wives, but he must give the same to each one, and treat them all equally. Often a man marries two or more sisters, so they don't have to be separated. González de Marmolejo, who often came to my Mapudungu lessons, explained to Felipe that such unbridled licentiousness was ample proof of the presence of the devil among the Mapuche, who without the holy water of baptism would roast in the coals of hell. The boy asked the priest if the devil was also among the Spaniards, who took a dozen Indian girls without paying their parents with llamas and guanacos, as should be done, and then in addition beat them, and did not give them all equal treatment, and, whenever it suited, exchanged them for new ones. Perhaps Spaniards and Mapuche would meet in hell, he suggested, where they would keep on killing one another throughout eternity. I had to run stumbling from the room to keep from laughing in the venerable priest's face.