Mexico (51 page)

"I am called there," the young priest replied.

"Who called? You know nothing about Mexico!"

"I haven't spoken to you about this," the young man replied, still blocking the alley, "but I've been concerned about it for many months. If you ask me who called, I can only reply that God did."

Professor Palafox shrugged his shoulders and looked dumbly past his son toward the huge plaza, where he could see the familiar sights of Salamanca: muleteers down from the hills with casks of wine; silversmiths from Antwerp tending their shops; scholars from Oxford in gaudy crimson caps; and alluring young girls wasting time before the night. This was the meeting place of the world, and his brilliant son was prepared to cast it away for an adventure in Mexico. "Can't you reconsider?" he asked.

"No," his son replied. At this moment the setting sun threw such shafts of golden light across the plaza that Palafox senior caught an impression of oceans and mountains and people with faces of burnished gold, and he muttered, "It's Mexico," acknowledging to himself that if he were young and full of promise he too would want to join Cortes in that distant land. He broke the tension with a laugh, grasped his son's arm and cried, "Let's get that wine and drink to Mexico."

When they were seated so that the pageant of the plaza was before them, the stocky professor laughed at himself: Ridiculous. This afternoon at the convocation I argued that we must adjust to the reality of Mexico. I was rather persuasive, too, but I convinced no one. Now my son says, "I'm going to adjust to the reality of Mexico," and I grow afraid. We're very stupid, we human beings.

The eager young priest took several large gulps of wine, then set his glass down and explained energetically, "I'll work in Mexico for six or eight years, Father. The basic reason I'm doing this is to help establish the rule of God in the New World, but a more personal reason is that I believe preferment in Church and government here in Spain will henceforth come to those who know Mexico."

The wisdom of this rationalization pleased Professor Palafox, and he observed, "When you return, you'll be twice as valuable to your Church--and also to Spain."

"You must reserve the professorship for me," his son replied.

"That can be arranged," Palafox senior assured him. He snapped his fingers to order more wine, then observed: "It'll be exciting to think of you working with Captain Cortes in the building of Mexico while I stay here at the university trying to explain what's happening in the world of business and morals."

At this remark the young priest frowned. "As I was leaving the hall just now, Maestro Mateo stormed in, all furious over some argument you had pursued in the convocation. He said to several of his companions, 'This damned Palafox is going to strangle himself on Mexico.' What did he mean?"

"An argument," the professor replied.

"What argument can there be about Mexico?" the priest asked.

Palafox took the wine from the waiter and poured himself and his son substantial drinks. "I reason, Antonio, that the advent of Mexico changes many things we used to consider fixed for all time."

"For example?" Antonio asked.

'Take your case. You go there as priest to the army. What is your responsibility to the king, to the Church, to the army and to the Indians?"

"Very simple," the priest replied easily. "First, I'm to save the Indians for God, and this takes precedence over all. Second, I'm to protect the souls of our soldiers. Third, I'm to help win a new land for our king."

"Good," the professor agreed, his eyes flashing with the joy of anticipated debate. "But what do you do when your first responsibility, converting Indians, conflicts with your third, winning a new land?"

"There'll be no conflict," the priest affirmed.

Professor Palafox leaned back and smiled at his son. "You're very young, Antonio. You can't even imagine the snake pit of conflict and confusion you're entering. It was something like this I was talking about today."

Antonio, befuddled somewhat by the wine, did not comprehend what his father was talking about but he did remember one thing clearly. "Father," he warned, "when Maestro Mateo railed against you, he was not speaking idly. In fact, he was about to say something important when he saw me and caught himself. I still don't understand what it was you said about Mexico, but do be careful."

"Let me put it simply," the professor said. "When great wealth intrudes upon any established situation, new concepts are required to manage it. Our glorious nation has stumbled upon that wealth--"

"Stumbled?" Antonio gasped. "I would say that God in His wisdom has led his favored people to the discovery--"

"Is that how you'd say it?" Palafox asked.

"Of course," Antonio replied.

"Let's go home and tell Timoteo the news," Palafox suggested. "With you in Mexico he must become the next professor in our family."

The two men left the plaza and wandered unsteadily through narrow streets until they reached a little square that overlooked the river Tormes and the antique Roman bridge that carried the main Spanish road south to Seville. Here they entered a house of modest appearance, whose front wall crowded the street but whose dark interior gave way to a small patio containing a Roman statue found one day in Salamanca, a fragment of Greek marble and a bronze horse that had been cast in the Spanish capital, Toledo. But what gave the patio its essential character were the flowers, some planted in formal rows in the sc>il, others strewn in profusion in clay pots. It was the private garden of a man who loved nature and during all the years that Fray Antonio could remember it had provided the Palafoxes with a sense of serenity.

Now as the two men entered this tranquil area Antonio confessed, "This was the one thing that might have kept me from Mexico. I would have enjoyed being a professor here and inheriting your garden." Then he shook his head as if to clear it and said, "But there is also Mexico, and I think it may be a bigger garden than this."

"You'll still come back and inherit mine," the professor said. "When you're a bishop."

"Of course!" the priest agreed. He was about to speak further when he saw that his younger brother, accompanied by the French professor, was waiting on one of the garden benches.

Young Timoteo, then twenty-two years old and honed to a fine edge by his anticipation of life, rose and said, "Professor Desmoulins and I have been talking about your meeting today, Father."

"Could I speak with you alone?" the Frenchman asked in Latin.

"My sons are privy to all I know," Palafox replied, and something in the manner in which the Spanish professor indicated that his boys were to sit with him made the Frenchman suspect that in this house there was no woman and that a widowed man had raised his sons as both father and mother.

"Very well," Desmoulins nodded. "Perhaps it's better that the young men hear what I have to say. Their influence could be decisive." He coughed, and as a man considerably older than Palafox, assumed a paternal attitude. "Young men, this afternoon while your father was waiting to inform the priest here of his appointment to a post at the university, I had occasion to reprimand him--gently, of course--for heretical ideas that he had propounded at the convocation."

At the word "heretical," Antonio raised his eyebrows and leaned forward. "Did you say heretical?"

"I used the word now, although I did not do so this afternoon," the Frenchman replied, "because after I left you in the university square I was joined by three other professors whose names I may not divulge, and it was their opinion, first expressed by Maestro Mateo, that Dominican with the probing mind, that in today's arguments your father came terribly close to heresy."

With the mention of the dread word, Timoteo moved closer to his father, as if to protect him, but Antonio drew back. The Frenchman resumed, "So I have come to advise your father that tomorrow there will be spies in his lecture hall, directed to report to Maestro Mateo, and if your father is a prudent man he will recant his approach to heresy."

There was an uneasy pause while the visiting professor and the Palafox sons waited for their father to speak. Finally he said, "Is speculation heresy?"

"Some things are settled by divine law," Professor Desmoulins reminded him.

"But the movement of business and the operation of forces--"

"Don't finish the sentence," the Frenchman begged. To the boys he said as he rose to go, "It's your duty to prevail upon your father, for he has entered upon a course of reasoning that could end in heresy."

At the gate, Desmoulins told the two young men: "I wish you'd accompany me to your father's lecture tomorrow. I want you to sense for yourselves the danger in which he might find himself." Antonio explained that he could not join them, since he himself would be teaching at that hour, but Timoteo eagerly accepted: "I'll see if I can identify the spies that've been reporting on Father," and the four men laughed as if that possibility really were a joke.

The lecture room was typical of that period, very large, with an earthen floor on which the scholars sat before low wooden benches that served as desks. Each length of wood was deeply carved with the names of girls, some of whom had lived and died in Salamanca more than a hundred years before, inflaming the minds of youthful scholars, then passing on to become fishwives and loom tenders, and finally old crones begging in the plaza.

The lecture room had only one small window, which shed a cold north light on a stool and a desk at which sat a clerk who kept the roll of the class and who from time to time droned out passages from ancient Latin texts on which Professor Palafox, standing in a kind of elevated pulpit, was required to comment. This morning the clerk chanted a text from the distinguished C
o
rdoban philosopher, Averroes, who in 1190 had made his own interpretation of Saint Augustine's famous observation: "For who would not rather have his pantry full of meat than mice? This is not strange, for a man will often pay more for a horse than for a servant, for a ring than for a maid."

The dark room was hushed when Professor Palafox began speaking. Without committing himself, he referred to Aristode and Saint Thomas Aquinas. He squared Averroes with Saint Augustine and cited the responses of learned men from Bologna and Oxford. His erudition was enormous, for speaking without notes he gave in twenty minutes a fairly complete gloss on the text, quoting many authorities verbatim.

Now came the time when he was required to express his own reaction to the text, and no one moved as he put his hands firmly on the wooden lectern and said, "I hold with Saint Augustine that prudent men will sometimes pay more for an ingenious ring than for a serving maid, for the value that men place upon an object is determined not by any external standard of worth but by their own desire for that object and their estimate of the good its possession will do them."

The more critical members of the audience sighed with relief as Palafox firmly supported the traditional Salamanca view regarding these matters, and some even took pleasure from the brilliant manner in which he marshaled his facts in support of the dictates laid down by the pope in Rome.

"Our Church is on solid ground when it condemns usury as an immoral act in which gold and silver beget profits for which they have done no constructive work. Only a living creature, acting in conformance with the laws of God, can beget another living creature. Gold and silver, being inanimate, must not be allowed to procreate."

When the savants applauded this unequivocal proof of his orthodoxy, Palafox sought to quench any flicker of doubt about his doctrinal purity by reconfirming the Salamancan dogma:

"As we terminate this thoughtful convocation, let us restate the permanent truth that these difficult matters will be set
tl
ed as they have always been settled, by our wise attention to the will of God, by our careful study of His word, and by the learned dictates of His church. It is inconceivable that the truth could reside outside these sources, and it is our duty to reconcile our business behavior to the truth as it shall be revealed. Thus there can be no quarrel between the merchant and the Church, the peasant and his king, nor Bologna and Oxford. We are all obligated to work within th
e c
onscience of the Church."

These sentiments rescued Professor Palafox from the charge of heresy. They relieved the anxiety felt by Professor Desmoulins, and they enabled young Antonio Palafox to leave Salamanca with his mind at rest.

On the first day of May in 1524 Antonio Palafox, a priest of the Franciscan order, said good-bye for the last time to the flower-filled patio of the professor's house and marched down to the riverbank to join a military party that had assembled for the long and dangerous march to Seville. He was accompanied, in this part of the journey, by his father, a man who was not afraid to express emotion at the milestones of life and therefore wept, and by hard-muscled Timoteo, who was already vacillating between the priesthood and the army. The three proceeded to the Roman bridge, where a confused and apprehensive group of travelers was receiving harsh marching orders from the captain who would be responsible for their safety.

"Will you pray for us?" Professor Palafox asked his son, and the three stood aside from the others while the tall young priest asked for blessing upon their various ventures. "You!" the captain shouted. 'This horse is for you." With agility Fray Antonio leaped astride the animal and moved to the head of the column, from which he turned for one last glance at his father, the spires of the great University of Salamanca, and the benevolent little alleys down which he would run no more. The captain shouted "Hallooo!" and the ungainly troop started across the bridge.