Mexico (56 page)

By the time the galleon was loaded for the long trip to Mexico, it was apparent to the marquis that his headstrong daughter and the priest had fallen in love, and he suspected that not all the night sounds he had been hearing along the corridors were due to the wind. He was aware that Spanish custom required him to do something about his daughter's honor, but he had already successfully married off his older daughters and recognized what a lot of nonsense went into the procedure; with Leticia he was inclined to let nature follow a somewhat simpler course. Furthermore, he was in no way repelled by the idea of a priest's taking a wife, for the custom had been commonplace throughout Spain until the late 1490s, when Ferdinand and Isabella had tried to stamp out the practice, with no success. So there were still many priests throughout Spain who had wives and children. The marquis imagined that in Mexico conditions must be much the same.

On the day of the galleon's departure, the old marquis led Antonio once more into the garden with the pillars and asked bluntly, "Have you talked with my daughter about taking her to Mexico?"

Antonio blushed and replied, "I could not appear before Cortes with a wife."

"Not at first, perhaps," the old soldier growled. "But in Mexico these things are no different than in Spain. Later--"

"Later I would be proud to be your son," Antonio replied.

"You are already my son," the marquis responded. "Leticia is headstrong. My future here is uncertain. It might be better if she were safe in Mexico."

A month later they rode together, the marquis, Leticia and Antonio, to the dock where the galleon was preparing to stand out into the river for the long journey down the Guadalquivir to the sea, and at the ship's side they said farewell. The young priest wanted desperately to kiss Leticia good-bye, but they had done this through most of the night and now they merely gazed at each other.

Antonio had had no previous experience that would have enabled him to gauge how seriously Leticia had taken their nights together, but as for himself, he was shattered by the thought of leaving her, and as the noisy preparations were being made aboard ship for sailing down the river, he was tormented by the agony of leaving her. Then he clenched his fists and mumbled: "God forgive me for this transgression. Let me put it behind me," and he turned away from Leticia.

"Man the ropes!" came the captain's cry.

"Aye, aye!"

"Up the anchor!"

"On deck and lashed down."

"We sail!" and the creaking galleon was warped out into the river, laden with nails and horses and handsome leatherwork and the flexible steel swords of Toledo and empowering letters from the emperor.

At the last moment, as the ship broke away from shore, Antonio looked frantically for Leticia, but she had turned to enter her father's carriage. "Leticia!" he bellowed like a lovesick boy of seventeen, and she heard him. From the step of her carriage she swung around and, seeing his anguished face, with the tips of her fingers imitating the flight of swallows she threw him a kiss.

Chapter
11.

SPANISH ANCESTORS: IN MEXICO

BECAUSE THESE WERE the good years when voyages from Seville to Veracruz were not threatened by pirates, English, Dutch or French, all lusting for the precious metals of the New World coming eastward from Mexico and the riches of Spain, traveling westward--the leisurely month
-
long sail across the Atlantic--was a delightful experience. Antonio conducted morning and evening prayers. He conversed with the captain, who had made two such voyages before. And he watched as the navigator marked off on his parchment chart each day's slow progress. It was a gentle introduction to a new world and a new life.

Antonio was awed by his first sight of Mexico--a snowcapped volcano rising majestically out of the clouds that hung over the ocean. He later recorded his sensations at that moment: "I felt as if the finger of God were indicating my new home to me, and I entertained the disturbing premonition that once I had set foot on the mighty land hidden beneath that finger I might never be allowed to depart."

He landed at the swampy port of Veracruz, and before the rowboat in which he was ferried ashore had gone ten feet he was covered with buzzing insects that punctured his skin in hundreds of places that began to itch. This was his introduction to mosquitoes. Ashore he found mud, filth, vegetation so dense it could be penetrated only with axes, and a few Spanish settlers covered with unfamiliar kinds of sores. A priest from Salamanca stumbled up, a shivering wreck of a man, weeping with joy at seeing a fellow clergyman.

"I'm going home ... on that ship," the sick priest mumbled, but before he could explain why, he fell to coughing and spitting blood, whereupon a soldier, thin as death, led him away.

What impressed Antonio more than the fellow priest, however, was his first sight of the Indians of Mexico, who now crowded in to inspect the new arrivals. They were for the most part naked, squat and blank-faced, displaying none of the superiority either of intellect or physical endowment that was supposed to mark the adversaries of Cortes, for they were jungle primitives, as he found out, whom the Spaniards had enlisted into forced-labor gangs. And it became obvious that false reports had been circulated throughout Spain in order to lure young men to a strange country with an unhealthy climate.

This suspicion was fortified wherever Antonio looked, for in late 1524 the port of Veracruz had already become what it was to be throughout the centuries of Spanish occupation: one of the ugliest and least hospitable anchorages along the Atlantic, the deplorable gateway to a noble land. For three miserable days Antonio languished there in the intense heat amid the sickening swarm of mosquitoes, catching not even one glimpse of the greater civilization he had come to Christianize. Without exception the Indians he saw were low brutes, while the Spaniards he talked with were disillusioned adventurers. From a rude room crawling with bugs he sent his first letter home to his brother, Timoteo, reporting his disgust with the new land. In spite of its harsh tone, it has become an epistle much honored in Mexican literary history because of its honest appraisal of daily life in that early period.

We eat strange foods prepared in filth, fight strange insects whose wiles are superior to ours, and are attended constantly by as low and mean a body of natives as it has pleased God to put on this earth. Many mumble that they have been deceived, and if I were you, Timoteo, and not a man of the Church, and if someone invited me to join Cortes in Mexico, I would most quickly say no, for this is a mean land unless one has a taste for bugs that bite with a most furious intensity. What , has impressed me most, I think, is that the air seems so unusually heavy, as if it were compressed by weights and laid oppressively over all things. One breathes, and the air he inhales is hot and wet and heavy. One sweats all day, but the heavy air keeps pressing upon him, making him ever more damp. From the ocean, on our first sight of
Mexico, we beheld a majestic volcano rising above the clouds, but on land we see nothing, absolutely nothing, to inspire the mind or gladden the heart. We live at the foot of that volcano, whose slopes are forever hidden from us, swamped in a green maze of jungle whose trees produce no fruit. I take solace in only one thing. The stolid brutes I see, the brown-skinned Indians, require the saving grace of Jesus Christ like no other human beings I have ever witnessed, and that I shall be the agent for bringing the light of God into those empty eyes is the only boon among the manifold disappointments of Mexico.

Antonio's disillusionment continued during the long march from Veracruz to the capital, for the route was ugly, forbidding and dangerous, and the Indians encountered were even less civilized than those at the port. Yet once, during a night that was refreshingly cold, the young priest awoke to adjust his blankets that had slipped off, and he happened to look through a clearing in the trees toward the moonlit sky, where a gigantic peak, snow-white and perfect in its conical beauty, rose serenely in the heavens. He gasped and looked again, but before he could verify that he had actually seen the lovely mountain a veil of clouds enveloped it, and in the succeeding days he saw nothing of it, so that he was again convinced that he had come to a land of chimeras.

But on the eleventh day the troop of newcomers broke out of the jungle, leaving the tangled vines and the insects, to discover themselves on a vast plateau bigger than any in Spain, rimmed by volcanoes even more majestic than the one Antonio thought he had seen at night and marked by carefully tilled fields that bespoke of an organized society. As the Spaniards marched through the cool morning they felt the oppressive humidity of the coastal areas replaced by the most bracing air in Mexico: the cool, crisp air of the upland plateaus.

To Antonio's disappointment, the troop skirted the cities that Cortes had conquered on his way to the capital. Tlaxcala lay to the north, an intriguing city enclosed by a brick wall. Mighty Puebla and holy Cholula lay hidden in the south, but evidences of their power were visible everywhere in the good roads, the canals and the rich fields. From time to time groups of tall Indians in good raiment passed on official business, and Antonio studied their faces to find them not unlike his own and marked with an equal intelligence.

Fed by such evidence, his judgments of Mexico began to soften, a fact that he reported in his second letter to Timoteo:

I fear I was too hasty in Vera Cruz when I condemned this land as barbaric, for the upland areas provide quite a different impression, and along the well-paved road one meets tall, straight men of obvious breeding and capacity. To win these men to God would prove a substantial victory, and now I am eager where before I was depressed. But I think that much of this change has been due to the salubrious air that has attended us once we broke free of the jungle. Here among the volcanoes it seems to rush joyously into one's lungs, urging one on to explore the next bend in the road. For three days I have been amazed at the beauty of this new land.

More important, however, to our family history was a more secret letter, which he wrote to Leticia in Seville and which was taken to her by a sailor returning to that port city:

I dare not address you as my dearest or my beloved, for the rules of my life and my chosen occupation forbid that. But in the night watches aboard ship, in the steamy fastness of the jungle, and when the great volcanoes gleam down at me like guideposts, I am tormented by our nights together. In a saner moment this morning, as I saw the new land opening ahead of me, now that the jungle is gone, I had the wild thought that Mexico needs women like you, women with grace and courage, women capable of building a new nation in a new land, and my heart called out "She should be here." If you were, even though we could not be wed, I would feel extraordinary strength. In my imagination you are in Mexico.

It was on the fourteenth day of his travel that Fray Antonio received impressions that would never fade from his memory during the fifty-six years that he was to labor in Mexico, for toward noon his troop approached the enormous lake across which lay the shimmering City of Mexico. Even though its highest pagan towers had already been pulled down by tjie conquerors, it still presented an imposing face to the newcomers, who were enthralled by its grandeur.

Its general aspect, seen from across the lake, was a light gold broken by the greenery of many trees. Its houses and public buildings were of uneven height, which lent the city a kind of rippling quality well fitted to a metropolis surrounded by water. About its shores there was a constant movement of boats whose passengers, wearing bright garments and the plumage of brilliant birds, could occasionally be seen. But what principally characterized the city was its sense of extreme solidity and efficient operation, an impression that grew stronger with each step the Spaniards took along the causeway that led across the lake.

The soldiers who were seeing the great city for the first time thought: It has already been looted. How fortunate the first ones must have been. But Antonio, renewing the sense of dedication that had possessed him in Salamanca, thought, What an admirable city to win for God, and as specific houses began to take shape and as he saw the physical beauty of what the Aztecs had accomplished, the conviction grew that here was a prize worth any effort required for its salvation.

He was now in the area where small boats abounded, and he could see their cargo--the fish, the myriad strange fruits, the corn, the woven cloth, the threads of gold and the brilliance of the feathers--and it occurred to him that not even in Salamanca had he seen such riches. He entertained for the first time the suspicion that this rude, violent land of Mexico with its towering volcanoes would one day be more powerful than Spain. Spiritual battles of greater significance would be fought here, and in generations to come, Mexico would loom larger in the world than its mother country. "I must send for Timoteo quickly," he decided. "He's the kind of man this country needs."

He had now reached the portals to the city itself, and from the watchtowers friendly Spaniards called down greetings to the new troops; Captain Cortes, hearing the news of their arrival, hurried to greet them at the gateway. With marked deference the conqueror first welcomed the priest and found to his pleasure that Antonio was from Salamanca. Then he quickly passed on to soldiers to ascertain how many and how worthy they were, for he was already engaged in vast new conquests that had carried the flag of Spain to Guatemala and was planning others that would in later years consolidate all the territory between the City of Mexico and what would later be called California.