An Inca Account of the Conquest of Peru (4 page)

These events tell us much about the reasons why Titu Cusi decided to have his story translated and transcribed for a Spanish audience and about the poetics of the surviving text. Some critics have suggested that such a decision seems to privilege European alphabetical writing over indigenous structures of knowledge—such as Andean oral traditions or the
quipu
(the records the Incas kept by way of colored knots)—and to betray a Eurocentric perspective that may have originated either with Titu Cusi's own acceptance of imposed European cultural norms or with a manipulation by the Spanish translator (see Luiselli, 30, n.1). Although this is probably a reasonable inference to make
with regard to fray Marcos García, it would be unwarranted with regard to Titu Cusi. Rather, I would argue that his choice of the written medium must be seen in the context of the overall rhetorical nature of this text as a pragmatic attempt at intercultural diplomacy. When addressing a European monarch and court, Titu Cusi's history had to bridge a considerable hermeneutic gap. For this reason, Frank Salomon has called Native American chronicles, such as Titu Cusi's account, “Chronicles of the Impossible”—diachronic narratives of the conquest era that must be fully intelligible to Spanish contemporaries and at the same time made from and faithful to Andean materials alien to European diachrony (Salomon 1982, 9). Titu Cusi made hereby calculated use of everything he had learned about Spanish culture without becoming unfaithful to his own culture. His rhetorical strategy included his choice not only of the written medium but also of the Augustinian Marcos García as his translator and mouthpiece. Indeed, Marcos García was chosen after Titu Cusi had made inquiries (as he tells us in his narrative), asking “who among the monks in Cuzco was the most outstanding personality and which religion enjoyed the widest approbation and power” and after having learned that “the mightiest, most respected, and most flourishing religion was that of the Lord St. Augustine” (p. 133).

Titu Cusi understood the importance of alphabetical writing in dealing with the Spaniards. Thus, he relates that one of the reasons why the Andean people who first saw the Spaniards upon their arrival in Tahuantinsuyu called the strangers
Viracochas
(gods) was that “the Indians saw them alone talking to white cloths [
paños blancos
], as a person would speak to another, which is how the Indians perceived the reading of books and letters” (p. 60). Similarly memorable is Titu Cusi's account of the fateful encounter between the Spaniards and Atahuallpa at Cajamarca in 1532. He relates that the Spaniards “showed my uncle a letter or a book (I'm not sure exactly which), explaining to him that this was the word of God and of the king. My uncle . . . took the
letter (or whatever it was) and threw it down, saying, ‘What is this supposed to be that you gave to me here? Be gone!'” (p. 61). The subsequent Spanish attack was triggered when Atahuallpa, in a haughty gesture, flung the breviary presented to him by the priest Vicente de Valverde into the dust. The book contained the infamous
requirimiento
(Requirement), a text that by law had to be read aloud to the Natives and which informed them of their obligation to “acknowledge the Church as the Ruler and Superior of the whole world. . . . And the high priest called Pope, and in his name the King and the Queen” (quoted in Hanke, 33). Noncompliance was legitimate ground for the commencement of violent conquest. The power attributed to the written word in dealing with the Spaniards reverberates in many other Andean sources relating this scene and dating from the sixteenth century to the present, both written and oral.
¹⁹
Thus, Juan de Betanzos—a Spaniard who was married to Atahuallpa's sister (Francisco Pizarro's former mistress), Doña Angelina Yupanqui, who told the story of the Conquest as remembered by her family—wrote that, after the interpreter had explained to Atahuallpa that he should “obey the captain [Pizarro] who was also the son of the Sun, and that was what . . . the painting in the book said,” Atahuallpa “asked for the book and, taking it in his hands he opened it. When he saw the lines of letters, he said, ‘This speaks and says that you are the son of the Sun? I, also, am the son of the Sun' . . . Saying this, he hurled the book away” (Betanzos, 263). Similarly, the indigenous Andean chronicler Guaman Poma de Ayala, writing during the early seventeenth century, remembers Atahuallpa's response to the book like this: “‘Give me the book so that it can speak to me.' And so he [Valverde] gave it to him and he held it in his hands and began to inspect the pages of the said book. And then the Inca said, ‘Why doesn't it speak to me?'” before angrily throwing it to the ground (Guaman Poma, 357). Once in captivity, Atahuallpa reportedly asked the Spaniards to be taught how to “listen” to these texts. Finally, the early seventeenthcentury
Huarochirí Manuscript,
written by an anonymous Andean probably recruited by the Spanish priest Francisco de Avila, begins by stating, “If the ancestors of the people called Indians had known writing in former times, then the lives they lived would not have faded from view until now. As the mighty past of the Spanish Vira Cochas is visible until now, So too would theirs be” (
Huarochirí Manuscript,
41).

Constance Classen has argued that what made writing so “radically novel” for the Incas was its “disembodied nature.” Unlike the Native non-alphabetical quipu, which still required oral transmission, European writing represented and appeared to act as a “substitute of speech,” thus placing knowledge outside the human body (Classen, 127). But although this might be true for Atahuallpa and the first Andeans who came in contact with Europeans, it is unlikely that Titu Cusi (whom she cites here) would have viewed writing as radically novel, having lived in Cuzco and, in fact, now (in 1570) making use of it by relating his story for translation and transcription. Atahuallpa's successors quickly learned to use the written word for political purposes in dealing with the Spaniards, employing scribes and even becoming themselves literate in the foreign medium. Although Titu Cusi doubtlessly understood the power of alphabetical writing in Spanish culture, there is little evidence suggesting that he believed it inherently superior to Andean practices of recording and memorizing the past or even thought of it as divine. His own explanation of his decision to have his narrative written down—that “[since] the memory of men is frail and weak, it would be impossible to remember everything accurately with regard to all our great and important affairs unless we avail ourselves of writing [letras] to assist us in our purposes” (p. 58)—may well contain a hint of irony. After all, native Andeans
did
remember their own histories without alphabetical writing. Indeed, Titu Cusi was himself drawing on these non-alphabetical traditions even as he spoke when relating his account to fray Marcos García. Thus, we may
read Titu Cusi's reference to the men whose memory is frail and weak unless assisted by writing not so much as a general statement about humanity's shortcomings at large but rather as a critical commentary specifically on Spanish infidelities to the spoken word.

The composition of this text was profoundly informed by Spanish and native Andean structures of knowledge, fusing various and often incommensurate rhetorical practices and conceptions of history. Related orally in Quechua by a speaker known to be curious about the culture of his Spanish audience, translated by a Spanish missionary whose knowledge of Quechua was probably proficient though limited, and transcribed from an oral medium into a written one by a bilingual mestizo, this text is an apt expression of the hybrid culture that was taking shape in sixteenth-century colonial Peru and resulting from some forty years of intercultural contact, conflict, and mixture.
²⁰
It was a colonial culture, to be sure, whose intercultural exchanges occurred under conditions of extreme power imbalances. Nevertheless, it was a culture that was neither entirely Spanish nor entirely Andean but had become, as various historians and anthropologists have put it, “mutually entangled.”
²¹

On the one hand, Native leaders quickly learned not only that writing was the foundation for European notions of truth in general but also that it was particularly closely tied to royal power. After their battle-axes had failed them against the Spanish conquerors, many of whom (like Francisco Pizarro himself) were illiterate or only marginally literate (see Lockhart 1972, 135–156), here might yet be an effective weapon in the fight against the Spaniards' claims of being the new rightful lords of Peru. It was with this awareness that many Latin American Indian chronicles, such as that of Titu Cusi as well as those of Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala (1615) and Juan de Santacruz Pachacuti Yamqui (1613) were written. As Angel Rama has argued, if writing had already been a privileged medium in Spanish culture before the American
conquests, it “took on an almost sacred aura” in the largely illiterate territories of the New World (9–10). It is in this context of a culture of “letrados”—what Rama calls the “lettered city”—emerging in the Spanish empire that Titu Cusi's instructions to Marcos García and Martín de Pando with regard to his narrative must be seen: “[Because] I am unfamiliar with the phrases and modes of expression used by the Spaniards in such writings—[I] have asked the reverend fray don Marcos García and the secretary Martín de Pando to arrange and compose the said account in their customary ways of expression” (p. 136).

Formally, the text is divided into three distinct major sections: (1) a short introductory part explicitly addressed to Lope García de Castro, the departing governor of Peru, with Titu Cusi's request (
instrucción
) to present his text to King Philip II; (2) Titu Cusi's historical account (
relación
) of the Spanish Conquest of Peru, his father's maltreatment at the hands of the conquerors, the ensuing military conflicts, his father's withdrawal to Vilcabamba, his eventual murder there, and Titu Cusi's own succession as Inca, as well as his conversion to Christianity, leading up to the production of the manuscript; and (3) a power of attorney (
poder
) in which Titu Cusi authorizes García de Castro to represent him legally in the courts of Spain in any matter pertaining to his interests, title, or possessions.

Most likely, this surface structure of the text must be ascribed to the “ordering” hand of the translator fray Marcos García. The text's generic designations help us reconstruct the Spanish cultural context in which Titu Cusi's account of the Conquest of Peru must be seen. In early modern Spain, the designation of a text as a
relación
identified it as belonging to a genre that originated, as Roberto González Echevarría has shown, in legal discourse, especially notarial rhetoric, denoting an eyewitness account in a legal dispute. A defining characteristic of the relación genre, as it originated in the Old World context, was its humble, plain, but highly official character, as well as its appeal to the authority
of firsthand experience.
²²
In the New World context of overseas expansionism during the sixteenth century, however, the term relación took on a new meaning, now becoming, as Walter Mignolo has shown, largely synonymous with the terms
historia
(history) and
crónica
(chronicle), “in order to refer to a historiographic text.”
²³
In the context of overseas imperialism, law and history became inextricably intertwined. One of the most common sub-genres of the relación was hereby the
relación de méritos
(the account of merits). These were personal narratives composed not for a
public
audience in the modern sense of the word but rather for a patrimonial audience within the hierarchy of the monarchical state in order to supplicate the monarch for a royal pension, office, or favors as compensation for services rendered to the Crown. Their printing was frequently paid for by the author himself, making this type of writing “one of the major genres of publishing in colonial Spanish America” (MacLeod, 1). As González Echevarría points out, “many of the adventures and misadventures, by people who were marginal to society, found their way to legal or quasi-legal documents in which lives large and small were told in search of acquittal or social advancement” (1980, 20–21). Nevertheless, the vast majority of these texts remained unpublished and survive today only in manuscript form. Typically, their publication was patronized by the Crown only if they contained material that was of wider interest than the private gain of an individual author. Historical relaciones by eyewitnesses of the American conquests could hereby serve as a sort of legal deposition or testimony in the official courtrooms of imperial policy and legislation (see Bauer 2003, 30–76).

It is in this legalistic context that Titu Cusi's critique of the conquerors' avarice and cruelty must be seen. Although it may appear as odd to the modern reader that a text addressed to the Spanish monarch engaged in what seems to be a radical indictment of the Spanish conquest, it is in fact of a piece with the scholastic political philosophy of influential voices in the Spanish
Empire, such as the Dominicans Francisco de Vitoria and Bartolomé de Las Casas, who had argued that the conquest of America was an “unjust” war by the standards of scholastic law. Their depositions were used, in turn, by the Crown to justify stripping the conquerors of their neo-feudal status by passing in 1542 the “New Laws,” which revoked the conquerors' claim to an
encomienda
(a geographically defined grant of Native tribute and labor) in perpetuity. These New Laws caused outrage and defiance among the conquerors throughout the Americas and even led to the aforementioned insurrection against the Crown led by Gonzalo Pizarro. When the conquerors mobilized a legal counteroffensive, the dispute over the constitution of the Spanish Empire came to a head in a famous series of debates held in Valladolid in 1551–1552. The conquerors' legal representative, Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, argued that the native lords of the Americas, such as the Aztecs or the Incas, had governed their subjects by way of cruelty and tyranny. Furthermore, they had engaged in violations of “natural law” (such as the Incas' habit of polygamy), all of which disqualified them from being considered legitimate rulers. Given the native lords' presumed illegitimacy as rulers, the Spanish conquest had been “just” (by scholastic legal standards) and hereby not unlike the Christians' “re-conquest” of Spain from the Moors. By implication, the Spanish conquerors of America, as participants in a “just” war, were entitled to feudal lord stature and to the tribute and labor previously claimed by the native lords. By contrast, the opposite side, represented by Las Casas, argued that the local nobles, even though previously pagans, were and continued to be the legitimate rulers of the American communities who had willingly subjected themselves to the supreme authority of the emperor Charles V and the Holy Catholic faith, not unlike the local nobility of Italy, Germany, or the Netherlands. The Spanish conquerors were therefore foreign invaders who in an “unjust” war not only perpetrated unspeakable acts of cruelty, destruction, and avarice but arrogated
to themselves a status of feudal lords that rightfully belonged only to the Native nobility (see Brading, 70–71; Hanke; Pagden).