Captain from Castile (42 page)

With a memory more discreet than Luisa's, Sefiora Hernandez did not choose to remind him of the water which had flowed under the

bridge since then, nor of what would certainly have happened if she had reported the meeting at the time.

He began thinking aloud. "The de Vargases are not rich. Their claims to dowry would be modest; they would possibly ask little or nothing. No, not rich—but in favor. That's the point. . . . You're sure young Pedro's in love with her?"

"Most certainly."

"And she with him?"

Antonia remembered Luisa's confidence after church. "I'll vouch for that."

"Then it can be arranged. We'll have her marriage annulled. I still have money and influence enough for that. And we'll build up to a more promising marriage. Let young de Vargas's parents know how it stands between him and her, hint at a union, prepare the ground for his return. Finesse, Antonia, sutileza! I shall need your help."

"I'm Your Grace's servant."

Next day the Marquis called at the Casa de Vargas and began spadework. It was not difficult for a man of his address and courtly experience to make a favorable impression. Besides, he had his title and prestige as a grandee to help him. Without stooping to flattery, he could still flatter with a tone of voice, an approving nod, absorbed interest in Don Francisco's remarks.

He rejoiced that so expert an umpire as the Senor de Vargas had returned to preside at the approaching fiesta de toros in the market place, where twelve gallants of Jaen, armed cap-a-pie and on horseback, would take part in the then exclusively aristocratic sport of fighting bulls in honor of their ladies.

"I regret that your own brave son will be absent," said the Marquis. He added with a smile, "And so, I'm sure, does my daughter."

"Indeed?" returned his host vaguely.

"Yes. From all accounts, he would be apt to win the prize, and he wears Luisa's favor, I'm told."

"Indeed?" Don Francisco stared. "Your Grace knows more of him than I know myself."

The Marquis laughed. "These young people tell us very little, my friend. It seems that your son and my daughter were mightily taken with each other. The usual moonlight and vows. I did not learn of it myself until a short time since." He shook his head. "More's the pity. What a couple they would have made!"

Having sown the seed, Carvajal left it at that. He knew that Don

Francisco would report the last remark to his wife and that they would both discuss it. Dropping the subject, he took the natural opening it left him to talk frankly about de Silva and to gloss over the marriage. This he did to de Vargas's full satisfaction.

So, when Luisa and Seiiora Hernandez called on Dona Maria a week later, the way was open. Formal and cold at first in the presence of de Silva's wife, Senora de Vargas thawed in favor of Pedro's sweetheart. Facing Luisa's wistful and appealing beauty, how could she help herself? "Pohrecita!" she thought. "So innocent! So young!" She thought too of how she had once hoped that Pedro would pay court to so high-born a girl, even if she seemed beyond him, and how she had scolded about that trollop at the Rosario, when, unknown to her, he wore Luisa's favor. Yes, what a fine couple they would have made! The seed was germinating, for regret at what might have been is the first step toward what may yet be.

In that interview, Luisa did not need to remember her father's coaching. She could be entirely herself—indeed, more than herself, with the strange eagerness and sense of liberation which the renewal of first love brought to her. During the past week, she had felt as if she were two people: the one, familiar and conventional, mincing through the round of small duties and pastimes that made up the dull life of Jaen; the other, new, surprising, unpredictable, given to dreams and to a secret expectancy. It was this newcomer in the form of Luisa de Carvajal who called on Dofia Maria.

This was his house, his mother. She felt a timid deference, which her pearl-pale face, dark eyes, and sensitive mouth reflected perfectly. The place seemed to her haunted by Pedro's presence, though she had seen him too little to have more than an exaggerated and half-fanciful memory of him. She behaved conventionally, of course, but with a warmth of manner that Antonia Hernandez considered excellent acting. Doiia Maria began by calling her "seiiora" and ended by calling her "my child."

"And the cahallero, your son?" Luisa ventured. "I suppose you have had no news of him?"

On the surface, nothing could have been more casual—only a polite query; but the soft distance in Luisa's eyes revealed much more and captured the mother's heart.

Dofia Maria beamed. "Not from Pedrito himself, though we hope daily now to hear something; but yesterday we had a letter from our kinsman Don Juan Alonso de Guzman, who resides near Sanlucar. He writes that a ship, under the command of two gentlemen, Montejo and

Puertocarrero, has just arrived from Hernan Cortes—the captain, you know, with whom our boy is serving. He says that the ship carries a marvelous treasure of gold and jewels for the Emperor (whom God preserve) and that our Castilians have found a new land far to the west which is wonderfully rich and great. A continent, Don Juan writes, and not one of the islands. He writes too that the cavaliers in command of the ship told him that our Pedro is now a captain and much beloved by the General. They have also a letter from him to us. But would you believe it?—certain officials of the Casa de Contratacion, who are friends to the Governor of Cuba, have seized upon the ship and upon the effects of these gentlemen so that they are little better than prisoners. Unless we soon receive the letter, my husband plans to make the journey to Sanlucar himself and to have a talk with the Senores Montejo and Puertocarrero. He vows he will have that letter if he has to pluck it out of the beard of whoever dares withhold it . . ."

Luisa listened with glowing eyes. Lands of gold and precious stones! Pedro, a captain! She pictured him riding at the head of at least a hundred lances thi'ough enchanted country, where gold apples grew on trees. She imagined lines of steel-clad knights, waving of banners, the gay pavilions of the camp. Did he wear her handkerchief on his helmet or attached to his pennon? What were the heathen women like?

"It's wonderful news," she sighed.

"Yes, we're proud of our son. May Our Lord protect him and bring him safe home to us!"

"I shall pray for him, Doiia Maria."

When the call was over, Sehora de Vargas could not resist clasping Luisa against her plump bosom. "Let me kiss you, my child. It was kind of you to visit me. You must come soon again. You remind me of my own daughter."

The conventional Luisa would have been concerned for her complexion and headdress during this affectionate embrace; but even after re-entering her coach, the new Luisa did not so much as glance at the hand mirror, until Antonia thrust it upon her.

"You need a touch of powder, my rose," smiled the duenna. "Here's my pomander. You were quite submerged at the end, weren't you?"

Absently, Luisa made the necessary repairs.

"If the good lady," Antonia added, "only knew how to lace, she would not be so overflowing."

"She has Pedrito's eyes," Luisa murmured. "Did you notice?"

Seiiora Hernandez smiled again: it would be a good report she could give to the Marquis.,

Tart Three

XLV

"Is THERE any city like it in the world, gentlemen?" Cortes demanded. "On my honor, Venice is a dish clout to it!"

His captains were not apt to contradict him. None of them had been to Venice, and, even if they had, partiality for this wondrous city—a city peculiarly their own—which was now spread out beneath them would have insured agreement. But, indeed, a Venetian himself could not have failed to be impressed by the beauty of Mexico City, Tenoch-titlan, under the blue of that spring day.

From the summit of the great temple-pyramid, the entire vast oval of it could be seen, an intricate pattern of square rooftops, broken by the green of patio gardens or by flowered terraces, intersected by the sapphire lines of canals and by three great avenues. Here and there, frequently breaking the chessboard level of the roofs, a wide scattering of temples rose airily on their pyramid bases. Under the deluge of sunlight, the stone facings of palace, temple, and pavement, the red or white of house fronts, the reflection from water, and the vivid coloring of gardens, released an infinite sparkle, all the more intense because of the green circle of suburbs merging at last with the blue of the surrounding lake.

North, west, and south, binding it to the mainland, the avenues of the city continued over the water in three broad causeways built several feet above the level of the lake. And beyond them the sparkle of smaller towns, like separate pearls along the shore, repeated distantly the beauty of the metropolis. Then last of all, on every side, the horizon of mountains, a gigantic cloister, shut in this beauty and shut out the world.

The men around Cortes—Alvarado, Olid, Vargas, Tapia, and others —were not especially sensitive to beauty, but on the other hand they were by no means blind to it. Besides, after five months in the city, they

had not yet ceased to wonder at so magnificent a prize of their courage and luck.

"I don't know about Venice," said Olid, squinting his dark eyes against the blaze of the sun, "but it beats Seville or Toledo or Salamanca—that is, except for the churches. There's the difference. This city stinks of the devil. Aye, and the cursed quiet of it! Not a hoofbeat, not the rattle of a cart wheel! Uncanny!"

"Pooh!" interrupted Cortes, impatient of criticism. "Give us time, Gossip. Without being a prophet, let me tell you that within a year these cues" —he swept his hand at the circle of temples—"will be churches, with the cross on top. As for cattle and cart wheels, wait You'll see those causeways black with them before long."

And yet vaguely Olid had expressed what all felt. Except for its canals, the city was unlike Venice; it resembled nothing in the Old World. Its beauty remained alien, unhomelike, irreconcilably pagan. Though it had the grace and vividness of a tiger, it breathed also the tiger's rankness, the rankness of raw meat and stale blood. It represented barbarism thinly concealed by architecture and manual skill, but spiritually childish; the stone age as yet unconscious of man's higher possibilities.

At the foot of the teocalli In the great central square, with its palaces, pools, and shrines, the Spaniards looked down at the skull rack, strung with tens of thousands of human skulls, the relics of endless sacrificial victims. They could see the vast heap of bones left from myriad cannibal feasts. They could see the blood-drenched stone of sacrifice, the serpent "hell-mouth" (as they called it) of Quetzalcoatl, the black-robed priests with their matted hair. They could smell the fetid odor of decayed blood that clung to the walls of the temple; and not all the flowers of Tenochtitlan disguised the stench of human excrements, used for tanning, when the wind blew south from the great market place of the Tlaltelolco district. Grandeur and beauty, brutish callousness and nightmare superstition lay outstretched before the cavaliers, who admired and partly scorned, but could never understand.

"Give us time, I say," Cortes repeated. "Why, sirs, recall what we were doing this month last year: fighting mosquitoes on the flats of San Juan de Ulua; gaping at some paltry gifts from Montezuma; half-starving, without allies, without a base on the coast, scarce knowing which way to turn. And now—"

His arm swept the horizon. It took in not only the city, the valley of Mexico, and the guardian mountains, but the stretch of time between a year ago and now: the anxieties, schemes, crises, labors, marches, bat-

ties, victories; the founding of Villa Rica, dispatch of the treasure to Spain, scuttling of the ships, march across the mountains; the fierce campaign in Tlascala, which had been necessary to win that warlike people as allies against the Aztecs; the massacre at Cholula, which still haunted the memories of the less hardened; the ascent of the final range; the breath-taking first view of this magnificent valley with its sparkling cities. Cortes's gesture reviewed the whole crescendo of conquest.

From where they stood, he and his captains could see the great southern causeway by which, last November, they had first crossed the lake. And in the minds of all, the months since then formed an epic background. Four hundred white men taking over an empire.

Received as demigods, they had made the most of their attributes. Ruse, diplomacy, bluff, force. Pedro de Vargas would never forget the kidnaping of Montezuma in the royal palace. For self-protection and in order to dominate the country, it had been found necessary to secure the person of the Aztec emperor. Under the pretext of a call, the Spanish captains had waited on him and then had suddenly surrounded him. Choosing between captivity and immediate death, Montezuma had at last made a show of willingly accompanying the white men back to the quarters he had assigned them. After five months, he still "visited" his Spanish guests, who kept him under guard, a royal puppet and prisoner. And other memories filled in the scroll of victory. It took alertness and strong measures to buttress up the prestige of demigods.

But today crowned all. It was more significant even than the vast treasure of gold and jewels collected by Montezuma for his white masters and now stacked up in the Spanish treasure room. It atoned for massacre, extortion, and sharp practices, which the business of conquest required. For today Huitzilopochtli, Witchywolves, high god of the Aztecs, no longer sat on his temple throne. He would delight no more in the out-torn hearts of victims. His temple walls, cleansed of abominations, housed the Virgin and Child. Today in the presence of the entire company, Christ had been honored on the main teocalli of the city, and the chief cavaliers were even now lingering after the blessed sacrament of mass. To this peak they had climbed: not only the king and the goods of the heathen were in their hands, but even the Aztec gods were falling. From now on, Cortes had only to divide the spoils and transform Anahuac into New Spain.

"Yes," said Alvarado, his hard, handsome face relaxing with satisfaction, "I grant you. Close to a million castellanos of gold in a year