Mexico (59 page)

"Do you mean," she said in a whisper, "that in Spain they burn people alive?"

"Yes," he confessed uncomfortably.

"But the Virgin ..." she asked, pointing to the statue that graced his bleak wall.

'They do it to protect Her," he tried to explain.

With penetrating eyes the Indian woman looked at him and asked quietly, "So in your country they do exactly what we did in ours?"

"Oh, no!" the young priest protested vehemently. "Even though it was my own father they did it to, I have to admit that it was done to protect ..."

"The same as we did," the woman replied, looking right at the priest, and at this moment a kind of absolute equality was established between the two, so there was never again any further discussion of baptism.

Because Timoteo Palafox had been safely in the army before his father was executed for heresy, he escaped the generations
-
long punishment meted out to all members of the heretic'
s f
amily. But although he could remain in service, he could never be promoted to officer or hold any rank of distinction. In 1529, still unaware that his father had suffered the extreme penalty for his liberal ideas, he reached Mcxico City in his bright uniform of ensign, an ambitious and courageous young soldier with an alert mind. Announcing confidently that he was on his way to join his brother in Toledo, he was surprised when Captain Cortes gave different orders: "The Indians in Oaxaca, a big settlement to the south, are proving troublesome. Assemble a company of men and pacify them." Timoteo wanted to turn down this unchallenging task, but Hernan Cortes was not a governor to whom one could offer objections.

It was therefore to distant Oaxaca that Fray Antonio had to travel to greet his brother, and when he joined him in the mean adobe hut being used as headquarters, he learned that Timoteo had been aboard ship so long in getting to Mexico that he did not know of his father's burning at the stake.

'Terrible news, brother. Father's enemies were remorseless. They hounded him till the Inquisition had to condemn him."

"Burned?" Timoteo screamed.

"Mercy was shown. He was strangled before the fires were lit."

For several minutes Timoteo stormed about the hut, the veins in his neck bulging, and then, choking as the words came out, he swore: "We shall revenge that evil deed. His yellow robe will hang in Salamanca proclaiming our disgrace, yours and mine, but by the strength of God ..."

"Don't blaspheme."

"By God's strength working in your right arm and mine, we'll cleanse our father's name and ours. Swear to it, Antonio," and in that steaming jungle hut the brothers prepared to take that oath. Standing erect, each man held aloft his badge of office, Antonio his Bible, Timoteo his sword, and swore the vow uttered by the soldier: "We will purify the name of Palafox. Whatever it requires, we will pay the price. That stain will be removed." They lowered their arms and gritted their teeth as if preparing for batde.

Antonio produced a cloth bag he had smuggled from Toledo and emptied its contents upon a rickety table.

"Silver?" Timoteo asked.

"The purest, I'm told. These are the bullets we'll use."

Timoteo, fiery and ready to act, carefully tossed the pellets from hand to hand as if weighing them. "Where was this found?"

"I don't know," the priest replied.

The young officer grabbed his brother by the surplice and shouted, "Then why did you bring me here?"

"To find the mines," Antonio said coldly, unfolding a rough map showing Toledo and the high valley of which it was a part. "The silver seems always to reach us from this area," and with the prescience that marked so much of his work in Mexico he stabbed at the exact spot where the Mineral was later to be discovered.

"Then that's the land we have to have," Timoteo growled, pacing up and down the narrow room.

'That's my intention," the priest agreed. 'This poor land I've already sequestered for the Church." He indicated those barren portions from which the flakes of silver seemed never to come. "These better lands you must secure for our family when you get to Toledo."

"How can I get to Toledo?" Timoteo stormed. "Captain Cortes has sent me here."

"Captain Cortes assigned me to the capital," Antonio replied coldly, "but I reached Toledo. You must do the same."

That night the two brothers drafted six different letters to Cortes, but each seemed lacking in persuasive force. Finally, toward dawn, Fray Antonio decided that Timoteo should send a simple, soldierly appeal, which he proceeded to dictate while Timoteo wrote:

Esteemed Captain
,
Since my devout brother, the renowned Fray Antonio, has worked so diligently to bring peace to the Altomecs and glory to your rule, I, Ensign Timoteo Palafox, do petition that I be dispatched with a small troop to protect my brother in his saintly duties among the unconverted
.

The petition succeeded, and in late 1530 Timoteo, now reduced to the ranks because of his father's disgrace, was summoned to Mexico City, where Captain Cortds personally delivered the good news, but the great conquistador did not show enthusiasm as he told the nervous young applicant, "Your petition is granted to go to Toledo to serve as your brother's strong right arm." Before Timoteo could exult, the ruler of Mexico added: "Do not write letters home about this appointment. I've received instructions from Seville following your father's disgrace." He snapped out the words as if he loathed them and their source. "I've been ordered to demote you, Palafox. You can never again occupy an officer's rank in the armies of Spain."

"Permission to sit down?" the young soldier asked weakly.

"Granted. And I'll give you one ray of hope. As an ordinary soldier you can still achieve much, with valor, determination, obedience to command. By being a model for others less intelligent."

"But what will I be called if I'm allowed no rank?"

The two soldiers discussed this for some moments, and it was Cortes who recalled a title once used in the Spanish armies, a word that could be translated into English as something like "sergeant," so that when Timoteo marched west to look for the silver mine of Toledo, he was no longer an ensign destined to become a general; he was plain Sergeant Palafox, burning with anger, hatred and a determination to find the wealth that would buy back his family's reputation.

As soon as the sergeant reached Toledo, he initiated his search for the mine. Accompanied by only a few other soldiers, he tramped riverbeds and climbed hills from which he could look down on his brother's fortress-church. He found nothing, and was infuriated by the fact that whenever he came upon Indians in their small outiying villages, a few women in the mean huts were sure to be wearing silver bangles.

"Ask her where she got them," he would shout at his interpreter.

"They were given her."

"By whom?"

"She says her uncle."

"Fetch him!" but when the old man was brought, and even tortured, he would not tell how he had obtained the bracelets and earrings. Enraged, Timoteo would want to lay waste the village to uncover the secret source of the silver, but would be restrained by the other soldiers.

Timoteo had been rampaging through the countryside for less than a month when Fray Antonio was approached one day by a nine-year-old Indian girl he recognized. It was Stranger, who screamed: "They've taken my grandmother!" and she led the priest to the barracks, where he found Timoteo and four soldiers torturing Lady Gray Eyes, who was strapped prone to a bench.

"What are you doing?" the priest thundered.

"She knows where the silver is," Timoteo snapped.

"Let her go!" his brother shouted, and the woman was unbound. As she struggled to her feet and rubbed her shoulders to relieve the pain, she did not thank the priest but smiled at him with a kind of rueful satisfaction.

"You may go," Fray Antonio said.

"You are acting just as we used to," the queen said as she took her granddaughter by the hand.

In 1532, Timoteo, urged by his brother to find the silver but forbidden by Fray Antonio's piety from using the tortures that might have uncovered it, undertook an expedition to that Valley-of-the-Dead from which the Altomecs had launched their conquest of City-of-the-Pyramid, and here he found more silver bangles than in any other previous area, which convinced him that he was close to the mines he sought. But the Indians in the valley proved wholly intractable. Perhaps on orders from Lady Gray Eyes they reftised to speak of silver; they would provide no food, nor would they work for the Spaniards; and finally one young warrior knocked Timoteo down when the latter tried to take his wife.

In retaliation, Sergeant Timoteo Palafox lined up his soldiers and marched down the middle of the valley, killing everyone he encountered and setting fire to every home. Some Altomecs, of course, escaped to the hills, but more than six hundred Indians were killed that day, and from their arms and legs nearly two thousand silver bangles were recovered.

When Timoteo returned to Toledo, he marched his troops into the fortress-church and threw the booty before his brother with the words "Now we're beginning to find silver somewhere." Secret messengers had sped before him to inform Lady Gray Eyes of the massacre, and she was at the side of the priest when his brother delivered the bangles, so that the young soldier's reception was not a pleasant one.

"You wanted silver!" Timoteo shouted defensively.

"But not this way," Fray Antonio replied. "Not by massacring hundreds."

"Getting silver is not easy," Timoteo argued.

"But these were Indians that I had baptized," the priest cried in anguish. "They were part of us."

"They were savages," Timoteo said, "and they attacked us."

"They did not!" Antonio thundered.

"Do you believe her?" the soldier demanded. "Rather than your own brother?"

Fray Antonio, realizing that it was unseemly to fight with his brother before an Altomec witness, said calmly, 'There must be no more slaughters, Timoteo."

'They know where the silver is," the sergeant replied ominously. At this, Lady Gray Eyes smiled, causing Timoteo to shout, "Brother, get her out of this city. She's poisoning you."

The extent to which Lady Gray Eyes was influencing the priest was not to become evident for some years, but Timoteo was correct in his estimation of the situation, and he became her avowed enemy as she became his.

For four more years Sergeant Palafox probed the hills for silver and found nothing. Each time he trudged back to the fortress-church his gaunt, stoop-shouldered brother would pace up and down before him as he washed, storming, "While you fail, our family continues in disgrace."

"Brother," Timoteo would reply, "I have looked until I'm weary and there is no silver."

"It's right around us," Antonio would cry in frustration.

"They must be bringing it in from the north," Timoteo reasoned.

"No!" Antonio would shout. "Don't ever say that. It's here, under our feet."

Finally, one day in 1536, after such a scene Timoteo replied quietly, "All right. If it's out there, you find it. I'll guard the fortress." And during most of that year the residents of Toledo saw their thin, scholarly priest astride a donkey riding into the hills looking for a treasure that he was destined never to find.

Upon his return from one such fruitless expedition Fray Antonio was ablaze with an idea that in the long run was to prove even more important in establishing the fortunes of the Palafox family than the later discovery of silver. He called his brother to his room and while he washed he explained excitedly, 'Timoteo, you must marry a girl from Spain, one with a name so proud that our father's disgrace will be submerged.

You must bring her here, and for a wedding gift we'll petition the king for a quarter of a million acres. The land will be legally ours, and one day we'll find the mines."

"It's a good idea," the soldier said, "but I don't know any girls in Spain."

"1 do!" the priest cried, "and she's of such exalted reputation the king will have to grant us the land." Summoning an Indian artist, he directed the man to paint a likeness of Timoteo, which he enclosed in a letter addressed to the marquis of Guadalquivir with a message our family still owns:

It seems highly unlikely that a girl as well born and as beautiful as Leticia should still be unmarried, but on the chance that she is, I am writing to request her hand for my brother, Captain Timoteo Palafox. Frankly, esteemed sir, my father was burned as a heretic in Salamanca and there is every reason for you to refuse to ally your noble family . . .

"Should you mention that?" Timoteo asked. "With the marquis, it may prove the deciding point," Antonio replied, without informing his brother of the marquis's liberal views.

In his impetuous desire to find his brother a proper wife who could enhance the family fortunes, Antonio did not pause to reflect upon the terribly wrong thing he was doing: bringing a woman he had loved to Mexico not for the real reason--that he wanted her to be near him again--but for the ostensible reason that he sought a bride for his brother. He could not foresee the anguish this must bring him.