Mexico (60 page)

But having made one daring move, he found courage to make another: He drafted a second letter to the king himself:

And so, Sire, in view of the warlike nature of the Altomecs, whose constant incursions threaten Your Majesty's lands, and in view of my constant desire to win these difficult pagans to God, I humbly beseech that these rebellious areas be made part of the dowry of the marquis of Guadalquivir's daughter, he being the one who served you so gallantly in your fight against the Moors. If this is done, I assure you that I shall see to it that troops under my control will bring peace, tranquillity and the love of Jesus Christ to this part of your realm.

When this extraordinary letter reached Spain, the king was faced with a dilemma: if he approved of the marriage and the land grant, he ran the risk of infuriating the Dominican leaders of the Inquisition, which had condemned the Palafoxes; but if he denied the petition he would be rejecting one of the men he trusted most and upon whom he had relied in the times of decision, the marquis of Guadalquivir. He could not reach a decision until he restudied Fray Antonio's plea, and then he grasped the nub of the problem: 'The priest promises he'll bring new lands under my control and new souls to Jesus Christ. Petition granted. Let the marriage and the dowry go forward." In this duplicitous way the Palafox brothers grabbed their first sizable section of land.

The royal decree authorizing the grant reached Toledo long before Leticia arrived, for her departure from Seville was delayed by protests lodged by the parents of the minor nobleman she had married eight years earlier. He had been a handsome young fellow with an important position in the army, but while on service in the king's dominions in the Netherlands he lost his life in a daring sortie against the Protestant armies. Now his parents wanted his widow, Leticia, and her children to remain with them in Spain.

She had startled them by saying boldly: "The children can stay with you. I shall go to Mexico," and not even her father's caution against this rash judgment dissuaded her. Her arrival in Toledo was further delayed by other considerations imposed by her various relatives, but her dowry was delivered according to the king's schedule.

When the lines of deed were to be officially drawn, Fray Antonio dominated the proceedings to ensure that any lands suspected of containing silver fell into the Palafox personal holdings, while those that had already proved barren went to either the Church or the king. By this stratagem Sergeant Palafox gained possession of enormous stretches of promising land around Toledo plus the virtual ownership of some nine thousand Indians, whom he considered as his slaves and treated as such.

One of tt^e first Spaniards in Mexico to be aware of the power to be gained from land and Indians, Timoteo caused six iron brands to be forged in the form of a large letter P, and he carried these to all parts of his new estate, where they were placed in fires until white-hot, after which they were pressed against the right cheeks of all the Altomecs belonging to him. So for two generations men in Toledo could point to the right cheeks of Indians and say with certainty, "That one belongs to Palafox."

It was Lady Gray Eyes who brought this barbarous behavior to Fray Antonio's attention. Dragging a badly scarred peasant woman before the priest, she showed him the distorted face still bloated and discolored from the branding. Antonio, drawing back in horror, asked: "What happened to her?"

"Your brother," Gray Eyes said with obvious revulsion.

"He struck her?"

"Branded her--with a hot iron. Your family initial. That big P."

She spoke calmly and dispassionately, but there was a sadness in her voice and at one point she observed, "When I lay hidden in the cellar with my son's pregnant wife, waiting for Stranger to be born, we used to study the parchment showing your gods and pray for their arrival, because they were the gentlest deities we had ever imagined. When I saw how your men killed, I thought, They must have left their gods in Spain. But then I learned that the people there had burned your father. .. ."

For the first time she told Fray Antonio of how she and the Altomec women had slipped out at night to destroy the Mother Goddess, to whom people had been sacrificed by burning. Looking at him with dark accusing eyes, she cried dolefully, "Six years before you came to this city, we had cleansed ourselves of abominations like the burning of people. Why have you not ended them in Spain?"

Her question was so devastating that Fray Antonio rushed from the room and issued a chain of orders: "Go to the villages. Collect every branding iron with that shameful letter. When you have them all, report to me."

On a day in June he ordered a great fire to be lit and melted all the cruel irons.

In late 1537 the beautiful young widow Leticia de Guadalquivir arrived in Veracruz, whence she made the long upland journey to Toledo, where on a bright sunny morning under a sky that was an impeccable welcoming blue she faced the brothers. At that moment she was more alluring than she had been when Antonio had known her as a self-willed girl in Seville. The years had softened her, made her more of a woman, and the tragedy of her husband's death had given her maturity, but Antonio could see from the imperious manner in which she surveyed her surroundings that she was still determined to be mistress of her own world.

When she moved forward toward the brothers, she went automatically toward Antonio as if to resume their love affair of years ago, but the priest flashed a warning signal with his eyes and an almost imperceptible shake of his head. With a half
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smile she turned away from Antonio and moved almost gaily toward Timoteo. "You must be the handsome young man in the painting they sent me," she said, and with the elegant ease she had perfected even as a young girl, she kissed him on the cheek.

That afternoon, with scores of Indians watching and approving, the couple went into the fortress-church, where Fray Antonio was waiting to marry them. I can visualize the three of them as they stood there together on that fateful day, for I often heard about it from my Palafox relatives. My mother-in
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law, Dona Isabel, from the Spanish branch, liked to describe the scene: "Four hundred years ago, it seems like only yesterday. Antonio the priest, tall and slim and dark, a solemn man. Palafox, short, rugged, with a grinning countenance, always a soldier. And between them this radiant woman, thirty years old maybe. How tangled their emotions must have been. They say in our family that when the time came for Fray Antonio to recite the marriage ritual he almost fainted, but his brother reached out and steadied him. 'Not here,' the soldier whispered, and the marriage was solemnized." My mother-in-law always ended with that strange word, adding: "What no one noticed at the time was that when Father Antonio ended the marriage ceremony he cried in a firm voice: 'Captain Palafox, you are now wed to Leticia.' He had no right to use that word 'Captain,' for Timoteo had surrendered any claim to an officer's rank, but from that moment on he was Captain to everyone. Just as Timoteo had stolen the Palafox lands, so now Antonio stole the name Captain. We're a bold, clever lot, Norman."

On the night of the wedding Lady Gray Eyes told her granddaughter, who was then seventeen, "These brothers have done an evil thing, Stranger."

"What?" the lissome girl with long braids asked, anxious to learn all she could about the Spaniards.

"The priest has summoned for his brother a girl with whom he was once in love," the wise old woman explained.

"Did he tell you that?"

"Not in words."

"What did you see?"

The moving forward, the drawing away," the queen said, and tears came into her eyes. "These Spaniards make life so hard for themselves. They love a system of gods they can never sustain. They adhere to principles they can never understand."

"Why doesn't the priest take the girl, if he's the one who loves her?" Stranger asked.

"For a Spaniard that would be too simple," the queen replied. And in the succeeding days they watched.

What I am about to relate does not, of course, appear in the chronicles of either the Spaniards or the Altomecs, but it is very much a part of my family tradition, and I heard it first from my own mother, who was certainly not given to idle chatter. For three years, from 1537 to 1540, Fray Antonio Palafox lived in a kind of hell. He was deeply in love with his brother's wife, whom he had known intimately in Seville; yet he himself had officiated at her wedding to his brother and it was with his words that her marriage had been solemnized.

Like King David, he found himself dispatching his general to strange battlefronts, hoping that the enemy would slay him so that Timoteo's wife could revert to him; yet even when the captain was miles from Toledo and Leticia was alone in the fortress-church and obviously eager for the priest t
o
visit her, he could not bring himself to violate his brother's marriage. He would meet Leticia inside the fortress and she would intimate that he would be welcomed in her chambers that night; against his will he would recall the night he had spent with her in the Moorish garden in Seville and he would suffer an agony of desire, but he could never bring himself to approach her room. As soon as Captain Timoteo's horse could be heard whinnying at the fortress gate, the priest would mount his donkey and leave by another exit.

Antonio would go searching for silver, and the Indians of remote areas saw him often in those years, a tall, graying, handsome priest of forty-two. He had once been the most commanding figure among the Spaniards, but he was now irresolute, alone and driven by conflicting desires. On one such trip he camped in Valley-of-the-Dead, hoping that Altomec survivors of his brother's massacre might slaughter him in revenge, but the Indians knew him as their friend and fed him. Next day he startled them by lining them up and washing their feet. Through tears he pleaded for their forgiveness, which they had already granted. Later, when he wandered off into the hills, they kept scouts watching over him, and when news of his unusual behavior reached Toledo, Captain Palafox thought he might have to send his crazy brother back to Spain.

But Lady Gray Eyes had contrary plans, and when word sped through the fortress that the mad priest was returning on his donkey, she ran to the walls and looked down on his forlorn figure. He was gaunt from hunger, and sunken-eyed with confusion. His long legs dragged in the dust, and his donkey was in command. Carefully she watched as he dismounted, went to the refectory for food, and repaired to his quarters for a bath. When he reappeared shaven and once more a priest, she kissed her granddaughter on the forehead and whispered, "Now."

A few minutes later the slim young girl, dressed in her simplest gown of linen and with flowers in the tips of her long braids, went to the chapel where the priest was praying in much confusion of soul and said, "Fray Antonio, I have come to be baptized."

The priest looked up and asked, "Has your grandmother at last given her consent?"

"No," replied the girl demurely. "I am doing this of my own will."

The priest clutched her hands. "Why?" he cried joyously.

"Because last night I heard about how you begged die Indians in Valley-of-the-Dead for their forgiveness."

The priest felt hot tears edging their way into his eyes, for it seemed to him that in a world of moral confusion the Indian convert represented a solid point of reference, one that his mind could cling to. He took her triumphantly to the tunnel that pierced the fortress wall and led to the outdoor chapel, where they stood at last before the baptismal font. Normally, Stranger would have had to wait until an assembly of several score had been gathered for conversion because Fray Antonio conducted his baptisms with pomp, but the honest joy at winning the queen's granddaughter inspired him to baptize her at once.

When the rite was concluded, Fray Antonio put his hand once more upon the head of the tall girl and said in a kind of exaltation whose source he did not comprehend, "Henceforth you shall no longer be known as Stranger. Your name shall be Maria-of-thc-Assumption." With that he led her back into the narrow tunnel. When they were beside the huge wall that he had constructed, he felt her close behind him and stopped, and perhaps by accident she bumped into him; they embraced, and there was a tremendous meeting of their mutual hunger, and after more than an hour they emerged into the sunlight of Toledo, the city they would govern together for many decades.

When the Palafox brothers were comfortably settled with their women--Timoteo with the daughter of a Spanish nobleman, Antonio with an Altomec princess--they resumed their search for the hidden silver mine with which they hoped to cleanse their father's shame. One day in 1541, Timoteo was returning empty-handed to Toledo and had reached a point within sight of both the pyramid and the fortress. He started going down a hill he had climbed many times and, in so doing, kicked aside a small rock, which revealed another of a type he had not seen previously. Upon examining it closely, he concluded joyfully that it must be silver ore and ran with it to his brother. The two pulverized the rock and finally reduced it to a small lump of silver.

Attempting to mask his excitement, Fray Antonio asked casually, "Where is the mine?"

"It doesn't seem to be a mine," Timoteo replied.

Fray Antonio bit his lip. "But now we'll surely find the mine."

"I looked, but it was not at hand," Timoteo said, and this was the beginning of the real frustration of the Palafoxes. It is true that between the years 1540 and 1550 Timoteo was to uncover several profitable deposits of silver, and it is a matter of record that for the remaining years of his life he was able to send the king in Madrid an annual gift of about twenty thousand duros, which paved the way for his and his brother's advancement in the army and the Church. But the great mother lode of Toledan silver, which the brothers knew had to exist somewhere in the vicinity, eluded him and often in the evenings his brother, now Bishop Palafox, would unroll his maps and ask once more, 'Tell me, Timoteo, have you searched this valley?" Invariably Timoteo had.