The Compass of His Bones and Other Stories (4 page)

“It was no dream, Manco,” he said. “It was no dream, then.” His eyes widened and his voice came out in a whisper. “Last night by the fire, I sat at the Last Supper and Our Savior hovered above me and told me to eat and drink and he said that unto me a fortune would be delivered. And he spoke truly! Truly he is the Son of Heaven!”

He kissed me on both cheeks. “I am rich! And you have served me faithfully.” So saying, he took a few gold artifacts worth twice my meager fee, put them in a pouch, and gave them to me.

Pizarro was eager to leave in all haste and thus we left the ruins almost immediately, although I felt a reluctance to do so. We soon found our way back to the dead Spaniard and lower still by dusk.

That night, I fell asleep to the
clink-clink
of gold against gold as Pizarro played with his treasure.

But, come morning, I heard a curse and woke to the sight of Pizarro rummaging through his packs. “It has vanished! It is gone!” His cheeks were drawn and he seemed once more an old man. “Where has it gone? The gold has vanished from my hands, into dust.”

I could not tell him. I had no clue. If he had not seen it disappear himself, he might have blamed me, but I was blameless.

We went back to the city and searched its streets for two days. We found nothing. Pizarro would have stayed there forever, but our food had begun to run out and I pleaded with him to return to Cuzco. With winter closing in, I thought it dangerous to stay.

We started down again and Pizarro seemed in better spirits, if withdrawn. But, on the fifth day, we camped by a small, deep lake and when I woke in the morning, he was gone. His nag stood by the lakeside, drinking from the dark waters. His clothes were missing.  Only the map remained, black ink on orange parchment, and his sword, stuck awkwardly into the hard ground. I searched for him, but it was obvious to me that the Spaniard had been broken when the treasure turned to dust, and had drowned himself in the lake.

I continued the rest of the way down, leading the nag but not riding her, for I did not know how. I knew only that my gold had not faded. It still lay within the pouch, and it was with that gold that I would later buy my way to America.

Soon I came upon the ghost dancers again, but I did not stay long, though I wished to, for the man who resembled Pizarro stood in the highest part of the tower and for some reason he troubled me. I believe I thought it was Pizarro, gazing down on me.

Thus, rich beyond measure and fortunate to be alive, I hurried past the tower and down into the lowlands and the fields to rejoin my family.

V

The reporter doesn’t know what to say at first, so she doesn’t say anything. Ignore the parts that aren’t possible, she tells herself. He’s an old man. He’s just mixing fact and fiction on you. But it’s not the impossible parts that bother her.

Manco stares at the wall, as if reliving the experience, and she says, “Did you ever discover who the Conquistador was?” She could really use a smoke, but she doesn’t dare light up in front of a dying asthmatic.

His gaze turns toward the darkened window, toward the movement outside that window. His eyes seem unbearably sad, though a slight smile creases his lips.

“Among his personal effects were letters written to his family and when I returned to Cuzco, the
mestizo
he had bought the horse from filled in the gaps. It is quite ironic, you see — ” and he stares directly at her, as if daring her to disbelieve “ — he was an immigrant, a destitute carpenter whose father had herded sheep across the Spanish plains. Had he attended the military academy in Barcelona? I do not know. But during the time of land grants, his forefathers had settled in Peru, only to come to misfortune at the hands of other fortune hunters, the survivors limping back to Spain. No doubt he had read the accounts of these pathetic men and hoped, long after it was possible or politic, to acquire his own land grant. Practically speaking, though, he chose the best route: to steal treasure.”

“But where did the map come from?”

Manco shrugs, so that his shoulders bow inward, the bones stark against brown skin.

Silence, again, the reporter trying to think of what to ask next. It frustrates her that she is reduced to
reacting.
Her mind alights upon the woman dancing around the fire. An adolescent wet dream. Believable? Perhaps not in the setting he had described, but the romances in the man’s life might fill up a side bar, at least.

“What happened to the woman?”

He closes his eyes so that they virtually disappear amid the wrinkles. He must have twenty wrinkles for each year of his life, she thinks.

“I forgot her. I forgot much, as if my mind had been wiped clean. Sometimes the memories would brush against my mind as I sought my fortune in America. Other women . . . other women would remind me of her, but it was as if I had dreamed the entire night.”

“When did you finally regain your memory?”

“Years later, as I walked through Death Valley, dying of thirst, certain that the bandits who had stolen my horse would find me again. My eyes were drawn to the horizon and the sun. It was so hot, and the sun was like a beacon filled with blood. I stared and stared at that sun . . . and after a while it began to give off sparks and I heard myself saying ‘Inti was in the fire.’ I saw the bonfire then and the gods who had surrounded the bonfire, and  . . . her, the woman — and I wept when I realized what I had lost when I lost my memory, for she had been human, not a goddess.

“Those memories sustained me through that dry and deadly place, as if I drank from them for strength, and when I reached California, I decided to return to the city.”

“You went back to the city?” the reporter says, which vexes her even more.

“I spent a night in the ruined tower where the Ghost Dancers had once danced. I stopped by the lake where the Conquistador had drowned.”

“And you found the city again?”

“I did, although it had changed. The vegetation — the path of flowers, the many trees and vines — had died away. The towers and buildings still stood, but more eaten away, in ruins. So too did I find the woman — still there, but much older. The gods had left that place, driven back into the interior, so far that I doubt even a Shining Path guerrilla could lead you to them now. But she was still there. The gods had preserved her beauty well past a natural span, so that in their absence she aged more rapidly. I spent seven years by her side and then buried her — an old woman now — in the courtyard where I had once jumped across a fire with a hundred eyes staring up at me. And then I left that place.”

Manco’s voice is so full of sadness that suddenly the reporter feels acutely . . . homesick? Is it homesickness? Not for New York City, not for her apartment, her cats, her friends, but for the bustling white noise of her office, the constant demands on her time which keep her busy, always at a fever pitch. Here, there is only silence and darkness and mysteries. There is too much time to think; her mind is working in the darkness, trying to reconcile the possible, the impossible.

Something dark moves against the lighter dark of the window. Something in the darkness nags at her, screams out to her, but she wants to forget it, let it slip back into the subconscious. Outside, someone shouts,
“No habla inglés! No habla! No habla!”
She can feel dust and grit on her and her muscles ache for a swimming pool. When her husband left — was it four years now? — she had swum and swum and swum until she was so tired she could only float and stare up at the gray sky . . . and suddenly, she is looking up from the water . . . into Manco Tupac’s eyes.

“You changed the most important part,” she says, her heart thudding in her chest. “You changed it,” and as she says it, she realizes that this story, this man, will never see print, that the darkness, the shadows, the past, have changed everything. What is there left to her with this story? What is left at all? Nothing left but to go forward: “Tell me what you left out.”  It is one of those moments that will not last — she’ll recant later, she’ll publish the story, but for this moment, in this moment, she is lost, and frightened.

He is quiet for a moment, considering, then he turns his head to consider her from an angle. “Yes, I will,” he says. “Yes. I’ll tell you . . . What does it matter now?”

Then he is whispering, whispering the rest of the story to her, an enigmatic smile playing across his lips, as if he is enjoying himself, as if the weight of such a story, never before told, can now leave him, the machines the only weight left to keep him tied to this earth. And every word takes her further from herself, until she is outside herself, out there, in the darkness, with him.

VI

Tupac remembered precisely when he decided to kill the old man he called the Conquistador. They had stared into the dark waters of a lake above Cuzco and the Conquistador, already dismounted from his horse, had said, “This place holds a million treasures, if we could only find a means to wrest them from the hands of the dead.” The lake held the bones of Tupac’s ancestors as well as gold, but he did not say this, just as he had not protested when the old man’s map had led them to the hidden city. He had done nothing while the Conquistador had rummaged through the graves on their last day in the city, picking through the bones for bits of jewelry to supplement the gold. How could he have done nothing?

But as they stood and looked into the dark waters, Tupac realized that the old man’s death had been foretold by the lake itself: the Conquistador’s reflection hardly showed in those black depths. If the Conquistador’s reflection cast itself so lightly on the world, then death was already upon him. Killing this man would be like placing pennies upon the eyes of the dead.

When they came out of the hills and the fog of the highlands into the region of the deep lakes, Tupac’s resolve stiffened. In the early morning light, the Conquistador’s horse stepping gingerly among the ill-matched stones of the old Inca highway, Tupac had a vision: that a flock of jet-black hummingbirds encircled the Conquistador’s head like his Christian god’s crown of thorns.

The Conquistador had not spoken a word that morning, except to request that Tupac fold his bed roll and empty his chamber pot. The Conquistador sat his horse stiffly, clenching his legs to stay upright. Looking at the old man, Tupac felt a twinge of revulsion, at himself for serving as the old man’s guide, and at the old man for his casual cruelty, his indifference, and most frustrating of all, his stifling ignorance.

At midday, the sun still hazy through the clouds, the Conquistador dismounted and stood by the edge of yet another lake. He did not stand so straight now, but hunched over, his head bent.

Tupac hesitated. The old man looked so tired. A voice deep inside him said he could not kill in cold blood, but his hand told the truth: it pulled the Conquistador’s sword from its scabbard in one clean motion. The Conquistador turned and smiled when he saw that Tupac had the sword. Tupac slid the sword into the Conquistador’s chest and through his spine. The Conquistador smiled more broadly then, Tupac thought, and brought close to his victim by the thrust, he could smell the sour tang of
quinoa
seeds on his breath, the musk of the Conquistador’s leathers, and the faint dusty scent they had both picked up traveling the road together.

Then the old man fell, the sword still in him, Tupac’s hand letting go of the hilt.

Tupac stood above the dead man for a moment, breathing heavily. An emptiness filled his mind as if he were a fish swimming blind through the black lake that shimmered before them. The sound of a chipparah bird’s mating call startled him and he realized that the Conquistador had died silently, or that his own frantic heartbeat had drowned out any noise.

The Conquistador’s eyes remained open and blood had begun to coat his tunic. Blood coated the sword’s blade, which had been pushed upward, halfway out of the Conquistador’s body when he fell to the ground. Tupac tasted salt in his mouth and brushed the tears from his eyes. He felt nothing as he rolled the Conquistador’s body over and into the water. The body sank slowly, first the torso bending in on itself, then the legs, and finally the arms, the palms of the pale hands turned upward as if releasing their grip on the world.

When the hands faded from view, the emptiness spread through Tupac, from his arms to his chest and then to his legs, until it felt like a smooth, cold stone weighing down his soul. He would never forget that moment, even when he was old and bedridden. He would see the Conquistador falling, for a hundred years, and no matter how many places he visited, no matter how many adventures he had, no matter how many memories he filled his mind with, he could not stop seeing that slow fall, or stop feeling the sword, as if it had entered his body, as if
he
had fallen into the dark wet lapping of waves, into the unending dream of drowning . . . .

THE EMPEROR’S REPLY

I

The last Incan Emperor, Tupac Amaru, had neither eaten nor drunk for three days in his tower above Vilcapampa, the Spaniards neglecting him as they tightened their control over the city. But now, over the ghostly moans of the dying, Tupac heard footsteps on the stairs outside his room.

It was a large, drafty room, for the invaders had stripped it of everything except a chair and the burnished salt birch floor, which they could not carry away with them. They had bound Tupac Amaru to the chair with rough hemp, positioning him near the only window. Outside, the Sun God Inti, father of the divine messenger, the hummingbird, faded in the west. In the courtyard below, the Spaniards had begun to slaughter llamas and alpacas, their screams not unlike those of his nobles from the days and nights before.

But he remained calm, even as he had remained calm when, on the second day of his imprisonment, he had seen the likeness of his son Hualpa — whom he had sent into southern exile five days before — in the clefts of rock and shadow.

Despite, or perhaps because of, the numbness in his limbs, the burning thirst, his son’s image had become sharper, etched into the land with a permanence that mocked Tupac’s own failing strength.

Ichnoti and Tuectolt formed his son’s eyes: turquoise lakes pooling on a hilly shelf outside the city’s walls. Tupac had taken Hualpa there in the summers to swim, for the lakes remained icy cold even during drought. The sight of his son diving deep, fearless, and then surfacing, pushing effortlessly up against the cold, hard weight of water had made the Emperor flush with pride.

He heard the footsteps again, much closer, the sound coming to him through the rock and wood like a premonition of disaster.

His son’s mouth was a smile formed by the union of two rivers, the Bilcapampa and the Nuexcan. At the conjoining where rapids raged they had fished for gar and trout. His nose was a slope of granite worn down by erosion. Hualpa had often smelled of sweet plums plucked without permission from his mother’s orchard, his poncho stained with their juice. How fleet of foot his son had been under the towers of Vilcapampa! How quick to learn!

The footsteps paused outside his door. He closed his eyes and prayed to Inti for his son’s safety.

As the door opened, twilight settled over the city.

II

Captain Gaspar de Sotelo entered the Emperor’s room with a priest at his elbow, a dour Dominican carrying a crucifix and a bottle of holy water. Behind them strode two swarthy soldiers. The gleam of gold had eclipsed the pupils of the soldiers’ eyes until their level gaze was the distillation and reflection of gold and everything that passed across their field of vision was sifted through a sieve of gold. They stood at attention to either side of the Emperor’s chair, their swords clanging against muddy armor.

In Castilian Spanish, the Captain said, “We have established control over Vilcapampa. We have routed the armies of your allies.” He paused for emphasis, his gaze darting toward the window, then continued: “I am sorry, Emperor, but we must find your son. For the safety of my men and their descendents who will settle these lands. You must tell us where he is.” Gaspar de Sotelo had an ordinary face, pocked with disease, and his regret, the way his mouth pursed as his teeth worried his lower lip, was ordinary too.

Tupac Amaru said nothing.

“Can you understand me?” Gaspar cocked his head. “I was told you would understand me. I had expected a man of reason, of restraint and shrewdness. Not a savage.”

The Emperor stared out the window.

“I am mistaken. I can see that now.”

The priest mumbled a few words in Latin. He nodded to the Captain.

“Forgive me, Emperor,” Gaspar de Sotelo said as he motioned to the soldiers.

They removed Tupac Amaru’s bonds.  They forced him, hobbling, to his feet. They stripped off his mantle and doublet of crimson velvet, the shoes made of wool, his crown with the mascapachu royal insignia woven into it, then lowered him to the floor.

They beat him with the flats of their swords until he screamed. They gouged his toenails and fingernails. They carved patterns in his skin, stroking him with the blades.

Blood misted the room. Blood pooled in the corners. Blood rose in the torturers’ nostrils like an aphrodisiac.

Night fell with no moon.

The priest lit candles.

The soldiers removed their armor, revealing pale skin whorled with scars.

They sliced the flesh between his fingers. They chopped off his thumbs. They stabbed his testicles. They twisted his shoulders until bones popped from sockets.

Night fell.

The Emperor made noises like the weeping of a child’s ghost.

Night fell.

The soldiers did not blink. Their eyes formed a surface so smooth blood and tears could not cling to it.

As Tupac Amaru trembled and groaned, spasmed and gasped, Gaspar de Sotelo said, more times than sane or necessary, “Because of who I am and who you are at this time, in this place, I must punish your silence. I do not enjoy this. I am not a savage. I would not wish this upon you if it were not forced upon me.”

III

Gaspar de Sotelo, like the soldiers, filtered the world through eyes of gold, but behind the gold lay the moldering image of the rainforest. Those eyes had recorded the madness of treks into the interior: the moist rot that seeped into brain and bone and soul, trapped in armor that roasted him day after day, rooted him in place and made him an easy target for poison arrows from enemies as formless and oppressive as the ever-present humidity. Gaspar feared the rot would never leave him, that it would infect the marrow of his bones, eat him up, and then eat of itself, until even the fear left him and only the gold lust remained; afraid that he would not even feel his own death until coins, cold and slick, were placed over his eyes.

Sometimes he hoped God would show himself in the patterns left on the flayed skin of his victims, for in no act of decency or betrayal had he seen God’s will at work in this strange hemisphere. Even the stars betrayed his knowledge and he whirled beneath them, ripe to fall if not propped up by his fading religion and the discipline of his military experience.

IV

After a span of time measured by the swift and slow rhythms of his torturers, the Emperor could hear only the febrile rattle of his own breathing. He lay on his stomach, splinters from the wooden floor biting into his wounds.

Above him, Gaspar de Sotelo said, his voice dry and taut, “Tell me where your son is or my men will cut out your tongue. I do not wish this. I do not enjoy this. But I will do it.”

Tupac Amaru struggled to rise, coughing blood, drenched in blood. Blood clouded his eyes so that his torturers were gray, distant shapes. He lifted his face toward the window, wanting to tell Hualpa that he had not betrayed him, but his hands slipped in his own blood. He fell back against the salt birch floor —

— and immediately convulsed, cried out against a new pain. The wood against his wounds felt as if a hundred stars the size of arrowheads had exploded inside his heart. The pain seared his flesh, then dulled, replaced by a tingle, an itch. The itch gave way to a stretching sensation, his flesh expanding and contracting in the same instant. The Spaniards’ voices rose in consternation, drowned out by the pumping rhythm of blood in his ears: the rainforest’s pulse, the opened veins of fire beetle and freshwater porpoise, the rushing capillaries of anaconda and jacaranda; the pulse, too, of rivers and trees, valleys and slow-sighing mountains. The Empire’s pulse, beating beneath his bones, leaching upward through the birch floor. His mutilated fingers began to throb and he awkwardly turned over on his back and raised his hands. Blood bubbled from the severed joints, but upward, as though seeking to replace missing flesh. His entire body began to throb and he moaned, disoriented and afraid.

Above him, Tupac heard the priest gasp as the blood swayed at his fingertips and scintillated, forming sinuous shapes. The blood danced on his chest and legs as well, tapping out a staccato beat. Pain swept across his body in waves that left numbness behind, his heartbeat swallowed by the pulse of the Amazon.

“The Devil!” the priest cried. “The Devil!”

“Do something!” Gaspar ordered, but the soldiers did nothing.

Tupac looked at his hands. Where the blood ran thickest, it separated from the host finger and floated in the air, where feathers sprouted, then wings, and from above each finger appeared a hummingbird, Inti’s messenger in the world of men. Wherever the torturers’ blades had touched him, feathers sprouted as scarlet as a woman’s menses, followed by the birds, glistening with afterbirth, wing bones clenching and unclenching, the emerald eyes blinking once, twice, three times, as they hovered over the Emperor. Where they rose, the blood soaked into their breasts, his wounds closing puckered lips that left no scar.

Then a river of hummingbirds poured from his eyes, leaving him blind and cold. Everywhere, he heard their rustling speech, the weight of their departure lifting from him until he felt lighter than a single feather. But cold. In the whispering of the hummingbird wings, he heard the echo of his own voice, praying for his son. He smelled the wild plums his son had plucked from the orchard. He saw his son breaking the lake’s surface, mouth wide with laughter.

His hands uncurled, bloodless but whole. His pulse beat weakly in his ears. He thought he heard footsteps on the stairs. He thought he heard his son’s voice.
How quick to learn, how fleet of foot.

“The Devil!” the priest screamed. “The Devil! The Devil! The Devil!” until he could scream no more.

V

Gaspar de Sotelo stood at the window, the Emperor curled up at his feet, and watched the sun rise in the sky. Against its corona, hummingbirds flew in long, dark lines. Gaspar’s face was impassive as he watched them, his lips quivering only slightly. He thought — he knew — that for a moment, a flicker at the edge of his awareness, he might have — had — seen Him in the birds flying from the Emperor’s wounds. His knuckles whitened as his fingernails bit into his palm.

He stared through eyes so pure a gold that even the rainforest’s green had been stripped from them. The tears that lined the contours of his face dripped to the floor, mingled with the blood to form a patina of red and gold.

VI

In the Gorge of Cusac, many miles east, Hualpa struggled through the snows, clad in a cloak of white alpaca fur. The air in the Gorge was so thin that Hualpa’s heartbeat slowed in his chest and his every movement was sluggish.

Lost, supplies frozen, he was treading ever closer to despair when the first hummingbird, a splash of red against the whiteness, fluttered before his eyes — and then another and another, until a flock hovered above his head. Their wings were edged with frost and their breath blew in flumes of white from their beaks. They flew up against Hualpa and in their silken touch he could feel his father dying. He knew this as surely as he could see the outline of his father’s face in the mountain cliffs.

But even as he wept for his father, his legs became warmer, his breath quicker. He could sense the old Emperor’s spirit all around him: in the birds’ hot wing strokes against the cold; the eyes that reflected intelligence beyond the animal; the honey with which they sustained him; the iridescent arrow they formed in the sky, leading him through the Gorge of Cusac and into southern exile.

VII

It is said that Tupac Amaru survived the torture at Gaspar de Sotelo’s hands long enough to return to Cuzco and be burnt at the stake.

At no time did Tupac Amaru seem aware of the jeering crowds or of the priest who begged him to embrace the European God. He did not blink as his wife was torn apart by four white horses.

His eyes, like glass, reflected nothing, and there was nothing behind them. The flames hovered over his body, those same eyes cracking, then melting. Soon after, the hollow frame tottered, fell, the spirit having long since left it.