The Compass of His Bones and Other Stories (5 page)

THE COMPASS OF HIS BONES

In the summer of 1615, Captain Gaspar de Sotelo, arm of the Viceroyalty in Peru, watches as the last Incan Emperor, Tupac Amaru, burns to death after first accepting Christ and renouncing all land claims. The Emperor burns slowly and his blood turns black as it catches fire and seeps out beneath the branches heaped around him. The Emperor does not scream as once he screamed while being tortured in a tower high above Vilcapampa. Instead, silent, the Emperor stares at Gaspar with a hollow gaze. Gaspar cannot look away. The Emperor takes a long time to die. Gaspar burns as if he were back in the rainforests waiting for the insects to devour him.

Later, after the body has faded to ash and smoke, gray plumes rising into the Cuzco sky, Gaspar finds himself in the courtyard where the execution took place. At his side stands a shadow wrapped in a cloak: Manuel de las Vegas, the Dominican priest who has, since the storming of Vilcapampa, become his companion in all things. Beyond them both stand squat stone houses, mantles covered in honeysuckle, the thick
sweet
of it as disturbing as the smell of corpses. Through the archway to the street, Quichua Indians pass, bearing fruit and vegetables on their backs, leading llamas to market. Ladies of the Viceroyalty pass less often, looking exotic on scented divans borne by native youths. Beneath their feet, the alleys suffer under layers of dirt, garbage, and excrement.

Manuel hands Gaspar the still-warm skull of his enemy. The skull — the freedom of its eye sockets, gaping mouth, hollow nasal cavity — gives Gaspar no answers. As he stares at the skull, he imagines it talks to him. It says, “Nothing is left that can betray my will. Not eyes. Not hands. Not arms. Not legs. Nothing.” Gaspar gives a little laugh. It is hard to concentrate through the layer of sweat that always coats him; never a cool breeze in Cuzco now.

“We’re a long way from Madrid,” Gaspar says as he stares at the skull. “I wonder if the Church knows how far?”

“The Church is not your enemy,” Manuel says. For the Dominican, the laconic has become both law and religion.

“It is not my friend.”

Manuel’s shadow falls upon him. It is a long shadow and sometimes it seems to rustle, as if the darkness of it were composed of a thousand black moths.

“What,” says Manuel, “is your desire?”

A sly smile plays across Gaspar’s lips. What is his desire? To tell the present from the past. To slake his thirst. To distinguish night from day.

“Simply this,” he replies. “Take this skull and have it smoothed and cured and oils applied to it. Fashion it into a compass and candle both, so that it may guide and light our way through this miserable land. Place the skull atop a standard, as you would our beloved flag, and then fasten this standard through a stirrup on my horse, that I may always carry the head of my enemy upon a pole.”

Gaspar stares up at Manuel, slight and effete beneath his robes, hands more weathered than his face. Startling white hands against the black.

“As you wish,” Manuel says.

Gaspar sees nothing in Manuel’s countenance to mock him.

Gaspar and Manuel have never discussed what occurred in the high tower above Vilcapampa, during the Emperor’s torture. From the wounds on Tupac Amaru’s body, wherever he bled, black-and-crimson hummingbirds had burst forth and flown into the greater wound of the sky. Until the blood had dried and the Emperor had stopped his moaning. Gaspar and Manuel had stood there, unable to believe.

Gaspar has blocked it from memory. He knows it happened, but at best it remains a fluttering at the edge of his vision, an event from a fever dream. The shock of it still frightens him during his sleep. He wakes now with a sharp, upward lunging motion that, as he will not or cannot admit, mimics the hummingbirds rising from the Emperor’s body. Where had they gone? What had they meant? Their crimson bodies had been like flakes of blood against the mountains outside the window.

“I dreamt of nightmares within nightmares last night,” he tells Manuel sometimes. To which Manuel replies, “Nothing in dream is real.” Or in waking life, Gaspar thinks. Or in that place between sleep and wakefulness, the twilight he inhabits more and more. He is always sweating, the coolness of Cuzco given way to heat. And the plains below the plateau of the city have faded away into a heat-inflicting haze. And the insects are ever-present around him, reminding him of the hummingbirds.

If he saw a hummingbird now, he might not recover.

Even in letters to his wife Isabel, a beauty with raven hair that he has not seen in several years, Gaspar cannot express what he has seen. He sits in his office near the barracks and stares at her portrait on the wall — an image more real to him than her face in his memory. Behind her, a window, and through the window, a wide lawn, with a church in the background. Sometimes he wishes he could step through the portrait back into Spain. Sometimes he wonders why the scene in the portrait seems so unfamiliar to him. He searches his memory for that moment, sun-drenched and far away, but cannot find it. Maybe someday it will find him.

Gaspar reads poorly, and his writing is painful, simple. It is Manuel who takes the words from his Captain’s mouth and translates them into missives Isabel might appreciate, if read to her by their son’s tutor. The first time Gaspar wrote to her after the Emperor’s death, it seemed like a confession. Although Gaspar could not tell her, through Manuel, what had really happened to him. The closest he came was this: “After the Emperor would not divulge his secrets, Manuel administered the last rites and we brought him to Cuzco in an ox cart.” Something in this statement seems true. Something in what it denied calms him even now.

Later, when he is alone, he tries to compose his own letters to his wife, his fingers soon black with ink, raw. He does not want Manuel writing for him anymore. He knows the priest changes things, although he does not know what. He knows that he himself has changed, but he does not know how. The clues are few enough. Finally he gives up, lets the ink dry on his hands. Lets the sweat trickle down his back.

The Viceroy requested Gaspar’s presence, to report on the taking of Vilcapampa, as soon as he returned to Cuzco. Gaspar has resisted the request for days, uncertain of what he might say to the man. What was the truth? What would be seen as lies? He knows what the Viceroy wants. He does not want to give it to him.

Gaspar hears a flurry of beating wings, but when he looks up, the sky is empty.

Two days later, Tupac Amaru’s skull graces the top of a pole fastened through a stirrup on Gaspar’s horse. Everywhere Gaspar rides through the cobblestone streets, the light of the Spanish conquest shines within the burnt skull of the Incan Emperor. As Gaspar wanders without purpose, without need, it seems for long moments that he stares through the Emperor’s eye sockets.

The gleam of gold has spread across so many eyes in Cuzco that it unnerves even Gaspar. Many of his soldiers use the blankness of the Quichua stare to justify their plunder, yet have become blind to the film of gold closing over their own pupils. Sometimes Gaspar wonders if he controls his men or if they control him. Already, many of them want to be released from duty to pursue the dream of an
encomienda.
Gaspar refuses to share these concerns with Manuel. What if the priest accuses him of weakness?

At dusk, he pretends he stares through the Emperor’s eyes at the torches lining the streets.

“I must take you to the Viceroy,” Manuel finally tells him, on the fourth day of Gaspar’s random journeys across the city with the Emperor’s skull.

Gaspar laughs. The portrait of his wife is particularly distant that morning as they stand in the middle of a street, gutters filthy with the entrails of slaughtered chickens and soggy decaying tobacco leaves. His beard holds evidence of two nights haunting military barracks and their homemade wineries. The inside of his mouth feels raw and viscous. Although he does not have the staff with him, he can feel the presence of the skull, there, in the street with him.

“It’s simple enough, Manuel. You can tell the Viceroy yourself. ‘After the Emperor would not divulge his secrets, we administered the last rites. And although the Emperor seemed dead to the world, we hauled him back to Cuzco in an ox cart, where we burned him to death.’ What more is there for me to tell?”

Manuel shrugs. “Not much, of course, but you must tell it to him in person.”

Gaspar sits down on an overturned barrel to conceal a shudder. For a moment, Manuel’s face had been a death’s head, a leering vision of the enemy.

“Manuel, did anything else happen?”

“What do you mean?”

“Up there. Vilcapampa. While we were with Tupac.”

“I still don’t know what you mean,” Manuel says. Gaspar can feel his frown.

Around them stagger badly hung-over soldiers who gambled away their pay the night before. Beyond, the mountains, a searing white.

The next morning, Gaspar meets with the Viceroy. The Viceroy is an expressionless man with a big belly, who has taken to consorting with prostitutes. According to the physician Gaspar and the Viceroy both share, the Viceroy is already displaying symptoms: a burning when he pisses and sores upon his member.

The Viceroy, dressed in opulent waistcoat and scented wig, seems to float behind his desk, hovering just off the floor. The staff with the Emperor’s head upon it stands beside Gaspar’s chair. Dust-heavy light flows from the open window. From below, Gaspar hears the sounds of slaughter that have followed him from Vilcapampa.

Patches of light and dark across the floor. Does the staff rise above the ground?

Gaspar leans forward. “I bring you the skull of our enemy.”

The Viceroy smiles, ignores Gaspar’s shaking, outstretched hand, ignores the skull.

Gaspar begins to shiver. “The Emperor’s wounds,” he says. “They seemed to . . . close . . . to heal . . . and out of them came . . . birds . . . hummingbirds . . . ”

The floating Viceroy smiles but does not reply.

Outside the window, an old Quichua stands atop a crumbling watchtower, watching him. The armies of the Inca have gathered. The world is silent.

The next day, Gaspar sets out toward the heart of the cloud forests that cling to the Andean mountainsides. He has told Manuel that the Viceroy has granted his request to lead his men on another expedition. Perhaps the Viceroy did, perhaps he didn’t.

The priest sits high upon his horse of sable and Gaspar rides beside him, the skull of his enemy atop its pole. In front of them, slowing their passage, fifty foot soldiers, their armor and thick leathers dull from constant use, their faces pinched from breathing in the thin air, their expressions, by necessity, grim.

They follow a dirt path fashioned by the Quichua that, like the Vilcapampa River, changes course year after year, traveling where it will or where human feet tread upon it. The dirt clings to the horses’ shoes. It smells to Gaspar like the sharp bite of Spanish whiskey just opened from the flask. The branches of low trees that soon surround and then cover them brush against his forearms and leave their smell in the form of crushed leaves. The sunlight grows mottled and indistinct through the branches. The rising humidity sucks away his breath, makes him sweat more heavily beneath his leathers.

They have food for ten days; when Manuel asked him why not more, Gaspar waved off his concern, says, “We can live off the land.”

When Manuel asks why Gaspar has chosen this particular path, the horses nervous under them, the men uncertain as to their mission, Gaspar tells him, “It is as good any other.” His thoughts are already drifting to his wife, back to Barcelona. Fantasies of returning there drift pleasantly through his head.

The path leads through the southern Andes and into an area of intense jungle through which flows the westernmost branches of a mighty river patrolled by Amazons. He could, he thinks, have told Manuel that it is the route most likely to be used by fleeing members of Tupac’s court, or of other refugees flushed out by the destruction of Vilcapampa. But that is not why he has chosen the path. He has chosen it because it provides the quickest way to leave both Cuzco and Vilcapampa behind.

As they trek, hours turn, liquid and fetid, into days. The slap of leather against armor has taken on a rhythmic quality. It mesmerizes with its certainty. Gaspar finds his gaze wandering as he ignores Manuel’s increasing concern over their path. They have not encountered anyone for four days. They have been traveling for six days. How long should they continue before turning back?

But Gaspar finds his gaze drifting. Insects capture his attention. He remembers the Viceroy once telling him that Spain’s greatest scientists believed decaying bodies turned into insects and beetles. If this was true, could they also turn into hummingbirds?

Gaspar’s gaze becomes more precise. He cannot focus on Manuel at his side, or his complaining soldiers, but he can see a rhinoceros beetle lumbering away across the forest floor, its horned head swinging blindly, the metallic hue of its back catching glints of sunlight. Clever-quick snout beetles with long heads that become a down-curved beak with green pincers, and undulating along the trunks of trees, benchua: slugs thin as a wafer until they suck blood and become sated, their sharp mouthparts grinding away against flesh; treehoppers with the gold and black of the executioner’s axe upon their heads; springtails, primitive, wingless creatures pinhead small, black and fuzzy; walking stick grasshoppers with close-set eyes, antennae concentrated on a narrow extension, wingless, mute, and deaf, with long, thin back legs; blue-green darners or “mosquito hawks” zipping in and out of swarms of midges . . .