Silver, Sword, and Stone

by Marie Arana

  Today the ritual planting of three hearth stones is still practiced by the people of Central America. Often without knowing quite why, descendants of the Mayans or Aztecs will insist on placing three solid rocks at the foot of their buildings or installing three mortar stones in their kitchens, with the simple explanation that if a stool needs three legs for stability, so does a human abode. In such ways does the centrality of stone persist in the lives of Latin American Indians, who continue to hold a profound reverence for nature and a firm conviction that they are custodians of a sacred life cycle. As one Aymara candidate of the indigenist party said to potential voters in Qhunqhu Liqiliqi, Bolivia, as he plucked a random rock from the ground and held it toward the sun, “We are this stone.” Then, turning it in his hand, he parsed it more closely for his listeners, lest there be any doubt: “This stone is us.” It was a declaration of affiliation, reciprocity, and responsibility to nature. But it was also a statement of faith.

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  The ancient indigenous cultures of Latin America may have been surrounded by oceans on all sides, isolated, hermetical, unknown to the rest of the world, but their highly developed religions and profound curiosity about the world—about the why of things—made for exuberant intellectual pursuits. The Mayans, for one, who still populate Central America, are heirs to almost three thousand years of cultivated history, all of it informed by an ancient faith. When Britain and Northern Europe were still being overrun by wild, primitive tribes, the Mayans had built great temples, invented hieroglyphic writing, devised an advanced numbering system sophisticated for its use of zero, and fashioned a calendar meant to advance the science of astronomy. Indeed, the formula to count days devised by Mayan priests in the sixth century was more accurate than European versions until Pope Gregory XIII installed the Gregorian calendar nearly a thousand years later. To cultures such as the Maya, Toltec, or Inca, science and religion were partners, working hand in hand to explain the mysteries of the world rather than stand contest for its souls.

  Copán, in what is now Honduras, was the intellectual seat of the Mayans, a grand university city in which one of the most extensive displays of hieroglyphics can still be seen. Most of the codices are now gone, to be sure, destroyed in the blazing bonfires the Spanish conquerors held in their zeal to Christianize the hemisphere, but we see evidence of Mayan spirituality in books that have survived—the Popol Vuh, the Chilám Balám—which are replete with poetry, mythology, and a litany of beliefs that have not been extinguished completely in the Mayan people. Indeed, the pyramids built throughout the great expanse of present-day Mexico—not just by Mayans but also by Olmecs, Toltecs, Zapotecs, Aztecs—stand as imposing testimony to an abiding faith. The six that adorn the ancient city of Tikal in Guatemala are triumphs of architecture, towering belvederes meant to survey a sweeping panorama of empire. The pyramid at Cholula—now a sprawl of stony ruin—was larger, grander than any that the Egyptian King Cheops built. The pyramid at Chichén-Itzá is remarkable for its star-gazing observatory and a vast, becolumned ball court, a tribute to the god of air, wind, and wisdom. The Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacán was the preeminent religious site in all pre-Columbian America and, in its time, one of the most teeming, populous cities of the ancient world.

  Although historians can find no traceable communication between ancient Mexico and Peru, there are clear parallels in the religious iconography and spiritual lives of the people. Even as Olmecs and Mayans were raising temples to their gods, the nations that inhabited desert and mountain thousands of miles to the south—the Moche, Wari, and Tiwanaku—were building formidable monuments to strikingly similar deities: the omnipotent sun, the fecund earth, the fickle rains, the volatile sea. More striking still is how influences seemed to travel across inhospitable terrain: the Peruvian archaeologist Julio C. Tello discovered ruins on the Bolivian plateau that anticipate the architectural style of Peru’s most ancient structure, the spectacular underground labyrinth of corridors called Chavín de Huántar, built a cordillera away and hundreds of years later. There are many such examples in which discrete cultures in the Andes echoed and mirrored one another, although they would not be joined politically until many centuries later when the Incas dominated a vast empire that stretched from Ecuador to Argentina. The same could be said of the various cultures conquered by the Mexicas, from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific. These interconnections seem logical: the distances are not overwhelming. Yet images of mystically charged creatures—fanged serpents, great cats, lizards, spiders, hummingbirds—appear in dramatically different topographies and in diverse mediums, from metal to stone, and from Mexico to Paraguay. The artifacts, like connective tissue, reveal the gods and precepts that were held in common: the sun, the moon, the earth; the essential sexuality of nature; the humanlike fallibility of the sacred world. Even more startling are the similarities in interpretation. Take, for instance, the adoration of a sorcerous, fiendish, but ultimately fertile female figure, whether she be the Lady of Cao, a tattooed, spider-bedecked, bloody-minded queen who ruled the coast of Peru more than fifteen centuries ago; or the mythical Earth Mother, Coatlicue—Aztec goddess of womb and tomb, creation and ruin, birther and destroyer of men—whose snake-skirted, ghoulish likeness is graven in stone thousands of miles away.

  There are curious correlations, too, in myths of creation. According to one Andean legend, the god Viracocha forged man not once, but twice. On his first attempt, he fashioned a lumbering, brainless race, which he despised and quickly turned to stone. His second creation was shaped from smaller stones, perhaps even hardened clay, and the issue pleased him. Apart from conceiving all earthly life and all heavenly bodies, Viracocha, whose name means “foam of the sea,” was a natural teacher, committed to wandering his newly wrought world to impart his wisdom. He was bearded—a curious feature for the god of a race virtually free of body hair—tall, inordinately wise, and, as some Spanish chronicles tell it for obvious reasons, fair skinned. When, in his peregrinations, he finally reached the coast, he sailed off into the Pacific, vowing to return someday, although he was never to be seen again. Viracocha’s semblance is ubiquitous, rampant throughout the heartland of South America; clutching two thunderbolts, ringed by the sun’s rays, preserved for all time in metal or stone. So beloved a figure was he that a later ruler, the Lord Inca Viracocha, eventually took his name.

  Remarkable as it may seem, the creator god of the Aztecs, too, was reputed to be tall, bearded, and, according to some chroniclers, fair and blue eyed. He was “the plumed serpent” Quetzalcoatl, a protean figure who, it was said, would be reborn for each period of history, manifesting a different face every time. When the theologian Joseph Campbell set out to document the distinct manifestations of Quetzalcoatl, he quickly found that there were no fewer than a thousand of them, minted to appeal to specific peoples, specific regions. All the same, Quetzalcoatl, like his Andean counterpart Viracocha, represented heaven and earth: the radiant, orderly forces of a star-studded sky as well as the chaotic, generative powers of land and sea. For Incas as well as Aztecs, the worship of mysterious yet essential life forces was paramount. Just as believers today petition a Christian, Muslim, or Jewish god—along with a miscellany of saints and subalterns—to save their souls, the indigenous appealed to the Sun God and his attendant minions to allow them to harness nature. Toward that end, the conquering civilizations of South and Central America erected mighty temples, subjugated and converted alien tribes. The effort required a churning, uninterrupted mill of human lives—as slave labor, as sacrifices, as worshipers—a glorious, ever-expanding, continually evangelized mass of the faithful to ensure better rains, better sun, better harvests.

  FOLLOW ME

  Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey.

  —Matthew 28:19–20

  Xavier Albó knew very well that his chief obligation to the Church would be to preach the Gospel and bring souls to Je
sus, as it had been for every Jesuit friar entering the priesthood to emulate Saint Paul making his missionary journey to Cyprus. That commitment would change over the years and become something new—something deeper—but at the tender age of seventeen, with the weight of the Vatican’s Department of Missions upon him, Xavier’s goals were simple: he hoped to be educated, to grow, and to learn to communicate directly, meaningfully with those whose souls would be his responsibility. These were the thoughts uppermost in his mind as he wandered the Argentine capital, marveling at its mighty monuments, its evident political power, and the roiling humanity that surged through its rain-soaked, funereal streets, mourning the death of a beloved first lady. Even as Xavier booked his railway passage to Bolivia, another adolescent boy, Jorge Bergoglio, future Jesuit and pontiff, sat in a church on the other side of Buenos Aires, and glimpsed his destiny—a moment that presented itself to him with such physical force that he would describe it as being thrown from a horse, just as Saint Paul once had been. The paths of these two young Jesuits would not cross for another sixty-four years.

  As Xavier’s train lurched its way to Cochabamba, Bolivia, his window revealed a world he hadn’t imagined in his most improbable dreams. Months before, sure that he would be assigned to the mission in Bombay, he had read everything on India his school could offer. But Pope Pius XII had urged the Church to send its young to Latin America, where Communism was taking root and threatened to unleash a wave of atheism among the poor. The younger and callower the novitiates, was the thinking, the more easily they would insert themselves into the population. Now, as the Argentine pampas scrolled by and the train heaved its way toward the airless heights of the Andes, Xavier realized how truly raw he was, how little he knew, how disadvantaged he was in his chosen profession. He had read little about these lands before his ship had skimmed to shore and dropped anchor in the port of Buenos Aires. The first he had heard of Eva Perón was on board, when the Argentine captain had called for fifteen minutes of silence, and a member of the crew read aloud an entire chapter from Evita’s memoir, La Razón de Mi Vida, The Reason of My Life. Now, as his train puffed its way from the farmlands beyond the capital to the cactus plains of Tucumán, he could see Evita’s likeness enshrined in every station. It was worship, pure and simple, and he was taken aback by its intensity. Evita, a former actress—and not a very good one—had made a career of establishing schools, orphanages, old-age homes, hospitals, charitable institutions, and encouraging woman’s suffrage. She had done the kind of work missions strove to do.

  By the time Xavier arrived in Cochabamba, he had learned a thing or two. Bolivia was nothing like Argentina. Whereas Buenos Aires was largely white, its population overwhelmingly European and purged of Indian blood, the country to which he would devote the rest of his life was markedly indigenous. Women, even the poorest among them, wore colorful, layered skirts (polleras), bowler hats, and long braids that signaled their marital status: loose if they were single, tied if they were married, sometimes plaited with black fringe if they were widows. Men were broad shouldered, deliberate, somber. He watched as they scurried vigorously down dusty trails or herded animals from field to field. One face after another glanced up from the rugged landscape to gaze at the boy in the lumbering iron behemoth, and, with each, he felt he had passed into a distinct—and timeless—universe. There were farmers with ruddy countenances, hewing tumescent stalks of quinoa; little girls tottering down hillsides with babies strapped to their backs; women squatting on brightly colored cloths, displaying cures for fertility, cataracts, leprosy; laughing boys running by, shouting up, offering him baby llamas; a lone fisherman in a canoe, slipping quietly past on a mud-brown river; laborers arguing in a cantina, drunk. These were his flock. It would be his job to love them.

  Xavier had long sensed his calling was not to the priesthood as much as to missionary work. An adventurous, curious boy with a friendly and jovial streak, he was there to learn as much as to teach. He had not wanted to pursue a life of the cloth in a familiar place, in a Spanish town. Now, transplanted to a completely unfamiliar country, he looked around with a joy he had never felt before. There was plenty for him to learn here. The light-skinned Bolivians in Cochabamba who welcomed the novitiates and invited them to their sumptuous homes—those who had always held the power and the purse strings—seemed familiar enough, to be sure. They spoke Spanish, owned all there was to own, controlled 92 percent of the cultivable land, felt entitled to the nation’s riches, and had enjoyed privileges for hundreds of years. But the people he had seen from the train window, the Quechua and Aymara—the humble, the poor, the laborers, the mountain folk—were the ones Xavier most wanted to know. As it happened, the country had just been convulsed by a violent wave of revolution that had swept through only months before his arrival. The Bolivians he had been watching were poised on the verge of change. Xavier could not possibly know it, but the people around him were lit with a sense that the world had turned, the god of revolution Pachacuti had sent it topsy-turvy, and the last would now be the first.

  Xavier, shuttled by the Jesuits to his new quarters in Cochabamba and cloistered in a school where he would acquire a prodigious command of Quechua, would not learn about that revolution for some time. Studying the language of the land even as chickens and pigs wandered in and out of his classroom, he was blissfully unaware that the world outside was bubbling with a sense of newness; that it had made a cataclysmic transition. He had no idea that, for years, young intellectuals, frustrated with Bolivia’s conservative rule—its rank oppression, its economic inefficiencies, its abject surrender to the demands of foreign bosses—had championed indianismo, a conviction that the country needed to return to ancient roots and a better organized, more broadly representative Socialist state akin to that of the Incas. The white elites and their puppet generals had brought nothing but misery. Only two decades before, they had presided over a humiliating war with Paraguay in which the country had sacrificed sixty-five thousand lives and a vast expanse of land—the oil-rich scrub of the Gran Chaco. For years, Chile, Peru, Argentina, and Brazil had hacked at Bolivia’s borders, sensing a weak player. But it was Bolivia’s own oligarchs—its tin mine owners, its rural landowners, its generals—and its old, repressive power structure, that had tyrannized the ordinary worker, sold out to foreign corporations, given away its riches, and brought rampant hunger to the people.

  In 1946, in a fit of discontent, the people had thrown the government from power, abducted their president, Gualberto Villaroel, and hanged him from a lamppost outside the presidential palace. A turbulent five years followed. None of this was surprising: Bolivia had undergone 178 popular uprisings since its independence from Spain little more than a century before. These bouts of belligerence had paralyzed the economy, but they had been quashed easily by the powers that be. All the same, on April 9, 1952, even as Xavier Albó was sailing toward Buenos Aires en route to that country, Bolivia’s National Revolutionary Movement declared itself a champion to beleaguered Bolivians, seized military arsenals in La Paz, and began distributing arms to citizens. Gunslinging miners from as far away as Potosí swarmed into the capital and blocked the army from seizing advantage. After three days of brutal fighting, and despite all efforts by the US government to thwart the rebels, the military surrendered, and a newly elected president, former economics professor Victor Paz Estenssoro, took the reins, sending a rare jolt of possibility into the rural hinterland. Almost immediately, Paz Estenssoro extended universal suffrage to all, including the most remote and illiterate. Just as immediately, he nationalized the country’s mines—along with the world’s legendary source of silver, the global economic catalyst Potosí—and instituted an agrarian reform that abolished forced labor and redistributed land to indigenous farmers. It was to this newly invented world that Xavier had come.

  * * *

  Xavier had been a victim of cultural imperialism all his life. As a speaker of Catalan, he belonged to a population that had suffered linguistic subjugatio
n since the twelfth century, when Aragón had annexed the thriving, exuberantly independent people of Catalonia. Growing up under Generalísimo Franco’s boot, he had been allowed to use the language of his ancestors only within the walls of his home, not in public places. He could empathize with the anguish of colonialism, the suppression and extermination of a native dialect for “the good” of the state. He knew what it must mean for the Quechua, speakers of an ancient tongue, to lose their children to an alien culture.

  Getting to know the gentle, warmhearted Bolivians who welcomed him to that paradisiacal neighborhood where he was to train in the sacristy and learn their language—the jovial cook, the toothless caretaker, the friendly shopkeeper, the busy passersby—he began learning something more. Xavier began to hear about the difficult history through which they had passed. There was, of course, the revolution that had just rocked the country, sparked by miners who had borne the brunt of punishing demands for centuries. Before that, the dark, violent days of colonial rule. But even before all that, when conquering Incas had swept through these lands, annexing tribes, imposing their faith, and demanding their captives’ labor, life had been harsh for these people. Sacrifices had been legion. No salve to the conquered masses, the ancient religions had made blood demands.