City of Silver

by Annamaria Alfieri

  Holding her breath, Inez gently turned the latch of her mother’s door, entered, and in a flash exited again by the servants’ door opposite. The stairway led her quickly through the kitchen and out to the silent, stone-paved street.

  BEHIND THE DRAPERIES of her disarrayed bed, Ana Rojas de la Morada smiled. Her daughter probably assumed she was asleep when she stole through the room. But Ana waited each night to see if she would hear the faint click of the latch and to sense, not quite to hear, her daughter moving through the room, to revel in this betrayal her husband so deserved.

  Husband and daughter both despised her. And she had learned to despise them in return.

  She giggled, like the lovely, lively girl she had been when her bankrupt noble father gave her to Francisco Morada in marriage. Morada, the commoner who dragged her from her elegant, benign Lima to this money-grubbing Gomorrah with its intolerable society and unbreathable air. From the first, she had loathed her boorish clown of a lowborn husband—his coarse speech, his rough manners—everything about him, except his sex. On her wedding night, Francisco had taken his pleasure of her without regard to hers. But even as a girl she had learned to find her own satisfaction alone behind the curtains of her virgin bed. With him, she discovered that the same fantasies that had served her before their marriage brought her to ecstasy as he moved within her. Each night, when she lay down and drew the finely embroidered marriage linen over her, she welcomed the only part of him that interested her—what he thrust through the slit in the sheet.

  He was intense. He believed that true vigor in their coupling would give him a son. To her enormous gratification, he had kept at it nightly for almost a year before he impregnated her.

  She brought forth Inez.

  When he returned to her bed three months after the birth, he came with increased energy and stamina. For more than two years, she did not conceive, but she had him nightly, giving her pleasure beyond her imagining and, as was seemly, completely without his knowledge.

  When she gave him Gemita, another daughter, in return, he gave up.

  At first she had tried to persuade him to return to her, reminded him that it was their duty to procreate as God had ordained. She had even said she wanted to give him a noble son. Noble was a word that she thought would entice him, since noble was what she was and what he longed to be. But that common worm of a social pretender had had the gall to reject her.

  “I want no other child but Inez,” he had said, as if the second dainty pink infant in the cot were nothing to him. Inez was then barely four years old, yet father and daughter were bound in a potent rapport that was to grow and blossom and make Inez dearer to him than any son could be. Or any wife.

  Ana grinned. Weakling that he was under all his bluster, he adored his daughter. He thought he knew her.

  The mother rose and glanced through the shutters at the shadowy figure disappearing down the deserted street. When he discovered Inez had gone out into the night, it would wound him worse than the knife Ana dreamed of plunging again and again and again into his flesh.

  JUST BEFORE DAWN the next morning as she rose to go to the chapel to chant Matins and Lauds, Mother Maria Santa Hilda, Abbess of the Convent of Santa Isabella de los Santos Milagros, was called urgently to the door of her cloistered abbey. There she found Inez de la Morada begging in a shaky voice to be let in.

  The Abbess sent the Sister Porter to the chapel to ask the Mistress of Novices to lead the morning prayers. Then she led Inez into the refectory, lit a candle, and sat beside the girl.

  Inez’s beautiful oval face was pale, her blue eyes wary and red-rimmed. She had the face of a Madonna, except that she often betrayed emotions stronger than those ever portrayed in representations of Our Lady. “What is it, my child?” the Abbess asked.

  The girl paused and then began to sob. “I have seen the error of my ways, Mother Maria. I want to enter here and atone for the sins of the world.” She reached out and gripped the Abbess’s hand.

  Maria Santa Hilda held the girl’s small white fingers. Inez was seventeen, an age at which the self-sacrifice of the cloister held a romantic allure, when what seemed like a call to God’s service could be real or just a beautiful but superficial dream. And an age when fathers sought to choose husbands for their daughters and when some daughters preferred a life with God to submission to a man they found odious.

  The look in the girl’s eyes was fear, the Abbess thought. “Why today, at this hour, Inez? You are distraught.”

  The girl’s mouth opened and closed. She was struggling with the truth, it was clear.

  “Is it something your father wants you to do? Someone he wants you to marry?”

  Inez’s eyes brightened for a second, as if the Abbess had hit upon that which she did not want to admit. But they clouded again. She put down her head and wept quietly.

  The Abbess’s heart trembled like the girl’s lips. If defiance of her father, the Alcalde, was the girl’s purpose, aiding her could be dangerous. Francisco Morada would not tolerate anyone interfering with his wishes, especially if it meant coming between him and his daughter.

  The Abbess let go of Inez’s hand and groped for the rosary that hung at her waist. Several of the sisters in this convent had been put here by fathers who had failed to bend their daughters to their wills. But Morada was no ordinary case. He was the Alcalde—the Mayor of Potosí—and he loved Inez and indulged her beyond what most fathers allowed. Also, he was the convent’s greatest supporter. For the past three years, out of his own purse, he had supplied food and medicine for the hospital the sisters ran for Indian children. If the Abbess helped his daughter defy him, his beneficence might well evaporate.

  She reached out and lifted the girl’s chin. “Tell me the truth,” she demanded.

  “Please, Mother Maria,” Inez pleaded. “I must stay here. It is the only place I will be safe.”

  “Safe?” the Abbess said. “From what?”

  “From sin.”

  THAT SAME MORNING, across the canal in the private quarters of one of the huge ingenios that comprised both the silver refineries and the villas of miners, Pilar, the wife of mining captain Antonio de Bermeo y de Novarra Tovar, sat waiting on her stone balcony carved with exotic vines and images of the planets. Her maid Rosa was late bringing her morning maté. The bright sunshine on Pilar’s back warmed her bones but not her disconsolate heart. She missed her daughter, Beatriz, and cast about in her mind for a way to bring the stubborn, silly girl back home.

  An uproar intruded from the other side of the wall that separated the smelting works from the family’s mansion. The door to the work yard flew open, and the noise grew louder.

  Pilar stood and peered across the inner patio. To her complete astonishment, two pongos carried in something wrapped in a muddy gray blanket. They laid down their bundle on the stone pavement near the fountain. One of them hurried into the ground-floor kitchen.

  In seconds, wailing and screaming streamed out of the kitchen door, and slight and wiry Rosa Yana emerged, black braids flying, and threw herself on the bundle. She tore back the blanket.

  “Dear Mother Mary,” Pilar gasped, and blessed herself over and over. The mangled body of Rosa’s husband, Santiago Yana, one of the miners who toiled in the Tovar lode, lay with limbs askew, in positions one could not imagine on a living person.

  Rosa shook the corpse and shouted at it in Aymara. Ascensia, the scullery maid, stood in the kitchen doorway, her hands over her open mouth.

  Pilar grasped her skirts to keep from tripping on them and sped down the broad stone steps. She took Rosa by the shoulders and tried to lift her away from the pale, crumpled body that used to be her husband.

  “Wake him. Bring him back!” Rosa shouted at her. “Your Jesus came back from the dead. Call your priest. Make him bring back my Santiago. Call the priest.”

  “Rosa. Oh, Rosa. I am so sorry.” Pilar turned and commanded Ascensia, “Get her some maté.”

  “I don’t want tea. I want my Santi
ago.” Rosa turned finally and faced Pilar. “Mistress, I beg you. You believe, you told me you did, that your God brought Jesus back from the dead.” Her black eyes defied Pilar to deny it.

  “Yes,” Pilar whispered.

  “Then make Him bring back my Santiago. Jesus had no wife, no children. Santiago has us. We need him.” She gripped Pilar’s hands and kissed them. “Please, please. Call the priest.”

  “The priest cannot resurrect him.”

  “You said you believed!” Rosa pulled away her hands and raised her fists. Pilar stepped back, away from blows that looked certain to come.

  “Stop this!” Antonio’s voice boomed from the doorway to the ingenio yard.

  At the approach of the master, Rosa crumpled to the ground in a heap of sobs. Under his white-plumed cavalier’s hat, Antonio’s elegant face was grim. He strode to the body of his barretero and looked down on him but said nothing.

  Rosa rose to her knees and scuttled over to Antonio’s feet. She wrapped her arms around his ankles and wailed, “Capitán, I beg you. Call the priest. Make him come and bring Santiago back.”

  Pilar moved closer to her husband and pleaded with him with her eyes. Through the passive expression he feigned, she saw his grief and anger. He peeled Rosa’s arms from around his legs and stood her up as easily as if she had been a child of three. “Santiago should not have been in the mine at night,” he said, as much to Pilar as to Rosa. “This kind of accident befalls people who do what he did.”

  Rosa stiffened. “He did not fall by accident. He was murdered, I am sure of it.”

  Pilar doubted her. “Who would do such a thing?”

  “And why?” Antonio asked.

  “Because of the letters he carried.” As soon as the words were out of her mouth, Rosa’s fingers flew to her lips. “It was a secret.”

  “What letters?” Antonio demanded.

  “We could not read them, but they were dangerous. Santiago said the person who gave them to him said they could kill a man.”

  “Who gave them to him?” Pilar asked.

  Antonio raised an eyebrow. “If you could not read them, how could you know what they were?”

  Pilar put an arm around Rosa’s thin shoulders. It was no sin not to be able to read. She could not read. Her father, like Spaniards of his day, had considered it unseemly for a woman to read.

  “The captain who gave Santiago the papers told him to hide them where they would never be found. That they were dangerous enough to cost a man his life. This is all I know.”

  “Who gave them to him?”

  “I do not know.”

  Antonio crossed his arms over his embroidered doublet. “We found no papers on Santiago.”

  “He went to the mine to get them last night.” Rosa’s face was set in defiance. “He was killed for them.”

  Antonio’s face softened, then hardened again. “How can you know such a thing?” He spread his hands in a gesture of finality and turned to cover Santiago’s body. He instructed the pongos to take it to the chapel at the back of the ingenio. “Send for the padre to bless his body,” he said to Pilar.

  “What can be done?” she said.

  “The death of one Indian will garner no attention.” He wanted to seem as if he didn’t care, but she heard the pity in his voice.

  “Someone should suffer for this,” Pilar said to him quietly. “Suppose what she says is true?”

  “How can we ever know that?” Antonio said. “I will suffer. We will all suffer. The workers are already saying that Santiago died because the mine is cursed.” He drew his black alpaca cloak around him and followed the body out through the door to the ingenio yard.

  Rosa took Pilar’s hand and kissed it over and over. “Please, señora, justice. Please, justice.”

  Pilar took her chin and raised her head. The pleading in Rosa’s expression tore at her soul. She shook her head. Antonio was right. Justice over such a thing seemed as remote as the planets out in the ether. “I will try.” She patted Rosa’s shoulder in a vain attempt to comfort her. “I will talk to Padre Junipero. He cannot bring your Santiago back to life, but he may be able to bring his killer to some form of justice.”

  “Promise me,” Rosa demanded.

  “I promise.” Pilar could not resist saying it, though she knew it was impossible.

  Two

  THREE WEEKS LATER, early on Holy Thursday morning, a powerful black horse stamped impatiently against the cobblestones outside the Convent of Santa Isabella de los Santos Milagros. He snorted a stream of white steam, which clouded around his elegant head. A rider in a black cape slid from the richly adorned leather-and-silver saddle and approached the carved stone portal of the convent.

  From behind the heavy jalousies of her cell window, Mother Maria Santa Hilda recognized the short, stout rider carrying the canvas-wrapped parcel—Don Felipe Ramirez, an official of the city government. The Abbess knew immediately what he wanted and sent the sturdy maid Juana to meet him. More silver for the convent’s depository. The safekeeping of silver for wealthy families was just another responsibility that weighed on the Abbess.

  She turned from the window and knelt before the huge crucifix that was the only adornment of her spartan room. The patrician face she turned up in supplication revealed desperation and confusion. “Dearest Lord,” she murmured. In years of silence imposed by the rules of her contemplative order, she had developed the unconscious habit of speaking aloud her private prayers. “What am I to do? I want to do Your will.” But how could she know God’s will? So many times in her life she heard others call something God’s will when she saw it was really their own.

  Her present dilemma was of her own making. She had always overindulged Inez de la Morada, who as a spirited seven-year-old first came to the convent with other daughters of rich families to learn comportment and needlework. Her tiny feet danced more than walked. Her speech filled the rooms with music and laughter. She seemed a prize, and the Abbess had sought to win her. By the time she was ten, whenever she wanted something—an extra helping of sweetmeats or another girl to let her win in a game—her worldly-wise, large blue eyes would go blank just for a second. And the next thing she said would be disarmingly charming. In those moments, the girl was more like an enchanted doll than one of God’s creatures. Yet when Inez protested her love or her innocence, it was impossible not to believe her.

  “Dearest Lord, forgive me,” Maria Santa Hilda whispered up to the passive countenance under the crown of thorns. “If you had granted me marriage and family, instead of a religious vocation, Inez is the daughter I would have wanted.”

  Now, she found herself between God and the girl’s father.

  She crossed herself and gripped her hands together. A vein of envy shot through her admiration for Alcalde Morada’s love of his daughter. It was exactly the sort of love she had sought but failed to win from her own father. Whatever the cause of this rift, the Alcalde and Inez must be re united. But first, the Abbess had to secure the salvation of the girl’s soul. Doing that meant holding out for a while longer against the Alcalde’s demand to have his daughter back. “If I send Inez home now,” Maria Santa Hilda said to the impassive statue, “she threatens to defy her father in another way, become a wanton. Surely this is only a tactic. But she is desperate, and her very soul is at stake.”

  Despite her resolve, the Abbess of Los Milagros knew she must tread as if on spikes. If she offended the Alcalde, he would withdraw his support for the poor. “Must I choose between Inez’s soul and the lives of the poor children in Contumarca and Caricari?” Maria Santa Hilda demanded of the statue on the cross.

  Twice already, she had managed, even in the face of the Bishop’s intervention, to stave off the Alcalde’s commands. Now Morada had grown desperate and the Bishop surly. His Grace had summoned the Abbess for the third time. This morning, he would not be put off. Would the Abbess have the courage to refuse the Bishop yet again? She was afraid. And afraid of being afraid.

  She rose fr
om her knees and prepared to go out into the bone-chilling autumn morning. The wind whipped this bleak land whose reversed seasons made a mockery of the beautiful imagery in the hymns she and her sisters practiced each day in anticipation of Easter. They sang of fields and trees reawakening with the Resurrection of Christ. So it had been in the Spain of her birth. The Spain she longed for but had left when the convent that had been her refuge began to feel like a prison. She had professed to her superiors a calling to do God’s work in New Spain. She admitted only to her confessor that she came to Potosí to give her sterile life some meaning. The guiltiest part of her guilty heart knew she had come not to save souls, but to find employment for her prideful intelligence, an outlet for her passions—for adventure and a taste of the exotic New World.

  The work of saving souls had pursued her across the wide ocean to this place of forbidding beauty and desolation. Here, after four months of grueling travel, she had found a large and well-organized city so like the Spanish city she had left behind in Europe, it seemed a gossamer vision. Dozens of churches, plazas, stone-paved streets with Spanish names, white stucco houses with red-tiled roofs, haciendas surrounding tranquil patios, gurgling fountains, carved stone portals surmounted by coats of arms. Then, just as she had begun to accept that it was Spanish, it surprised her again. The carvings around the doorways of houses and churches were not the expected garlands of grapevines or roses with cherubs. The motifs portrayed instead strange little forest creatures with almost human faces, leaves and vines of the New World, and the faces of Indians with rings in their ears. The work was skillful, and the effect mystical. She knew at once that when she built her convent, she would have it decorated by those artisans. And she had. For fifteen years now, she and the sisters who had come with her and the new sisters born in this far land had prayed and constructed a true Catholic and Spanish holy place, but one of this world, not the old. Yet for all that she had accomplished, saving Inez’s soul could turn out to be the hardest labor of all.