Mexico

by James A. Michener

  At the word “heretical,” Antonio raised his eyebrows and leaned forward. “Did you say heretical?”

  “I used the word now, although I did not do so this afternoon,” the Frenchman replied, “because after I left you in the university square I was joined by three other professors whose names I may not divulge, and it was their opinion, first expressed by Maestro Mateo, that Dominican with the probing mind, that in today’s arguments your father came terribly close to heresy.”

  With the mention of the dread word, Timoteo moved closer to his father, as if to protect him, but Antonio drew back. The Frenchman resumed, “So I have come to advise your father that tomorrow there will be spies in his lecture hall, directed to report to Maestro Mateo, and if your father is a prudent man he will recant his approach to heresy.”

  There was an uneasy pause while the visiting professor and the Palafox sons waited for their father to speak. Finally he said, “Is speculation heresy?”

  “Some things are settled by divine law,” Professor Desmoulins reminded him.

  “But the movement of business and the operation of forces—”

  “Don’t finish the sentence,” the Frenchman begged. To the boys he said as he rose to go, “It’s your duty to prevail upon your father, for he has entered upon a course of reasoning that could end in heresy.”

  At the gate, Desmoulins told the two young men: “I wish you’d accompany me to your father’s lecture tomorrow. I want you to sense for yourselves the danger in which he might find himself.” Antonio explained that he could not join them, since he himself would be teaching at that hour, but Timoteo eagerly accepted: “I’ll see if I can identify the spies that’ve been reporting on Father,” and the four men laughed as if that possibility really were a joke.

  The lecture room was typical of that period, very large, with an earthen floor on which the scholars sat before low wooden benches that served as desks. Each length of wood was deeply carved with the names of girls, some of whom had lived and died in Salamanca more than a hundred years before, inflaming the minds of youthful scholars, then passing on to become fishwives and loom tenders, and finally old crones begging in the plaza.

  The lecture room had only one small window, which shed a cold north light on a stool and a desk at which sat a clerk who kept the roll of the class and who from time to time droned out passages from ancient Latin texts on which Professor Palafox, standing in a kind of elevated pulpit, was required to comment. This morning the clerk chanted a text from the distinguished Córdoban philosopher, Averroës, who in 1190 had made his own interpretation of Saint Augustine’s famous observation: “For who would not rather have his pantry full of meat than mice? This is not strange, for a man will often pay more for a horse than for a servant, for a ring than for a maid.”

  The dark room was hushed when Professor Palafox began speaking. Without committing himself, he referred to Aristotle and Saint Thomas Aquinas. He squared Averroes with Saint Augustine and cited the responses-of learned men from Bologna and Oxford. His erudition was enormous, for speaking without notes he gave in twenty minutes a fairly complete gloss on the text, quoting many authorities verbatim.

  Now came the time when he was required to express his own reaction to the text, and no one moved as he put his hands firmly on the wooden lectern and said, “I hold with Saint Augustine that prudent men will sometimes pay more for an ingenious ring than for a serving maid, for the value that men place upon an object is determined not by any external standard of worth but by their own desire for that object and their estimate of the good its possession will do them.”

  The more critical members of the audience sighed with relief as Palafox firmly supported the traditional Salamanca view regarding these matters, and some even took pleasure from the brilliant manner in which he marshaled his facts in support of the dictates laid down by the pope in Rome.

  “Our Church is on solid ground when it condemns usury as an immoral act in which gold and silver beget profits for which they have done no constructive work. Only a living creature, acting in conformance with the laws of God, can beget another living creature. Gold and silver, being inanimate, must not be allowed to procreate.”

  When the savants applauded this unequivocal proof of his orthodoxy, Palafox sought to quench any flicker of doubt about his doctrinal purity by reconfirming the Salamancan dogma:

  “As we terminate this thoughtful convocation, let us restate the permanent truth that these difficult matters will be settled as they have always been settled, by our wise attention to the will of God, by our careful study of His word, and by the learned dictates of His church. It is inconceivable that the truth could reside outside these sources, and it is our duty to reconcile our business behavior to the truth as it shall be revealed. Thus there can be no quarrel between the merchant and the Church, the peasant and his king, nor Bologna and Oxford. We are all obligated to work within the conscience of the Church.”

  These sentiments rescued Professor Palafox from the charge of heresy. They relieved the anxiety felt by Professor Desmoulins, and they enabled young Antonio Palafox to leave Salamanca with his mind at rest.

  On the first day of May in 1524 Antonio Palafox, a priest of the Franciscan order, said good-bye for the last time to the flower-filled patio of the professor’s house and marched down to the riverbank to join a military party that had assembled for the long and dangerous march to Seville. He was accompanied, in this part of the journey, by his father, a man who was not afraid to express emotion at the milestones of life and therefore wept, and by hard-muscled Timoteo, who was already vacillating between the priesthood and the army. The three proceeded to the Roman bridge, where a confused and apprehensive group of travelers was receiving harsh marching orders from the captain who would be responsible for their safety.

  “Will you pray for us?” Professor Palafox asked his son, and the three stood aside from the others while the tall young priest asked for blessing upon their various ventures.

  “You!” the captain shouted. “This horse is for you.”

  With agility Fray Antonio leaped astride the animal and moved to the head of the column, from which he turned for one last glance at his father, the spires of the great University of Salamanca, and the benevolent little alleys down which he would run no more. The captain shouted “Hallooo!” and the ungainly troop started across the bridge.

  On the other side of the river the captain abandoned the principal highway, which led down the west side of Spain, and turned sharply toward the southeast, whose forbidding mountains he would have to penetrate on his journey to the capital city of Toledo, where an additional complement of travelers to Seville would be acquired. Riding back and forth along the column, he warned his charges, “We’re entering dangerous territory. Obey commands.” And those on foot, as well as the creaking wagons bearing the luggage and the troops at the rear, drew closer together.

  As Fray Antonio rode toward the mountains he had a chance to see how glorious the peak of springtime could be in Spain, for he was attended by a swooping covey of red-and-gold birds whose wingtips seemed to have been dipped in bronze. The bee-eaters of the central plateau, they were exquisite in the sunlight, and the young priest wondered sadly whether he would ever see such brilliant creatures in Mexico.

  The hillsides glowed with yellow gorse, protected by old pine trees whose lower branches had been torn off by peasants seeking firewood. The gnarled cork trees, their valuable skin peeled back year after year, were home to hawks, those swift, fiery, dedicated birds who policed the highways as Spain policed the oceans.

  Wherever Antonio looked there were red poppies and buttercups and daisies and blue cornflowers—the entire countryside appeared to be almost an extension of his father’s patio garden. But what impressed him most was something he had not seen before, and in his memoirs, from which I am drawing for this account, he referred to this as a kind of benediction for his departure from Salamanca: “There were before us constantly as we rode a breed o
f swallows who dipped and swerved across our path as if with their wings they were bidding us Godspeed.”

  It was no mean thing, in the year 1524, to be a young Spaniard on his way from the world’s principal university to the compelling wonders of Spain’s new colony in Mexico. Spain was then the major nation of the world, with no near competitor in sight. It controlled the landmass of Europe and ruled the oceans. The New World was Spain’s, and the mines of Mexico and Peru were beginning to pour into Seville that constant supply of gold and silver which was to further enrich the wealthy. The most learned scholars were Spanish, as were the foremost admirals, the shrewdest money changers and the best weavers. In 1524 England was a puny power and France was torn with dissension. Germany was nothing and the Italian states were mere appendages to Spanish dominion.

  What was even more important, however, was that Spain formed the powerful right arm of the Catholic Church and was the source from which the popes derived their temporal power and their security. The Spanish people, freed from the yoke of Islam as recently as 1492, knew how to appreciate the sweet blessings of their Church and were more willing than the citizens of any other European nation to dedicate their lives and their wealth to its support.

  Therefore, to be a vigorous young Spaniard in 1524 was to be a man at the very center of world power, a man secure in the conviction that he represented the leading nation on earth and the religion that would soon confound schismatics. It was in this spirit that Spaniards set forth to colonize Mexico, and Fray Antonio was pleased when the captain of the troop reprimanded three Flemish merchants who were on their way to Seville and warned them how they must comport themselves.

  “You have to watch these foreigners,” the captain later whispered to the priest, and the latter agreed.

  In this arrogant frame of mind Fray Antonio entered upon the transit of the Guadarrama Mountains, which cut Salamanca off from Toledo, and as the wagons creaked their way up the northern approaches to the summit he could visualize his future clearly: he would spend six or eight years in the Christianization of Mexico, after which he would return to his professorship and to the problem of winning promotion in the Church. But as the troop began its descent along the southern trails it was attacked by the bandits who preyed upon this area. In the battle that ensued several of the marauders were shot and Fray Antonio was called upon to administer extreme unction to a hairy-faced rogue who wished to die with the blessing of his Church. For some nights a vision of the dying man haunted the priest and he reflected: Men’s lives don’t always turn out as they intended—that one may have wanted to be an honorable merchant. The nights were cold, and perhaps they induced in the young priest a fever; in later years he concluded that he had experienced a vision in those mountains.

  One night, trying to find warmth in the thin mattress that covered the cold rocks on which he slept, he looked up at the dark sky and saw the Gothic peaks of the mountains twisting and writhing among the stars, and from this experience came his first vision of himself as the builder of great cities stretching in grandeur across the plains of Mexico. Each city resembled those woodcuts of the previous century that depicted the holy city of God, but whenever Fray Antonio rubbed his eyes to study the cities more closely, their soaring towers became the peaks of the mountains in which the troop was encamped. He watched the dawn come over the Guadarramas, proving again that his imaginary towers were merely mountain crests, and he rose shivering to shake the dream from him. He laughed as he thought, I’m to be in Mexico only eight years, but the city I’ve been dreaming about would take sixty to build. But that night the vision returned stronger than ever, and he awoke that morning in a kind of fear. Am I leaving Spain forever? he asked himself, his heart pounding with anxiety.

  In this kind of semihysteria over the possibility of never seeing Spain again, the young priest allowed his horse to carry him down the last rocky passes and out onto the warm, flowering plain that reached out from the river Tagus, and as the troop marched along its gentle meandering a general excitement overtook them, so that those who had made the trip before began to spur their horses, and the captain hurried up to the laggard priest to warn, “We’d better move to the head of the column or we’ll miss it.”

  “What?” Fray Antonio asked, still distracted by his vision of a tall city.

  “You’ll see,” the captain called back as he led his horse at a gallop to the crest of a hill, where Antonio joined him to look down upon one of the memorable sights of Europe, an allurement that had bewitched the minds of Romans and Vandals and Muslims for nearly two thousand years: the view of Toledo seen from the east, with the city rising high upon a rock, encircled almost completely by a river and its tumbling gorges. In physical grandeur no other city could compare with Toledo, and in the rugged architecture that rose from behind its walls—bastions that had withstood eighty different sieges, some lasting as long as three years—there was a Spanish grandeur that shone in the afternoon sun.

  At his first glimpse of this unparalleled view Fray Antonio cried exultantly, “I shall name my city Toledo!”

  “What city?” the captain asked.

  “The one I’m required to build in Mexico,” Antonio explained, as if he were definitely committed to staying in Mexico for many years.

  “You better get there first,” the captain grunted. “There are pirates.”

  Fray Antonio laughed at the warning and began spurring his horse. “Why the hurry?” the captain asked.

  “We must enter Toledo before they close the gates,” the eager priest replied.

  The captain laughed and said, “We won’t reach the walls before dusk,” and the necessity of camping outside the city was so disappointing to the young priest that he asked if a forced march might not accomplish the entry, but the captain merely asked, “With these wagons?”

  That night as he camped beside the river Tagus outside the walls of Toledo, Antonio was profoundly affected by an epiphany that would have a lasting influence on his life. Of this experience he wrote:

  All through the long night I heard mysterious birds singing in the darkness, birds I did not know and whose plumage I could not guess about, but they talked with me. And across the silent river on whose banks we had pitched our tents I could hear the voices of those within the walled city and I could see flickering lights move back and forth along the battlements and once I heard a watchman call out, “Ho, Esteban!” and I spent more than an hour trying to picture Esteban and what he was doing in Toledo that night.

  I watched the city as it passed through the various phases of the night and it occurred to me, unable as I was to sleep from the excitement of the journey, that most men live outside a walled city and are aware of the life within solely because they hear muffled voices or see flickering lights whose meaning they do not comprehend. Or they hear a man cry “Ho, Esteban!” although who cried or why or who Esteban was or what he was doing they will never know.

  And it seemed to me that we live in this darkness outside the walled city only because of our ignorance. We know neither present life nor the fullness of God’s life hereafter, and it would be wise if we dedicated ourselves to the task of moving from the darkness and into the city of light, where voices speak openly to one another, man to man, and God to man.

  But when these thoughts possessed me a donkey brayed, for it was nearing dawn, and I lay on my pack staring at the walled city, and I thought: But those fortunate ones who are in the city tonight do not appreciate where they are or who they are, and perhaps it is only those of us who camp outside, waiting for admission, who appreciate what the city is.

  And as dawn broke, with our porters making a great noise assembling our party for the fording of the river and our entry into the city, I thought: A city can be truly occupied only by those who appreciate its significance, and it is of no real consequence whether a man be within the walls or out, so long as he has aspiration. And I concluded that faith is of this character, and it alone saves men; for when toward nine we entere
d the gateway through the powerful walls the city inside was nothing of what I had imagined, and I was happier outside at night attended by the mysterious birds and hope than I was inside, for Toledo is much more compelling seen from across the river than it is inside the walls.

  In 1524 Toledo was a city of spiritual grandeur rather than one of worldly display, for only recently it had suffered from communal riots that had destroyed the city’s treasures and many buildings. But in rebuilding from the somber ruins the Catholic Church had made the city the spiritual head of Spain, and from within its walls the kings of Spain ruled. There were libraries in Toledo and art schools, but there were also smithies where flexible steel swords were forged.

  The sturdy cathedral, more fortress than church, left a deep impression on young Fray Antonio, for it reminded him of something that his father had said about Spain but which he had forgotten. He was kneeling before the high altar to report his safe conduct across the mountains when a beggar, who waited impatiently for the long prayer to finish, finally interrupted with a hoarse whisper, “Father, if, as they say, you’re sailing to Mexico, you must pray at the column on your right.”

  “Why?” the young man asked.

  “It will protect you from pirates,” the beggar whispered.

  “How could that be?” Antonio queried.

  “Because it is the pillar of Abu Walid, the Muslim saint whom we worship in Toledo, and he will save you from his countrymen, who are pirates.” The old beggar asked for alms and shuffled away to tell others of the Muslim who had his place in a Christian cathedral.

  That night, dining at a Franciscan monastery, Antonio asked how it could be that a Muslim was revered as a saint in Toledo, and an older priest explained that centuries ago, when Muslim, Jew and Christian occupied the city in an uneasy truce, King Alfonso gave the Muslims his word that they could live unmolested in Toledo, but during his absence at war, his wife roused the Christians and there was a massacre of the Moors, so that upon his return King Alfonso felt obligated to execute his headstrong queen, but before he could do so, Abu Walid, saintly leader of the Muslims, came to him and reasoned, “King Alfonso, the uprising was a thing of the heat of the moment. The queen and her courtiers must be forgiven by you. They have been by us.”