Mexico

by James A. Michener

  That evening in Seville, while Lady Gray Eyes waited in the noontime heat of Mexico, Fray Antonio, the agency of salvation for whom she waited, rode away disconsolately from the burning plain. Ahead, in equal confusion of spirit, rode the marquis of Guadalquivir, but the crowds through which the horses moved appeared to experience no distress. They had enjoyed the burnings, which brought drama to an otherwise drab week, and their merriment as they trudged back to the city supported the contention of many authorities that a good public execution now and then did wonders for the morale of a city. Furthermore, it demonstrated the cohesiveness of Spain as it gathered strength for the salvation of the New World; Mexico might lie in remote parts of the world, but its presence was constantly felt in Seville, where the galleons stood in the river for all to see.

  Something of this excitement overtook Fray Antonio as he rode through the crowds, so that whereas he was repelled by the populace’s reaction to the burnings, he was nevertheless impressed by their sense of loyalty to the Church and to the nation that buttressed it. Dire enemies like Martin Luther were abroad, and they required strict measures to keep them from polluting both the Church and the country, and he did not doubt that he would encounter the same enemies in Mexico. He hoped that he would have the courage to combat them, but even as he expressed the wish he called to mind the young priest who had tried vainly to save the soul of the Jewish woman as the fires consumed her, and he knew instinctively that it had been this young priest, and not the executioners, who had spoken for humanity and God on that burning afternoon.

  It was in this confused frame of mind that Fray Antonio returned to the center of the city and followed the marquis as the latter rode past the cathedral, past the Moorish tower and across the plaza to his palace. When the two men reached the high wall that protected the residence, they saw that the brass-studded gates were open and that Leticia’s carriage was depositing her in the orange-tree courtyard. Seeing her father approach, she waited in the doorway while the carriage wheeled about the graveled circle and departed. She now ran up to him crying, “You looked handsome in the procession, Father.”

  “I was surprised to see you—especially at the stakes,” he said reprovingly, but his words had little effect on Leticia, who led the way into the arabesque interior, saying, “I’m starved. We’ll eat now.”

  But the marquis was still distraught from the death of his former companion and could not erase from his memory the eyes of the bewitched man as he stared back through the flames, so he told his daughter, “Arrange for us to eat a little later. Father Antonio and I will be in the garden.” He led the priest into the private garden, where the Roman columns reminded him of the stakes at which the heretics had burned. When he was alone with the young priest he abandoned the caution that had marked the discussion on Saturday night and said with visible agitation, “No man can predict where this will end. Even as I was pleading with my friend to recant, the Dominicans were marking me. I could be next … or the emperor.” He strode back and forth along the garden paths for some minutes and then said with great force, “Antonio, when you get to Mexico you must prevent this evil thing from taking root.”

  The priest drew back. “Evil thing?”

  The old marquis showed no inclination to retreat. “Yes, evil. The last twenty years have seen the evil of burning Jews and Moors.”

  The priest gasped and recalled, “Last evening we agreed that the Church must extirpate Jews and Moors who practice their abominations secretly.”

  “Isolate? Imprison? Perhaps,” the marquis snapped. “Burn alive? No!”

  Again the priest drew back in alarm. “I will keep your thoughts secret,” he mumbled.

  “Don’t bother. I’m an old man and I’ve always been willing to fight the enemies that might destroy Spain.”

  “You consider the Holy Inquisition an enemy?” Antonio asked with dry lips.

  “Yes,” the marquis said bluntly.

  “But last evening …”

  “Last evening I had not seen my friend burn to death,” the old man said forcefully.

  Dressed in a shimmering gown of lace and silk, drawn tightly about the waist, Leticia appeared to announce dinner. But once more her father asked her to wait, and while she stood framed in the doorway with the light behind her, Fray Antonio was trapped in the dilemma she had devised. As a young man he wanted to enjoy the ravishing sight of the exquisite form the shadows revealed, but as a priest who had already taken holy orders he knew that he must not. His confusion was solved by the marquis, who took his arm and led him to the opposite end of the garden, where he said quietly: “The important matter, Father Antonio, is that when you reach Mexico you must use your influence to prevent this from happening there. Promise me.”

  But Antonio was looking past the marquis and toward the doorway, and his thoughts were becoming so jumbled—the attack on the Inquisition was as disturbing as the presence of the girl silhouetted by the light—that he suddenly became dizzy and felt that he had to leave the garden. He went past Leticia, who did not move, so that he had to brush against her, and into the courtyard. Asking the servants to open the huge gates, he ran out into the city, calling over his shoulder, “I shall come back later.”

  We know from the records in our family that in profound spiritual and sexual agitation he walked along the banks of the Guadalquivir and back to the site of the burning, where townspeople had whittled away the charred stumps of the seven stakes, selling fragments as souvenirs, those from the stake where the Jewess had died bringing the highest prices. He studied this grisly business for more than an hour, then came back to the heart of the city and to that street which for more than a thousand years has enraptured the minds of all who visit Seville, the winding, narrow alley called Sierpes, its name meaning Serpent. From the town hall it creeps between shops whose upper floors are almost connected; it passes cafés where Gypsies dance; it winds through markets heavy with fruit and fish; it is the center for silversmiths and booksellers and the carvers of rosaries. It is the most extraordinary passageway in Spain.

  Had Antonio Palafox been a muleteer down from Salamanca, or a student on vacation, it could have been predicted that he would seek out this renowned alleyway, but for a young priest to be there walking alone in the night occasioned some surprise. A Gypsy girl from one of the smaller cafés shrugged her shoulders and said to her companions, “Why not?”

  She followed Antonio until he reached a darkened part of the Sierpes, then accosted him: “Would you like to see my room?”

  He looked at her in the shadows and realized with hunger how much he would like to join her. “Yes,” he said, and she quickly ducked out of the Sierpes and motioned him to follow.

  With both apprehension and desire he trailed some distance behind her, and she must have feared that he would lose his courage, for she fell back and took him by the hand, the first time any girl of mature age had done so, and he became less fearful. But when they reached her room near the riverbank and he saw how miserable it was, and how wretched she was in spite of her youthful beauty, he felt a deep revulsion and fled.

  He wandered through the city for three hours, tormented by the events of the day: the impassioned sermon of the Inquisition leader, the burnings, the wild attempt of the young priest to save the Jewess, the memory of Leticia in the doorway and the repugnant encounter with the Gypsy. It was after midnight when he realized how tired and hungry he was, and headed back for the marquis’s palace. When he banged on the gates he was surprised at how promptly they were opened, but then he saw that Leticia had remained waiting for him just inside the courtyard. She had at her side a silver tray of wine and cheese, which she offered to him, and as he ate he saw that she was still dressed in the silk and lace drawn tightly about the waist. When he was finished she took a candle and led him not to his room but to hers.

  By the time the galleon was loaded for the long trip to Mexico, it was apparent to the marquis that his headstrong daughter and the priest had fallen in lov
e, and he suspected that not all the night sounds he had been hearing along the corridors were due to the wind. He was aware that Spanish custom required him to do something about his daughter’s honor, but he had already successfully married off his older daughters and recognized what a lot of nonsense went into the procedure; with Leticia he was inclined to let nature follow a somewhat simpler course. Furthermore, he was in no way repelled by the idea of a priest’s taking a wife, for the custom had been commonplace throughout Spain until the late 1490s, when Ferdinand and Isabella had tried to stamp out the practice, with no success. So there were still many priests throughout Spain who had wives and children. The marquis imagined that in Mexico conditions must be much the same.

  On the day of the galleon’s departure, the old marquis led Antonio once more into the garden with the pillars and asked bluntly, “Have you talked with my daughter about taking her to Mexico?”

  Antonio blushed and replied, “I could not appear before Cortés with a wife.”

  “Not at first, perhaps,” the old soldier growled. “But in Mexico these things are no different than in Spain. Later—”

  “Later I would be proud to be your son,” Antonio replied.

  “You are already my son,” the marquis responded. “Leticia is headstrong. My future here is uncertain. It might be better if she were safe in Mexico.”

  A month later they rode together, the marquis, Leticia and Antonio, to the dock where the galleon was preparing to stand out into the river for the long journey down the Guadalquivir to the sea, and at the ship’s side they said farewell. The young priest wanted desperately to kiss Leticia good-bye, but they had done this through most of the night and now they merely gazed at each other.

  Antonio had had no previous experience that would have enabled him to gauge how seriously Leticia had taken their nights together, but as for himself, he was shattered by the thought of leaving her, and as the noisy preparations were being made aboard ship for sailing down the river, he was tormented by the agony of leaving her. Then he clenched his fists and mumbled: “God forgive me for this transgression. Let me put it behind me,” and he turned away from Leticia.

  “Man the ropes!” came the captain’s cry.

  “Aye, aye!”

  “Up the anchor!”

  “On deck and lashed down.”

  “We sail!” and the creaking galleon was warped out into the river, laden with nails and horses and handsome leatherwork and the flexible steel swords of Toledo and empowering letters from the emperor.

  At the last moment, as the ship broke away from shore, Antonio looked frantically for Leticia, but she had turned to enter her father’s carriage. “Leticia!” he bellowed like a lovesick boy of seventeen, and she heard him. From the step of her carriage she swung around and, seeing his anguished face, with the tips of her fingers imitating the flight of swallows she threw him a kiss.

  11

  SPANISH ANCESTORS: IN MEXICO

  Because these were the good years when voyages from Seville to Veracruz were not threatened by pirates, English, Dutch or French, all lusting for the precious metals of the New World coming eastward from Mexico and the riches of Spain, traveling westward—the leisurely month-long sail across the Atlantic—was a delightful experience. Antonio conducted morning and evening prayers. He conversed with the captain, who had made two such voyages before. And he watched as the navigator marked off on his parchment chart each day’s slow progress. It was a gentle introduction to a new world and a new life.

  Antonio was awed by his first sight of Mexico—a snowcapped volcano rising majestically out of the clouds that hung over the ocean. He later recorded his sensations at that moment: “I felt as if the finger of God were indicating my new home to me, and I entertained the disturbing premonition that once I had set foot on the mighty land hidden beneath that finger I might never be allowed to depart.”

  He landed at the swampy port of Veracruz, and before the rowboat in which he was ferried ashore had gone ten feet he was covered with buzzing insects that punctured his skin in hundreds of places that began to itch. This was his introduction to mosquitoes. Ashore he found mud, filth, vegetation so dense it could be penetrated only with axes, and a few Spanish settlers covered with unfamiliar kinds of sores. A priest from Salamanca stumbled up, a shivering wreck of a man, weeping with joy at seeing a fellow clergyman.

  “I’m going home … on that ship,” the sick priest mumbled, but before he could explain why, he fell to coughing and spitting blood, whereupon a soldier, thin as death, led him away.

  What impressed Antonio more than the fellow priest, however, was his first sight of the Indians of Mexico, who now crowded in to inspect the new arrivals. They were for the most part naked, squat and blank-faced, displaying none of the superiority either of intellect or physical endowment that was supposed to mark the adversaries of Cortés, for they were jungle primitives, as he found out, whom the Spaniards had enlisted into forced-labor gangs. And it became obvious that false reports had been circulated throughout Spain in order to lure young men to a strange country with an unhealthy climate.

  This suspicion was fortified wherever Antonio looked, for in late 1524 the port of Veracruz had already become what it was to be throughout the centuries of Spanish occupation: one of the ugliest and least hospitable anchorages along the Atlantic, the deplorable gateway to a noble land. For three miserable days Antonio languished there in the intense heat amid the sickening swarm of mosquitoes, catching not even one glimpse of the greater civilization he had come to Christianize. Without exception the Indians he saw were low brutes, while the Spaniards he talked with were disillusioned adventurers. From a rude room crawling with bugs he sent his first letter home to his brother, Timoteo, reporting his disgust with the new land. In spite of its harsh tone, it has become an epistle much honored in Mexican literary history because of its honest appraisal of daily life in that early period.

  We eat strange foods prepared in filth, fight strange insects whose wiles are superior to ours, and are attended constantly by as low and mean a body of natives as it has pleased God to put on this earth. Many mumble that they have been deceived, and if I were you, Timoteo, and not a man of the Church, and if someone invited me to join Cortés in Mexico, I would most quickly say no, for this is a mean land unless one has a taste for bugs that bite with a most furious intensity. What has impressed me most, I think, is that the air seems so unusually heavy, as if it were compressed by weights and laid oppressively over all things. One breathes, and the air he inhales is hot and wet and heavy. One sweats all day, but the heavy air keeps pressing upon him, making him ever more damp. From the ocean, on our first sight of Mexico, we beheld a majestic volcano rising above the clouds, but on land we see nothing, absolutely nothing, to inspire the mind or gladden the heart. We live at the foot of that volcano, whose slopes are forever hidden from us, swamped in a green maze of jungle whose trees produce no fruit. I take solace in only one thing. The stolid brutes I see, the brown-skinned Indians, require the saving grace of Jesus Christ like no other human beings I have ever witnessed, and that I shall be the agent for bringing the light of God into those empty eyes is the only boon among the manifold disappointments of Mexico.

  Antonio’s disillusionment continued during the long march from Veracruz to the capital, for the route was ugly, forbidding and dangerous, and the Indians encountered were even less civilized than those at the port. Yet once, during a night that was refreshingly cold, the young priest awoke to adjust his blankets that had slipped off, and he happened to look through a clearing in the trees toward the moonlit sky, where a gigantic peak, snow-white and perfect in its conical beauty, rose serenely in the heavens. He gasped and looked again, but before he could verify that he had actually seen the lovely mountain a veil of clouds enveloped it, and in the succeeding days he saw nothing of it, so that he was again convinced that he had come to a land of chimeras.

  But on the eleventh day the troop of newcomers broke out of the jungle
, leaving the tangled vines and the insects, to discover themselves on a vast plateau bigger than any in Spain, rimmed by volcanoes even more majestic than the one Antonio thought he had seen at night and marked by carefully tilled fields that bespoke of an organized society. As the Spaniards marched through the cool morning they felt the oppressive humidity of the coastal areas replaced by the most bracing air in Mexico: the cool, crisp air of the upland plateaus.

  To Antonio’s disappointment, the troop skirted the cities that Cortés had conquered on his way to the capital. Tlaxcala lay to the north, an intriguing city enclosed by a brick wall. Mighty Puebla and holy Cholula lay hidden in the south, but evidences of their power were visible everywhere in the good roads, the canals and the rich fields. From time to time groups of tall Indians in good raiment passed on official business, and Antonio studied their faces to find them not unlike his own and marked with an equal intelligence.

  Fed by such evidence, his judgments of Mexico began to soften, a fact that he reported in his second letter to Timoteo:

  I fear I was too hasty in Vera Cruz when I condemned this land as barbaric, for the upland areas provide quite a different impression, and along the well-paved road one meets tall, straight men of obvious breeding and capacity. To win these men to God would prove a substantial victory, and now I am eager where before I was depressed. But I think that much of this change has been due to the salubrious air that has attended us once we broke free of the jungle. Here among the volcanoes it seems to rush joyously into one’s lungs, urging one on to explore the next bend in the road. For three days I have been amazed at the beauty of this new land.

  More important, however, to our family history was a more secret letter, which he wrote to Leticia in Seville and which was taken to her by a sailor returning to that port city: