Mexico

by James A. Michener

  A few minutes later the slim young girl, dressed in her simplest gown of linen and with flowers in the tips of her long braids, went to the chapel where the priest was praying in much confusion of soul and said, “Fray Antonio, I have come to be baptized.”

  The priest looked up and asked, “Has your grandmother at last given her consent?”

  “No,” replied the girl demurely. “I am doing this of my own will.”

  The priest clutched her hands. “Why?” he cried joyously.

  “Because last night I heard about how you begged the Indians in Valley-of-the-Dead for their forgiveness.”

  The priest felt hot tears edging their way into his eyes, for it seemed to him that in a world of moral confusion the Indian convert represented a solid point of reference, one that his mind could cling to. He took her triumphantly to the tunnel that pierced the fortress wall and led to the outdoor chapel, where they stood at last before the baptismal font. Normally, Stranger would have had to wait until an assembly of several score had been gathered for conversion because Fray Antonio conducted his baptisms with pomp, but the honest joy at winning the queen’s granddaughter inspired him to baptize her at once.

  When the rite was concluded, Fray Antonio put his hand once more upon the head of the tall girl and said in a kind of exaltation whose source he did not comprehend, “Henceforth you shall no longer be known as Stranger. Your name shall be María-of-the-Assumption.” With that he led her back into the narrow tunnel. When they were beside the huge wall that he had constructed, he felt her close behind him and stopped, and perhaps by accident she bumped into him; they embraced, and there was a tremendous meeting of their mutual hunger, and after more than an hour they emerged into the sunlight of Toledo, the city they would govern together for many decades.

  When the Palafox brothers were comfortably settled with their women—Timoteo with the daughter of a Spanish nobleman, Antonio with an Altomec princess—they resumed their search for the hidden silver mine with which they hoped to cleanse their father’s shame. One day in 1541, Timoteo was returning empty-handed to Toledo and had reached a point within sight of both the pyramid and the fortress. He started going down a hill he had climbed many times and, in so doing, kicked aside a small rock, which revealed another of a type he had not seen previously. Upon examining it closely, he concluded joyfully that it must be silver ore and ran with it to his brother. The two pulverized the rock and finally reduced it to a small lump of silver.

  Attempting to mask his excitement, Fray Antonio asked casually, “Where is the mine?”

  “It doesn’t seem to be a mine,” Timoteo replied.

  Fray Antonio bit his lip. “But now we’ll surely find the mine.”

  “I looked, but it was not at hand,” Timoteo said, and this was the beginning of the real frustration of the Palafoxes. It is true that between the years 1540 and 1550 Timoteo was to uncover several profitable deposits of silver, and it is a matter of record that for the remaining years of his life he was able to send the king in Madrid an annual gift of about twenty thousand duros, which paved the way for his and his brother’s advancement in the army and the Church. But the great mother lode of Toledan silver, which the brothers knew had to exist somewhere in the vicinity, eluded him and often in the evenings his brother, now Bishop Palafox, would unroll his maps and ask once more, “Tell me, Timoteo, have you searched this valley?” Invariably Timoteo had.

  In 1544, when it seemed likely that the trivial silver mines so far discovered could be depended upon to produce a steady if limited income, Bishop Palafox began to turn his energies to the third obsession that governed his life. He took his brother to the southern battlements of the fortress-church and pointed to the cactus-ridden wastes that lay beyond what once had been the Altomec City-of-the-Pyramid.

  “Down there,” the bishop said quietly, “I shall build our new city.”

  “For a tribe of miserable Indians?” Timoteo asked.

  “For the glory of God,” the priest replied. “After us, there will be civilized people in this city, and we shall build structures of such splendor they will forever honor the name of Palafox.”

  “We’ve already built this fortress,” Timoteo protested.

  “Can you see that pile of rocks?’ the priest asked.

  “Beyond the tree?”

  “And the others?”

  “I can hardly see them,” the soldier replied.

  “They form the outline for our Hall of Government,” Antonio explained.

  “It’s too far away to defend from the fort,” Timoteo warned.

  “By the time it’s finished, we won’t need the fort,” the priest replied.

  “These Altomecs will never—”

  “Facing the Hall of Government,” the priest interrupted, “I plan to lay out a large public plaza. Can you see the rocks over there?”

  Timoteo tried but failed to visualize the ambitious plan. “You’re playing with empty fields.”

  “They won’t be empty long, because I plan to start building right away, a special building along the entire western side of the plaza. It’ll be the glory of our city.”

  “What kind of building?”

  “A cathedral,” the priest replied.

  “You mean from here … down to what you call your Hall of Government? You must be insane!”

  “When I was in Seville,” Antonio replied, “waiting for my ship, I saw their cathedral. Did you bother to see it?”

  “I did,” Timoteo replied, with some nostalgia.

  “When the priests of Seville started that enormous building,” Antonio reported, “they announced to their people, ‘We are going to build a church so large that all who come after us will cry, “They must have been insane.” ’ ” He paused, then added, “I am touched by that kind of insanity.”

  “But a building from here to there. Antonio, where will you get the money?”

  The priest turned on the battlement to look at his brother. “Why do you suppose I’ve driven you so desperately to find the silver?” he asked.

  “Our family …” the soldier stammered. Then he faced his brother and snapped, “You tell me! Why did you draw the map so that the mines would fall in my land … and not in the Church’s?”

  “Because I was determined even then that our family should do the building,” the priest replied. “Because I am determined to erase the shame we bear. Do you think I arranged for you to have nine thousand slaves merely for your pleasure? Timoteo, you are going to put those Indians to work not for yourself but for the building of Toledo, so that when you and I are dead, men will say, ‘This is the city of the Palafoxes, who served God.’ ”

  In 1544 the real building of Toledo began. The Hall of Government was finished in that year, after which Fray Antonio slipped the viceroy such an enormous bribe in silver that the official was willing to overlook Professor Palafox’s condemnation and appoint his son Timoteo, who had been demoted by Captain Cortés, to the rank of governor of the vast Toledo district. At Timoteo’s investiture, his brother whispered: “The cleansing of our family name has begun.”

  The spacious central plaza was now laid out according to Fray Antonio’s plan, and in 1549 the first public band concert was held there, given by Altomec musicians trained by Antonio. The construction of the vast cathedral was begun but made no conspicuous headway, for during the first fifty years its corners seemed so ridiculously far apart that the casual observer could scarcely believe that they were all intended for the same edifice. Roads were built; small churches proliferated; the House of Tile rose toward the end of the bishop’s life; wherever Antonio moved, buildings seemed to spring up, and they were of such beauty that later historians often speculated as to how this ascetic priest had acquired his flawless sense of design. A French professor of architecture said of him, “From the original fortress-church to the House of Tile we can follow the orderly progress of a master builder. Bishop Palafox took an Indian city and transformed it into a jewel of Spanish architect
ure, yet always, in all he did, he showed respect for Indian building traditions. Toledo is a monument to his solid yet exquisite taste in combining the two cultures.”

  Antonio was supported in his desire to build by María, who said: “My ancestors were insatiable builders, too. I think all great people must be. They suffer some kind of urge to leave the face of the earth different from what it was when they arrived.” And in later years, when the huge government and ecclesiastic buildings were completed, she said, “We have built for the governor and for the priests and for God. Now I want us to build a small, pretty building for my Indians.”

  And it was she who kept applying moral pressure on the bishop until he agreed to build a convent in which young Indian women could dedicate themselves to the Church and elderly ones find a last home. But, like Antonio, she could not think small, and when the convent was finished it stretched along the entire eastern boundary of the plaza, and flourished there until 1865, when Emperor Maximilian had it converted into his Imperial Theater. During these years of building, María never forgot her grandmother’s admonition: “You must seek and find the kind of man who is capable of the love that has marked your family, and if you find him, cling to him forever, more even than you cling to your family, or your god, or your country.” She became one of those many flawless wives that the Mexican Indians gave their Spanish conquerors, and from her union with the priest sprang multifold blessings, just as the union of Mexico and Spain produced far more that was beneficial than damaging.

  Fray Antonio and María had four children, who launched the Mexican half of the Palafox clan, and one of their three sons became a brilliant churchman who, in time, found his own Indian girl to help him in the task of running the ecclesiastical half of Toledo. It was largely because of the stability that María brought Fray Antonio that he ultimately overcame the shame his family had suffered in Spain and won the title of Bishop Palafox in the New World. His gnawing desire for his brother’s wife was easily dissipated when he compared her unsteady, nagging ways with the serenity and helpfulness of his own Indian wife, and before a decade had passed he felt sorry for his brother and almost censured himself for having engineered such an unfortunate marriage.

  Antonio never legally married María; there was no convention by which he could have done so, nor was she ever known as his wife. She was simply Doña María, the most gracious of all the women in Toledo. When dignitaries arrived from Mexico City to talk business with the bishop, they could spend three days in argument and never see the stately Indian woman; but once the business was concluded, Bishop Palafox would bring forth his Altomec princess with the introduction “This is Doña María,” and from the subtle manner in which she took control it was apparent that in the fortress part of that fortress-church she was mistress.

  It was she who organized the final baptism of all Altomecs, except her grandmother, who resisted until her death. The old woman was buried near the grave of her father, General Tezozomoc, and gained immortality in the religious festival that occurred each year on the anniversary of the day when she had marched out of the city with Doña María, bearing a parchment portrait of the Virgin Mary and her Son.

  But, most of all, Doña María brought a kind of balance into the life of Bishop Palafox. She showed him how ridiculous it was to avenge a father by trying to find more and more silver, especially when the father had given his life trying to prove that silver must be treated in sensible ways; and if the first Palafox brothers found redemption in Mexico, it was not because they discovered silver deposits but because they fitted themselves solidly into the community and made their part of Mexico a haven of law, religion and good government.

  During the sunny years that Doña María spent with the bishop, no Indians were killed in the high valley, and although it is true that those belonging to Captain Timoteo were slaves, they were nevertheless protected by the Church and an ultimate escape from their slavery was provided for.

  In 1580, at the age of eighty-two, Bishop Palafox died as happy a man as one could have found in Mexico. One of the reasons why he was able to die in peace was that he had accomplished his various missions: he had wiped the stain of dishonor from his family name; he had pacified the Altomecs and converted them; he had established the city of Toledo and adorned its central plaza with noble buildings. Just before he died, having finished the House of Tile, held to be his architectural masterpiece, Bishop Palafox was planning a new series of buildings and had even talked of constructing a Roman-type aqueduct across some half-dozen miles of hills and valleys so as to bring fresh water into the city. When he died, the walls of the cathedral were twenty feet high. If he had failed to find the mother lode, he and Timoteo had discovered lesser deposits that enabled them to provide their king with riches. But what gave him the greatest consolation was that he knew his work would be carried forward by the surviving members of his well-entrenched family.

  A son of Captain Palafox naturally succeeded to the governorship upon the death of his father, thus establishing a precedent that made the Hall of Government practically a Palafox inheritance. In the same manner, a youngster whom the bishop had sired with María was about to be ordained a priest and was obviously destined to become the second Bishop Palafox. To support such men, Captain Timoteo’s initial grant of a quarter of a million acres had been enlarged by one means or another to a third of a million and would shortly double itself.

  At her husband’s death Doña María started her own important work. In her upstairs room at the House of Tile she looked out over the city her bishop had built and she began to reflect upon the strange relationship that had developed between the Spaniards and the Indians. Doña María developed the idea that the greatness of Mexico would be secured by the continued union of Spaniard and Indian, and that if anything conspired against it, the nation would suffer. She was therefore inspired to record the history of her people, and it was this work that became so influential in the development of Mexico, for it gave substance to the claim that at the time of the conquest the Indians were already civilized.

  In the many books I have read on the subject, historians have been harsh in evaluating the claim of Spain that it colonized the New World, and particularly Mexico, in order to win souls for God, and the so-called unholy alliance of priest and soldier has often been ridiculed, especially by Protestant writers like my father, who heaped a good deal of scorn upon the Spanish rationalization. But I have studied the records of the Palafox family in an effort to determine exactly how the original brothers operated and what they did with their energies and their silver. Let me admit up front that, yes, Timoteo the hotheaded soldier did brand his Indians, whom he considered his slaves, and, yes, he did direct that massacre of the Altomecs, but in each instance he was condemned by his brother, and in repentance he helped not only to build the new city of Toledo but also to finance its major buildings about the plaza.

  How exactly did the brothers spend their income from the small mines? Of every hundred ounces of silver that Timoteo dug out of the Toledo hills, records I have seen proved that about sixty went directly to the king of Spain to support his Catholic opposition to infidel England; and the great armada that came so close to subduing England could not have sailed if the silver of Mexico had not reached Madrid. Of the remaining portion, thirty of the ounces went to the Bishop Palafox for the building of Toledo and for the subjugation of the surrounding Altomecs, and the last ten ounces were kept by the Palafox brothers, sometimes illegally, to purify their family’s reputation.

  On himself the bishop had spent little. He lived frugally, fought the paganism of the Indians and kept them at the onerous task of piling one stone upon another for the greater glory of God. Whenever one of his assistant priests ran into difficulty in some outlying parish, the bishop was not hesitant in dispatching his brother’s troops to allay the trouble and chastise the troublemakers.

  At the same time, no Indian tribe in Mexico was more quickly pacified, none was brought more securely into the
bosom of the church, nor treated with less brutality, than the Altomecs under the supervision of Bishop Palafox. One of the first Indians to become an ordained priest in Mexico was an Altomec from Toledo. The first home for elderly women was constructed under the bishop’s supervision, and in Toledo it was safe to walk at night while other areas of Mexico were still battlegrounds. When I use my Palafox ancestors as prototypes, I have to conclude that they, at least, and I believe a good many Spaniards like them, gave the Spanish colonies a government that was not noticeably inferior to what England would later provide her settlements in America or France hers in Canada.

  In the centuries that followed the death of the original Palafox brothers, there was some confusion about the connections in this vigorous Mexican family, for there were Palafoxes everywhere, but it was generally understood that there were two branches, each with its own inherited characteristics. The descendants of Governor Palafox maintained their tradition of marrying only full-blooded Spaniards, and this branch of the family, to which the present Don Eduardo belonged, watched over the business interests of the clan; the offspring of Bishop Palafox and his Indian princess continued to marry with Indians and produce the Church dignitaries, poets, artists and architects. But it was a significant characteristic of the Palafoxes that the two branches, the pure Spanish and the part Indian, lived in harmony, shared the great wealth of their clan, and looked upon each other as true cousins.

  There seemed always to be a Bishop Palafox, and he seemed always to contract an alliance with some able Indian woman, so that the essential fire of the family remained strong. In 1640 the third bishop finished the cathedral pretty much as his grandfather had planned it nearly a century before. In 1726 one of his descendants built the magnificent aqueduct that ensured the city’s growth. And in 1760 it was an Archbishop Palafox who tore down the old façade of the cathedral, replacing it with the marble churrigueresque masterpiece of which I have already spoken.