today I need other places but Pilar does not want to go alone and so we walk out and along, across and down, then up stairs cut in a gray stone base to the door. We buy tickets, receive brochures. While she looks at the entrance paintings–Atahualpa captured by the Spaniards, imprisoned, proposing terms for his ransom and release—I take out a pen, correct the brochure’s facts and phrasing, hand it to a guard.
The guard nods but does not understand, returns the brochure to its stack. Pilar slips in among the other tourists and gazes with them at trapezoidal niches. I follow, push only when necessary, my bulk unwelcome and stared at. Pilar is sad but delighted. I tell her that the actual ransom chamber no longer exists and was not located in this building. Now she glares, turns away.
Mariángel twists in my lap and I interrupt the nearest guide, Atahualpa a hostage yes but also a collaborator, looting his empire to save himsel—eleven tons of gold, tooled masks and statuettes, jeweled pitchers and jars, irreplaceable and vanished. But of course he was also hoping for escape or rescue, says the guide, and perhaps believed the Spaniards when they promised him a throne in Quito. How could he have believed them? I say. Yes, says the guide, but desperate men will believe anything.
He nods to me, turns back to his group, my stomach now weak again. I lower the window further, lean my head against the frame and squint into the wind. It is rumored that Rumiñavi is on his way in answer to Atahualpa’s call, leads two hundred thousand Inca warriors and thirty thousand Caribs. If this is true then by Spanish lights Atahualpa is guilty of treason, and his execution is thus necessary, justified. Soto is sent to find out, has not yet returned when Pizarro offers Atahualpa a choice of deaths: burned at the stake, or baptized and garroted. Friar Valverde leads the Spaniards in prayer as the cordel tightens at Atahualpa’s throat. When it is done Pizarro simulates a state funeral, and already the execution works backward in time, causality reversed, the Inca not a criminal but a fallen king.
The haze thins slightly, the foothills visible but blurred, my headache sharper and then fading and Pilar is missing. I push through a group of Swedes, see her at the door, not leaving, just standing, waiting. I call to her, ask for a few minutes more. She looks away and I find the guide, take his arm. Rumiñavi’s army? I ask. Perhaps en route, the guide says, but still distant, or Soto would have seen them. All right, I say, and Soto’s lead scout, did he fall off the cliff, or was he pushed? The guide nods. One of many unknowables, he says. Like slivers under our fingernails, I say, and he nods again.
Pilar still waits and I lift Mariángel as she turns, ease her head back down to my knee, wipe the sweat from her temple, from her cheek. I crook my hand above her face to shade her eyes. Blackbirds on a powerline, dunes into the distance. Occasional patches of satuyo lace. A burro pulling a cart loaded with firewood, and competing teleologies, tectonic plates of blame shifting in the historiography. At first Pizarro is the only villain. A decade later he is innocent and fault is split, half for the natives who first spoke of Rumiñavi and half for the interpreters who questioned them. Forty years further along Garcilaso names eleven Spaniards, says they spoke up to stop the execution but few of them were truly in Cajamarca at the time and perhaps Porras is right and Garcilaso brought the story in from Valera who invented it to make Herrada not the knave who murdered Pizarro but the hero who avenged Atahualpa and there is a stench.
I lift slightly, look out the window and back at something dead on the road, a deer, and the guide leads his group out the door. For a moment the room is empty. I sit on the rough stone floor. Atahualpa, that leather cloak, the skins of vampire bats, in his hands a chalice made from the head of Atoc, his
The guard nods but does not understand, returns the brochure to its stack. Pilar slips in among the other tourists and gazes with them at trapezoidal niches. I follow, push only when necessary, my bulk unwelcome and stared at. Pilar is sad but delighted. I tell her that the actual ransom chamber no longer exists and was not located in this building. Now she glares, turns away.
Mariángel twists in my lap and I interrupt the nearest guide, Atahualpa a hostage yes but also a collaborator, looting his empire to save himsel—eleven tons of gold, tooled masks and statuettes, jeweled pitchers and jars, irreplaceable and vanished. But of course he was also hoping for escape or rescue, says the guide, and perhaps believed the Spaniards when they promised him a throne in Quito. How could he have believed them? I say. Yes, says the guide, but desperate men will believe anything.
He nods to me, turns back to his group, my stomach now weak again. I lower the window further, lean my head against the frame and squint into the wind. It is rumored that Rumiñavi is on his way in answer to Atahualpa’s call, leads two hundred thousand Inca warriors and thirty thousand Caribs. If this is true then by Spanish lights Atahualpa is guilty of treason, and his execution is thus necessary, justified. Soto is sent to find out, has not yet returned when Pizarro offers Atahualpa a choice of deaths: burned at the stake, or baptized and garroted. Friar Valverde leads the Spaniards in prayer as the cordel tightens at Atahualpa’s throat. When it is done Pizarro simulates a state funeral, and already the execution works backward in time, causality reversed, the Inca not a criminal but a fallen king.
The haze thins slightly, the foothills visible but blurred, my headache sharper and then fading and Pilar is missing. I push through a group of Swedes, see her at the door, not leaving, just standing, waiting. I call to her, ask for a few minutes more. She looks away and I find the guide, take his arm. Rumiñavi’s army? I ask. Perhaps en route, the guide says, but still distant, or Soto would have seen them. All right, I say, and Soto’s lead scout, did he fall off the cliff, or was he pushed? The guide nods. One of many unknowables, he says. Like slivers under our fingernails, I say, and he nods again.
Pilar still waits and I lift Mariángel as she turns, ease her head back down to my knee, wipe the sweat from her temple, from her cheek. I crook my hand above her face to shade her eyes. Blackbirds on a powerline, dunes into the distance. Occasional patches of satuyo lace. A burro pulling a cart loaded with firewood, and competing teleologies, tectonic plates of blame shifting in the historiography. At first Pizarro is the only villain. A decade later he is innocent and fault is split, half for the natives who first spoke of Rumiñavi and half for the interpreters who questioned them. Forty years further along Garcilaso names eleven Spaniards, says they spoke up to stop the execution but few of them were truly in Cajamarca at the time and perhaps Porras is right and Garcilaso brought the story in from Valera who invented it to make Herrada not the knave who murdered Pizarro but the hero who avenged Atahualpa and there is a stench.
I lift slightly, look out the window and back at something dead on the road, a deer, and the guide leads his group out the door. For a moment the room is empty. I sit on the rough stone floor. Atahualpa, that leather cloak, the skins of vampire bats, in his hands a chalice made from the head of Atoc, his
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