Read an Excerpt
Part One
The clouds hang heavy over the Peruvian Andes. Nothing moves, except the tenuous white tremble blanketing the mountain.
An hour goes by.
Then another.
Suddenly, from out of the clouds, comes a figure: half poncho, one-third hat. Beneath the red vicuña-wool poncho hang the hems of her skirts. Beneath them are thick black tights and the two muddy crusts that envelop her shoes. The woman’s tall wide-brimmed hat makes her look smaller; her back is bowed under an invisible weight. Her eyes are hidden in a mass of wrinkles, and her mouth curves into something that might be a smile or a grimace. She walks slowly, so slowly, across the Andean foothills. As if she’s been walking for hundreds of years. It seems impossible that she will ever arrive, that there is any place at which to arrive at this altitude.
But when the sun finally casts its warmth, the clouds lift and one can see Rodacocha, a smattering of adobe shacks, pastures, and potato fields impossible to find on any map, having no church, no school, no police station or health clinic. A single dirt road, which until recently was simply rutted cart tracks, runs through the middle of it. Cajamarca, the closest city, is a six-hour walk if you know the shortcuts, three if you’ve got a horse.
Gaggles of geese and hens peck the ground in mechanical fervor. The hatted woman stops by a pile of fetid slop, which pigs the size of rams defend from the ferocious assault of some dogs. She lets out a shout that reveals toothless gums, and the dogs take off toward a long sky-blue hut as her husband emerges from within.
A hundred paces away, across the road, some adobe ruins are threatening to collapse definitively. The roof and two of the four walls already have, leaving the structure’s mud and straw entrails on view. Two rotted wooden shutters hang from the back window like broken bones. The blackened dirt floor is overrun by weeds.
That shack, the man says, is where his cousin Segundo Villanueva was raised. The one who went off in search of another faith and never returned. And up there is where his father had his potato field; that’s the trail he used to ride on his horse; there’s the hill where his mother got the tragic news. Everything was as it is now, just as it is now, except for the trees.
As it is now: with no horizon. Wherever you look, mountain and more mountain. It’s as though the only possible escape were up in the sky—when it’s not clouded over. How was it—how is it, the visitor wonders—even possible to envision a different life from within these confines?
Actually, this is not in fact where it all began. It began almost five hundred years earlier, down the mountain, in the valley that was, for a brief moment in history, the heart of the Incan Empire, the Tahuantinsuyo, or center of the world. The fertile plains are where the Inca Atahualpa ruled over nine million subjects, across two and a half million square kilometers. He’d just vanquished his most formidable rival, his brother Huascar, who had ruled from Cuzco, in a brutal war. Victory was intoxicating: he was the personification of a god, Son of the Sun, Powerful Lord of the Four Parts of the World. He was to be carried in a litter. Forever more. Should his feet ever touch the earth, catastrophe would follow.
And thus they never touched it. He held himself above all things human. Was that the reason why, when his sentries warned him that a group of strangers was approaching—166 men with sixty-two horses—he attached no importance to the matter? Or perhaps it was because his warriors numbered in the thousands. Or maybe he assumed nobody would do anything but surrender at the sight of Cajamarca, his fortified city in the foothills, with houses two hundred strides long surrounded by low walls and covered with wood and straw, two thousand subjects living in them, colorful fabric filling great storehouses, and great stone steps that led, beseechingly, up to it from the valley.
Did they not sense their own insignificance, those 166 men with their sixty-two horses, on beholding it? No, they did not. They were intent on conquering, spurred on by implacable ambition. Or by complacency. Or by desperation. For thirty years, their leader, the Spaniard Francisco Pizarro, had sought glory and fortune in the new continent known as the Indies. Hernán Cortés had found both in the North, on defeating the Aztecs. Dreaming of equal success, Pizarro had claimed for himself the lands of the South, which the Spaniards referred to as Birú and believed to abound in gold and silver.
Others had failed to conquer. It seemed likely that Pizarro would fail as well. He’d crossed sterile coasts and infested mangroves; he’d known hunger, infection, and terrible pain. Many of his men had deserted; others had died. The most tenacious had marched on with him in the scorching sun, survived a bubonic plague, fought hostile tribes, gasped for air in the never-ending rocky mountains and on frozen savannas. And here they were: a band of survivors still convinced of their victory. Or maybe exhaustion, avarice, and the need to conquer were all they had left.
Shrewdly, they requested permission to stay in the area, and the Inca—condescending, scornful—conceded it. They settled on his land and studied the city. The central square was walled. There was only one way in or out. If they could only corral all the “Indians” inside it . . .
On the afternoon of November 15, 1532, at Pizarro’s request to confer, the Inca Atahualpa entered the square on a gold-and-silver palanquin, escorted by eight thousand warriors. Hidden in the structures enclosing the plaza, Pizarro’s men were so terrified they wet themselves.
Not their commander. Pizarro had a plan.
But it couldn’t be executed straightaway. According to his mercenary contract with the Spanish Crown, he was required to explain himself before killing. A punctilious document, which he had carried with him from the other side of the ocean, instructed him what to say: that the conquest was being carried out in the name of God and the conquered could save themselves if they submitted to Him.
Pizarro didn’t know how to read, but he’d brought from Spain, for this very purpose, six men of the church who did. Of the six, only one, Vicente de Valverde, was still at his side: the others had died, deserted, or simply remained behind.
Valverde took a few steps toward the Inca, who, bedecked in his crown and wearing an emerald necklace, looked on him scornfully from atop his palanquin. The priest was clad in what was left of his Dominican black habit; in his hand he clutched a book. That book, he explained to the Inca with the help of an interpreter, contained the truth of God: the God and the religion he’d come to reveal and to which he commanded submission.
A new god! As though in response, the Sun, omnipotent god whose temple had been erected in that very plaza, began to set magnificently in the west.
The Inca signaled to the priest to pass him the small rectangular object he held. He took it, examined it, turned it over, perplexed. Valverde reached out a hand to show him how to open the book. Miffed at the man’s familiarity, the Inca rebuffed him, striking Valverde’s arm. He opened the book and examined it closely, apparently fascinated. Then he closed it and flung it to the ground.
The book, so sacred to Valverde that before opening it he would kiss it, landed five feet away; the interpreter rushed to retrieve it and return it to him. Holding it in his clenched hand, Valverde ran to Pizarro, shouting what some witnesses claimed were words of vengeance and others said were exclamations of fear.
As far as Pizarro was concerned, formalities had been complied with; he gave the prearranged signal to his men. The explosions coming from incredible, hitherto-unseen weapons and the charge of horses frightened the Inca’s warriors who, hurling their arms to the ground, attempted to flee through the plaza’s one narrow exit. Hundreds died in the crush; the rest were killed by harquebuses and muskets or skewered by the implacable swords of Spain. The last rays of the Sun died out as the massacre ended.
Imprisoned, the Inca offered to buy his freedom with two rooms full of silver and another of gold. The Spaniards agreed, and the Inca honored his part of the deal. But the Spaniards did not honor theirs. They kept the gold and silver, and allowed only for the Inca to choose his form of death: at the stake, or by garotte. And they added a condition: if he did not want to be burned, he had to accept the true God—the God of his captors. To die burned at the stake was unthinkable for the Inca: consumed by flames, he would not be brought back in the next world. So to ensure the salvation of his body, he was forced to accept that of his soul.
Valverde himself baptized Atahualpa. Once the ritual was over, he was strangled to death in the Cajamarca plaza, before his horrified people. The Spaniards displayed his body in a church that Pizarro ordered built on the ruins of the temple to the Sun.
His subjects were now orphaned, with no Inca and no faith. There had been a cluster of villages where, until that time, multiple coexisting gods were worshipped without problem: Inti, god of the Sun; Pachamama, goddess of nature; Pachacamac, god of earthquakes; the Apus, gods of the hills; Catequil, the oracle god; Huari, god of war; Urcuchillay, god of animals; Supay, god of the underworld. Some had their own temples and shrines; others were venerated on vessels, in tombs, the mummies of ancestors, trees, plants, and mountains.
The Spaniards’ theology, however, would brook no competition. Hernando Pizarro, Francisco’s brother, took a group of soldiers and stormed the temple to Pachacamac, an important place of pilgrimage predating the Incas themselves. He broke the Pachacamac idol and humiliated the priests. Sepulchres, huacas (revered objects), and temples were likewise destroyed throughout the conquered territory.
The victors and their priests spoke of a God whose son had died to save all men, including the vanquished. But they had to accept Him as their only God or suffer the consequences.
Preexisting religions were reviled as idolatry. A new force, the Inquisition, came from Spain to eradicate them via torture and the stake. It cemented the idea of infinite suffering, known as hell, that the Spanish priests had brought to the Andes. The new churches were filled with terrifying images in which idol worshippers burned in eternal fire for disobeying this new God.
They were also filled with figures and statuettes of the Son of God, his mother, the Virgin Mary, and countless saints that resembled huacas, the objects representing their now-forbidden gods. The priests soon discovered that the venerable figures of their saints were being used in secret as huacas so that people could keep worshipping their old gods.
That was all the vanquished had left. Two attempted insurrections were put down by force, and disease, oppression, and sorrow finished off the rest. More than 80 percent of the Inca Empire’s population disappeared in the forty years after Pizarro’s arrival; nine million were reduced to little more than one million, their births and deaths authenticated by church sacraments and marked by a calendar including Christmas, Easter, Sunday Mass, and saints’ days. From this—the plunder of some, the subjugation of others, and a religion that theoretically united them—was born Peru.
Decades after Pizarro, in the final days of the sixteenth century, Cristóbal Fernández Nieto de Villanueva would come to Cajamarca from Spain. Like other Europeans, he surely came in search of the fortunes he envisioned as boundless and at his disposal. What he found instead was that the conquistadors and their descendants were killing one another over the spoils, which the Spanish Crown would in the end forcibly seize with the help of their armies. Adventurers like Villanueva abounded in both cities and countryside, where they found no fortune whatsoever and exploited the vanquished in order to survive.
The Spaniards’ plunder had obliterated everything, even the land. Rumi Tiana, the hill against which the city was set, was renamed Santa Apolonia; the Inca’s buildings were now mere ruins; the storehouses full of fabric—the pride of Tahuantinsuyo—had also been destroyed, as had the shrines.
Out of the avarice and misery, a new order was emerging. Villanueva witnessed Cajamarca reborn as a colonial city of tile-roofed houses with patios, churches on every street, and an economy based on agriculture and mining. New landowners claimed the prosperous parts of the valley, while the Inca people, and later their descendants, were reduced to servitude, de facto if not de jure. Villanueva, too, managed to lay claim to fertile land in the valley; he too was served by those who had once been in charge.
But masters and servants were destined to mix. And Villanueva witnessed this as well: the birth of a new people, born of the union between Spanish men and Andean women. His own descendants would come of this intermingling: the spaces reserved for the wives of his son Juan and grandson Cristóbal would remain blank on his family tree, for in early Peruvian history only the Spanish and the Inca nobility had names.
Without the social status of their European ancestor, however, the Villanueva mestizos were sent off to the mountains, to settlements like Encañada and Sorochuco, to unknown territories like Rodacocha, and even higher up the mountain, to the remote Milpoc, where the air was so thin it was difficult to breathe and the earth neither possessed nor produced the riches that it did in the valley. The higher up the land, the less it was worth: the only things that grew in the pastures of Rodacocha were barley, potatoes, and yucca.
But there the Villanuevas, unlike the majority of their neighbors, were still their own masters, with an illusion of privilege that was preserved and transmitted from generation to generation, down an increasingly impoverished lineage.
And so it was that:
Cristóbal fathered Juan, who fathered Cristóbal.
Cristóbal fathered Miguel, who fathered Juan.
Juan fathered Andrés, who fathered Juan.
Juan fathered Bartolomé.
Bartolomé fathered Segundo Aquiles.
Segundo Aquiles fathered Álvaro, who fathered Segundo.
When he was old enough, Álvaro received an indeterminate percentage of high fields on which potatoes and yellow grassland grew, and the Rodacocha shack in which his grandfather Bartolomé had lived and died—a thick mud and adobe rectangle with rammed-earth floor, wood beams, and thatch roof that received very little light through its narrow door and small back window but stayed cool when the sun was scorching and warm when frost fell. It also stank of wood smoke, food, and the crowded-together bodies of Álvaro, his wife, Abigail Correa, and their five children.
