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A Novel
by Isabel Allende
"Well, then, we will give them a demonstration of the power of
cross and gunpowder." The captain laughed, and laid out his plan.
The mission defenders gathered in the church, where they
barricaded the doors with sacks of sand and stationed nests containing firearms
at strategic points. It was Captain de la Vega's opinion that as long as they
kept the attackers at a distance, so they could reload the carbines and muskets,
the scales would be tipped in their favor, but in hand-to-hand fighting they
would be at a tremendous disadvantage since the Indians far surpassed them in
numbers and ferocity.
Padre Mendoza had nothing but admiration for this captain's
boldness. De la Vega was about thirty and already a veteran soldier, seasoned in
the Italian wars, from which he bore proud scars. He was the third son of a
family of hidalgos whose lineage could be traced back to El Cid. His ancestors
had fought the Moors beneath the Catholic standards of Isabel and Ferdinand; for
all the high praise of their courage, however, and all the blood shed for Spain,
they received no fortune, only honor. Upon the death of their father,
Alejandro's eldest brother inherited the family home, a hundred-year-old stone
building towering over a piece
of arid land in Castille. The church claimed the second brother,
and so it fell to de la Vega to be a soldier; there was no other destiny for a
young man of his breeding. In payment for bravery exhibited in Italy, he was
given a pouchful of gold doubloons and authorization to go to the New World to
better his fortunes. That was how he ended up in Alta California, to which he
traveled in the company of Doña Eulalia de Callís, the wife of the governor,
Pedro Fages, known as The Bear because of his bad temper and the number of those
beasts brought down by his own hand. Padre Mendoza had heard the gossip about
the epic voyage of Doña Eulalia, a lady with a temperament as fiery as that of
her husband. Her caravan took six months to cover the distance between Mexico
City, where she lived like a princess, and Monterey, the inhospitable military
fortress where her husband awaited. It traveled at a turtle's pace, dragging
along a train of oxcarts and an endless line of mules laden with luggage. Every
place the party stopped, they organized a courtly diversion that tended to last
several days. It was said that the governor's wife was an eccentric, that she
bathed her body in jenny's milk and colored her hair—which fell to her
heels—with the red salves of Venetian courtesans, and that from pure excess, not
Christian virtue, she gave away her silk and brocade gowns to cover the naked
Indians she came across along the road. And last, most scandalous of all, were
tales of how she had clung to the handsome Captain Alejandro de la Vega. "But
who am I, a poor Franciscan, to judge this lady?"
Padre Mendoza mused, glancing out of the corner of his eye at de
la Vega and wondering, with irrepressible curiosity, how much truth there was in
the rumors.
In their letters to the director of missions in Mexico, the
friars complained, "The Indians prefer to live unclothed, in straw huts, armed
with bow and arrow, with no education, government, religion, or respect for
authority, and dedicated entirely to satisfying their shameless appetites, as if
the miraculous waters of baptism had never washed away their sins. " The
Indians' insistence on clinging to their customs had to be the work of
Satan—there was no other explanation—which is why the friars went out to hunt
down and lasso the deserters and then whipped their doctrine of love and
forgiveness into them.
Padre Mendoza had lived a rather dissolute youth before he
became a missionary. The idea of satisfying shameless appetites was not new to
him, and for that reason he sympathized with the neophytes. He had, besides, a
secret admiration for his rivals the Jesuits because they had progressive ideas;
they were not like other religious groups, including the majority of his
Franciscan brothers, who made a virtue of ignorance. Some years earlier, when he
was preparing to assume responsibility for the San Gabriel mission, he had read
with great interest the report of a Jean François de La Pérouse, a traveler who
described the neophytes in the California missions as sad beings bereft of
personality and robbed of spirit, who reminded him of the traumatized black
slaves on the plantations of the Caribbean. The Spanish authorities attributed
La Pérouse's opinions to the regrettable fact that the man was French, but his
writings made a profound impression on Padre Mendoza. Deep in his heart, he had
almost as much faith in science as he did in God, which is why he decided to
transform the mission into a model of prosperity and justice. He proposed to win
followers among the Indians through persuasion, rather than lassos, and to
retain them with good works rather than lashings. He achieved that goal in
spectacular fashion. Under his direction, the neophytes' existence improved to
such a degree that had La Pérouse passed through, he would have been astounded.
Padre Mendoza could have boasted—though he never did—that the number of baptized
at San Gabriel had tripled, and that runaway converts never stayed away long;
the fugitives always returned, repentant. Despite the hard work and sexual
restrictions, the Indians came back because the padre showed them mercy and
because they had never before had three meals a day and a solid roof to shelter
them from storms. The mission attracted travelers from the Americas and Spain
who came to this remote territory to learn the secret of Padre Mendoza's
success. They were impressed with the fields of grains and vegetables; with the
vineyards producing good wine; with the irrigation system, inspired by Roman
aqueducts; with the stables and corrals; with the flocks grazing on hills as far
as the eye could see; with the storehouses filled with tanned hides and botas of tallow. They marveled at the peaceful
passing of the days and the meekness of the converts, whose fame as basket
weavers and leather workers was spreading beyond the borders of the province.
"Full belly, happy heart," was the favorite saying of Padre Mendoza, who had
been obsessed with good nutrition ever since he'd heard of sailors suffering
from scurvy when a lemon could have prevented their agony. He believed that it
is easier to save the soul if the body is healthy, and therefore the first thing
he did when he came to the mission was replace the eternal corn mush that was
the basic diet of the neophytes with meat stew, vegetables, and lard for
tortillas. He provided milk for the children only with Herculean effort, because
every pail of foaming liquid came at the cost of wrestling a wild range cow. It
took three husky men to milk one of them, and often the cow won. The missionary
fought the children's distaste for milk with the same method he used to purge
them once a month for intestinal worms: he tied them up, pinched their nostrils
together, and thrust a funnel into their mouths. Such determination had to yield
results; thanks to the funnel, the children grew up strong and with resilient
characters. The population of San Gabriel was worm-free, and it was the only
colony spared the deadly epidemics that decimated others, although sometimes a
cold or an attack of common diarrhea dispatched a neophyte to the other world.
From Zorro by Isabel Allende. Copyright © 2005 by Isabel Allende. English-language copyright © HarperCollins Publishers.
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