City of Silver Page 7

  “I must speak to the Captain immediately.” She was breathless from the small exertion in the rarefied air.

  Barco grabbed an Indian by the shoulder. “Go and bring Captain Tovar here at once.” Then he raised an arm to block Pilar’s path and indicated the door with his other hand. “If you will only return to the house, Doña Tovar, I will send the Capitán to you at once.”

  She stood there, unwilling to push past her husband’s overseer but unwilling to obey him, either. In the awkward silence between them, the braying of the mules and the bursts of Quechua and Aymara spoken by the Indians hung in the air.

  “Please, my lady—” Barco began.

  “I heard you,” she said. They were the words and the tone her daughter used when she meant to defy her. Barco did not press her further.

  They both saw Antonio, the red plume on his hat blowing in the wind, striding across the yard. His approach made further argument unnecessary.

  He accepted the greetings of the workers, grinned at the children, showing white, even teeth and a glint of mischief in his eyes that had stirred her sex when she first saw him and still did whenever he entered her bed. Theirs had not been a marriage of dutiful coupling through a slit in the sheet, as her mother had taught her to expect. In the daylight, they never spoke of the passion of their nights, but it buoyed all that passed between them.

  Nevertheless, Antonio’s winning smile disappeared when he saw her standing there in the ingenio yard behind Barco, who still posed, arms outstretched, like an actor declaiming a verse in a play on the feast of Corpus Christi.

  “Captain,” she addressed her husband, her lover, “I must speak with you most urgently.”

  Without a word, Antonio swung his black alpaca cape off his shoulders and used it to cover her. He dismissed Barco with a look and hurried her through the door back to the patio of the house. “What is the meaning of such behavior? Do not tell me this has something to do with your notions about the supposed murder of Santiago Yana.”

  “Inez de la Morada is dead.” She watched his face.

  A cloud of fear passed his eyes before the heat of anger returned. “How can you know such a thing?”

  “The maids.”

  He accepted her answer immediately, as she knew he would. The maids knew everything. And they were never wrong.

  He raised his hand to stop her next words, ushered her into his study, and sat her in the carved wood and tooled leather chair where Domingo usually sat when they discussed men’s affairs.

  “What do you know about how the Morada girl died?” he asked her. His face revealed consternation but little sadness over the death. He and Morada had been enemies too long for him to mourn even such an event. Morada had killed his brother in the vicuña war, shortly after Pilar arrived from Spain, on that awful day when the men of Potosí, the Basques against the other Spaniards, went out—like knights in some pageant, plumes bobbing and armor shining—to the field of San Clemente to fight the battle that had decided nothing but at least exhausted them into an uneasy peace. Jorge, Antonio’s younger brother, wounded and knocked to the ground by Morada, had begged not to be finished off until a priest heard his confession. Priests had been running back and forth on the field of battle, trying to reach the dying, anointing, praying. The weeping Antonio had found one and brought him to Jorge, but too late. The brother Antonio had sworn to his parents he would protect died without confessing. Antonio had attacked Morada in revenge, but Morada protested he had not slain the unshriven man, that Jorge had died of the blow already inflicted in battle. Later, however, when they prepared Jorge’s body for burial, they found two wounds on it. Hatred had festered between Morada and Antonio forever after.

  “My husband,” Pilar said, “I am afraid there could be a plague in the convent.”

  Antonio dismissed the idea with the back of his hand. “One dead girl does not constitute a plague.”

  “Let me bring Beatriz home. Please, Antonio.” She never called him by his given name except in their bed, when the curtains were drawn. “Please tell her she does not have to marry Rodrigo. Let her come home.”

  He paced in front of the painting that hung behind his desk—the Virgin de Cerro, the Madonna whose robes took on the conical shape of the mountain of silver to the south of the city. The picture had disturbed Pilar since he had first brought it into the house. To her, it symbolized a confusion of love of God’s Mother and faith in silver. Antonio called his refinery Ingenio de Corpus Christi. Was his devotion divided between God and Mammon? Or were they one in his mind?

  “Do you remember when I awoke shouting from my sleep last night?” she asked.

  He stopped moving and turned to her. “Yes,” he said softly. He had taken her in his arms and soothed her until her heart stopped palpitating from the fear. Then he had made it beat even harder with passion.

  “I dreamt of two dead girls. One must have been Inez. I am terrified the other will be Beatriz. I cannot lose her.” She stood and grasped the side of the heavy table between them. “You must relent. You must.”

  “You are becoming overwrought.” He came to her, touched her shoulders, and pressed her back into the chair. “When Easter week and the celebrations for the arrival of Visitador General Nestares are over, you must go to Miraflores and stay in the valley for a rest.”

  Anger flared in her. She fought it down. She defied him in as sweet a voice as she could muster. “I will not leave, and I will not let you change the subject. I do not need a trip to the lake. I need my daughter. I will not see her perish in a plague.” Tears welled, unwanted, in her eyes.

  He sat next to her and took her hand. There were splatters of reddish brown water on his white hose. “Then persuade her to marry Rodrigo de Villanueva y Silva. You have not even tried. If you supported the match, she would have accepted it by now.” His voice was soft, but he held his shoulders stiffly in that way he always did when he was completely determined.

  “You are unfair, my husband. I did urge her, in my own way. You credit me with having more control over her than I do.” She did not admit that her efforts had been halfhearted. She did not know this Rodrigo. She was not at all sure he was the kind of man for her daughter.

  He raised one eyebrow and gave her a sardonic smile. “It is your own fault that Beatriz is so willful. You insisted that we send her to learn to read and write.”

  “All the modern girls learn those things. I wanted her to have what they have.”

  “Yes, and now she is beyond the control even of her father. She is seventeen. This is the year she should become betrothed. And yet she defies me. I cannot even talk to her without her flying off into a tantrum.”

  “You do not approach her the right way.”

  He leapt to his feet. “Are you questioning me? Do you criticize me, woman? Does a father have to follow a protocol when he speaks to his own child?”

  She put up her hand, wanting to touch and soothe him, but she knew he would not accept that. He never understood his daughter’s emotions. He tried to reason with her, as if the choice of a man to marry were some engineering problem or an equation about how much mercury to put with the ore to extract the silver. It was always like that when their daughter became distressed. Beatriz would be sobbing in desolation, like a person vomiting, and he would try to talk practicalities to her and end up upsetting her even more. And Pilar would watch and weep and wonder why anyone would try to reason with someone who is vomiting.

  She had to make him see that this recent defiance was more than a girl’s stubbornness. Should she betray Beatriz’s secret? She must. A betrayal would be better than allowing her to perish of some plague in that convent. “She is in love with Domingo Barco. She says she will not marry anyone but him.” Pilar bit her lips and hoped she had not misspoken.

  Antonio’s jaw dropped. “Are you crazy? He is completely unsuitable for her.”

  Pilar twisted the yellow ribbons that hung from the waist of her brocade dress. Her husband would never be able
to understand what their daughter found attractive in Barco. But she did. “Beatriz does not see him the way you do. And he cares for her, too. Have you not seen how sad he is since you took her away?”

  He threw back his head and groaned. “Have you lost your mind?” He went to the window, unglazed but shuttered against the wind. He fumed, “This is completely wrong. You do not know what this means. What makes you think you could have an opinion? There are issues at stake of which you know nothing.”

  She stood, too, in defiance of him. “I know nothing because you keep me in ignorance.”

  “I protect you from knowledge that would trouble you.” He was shouting now.

  “I do not want such protection. You think I should devote myself to prayer and poetry, spend my days writing little notes to the other Basque wives, asking if they slept well or if the baby has cut his teeth. I cannot be so trivial. I am alone. I want Beatriz back, and I am willing to do whatever it takes to get her.”

  “Not if it means she will marry Barco. That is absurd. He is a Mestizo. He has nothing but what I pay him.” He turned and glared at her. “Never even entertain this idea. Do you hear me?”

  Her hands went to her hips. She forced them behind her. “I will entertain whatever thought I wish. I am a woman, but I am still God’s child. He gave me a mind to think with.”

  “You should be thinking about Him instead of Beatriz marrying Barco. She will marry whom I say or she will rot in the convent.”

  The thought doubled her over. Now her hands clutched her stomach. She went down on her knees. “I beg you, Antonio. Do not do this. I traveled here and risked death. I said good-bye to my mother forever. For you, Antonio. But I will give you up before I give up my daughter.” The words, meant to shock him, shocked her, too.

  “Please, Pilar, do not say such things.” His voice was gentle but shook, with fear or anger she could not tell. He came and lifted her from the floor, led her back to the chair. She let him do it. She knew his soul—its smallness as well as its depth, his pride and stubbornness, his secretive nature as well as his honesty and generosity. He was always the fairest of the azogueros, caring about his workers, magnanimous with their families. He had given a large stipend to Santiago Yana’s widow and children when the barretero was found dead at the bottom of the mine, even though Antonio insisted that they could never prove anything about the mysterious documents, that the man had probably gone down at night to steal ore to sell on the black market. Why, Antonio asked over and over, would anyone give valuable documents to Santiago Yana?

  He took her hands again. “Have I not been a good husband to you? Do you regret following me here?” He watched her eyes. “I think you do, don’t you.”

  She laid her hand on the side of his beautiful face. “No, Antonio. No, I do not regret it. It is my love for Beatriz that propels me, not any remorse over marrying you.”

  “Have I not treated you well?”

  “You have. In this place where so many temptations exist, you have been more loyal to me than most.” Other women had husbands who gambled, went with courtesans, drank to excess. Antonio spent every night in her bed.

  He looked away, but he held her hand. “Completely loyal. No one could move me as you do.”

  She drew his fingers to her lips.

  He straightened up and affected a pose of relaxed command, the way he stood when she watched him from her window, giving orders to the pongos and barreteros in the refinery yard. “If you love me and Beatriz, how can you even imagine that marriage to Barco could be good for her? How can you help her defy me?”

  “I know how happy a woman can be when the lover who pleases her is also her husband.”

  He fell silent. They did not speak of these things.

  “I followed the custom today,” she said softly. “I visited seven churches to pray on Holy Thursday. In every one of them, I asked God and His Blessed Mother for only one thing. To return my daughter to me. Perhaps Barco would not be a suitable husband for Beatriz in Spain, but here things are different.” Daring speculators came to Potosí, not conventional Spanish aristocrats. They vied with one another in making and wasting fortunes, and they had a great tolerance for departures from what was considered correct in Spain.

  “It is impossible!” His voice was harsh again. “The needs of our family forbid it.”

  “Needs of our family?” She shocked herself by shouting at him. Her hand went to her mouth.

  “Yes. Needs,” he boomed back at her. At that moment, the thudding hammers of the mill stopped, signaling the end of the workday. In the stunning, sudden silence, other sounds quietly emerged—the trickle of water in the patio fountain, Sagrada in the kitchen, singing while she cooked.

  “Explain it to me so I can understand, Antonio,” she pleaded with him. “You know I am a woman who can accept what she understands.” Though nothing could make her accept her separation from her child.

  “It is complicated. It has to do with the mine.”

  “Yes, of course.” She could not keep her impatience out of her voice. “Tell me. I will understand. Other women are given responsibilities by their husbands. Doña Clara Pastells is the administrator of Don Francisco’s estate. Doña Immaculada manages the mine when Don Bartolomé goes to La Plata for the Audencia.” Her voice rose with each example. “Isabella the Queen ruled with King Ferdinand.” She was half out of her chair.

  He raised that ironic eyebrow. “The Queen?”

  She smiled at her own grandiose thoughts. “Yes. The Queen. I may not be a monarch, but I am not asking to rule a country. Only to understand my own family’s business.”

  He looked at her long and hard and finally sank into the chair behind his writing table and ran his hand over the inlaid pattern of the sun and moon on its surface. “I am in debt, Pilar.”

  “In debt?” When he took so much silver from the mountain? When he did not gamble like other men?

  “Yes. Deeply in debt.” Shame twisted his features as pain might contort the faces of tormented souls in a painting of damnation.

  She waited, wrestling with her fear.

  “Our mighty river of silver is down to a trickle.”

  “Ours?”

  “Not just ours. All the mines of Potosí.”

  She did not understand, but she held her tongue, waiting for him to make it clear.

  “The mine has been worked for a hundred years. They took the best ore at the beginning. Now we have to work much harder to take out ore of poorer quality.”

  “But it still contains silver?”

  “Yes, but hardly enough to cover our expenses.”

  “Surely we can live more simply. Eat plainer meals, buy fewer—”

  He chuckled, but his eyes remained sad. “We cannot save what we need by giving up a few dresses.”

  “But where did such a debt come from?”

  “I spent money—all the azogueros did—to build the lagoons and the aqueducts that store and bring the water to the city to run the waterwheels. When the dam broke at Caricari, we had to pay to rebuild the destroyed property.”

  The devastating flood had happened the year after Antonio’s brother Jorge was killed in the war. People still feared another deluge from the reservoirs above the city. At the time, she and the women of the city were concerned with the dead and the dispossessed. “That was so long ago.”

  He leaned forward, spoke in earnest. “Debts continue until they are paid. And there are other problems. You know we must have quicksilver to process the ore.”

  “Mercury. It comes from Huancavelica on the mules.”

  “Exactly. The King controls its price. To get the mercury, we must buy on credit, then we pay with the silver it extracts.”

  “So when the silver is gotten, it is already owed.” She surprised herself by understanding quickly how that worked.

  “Having enough silver left over to make a profit depends on the number of mita Indian workers we get. But there are fewer and fewer of them. Many Indians died of t
he pox. So we have to pay the local Indians more than the forced laborers. Our costs go up.”

  “Padre Junipero says there are not enough mita workers because they die of overwork.” Again her sympathies for Rosa Yana surged through her, but she held that diversion at bay. If she was going to convince Antonio to let Beatriz come home, she would have to understand what troubled him.

  “Workers do not die in my mine.”

  “Santiago Yana died,” she let slip.

  He turned away from her. “I have had to pay for that, too. Since Yana died, the workers are frightened. Local Indians do not want to come to work for me. I have to pay them more and more. They use their superstitions to extract more pay from me.”

  She gave him an ironic smile. “We have our methods for extracting silver from the mine, and the Indians have their ways of extracting it from us.”

  He reached for her hand and smiled, too. “And they do not have to pay the King exorbitant prices for mercury.” He patted her hand and let it go. “There is more.”

  “Go on.”

  “You know that Don Francisco Nestares, the Visitador General, is coming. Do you know why?”

  “Something about false money. I really don’t know what it means.”

  “All over the city, men have found their fortunes dwindling because the mining is harder. To maintain their wealth, some apparently have cheated by making coins that are not real silver, but tainted with copper and lead.” He rose again and bunched his fists at his sides. “I do not see how they thought they could get away with it. The rest of the world was bound to find out.”

  A small sun rose in her brain. Its light pained her already throbbing head. “If the world does not trust our money, we cannot use it to pay our debts.”

  “And we will all be ruined.” His eyes held respect for her understanding as well as defeat over the very idea of such ruination. “If Nestares should declare that our money is worth one-third less than before, instead of owing the King sixty thousand pesos, I will owe him eighty. And I cannot pay the sixty.”