Ines of My Soul

A Novel

Isabel Allende

• Publisher: HarperVia
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780063021754
• eBook ISBN: 9780063049666
• Subtopic: Letteratura generale

A passionate tale of love, freedom, and conquest from the New York Times bestselling author of The House of the Spirits, Isabel Allende.

Born into a poor family in Spain, Inés Suárez, finds herself condemned to a life of poverty without opportunity as a lowly seamstress. But it's the sixteenth century, the beginning of the Spanish conquest of the Americas. Struck by the same restless hope and opportunism, Inés uses her shiftless husband's disappearance to Peru as an excuse to embark on her own adventure. After learning of her husband's death in battle, she meets the fiery war hero, Pedro de Valdivia and begins a love that not only changes her life but the course of history.

Based on the real historical events that founded Chile, Allende takes us on a whirlwind adventure of love and loss seen through the eyes of a daring, complicated woman who fought for freedom.  

Two

AMERICA, 1537–1540

PEDRO DE VALDIVIA was thirty-five years old when he and Jerónimo de Alderete reached Venezuela—“Little Venice,” the first explorers ironically called it when they saw its swamps, canals, and huts on stilts. Valdivia had left the delicate Marina Ortiz de Gaete behind, with the promise either to return a rich man or to send for her as soon as it was possible—little consolation for the abandoned young woman. He had spent everything he had, and gone into debt besides, to finance the voyage. Like everyone who came adventuring in the New World, he had invested his wealth, his honor, and his life in the undertaking, although all the conquered lands, and a fifth of the wealth—were there any to be had—belonged to the Spanish Crown. As Belalcázar had said, with the king’s authorization, the adventure was termed a conquest; without it, it was armed assault.

The beaches of the Caribbean, with their blue waters, opalescent sand, and elegant palm trees welcomed travelers with deceptive tranquility, for as soon as they stepped into the undergrowth, they were absorbed by a nightmarish jungle. They had to slash a path with machetes, dazed by humidity and heat, constantly besieged by mosquitoes and animals they had never seen before. They slogged through swampy ground where they sank up to their thighs in stinking slime, weighed down, clumsy, covered with disgusting leeches that sucked their blood, but unable to remove their armor for fear of the poisoned darts of the Indians trailing them, silent and invisible in the undergrowth.

“We cannot be captured by these savages!” Alderete warned, and reminded the others that the conquistador Francisco Pizarro, on his first expedition to the south of the continent, had with a party of his men come across an empty village in which fires were still burning beneath a number of large clay pots. The starving Spaniards took off the lids and revealed the ingredients of the soup: human heads, hands, feet, and viscera.

“That happened west of us, when Pizarro was looking for Peru,” put in Pedro de Valdivia, who considered himself well informed on discoveries and conquests.

“On this side the Carib Indians are cannibals too,” Jerónimo insisted.

It was impossible to determine their location in the absolute greenness of this primitive world that predated Genesis, an infinite, circular labyrinth outside of time, outside of history. If they strayed a few feet from the banks of the rivers, the jungle swallowed them up forever—which happened to one of the men, who plunged into the tall ferns calling his mother, maddened by anguish and fear. The men were silenced, oppressed by an abysmal loneliness, a sidereal anguish. The river was infested with piranhas, which at the scent of blood rushed in schools to end a Christian’s days in a matter of minutes, leaving nothing but clean white bones as a sign that he once existed.

In all that lush growth, there was nothing to eat. Their provisions soon ran out, and hunger was added to their suffering. Occasionally they were able to catch a monkey and eat it raw—in that endless damp it was next to impossible to light a fire—nauseated by its human resemblance and its stench. They ate unfamiliar fruit, which made them deathly ill and for days kept them from making headway, weakened as they were by vomiting and watery bowels. Their bellies swelled, their teeth fell out, they were racked with fever. One man died bleeding through every orifice, including his eyes; another was lost in a pit of quicksand; and a third was crushed by an anaconda, a monstrous water snake as big around as a man’s leg and as long as five lances laid end to end. The air was like hot steam, rotten, noxious—a dragon’s breath. “This is Satan’s kingdom,” the soldiers swore, and it must have been so, for they grew quick to anger and fought at every turn. Their captains found themselves hard put to maintain discipline and force them to continue. Only one inducement kept them moving: El Dorado.

As they fought their way forward, Pedro de Valdivia’s faith in the venture faded and his frustration mounted. This was not what he had dreamed of in the boredom of his family home in Extremadura. He was prepared to confront savages in heroic battles and to conquer remote regions for the glory of God and the king, but he had never imagined he would use his sword—the victorious sword of Flanders and Italy—to hack his way through a jungle. He was revolted by the cupidity and cruelty of his companions; there was nothing honorable or idealistic in that brutal group. Except for Jerónimo de Alderete, who had given more than enough proof of his nobility, his fellows were ruffians of the lowest sort, treacherous and quarrelsome. The captain at the head of the expedition, whom Valdivia immediately detested, was heartless: he stole, he treated the Indians like slaves, and he did not pay the quinto, the fifth owed to the Crown. “Where are we going, with such anger and desperation, when in the end none of us can take the gold with us to the tomb?” Valdivia wondered, but he kept on because he could not turn back.

This senseless adventure lasted several months, until finally Pedro de Valdivia and Jerónimo de Alderete were able to split away from the ill-starred party and take a ship to the city of Santo Domingo, on the island of Española, where they took some time to recover from the ravages of the trek. Pedro used the opportunity to send Marina a little money he had saved, as he would continue to do till he died.

They were in Santo Domingo when the news reached the island that Francisco Pizarro needed reinforcements in Peru. His partner in the conquest, Diego de Almagro, had gone off to the extreme south of the continent with the idea of taming the barbaric lands of Chile. The two men were unlike in temperament: the first was somber, suspicious, and envious, though courageous, and the second was frank, loyal, and so generous that he wanted a fortune only to be able to share it. It was inevitable that men so different, though equally ambitious, would have a falling out, even though they had sworn to be loyal to each other before the altar, each taking half of the same host. The Inca empire was too small to hold them both. Pizarro, who had been given the title of marqués gobernador y caballero de la Orden de Santiago, stayed in Peru, aided by his fearsome brothers, while in 1535, Almagro, with an army of five hundred Spaniards, ten thousand Yanacona Indians, and his own title of adelantado, started out for Chile, a still unexplored region whose name in Aymará means “where the land ends.” To finance the trip he spent from his private fortune more than the Inca Atahualpa had paid for his own ransom.

As soon as Diego de Almagro left with his men for Chile, Pizarro was faced with widespread insurgency. Seeing the forces of the viracochas—the Peruvians’ name for Spaniards—divided, the Indians rose up against the invaders. Without help, and soon, the conquest of the Inca empire would be endangered, as well as the lives of the Spaniards, who were forced to contend with numbers far greater than their own. When Francisco Pizarro’s call for aid reached Española, Valdivia heard it, and without a moment’s hesitation decided to go to Peru.

For Pedro de Valdivia, the mere name—Peru—evoked visions of inconceivable riches, along with a picture of the refined civilization his friend Alderete had described with such eloquence. In fact, he had thought when he heard Alderete’s account that it was a civilization to be admired, even though not everything about it was worthy of praise. He knew that the Incas were cruel, and that they were ferocious in controlling their people. After a battle, if the vanquished did not accept being absorbed into the empire, no captive was left alive, and at the least hint of discontent entire villages were relocated a thousand leagues away. They tortured their enemies, including women and children, in horrible ways. The Inca, who wed his sisters in order to guarantee the purity of the royal blood lines, was the divinity incarnate, the soul of the empire—past, present, and future. Of Atahualpa it was said that he had thousands of maidens in his seraglio and an uncountable number of slaves, that he enjoyed personally torturing prisoners, and that he often cut the throats of his ministers with his own hand. The faceless, voiceless people lived in subjection; their destiny was to labor from childhood to death to benefit the orejones—the priests, military, and members of the court—who lived in Babylonian splendor while an ordinary man and his family barely survived, living off a piece of land they occupied but did not own. The Spanish reported that many Indians practiced sodomy—a sin punished with death in Spain—even though the Inca rulers had forbidden it. There were many tales of sexual excess in the Inca society, proof of which could be found in the erotic ceramics adventurers showed in taverns for the entertainment of the customers, who had never suspected that there were so many ways to disport themselves. It was also reported that a mother broke her daughter’s hymen with her finger before giving her to a man.

Valdivia found nothing wrong in aspiring to the fortune he might find in Peru. Riches, however, were not his incentive; that came from feeling it his duty to fight beside his fellows and his desire to achieve the glory that had until then been so evasive. A sense of honor distinguished Valdivia from others who had joined the expedition to go to Pizarro’s aid; they were dazzled by the gleam of gold. This is what Valdivia himself told me, many times, and I believed him because his behavior would have been consistent with the other decisions of his life. Years later, driven by idealism, he sacrificed the security and wealth he had finally obtained in an attempt to conquer Chile, which Diego de Almagro had in the end failed to accomplish. Glory, always glory, that was the lodestar of his life. No one loved Pedro more than I did; no one knew him better than I, which is why I can speak of his virtues, just as later I must refer to his defects, which were not minor. It is true that he betrayed me and behaved in a cowardly fashion with me, but even the most valiant and honorable men sometimes fail their women. And I can speak with authority when I say that Pedro de Valdivia was one of the most valiant and honorable men among all those who have come to the New World.

Valdivia traveled to Panamá by land, and from there, in 1537, along with four hundred soldiers, sailed to Peru. The journey took a couple of months, and when he reached his destination the Indians’ uprising had already been subdued by the opportune arrival of Diego de Almagro, who had returned from Chile in time to join his forces with those of Francisco Pizarro. Almagro had crossed icy peaks in his advance toward the south; he had survived incredible hardships and had returned across the hottest desert on the planet, a ruined man. His expedition to Chile had reached the Bío-Bío, the same river along which the Incas, seventy years before, had retreated when they had unsuccessfully tried to take the land of the Indians of the south, the Mapuche. The Incas, like Almagro and his men, had been stopped by these warring people.

Mapu-ché, “people of the earth,” they call themselves, although now they are called Araucanos, a more sonorous name given them by the poet Alonso de Ercilla y Zúñiga, who took it from who knows where—perhaps from Arauco, an area farther to the south. I intend to call them Mapuche—the word has no plural in my language—until I die, since that is how they call themselves. It does not seem just that their name was changed only to make it easier to rhyme: araucano, castellano, hermano, cristiano, and on and on for three hundred quartos. Alonso was a runny-nosed boy living in Madrid when we Spaniards first fought on this soil. He came to the conquest of Chile a little late, but his verses will tell the epic story through the centuries. When there is nothing left of the spirited founders of Chile, not even the dust of our bones, they will remember us through the work of that young man who, in his eagerness to make his lines rhyme, is not always faithful to the facts. Furthermore, he does not always present us in the best light. I fear that many of his admirers will have a slightly erroneous impression of what the war of the Araucanía was.

Ercilla accuses the Spaniards of cruelty and an excessive hunger for wealth, while he exalts the Mapuche, to whom he attributes qualities of bravery, nobility, chivalry, a spirit of justice, and even tenderness with their women. I believe I know them better than Alonso because I have spent forty years defending what we founded in Chile, and he was here for only a few months. I admire the Mapuche for their courage and their deep love of their land, but I can tell you that they are not models of sweetness and compassion. The romantic love that Alonso so extols is quite rare among them. Every man has several wives, whom he prizes for their labor, and for bearing his children. At least this is what we are told by the Spanish women who have been kidnapped by them. The humiliations they suffered in captivity were so great that these poor, shamed women often choose not to return to the bosom of their families. On the other hand, I must admit that Spaniards do not treat the Indian women who serve them and satisfy their lust any better. The Mapuche do surpass us in some aspects. For example, they do not know greed. Gold, land, titles, honors, none of those things interests them. They have no roof but the sky, no bed other than moss. They roam free through the forest, hair streaming in the wind, galloping the horses they have stolen from us. Another virtue I celebrate is that they keep their word. It is not they who break pacts, but we. In times of war they attack by surprise, but not in betrayal, and in times of peace they honor accords. Before we came they knew nothing of torture, and they respected their prisoners of war. Their worst punishment is exile, banishment from the family and the tribe. That is more feared than death. Serious crimes are paid for with a swift execution. The condemned man digs his own grave, into which he throws small sticks and stones as he names the beings he wants to accompany him to the next world. When he has finished, he is dealt a fatal blow to the skull.

I am amazed by the power of Alonso’s verses, which invent history and defy and conquer oblivion. Words that do not rhyme, like mine, do not have the authority of poetry, but in any case I am obliged to relate my version of events in order to leave an account of the labors we women have contributed in Chile; they tend to be overlooked by the chroniclers, however informed they may be. At least you, Isabel, must know the truth, for though you are not the child of my blood, you are the child of my heart. I suppose that statues of me will be erected in the plazas, and there will be streets and cities that bear my name, as there will be of Pedro de Valdivia and other conquistadors, but the hundreds of brave women who founded the towns while their men fought the wars will be forgotten.

But I have wandered. Let us return to what I was telling, because I do not have very long; my heart is weary.

Diego de Almagro abandoned the conquest of Chile, forced by the invincible resistance of the Mapuche, the pressure of his soldiers—disenchanted by the scarcity of gold—and the bad news of the Indians’ rebellion in Peru. He returned in order to aid Francisco Pizarro and snuff out the insurrection, and then together to achieve the definitive defeat of the enemy hordes. The proud empire of the Incas, devastated by hunger and the violence and chaos of war, was broken. However, far from being grateful for Almagro’s intervention on their behalf, Francisco Pizarro and his brothers turned against him; their sights were on Cuzco, a city granted to Almagro in the territorial division set out by Emperor Carlos V. Their own vast holdings, with their incalculable riches, were not enough to satisfy the ambition of the Pizarro brothers. They wanted more. They wanted everything.

Pizarro and Almagro ended by taking up arms and facing off in a brief battle at Abancay that ended in Pizarro’s defeat. Almagro, always magnanimous, treated his prisoners with unusual clemency, even the brothers of Francisco Pizarro, his implacable enemies. Because they admired Almagro’s conduct, many of the defeated soldiers went over to his ranks, while his loyal captains begged him to execute the Pizarros and take advantage of his victory to claim all of Peru. Almagro ignored their counsel and opted for reconciliation with the ungrateful partner who had wronged him.

It was during this period that Pedro de Valdivia arrived in Ciudad de los Reyes and placed himself at the disposal of the person who had summoned him: Francisco Pizarro. Always respectful of the law, he did not question the authority or the intentions of the governor; he was the representative of Carlos V, and that was enough. Nevertheless, the last thing Valdivia wanted was to be embroiled in a civil war. He had come to combat insurgent Indians, and it had never crossed his mind that he would have to fight other Spaniards. He tried to act as intermediary between Pizarro and Almagro and reach a peaceful solution, and at one moment believed he was about to achieve it. But he did not know Pizarro, who said one thing but in the shadows was planning another. While the governor was stalling, making declarations of friendship, he was preparing his plan to rid himself of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Map
• Title Page
• Contents
• One
• Two
• Three
• Four
• Five
• Six
• Author’s Note
• Bibliographical Note
• Also by Isabel Allende
• Copyright
• About the Publisher