DAGOBERTO GILB

THE HEXAGON OF THE CONQUEST

I didn't like books when I was young. Or, better said, I didn't play much with books and they didn't play much in my life. I played baseball and football and shot hoops when I could find one. I was good, one of the two who always picked sides on all elementary school teams. I lived in that dirty house in the neighborhood, the one where the yard wasn't mowed or edged, bushes overgrown, the neighborhood where I would learn, especially from other kids' parents, that divorced and Mexican were words that were dirty too and that kept me from having friends in neat houses. Then a new boy from another state moved in near enough when I was around 12. My new friend wasn't athletic. He never talked about sports. I didn't care because at least I got to go over to his house, which was the dirtiest of them all, on a street with a traffic light, a house that was always for sale or rent. They rented. His mom looked like she drank, and his dad was a taxi driver. His dad, who was very quiet, sullen I'd put it now, lost his left arm working for the railroad. His dad could have been the one-armed man from The Fugitive! I never told my new friend how I smiled thinking it, not once, but it was always sort of there, making me feel like I was closer to a TV show world.
       My new friend didn't even care about sports. He cared about what I had never heard anyone else talk about. If I wanted to go look at bicycles at a store, he'd go with me blabbing about airplanes and space craft, flights to the moon and Mars. I liked Archie Comics, because of Veronica mostly, though la güerita Betty sometimes too, but he went for the superhero stories that were, well, too brainy and complicated for me. He knew dinosaur names and cared about science—he had both a microscope and telescope. He owned a few books, a used encyclopedia, and he knew about libraries too and he checked books out there. One time he walked me to his library, where I'd never been. It was a small local branch, with very few bookcases or books in it, though then it seemed otherwise to me, with big tables that we could sit in front of and spread out over. The library was a tense world to me, uncomfortable as maybe sitting for a meal at a family dinner table like people on TV shows did, as curious and unique to me as that. Different light bulbs, air not from windows, only whispers and pages turning, and coughs, sneezes, and blowing noses. At first I looked at books he would show me with my eyes checking around me too, waiting for someone to criticize me for doing something wrong—I think now it was that strange feeling of time that really disoriented me, the hands on the clock moving either too fast or too slow. I looked, and I read with him, until suddenly I was initiated: I forgot where I was once I found a book on my own. We probably looked at it together, maybe or maybe not, because I only remember the book, which was about the Seven Ancient Wonders of the World.
       Just think of them, or better said, the drawings of them in a children's book. The Pyramid at Giza, that obvious one of power, already as famous as the country of Egypt where there was the Sphinx too. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon was so much more to me because we heard in school so much about the "fertile crescent," the rich dark land between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, where these walls and terraces held and nourished fruit and flowers that grew on them like ivy. There was Zeus in Olympus. a godman made of gold, so big his head bumped the ceiling when he took this indoor throne. There was the Colossus of Rhodes on the Mediterranean, his feet planted on two land masses so that boats would have to go under him like a bridge. There were two in Turkey—the Temple of Artemis, who was the mother goddess of the wilderness, guarding the wild animals and nature, and the Tomb of Halicarnassus, which maybe was only another version of a pyramid, but to me was more a monument to death, the Big Grave.
       That counts six. It's that I remembered number seven wrong. The correct number seven was the Lighthouse of Alexandria. Even now, to me, this one seems off. It wasn't as tall as Giza or the Colossus, it wasn't golden, it wasn't an attraction to all or most or certain beautiful birds of the Western world—not one extra detail that would cause the imagination to dwell on its image or meaning. Bright as its light might be, important as I am sure it was for navigation, it was only practical. And so it was nothing like what I remembered, wrongly, as number seven, which was the Library of Alexandria. Could have been that these were so close, both with an "L of." I was so sure too, I couldn't believe it when I looked it up. But I say—still say—it has to be like number eight, no less than in the top 10! Doesn't it have to be? It was the library that collected all the knowledge combined of both the Greeks and the Egyptians, it held the library of Aristotle himself. That is, it was the symbol of knowledge, of its collection, of what a library is and does. And it was lost. Lost by Julius Caesar, the Roman conqueror, when he chased his rival Pompey and, in pursuing him, burned the Library of Alexandria down (accidentally, the story has it), and with it, or so it would seem, the oldest papyrus scrolls that were there, estimated to be somewhere between 400,000 to 700,000. That's as though ancient history, knowledge, and wisdom itself were burned and it all had to start over.

I was in the state of Michoacán, México, ascending a mountain on a bus from Uruapan, and as I did we passed through clouds, as an airplane does, dark ones, a drizzle on the streets below them, and once the bus broke through there were lush, surreal green fields and fields of corn growing and then a village of indios living in stick shacks until, passing that, lower gear howling, came more corn fields and another village where furniture was carved and assembled and for sale and, climbing, more lush fields of corn until another Indian pueblito where bricks were made and sold, and then more milpas until, well, the bus leveled at what seemed a mountain top, and I got off, in bright sunlight, at a pueblo bonito named Paracho, where the best guitars in all of México are made. One day later I’m on a saggy horse as small as a donkey, a burrito sin frijoles. The toes of my boots barely hooked into the stirrups of the saddle, hanging down like they might rut the dirt, while my knees were so propped up they seemed like they might poke the ears of my so-called caballo—I would have to have this saddle mounted over his butt to get the leg-reach I needed. My body complained that it was longer than a three-hour ride to the edge of the Paricutín volcano, through the avocado orchards that compete with California's, and since the horse—whose tired old patas had to carry my huevos con frijoles—also carried along my own gimpy left pata. I had a tearing Achilles and wasn't able to climb up to its gurgling, steamy mouth.
So I waited sitting on a big rock under a tree beneath it in the crunchy, grayish black ceniza that mulched the land below the wide horizon. I was there with Luís, the guide, who offered me some of his cookies which were a cross between Marías and Oreos. Luís was a Purépecha Indian, a Tarascan, and, he told me, a pocho from los estados, that what they called him was a mocho because his Spanish, his second language, wasn't so good. He asked about the woman with my son and me—both who we could see practically crawling up the mountain on all fours through the sandy ash—if she were my wife. No, I said, we only met her down there, I'm single now. He slowly shook his head at me surprised, even disapproving. Didn't I know it was bad for my health, he said, to not have a woman? His people marry when the woman is around sixteen, maybe fourteen, and the man is eighteen, or even sixteen, and stay married. The only reason to remarry is if a spouse dies. Nothing else is acceptable. Down there the people don't live as long as his people, who, with fifty years, he said, are at the halfway point of life. Luís was past calm, a blood pressure that could stabilize a hundred hearts in a hospital ward. Under his straw hat was a man I would have estimated to be between a rough-looking late-forties or a youngish sixty. He was seventy-three, and not one fraying Achilles tendon.
Tossing the cookie wrapper to the wind, he stood up almost solemnly when I asked him to tell the story of the eruption. Before it happened there was a sign that crossed the sky, he said, a comet, but no one listened to that warning. Then one day they were working in the cornfields when the land opened and steam that smelled bad began coming out. It grew fast, within days, into a hill, and then just as fast the hill became a mountain. The lava came slow, not much at the beginning. The people crossed their arms with fear, afraid of what the darkness in the sky meant, and they prayed. At first they wouldn't leave. But as Paricutín kept growing, a big eruption came and the hot lava passed over the valley until—he pointed and named villages in the three directions we could see, the volcanic mountain at our back—the lava and ash were everywhere around here and over there, and everyone had to leave. Everything was lost, but the people who lived here only had to change their lives. And, Luís said, many now say the land is better.

After winning a vicious battle against the indios at the river they called the Tabasco after one of their own, what the Spanish renamed the Grijalva, Hernán Cortés devised a plan of peace. He sent messages out offering this to the Tabascan caciques, the village leaders, through captured warriors who Cortés treated well. Meanwhile, he had his biggest cannon loaded with the biggest ball and told his men to fire it when he signaled. Next he had a mare, who had just foaled, be put together with a hungry stallion, then separated. He knew the indigenos were scared of this muscular animal they had never seen. When forty caciques came to talk to him in the afternoon, he told them, a little mad, that though he had many times offered peace, they had attacked and so it could be said they deserved to die. He explained that he himself was in the service of King Carlos, Emperor of Spain. It would be good if they were truthful in submitting to peace and his Lord's service as he was, but if they were not, if there was a sense that they were going to deceive his king, the tepuzque, the cannon they had experienced in their losing battle, would become angry. He secretly signaled for it to be fired, and it blasted and whistled. They were predictably terrified. He calmed them, saying he had given orders that they should come to no harm, and he called for the stallion to come near, next to a tree where the mare had been and had left her scent. The stallion kicked, neighed, and stomped, his crazed nostrils making his eyes wild right into those of the Tabascans. Cortés ordered the horse away, telling them that he told the horse to not be angry with them, since they came to make peace.
       Afterwards they ate bird and fish and fruit to celebrate their friendship, and the next morning the caciques brought offerings of ornaments—trinkets shaped as lizards and dogs and ducks, crowns and masks, soles for sandals, all of it a poor quality gold. And Cortés was given twenty women, one of whom would forever be known as Malinche, who the Spanish called Doña Marina, who spoke both Maya and Nahuatl. He asked them where they found their gold and jewels, and they told them it was in the direction of the sunset and that it was called Culua and Mexico—words, places, and land they did not yet know.
       When I think of Mexico, I imagine it like it could be a blurry memory, say if I were two-years-old, and I am being held on a dirt sidewalk, like an alley in El Paso, Texas, as Cortés and his column of men in suits of armor, sharpened swords and lances, high on horses that terrify me when I am beneath them, the ground-trembling clop of the hooves of those powerful legs prancing sideways, bells clanging on their harnesses, huge, mastiff-like greyhound dogs marching alongside, their tongues slapping between their long incisors, panting, all that ferocious animal heat and iron clang, as they approached an island city on a lake, the most beautiful they had ever seen, populated, bountiful, luxuriant, of fragrant trees and flowers and birds never seen in Europe, with tall buildings of stone and long, straight bridges, a terraced agriculture cut by canals and worked by canoes, a vision, a new world Venice, an enchanted land that made the Spaniards feel they were dreaming.
       Is there any story greater than that of the Conquest? Isn't the Spanish Conquest—less than fifty years from time of Cristóbal Colón, Hernán Cortés, Fernando de Magallanes, and Francisco Pizarro—the most fantastic tale in human history? It is the adventure story, a journey mythic and epic and evoking more the green blue red yellow black of primal exoticism, land and water and wind and sky, darkness and light, its subterranean jungle images and Homeric archetypes, emperors, kings, the gods with feathers and the God with a beard, savagery and nobility, sacrifice, cannibalism and gold lust, urges and acts both spent, wanton, honorable, deceitful, betrayals, lies, blood, semen, a story that would seem to brood and obsess more at a humid, fevered subconscious. It is not fabled sea monsters or a cliff at the end of a flat earth, but the factual account of the insemination of national histories that are now in the two continents birthed by it—and the transformation of the European isthmus that boomed not only through the plunder of Aztec, Mayan, and Incan gold and silver and gems, but by a booming agricultural business—the fertile lands well-maintained by the indigenos became more supply productive of what Europeans already ate, while demand imported the new foods that came from there, like the tomato, the potato, corn, avocado, sweet potato, pineapple, coconut, peppers, squash, vanilla, and of course chocolate, and especially tobacco—all driven more efficiently by the massive import of African slaves and because of the unintended devastation of indigenous cultures brought to submission not only by an aggressive sword and cannon but their conquerors' smallpox and measles.
       The Conquest was the final human discovery event on the planet Earth, the one after which any other human culture would have to learn that our natural world is on a globe, that it is defined, that here are its lands and seas: any disagreement would simply be lesser knowledge. It was the last clash of huge, continental civilizations that did not yet even know of each other's existence.

The first time I was in Sevilla, Spain, I was in the center of the old city, any tourist's focus, when I found the entry in a dated, used guide book I'd brought along: "The Archivo de Indias, the archive of the documents of the discovery and conquest of the New World, could be fascinating, but little of importance is on display (old maps of Havana) and there's not a word of English." I was reading from the steps of the statue at the Plaza del Triunfo, which is between the great cathedral and its famous 12th century Moorish minaret—re-established as a Christian bell tower—known as the Giralda, the icon of the city, and another monument, the Alcázar, a 10th century Moorish castle that grew in size and splendor to become the capital and residence of every Catholic monarch since Los Reyes Fernando and Isabel. Though on a map it was supposed to be in visible sight from where I was sitting, I couldn't make it out. I didn't think it possible that, if this were here, it didn't stand out not only visibly, but at least as flashing psychic kleig lights in a consciousness not just mine: It only gets a couple of sentences in this guide book? Did I understand it right?   Because if I did, if I was reading correctly, this archive, this library, kept all the documents of Las Indias, which in countries that are not Spain would be called Las Americas, what history calls the New World. In other words, the cultural geography after the Conquest, everything after October 12, 1492, the day a sailor from Sevilla, Rodrigo de Triana, among the miserable and mutinous crew only days before, yelled from high on the ship La Pinta, "Tierra en vista!", and Cristóbal Colón, with two other captains and a notary, rowed a dingy onto the Bahamian island he named San Salvador, sanctifying it in the name of the Christian God, claiming the land for Fernando and Isabel with the same royal flag of Castillo y Leon he'd seen less than a year before flying over the the Alhambra in Granada, days after the final defeat of the Moors. It could mean that this library would possess the logs or itemized requisitions or receipts of the crew of Francisco de Magallanos—Ferdinand Magellan—on his discovery of the Mar Pacifico, which he named after he passed into the calm through what is now named the Magellan Straits at the tip of South America on his way to what would be called the Spice Islands, the land of cinnamon and clove, now the Philippines, the journey which ultimately proved that what was the European easternmost of the East Indies could be reached by traveling the waters west. It would surely mean that it would own the pleas written by Hernán Cortés to His Majesty, arguing for his honorific place as Governor of Mexico. It might also have correspondence documenting the smallest details from Cajamarca, Peru, after the ruling Inca, Atahualpa, drawing a line above his head inside the building where he was prisoner, believing he would negotiate his release, offered to fill the room to the height of his reach with the gold Francisco Pizarro and these Spanish craved so much.
       I walked around the small area in Sevilla's center until I got spun around and then wasn't sure which direction it would be relative to the map and so I asked someone. Right where I was standing. It was the building with the huge stone nautical pilings and heavy anchor chains surrounding it. I found the glass front doors all by myself. The Archivo was closed, a uniformed guard said, and there was nothing to see for now. Can I just look inside for a second? He allowed me, trusting me, but watching. Maybe it was the marble stairs that would take me up for a peek at the closed doors above them, but my feet felt so tiny, and the stairs so big, and the silence came at me as wide and distant as clumsy, childhood fear and awe.
       The Egyptian Library of Alexandria is lost forever, but right in the heart of Sevilla—which for two-hundred years, as the capital of the Conquest, was the richest city in the world for not only the indigenous gold and silver that would cargo up the Río Guadalquivir, but as the port city of all trade coming into and out of the New World—there is a library archive that has amassed all the documents of trade, law, and government from the last great political and cultural upheaval in our human history. If there were an interest in an updated, color-drawing book of a current, surviving Ancient Wonders of the World, and if, as I believe, included on a list of them there has to be a library holding our most valued ancestral documents, then it is the Archivo General de Indias.

I have returned, determined this time, to touch the wonder, to report on the mystery. At the Barcelona airport, after a flight from London, I am in the middle of the customs line about to pass through a glass door to the kiosk. I do notice the way-fat dude—in baggy pants and an oversized long-sleeve sports team shirt and some neck bling which swings from side to side, I think a Latino if there is such a thing in Britain—cruising up to the front, his shorter, thin, comparably dressed but more embarrassed partner at his back. Way behind I hear that fierce and raspy española voice. It’s not just cigarettes. She starts in Spanish but switches into a good-enough English, telling him that there is a queue, and we are all in a queue, and he needs to step back into it like everybody. He ignores her, shoulders bobbing and pressing forward, when here she comes into his face, telling him right up into it. Don't touch me, he says, his first words. She says how maybe in his country he can get away with this, but not in hers. He says how it is his country—his a more under-his-breath reply. She steps in front of him, her arm out and palm up in his chest, trying to hold him back, definitely slowing him down. She says, for anyone to hear, that she is calling a security officer. He says how he is a security officer. She says, louder, she too is a security officer. All this in English. I don't think the dude or his cuzz spoke Spanish. I pass them by and get stamped through. I am officially here, even if I have one last flight.
       The next day, a Friday, I've awakened in Sevilla, and am now nervously on my way toward my destination, the sky as blue as the Yucatán's. I admire the Barrio Santa Cruz, the maze-like, pre-Inquisition Jewish neighborhood, clearly the city's most picturesque, which shares walls with the Royal Alcázar, what many who'd never seen Spain would think of as, say, so Mexican if they were in Xico or San Miguel de Allende, where my gimpy foot and I get turned around. Redirected through a couple of plazas shaded with arboles de naranjo—orange trees, introduced by the Arabs to the Andalucia region—on cobblestones and on mosaic sidewalks intricately patterned with tiny stones individually set on their edge, I enter a tunnel that, punching through, frames the Giralda—a photo every single Japanese tourist in every group snaps. Not a hundred paces west, past the massive wooden front gates of the Alcázar, I slip under the giant chain and move along the side of the Archivo de Indias to reach its public entrance. The building itself is the 16th-century former Casa Lonja de Mercadores, created to stop all the nasty stockmarket-like business taking place at the steps and inside the cathedral at the peak of the era. But where I need to go, I am told, is a building across a small cobbled street with more glass doors and a Ministerio de Cultura sign above it. Guards direct me through a metal detector, I check my workbag, and limp up more stairs. I have a letter to allow me in as an investigador, a researcher. I have a passport, I have two official photos. I answer questions typed into a computer application. Not Mexico, I say three times, I'm from the United States. I fill out multi-duplicate forms of names, numbers, and dates about where I am from, staying, representing, researching, and then I am given, besides a rules and information sheet, green and pink in blue stencil ejemplares of what I have signed and a photo ID tarjeta nacional with my own number, signed and rubber stamped on both sides. The paper from my yellow legal pad has to be torn in half, and they all have to be loose. I can only carry and use a pencil. Laptops are allowed.
       I am introduced to skinny and voluble José Antonio who tells me how unusual it is that I would get to see the archives themselves. I have to see them, I explain, because that's why I'm here. It's not a particular few documents I am interested in. It's that I have to see the whole of them. How they're stored, how high stacked, how deep the aisles, how unlit the space. It's the archive, the library, that's what I'm wanting to learn about. I want, I tell him, to think of it as the Ancient Library of Alexandria. I can't tell him how the more I imagine it, the more it becomes a Hieronymus Bosch painting in my mind, a medieval space so vast that people shrink, and then these pale, small people scurry around, ancient scrolls in both arms. Or maybe a Gothic German painting, a stooped old man at the topmost of an old, old, tall wood ladder, his thick wire glasses dangling from his nose and ears, and he's squinting, reaching into a faraway corner. José Antonio says it's not usual to be taken to the depositos, it's not normal, it's not done, but, wanting to be generous, he will ask the assistant director tomorrow, he will see what she says, he will tell me what her decision is.
       On the way to the sala de investigadores, I apologize to José Antonio for my slow movement. It's that I have a pata mala, I tell him. He shakes his head. Pierna, he corrects me, or pie. Only animals, he says, have a pata. Y por eso, I say, they tell me I have a pata. Where I'm from, I'm considered an animal. He stares at me, shrugs, but I can't make sure he knows I'm joking around because, too late, we are in the guarded research room. It is several aisles of shoved together tables, four computers per side, around 50 seats total, and only a few empty. Many, many serious-minded people are busy in the silence. He gives me what seems like a giveaway pamphlet about the archive as I sit, and then shows me how to use the search application in the computer, the archives' category list, a computer version of a card catalog but with a few extra features. For example, in moments, I am staring at a photo-digitalized copy of a letter from Cortés.   And José Antonio goes back to his own work, and I'm alone feeling really ignorant. Really dumb. Like a horse, or worse. I have no idea what I am going to do here. I don't even know enough history colonial or pre- or post- or otherwise but a few books, to exaggerate, so it's not like I can ask specific questions. I'm like, I heard about Babe Ruth and Mickey Mantle and I'm sitting in the room with every baseball card ever created and I only really know the name of a few teams and virtually nothing else but home runs. And it's a PC machine and I only know Macs. I keep messing up what effect the right versus the left click has on the application's functioning and split screen—you hit this link and a description of what's in it pops up over here—and I can't make any of it do what I think I might want if I have any of it right anyway.
       When I get up the courage to try the man at the reference desk, José Antonio's compadre Javier, he comes over. He's got the expert look of years of conscientious employment here. What do I want? he asks rhetorically. Say I want this, he answers. Click. Then click. Then click here, vale? Want to see this? Vale, click. Click click click. Vale? And he goes through it again. Asi, vale? He does this all so fast, so skilled. Easy, his pat on my shoulder says, going away. Could I say, bueno, well, es que, maybe if after each of those clicks you paused, bueno, ten to thirty seconds and, bueno, I stared and, wait, stared at the screen before the next click? And then you went through it, oh, like ten more times and explained every single thing and the history behind each?
       Sad, defeated, I decide to make my first day one that's out of there early. As I hobble onward, the guard at the exit is on a walkie-talkie, eyeing me. He asks my name. My name? He writes it on a clipboarded form. Looking up, he tells I have a folleto belonging to the Archivo and I need to return it. This? It looked free to me. I walk it back upstairs, embarrassed. Vale, now they know I am here. Outside, I am ashamed. Bueno, pues, I am a gimp. I am resigned to giving up my NBA career. I know I will definitely have to say no to the mile-relay Olympic team if I'm asked. But this too? I can't even read what I don't know anything about anyway. I can't click a computer mouse without wanting to throw it across the room or smash it like a Texas roach. Quietly though, no screaming, real quietly I swear, no breaking any noise rules. It's just that I wasn't expecting the computers or software issues at the Library of Alexandria.
       Not to slump and limp too mopey and lose the whole day, I drag along the achy foot across the street to the public entrance to see the public display of the Archivo de Indias. Maybe I should have started there in the first place. Maybe I should know something. At the outside stairs, a male voice catches me from behind, telling me how he's working on material from a 17th-century political murder in Mexico. He even invites me to a goodbye party for one of the archivistas. Yes, I gimp, and therefore I am a gimp, but I just got me a party on my first night! And so I lift both pie and pata up those marble stairs that are not so intimidating now that I have not only a party to attend but an official government-issue ID, like a membership card.
       The public space of the Archivo offers a spacious, if dark, gallery of regally framed, official portraits of uniformed men, and the expansive marble floors and arched ceilings are circled by faux bookcases of empty legajos, designer quality boxes decorated by engraver's ink, where actual documents could be stored. Somewhere deep within this building there are real, filled legajos like these, and there are employees—little people scurrying in a cool, dim-lit basement, somewhere nearby—moving them up and down and sideways. There are around 43,000 legajos, and somewhere close to 80 million pages, three centuries of documents with details and implications small and large, historical, economic, political, social, religious, engineering, architectural, cartographical, concerning the southern United States, Mexico, Central and South America to Tierra del Fuego and east to the Philippines, and the Spanish government has set in motion a plan to digitally scan them all and has approximately 14% of them. As my eyes stare glassy into display case examples of early 16th century escudos—royal coats of arms designed for newly anointed nobles, some even related to indigenous royalty—I am wondering how many people it took and how much so far to get to that percent, and (this is how I am) I am visualizing these ancient pages rolling through a scanner that resembles a mechanized tortilla-maker, that last step a drop onto a dark manito which makes a neat, counted stack. Alone to the vast breadth and width of elegant, physical space and my imagination, suddenly appears a couple who look like my own territorial descent, and then I hear them whispering in English. I can't keep myself from asking. They are a Mexican American couple from Los Angeles, and the one who is a professor says she saw an entry in a guide book, and, like me, she had to know if it was for real, she had to go inside. I am in Spain, they have taken my name down, and, ¡ajua!, my brain is not alone in its peregrinations. It isn't only me who is eager to see into the cultural and historical looking glass that we didn't even know existed.

I worked in a library for a few years when I was in college. Although there are passers-through, those who visit for their needs and go, it's the ones whose lives are in them who are the special stories. Let me give an example of what I mean. I had a boss who was this huge man, at least six-five, 275 pounds, maybe more. Big as he was, though, he didn't seem big, because he was all feet and shoes, like he was still growing into them, and maybe also because everything about him seemed as soft as his voice. He was as kind, caring and gentle as St. Francis, which made sense because, before he became a librarian, he'd been a Franciscan priest. He knew Latin, to speak it too. To me, that meant he lived in a Pure Other World I could only imagine, as might a pre-teen boy getting hormones, squirming with awe and fear on the idea of a voluptuous, naked woman. Then one day he fell in love. If I were a viejita, this would have been a fanning-myself susto, because, to me, he was still a priest. He fell in love with a woman who was fat. He loved her so much he bought her flowers all the time, excessively. He bought her chocolates, boxes of the best chocolates, excessively. And they must have eaten them together because they both got fatter and fatter. Then together they decided to lose weight. Following weight loss books precisely, they did. And then, just as suddenly, he became fat again. I can't remember if she left him or if that had nothing to do with it. His clothes changed, he forgot to shave, his hair wasn't just unruly but scissored unworldly, not for style or as statement. It was said, quietly in the library of course, he was drinking too much. I'm not sure which part made this story a story I remember, whether it was that he was a librarian or a priest. It is only one of them. But it reminds me of going to the library.
       With my investigador card, laptop, and my pencil, I have begun a routine of mornings of going there. I receive a familiar castellano bueno dia from the men in uniform as I clear the screening machine. I give my bag to the kind lady at the desk, hang the coat, and gimp upward. As I pass through the glass door of the sala, a silent mutual nod to that guard, I hand my card to the non-reference desk employees directly responsible for physically keeping track of both the legajos and researchers. I am given a desk number where I sit. Before I traveled to Spain, thinking on paper, I'd made a first list of topics that I could look to find paragraphs about. They were not very historical and very naïve, I knew not seconds after I became more expert with the clicks. I hereby disclose them publicly: food on ships, wages, chocolate, los escándolos, los secretos, los atrocidades, sex, moving and storing gold, smoking tobacco, dogs, ask what has been stolen from the Archivo. Those as though the Archivo would be some encyclopedia, not a document library.
       Still limited by my own broad—and only broad—knowledge of the Conquest and its conquerors, I'm clicking better and narrowing down names and places, for example: Cipango, Cibola, Padre Francisco de Bobadilla, Cuauhtémoc, Malinche, Bartolome de las Casas, Juan de Cartagena, Manco, Atahualpa, Francisco de Carvajal, Diego de Orellano, Tzintzuntzan, Patzcuaro. I've also started letting my nosy eyes go around the room, this research room, to these people in the library who have a computer and a pile of almost ancient paper near that. A few I met at the party I went to, which, like Sevilla at the time of the conquistadores, was attended by an international array of people—Canadians and Americans and Spaniards, italianos, alemanes, franceses, flamencos (Flemish was what King Carlos I was too, and because of his royal court, the word in Spain came to describe anything "flashy," unto the traditional dance most recognized as its only meaning)—plus a few more I look to give little waves to: a Sri Lankan bella being paid by a company to find everything she can on cacao, a New Mexican finishing a PhD in art about mirrors in Cuzco, a madrileña researching Tierra del Fuego, an Ohio historian on 18th century Peru, a chilango studying las mayas, a Texan the 17th century New World book trade, a sevillano Puerto Rico, a Tennessean the slave trade, a Parisian Nueva España, a Florida historian amassing material for a book on Nueva Granada.
       It's always the usual sneezes and sniffles and nose-blowing that percolate the silence, the strolling guard monitoring like it's a bank. The other Spaniards, employees and not, both the men and women, can be spotted by the almost Catholic school consistency of clothes—a striped cotton dress shirt, collar out from under a dark pullover sweater. It's that I like to know how it is within a workplace—and what's down there. And he went there every day, I was sure of it. He being this very stern, small, older man who rolled the institution gray cart in and out and down and up the elevator when requests came to see pages in a legajo. Unlike the stereotype of the Spanish male, of the balding dome and thick, far-sighted glasses, his mixed black and gray hair was all there, and his glasses were for myopia. But he also had an odd white patch of hair, like a bandage, at the back of his head. He did not talk to the others much, and if some non-employee incidentally spoke to him, he sighed like he was clearly indisposed and above such verbal interfaces. He was my evidence, he made it more curious. What was it like down there? I politely ask José Antonio if I have been given that permission yet. The one who gives this, the directora, he explains, is not here, maybe tomorrow. He will find out, he will try. He didn't have to say each time how unusual, how not normal.
       At my assigned desk, I am at the Archivo computer, and this is the large topic catalog list at the beginning:
       PATRONATO (Foundation) 1480-1801
       CONTADURIA (Accounting) 1514-1782
       GOBIERNO (Government) 1492-1870
       JUSTICIA (Justice) 1515-1617
       CONTRATACIÓN (Trade) 1492-1795
       ESCRIBIANA (Court Records)
       ARRIBADAS (Arrivals)
       CORREOS (Letters) 1752-
       Hit any of these, and more links rain beneath. Hit those, more. And so on. Or go to a small window, type in a name or a place or a phrase, wait, and a list of hits unfurls. Yes, I was told, it probably takes at least two weeks of—and I quote an eloquent and sophisticated American—"spasing around" to get any idea of what's going on. As I am beginning my battle with my own daily twitches, typing in “plata en Charcas," because of the story of a local in Potosí, who, chasing a llama up a hill and, climbing, pulled a weed and found silver pellets on its roots, and thus became the richest silver mine ever known—when—this I swear—in walks a new guy, who is seated right across from me. He has the quiet, utterly polite, dark face of an indigeno. He has that first day look of fright and intimidation as he is awaiting the click click instructions of Javier. He moves eyes that do not intrude, do not look straight, that angle down. In the sala, as you are never supposed to share physical material, you are also not supposed to share talk material either. A rebel, I lean forward and whisper. He's from Bolivia. He's a religioso, and he is studying the los dominicos (the Dominican Order) in Charcas.
       I want to pull paper and find silver. I want to discover something, the library search version, I want time to disappear. I consider several options. One about livestock and "also about the condition of those indios." Another on how Admiral Colon discovered Panama. Another on Juan de Oñate and New Mexico. Another on doña Marina and her service to the country. Ones on the population of Peru after the conquest, on Cortes's complaints to the King, on the registration of slaves.
       Many of these above you can see digitally. All you do is select ver imagen (see the image)and on a screen it is (even through the web—www.aer.es); e.g., the Papal Bull and Treaty of Tordesillas, which drew the latitudinal line through South America, making everything east of it Portuguese territory, like Brazil, and the rest conveniently belonging to Spain. But I had to actually see and touch the ancient paper. I had to find something that would allow me to click the solicitar fondo link, which causes the man with the square white patch of hair to descend.
       I decide to click one on Fernando (or Hernando) de Magallanes. In a paragraph, here's why his story is so especially fascinating: Magellan leaves from Sevilla in August 1519 to find the western route to the Spice Islands, the East Indies. He loses one ship on the coast of Brazil and fights back a mutiny. As he strains for five miserable weeks through the tip of South America, he loses yet another ship when it deserts him and returns to Spain. When he finally passes out of the straits that will be named after him, the breakthrough is into such calm that he names the ocean el pacifico. He comes onto the "islands of Saint Lazarus," what later we will know as the Philippines. He supports an island King of Sebu who he has converted from Islam to Christianity. Fighting on behalf of this King, he is killed in a losing battle. Disillusioned, the King massacres all but two of Magellan's twenty-nine officers. 115 men escape the island. Months pass, more crew die. Another ship is burned. The two which remain finally set sail and even find the East Indian islands of the Maluca that were the original goal, where they load their ships with cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon, and then began their return journey to Spain. The Trinidad springs a leak, and eventually only 4 survive starvation and disease. The Victoria, captained by Sebastián del Cano, rounds the African cape and, in September 1522, makes it up the Rio Guadalquivir to Sevilla with its spice cargo and 18 men, the first to ever circle the earth.
       I don't wait long for my request to ascend on the gray cart. When the package is passed to me, I feel magic and mystery. I give a pause of deep respect as its weight is hefted to my time bound hands and I carry it to the table. A legajo is secured by one long, white cotton ribbon—everyone must learn to wrap and tie a legajo just right, be professional. The design of its cover is classic, highbrow European: the lettering, an old typeface in caps, Archivo General de Indias, Sevilla, and artwork, a linocut etching of, in the foreground, soft naked boys dumping their bounty of fruit and bread from baskets, behind them a King probably, with two Archbishops or Cardinals on either side of him. The box unfolds on all four sides, revealing the document inside which also has a tie.
       I do not believe what I have has been looked at much, if at all. When I turn a page—bound by a string binding—there is that clinging together with another that new books as we know them have when pages haven't been turned. The aged, cream paper itself is thick but soft. Created from a wood paste, if looked at carefully, there are even little bluish lines in them for a pen to follow. These pages have survived a fire, because the edges, particularly on the bottom, have jagged, dark brown and black burn lines. There is about an inch-and-a-half hole that almost looks like it has been punched out and then put back perfectly. I fear touching it. The all of it is, from the found art point of view, terribly, startlingly beautiful. I turn pages as though each is an unframed canvas, a fragile tissue. I cannot imagine getting used to them. I cannot imagine that anyone is letting me, for example, touch them.
       Inside are supposed to be descriptions of payments made to these men on the ships, both survivors and dead, what the cargo was, how money was divvied up. And yes, I can see a list of names and numbers. The names, yes, I can even make out, to some degree. But I really cannot read any of it, not really. I cannot read anything in this legajo, and I probably can't read the vast majority that would be dated before at least 1700. There would be, of course, always the issue of language when studying one that isn't what you primarily speak or read. And then it wouldn't be only that it is in Spanish, but that it's in a Spanish that is an older idiom, much older version at that, with words and phrases that are out of common use. And then there's the issue of abbreviations and recording shortcuts that have to be learned in trying to read these texts not only as a non-expert, but as one would read a court reporter's shorthand.   And then, finally, there is the penmanship itself. Reading anyone else's writing is often an eye-strain. That, however, would not be the trouble here. Because the documents were almost always written by human typewriters, escribanos, whose calligraphy skills were equal to and as important as carpenters on ships.
       The sum of it is this: When I look at any of the pages, I am looking at an artistic rendering of letters and words and sentences—the margins, for example, all around are filled in by swirls that look like infinity marks with yet an extra dimensional loop of emphasis, or swirls that are tight, dark tornados or loose, weak springs, or worms, or curls, or curlicues—every garnish and flair that is possible. The first letter in a sentence is not just a cap, it's dressed in the finest feathers and hat and shoes and gloves. If it's the first letter of a paragraph? The letter swoops off the sides of the page and swings up and over into empty space. You can only admire what happens within a text to an e or f or m or p or z, just to name a popular few.
       At a distance, the script could seem like ancient Greek, or Coptic, or Aramaic, even Arabic, maybe Egyptian, a language that might have been in Alexandria. Hieroglyphics. On the page, it is an ancient, unknown script that has to be learned, must be taught by someone who already knows, like through an initiation. Or through what is scientifically named paleography. I was told by a professor working in the Archivo that this is exactly one of his courses. After a few months, he told me, depending on a mastery in Spanish, pages written by a conquistador, one maybe some years after Colón, can begin to be deciphered. After 6 months, a person can begin studying pleitos, legal arguments, about encomiendas, salaries, or royal titles. As to him, in his lifetime he will never be able to read all the material there is in his own area, even if it were all he did. Which is a lot like me, because I know I can never read all that I wish to either, except for me, a gimp, I cannot read any of it.
       Inches near an actual document, I am still so far away. From then. From time. From seeing clearly the colors and lines that might make sharper images in my mind. And if I could read any word, most, every word even, how much closer would I be then? How much less a dream, how much still like a "memory" that is as accurate as a two-year-old's, even a precocious one? How near must I get to be fulfilled? With what kind of eyes or seeing glass? What quantity of books, or detail from one, in a library, in an archive, will finally get me there, wherever it is I want to go, whatever it is I want to learn?
                                                               *
       I step, I drag, I step, I drag. Well after two in the morning, the streets of Sevilla tap many melodies of shoe heels walking fast, walking slow. Voices, single and in group, echo loud, singing, laughing. Three Spaniards, dark leather coats and neck scarves swung over the shoulder, drunk and happy, bump up to me, asking directions. When I tell them how I wouldn't know and where I'm from, they squeal—one's been to Houston, one's been to El Paso! The cobble streets are wet from being washed, and the cool black air around the plazas near the Giralda, the Alcázar, and the Archivostirs the sour of burning cigarettes and the sweet of fresh horseshit from the tourist carriages. In el centro of Sevilla, the quietest hours come at dawn and a few after. Nothing really opens before 10:00 am or later.
       On my way to Mérida earlier than that, above the cooler shadows of the narrow streets in Barrio Santa Cruz, high-definition sunlight sharpens the tone of the whites and yellows of walls, and the reds, greens, and blacks of higher-up, flower draped, wrought-iron window terraces. I am saying to a taxi driver how a walk to the bus depot would be nothing without my pata mala. He asks me if I know the difference between pata mala and mala pata. I laugh and I say that if my bad foot is bad luck for me, it at least makes good fortune for him. The word fortune makes me tell him about the pretty, flirty gitana in Córdoba who, on my last little side trip, momentarily played my vanity and my discouraging, unhandsome gimp, offering me dried sage and insights into my future after she called, Por favor, guapo. Says the taxista, we don't have gypsies here, only romanis.
       I am on my way to Medellín, a few kilometers east of Mérida, which by bus is three hours north of Sevilla, because I want to see the pueblo where Hernán Cortés was born. Always when I've read stories on the Conquest there are these remarks about Extremadura, the region where so many of the men had come from, especially Cortés and Pizarro, whose hometown of Trujillo is a few more kilometers east of Medellín. In histories, this land is always described as as hard and barren as its name, and that was why, it is explained, men from there were so hungry and brutal, why they were so successful at their occupation. If Andalucía, the southern region where Sevilla is located, is the land with the resemblance of the Old American West in spaghetti westerns, then Extremadura must be the almost uninhabitable desert from Juárez to Chihuahua, or New Mexico's parched jornada del muerte trail region that paces north from Las Cruces.
       Maybe once it was barren. Maybe. I doubt it. From the bus windows it looks plowed and planted, a cross between the cotton and green chili fields that grow well in the upper and lower Rio Grande valleys of El Paso and southern New Mexico. There are patches of land where fields of rocks, even boulders, begin to share the ground with what seem to be hardwood trees, like live oaks, and when I see what seems like limestone breaks, and groutless but carefully fitted stone fences, and nopal cactus and horses, and cattle, then it seems it could be what south of Austin is called: the Hill Country, one of the most naturally beautiful and, if rugged, lush in the state.
       I arrive in Mérida too late to catch the morning bus to Medellín, and I have several hours before the next one goes there in the afternoon, a man at the depot office tells me. A man next to him figures out what it is I'm doing, because he’d been to México. Todos los conquistadores son de aquí, he tells me. Los mierdos robaron la plata de todo. ("All the conquistadors are from here," he tells me. "The shits stole money from everybody.") Pizarro, he singles out as his personally favorite example, came from a family which raised pigs only a few kilometers from here. My driver is the gerente, manager, of the depot and, since he has to drive there anyway, offers to drop me off downtown. "The rocks right here," he says, pointing to a wall of them after we cross a bridge over the Rio Guadiana, "to them, when they were in the Yucatán, reminded them of these rocks, so they named it Mérida there too." He leaves me at the Teatro Romano, which is to say, the site of the Roman Theater, built in the teens of the first century by the son-in-law of the Roman Emperor, Octavio Augustus. Not too far from the theater is a first century amphitheater, one of those rings for gladiator versus animal events. Across the street from the Roman Theater, a very contemporary Museum of Roman Art collects much of the public sculpture of gods and goddesses once worshipped in the city. Also of the Emperor himself, if for no other reason than that the city's name descends from being named in honor of him, Emérita Augusta. It was the capital city of one of Rome's most important regions, Luistania, known for its marble and wood and grain crops, its most eastern port (it included what is now Portugal), a stopping point for trade and travel from the east, north, and south on the peninsula. Gimping toward the river to get back to the depot, through this photo-shoot beautiful city, I pass by the Roman Templo de Diana (the Greek goddess Artemis), the Emperor's cult, the goddess of the hunt, of the wilderness, around twenty granite columns of which stand twenty-five feet high, until, walking more, I reach the cut-boulder walls of a major Moorish castle that goes to the river's edge, where it overlooks Rome's longest and best surviving bridge.
       Not a half-hour after I've crossed la puente romana, the Roman bridge, I have made it onto a commuter bus of old people and teenagers that has a stop in Medellín. It crosses more plowed and budding fields and prickly pear and rocks and towns painted as bright as any nurse's uniform, the towers and steeples as Arabic as they are Spanish. Getting closer, as we pass some groves, a viejo, very kind, with those glasses and beret covering the balding dome, tells me how they are nueces on this side, and peras on that one. Fences hold bulls, horses, sheep. Medellín is a white-washed pueblo set up against a river and a prominent, almost God-above rise of a green hill which is crowned by a castle, a massive 10th-century Moorish fortress of brown stone. Even if this picturesque village of now was a tenth of its population then, one percent, this was there. When I stop at the cafe-bar Palomares in the center of the city, waiting for the return bus, a cerveza and media ración of deer meat, all I am able to think of is the history of the Romans down the road, and the boy Hernandito prancing up the hill, bouncing his rubber ball against castle walls. Like my new best friend long ago, he probably imagined superheroes, and instead of sports and their leagues, he had gigantic, mythic trophies of conquering and conquered empires all around him.

I had to get back to Sevilla quickly because my time was running out and I still hadn't been down there. Days before, I had nagged good-natured José Antonio enough times until finally, one day, there was a shift in the discussion. I needed a document to give la directora to approve. He suggested a letter expressing my purpose. He suggested I write it on the spot, on my laptop, and he'd print it out for me. Everything, of course, had to be documented. There was evidence of this want and need functioning everywhere around me. I felt like someone from so many of these archived pages entreating Her Royal Majesty the Queen. And so I composed. I felt it was essential to craft well my request, but also with speed and a confidence in my command of reasoning and word, yet displaying my determination. I believe I achieved this. Thus it was printed out, and it was passed forward and up and onward. A stamped photocopy was returned to me: ARCHIVO GENERAL DE INDIAS, 19 DIC. 2005, Entrada no. 2108. Frankly, I felt an odd achievement, an anointment of a kind, numeric only at the surface level, for my document, with my very signature, will forever be searchable by and linked to the library. A letter by me.
       I am considering journey, travel, and work, occupation, both vocation and avocation. Almost every day in the late afternoon I have stopped at a small establishment, with the customary outdoor tables and chairs for café con leche, which in Spain is as good as it gets anywhere, where I am served by this giant, gap-toothed, redheaded waiter. Right or more likely wrong, as courteous and comfortable as he is, he does not seem to me like he should be wearing the white and black apron of the waiter. To my mind, it somehow does not match him. I imagine work in Sevilla then, employment, and I think, of course he would fit. And on my way to the Archivo I pass construction sites, even one going on next to the Archivo's Ministerio de Cultura building I enter each day, the men and me nodding in common buenos at each other, and I imagine seeing Francisco Pizarro's military leader Francisco de Carvajal, a huge and certainly cruel man who led his men into battles—always in full armor, never off his horse—"I am as big a target as any two of you, yet they do not hit me"—in Peru in his seventies, renowned for his tireless and sleepless energy, until he was executed and quartered in his eighties. I'm sure he was several of my own construction foreman and superintendents, and, I think, I imagine work then, and of course these men at this job would fit.
       But this is my morning. Oh sure, I do still have to wait. She just arrived when I first asked, and she couldn't see me right that minute. I'm over there, in the sala, I suggest. When I return, an hour later, we must have just missed each other, and she'll be back in a half-hour or so. It is, I understand, unusual what I am asking. It is very uncommon. And she is very busy. So I have to be patient. The next time I hear her voice inside her office on the phone now, I'm that close. And, before I interrupt, she has to talk to this employee, and that one too. It is that tough española voice, aggressive, burned with and accelerated by nicotine. Until, finally, she has received me, and I am sitting in a chair in front of her. Not the directora herself, but the Jefe del Departamento de Referencias, the boss of the reference department. She has, it seems, my stamped and signed and numbered document on her desk in front of her. The depositos, she says, have no old dust or dark corners, and it's not in a basement. She was quoting from my carefully written submission. She does not smile. I cannot, I recognize, bring up the little people scurrying, ask how many there are. It is, I try to say, a figure of speech. I have made a little list of questions, and I pull them out to leap over this pause, hoping that, maybe we can talk a little anything, converse, chat, relax. I want her to tell me a story, but her face seems, well, unenthusiastic, her voice defensive. Which isn't impolite. I don't take it that way, because that would be parallel to saying, for instance, a nun could be rude. How, when she is doing such good work, has she made such a sacred commitment? It's busy and full of pressure in a monument such as this. So I think, well, maybe a couple easier questions about numbers of employees will lighten it up. No, not just reference librarians, I mean, all together. Around 50. And the scanning machines—I make no mention of tortillas, nothing from me—and how many are on them, and how long does she expect such a project to take to scan all? She shakes her head, that, she says, that…. She thinks I am criticizing their production? That I am writing a work review? I write, "a long, long time." In the pause I am deciding whether I should even bother to ask about what the Archivo's most fascinating find. And I wanted her to tell me what had been ripped off—they do have uniformed guards everywhere—what the most valuable loss has been. She's not going to see the human interest in either, so, instead, bueno, I'm ready, vale, let's go.
       She moves fast. I am certain she was wondering, inside her mind, why it was I was walking with a gimpy foot, why it was hard for me to keep up. Though I meant to keep up, and I probably did so well she had no cause to notice. I did not want to slow her pace, I wanted to let her be herself. And I am sure, inside her mind, she was as curious about me as I might have been about her, you know, about where I was from, and where she was from, and so on. But we're both hurrying together, we're both excited for me to go down there. And when I tell her, out loud, so she’ll hear me, "Those corners, that dust, it's all in my head, my imagination, a story I'm wanting, not The Truth," I'm not really sure she is sincerely listening to me. After we’ve gone under the mammoth chains, when we get to the front door of the public building, a coincidence—it's the actual directora herself coming into work! She has on an ordinary brown wool coat, ordinary glasses, appears as much a mother and wife as most women who are the companions of those older men with the far-sighted glasses and beret, in every respect a woman no one would ever suspect is the she who runs the Archivo de Indias. But she is short, half my size. Particularly small, even with a big winter coat on.
       The depositos are on the main floor, on the same tile and floor plan as what's seen publicly above, on the planta primera, where the tourists can see the displays. It occupies the same very high ceiling space of the Casa Lonja de Mercadores building. The legajos themselves are stored in three rooms of metal bookcases which are collapsed, the aisles expandable by a hand turn of a wheel. There is the directora's office, there is copy room, with copy machines, another where maps and plans and other large pieces are stored in long, flat metal cabinet drawers, and there is a restoration room, where the damaged papers go to be salvaged. There are a couple men there, who are not tall, but not short. And another normal-size-range man who sits in a chair with a table, reading a daily newspaper, in the open space between the various rooms. He is responsible for finding the research requests from the sala de investigadores. But not many employees, it seemed to me. Are there others? It's coffee time, she tells me, and also a time of vacations. Yes, I nod, por supuesto. And thus, as fulfilled as I can be, I extend my mil gracias as she, staying behind, lets me through a twenty-foot, thick barred gate near the front door entrance and exit.
       Of course I’m suspicious of that convenient answer and that underworld gate. But then, I am a gimp. I am limited. I am limited. There is always less time, there is always more then. But with books, with my imagination, I travel out of my body’s crumbling occupation of space and time, impossible distances, and I too discover many worlds de maravilla only few might believe or know but which are true, even if it’s in difficult English, Spanish, Latin, Greek, Alexandrian, Babylonian—more a “Babel” truth than what a fundamentalist with only two worlds believes or permits. There are limits, but there are the complexities that are not just two- or four-sided, like hexagons, which is learning, which is in libraries, is the Library. In Sevilla, I read Borges:
  Like all men of the Library, I have traveled in my youth; I have wandered in search of a book, perhaps the catalogue of catalogues; now that my eyes can hardly decipher what I write, I am preparing to die just a few leagues from the hexagon in which I was born. Once I am dead, there will be no lack of pious hands to throw me over the railing; my grave will be the fathomless air; my body will sink endlessly and decay and dissolve in the wind generated by the fall, which is infinite. I say that the Library is unending. The idealists argue that the hexagonal rooms are a necessary form of absolute space or, at least, of our intuition of space. They reason that a triangular or pentagonal room is inconceivable. (The mystics claim that their ecstasy reveals to them a circular chamber containing a great circular book, whose spine is continuous and which follows the complete circle of the walls; but their testimony is suspect; their words, obscure. This cyclical book is God.) Let it suffice now for me to repeat the classic dictum: The Library is a sphere whose exact center is any one of its hexagons and whose circumference is inaccessible

I went to the cathedral my last night, a Thursday, to visit the tomb of Colón. Instead there was a special mass with little girls dressed as angels, boys as shepherds, all bunched at the feet of a cardinal. The cathedral is, to say the least, cavernous, and for all the singing and ceremony and homily, it would be impossible for me, and not more than 200 others, to hear a word without the microphone. The difficulty I still had hearing was that I was distracted by the shine, tall and wide, of a spectacular altarpiece carved with more religious figures than I even knew existed, made so deafening by what I could only assume was Aztec and Incan gold, melted trinkets and masks. But then a fog of incense alerted another sense, its jangle like an alarm clock, and my eyes and ears shifted to the cardinal behind it. The mass was a benediction of imagenes navideñas, and standing below me a little, little boy held up an object, a baby Jesus I think, no bigger than my thumb. When the Father came—the red vestments, their nobility and formality a real sacred force—he sprinkled holy water on it, blessing it and the boy so personally, and he said he blessed us all, and I did feel so blessed, with both sadness and joy.
And then my own last dinner. La Mezquita was my favorite restaurant in Santa Cruz, because who I took to be the manager always greeted me even when I was only passing by. I also liked eating there because he had a TV set on all the time, news or a program or futbol. The day’s special was my favorite, spinach with garbanzo beans. And I ordered aceitunas, the green Spanish olives that are as big as Mexican limones. What was on this night was the Spanish version of the quiz show “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” The contestant wasn’t, if you ask me, doing that well since he’d used up his lifelines before he got to what are supposed to be the harder questions, though two that he spent them on I wouldn’t have gotten right if he hadn’t. He was out of them when this one came: There were four names of Roman Emperors. Which country did they come from—Inglaterra, Italia, Grecia, or España? The owner was standing between me and another customer who was drinking a beer. The customer is saying, with certainty, it is not Italia, and it is not España. The owner isn’t saying, and the game show host is pressing the contestant to make a decision. The customer with the beer makes his. Grecia, it has to be, he says. But me, I’d been to Mérida, and I can’t help myself. España. It’s that I had learned there were several Spanish Emperors, and I knew for sure that Trajano, one of the names there, was one of them. The owner looks at me. España. He isn’t sure, but he senses I must be right. When España blinks, not as the choice of the contestant either, the man with the beer throws his arms up and slumps. I am from here! he cries. But not, I didn’t say out loud, from Extremadura.