An Inca Account of the Conquest of Peru Read Online Free Page A

the Spanish yoke but knowing that Vilcabamba was not strong enough to withstand a concerted Spanish assault, Titu Cusi walked a fine line between resistance and accommodation in his attempt to preserve his refuge. For example, he strictly forbade the admittance of any Spanish settlers (apart from the missionaries) into the valley in order to avoid conflicts that might provoke Spanish military action. The early seventeenth-century chronicler Antonio de Calancha relates that when in 1570 a sole Spanish prospector turned up at Vilcabamba to ask for permission to search for gold in the area, Titu Cusi acquiesced assuming that there was none to be found. When, contrary to Titu Cusi’s expectations, the Spaniard did find gold and brought it to Titu Cusi thinking “that the Inca would be delighted” and grant him a new license for more exploration, Titu Cusi had the man killed and thrown into a river so not to “arouse the greed and attract thousands of Spaniards” (quoted in Hemming, 337).
    These events tell us much about the reasons why Titu Cusi decided to have his story translated and transcribed for a Spanish audience and about the poetics of the surviving text. Some critics have suggested that such a decision seems to privilege European alphabetical writing over indigenous structures of knowledge—such as Andean oral traditions or the
quipu
(the records the Incas kept by way of colored knots)—and to betray a Eurocentric perspective that may have originated either with Titu Cusi’s own acceptance of imposed European cultural norms or with a manipulation by the Spanish translator (see Luiselli, 30, n.1). Although this is probably a reasonable inference to makewith regard to fray Marcos García, it would be unwarranted with regard to Titu Cusi. Rather, I would argue that his choice of the written medium must be seen in the context of the overall rhetorical nature of this text as a pragmatic attempt at intercultural diplomacy. When addressing a European monarch and court, Titu Cusi’s history had to bridge a considerable hermeneutic gap. For this reason, Frank Salomon has called Native American chronicles, such as Titu Cusi’s account, “Chronicles of the Impossible”—diachronic narratives of the conquest era that must be fully intelligible to Spanish contemporaries and at the same time made from and faithful to Andean materials alien to European diachrony (Salomon 1982, 9). Titu Cusi made hereby calculated use of everything he had learned about Spanish culture without becoming unfaithful to his own culture. His rhetorical strategy included his choice not only of the written medium but also of the Augustinian Marcos García as his translator and mouthpiece. Indeed, Marcos García was chosen after Titu Cusi had made inquiries (as he tells us in his narrative), asking “who among the monks in Cuzco was the most outstanding personality and which religion enjoyed the widest approbation and power” and after having learned that “the mightiest, most respected, and most flourishing religion was that of the Lord St. Augustine” (p. 133).
    Titu Cusi understood the importance of alphabetical writing in dealing with the Spaniards. Thus, he relates that one of the reasons why the Andean people who first saw the Spaniards upon their arrival in Tahuantinsuyu called the strangers
Viracochas
(gods) was that “the Indians saw them alone talking to white cloths [
paños blancos
], as a person would speak to another, which is how the Indians perceived the reading of books and letters” (p. 60). Similarly memorable is Titu Cusi’s account of the fateful encounter between the Spaniards and Atahuallpa at Cajamarca in 1532. He relates that the Spaniards “showed my uncle a letter or a book (I’m not sure exactly which), explaining to him that this was the word of God and of the king. My uncle . . . took theletter (or whatever it was) and threw it down,