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

saying, ‘What is this supposed to be that you gave to me here? Be gone!’” (p. 61). The subsequent Spanish attack was triggered when Atahuallpa, in a haughty gesture, flung the breviary presented to him by the priest Vicente de Valverde into the dust. The book contained the infamous
requirimiento
(Requirement), a text that by law had to be read aloud to the Natives and which informed them of their obligation to “acknowledge the Church as the Ruler and Superior of the whole world. . . . And the high priest called Pope, and in his name the King and the Queen” (quoted in Hanke, 33). Noncompliance was legitimate ground for the commencement of violent conquest. The power attributed to the written word in dealing with the Spaniards reverberates in many other Andean sources relating this scene and dating from the sixteenth century to the present, both written and oral. 19 Thus, Juan de Betanzos—a Spaniard who was married to Atahuallpa’s sister (Francisco Pizarro’s former mistress), Doña Angelina Yupanqui, who told the story of the Conquest as remembered by her family—wrote that, after the interpreter had explained to Atahuallpa that he should “obey the captain [Pizarro] who was also the son of the Sun, and that was what . . . the painting in the book said,” Atahuallpa “asked for the book and, taking it in his hands he opened it. When he saw the lines of letters, he said, ‘This speaks and says that you are the son of the Sun? I, also, am the son of the Sun’ . . . Saying this, he hurled the book away” (Betanzos, 263). Similarly, the indigenous Andean chronicler Guaman Poma de Ayala, writing during the early seventeenth century, remembers Atahuallpa’s response to the book like this: “‘Give me the book so that it can speak to me.’ And so he [Valverde] gave it to him and he held it in his hands and began to inspect the pages of the said book. And then the Inca said, ‘Why doesn’t it speak to me?’” before angrily throwing it to the ground (Guaman Poma, 357). Once in captivity, Atahuallpa reportedly asked the Spaniards to be taught how to “listen” to these texts. Finally, the early seventeenthcentury
Huarochirí Manuscript,
written by an anonymous Andean probably recruited by the Spanish priest Francisco de Avila, begins by stating, “If the ancestors of the people called Indians had known writing in former times, then the lives they lived would not have faded from view until now. As the mighty past of the Spanish Vira Cochas is visible until now, So too would theirs be” (
Huarochirí Manuscript,
41).
    Constance Classen has argued that what made writing so “radically novel” for the Incas was its “disembodied nature.” Unlike the Native non-alphabetical quipu, which still required oral transmission, European writing represented and appeared to act as a “substitute of speech,” thus placing knowledge outside the human body (Classen, 127). But although this might be true for Atahuallpa and the first Andeans who came in contact with Europeans, it is unlikely that Titu Cusi (whom she cites here) would have viewed writing as radically novel, having lived in Cuzco and, in fact, now (in 1570) making use of it by relating his story for translation and transcription. Atahuallpa’s successors quickly learned to use the written word for political purposes in dealing with the Spaniards, employing scribes and even becoming themselves literate in the foreign medium. Although Titu Cusi doubtlessly understood the power of alphabetical writing in Spanish culture, there is little evidence suggesting that he believed it inherently superior to Andean practices of recording and memorizing the past or even thought of it as divine. His own explanation of his decision to have his narrative written down—that “[since] the memory of men is frail and weak, it would be impossible to remember