An Inca Account of the Conquest of Peru (7 page)

Yet, it is possible that Titu Cusi's pragmatist arguments were a more or less realistic reflection of the historical impact of the cataclysmic events just before and during the Conquest upon Inca logic of succession. As Julien points out (42–47), the combined impacts of the pre-Hispanic civil war in Peru (in which Huascar and scores of his descent group died), European diseases (killing both Huayna Capac and his heir), as well as Atahuallpa's murder by the Spaniards left a tremendous stress on the traditional Inca logic of succession resumed by Huayna Capac's father. This situation was further aggravated when the Spanish conquerors, in search of wives, seized on the female Inca nobility. Titu Cusi's unforgettable account of Gonzalo Pizarro's demand that he be given Manco Inca's sister-wife, Cura Oclo, as a wife and Manco
Inca's attempt to deceive Pizarro by giving him another woman, Ynguill, in her stead is a good illustration of this (see p. 96). Despite Manco Inca's ingenuity here, he ultimately failed to protect both Inca noblewomen against the Spanish suitors. As Titu Cusi relates, Cura Oclo did fall into the hands of Gonzalo Pizarro, was abused by the Spaniards, and tried to resist their advances by “covering her body with stinking and filthy things” before being murdered in Spanish custody (p. 124; also Hemming, 183). Ynguill, as Julien points out, may have been Francisca Ynguill, who became the wife of Juan Pizarro (305, n. 13). Although it appears that both of Titu Cusi's brothers, Saire Topa and Topa Amaru, had more legitimacy for rulership than he did, ultimately even the claim to legitimacy of their common father, Manco Inca, was weak by traditional logic of succession. In pre-Hispanic times, Manco Inca might have settled such a controversy as Atahuallpa (and some of his predecessors) had done—by wiping out the panaca of any competitor for succession. The Spanish invasion, however, not only changed the balance of power but also brought the introduction of alphabetic writing to Andean historiographic practices; therefore, such a “new beginning” of history became more difficult to orchestrate. Ultimately then, the fact that Titu Cusi's account appears to be particularly at odds with other surviving versions based on different panaca traditions may be explained by the dwindling power of this penultimate Inca compared to that still commanded by his grandfather, who was the last undisputed ruler to consolidate his power over the entire Tahuantinsuyu.

On the other hand, there can be no doubt that some of the ambiguities with regard to Andean and Spanish cultural concepts crept into the text only with fray Marcos García's translation. Especially some of the glosses over native Andean cultural concepts are unequivocally the marks of his interventions and impositions. One example is the account of Atahuallpa's sensitive reaction toward Vicente de Valverde's fateful presentation of
the breviary as the result of the Inca's lingering annoyance with the Spaniards' disregard for his offer of a ceremonial drink. Marcos García translates Titu Cusi's Quechua account like this: “My uncle, still offended by the wasting of the
chicha
(which is how we call our drink) took the letter (or whatever it was) and threw it down” (p. 60–61). Although this passage seems to reflect upon the Inca principle of reciprocity (see Classen, 1–2, 59–60), it is noteworthy that chicha was not a Quechua word but was imported by the Spanish from the Caribbean. This suggests that fray Marcos García is falsely representing Titu Cusi's use of the first person plural (“we”) here.
³¹
It is difficult to decide whether these misrepresentations of Andean culture result from Marcos García's imperfect grasp of Quechua or from his deliberate manipulations, possibly intended to lend his translation an air of authenticity.

Only slightly more ambiguous in regard to agency is the use of various Christian and Andean religious concepts in this text—concepts such as “God” (
Dios
), “Viracocha,” “Devil” (
demonio
), and “
supai
.” It is doubtful, for example, that the cultural gloss on supai—“which is to say the Devil in our language” (p. 76)—can be attributed to Titu Cusi. The word in pre-colonial Quechua simply meant “a supernatural being that could be both malignant and benevolent.” Domingo Santo Tomás's 1560 dictionary still translates
çupay
as “demonio, bueno o malo” (99), thus bearing testimony to the incommensurability of Christian and Andean religious concepts by allowing for the idea of a “demonio, bueno.” In pre-Christian Quechua the word appears to have meant something more value neutral, perhaps better translated as “mountain spirit.”
³²
In light of Titu Cusi's noted tolerance of Christianity and reluctance to give up native Andean
huacas,
its use in the Manichean sense of evil here suggests the imprint of Marcos García's monotheistic missionary jargon on this text.

A final example of ambiguous agency in this text is Titu Cusi's account of the miraculous appearance of an equestrian knight,
recognizable to Spanish readers as Santiago, patron saint of Spain, in support of the Spanish siege of Cuzco. Is this a Native tradition repeated by Titu Cusi or a liberty taken by the Spanish translator or the mestizo scribe?
³³
It is difficult to decide for this early text, but it is worth mentioning that by the early seventeenth century this story apparently had become part of native Andean memories, for it was repeated and illustrated by Guaman Poma de Ayala (see Illustration 7). To be sure, Guaman Poma's version must also be taken with a grain of salt, because he was not, as mentioned above, considered to be a member of the Inca nobility (being connected to it only through his mother's lineage) and tended to portray Inca religion from the perspective of a Christian convert (even though he praised the civic accomplishments of the Inca state). In any case, Marcos García's translation of Titu Cusi's oral version of this story might well present an early manifestation of the hybridization of various European and Andean traditions of the history of the Conquest from which Guaman Poma could draw roughly half a century later.

Regarding the hybridity of Titu Cusi's account of the conquest of Tahuantinsuyu, a final word is in order also about Martín de Pando, Titu Cusi's mestizo secretary who transcribed Marcos García's Spanish dictation into manuscript form. He had arrived, along with Juan de Betanzos, at Vilcabamba in 1560 as part of an embassy sent by the corregidor (royal administrator) of Cuzco, Juan Polo de Ondegardo, in order to assure the Vilcabamba rebels that the deceased Saire Topa had died a natural death. After the embassy's mission had been completed, Titu Cusi, aware of the advantages of having a person knowledgeable of European culture at Vilcabamba, persuaded the mestizo to stay. Pando accepted the invitation, serving Titu Cusi as secretary, confidant, and advisor for the rest of his life. Titu Cusi seems to have appreciated his company a great deal, frequently practicing European-style fencing with him and using Pando's writing skills in his correspondence with Spanish authorities. Because Pando stayed,
continuously as far as we can tell, at Vilcabamba from 1560 until his death in 1571, it is uncertain whether he would have seen a copy of either the first bilingual Spanish/Quechua dictionary or the first grammar of the Quechua language, both of which had been completed by the Dominican clergyman Domingo de Santo Tomás in Peru and printed in Valladolid by the royal printer Francisco Fernández de Cordoba in 1560 (see Illustration 8). A comparison of Pando's transcriptions of Quechua words and Santo Tomás's dictionary is inconclusive as to the question of whether he transcribed Quechua words simply as they seemed to him grapho-phonemically most accurate or whether he consulted Santo Tomás's first attempt at a standardized orthography of the Quechua language in European alphabet. The evidence suggesting the former seems to preponderate. Some of his transcriptions basically correspond with Santo Tomás's dictionary, such as
yllapa,
Viracocha,
and
macho
, but others do not, such as his transcription of
supai
(p. 76) compared to Santo Tomás's
çupay
(
Lexicon,
279). Also, Pando's orthography is not always internally consistent—which at the least suggests that Pando was not consistently using Santo Tomás's works during the transcription process even if he owned or had seen copies. For example, he spells the plural form of the Quechua word for “knife” as
tomës
in one place but
tumës
in another (see p. 61 and p. 62). Similarly inconsistent are his renderings of grammatical forms, such as the plural of Quechua nouns. Some of these forms follow Spanish, not Quechua, rules. For example, the manuscript represents the plural of
yllapa
(thunderclap) as
yllapas
. At other times, however, Pando transcribes forms that appear to be Hispanized spellings following Quechua grammatical forms, such as
Apocona
(Lords;
Apu
means “lord” and the suffix
-kuna
signifies the plural form, but rendered
Appó
and -
cona
by Santo Tomás's
Lexicon
and
Gramática
). However, these Quechua plural forms are inconsistent in the manuscript and, at times, hybridized with Spanish plural forms; for instance, in Pando's transcription
yanaconas
(p. 121)
(
yana-cona-s: yana
means “dedicated servant” and the suffix
-kuna
[or
-cona
] signifies plural in Quechua but
-s
is apparently derived from Castilian vernacular grammar). A full-scale analysis of these hybridized linguistic forms is not appropriate here. A future first step in this direction may lie in definitively establishing which forms can plausibly be ascribed to Pando and which ones to Marcos García. Those attributable to the mestizo Martín de Pando may well point toward the heteroglossia pervading the still unstandardized pigeon culture of which he was born, a culture in which Old World and New World linguae francae and vernaculars mixed, fused, and hybridized to make new standards in future generations.

7. St. James the Great, Apostle of Christ, intervenes in the war for Cuzco. From Guaman Poma de Ayala,
Nueva corónica y buen gobierno.
By kind permission of the Royal Library at Copenhagen (GKS 2232 4to)

A Note on Quechua Terms and Orthography

Regarding the translation of indigenous concepts and orthography in the present introduction and edition, I have chosen to use a European concept throughout in order to convey an Andean concept in cases where a European concept is semantically broad enough. For example, when I use the term “Inca Empire” interchangeably with “Tahuantinsuyu,” I do so in the broadest sense of “empire” as a polity that territorially expanded beyond its original ethnic boundaries, recognizing the important differences between the Andean geographically expansive polity and what Europeans would associate with the term “empire.” In other cases, I have used European concepts provisionally and in quotation marks until an explanation of the Andean concept was in order. An example of this would be the European concept of “queen” and the (not identical) Andean concept of coya. As far as my orthographic rendering of Andean names that commonly occur in historical and literary scholarship, I have, after some wavering, finally chosen to go with the Hispanized version rather than the grapho-phonemically more precise spelling representing the velar/postvelar contrasts that was standardized by the Peruvian
Ministry of Education during the 1970s and since has been used in some recent anthropological and historical scholarship (see, for example, D'Altroy). This decision was made purely on pragmatic grounds, as most of the scholars cited in this introduction still used Hispanized orthography and, therefore, it would have been unnecessarily confusing and complicated to represent two systems of spelling in this Introduction or to change the spellings of my modern secondary sources.

8. Frontispiece of Domingo Santo Tomás's
Lexicon o Vocabulario
(1560). Library of Congress, Rare Book Room