Acknowledgments

A draft of this essay was presented to the 51st International Congress of Americanists in Santiago de Chile. I wish to dedicate it to the memory of Enrique Tandeter with deep gratitude for his long-lasting support. I thank Irene Silverblatt, Orin Starn, and Enrique Tandeter for comments on drafts; Roxana Boixadós, Charles Piot, Bill Ready, Walter Mignolo, and Tom Rogers for our discussions; and the reviewers and the editors of CSSH for their suggestions and professionalism. All mistakes, of course, are mine.

The scene that unfolded in the plaza of Cajamarca on Saturday, 16 November 1532, is one of the most loaded in the Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire. That day the Inca Atahualpa, head of an empire of several million extending from present day Ecuador to Chile, surrounded by his powerful army, was captured by 168 men. The attack took place after the exchange of a book and words in the middle of the plaza, between the Inca and fray Vicente de Valverde, head clergyman of the conquest party lead by Francisco Pizarro. The scene has been the object of much debate, both in the sixteenth century, when it rapidly became part of Europeans' colonial imagination, and in the present. This essay's goal is to offer an alternative interpretation of Cajamarca, which addresses a simple, under-explored question: Why did the meeting occur in the way it did? Why was Atahualpa there, exposing himself to some dangerous looters, why did the Spanish not attack directly if the ambush was ready? To anticipate my conclusion, I argue that Cajamarca happened as it did because it was the necessary final act of a long chain of improvised moves, which responded to culturally specific political dilemmas. Its dynamic reflected a radical uncertainty common to contact processes, but left aside by most scholarship. Recovering this, I suggest, speaks not only to the case in point, but to the mechanics of power and coloniality across space and time.

Cajamarca has been studied with different interests and approaches. Social historians focus on the socio-economic dynamics of the conquering force (Lockhart 1972; Varón Gabai 1996), while traditional historiography, cleaving to an enlightenment vision (e.g., Del Busto 1966; Porras 1978), focuses on the Spanish advance. In both cases what happens occurs only because the Spanish act, while native actors are in a secondary plane without agency. This image has been contested by works that reveal the complex native political landscape, relocate agency, and revise the conquest's dynamics. These studies stress the alliances between ethnic lords and Spaniards from a Marxist perspective (e.g., Espinoza Soriano 1973), or the late moments of Inca resistance from a nationalist one (Guillén Guillén 1974; 1979; 1994). Similar goals drive Hemming's (1982) detailed account of Cajamarca. In all cases, the scene is narrated by staging rational actors in full control of a clear politico-military interaction. This approach has a political goal: to reject marks of native inferiority. Peruvian native peoples took the Spaniards for what they were: ordinary human beings, nothing else. They did not take them for a native god returning—Viracocha, as all native sources mention. Difference is effaced and native sources purged for good ends. As a result, however, the political goal backfires: agency is indeed restored to native peoples, correcting one effect of Spanish sources, but at the price of echoing another: everyone is endowed with the rationality proper to a Western subject—or rather, proper to how Westerners like to think of themselves.

Recent studies of how native peoples saw the Spaniards that do not engage an actual historical dynamic have introduced a related assertion: that the idea that native people mistook the Spaniards for a native god (Viracocha) is in fact a late Spanish invention and imposition (Pease 1991; 1995). That is why, it is said, early Spanish accounts do not mention it—the Incas had no writing system, while late native and Spanish authors did. Again, the political intent backfires: Indians appear to be dupes, while the Spanish have the capacity to shape their minds with odd ideas. These options lead to a paradoxical situation: while a large body of scholarship shows that cultural dimensions played a key role in the actual dynamics of colonial Peru (e.g., Wachtel 1971; Spalding 1974; 1984; Stern 1982; Duviols 1986; Silverblatt 1987; Ramírez 1996), they are almost totally absent from the twenty-year conquest period that made colonial Peru possible in the first place. Domination, understood as the effective pretension of a single order of things, is in place even before it began.

The coherence of the predominant, neat image of Cajamarca's scene has been questioned by MacCormack (1989) and Seed (1991). They show how the political goal and narrative strategy informing each source conditions the way in which the exchange between Valverde and Atahualpa is portrayed. MacCormack argues that what had to be narrated changed across time: from the conquerors portrayal of a just, transparent interaction, to its interrogation in the 1550s, to a mythified view in the 1570s, to the view of end-of-century native authors who accept the mythification but stress Atahualpa's proper behavior, questioning the moral standing of the parties. Seed questions “historical realism”—Hemming being an exponent of this genre—because by privileging eyewitnesses' accounts and standardizing differences it reifies one view of the story, that of the conquerors. She contrasts the 1534 account of Xérez (Pizarro's secretary) to native ones, and argues that the former expressed the Spanish claim of transparency and universality of its values (Christianity and literacy), which the latter challenge in several ways. Both works remain within the limits of a textual analysis, and reject the possibility of knowing what occurred in Cajamarca, but they open dimensions of analysis that I will build on, and dialog with, when I focus on the final scene.

But that scene does not stand on its own as a form of encounter; it is the result of an ongoing contact process that I will examine by engaging debates on cultural encounter and colonialism (Sahlins 1985; 1995; Obeyesekere 1992, 1997; Todorov 1978; Clendinnen 1991). In particular, in order to avoid the double-bind that plagues representations of non-Westerners, in which cultural difference is denounced as exotization and likeness as an imposition of Western rationality, I will stress uncertainty and diversity, within and across the cultural divide, and the politics of their simplification by both natives and Spaniards. To that end, instead of solving differences between sources to produce a unified historical narrative, I consider them as indices (Ginzburg 1989; De Certeau 1991) of distinct ways of making and producing sense of events that coexisted when the events occurred—narrative strategies and political goals aside. Following these indices, and considering native-like sources¹

By exposing the mechanisms through which the actors tried and often failed to control their unstable present, Cajamarca regains its character as a contact situation in which different senses of order competed and tangled. As interactions lose their neatness and the Spaniards their mastery, an alternative image begins to make sense on its own. After all, domination is to a large extent precisely about rendering some views unintelligible, and good ethnography should serve as an element to counterbalance it, as the Comaroffs point out (1991:xiii).

In the Inca Empire in 1531–1532

The small compañía (company) that began the conquest of the Inca empire landed in the empire's very northern tip sometime in early 1531. It took its men almost two years to reach Cajamarca, and some sixteen months to contact Atahualpa. During this time all attention and military resources were concentrated on a ferocious open war of succession between Inca political fractions, possibly royal lineages (Ziólkowski 1996:322–65), whose visible heads were Huascar and Atahualpa, sons of the last Inca emperor, Huayna Cápac. The latter's base was in Quito, not too far from the fistful of Spaniards but in the highlands, where Inca political action always gravitated. That of the former was in the heart of the empire, Cuzco, some 1500 kilometers south. As chroniclers and scholars alike point out, this particular coincidence gave the conquerors a chance to succeed.

A compañía was a private enterprise contained within the legal frame given by the Crown's authorization. It was organized around several captains with a “prospective governor” (Spalding 1984:116) as its head. Each captain had his own ambitions and several mini-compañías existed, and there was thus a potential for political fission. Authority was established through a constant balance between giving the men what they wanted and being respected and obeyed. This local tension tangled with another between the Crown and the compañía. Although the Crown was present through its royal officers, their task was mainly to secure that due taxes were paid; a real external challenge could only come from a competing compañía with good political connections at court. But during its early stages, as Lockhart stresses, a compañía's real danger was that it might fail and dissolve (1972:7).

The 1531 compañía was the third attempt organized by Diego de Almagro and the would-be governor, Francisco Pizarro. The first (1523–1524) had been a fiasco that only reached Mesoamerican lands infested with mosquitoes. After a disastrous start, thirteen survivors of the second attempt (1526–1528) navigated south, and reached several towns in present-day coastal Peru. They gathered two young natives who would serve as interpreters plus enough information and proofs of a viable future to enable Pizarro to negotiate a conquest permit and a governorship at court. Organizing each expedition meant borrowing and investing a significant amount of money, as well as rallying manpower. Pizarro and Almagro had exhausted most of their capital when the third compañía landed in San Mateo Bay, in northern Ecuador, while most of its men had indebted themselves to pay for their equipment and travel. Everyone's most urgent need, then, was riches to pay off debts, while the second was to find large native populations to exploit, which the compañía needed for propaganda.

The mechanism of advance involved a constant definition of the limits of the possible. When encountering a new group, if the local lord welcomed the compañía then exchanges and behaviors were contained; he would only have to provide them with all the goods and services they wanted. If, on the other hand, he attempted any resistance a clear politics of fear was put into place; with violent punishing actions the conquerors would kill as many Indians as they felt necessary and loot with few actual limits. Finally, more stable relations were set by Pizarro's political alliances with native lords, required because his goal was not extermination but domination.

One can see these dynamics in different combinations. The Christians (that is what the conquerors called themselves at almost all times) landed in a hot area with few inhabitants and plenty of mosquitoes. Their initial way south was slow because the groups along their way emptied their small towns and withdrew supplies. When they arrived in Coaque, the first town of significant size, they attacked to prevent this and looted it (Xérez 1985 [1534]:64–65). Pizarro then seized most of the bounty to pay off debts to the ships' owners, who were key for future reinforcements and supplies, and so as to spread in Panama and Nicaragua the news that there was something to gain there and prevent the conquest from fading (Lockhart 1972:7). The idea worked, and in November 1531, after eleven months of enduring tropical illnesses, the compañía greeted two ships which brought them fifty men and twenty-five horses (ibid.:8). Even so, they still numbered fewer than 100 men.

Their reputation and military might opened the way south. Some lords they encountered welcomed them, and when they did not, as in la Puná island, the resulting open war set the pattern of encounters to come: the better-equipped Christians suffered only two casualties and crushed the numerically superior natives. In Túmbez, their next stop and Pizarro's original goal, they suffered their last three losses in a skirmish (Xérez 1985:71–76). From there, with a reinforcement of 100 men and twenty-five horses, Pizarro moved south and the conquest entered a new stage: he began realizing his potential governorship by blending fear and alliance. Aware of the Christians' might the lord of Poechos welcomed them, and Pizarro received his vassalage, opening the door to a regulated flow of goods and services. Yet nearby lords in the sierra and on the coast refused to serve them, and some men arriving by sea reported fearing an imminent overnight attack. As in any (neo)colonial enterprise, the frightening of a colonizer by locals required immediate action. After a military operation, hierarchy was reestablished through exemplary punishment: Pizarro had a main lord, several principals, and some other Indians burned alive; but he also kept one of the accused main lords in office, and even extended his lordship over the executed lord's people (ibid.:78–80).

This blend was an effective mechanism of reality-making, because it knitted local and foreign orders causally, turning events into structure. Salomon (1986: 219) uses the term “crystalline integration” for the way in which local lords conquered by the Incas in the north of the empire themselves replicated Incan models to gain unprecedented control and power over their own subjects. A similar mechanism was at work here: a local lord acquired a new authority, with the Christians' presence at its base, while, simultaneously, Christian authority was fortified in being so recognized. Each new social position depended on the other, both arising from a temporally ordered indebtedness—much like a Melanesian Big Man to whom exchanges of gifts are owed. This dual mechanism secured indirect rule and brought Pizarro's governorship into being. As his secretary Xérez summarized the shift, from then on “they all served better, with more fear than before” (1985:79, my emphasis).²

During these months Atahualpa's generals were closing in on Cuzco, defeating Huascar's armies in battle after battle, some 1500 kilometers away from the compañía. This no doubt organized Inca attention, as many have argued, yet, if the conquerors' production of order seems uncontested it is because I am condensing here only what their own accounts tell. Their narratives have a narcotic effect: one has to adjust to only a certain way to actually make sense, of only certain kinds of events, which take place within clear, intelligible boundaries. Actions become reasonable because in the Spanish eyewitnesses' regime of visibility there is nothing else in sight. To correct this, I will introduce native-like sources and contrast them with Spanish sources. This will flesh out the steps of Atahualpa's production of order vis-à-vis the newcomers, and will render visible silences and hidden objects on both sides, and denaturalize critical actions and categories. To that end, I will depart from most prior histories by focusing on the exchange of messengers between Atahualpa and the Christians, using the latter's advance as its context. The first exchange originated in Tangarara, to where I now return.

Messengers: From Newness to Objectification

All so-called native chroniclers (Tito Cussi 1985 [1570]; Huamán Poma 1987 [1615]; Garcilaso 1960 [1617]) include extraordinary, often flustering elements when they give people's first images of the Spaniards. Yet, they quickly erase this uncertainty, which corrected the narcotic effect of the conquerors' narratives; they associate the New People with a native deity, Viracocha, and jump immediately to the scene in Cajamarca. This is not the feared revelation but rather an interested simplification that conceals uncertainty and local politics. Behind this simplification one can identify four stages: newness, inquiry, contention, and objectification. I will study them signaling the locations of strangeness, the means to make sense of them, and the mechanisms through which they are harnessed in pursuit of clear political goals. Twisting Bhabha's (1994:88) idea slightly, the representation of difference always can turn into a problem of authority.

Newness. According to Huamán Poma, a native intellectual who wrote a more than 1000-page political letter to the Spanish king, the first news about the Spaniards was bewildering. When they reached Atahualpa, his captains and other Indians:

Within the extraordinary, different locations expressing strangeness can be recognized. First, it had to do with unexpected social behavior: not sleeping at night, no clear order in the group, no hierarchy (i.e., all dress, behave, talk, and eat in the same way and place). These last two contrasted markedly with Andean politics, particularly Andean high politics. Second, uncanniness has to do with the body. They had very long penises tied in the back, and ate gold and silver, as did their “big sheep” (horses); they had silver shoes, dresses, and objects around their bodies, which were shrouded; only a small part of their faces was visible, most being covered by wool (Andeans had no facial hair). Wool suggests an analogy with animals that can be read as a crossing-over of categories between animals and humans, and eating minerals signals mixed matters and unnatural acts. Gold and silver in particular were high-status markers associated with the Inca. This signals not bodies per se, but what arises from them, bringing to consciousness how fundamental body imagery is to world view (Douglas 1966; 1970). Finally, there is an excess of markers with no local parallels (reading in Huamán Poma, big sheep-horses, guns/thunder and fireballs in other native-like chroniclers).

These elements point to a concrete problem common to any contact case: someone who is strikingly different cannot be predicted; since the taken-for-granted that makes interaction appropriate is missing, relations to him can only proceed by guesswork. The sole source (recently found in its complete version) that allows for chronological study of such Inca guesswork, and its politics, was finished by 1551 by a Spaniard, Juan de Betanzos. Married to Cuxirimay Ocllo, an Inca princess of high rank, his narrative is composed largely of oral history from his wife's kin, who were close to Atahualpa. It is not a pure native text, yet it contains much more native material than Betanzos could marshal, and is full of uncertainties and contradictions that are absent in any other native-like source, which make it a dialogic text (Ginzburg 1989:159) par excellence.

According to Betanzos (II, 17, 1987 [1551]:253), Atahualpa knew of the strange people just after his generals had achieved the final victory over Huascar in Cuzco. Tallán messengers from Tangarara reached him near Huamachuco, south of Cajamarca, with odd images similar to Huamán Poma's. Soon after, three other messengers arrived with gifts and a message from Pizarro: the capito (capitán, captain) had come from Spain to see him because he had heard of Atahualpa's grandeur, and he carried a message from a very great lord which he would give to him once they met (ibid., 254). Atahualpa's reaction allows one to see how unsettling newness is turned into a fact (not unlike crafting 9/11 and its aftermath into a “War on Terror”). The first step was inquiry, and included endless questions which I present summarily.

Inquiry. From the first, bewildering news was followed by a short inquiry in which a godly element was brought in. Atahualpa asked for the New People's name—naming is a means not only for condensing and controlling reality in general (Foucault 1973), but in this case also of locating the other within the map of the known, of containing newness. The messengers said that they did not know it, but they called them Viracochacuna (plural of Viracocha) “that means the gods” (Betanzos II, 17, 1987:253) because, as their elders had told them, “Con Titi Viracocha” after having made the people went into the sea and did not return until a few years ago, when they saw some of them (there were sparse contacts during Pizarro's second trip). That is, facing eerie people coming from where none were known to come—the sea—the tools used for reaching a familiarizing conclusion are experience and myths. I use the word myths in a very practical sense: they are, among other things, ways of making sense of the present through past, archetypal events that can be actualized. Some extraordinary beings had disappeared towards the north by the sea, and some had appeared from there.

I will later analyze the godly label in detail, but first let me present some additional information. For the time being I stress that there was nothing exotic in Andean politics and culture about supernatural beings of some sort at work. I am, indeed, pushing a natural/supernatural distinction on indigenous categories only to make my exposition clear. The Inca, for instance, was a semi-divine, supernatural being, and the supernatural was not confined to bodies. When the messengers reached Atahualpa he was involved in a godly contest. On a hill near Huamachuco was Catequil, a main huaca (sacred, powerful being/shrine). Some huacas were Inca, but most were local, related to each ethnic group's ancestors/gods. Depending on the case, the Incas paid recognition to local huacas and/or built an imperial one beside them, but confrontation was also an option (MacCormack 1991:58–62). Most huacas were oracles, they forecast the future through their port-parole. Atahualpa had asked Catequil about his war against Huascar, and after an adverse answer he had declared it to be an enemy and ordered it to be literally annihilated—the port-parole killed, his body and the huaca's idol burned and ground, the ashes dispersed, the hill burned and flattened (Betanzos, II, 16, 1987:250).

With the second messengers the inquiry was exhaustive. He ordered them to be locked away, and continued his daily affairs. Next morning he and some of his captains met behind closed doors with the messengers. The first questions aimed at determining the strangers' status by searching for ordinary markers that we have already seen: the name of he who sent them, what kind of man he was, how he dressed, how they talked, and what they talked about. The answers, too, follow known lines: the capito was tall, his face covered by a beard; he was wrapped to his throat in cloth, and they all dressed alike—no familiar dress nor signs of hierarchy. The second questions aimed at the excess. Besides the never-before-seen tall sheep, the New People had something long hanging that when one stranger took it out shone like silver and could cut a sheep's (llama's) head. Asked how, they said that after delivering a blow the head jumped out clean and the sheep fell dead. Atahualpa said that they must be macanas (wooden club or sword). In doing so he was trying to render the swords ordinary, distinctive from the lighting/thunder that were the Inca's double and arm (Ziólkowski 1996:126–42). But this strategic interpretation could not be conclusive: swords shine while wood does not, and the main Inca captains had silver or gold arms. Thus the messengers responded to his interpretation with: “That might be the case.” The last element investigated was food. Asked if the strangers eat raw meat, and in particular human flesh, the messengers said they ate only animals, roasted. This inquiry had clear goals. In Inca warfare eating the enemy's raw flesh gave an explicit message of total war and requested final submission (Ziólkowski 1996:239–44). Also, eating human flesh was a pre-human behavior proper to pre-Inca ethnic huacas (Huarochirí [1608?] 1987:45, 121). Without reading Atahualpa's inquiry too narrowly, it is clear that he was not simply curious in a general fashion, but rather was trying to determine the kind of people that he might have to face.

Containment. At this point Atahualpa's captains intervened and told him that he should see which kind of people they were, whether they were gods or people like themselves, whether they meant to harm or good. If they were “runa quiçacha,” destroyers of people, and they could not be defeated, then they should run away; if they were “viracochacuna runa allichac, that means gods who are benefactors of the people,” then they should stay (Betanzos II, 17, 1987:255). This polarization constrained the unknown within familiar forms—either vandals or gods—and neither option included taking the New People for conquerors, a possibility that was simply not on the table. Atahualpa then solved the uncertainty remaining in his captains' double hypothesis: he declared himself very happy to hear that gods had arrived in his time. This was not naïve. It was a far more convenient idea for an aspirant to omnipotent lordship in a convoluted political terrain than was the idea of unknown people that no one could stop wandering around and looting, openly unsettling his authority. The solution also made the New People his affair alone, a point to which I will return.

Objectification. Next Atahualpa began backing his version through actions. This production of sense had at least three targets: the strangers, the men in his camp, and his men in Cuzco. First, he sent back the messengers with orders to tell “to the great Viracocha the capito” (Pizarro) that he was very happy of his arrival, would be happy to meet him in Cajamarca, and “que le tenía por parte” (loc. cit.), meaning that he considered the two of them to be of a similar kind, which he also expressed through some high-ranking presents. Second, he ordered his men to rejoice for two days after which he wanted to leave for Cajamarca and meet the capito (loc. cit.). Finally, he sent an envoy to Cuzco with several instructions and a message to his generals in control of the city, Calcuchima and Quizquiz. The news reached them in a clearly packaged way: “the Viracocha and many other viracochas had emerged from the sea, and it is believed that they are the ancient viracochas that made the people. The Inca, pleased by this news, [decided] to meet them” (ibid. II, 19, 1987:261).

Atahualpa's production of sense acquires more significance once the broader context is considered. On one hand, at the Inca level, Cuzco was by then an unsettled place. His generals had just defeated Huascar's last army, captured him and his close kin, and made all Incas ritually recognize Atahualpa through his bulto, or body double. Cuxi Yupangue, the envoy, carried several orders intended to strengthen Atahualpa's position. Among them, to punish Topa Inca Yupanqui's (Huayna Capac's father) panaca³

On the other hand, beyond the official Spanish-Inca channel which native-like chroniclers privileged, rumors about the New People were spreading throughout the empire, reaching lords and common people. In 1573 don Diego Mocha recalled hearing in Atahualpa's camp in Huamachuco of their arrival, and that they had founded a town in Tangarara (Probanza . . . 1974:95).⁴

In summary, if Betanzos allows us to see that identifying the Spanish as Viracochas was neither natural nor conclusive, the world of rumors exposed in local native testimonies reveals another perspective that is hidden in the native-like, Inca-biased chronicles: Atahualpa badly needed to keep things under his control, and his reaction to the New People's presence involved actions that are silenced in native-like chronicles. Atahualpa's guesswork did not end with his declaration of the newcomers' identity, it continued by combining gracious speeches and direct actions. The uncertainty and variety of interpretations we find among the indigenous peoples was echoed in some ways by the Spaniards, but only to a point, because for them the situation was at base a contest of fear.

Ground Ducks and Double Readings

Although the conquerors mention several “spies” sent by Atahualpa, the first messenger—identifiable as the one mentioned in Betanzos—met captain Soto in Caxas, a reasonable place to choose since Tangarara-Caxas was along the easiest route to Atahualpa.⁵

The 1534 account of Pizarro's secretary, Xérez, tells of a smooth and clear interaction, with no excesses. In some ways, it resembles Betanzos' portrayal of Atahualpa. After Pizarro left Tangarara (24 September 1532) the lord of Pabor, whom Atahualpa's father, Huayna Cápac, had severely punished, welcomed him and told him that there was an Inca captain nearby in Caxas, up the sierra. Enforcing the policy of fear, Pizarro ordered Captain Soto to go there, “so . . . that they would not become arrogant” (1985:84). Meanwhile, Pizarro left for Çarán, where again they were welcomed by the local lord. On the way, nine men chose to return to Tangarara because there were not enough men there. Eight days later Soto arrived in Çarán, after having met one of Atahualpa's captains and seen, among other things, a house full of women making cloth for his army. With Soto came a messenger from Atahualpa, who told Pizarro that the Inca wanted to be his friend and would await him in Cajamarca. He brought as gifts “two fortresses made out of stone, shaped as a fountain, with which he could drink, and two loads of dry, skinned ducks, with which, after grinding them, he could sprinkle himself” as native lords do. Pizarro welcomed him and told him that he was happy that he had come, and that after hearing that Atahualpa was waging a war he had decided to meet him and be his friend and brother, and to help him. He ordered that the messenger be treated well, and at his departure (mid-October 1532) sent with him some presents for Atahualpa (ibid.:86–88).

The image Xérez gives of certainty and control contrasts with captain Mena's 1937 [1534] account. After Tangarara, every lord along their way threatened them with Atahualpa and described the route to Cajamarca as very bad, with no water or supplies. This made seven men decide to return, arguing that the best land was behind them, not ahead (1937:80–81); everything was still unclear. Mena went to Caxas and reports that it was empty when they arrived. Caxas was destroyed and many Indians were hanged—Atahualpa's punishment for their having sided with Huascar. When the local lord showed up he complained about Atahualpa, but said that they were hiding “because of their fear” of the Spaniards. Soto responded by offering him friendship and asking him for vassalage. The lord accepted, and took some women from Atahualpa's house and gave them to Soto. What was a politically loaded gift exchange became then a local fear exchange. When a captain from Atahualpa arrived the local lord panicked. He had broken all acceptable behavior by taking Atahualpa's women, and he tried to fix things by standing up (there was a strict protocol governing sitting and standing; the one seating had the highest rank); but Soto had his own politics of fear and ordered him to sit by his side. The captain had brought gifts for the Christians: two skinned ducks, meant to represent how they themselves would soon look, and two fortresses, indicating what awaited them ahead. Trujillo ([1571] 1953:135), who was also present, adds that the captain was arrogant and threatened them. Soto sent a messenger to Pizarro asking him what to do and Pizarro answered that they should put up with the arrogance and pretend that they were afraid of him, thereby reversing the previous, local politics of fear.

Recent historiography has given little attention to the meaning of these gifts, often following Xérez's version. Yet by analyzing the gifts one can illuminate Atahualpa's strategy. I know of no source that says the Incas used stone drinking vessels, or that Andean lords sprinkled ground, dried ducks on themselves. Years ago Kubler (1945:417, n. 27) suggested a sensible interpretation: the birds (“ducks”) were means to void the Spaniards' power.⁶

We can discern more of Atahualpa's guesswork by analyzing his envoy's activities among the Christians, and understand the kind of practical knowledge he was trying to gain. His ‘spying’ (so labeled by the conquerors) involved an exchange of perceptions characteristic of contact situations that blend bodies and objects (Comaroff and Comaroff 1991:180–97), key means for determining the status of unknown beings (Connolly and Anderson 1987). In addition to counting how many Spaniards there were, the envoy tested their strength by pulling and pushing “as if scoffing,” asked some to take out their swords, and even pulled a Christian's beard—particularly telling since beards appear as a marker of strangeness in all native accounts. Pedro Pizarro recalled that this earned the envoy a slap, and lead Pizarro to order that no one should touch him in any way (1965 [1571]:176). If native chroniclers delete Atahualpa's uncertainty, Spanish accounts render his envoy's actions intelligible only as those of a spy. Summarizing after-the-fact information, they say that he told Atahualpa that the New People were few in number and thieves. He reported that they had big sheep, but that they could kill them and only needed some rope to tie them up (loc. cit.)—only the barber, “who turns people young,” the farrier, and the lassoer should be kept (Trujillo 1953:136). Only Estete (1918 [1535?]) recalls the envoy asking “from what land we came and what we wanted,” besides counting the men, horses, and arms (1918:21).

I will examine this duality in depth in a moment, but first I want to point out that this exchange involved another dimension of contact that will be significant later on: the envoy's tests and the leeway he was granted implied a suspension of the limits of the possible restraining him, exposing the Christians to interactions that would have been unthinkable in an ordinary context. No other Indians, except for servants, would be allowed such intimacy with the Christians' bodies. The same thing would happen regarding Atahualpa, who would allow all protocol rules to be broken during his first contact with the strangers.

The Politics of Being an Inca

The messenger/spy, called Ciquinchara, reported to Atahualpa in Ybocan, on his way from Huamachuco to Cajamarca. Through an examination of their exchanges, I will present new perspectives on the complex politics informing Atahualpa's actions, and unpack the divine implications of being an Inca under the exceptional stress of contact dynamics. As we will see, bringing native orderings into the analysis does not generate a picture of rigidly ritualized responses, as one finds in Todorov's (1978) portrayal of the Aztecs in the Mexican case. Quite to the contrary.

Secrecy surrounded the matter again. Atahualpa took Ciquinchara aside and asked him about the New People in terms of the by now familiar lines: if they were “making gods” he was ready to welcome them, happy that they had come “in his time.” Ciquinchara told him that the Tallanes—the messengers with the first news—were wrong; that, although when seeing the strangers for the first time he was as flummoxed as the Tallanes, after observing them he had concluded they were not the Con Titi Viracocha and the other Viracochas. His argument is twofold: (a) they do things that ordinary men do; and (b) they do not do things that gods do. Thus, they (a) eat, drink, dress, mend their costumes, and talk to women; and (b) they do not make miracles, do not make sierras or flatten them, nor make people, nor do they make rivers or water fountains flow on their way—if there is no water they need to carry it. And if they are not gods, they are men of the worst kind: they take everything they see and desire—young women, gold and silver vessels, rich clothes—and force bound Indians to carry their things. Concretizing his findings in a known category, Ciquinchara says that they must be “quitas pumaranga, that means people without a lord, loose and highwaymen” (Betanzos II, 20, 1987:264). Matching the conquerors' view, he added that they should be killed, and the best way do to that was to burn them since they gather each night in the same house to sleep.

This report shows a clear advance in the process of turning newness into a manageable object. In contrast to the exhilarating exchange between the Tallanes and the Inca, full of mesmerizing details and questions, this one is a contained exchange concerning the grounds for interpretation. Yet Atahualpa's next questions about the New People and Ciquinchara's answers bring the status-quo back into uncertainty. There is an excess of markers: they walk on top of very tall sheep, when they run the earth trembles and the din they make sounds like thunder; they carry something hollow, made of something like silver, which they fill with something like ashes and light on fire from below, and as it catches fire a large flame and a thunder come from the opening. Ciquinchara adds that the thunder from the sky kills people while this thunder does not, but there is a clear similarity to the Inca's supernatural arms and his thunder/lightning double. Thus one of the reasons Tito Cussi, Atahualpa's nephew, gives for identifying the Spanish as Viracochas was that they had “yllapas . . . because we thought that they were thunders from the sky” (1985 [1570]:2). Finally, there is the fact of their odd bodies: they are white, bearded, and dress in a way never before seen.

This presents a clear problem: because of their strange personas, and the strange acts and objects surrounding them, the Spanish belong to a separate category. Difference is established, and it is not removed by arguments that they are not “gods” because they do not strictly qualify. If men often can play the trickster with the god (Sahlins 1985:124), we will see next that in the Andes the god/huaca can be the trickster/anti-hero who embodies the destructive virtues of the god (Urbano 1981), or it can be, simply, the wrong god/huaca. Atahualpa's decision is consistent with this dilemma: he ordered Ciquinchara to return with two gold vessels for the capito, and to tell him that he loved him and would like to meet him; but he begged Ciquinchara to be careful and to help him find out what kind of people they were, “that they could be gods and be angry, and do those things that you say and show themselves as you saw them, . . . because I would not want something to happen to us because we do not understand what they are” (Betanzos II, 20, 1987:265).

Recall that Betanzos is the closest we have to a royal historical account, however much it is shaped for a Spanish audience. The kinds of reasoning used and the options considered express an Inca's way of ordering reality. Atahualpa's moves are only logical: if receiving a god in the wrong manner was going to impact someone, it was him. As Inca, he was a semi-divine being; mediating between the ordinary and the supernatural was his job.⁸

To fully understand these risks I will revise the identification of the Spanish as Viracochas, a controversial point that has been rejected as a Spanish invention imposed on the Indians (Pease 1991:148–55; 1995:137–60), a clear case of Western mythmaking in Obeyesekere's (1992) sense. In my opinion, the problem has been miss-framed, Viracocha is not relevant, per se. First, the exchanges between the Tallanes, Ciquinchara, and Atahualpa, and the subsequent research and guesswork, all fish elements out of a pool of godly attributes, which are used in a bricoleur fashion to make sense of something out of the ordinary. Second, this sense-making was politically informed. Finally, though the Viracocha label is a poor encapsulation of a much more fluid and complex situation, it is not an imposition, but rather the result of a colonial process of transculturation (Pratt 1992) involving Spanish actions as much as native “border thinking” (Mignolo 2000). Let me extrapolate on these three points.

First, the bricolage. As we have seen, the Spanish were strange for many reasons, and the gods (or rather huacas) were used to make sense of them. In such a multi-ethnic (multi-myth, multi-huaca) space as the Andes any identification was necessarily composite. This is hard to illustrate with the available sources, but I can give one example. In the first encounter with Atahualpa, the Tallanes explained that they were calling the New People Viracochas because “Con Tici Viracocha” had disappeared in the sea. “Con” was soon dropped in Betanzos, and no other native-like writer uses it. This makes sense. Con was a northern, coastal god, and therefore a familiar element of intelligibility for the Tallanes. Pressed to make sense of strange beings for a semi-divine king to whom Viracocha was proper, they combined the two names. As Pease objects, Viracocha was neither associated with landscape changes, nor a local deity in the north (1991:152), but Con was (Zárate [1555] I, 10, 1995:50). Further, Con had many qualities that resonated with the terms according to which the Spanish were discussed both by the Tallanes and Ciquinchara: both Con and the Spanish had strange bodies; Con could shorten distances, the Spanish moved so fast on their sheep that they, too, compressed distances; Con could command water, the Spanish needed to carry water.

Second, since in the Andes all high politics was huaca-based, defining the identity of powerful beings was no game; actual beliefs aside, it had important consequences. As Rostworowski points out, Con's and similar accounts can be read as mythical narratives of political events (1983; 1989:167–74). Con disappeared in the north, superseded by Pachacama, a coastal god/huaca coming from the south who, like Con, was son of the Sun and the Moon. Pachacama turned Con's Indians into animals, and made new people and taught them how to work the land and plant trees, superseding Con's order. Now strange and powerful beings were coming from the north. Besides, Con was only one among many huacas in the northern and central sierra (loc. cit.) some of whose features resembled some of the Spaniards', and we have seen the rumors about them that were spreading throughout the empire. This complexity must have increased with the simple impact of translation: each time the Spaniards interacted with an ethnic group, to which deity was God equivalent? On the other hand, together with interpretations, actions were taken. At some point Atahualpa asked the powerful huaca of Pachacamac about his encounter with the New People, and he responded that he would kill them all (Xérez 1985:127)—here “he” could refer to either Atahualpa or Pachacamac. After Huascar's defeat his supporters made a sacrifice to Viracocha, asking him for help against Atahualpa (Cieza [c. 1553] 5, 1988:39–40), and though Viracocha's association with the Spanish strengthened after Atahualpa's capture it may have been in the air before. Finally, as I will show, a local lord used the Spaniards' aura against Atahualpa's captains.

Third, the Viracocha label was no European imposition. The equation Viracocha = Maker is a simplification, as many scholars have noted. Viracocha was a deity related to the Sun and to agricultural tasks, whose virtue was to make things achieve fruition; he had the power to transmit the capacity, including different kinds of knowledge, to ensure reproduction, but he was not himself a maker (Itier 1993; Duviols 1993). Or he was merely one manifestation of a multiple deity; another was the anti-hero of uncontrollable power and disorder, incarnate in Tunupa/Taguapaca (Urbano 1981). Or he had attributes that tangled with several other gods/huacas/ancestors, including diverse creative and destructive forces, and thus as having several manifestations, only some of them anthropomorphic (Gisbert 1990). It is likely that local specialists did not agree on these interpretations, and that they had their own agendas. But in any case, Atahualpa's guesswork and actions were far more complex than is suggested by the simple Christianized image of a “goodwill god” returning. Much more was at stake.

How much of this complex panorama the conquerors understood is an open question. I show elsewhere (n.d.) that some of them recognized that supernatural elements were in play and took advantage of them accordingly. But it is also clear that Andean peoples were not dupes whose heads were simply filled with a Christian conceptions, replacing what was otherwise a Western secular event. Neither were the Christians so powerful nor the natives so passive. Supernatural beings did not come out of nowhere. The elements that informed the politics of defining the Spaniards' status had little to do with a Judeo-Christian frame and the reduction of Andean peoples' gods/huacas/ancestors to such frame is not an imposition upon them but rather an accomplished erasure of a rich dynamic that I am trying to recover here.

Behind this erasure different agendas can be seen. On the Spanish side, the result conforms to a common colonizing gesture: seizing native reasonings.¹⁰

Native-like accounts, on the other hand, were colonial creations, but they were not simply colonial inventions, nor were they created through top-down processes or for top-down reasons. They were efforts by native intellectuals to render their views intelligible within the hegemonic frames that defined reality, similar to Du Bois' double consciousness (1994:2). They thought it necessary to edit out guesswork and politics, and to purge pagan elements. The Viracocha = Maker equation made Huamán Poma, Tito Cussi, or Garcilaso accept Spanish categories, but it also enabled them to contest the Spanish order by inserting a positioned difference, an example of border thinking (Mignolo 2000) (this occurred in addition to the making of direct political claims, such as those of Tito Cussi and Huamán Poma). This rich politics took place too long after 1532 to be detailed here, but its importance will become clear when I analyze the final scene of the events in Cajamarca. I return now to the exchange of messengers, and the murkiness of the ongoing contact process.

Cracks in the Coherence During a “Negotiation of Fear”

In the Christians' final approach to Cajamarca one can recognize, in action, the effects of the divided opinions in Atahualpa's camp that we saw in Betanzos (i.e., the Spanish are dodgy thieves; the Spanish are some sort of godly beings). One can also see a local use of the Spaniards' aura, in which Spanish and native intents converged. After Ciquinchara left the compañía headed for Cajamarca and faced an obvious shift: there were no more messengers, supplies, or loaders, and they received no information as to what lay ahead; most towns were empty, and in one case the Indians opened irrigation channels to overflow a river the Spanish had to cross (Trujillo 1953:135). This new strategy of passive deterrence conveyed Atahualpa's uncertainty, being a half-way measure that fell short of his counselors' more aggressive advice. Some Indians that the Christians captured to obtain information told them that Atahualpa awaited them in Cajamarca, and that he had ordered warriors to confront them along their way (Mena 1937:81; Xérez 1985:92).

As a result, the compañía's journey up the sierra was plagued by a constant fear. As they traversed narrow, vertical paths that over short distances climbed 4,000 to 5,000 meters, the advantage of horses disappeared, and even a simple attack with rocks would have been devastating. In this milieu of uncertainty, Pizarro made a standard move: he attempted to regain control by inverting the balance of fear. He sent a messenger, a Tallán principal named Guachapuro, to tell Atahualpa that he should not be afraid, that they were peaceful people who only fought those that attacked them. But before Guachapuro could return Atahualpa shifted his strategy again; after four days in which the Spaniards faced no attacks, saw no one, and obtained no supplies, contact suddenly resumed.

The first exchange was anything but neat. Atahualpa's envoy brought supplies and told Pizarro at length about the wars between Atahualpa and Huascar, stressing that the latter had already been defeated and imprisoned. The intent seems to have been to impress upon the New People that ahead they would find a single interlocutor. Pizarro, however, misunderstood it to be an attempt to scare him with Atahualpa's power, and, as usual, he responded by mirroring. He said he was vassal of a very great lord, in fact lord of all the world, who had made other great lords his vassals. He added that this lord had sent him to make all know and obey God, and that if Atahualpa welcomed him he would befriend him, but otherwise he would battle him (Xérez 1985:97–98). The bewildered messengers asked for permission to return and inform Atahualpa. There is no way to know how Pizarro's response and status were understood—Betanzos does not mention it, but the concepts perfectly fit a huaca's port-parole. And this murky exchange of words tangled with and echoed murky acts. For instance, because of their fear, the Christians had been lodging in distinguished, well-built constructions which were Inca-only places. Occupying them must have added to their peculiar aura a meaning legible to any native: who/what is this that lodges where the Inca kings lodge, and yet is not punished? And more generally: who/what are those that can thus break all social rules and taboos?

This failed exchange was mitigated by the next envoy to arrive, Ciquinchara, whose behavior matches Atahualpa's orders (to be careful and welcome the capito). He told Pizarro that Atahualpa, “Pizarro's son” (Betanzos II, 21, 1987: 267), awaited him with many people to befriend him. Ciquinchara also brought golden vessels from which he invited several men to drink chicha, a clear gesture of recognition and friendship (Xérez 1985:99). Yet this brief moment of clarity was blurred once again with the return of Guachapuro, Pizarro's messenger/spy. He attacked Ciquinchara, infuriated by how he had been treated at Atahualpa's camp, and he accused Ciquinchara of being a spy. He said that he had been refused entry but that an uncle of Atahualpa's emerged to meet him. Guachapuro was then asked, “What people are the Christians and what arms do they bring?” He responded that they were valiant warriors, with horses that ran like the wind and long lances that killed anyone “because with two jumps they reached them, and the horses with their feet and mouths kill many” (Xérez 1985:100). He added that the swords could cut a man into two, and the fireball throwers could kill many. The uncle—and other men of high rank since the account switches to ‘them’—said that the Christians were few, had two fireball throwers only, and the horses were not carrying arms; they could kill them. Guachapuro answered that they could not penetrate their leather. Mena (1937), departing further from both ordinary interaction and the tropoi of the good god returning, adds that Guachapuro was asked at Atahualpa's camp “from where does the messenger of the devils that had crossed so much land and no one could kill come?” (1937:82).

Guachapuro's comments reveal a non-Inca interest in defining the terms of the encounter: he was making the Christians uncannily scary, using their aura for his own ends (horses could eat people, men could throw fireballs) in an indigenous “negotiation of fear” (Adorno 1991) that echoed the Christians' policy of fear. At the same time, one can see for once that the terms in which the New Peoples' status was being discussed were other than the simple military ones that the conquerors privileged, and closer to those in Betanzos' account. Their features, actions, and objects had surrounded them with weird, out-of-the-ordinary signs that lacked clear shape. These “faults in the discourse of comprehension” (De Certeau 1991:223) destabilize the Spanish eyewitnesses' explanations of their journey up the sierra: that the Inca had been simply too confident of his power—an idea that most historiography also has accepted in an almost 500-year coincidence in the construction of coherence.

From Messengers to Contact: A Failed Meeting

There was one last scene before the capture, a meeting in Atahualpa's camp between the Inca and two Spanish captains, Hernando de Soto and Hernando Pizarro. Contrary to what a committed empiricist might expect, Atahualpa's first contact with the Spaniards clarified nothing. The meeting unfolded, as with the previous contacts, as a messy exchange of improvisations and ‘fear blows.’ This repeated failure by both parties to reach across politically meaningful cultural differences made the final act in Cajamarca necessary, and also anticipated its dynamics.

The Christians arrived in Cajamarca on a Friday, 15 November 1532. They advanced in military formation but met no opposition—the place was “empty.” Disturbing Inca order once again, they lodged not in the native town (which still exists) but in the Inca tambo nearby. This state facility consisted of several large buildings surrounding three sides of a large plaza, with a wall on the forth side. Near the middle of the plaza was an usnu, a large platform-like ceremonial center from which the Inca solemnly commanded rituals (Hyslop 1990:69–100). The tambo was, in sum, a controllable space, and the Spaniards needed the feeling of control.

“Empty” meant that upon their arrival they faced no warriors, but when they approached the tambo its inhabitants “lost control [se desmandaban] to come see us” (Estete 1918:22). This proximity was unsettling, as was the sight of Atahualpa's huge camp, half a league away. Fear at first sight is an element of all the accounts, but it was not simply size that mattered here but also order. This threatened a key element in the Christians' ability to control their fear, their certainty of their superiority: “the tents were so many . . . that it certainly frightened us because we did not think that Indians could have such magnificent dwellings nor so many tents, nor so perfect” (ibid.:22). Some conquerors were aware of the importance of the delicate balance of fear in giving bizarre situations an appearance of solidity, providing a frame for orders to be given and obeyed, for actions to refer to some unstable but effective context of sense. After all, they were 168 men, days away from help, having broken all political rules and about to face a feared king with some 40,000 to 60,000 men. As Estete says, the sight of Atahualpa's camp “led all Spaniards to be very confused and scared, although it was not convenient to show it nor, even less, to walk back, because if they felt any frailty in us, our own Indians would kill us” (loc. cit.). He refers to their mostly forced porters; their command over them was, in his view, grounded in the momentum that the constant irresistible advance had given them. Sense was being produced in and by motion; stopping or even hesitating was dangerous.

The Christians wanted to know Atahualpa's intentions and power, and also to establish contact. A first group of twenty horsemen commanded by Captain Soto went to meet him, followed by a similarly sized reinforcement commanded by Hernando Pizarro. Atahualpa had finished a ritual confirmation of his triumph over his brother by stepping on Huascar's dress and insignias when he learned of Soto's approach. Ciquinchara, the first to reach Atahualpa, told the Inca that one “capito” from “capito” and thirty to forty men were coming, walking on top of their sheep, more heavily armed than ever before. Atahualpa asked the names for horses and of the man approaching, and what he wanted; Ciquinchara told him that Soto wanted to ask him to meet the “capito” (Betanzos II, 21, 1987:268).

During this encounter a mix of curiosity and protocol guided Atahualpa's actions, which intertwined with the Spaniards' goals. The first entanglement can be read through spatial rules. Soto and his horsemen approached the camp passing through heavily armed squads that stood still. They had to cross several creeks, and since the bridges were not strong enough they passed them swimming on the horses. The last creek was of hot water and deep, so they stopped and asked for Atahualpa to cross over to their side. The Indians on the other side asked who ordered so, “and the interpreter told them that that captain calling him was son of the maker” (ibid., 269)—not a “capito.” Atahualpa sent a main captain, Unan Chullo, to tell Soto to tell him what they wanted. Soto responded there was nothing they wanted from him, but from Atahualpa. Unan Chullo insisted, and told Soto to tell him what they wanted because he had been sent for that end, and to “let them know that if they wanted to talk to the Ynga he did not talk to people like them” (loc. cit.). There is a clear defense of protocol rules—Atahualpa knew Soto was just a messenger and refused to meet him—and there was a safety concern too, as some counselors wanted to treat the Spanish simply as enemies (we saw Ciquinchara's opinion). This first exchange anticipated the way in which things would unravel: once the hope of a contained, defined interaction failed, Atahualpa's curiosity, his desire to see with his own eyes, prevailed. He ordered Unan Chullo to show Soto the ford.

The next scenes are very rich; I will focus only on the constant oscillation between protocol and improvisation. The Inca was a semi-divine being, and contact with his persona was restricted not only because of his highness but also because of the powers inherent in his body—a restriction that the conquerors read as Oriental exoticism. When the Spanish first entered the patio where Atahualpa was he sat behind a piece of cloth, beyond the reach of most of his men. Indeed, only women could reach him ordinarily. During the meeting Atahualpa did not lift his eyes nor talk to Soto; the interaction went through his port-parole. Soto told Atahualpa that “the governor” was waiting for him and would not lodge nor eat without him, Ruiz de Arce (1543) recalls (1953:95). Atahualpa answered, through Unan Chullo, that he was celebrating a feast and was fasting, he would go the next day (Betanzos II, 21, 1987:269).

Then Hernando arrived. Seeing Soto lost in Inca protocol, he circumvented it by making his dialog with Atahualpa an exchange of discursive blows. When Atahualpa responded to his goodwill opening through his port-parole, Hernando asked him to talk to him directly, as he was Pizarro's brother. Atahualpa said then that a lord from Tangarara had told him that they had mistreated his Indians but were not good for war, he had killed three of them. Hernando responded that the lord was a liar and the people of Tangarara like women, the Christians were good for war and if he had any enemy they would help him. Atahualpa said one lord refused to obey him, and Hernando said that ten horsemen would be enough, that his Indians would be of no use except to find those hiding. Atahualpa smiled “as a man that did not esteem us much” (Hernando Pizarro 1953 [1533]:54).

After this bullish exchange Atahualpa tried to regain control through two calculated improvisations, shifting the field of interaction from words to acts. Firstly, he ordered food to be presented and invited the capitos to eat. His intent was to see them eat, and to make them get down from their horses and up again (Betanzos II, 21, 1987:270) in order to gain personal experience of their bodies. The Christians refused, afraid as usual of a trick, but being aware (for once) that this was an improper response, they justified it by invoking a sense of order outside the immediate context: they said they had no permission to do so, but were only to ask his intentions and return, which they had sworn to do (Ruiz de Arce 1953:95). Then Atahualpa ordered that gold vessels with chicha be offered to the capitos. A unique honor, but granted to see if they would keep the vessels after drinking, as he had been told they did (Betanzos, loc. cit.). The Christians feared the drink was poisoned but, as Estete (1918) says, “there was no way to avoid doing it” (1918:23). Some drank and some did not, while some pretended to spill theirs. The two native-like accounts that explain this scene do so differently. For Tito Cussi (1985 [1570]:3) it was a clear sign of discourtesy that would justify Atahualpa's dismissal of the Bible in Cajamarca (Seed 1991: 21), while for Betanzos it was a practical exercise. It may well have been both.

Before departing, Soto tried to recover the initiative lost to Hernando. He took a ring from his hand and offered it to Atahualpa, who refused it and, setting limits again, ordered Unan Chullo, his porte-parole, to take it. Soto insisted that it was for Atahualpa, not for Unan Chullo. During the negotiation Soto got so close to the Inca's body that his horse's breath blew the royal insignia in his head, the borla. Atahualpa stood still, showing no sign of fear, and angrily ordered that the ring be returned and the capitos leave.

I will stress a few points here. First, reality was suspended. All possi-ble breaches to Inca protocol occurred at once: the rules governing personal contact (visual, oral, and corporal), drinking, and eating were broken. When Ciquinchara first met the conquerors he was allowed to do what no Indian could, and now the tables were turned. Since there was no signifying context to frame their interactions, the actors exposed themselves to limitless risks. Atahualpa could have been slaughtered, or Soto and Hernando poisoned.

Second, the meeting solved little. Although the strangers' hierarchy left some of them below Atahualpa's status, he still had to meet the powerful being/capito, and although Ciquinchara's “capito” did not reconcile with Soto's interpreter's “son of the maker,” Atahualpa's tests had largely failed. Thus when the capitos left the Inca said “Mana unan changa runan caicuna, that means ‘these are people whom it is impossible to understand’” (Betanzos II, 21, 1987:270). Perceptions, rather than being unveiled, were being redefined through continued, politically informed improvisation.

My third point is that personal differences between participants mattered. Even if the cultural divide was striking, different actors had an uneven ability to cross it. Soto stubbornly tried to reach the Inca but never managed to, nor to challenge the rules. Hernando, as usual, relied on a bullish strategy to undo the hierarchy that ordered action and was more effective. Ciquinchara and some Inca captains had no interest in the strangers and wanted to fence them off, but failed. Atahualpa oscillated between maintaining royal protocol and exposing himself to experimentation, and in the end reached no conclusion.

Finally, in this chaotic meeting key elements escaped the realms of neatness that predominate in practice theory. On one hand, it was a cross-cultural contest of fear, as shown by the exchange between Hernando and Atahualpa and the latter's tight control of his emotions. On the other, the risky, close contact that broke all rules occurred because of Atahualpa's curiosity, however politically interested it might have been. With the closing of this scene, acts and actors only became less stable.

Cajamarca

The next day, Saturday, 16 November 1532, the Spaniards would capture Atahualpa in a quick and bloody act. Historians have tried to explain how this was possible in a way that contests demeaning images of the Incas not defending themselves, fooled by taking the Spanish for Viracochas (= good gods). Consistent with a politics of anti-inferiority and of objective actors engaged in mutually intelligible acts, their answer has been military. While Atahualpa miscalculated the Spaniards' might (they were few) and was too confident of his power, the Spanish attacked by surprise and without provocation. This version of events makes only limited sense, and it does so at the price of ignoring numerous clues. As I have argued, the mythifying version of the encounter is a colonial product that kidnaps native reasonings, but to dismiss alterity altogether is a Pyrrhic victory. Furthermore, the stress of a perfect contact scene triggered uncertainties and emotions on both sides that are poorly conveyed by a portrayal of reified rational Spanish subjects in control of all events.

My interpretation aims to recover alterity and to destabilize Occidentalist (Coronil 1996) images of the Christians. The first point to address is the idea of a unified native conception of what was ahead and what to do. I argue that there was no consensus, and that explaining Atahualpa's acts as a simple miscalculation echoes a Eurocentric fable in which capturing him was a neat military deed. After the capitos left Atahualpa's camp, he and his captains debated what to do the next day. Although new indices were considered, the arguments followed familiar lines: Ciquinchara said the New People might look like gods but were not, the generals wanted to attack, Atahualpa was undecided. It was agreed finally that they would leave with all the warriors at the ready, and send Ciquinchara to find out and report on the strangers' intentions (Betanzos II, 22, 1987:272–74). Had Atahualpa been so certain of what was ahead, he could simply have sent his men to capture the Spaniards, but he did not. The compañía's size did not make choices easier: a large number would have been an army, providing a frame for military action, but a small number of powerful, strange beings, if anything, signaled heroes/ancestors and called for improvisation. The Spaniards' might, Atahualpa's attempt to disempower their huaca, and that he had asked the most powerful huaca in the Empire, Pachacamac, about the coming encounter (Xérez 1985:127) show that the Spaniards worried him.¹¹

A second point to question is the rational image of the compañía. Things were not easy at the Christian camp, either; indeed they were closer to the hallucinatory (Taussig 1987; Das 1998) than to the ordinary. If the size and order of Atahualpa's camp had troubled many, making their own fragility blatant, the expedition's news of his power unsettled them further. Uncertainty and fear increasingly mingled. Many were afraid because they had not fought with Indians of such a kind and order, and they knew not what to expect (P. Pizarro 1968: 12). All knew the numerical odds against them were some 400 to 1, and far from any familiar face they “expected no help but from God” (Mena 1937:83). While they spent the night sleeping by turns, with the horses saddled and bridled, their view of the fires in the Inca camp resembled a sky in its vastness.

What was their idea for the next day? Most scholars do not ask this question; the ambush and the attack seem to speak for themselves. Hemming contradicts himself. First he says they planned to attack by surprise, and adds paragraphs about their military training. Then he says that they chose to let Pizarro make decisions as events dictated: they might attack if feasible or attacked, or Atahualpa might willingly give some sign of submission, or, if neither occurred, they would pretend to be friends (1982:29–31). However, there is reason to think that things were more complex. The neat version of ‘leaving things open’ comes from Xérez. As usual, he presents Pizarro as in control, the sole organizer of his men (1985:109). Estete complicates matters by relating that there was a long debate, but he does not explain the different opinions (1918:23). Hernando Pizarro opens another window of possibility: they knew from some of their service women that Atahualpa planned to kill them; some of his messengers were their kinsmen and had told them to run away (1953:55). This makes sense, since those serving the Spanish were likely to be killed if things went wrong, and it shows, again, that there were cleavages other than Spanish/Inca at work. Not surprisingly, Pedro Pizarro (1968:177) describes it all as an ambush pure and simple, since he was certain that the Inca wanted to kill them; for him it was all a game of mirrors.

Before the encounter, both sides took good care to assure that the supernatural would be on their side. Sacrifices were carried out in Atahualpa's camp (Cieza 43, 1996:134) while, after a night of vigil, the conquerors heard mass to uplift their souls and pray for help (Estete 1918:23). The compañía was divided into four groups: Soto, Hernando Pizarro, and Benalcazar would command cavalry units, Pizarro the infantry. They hid in the buildings encircling three sides of the large plaza to surprise Atahualpa with a sudden charge. In the upper terrace of the usnu/fortress was the Greek captain named Candía with the handful of musketeers and the two small cannons.

Atahualpa, surrounded by thousands of his men, took the entire day to cover half a league. His slow pace and ceremonial display have been interpreted as a sign of majesty, and that the head squad carried only disguised arms a sign that he had underestimated the Spaniards.¹²

Some time before dusk Atahualpa finally made his majestic entry. Men dressed in different colors ceremonially swept the floor. Another group followed singing and dancing, and a third entered with golden and silver patens that flashed in the afternoon sun, carrying diverse weapons, many of them ceremonial ones made of gold or silver. Some 4,000 to 5,000 men crowded the plaza, and in the midst of them was Atahualpa in his gold andas covered by feathers, carried by ethnic lords and surrounded by his guard, each group distinctively dressed. Outside the plaza were other squads of up to 40,000 men. After the long day, weather due to terror or military calculation there was no one to welcome him.

The next scene between fray Vicente de Valverde and Atahualpa condensed all emotions, intents, and expectations, and is present in all accounts both sixteenth-century and current. As MacCormack (1989) and Seed (1991) show in detail, what happened with a book passed between them was of key significance to the Christians, and hence to native thinkers too. There are, still, two tangled aspects of the exchange that have received little attention. The first is the question of why it ever happened as it did. Why was Atahualpa there? If capturing a few vandals was the issue he could have waited elsewhere while the task was done. His presence only makes sense if he had something to gain in person. Likewise, if Pizarro simply wanted to attack, all was in place: the Inca in person, surrounded by walls in a flat space, and the ambush at the ready. He did not need Valverde. The second question is what each party understood about the exchange between Atahualpa and Valverde, what was being exchanged or who was what. My answer to both questions is that it was a matter between huacas, and therefore required high politics, although for each side in different ways and for different reasons.

As I have suggested, the encounter with the New People was problematic for Atahualpa, among other reasons because he was a mediator between the normal and the supernatural, and many of the capitos' features were extraordinary. This takes on more significance if one considers an Inca's role in war. He rarely engaged in battle in person; his armies and generals battled literally in his place, carrying his bulto or body double. The battle's outcome showed his atao, or warlike luck—not that of his generals', expressing as it did his huacas'/gods' support and power. That is why a consecrated Inca could never lose a war. His personal intervention was a last resource involving the deployment of his supernatural powers (Ziólkowski 1996:215–57), and as such it was a public test of his semi-divine condition, of his camac—energy or power (Taylor 2000:1–34; Salomon 1991:16). Thus, up until the final battle, when Huascar had no option but to try his atao in person, neither he nor Atahualpa took part in the battles between them. On that occasion Huacar had assured his men that “he would turn into fire and water against his enemies” (Sarmiento [1571] 66, 2001: 161).¹³

In this light, the exchange between Atahualpa and Valverde gains new meaning. For Seed (1991:30) and MacCormack (1989:165), it is impossible to know what happened with the book; the answer depends on each narrator's intentions and when he wrote. But, one must ask: what was the book for Atahualpa? Valverde approached him when no other Spaniard was in sight to welcome him, making the opening act a murky one, considering the elaborate Andean protocol. And, as on the previous day, during the interaction the words and forms muddied the waters further. Betanzos, like Garcilaso, says that the interpreter could not translate well. According to the former (II, 22, 1987:277), Valverde, holding a book, began addressing Atahualpa, and what the interpreter said was that “that father/friar was son of the Sun, who sent him to tell him [Atahualpa] that he should not fight and should give obedience to the captain [Pizarro], who was a son of the Sun too.”

That is, ‘God’ was translated as ‘The Sun,’ and Valverde and the capito claimed to be his sons and to carry his message. This must have sounded strange and problematic because it is exactly what an Inca would claim. Further, the interpreter said that all that the father said was “in that book . . . , thus said it that painting” (ibid., my emphasis). ‘Painting’ (quilca) was the closest word to ‘book,’ but there were no images in the book; ‘written’ was out of the question since the Incas had no writing system; so the book said it. As Huamán Poma (385 [387] 1987:392) makes explicit, Atahualpa's immediate reaction was to ask for the book because he expected it to talk: “Give it to me, the book, so that it will tell me that. And . . . he began leafing through the pages of the said book [and said] ‘What, how is it that it does not tell it to me? It does not even speak to me the said book!’”

This makes sense: the only object that could say something was a huaca, and as we have seen Atahualpa knew that the New People had one that claimed to be the most powerful, mocking all others. Atahualpa had tried to disempower it, he had his own, and he was one as well. They had also showed their atao in several battles. It was clearly a matter of high politics. The moment at which Atahualpa asked Valverde for the book condensed all of Atahualpa's expectations: rather than responding to the odd words he chose to literally face the huaca—it was the moment of truth. And yet the alleged huaca failed to perform—it did not speak. The much-anticipated moment was a fiasco. Once the loaded object lost its powerful aura, Atahualpa looked at the silent pages and said: “‘This speaks and says that you are son of the Sun? I am son of the Sun too’, and all his Indians answered . . . all together ‘thus is, Çapa Ynga.’ And the Inca turned to say very loud that he also came from where the Sun was, . . . and his people answered him once again: ‘thus is only lord’” (Betanzos II, 22, 1987:277).

It is, then, not only that words like ‘Dios’ (God), ‘libro’ (book), or ‘escrito’ (written) had no translation—the interpreter seems to have chosen the right words given the pressing context—but also that the form (object) through which the encounter was to be rendered intelligible failed: the huaca/book did not talk. This was no simple miscalculation. So far, Atahualpa had magisterially handled the extraordinary stress to which the contact scene had subjected him: to publicly test his semi-divine nature vis-à-vis odd beings (the equivalent of asking the Pope to perform a public miracle when facing aggressive aliens). Once the situation proved to be ordinary politics Atahualpa threw away the quilca, likely shifting to plan B: to face bandits and undo all the damage they had caused to his authority. As all sources report, he asked for everything they had taken to be returned immediately.¹⁴

I diverge thus from MacCormack's (1989) and Seed's (1991) view of Huamán Poma (and Garcilaso), based not on selected clues, but on their own readings. In my view, both native authors presented the key elements of what had happened—the huaca failed to talk, Atahualpa needed to be majestic, and what Valverde said made no sense—within an account of the advent of Christianity, the frame acceptable to hegemonic eyes. They did not simply deploy rhetorical strategies to subvert Spanish claims of transparency and universality, pointing out that the book did not talk, questioning the moral standing but accepting the mystification. Rather, they presented, within a “colonial semiosis” (Mignolo 1995:7–9), a native understanding of what things had looked like. Their writing choices were rooted in a different order that they could not present bluntly—they had to accept the rules—but only suggest. Making another, silenced, sense (alterity) is, per se, challenging, because it makes the hegemonic rules of recognition visible, and thus arbitrary (Bhabha 1994:110). And yet, in doing so they were caught in the double-bind of being both different and sensible, what Salomon (1982) calls “chronicles of the impossible.” From a Spanish point of view, however majestic Atahualpa was in Huamán Poma he still reconfirmed the Indians' inferiority (ignorant, he expected a book to talk), and as Seed signals (1991:24), Garcilaso had to conclude that the Incas' language lacked adequate abstract terms with which to express the mysteries of the faith.

The scene's dynamics were similar from the Christians' perspective. Why was Valverde there? Even if some so wished, Pizarro could not permit a direct attack because he had to comply with the requerimiento—the legal text the crown ordered to be read to any lord a compañía encountered, a must in this perfect encounter scenario.¹⁵

After the faulty opening, during which no Spaniard was in sight, Valverde approached Atahualpa with a native interpreter. Although the exact sequence of events varies from source to source, all mention the same events that native accounts do: after some words were exchanged the book Valverde carried passed to Atahualpa's hands, it was soon on the floor, and Atahualpa asked for all that had been taken to be returned. Further, most Spanish narrators make explicit the connection between Valverde's words (a request to befriend the Spaniards because God had said so) and the fact that what God had said was in the book.¹⁷

And yet, regardless of this variation, whatever Valverde said was only an after-the-fact matter; most men were simply too far away to hear at all. For them the exchange was a silent yet clear scene in which gestures mattered. As several men who were present in Cajamarca, but who did not write about it, declared in a trial in 1544–1545 (Archivo General de Indias, Ec 1007c, pza. 1, ff. 41–954), they read the interaction from a distance as a turning point. They saw Valverde going to Atahualpa and talking, a sacred book changing hands and ending up on the floor, Valverde running back and Atahualpa standing defiant and calling his men who responded with a loud shout. For Valverde, it must have been a frustrating blow that put an end to his intention—not unlike Atahualpa's frustration when the famous huaca failed to perform. But unlike Atahualpa, Valverde had no plan B. In the same act by which Atahualpa proved the New People's huaca to be false the Christians saw it dropped to the floor. This was clear regardless of what they thought afterward about Atahualpa's understanding of Valverde's words. Once the need for a peaceful performance was over there remained only contained fear and hatred.

The attack was chaotic and frenzied. What has been narrated, following Xérez, as an orderly military deed was to others more of a hallucinatory blood bath. As the conqueror Pedro Cataño recalled in 1543, “It was agreed that all people grouped with their captains should come out when a shot was fired . . . and since it was not fired all Christians were confused” (Archivo General de Indias, Pat. 90a, n. 1, r. 11, f. 183v). The signal did not come, and there was no epic start. Some began going for the Inca. Not surprisingly, Soto and his men took the lead. Others followed soon, and at some point the shot came and the tension exploded. They were 168 men among 5,000, and they could barely see. Like a camera, Cataño remembers returning after the first cavalry charge “and as they passed through them, when they turned right around upon them they saw that all the others were already mingled with the Indians” (loc. cit.). Meanwhile, Pizarro with his footmen went straight after Atahualpa, but found it hard to pull him down from his andas; they had to literally chop down the carriers, which were quickly replaced by others defending the Inca.

The plaza was a crowded, closed space, and to elude the cavalry charges many of Atahualpa's men tried to open a breach in the wall and eventually managed to push down some of it. In the center of the scene Pizarro continued his attempt to capture Atahualpa. As don Diego Inga Mocha recalls (1573) “they suddenly assailed Atahualpa and the people coming with him killing and chopping many of them, and thus [his guards] began to cluster around Atahualpa to defend him, the Spaniards were only wounding and killing” (Probanza 1974:96). In the frenzy, before managing to take down and imprison the Inca, Pizarro even had to stop a sword blow with his hand to secure Atahualpa's life.

By then, bodies were also being chopped outside the tambo, where the horsemen continued their (dis)charge. As I have said, Xérez's account of the battle as an orderly deed with Pizarro in command is a biased, after-the-fact simplification. Success came from compressed energies that poured out for hours until they were mastered. Following Pizarro's orders, Valverde and Hernando Pizarro tried to stop the attack after the plaza was cleared. Invoking all available sources of order, they asked the men, “in the name of the king and the governor to retreat because the night had fallen and God had given them the victory,” they would continue the next day (Archivo General de Indias, Pat. 90a, n.1, r.11, f. 184). Some did so, yet as “it would not be right to leave the enemies so close and go to sleep” (loc. cit.) most decided to continue the massacre, which went on until midnight when Pizarro fired a cannon “and then the horsemen retreated . . . thinking that the Indians were attacking the camp and the same did the footmen” (Mena 1937:87). Once order was reestablished, the panorama was Dantesque: “there remained . . . dead, . . . six or seven thousand Indians, and many others had their arms chopped and other wounds” (loc. cit.).

Unlike the portrayal in most scholarship, in Cajamarca there was nothing coldly ordered by the mastermind Pizarro, an embodiment of Western reason. As Feldman points out in his study of Northern Ireland, the idea of power as being contained in the center and flowing toward its peripheries, external to violent action, is a “myth of rationalization” (1991:3). Violent action is not simply instrumental, it has to be thought of as having a semantic and material autonomy. Power's effects, as in Cajamarca's outcome and aftermath, rest largely on local practices, on concrete material forces, and its legitimation is related not necessarily to arguments laid out from the center but to performance and contingency.

This has direct consequences. Seed argues that Xérez's account of Cajamarca celebrates the Western belief—culturally particular but assumed to be transparent—in the superiority of literate people. Atahualpa was punished for the arrogance that prevented him both from marveling at the form (an object containing speech) and from accepting its content (Christianity), thus justifying Pizarro's reaction. I want to interrogate the assumption of transparency. No doubt Xérez, like any European, would have been endlessly happy to see Atahualpa marvel at the book, “the sixteenth-century equivalent of green vibrating crystals carried by Martians as evidence of the obvious superiority of their culture” (Seed 1991:28). Yet, it must have been clear to a thoughtful 16^th century reader that it was impossible for Atahualpa to understand what a book was, much less to marvel once exposed to (alphabetic) writing; crystals vibrate on their own, books do not. Rather than frustrated cultural expectations universally taken to be transparent, Xérez's pretension of transparency was necessary to expurgate any question as to the requerimiento's performance, and was a result of the surging emotions that effaced the opacity of the moment.

Spanish colonialism was a complex mix of royal and private mechanisms, ideas, and components. There is a constant tension during the production of the colonial order in Peru between the conquerors' actions and the Crown's dispositions. As the Crown demonstrated in practice, it was ready to open tenacious legal proceedings against anyone whose actions were not pleasing and who had lost political backing at court. As a result, few governors could afford to be in office without someone writing a ‘true’ account of their task.¹⁹

That said, I do not mean to argue that the pretension of—and even the belief in—the universality and transparency of cultural particularities is not a powerful, effective, and even key tool of any colonial or neocolonial project. To the contrary, it is precisely in spaces of murkiness when acts are assumed to be transparent that strategies of dominance are empowered, both because it is difficult to recognize the slippage as such, and because assumptions and slippages are enacted and embodied by imperial subjects. I argue, then, that in Cajamarca's case the slippage was less rhetorical than bodily powerful. What was crucial were the heightened emotions that, for those in the front line, suspended murkiness. Actors, events, and narratives were achronic (Feldman 1991:13, after Lyotard 1973)—each constituted the other. That is why conquerors all agreed, whether they wrote in 1533 or 1571; it was not a generational difference (MacCormack 1989). And that is why many of those far from the action (Las Casas, Zárate) could not share in the agreement.²¹