The Golden War of Antonio de Paredes

The first thing I remember is the rain. It was a cold, hard rain that always seemed to be falling. It came down in sheets and it drenched everything in sight. It made the ground muddy and even the most worn roads slick. It was like water torture for everyone except the birds. They loved that rain. Not only did it fill every pond and lake across New Spain, but it also made their nests safe from predators.

I knew all of this because I grew up by the great lake, on a small farm in the middle of nowhere. My mother told me how her father would tell stories of people who drowned in the mud while trying to cross some river or other. He’d say it was God’s way of telling them they were sinners and needed to repent, but my mother always thought it was just because the rain made everything so slippery that you couldn’t get a good grip on anything when you tried to run across a field.

That wasn’t our biggest problem though. Our biggest problem was that we never had enough money to do anything with ourselves. We barely had enough to feed ourselves, let alone pay taxes or make any improvements to our land. We were stuck working in the fields every day until we died, and there wasn’t anything anybody could do about it because we were just serfs. When my father died several years ago, my mother told me things would be different for us now that I was old enough to work the fields instead of going to school like I used to. But no matter how hard I worked, those fields still produced less than they used to and even less than they should have been able to produce if they were treated right.

Which meant that we were always poor, which meant we couldn’t afford books or pens or paper, which meant that I didn’t know how to read or write as well as I wanted to be able to do. As I got older and stronger, I learned how to fight better too, but not well enough for my mother’s liking because she worried about what might happen if I ever got into a brawl with someone bigger and better armed than me. She told me one time that she wished she could send me off somewhere else so that maybe I could find myself a decent wife or keep myself fed or both at once someday. The only place she said she knew where men went off looking for work was Seville, but she didn’t know how much money it would cost her if she sent me there, so maybe she should just forget about it and hope things got better soon instead of worse like they were now.

But finally one day when I was seventeen years old, Mother decided that things had gone on long enough and she packed us up in our two best goatskins and told us we were going away for a bit while she took care of some business nearby with some of her friends who owed her favors from other times when we needed help paying taxes or buying food before winter came around again. She left directions for me where she expected me to find work somewhere in town as soon as possible after we arrived there later that afternoon because we didn’t have any money left anymore at home except for what was left inside those goatskins anyway, so why not take my chances at finding work wherever we ended up staying?

As it turned out there was work for me in Seville alright, but not exactly the type of work Mother had hoped I might find there when she planned this trip for us all those weeks ago back in our little village near Lake Texcoco out east where we lived all our lives before this trip began this morning. It was raining outside my bedroom window back home as usual, and today was supposed to be a day-off according to Father Garcia who works across the street from us and likes telling people about the weather whenever he can. Oddly, it shouldn't have been raining at all today according to his predictions.

My new neighbor Mrs. Marin, who would often spend her days sitting out on her porch, seemed to have taken an interest in me since my arrival to Seville. Despite my mother's absence as she took care of her business with her friends nearby, Mrs. Marin kept watching me from her porch across the street. She started yelling towards me, "Go ask someone else, Antonio! You'll never understand what's written inside those letters you're holding! Maybe somebody else knows more than I'm ever going to learn about them!"

These mysterious letters she spoke about were tucked away in our goatskins, addressed to a man named Antonio, mentioning how he had never met Maria, Amaia's daughter, and that Amaia had now arranged for Maria to be married to Jesus Jose Manuel, the son of a neighboring farmer. It was news that traveled quickly through Seville, with many people talking about the upcoming union, yet its significance remained lost on me.

And so, as Mrs. Marin continued urging me to seek answers elsewhere, I kept pondering about the contents