The golden parting gifts from La Llorona— Based on real Aztec goldwork on display in the Baluarte. Ordinarily they would have been melted down by the Spaniards, but the galleon sank. An octopus fisherman found them in a wreck, and went to jail for not disclosing them.
TWO KINGS IN ZIÑOGAVA
Epigraph: “But what does the social order do…?”— Jan Potocki, The Manuscript Found in Saragosa, trans. Ian Maclean (New York: Penguin Classics, 1996 repr. of 1995 ed.; orig. French ms. ca. 1812), p. 517.
Common Spanish reference (ca. 1625) to an elegant, white-dressed black woman as a mosca en leche, a “fly in milk”— Herman L. Bennett, Africans in Colonial Mexico: Absolutism, Christianity, and Afro-Creole Consciousness, 1570–1640 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), p. 19.
A few details of religious coercion and sacramental fees are taken (perhaps not entirely accurately, since Veracruz is not in the valley of Mexico) from Charles Gibson, The Aztecs Under Spanish Rule: A History of the Indians of the Valley of Mexico 1519–1810 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1964). Some descriptions of masters’ and mistresses’ cruelty to slaves are derived from period woodcuts reproduced in Benjamin Nuñez, with the assistance of the African Bibliographic Center, Dictionary of Afro-Latin American Civilization (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980).
Description of the aventurine cask— From information in the Condesa de Galve, p. 143. Aventurine was a kind of glass containing scintillating particles.
Description and history of San Juan de Ulúa— After a visit there in 2011, and information from Teresa del Rosario Ceballos y Lizama, Una visita al pasado de San Juan de Ulúa [contains abbreviated English trans.] (Veracruz?: self-published? 2010). For the legends of Chucho el Roto and the Mulata de Córdoba, see p. 69. In English the island’s name is often spelled “Ulloa.”
“Mestiza, goddess of the orient…”— Frenk, p. 376 (5182, estrofa suelta, trans. by Teresa McFarland and WTV).
Franciscan desire to create a Kingdom of the Gospels in Mexico— Alicia Hernández Chávez, Mexico: A Brief History, trans. Andy Klatt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006; orig. Spanish-lang. ed. 2000), p. 38.
“Stretch out your arms, negrita…”— Invented by WTV.
Benito Juárez: “I know that the rich and the powerful…”— Smart, p. 355 (said in 1865).
The Blue Range in Moquí Province (believed in from end of seventeenth century until the nineteenth)— Luis Weckmann, of the Mexican Academy of History, The Medieval Heritage of Mexico, trans. Frances M. López-Morillas (New York: Fordham University Press, 1992), p. 39.
The Amazon of Ziñogava; characteristics of Amazons; claim of the Tarascans— Ibid., pp. 51, 49.
The skeleton hand— A not entirely uncommon Gothic element. For instance, I once read an English tale about a woman who was murdered by a rejected suitor on her wedding night. No one could prove anything against the man; the body had disappeared, and so had he. Her skeleton was found years later; her sister asked that the hand be cut off, in case it could bring about justice. One day the murderer came into the bar where it was displayed (yes, in a velvet-lined glass box, although in this version the velvet was black, not red, which I thought better for a Mexican setting), stared at it in horror, approached the glass box, touched it, and blood appeared on his fingers.
The crocodile “bullfights” of Dorantes de Carranza (ca. 1593)— Weckmann, p. 122.
“Much do I care for my María…”— Frenk, p. 121 (3636, “¡Ay! qué diantre de María,” trans. by WTV).
The head’s magic power— This may not touch your belief, but in 2011 I saw for myself how some pyramidal little tugboat could pull a long, many-smokestacked Rickmers freighter right past San Juan de Ulúa and out of Veracruz Harbor without seeming effort.
First arrival of Cortés at San Juan de Ulúa— Bernal Díaz, The Conquest of New Spain, p. 69. On the next page this conquistador describes the future site of Veracruz as “no level land, nothing but sand-dunes.”
Colors and significances of ancient Mexica directions— Zarur and Lovell, pp. 98–99.
“they are dead; they will not live…”— Isaiah 26:14.
Description of the Queen with “her eyes squinted shut like a corpse’s”— After an illustration in López, p. 153. “The closed eyes and the open mouth of this female figure indicate that she is dead.”
The two fountains of Huasteca and the magic mountain with the petrifying river— Weckmann, pp. 40, 39.
The shrub called hueloxóchitl—Lieut. R.W.H. Hardy, R.N., Travels in the Interior of Mexico, in 1825, 1826, 1827, and 1828 (London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1829), p. 533. I have Mexicanized the orthography of Hardy’s huelosóchil.
“engordar el cochino”— Christoph Rosenmüller, Patrons, Partisans and Palace Intrigues: The Court Society of Colonial Mexico, 1702–1710 (Calgary, Alberta: University of Calgary Press, 2008), p. 45. This may be an anachronism, since the phrase was current in 1710, but then again perhaps it was in use a half-century earlier; therefore, dear reader, please let me off the hook.
Punishment of concubinage— Weckmann, p. 455.
“Sad is my heart, negrita…”— Frenk et al, p. 5 (2773a, “El Siquisirí,” trans. by Teresa McFarland and WTV).
Former name for San Juan de Ulúa: Chalchiuhcuecan— Francisco López de Gómara, Cortés: The Life of the Conqueror by His Secretary, trans. and ed. Lesley Byrd Simpson from 1552 ed. (Berkeley: University of California, 1964), p. 54.
THE WHITE-ARMED LADY
Epigraph: “For the white-armed lady…”— Snorri Sturluson [attributed; but the true compiler’s identity is uncertain], The Poetic Edda, trans. Lee M. Hollander, 2nd. ed., rev. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1962; orig. texts 9th–14th cent.), p. 161 (stanza 7; slightly “retranslated” by WTV).
WHERE YOUR TREASURE IS
Kvitsøy is an island about twenty kilometers northwest of Stavanger.
“Better is the end of a thing than its beginning.”— Ecclesiastes 7:8.
“To what shall I compare the kingdom of God?…”— Luke 13:20–21.
The flower called guldå— Galeopsis speciosa Leppeblomstfam.
“I never knew you…”—Matthew 7:23
A valurt-flower — Symphytum officinale Rubladfam.
Rogaland is the district containing Stavanger.
“Do not lay up for yourselves treasures…”— Matthew 6:19, 21.
“Somehow Astrid helped her make up the money — in secret of course.”— The following verse might apply to Astrid’s pre- and postmortem doings: “But when you give alms, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your alms may be in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.”— Matthew 6:3–4.
Bishop Eriksøn— Jørgen Eriksøn, the Bishop of Stavanger in 1571–1604, proved that the Lutherans were as firm against witchcraft as the Catholics. In 1584 Stavanger was the proud originator of the witchcraft law whose provisions eventually put to death about three hundred people in Norway, and we can give the Bishop some of the credit. The victims got hanged, burned or decapitated. In a portrait, the Bishop’s immense red moustache bends down over his mouth like the eaves of an old turf house, and his dark little eyes are sad and watchful in his pink moon-face.