Retablo of Ponce de León

By Enrique Sánchez Goyanes

San Juan de Puerto Rico, fall of 1520. Juan Ponce de León, conquistador and first governor of the island, plans his second voyage to Florida, discovered and named by him seven years previously. Officially, his aim is to found the first city in this territory, of which the Spanish Crown has appointed him as its Adelantado, with powers that would make him in the first European to politically govern at his destination. But, secretly, at the same time, he is also planning to reach the Fountain of Eternal Youth, taking advantage of the information that he has accumulated after his conversations with several native caciques on his travels through the Caribbean archipelago. However, the objective that he decides upon when reaching it, and the motives that drive him, would surprise anyone.
Ponce intuitively knows that this could be his last voyage. And among the other consequential decisions, he puts his personal papers in order, with which he would be able to rebuild the altarpiece of his life, the last panel of which would be precisely that voyage he is about to undertake. As he does so, his life appears before him, at its most significant moments, but also interwoven with the history of Spain (and that of the Americas), captured during a transcendental period and including some of the most intimate and unknown moments. All of this is a result of having been close to the main characters, starting with the Monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabel, from when he escorted them as a very young pageboy when they exchanged their marriage vows in secret whilst persecuted within Castile, something they never forgot and endeavoured to grant him a very special treatment, particularly during the most difficult personal and political times of his life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Enrique Sánchez Goyanes
• Release date: Mar 6, 2013

Enrique Sánchez Goyanes

Enrique Sánchez Goyanes obtuvo el Doctorado en Derecho en la Universidad Autónoma de Madrid y amplió su formación con varios años de estudios en Historia, Literatura, Ciencias Sociales y Arte en centros superiores de Cambridge, París y Florencia. En 1979 publicó su “Constitución Española comentada”, obra divulgativa sobre los derechos fundamentales de los ciudadanos que se convertiría en la más reeditada en la materia, y la primera de casi 60 libros en los que ha sido autor o coautor, en diversos sectores del Derecho Público esencialmente. Ha impartido docencia en distintas Universidades españolas y americanas durante más de veinte años, habiendo favorecido que se implantaran en centros iberoamericanos enseñanzas sobre técnicas jurídicas para el desarrollo sostenible, en el marco de programas formativos por él diseñados. En paralelo a sus actividades, ha recibido reconocimientos diversos, en las Américas (Méjico, Brasil, Argentina, República Dominicana...) y en España, de los que destaca el español Premio Nacional Fernando Albi por su aportación al estudio de la Administración española. Desde hace varias décadas, ejerce como abogado y como consultor jurídico, dentro y fuera de España, habiendo aparecido votado por sus colegas en publicaciones jurídicas como uno de los “Best Lawyers” españoles en su especialidad. Su profesión le ha franqueado el acceso a todo tipo de antiguos manuscritos olvidados en archivos de ayuntamientos, conventos, iglesias y diversas otras entidades públicas y privadas, desde Medina Sidonia a las dependencias secretas de la catedral de Santo Domingo, con todo lo cual ha sido capaz de recrear fielmente, en el Retablo de Ponce de León, al hombre y su tiempo, dentro de los distintos marcos que conformaron la personalidad del descubridor, desde la tempestuosa Castilla hasta la hermosa Florida, en una obra donde el ensayo y la novela histórica se funden, sin dejar espacio a escenas imaginarias ni errores históricos. Apasionado de la Historia y del Arte, amante y viajero infatigable por el Nuevo Mundo, patrocinador de artistas y exposiciones tanto en España como en América, Sánchez Goyanes rinde homenaje a quien en su día imaginó, y luchó por conseguir, de forma pacífica, una auténtica alianza de culturas y religiones, y aún hoy es honrado tanto por su visión como por la protección que siempre brindó a los primeros pobladores de América, contraria, en ocasiones, a las órdenes recibidas.

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RETABLO OF

PONCE DE LEÓN

By

Enrique Sánchez Goyanes

Smashwords Edition

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Retablo of Ponce de León

Copyright © 2013 Enrique Sánchez Goyanes

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the author.

English Translation: Simon Davies.

Cover: The Cave of the Holy Fountain, Oil on canvas, Vasyl Tretyakov (2010). Forms part of the Cuna de las Américas exhibition, held in Santo Domingo, in commemoration of the American Capital of Culture 2010.

To Ángeles Goyanes, in recognition of her exemplary nature, not only as an editor, but for her good fortune, first and foremost as a talented writer already appreciated in her own right from Atlanta to Manila, and in testimony of the immense gratitude for her decisive assistance in the editing of this work.

CONTENTS

Presentation of the editor

Prologue of the restorer

The Retablo:

Panel I Remembering is reliving (San Juan de Puerto Rico, Summer of 1520).

Panel II A Pageboy: A Conspiracy in the Background (Santervás, Valladolid, 1460 – Segovia, 1474).

Panel III A Soldier and Two Wars (Segovia, 1475 – Granada, 1492).

Panel IV A Secret Mission: under the Orders of Columbus (sailing between Guadalupe and Cuba, 1493 – 1495).

Panel V The Court of Prince John (Almazán, 1496 – Salamanca 1499).

Panel VI Lieutenant Governor in La Española (La Española, 1499 – 1508).

Panel VII Governor of San Juan (island of San Juan, 1508 – 1511).

Panel VIII Discoverer (San Juan, 1511 – La Florida 1513).

Panel IX The Last Meeting with the King (Valladolid, 1514).

Panel X The Great Armada against the Cannibals (sailing the Caribbean, 1515 – 1516).

Panel XI Face to Face: Before the Iron Cardinal (Madrid, 1517 – Valladolid, 1518).

Panel XII Let this land be for those that live for it (San Juan, 1518 – 1520).

Panel XIII Pluto rides through Castile (1520, at the end of autumn).

Panel XIV Last Logbook (San Juan – La Florida, spring of 1521).

Epitaph in the Cathedral of San Juan de Puerto Rico

Epilogue of the restorer

Materials used in the restoration of the Retablo

About the author

Presentation of the editor

Around about twenty five years ago, I took charge of the originals of the texts that today see the light of day, with the mandate of publishing them just a quarter of a century afterwards. Was it pursued that the end of this period would coincide with the 500th anniversary of the most significant milestone of those involving Juan Ponce de León on April 2, 1513: namely his discovery of terra firma to the north of the Caribbean archipelagos, and the decision to baptize it with the name Florida, preserved up to today? A question the reader will no doubt ask and one I sincerely cannot answer. By the way, just as it was with Columbus, it too was an accidental discovery. He was actually searching for the legendary island of Bimini, where the Fountain of Eternal Youth was supposedly to be found, and it is this mythical search of his that is, paradoxically, the most universally known part of his life.

This editor, in execution of that mandate (in the performance of his profession as a lawyer) has no other responsibilities in bringing this work to life, whose essential authorship is of the person who wishes to appear as the restorer of this retablo detailing the main chapters of the life of such a unique person.

Yet, in his role as agent, there are two additional responsibilities for complying with the same mandate, which are almost incompatible. The first is to ensure that the cost of the work is as economic as possible to aid its publication, as the restorer considered that the accomplishments of Ponce are worth publishing for the example that it may give to future generations; and, secondly, to donate any profits made through the usufruct of the rights deriving from the work to the creation of a social and employment reinsertion organization for young people, which must favor the coexistence between the different races and religions, given that creating such a place in the first city that he was going to found was one of the aims of Ponce -and one shared by the restorer- on the voyage that returned him to Florida in 1521, where he passed away.

E. S. G.

Prologue of the restorer

For centuries, the name and figure of Juan Ponce de León have remained buried beneath the sands of time. Some groups from inside Spain, and others from outside, were interested in making sure that this happened.

For the first group, Ponce was a heterodox, a discoverer that had gone against other discoverers, especially against the methods of Discovery and the subsequent colonization process, the first three decades of which he had experienced in the Americas. In particular, for a certain official histiography, Ponce de León was also a dangerous witness who had known all the secrets of the reign of Isabella and Ferdinand as a result of escorting them as a pageboy during the days when they were both persecuted in Castile.

In the case of the second group, Ponce was a discoverer that did not fit in with the Black Legend that had been so carefully concocted against Spain, precisely for being a heterodox, but most of all, for having been a man that had never given in to the thirst for gold, for having been a colonist and not a conqueror, for having defended the South American Indians, like so few others, for having treated them with loyalty to the Gospel that Castile had brought to the Indies.

Between the coinciding will of these and those like them, the figure of Ponce was buried, hidden among the dazzling feats of Columbus, Cortés, Balboa and Pizarro.

Gradually, his exploits were forgotten. Or, worse still, they were reduced to his obsessive expeditions in search of the Holy Fountain. His historical image was therefore deliberately distorted, transformed into that of an everlasting dreamer, the posthumous son of the Middle Ages.

For centuries, the truth about Juan Ponce de León, the truth and the truths, remained forgotten. His private papers, with which he would have wanted to rebuild his life, were wandering around lost.

These papers, with their vague figures, hazy landscapes and evanescent scenes, resembled a retablo that had been damaged over time, an altarpiece in which the discoverer played the leading role with Spain in the background, captured at a transcendental moment in history.

I have patiently restored this altarpiece using the methods described at the end of this book. I have tried to rescue a voice whose last eco was heard almost fifty decades ago from merciless oblivion. I have dreamed of reconstructing the vision of Discovery that a discoverer had.

In doing so, I have tried to pay a triple homage: To Castile, to the Spanish language and the Castilians.

To Castile, because it generously sacrificed so much of itself, the best that it had for the great enterprise, during a time that its cities were becoming deserted, its industries were failing and its roads were seeing how the gold and silver from the Indies hastily made its way north, without touching the ground.

To the Spanish language, because it is the supreme symbol of the legacy of Castile in the three Americas, and which is today in urgent need of being defended against multiple aggressions.

And to the Castilians, because it was their ancestors that from 1492 onwards undertook the most formidable, collective task that Humanity had witnessed until then: colonize the New World. Some of them made mistakes, certainly. But there were others, such as Juan Ponce de León, who the Puerto Ricans consider their First National Hero, that we can feel proud of today, five centuries later.

Paris, spring 1987

Men given to wisdom would have known to make books that would not die with them, and in this manner, the men of that time were akin to those that would come after them.

Alfonso X The Wise

(Quote underlined in the private papers of Juan Ponce de León)

PANEL I

Remembering is reliving

(San Juan de Puerto Rico, summer of 1520)

When I lost Leonor, I stopped being who I was. I only needed her, yet, for me, the whole world had become empty. Her absence hung over me everywhere I went. In the bedroom, the dining room, (in front of the jasmine trees that she had once watered), at the pond, where her face had been reflected next to mine on so many occasions in the crystal surface.

How wise that old Persian proverb seemed "for a person to be justly appreciated, they must leave... or die!"

Everything that I had done for her suddenly seemed so very little. I had always been faithful to my wife, I had always loved her with passion and she had known. More so, in the last seven years of her life, from when I left to explore the unknown regions of the north, kept away by my desire to travel, my obligations as Governor and later as the military leader in San Juan, and my two very long visits to the court, I had been at her side for only half of this time. When I thought back on those painful times, full of sorrow, of when she needed me, my conscience tormented me and I could find no comfort.

I found myself remembering the long ago laments of the troubadours. When I was young, in Castile, I thought that those soft litanies, which always seemed to rebuke a merciless love, had no other purpose than to join the melancholy melody of the harp or the vihuela. I saw the troubadours sing or recite with the same talent that later prepared them for participating in other court games. Often they would repeat verses by other pens, on occasion they would improvise their poems using only a few words that they had been given, with various competing in a contest that measured dexterity, ingenuity and subtlety in a pure game. They were hardly ever sincere. The majority spoke of feelings that they had never experienced, except in the case of good Garci Sánchez from Extremadura.

And so it was that many of the words that I had heard used back then, came flooding back to me when I had thought them totally forgotten, and I made them mine. After so much time, I understood the desperate complaint against a cruel Love that steals the object of our veneration when we most need it, of a feeling that torments us when remembering it when alone, before an elusive deity that enjoys punishing those that have been faithful, converting our paradise into a prison. And moreover, I finally came to see death as a hope of last resort; to yearn for it as a door to the eternal life, where it would be possible to be reunited with those we have lost on earth; the feeling that we relive when we feel it ever closer, calling us to its funeral dance.

There are people in our lives who give us the measure of our own happiness. They can share it with us to a higher or lesser degree, in the same size and duration of feeling that we enjoy. In some manner, we are happy because of the way we can make those people happy; we search for happiness not so much as to enjoy it selfishly but to share it with them.

Depending on the circumstances, for some, these people are their children, for others, their parents, for others, a woman or a man. For me, it was Leonor. My desires were her desires. I desired to satisfy her, fill her with joy. I fed ambitions to be able to present my accomplishments at her feet. I wanted to be rich, famous, respected by everyone, so that she would be. And finally, when I had discovered a true paradise, and the king had granted me the maximum privileges as his Governor in Florida, I suddenly realized that fortune had smiled on me too late.

When these people disappear, the first feeling that afflicts us is desperation. The world has lost its sense, justification and meaning. For a while, which could be days, weeks or months, the horizon is cloudy, it disappears, it fades. It ceases to worry us. We lose all hope, all desire of moving forward, all ambition.

Happiness, the hope of preserving it or reaching it leaves us forever, because the person with whom we could measure or feel it has gone.

I began to frequent the solitary spots of Baramaya, where the silence was only sweetly broken by the chirping of the birds that nested there, warblers, kingbirds, nightingales and red tailed hawks. I needed that almost absolute loneliness to find myself. I felt like a glass figure cracked by some violent commotion which could fall to the floor at any moment and shatter into a thousand tiny pieces. Each one of its cracks required patient labor to restore its conscience. I needed a remedy that would soothe me, and in part, I had part of its components close to Baramaya: silence, solitude, and time. Time, the essential balsam to alleviate the pains of the human spirit.

There, next to the clean current, completely surrounded by aloes, corosos, sour sops, fig and maga trees, with their ostentatious flowers open towards me (the flowers that I latter cut to leave on her tomb), I began to find myself, slowly recovering, faster than I had ever believed possible, the lost or hibernating abilities to articulate words, the awareness to select answers, to react to what was before me. But most importantly, I managed to explain to myself the need to continue onwards, to follow the path drawn since the day that we decided, together, to settle on this side of the ocean.

The spots in Baramaya, where I recovered my will and my faith, continue to fill me with a sensation of respect, especially at dusk. I often associated this sensation to the closeness of the ruins of the city where the primitive inhabitants of this island once lived. The strict orders for no-one to touch a single one of those stones, and severe punishments for those that violated them, were surely dictated under the influence of those feelings.

Whether it was for the deep depression that had swallowed me by the disappearance of my wife, or for the proximity of the abandoned necropolis, for months I lived obsessed with the presence of death, feeling it in all parts, feeling –or believing that I could perceive them– funereal omens, at all hours and in all places, casting their shadows over me.

I had seen companions die at my side on the battlefield, at such a cruel speed that it was impossible to count the casualties. I had seen broken bodies that no-one could recognize almost buried in the mud under the rains that followed the formidable combat that unfolded near Toro, in the early hours of the civil war that was beginning to be won by those loyal to Queen Isabella. I had seen the son of the maestre of Santiago, Manrique, the sublime poet, die at the peak of his life in an unnecessary operation, which should never have happened, just as Peace was to be signed with Portugal. I also later saw veterans and youngsters torn apart by the bloody fury of the Moors in the prisons where they were held captive. Yet, for reasons that escape me, when faced with this permanent and triumphant dance of death, I had never felt as deeply affected as when it struck so close to me.

I also realized that I had crossed a dangerous frontier, that I had now lived more years than what many men lived, that I was still here, as if I had been granted a special permit. But for what purpose, I asked myself.

For the first time in my life, I began to seriously meditate on questions such as those that Man has philosophized on since the first cultures.

Walking among the ruins of the public squares, where centuries ago the Tainos communicated with their gods in ceremonies which today would appear to be diabolic, I understood just how much Man does not change, even though civilizations rise and fall, even though he sits at the farthest reaches of the Earth and stays apart from his kind, with an ocean as a frontier.

Seeing these dark stone tombstones, clumsily carved centuries ago by the ancestors of these Indians that have told me about the legends of their race, seeing the figures drawn by a mysterious chisel, with large disproportionate faces, of human and divine beings, in postures of reverence or piety, allegories of a religion that was no longer accessible to us, I remembered the tales of the Greeks. The descriptions of the funeral rites of those peoples from the East came back to me, –the kings of which the Bible sometimes speaks–, with the same chiseled tombstones, with the same funerary trappings hidden in the sepulchers. In the cemetery of this city, which they say was washed away by a deluge of rain, almost every sepulcher had some form of statue in the shape of an animal, or a ceramic urn painted white over red, or some small green stones. The men of those Empires that created writing and encouraged the arts and sciences, today buried below the dessert, and those humble potters of this nameless city that lived on lizards, snails and crabs, showed the same reverence in the face of death.

In the face of the certainty of death, I turned my eyes once more to the path that I had left behind, towards the retablo of my life.

Sometimes I sought comfort. I had given every fiber of my being to my family, served my country and my king, contributed to winning over the Indians that populate this hidden hemisphere to our holy Catholic faith. These were satisfactions that helped decrease my anxieties to some degree.

I have lived and sowed. There are seeds that only the generations that have still not come will be able to enjoy, nor will they have arrived when mine has left, but thinking of the far off, but certain harvest, gives me comfort.

Death does not worry me. Everything will die, everything dies: men, peoples, civilizations. Everything we see is transitory. Only when we cannot see, when we close our eyes and manage to elude the planet of the mortals, can we discern the vague form of immortality. I wanted to survive in this other world that lay in the depths of the human conscience and that fed upon, amongst other things, memories and evocation. I wanted to be remembered. I humbly wished to be worthy so that one summer night, when the heavens are clear and all the stars are shining brightly, that someone, who has yet to be born, after having contemplated them, would try to imagine my face or silently form my name on their lips within this world of interior visions. That is my secret ambition. So big, yet so small!

On other occasions, I tried to recreate my past moments of happiness, to be able to enjoy them in a different manner (knowing that even in their genuine manifestation, I would never capture the happiness already on the Earth), all the while saying to myself, remembering is reliving. In those trances I felt as if I were an art collector who copied famous works to be able to enjoy them in solitude. He can never feel the same pleasure as with the authentic, original creation, and he always knows this, but when the copy is finished and standing before him, he experiences a momentary delight that he is unable to deny.

Returning to my past brought with it a new concern, to try and rebuild it entirely, in such a manner that I could survive, after my loss. I was not moved by vanity. My lack of it, to the contrary, stopped me from doing so. Under this heavenly canopy, on the ever pure nights of the island, lost in the forests near Baramaya, I would contemplate the infinite flickering lights that looked down upon me and I saw myself so miserable as the last of the ants parading beneath my feet and I laughed bitterly at myself.

However, the presumption that they could find some useful considerations about life, men, and peoples, in this tragic tale of adventure and misadventure, of which I was the protagonist, made my hesitancy increasingly greater. Perhaps, through the panels of my altarpiece, my children and grandchildren, their children and grandchildren, would learn to distinguish the essential from the accidental, and they could mark their lives with a different rhythm.

Returning back to my life, I contemplate it as someone would contemplate a great altarpiece on the high altar of one of our cathedrals. Such a comparison is not a reflection of poetic dexterity, for I possess none. I heard it, a quarter of a century ago, from a great painter of altarpieces, Master Berruguete in Ávila. He was, at that time, finishing his magnificent creation for the monastery of Saint Thomas.

We had spoken about almost everything, of our Tierra de Campos, extending between my Valladolid and his Palencia, of the suffocating heat that we suffered that summer, of the already gathered harvest, but most of all, art, the Italian art that continued to be in fashion because of the campaigns that we fought there against France.

Italy and art were for him, in my opinion, like the two sides of the same coin, and very hard to separate. He had spent his youth in Florence, close to the famous painters, working in the studio of Melozzo, studying the work of his precursors, of Giotto, Uccello, Fra Angelico. He said that what he knew of art he owed to those men. He loved Italy so much that he planned to send his son Alonso, still a boy, to train there. (And so the lad would surrender himself to both sculpture as well as painting itself, which had surrounded him since the cradle. And he would meet the most famous. Even Michelangelo himself, of whom everyone spoke of so much, it would encourage him to study the techniques of the ancients, from whom he himself had learned).

Don Pedro already felt old, tired, and afraid of taking on a project such as the one that the bishop