Nine bronze sculptures stare at everyone who walks around the Basilica of Nuestra Señora de la Candelaria, in Tenerife. They do not go unnoticed, their large dimensions do not allow it, but most tourists, including peninsulars, are unaware that they are the Menceyes or kings who ruled the island before the Castilians arrived. Santiago Díaz (Madrid, 1971) knows them well. They have been accompanying him in his writing for years and now they have become the protagonists of his new novel, The Nine Kingdoms (Alfaguara), the first historical novel that he has published, and which narrates “the great forgotten chapter of Spain”: the conquest of the Canary Islands and the massacre of the Guanches, the aborigines who lived there.
Every time Father José Ramón sees the writer enter the temple, he smiles at him. Not only because he declares himself an “absolute fan” of María Oruña, an author whom he knows Díaz knows well, but because “it’s funny that a man from Madrid has come to tell this story,” he tells her. Although he is not an islander either, since he was born in Pontevedra, he knows the history well and assures that some of the theories he develops, always from the field of fiction, “are perfectly plausible.” One of them is the arrival of the Guanches to the islands. “I propose that they arrived in Tenerife after a mutiny aboard a Roman ship, although the most widespread explanation is that they were slaves who were taken there to make natural dye and that, at some point, they were abandoned, probably due to conflicts between their masters and the Romans”, points out the author of The Good Father.
The Guanches lived for fifteen centuries isolated from the world, which allowed them to develop their own religion and customs, which included the veneration of Achamán, creator of heaven and earth; of the goddess Chaxiraxi, considered the mother of the sun; “And they also developed an extreme fear of the Devil, whom they called Guayota, who they believed lived inside Mount Teide and expelled blood (lava) when he got angry. To keep him calm, they offered him animal and human sacrifices.”
Despite not knowing how to read or write, the Canarian aborigines “left evidence of their development as a civilization, with advanced mummification techniques, many times superior to that of the Egyptians.” Thanks to this, there are many Guanche mummies that are in perfect condition and that can be visited in the main museums in the world, such as the Museum of Nature and Archeology of Tenerife, which Díaz has toured once again these days. “The germ of this novel was born in 2018, when I read a news story that said that this museum asked the National Archaeological Museum to return the Guanche mummy that is exhibited there, the most complete found to date. All this caught my attention. What was a Guanche mummy doing in the capital?”
The article led the author to search for information “and I was so captivated by this primitive culture that that summer I came on vacation to Tenerife and realized that here was a novel, with many ingredients of adventure, love and also with the opportunity to talk about a “a very different perspective from what has been told until now about the Catholic Monarchs.” That also led him to meet Beatriz De Bobadilla, a woman, famous at court for her orgies, who managed to captivate King Ferdinand II of Aragon himself and Christopher Columbus. So much so that, on her way to America, he made an “unnecessary” stop on her three caravels in her La Gomera in order to see her.
“When she turned sixteen, she was put to serve in the Royal Palace, since her aunt was Queen Elizabeth’s trusted lady-in-waiting. She was a very beautiful woman who quickly caught the attention of King Ferdinand and they became her lovers, although she had others. Isabel saw great danger in her and forced her to marry the governor of La Gomera, which at that time was the furthest place from the court that they could send you. There, Beatriz continued to give free rein to her sexual desires and also to her cruelty and possible psychopathy, since she felt like the master and mistress of those lands with so many slaves. It is estimated that she ordered the killing of more than 500 Gomeros. She also told her husband when she found out that he was unfaithful to her, even though she was also unfaithful. She then became the governor of La Gomera and El Hierro, but she always yearned for more. Her abuse led her to have to answer to Queen Isabel, who sent the Inquisition to her.”
Bobadilla’s greatest desire was “to be queen, like Isabel, to take revenge for having banished her. Alonso Fernández de Lugo, who enlisted her to conquer the Canary Islands and also her, since he was always madly in love with her, promises to become Queen of the islands and she agrees to marry. There are traces of both of them from her time on the island. In San Cristóbal de La Laguna, for example, there is the Plaza del Adelantado, since that is the title that the Kings granted to Fernández de Lugo for being a key piece in the conquest.
That much of this history is so little known is something that surprises Díaz. “This epic has been told very few times at the level of fiction. Some islanders, and I’m not saying outsiders, don’t know who Bencomo was, the mencey of Taoro, a Braveheart from Tenerife called to lead the Guanche troops against the conquistadors. After three battles, the Castilians massacred the aborigines and many of the survivors were enslaved. “They had light skin and eyes, so they were more valued, since it was a rarity.” Some, like Bentor, son of Bencomo, preferred to jump into the void rather than fall into enemy clutches. An event illustrated with a statue at the El Lance viewpoint.
Furthermore, I was very interested in the historical context in which all this happened, between 1490 and 1500, when a period took place that, for me, is one of the most important of humanity, since there was not only the conquest of the Canary Islands and Granada, but also America is discovered and it is the beginning of the Modern Age.”
