‘Gentiles en la fe y en la belleza’ (VIII. 33): The Civil and Social Innocence of the Araucanian Nobility
The Araucanian community of Arauco domado is not, it must be said, wholly devoid of the military valour and patriotic zeal of La Araucana. Orompello’s chivalric attempt to spare the life of a valiant adversary (X. 53–78), and the oratorical pyrotechnics of the mutilated Galbarino (XII. 11–44, XVII. 24–51) with his strident critique of Spanish greed and hypocrisy, are given structural significance in the narrative. As in La Araucana, the punishment and freeing of the latter turns aside the senate’s inclination towards peace and therefore prolongs the conflict to the cost of both sides, while at this point the Araucanian assembly itself takes on a decidedly more political character than that discussed in the previous section.
The structure of Oña’s epic, like Ercilla’s and like much heroic poetry of the Renaissance, is open. As a result, not every contradiction within the poem’s fabric requires (or is capable of sustaining) a complete resolution. It retains, in Quint’s terms, the ‘epic curse’ with its capacity to trouble the calm current of teleology which carries forward the bulk of the narration, which often distorts or displaces latent anxieties, and with which the speech of Galbarino might be compared, though it is not a curse as such.
1 Quint, Epic and Empire, pp. 99–130. Cf. also Paul Firbas, ‘Galvarino y Felipe castigados: Cuerpos indígenas y género épico en Pedro de Oña y Juan de Miramontes Zuázola’, in William Mejías López, ed., Morada de la palabra: Homenaje a Luce y Mercedes López (Puerto Rico, 2002), pp. 655–66. Nor is the inclusion of particular episodes exclusively ideologically motivated: the fiery eloquence of the mutilated cacique is one of the most memorable episodes of
La Araucana, and, like other contemporaries who embarked on the exacting adventure of composing an epic poem, Oña is not one to overlook a potentially iconic scene, especially one which offered such potential for outdoing his predecessor’s rhetorical prowess.
This said, the potentially troubling power of Galbarino’s speech is nevertheless mitigated in a number of ways. Firstly, the character’s authority is already undermined prior to his celebrated oration. Now a commoner rather than a noble, his description leaves little room for ambiguity:
Era este Galbarín de mal respeto,
de mala inclinación, enorme y crudo,
assí para lo bueno torpe y crudo,
como en lo malo plático y discreto;
de quien jamás se tuvo buen conceto,
doblado, contumaz y cabeçudo,
sobervio en condición, humilde en casta,
y a todo bien ingrato, que esto basta. (X. 70)
[This Galbarino was disreputable, ill-natured, huge and cruel, clumsy and inept for doing good, skilled and clever at doing ill, of whom one could always assume the worst, two-faced, stubborn and big-headed, proud of nature, humble of birth, and always ungrateful, which is enough.]
When he treacherously clubs down Hernán Guillén, the soldier spared by Orompello, the latter utters a prophetic curse which makes his compatriot’s later mutilation an act of divine vengeance – another instance of the sustained attempt to distance acts of violence against the Amerindians from their immediate cause. Secondly, the killing of Guillén is accounted for in the perpetrator’s own terms in the language of Machiavellian
necessità otherwise marginalised in Oña’s reading of Ercilla: ‘¿No miras, Orompello mal mirado, | que de los enemigos mientras menos, | y si en esto a mí no soy honroso, | a todos havré sido provechoso?’ [Cannot you see, disapproving Orompello, that the fewer enemies the better, and if in this I do myself a dishonour, I will have done everyone else a service?] (X. 74). Galbarino’s subsequent interventions in the loyalties of the Spanish auxiliaries and the deliberations of the Araucanian council are then, quite literally, a mutilated remnant of the much more extensive dramatisation of Machiavellian virtues in
La Araucana, during a period which saw a decided hardening of attitudes towards the
políticos. Finally, in common with many of the poem’s projections beyond its stated historical scope, Galbarino’s discourse acts to some extent as an explanation and a chastisement of the direction taken in the Chilean campaign after the departure of Hurtado. While, on the whole, the latter’s forces are free of the vices attributed to them in the speech, Oña’s patron was quick to criticise the self-interested and undisciplined ethos he believed to have taken over by the time of his return to Peru and which in his view was directly responsible for the unreasonable prolongation of the pacification of ‘unos pobres indios desnudos’ [a few poor naked Indians].
2 Roberto Levillier, ed., Gobernantes del Perú, cartas y papeles, siglo XVI: Documentos del Archivo de Indias (Madrid, 1921–26), XII, 151. Again, then, we see a characterisation of the Amerindian with an eye to the present state of the viceroyalty as well as the past.
When not possessed by the infernal furies of war or engaged in
borracheras and religious rituals – in other words, when in a private rather than a public capacity – the Araucanian warriors and their beloveds are represented with more unmistakably positive traits. They are, admittedly, always unproductively
ociosos, but such
ocio can on occasion take on the appearance of an enviable and cultivated leisure. The most sustained character development involves the couples of Tucapel and Gualeva, and Talguén and Quidora, whose separate forays into the forest after the battle of Penco and eventual gathering in a shepherd’s hut occupies much of the second half of the poem (VII–VIII, XII–XVIII), interspersed with the ongoing Spanish advance and later the prophetic visions of Quito and the pursuit of Hawkins. The shared, rustic dinner of warriors and shepherds (XIII. 101–03, XIV. 41–42), domestic, mostly vegetarian, replete with local foodstuffs and sampled with moderation and order, is an eloquent counterpoint to the opening, idolatrous feast.
3 On the significance of shared meals in colonial epic, see Paul Firbas, ‘El banquete americano: Comida y comunidad en la épica colonial’, in Firbas, ed., Épica y colonia, pp. 61–82. Like his predecessor, Oña deploys this instrument of surprise and apparent paradox for deliberate effect, setting up and then deflating his readers’ expectations. In this case, however, the target of this surprise is likely to be a local reader, resident in the Viceroyalty and familiar with the direction of contemporary discourse in the region, and the political ideas tested out through the excursus are primarily relevant to the problems of colonial governance on the ground, rather than the imperial ideology with which they intersect.
The ‘fábulas de amor’ [love stories] (XVII. 2) of these Araucanian couples are, of course, ways of introducing entertainment, variety (XVII. 1–6) and novelty to Oña’s ‘primera labor’. As a mechanism for recounting the Quito revolt, they add an element of narrative distance from the controversial narration of the event. The increased attention paid to the love lives of the Araucanians in
Arauco domado is reminiscent of the lyrical transformations Ercilla’s poem undergoes in its adaptation to the ballad form, the
romancero nuevo,
from the late 1580s. In these
romances, the tragic union of Guacolda and Lautaro is repeatedly glossed and expanded and, as Patricio Lerzundi observes, ‘we find ourselves faced with a group of ballads which, using historical characters, takes them out of their real world and transports them to an ideal world. They sing not of history, but of love and death.’
4 Patricio Lerzundi, Romances basados en La Araucana (Madrid, 1978), p. 42. The extant romances were printed between 1589 and 1594 in various cancioneros. The bucolic framing of many of these scenes is also a form of ‘wishful thinking’, reminding us of their provenance in the modern, urban environment of Lima as outlined in Chapter 1.
5 Renato Poggioli, The Oaten Flute, ed. by A. Bartlett Giamatti (Cambridge, MA, 1975), p. 2; cf. p. 3, ‘the birth of the pastoral coincided with the decline of the ancient polis or city-state and with the appearance of a quasi-modern metropolis […] more of an orbis than an urbs.’ It draws inspiration from many such
intermezzi in the epic tradition, perhaps most prominently here the sojourn of Erminia with the shepherds in Tasso’s
Gerusalemme, as well as Ercilla’s own Garcilasian depictions of the Araucanian landscape. As Blanco points out, these pauses in the action often depict ‘the rustic hospitality conceded to a guest of lordly status’, with the moral (and aesthetic) intent of exemplifying ‘the happiness which is achieved (or not) in a laborious, modest and obscure form of life.
6 Blanco, Góngora heroico, pp. 193, 189.In this case the sojourn is unusually prolonged, however, and the dispute between the shepherd and Tucapel over the merits of the pastoral and military life respectively (XIII. 103–14) very self-consciously stages the poem’s own process of generic expansion. The scene takes an isolated reference in La Araucana as its starting point, in which the poet stumbles during an information-gathering expedition upon ‘un gran arcabuco y espesura, | donde la miserable y triste gente | vivía por su pobreza en paz segura, | que el rumor y alboroto de la guerra | aún no la había sacado de su tierra’ [a thick and impenetrable forest, where the sad and wretched people lived in safety and peace on account of their poverty, for the noise and tumult of war had not yet expelled them from their land] (LA XXIII. 23). Both scenes are set in a gloomy mountain, heavily wooded, and described otherwise in very similar terms (e.g. LA XXIII. 40, AD XIII. 11), and both destinations are the site of prophetic visions, except that the two trajectories are traced in reverse. In La Araucana, the poet-narrator immediately moves on from the humble settlement mentioned to the forest hut of the elderly hermit Guaticolo to the mountain cave of Fitón (with its palatial interior), while the three Araucanians descend from the dusky mountain, with its ghosts and prodigies, to the forest and finally reach the shepherd’s hut in which the remainder of the action will take place. Ercilla sets out on his journey at dawn and returns at nightfall; the three companions begin at dusk and Quidora concludes her story at midday.
This allusive gesture is not without its significance for the political as well as poetic independence of the narrative from this point. To begin with, while Ercilla’s shepherds are among the few inhabitants of Chile secure from the ravages of war in their miserable poverty, those of Oña are neither miserable nor especially secure. There is an implicit, though subdued, tension, in the temporary accommodation of the pastoral and epic protagonists, ‘la maliciosa gente y la sincera’ [the malicious and sincere people] (XIV. 41), beneath the same narrow roof. The heated response of Tucapel to Talgueno’s praise of the ‘verdaderamente fortunado’ [truly fortunate] shepherd (‘Igual por cierto fuera que esta gente | de tan inútil vida se dexara’ [It would be just as well for these people to give up such a useless life], XIII. 113), and the injuries inflicted on the shepherd’s dog (XVI. 120, XVII. 7–8) – presumably by the warrior-messenger who arrives to summon the party back to the battlefield – hint at the susceptibility of the bucolic harmony to violence. The injury of the dog has a certain symbolism despite its light-heartedness: the ‘guarda de su hato’ [guard of the flock] reflects the role of the shepherd himself, while his wife’s description of the pup’s signs of affection for her daughter (XVIII. 96–99) playfully anthropomorphises the pet by attributing to it the rustic courtship services conventionally rendered by the pastoral lover. In La Araucana, while the depredations of warfare come from all sides, the most vocal of the destitute, homeless and grieving victims of conflict owe their plight to the raids of the Spanish. In Arauco domado, by contrast, any nascent threat to the natural idyll appears to arise from the Amerindian warmongering itself.
On the whole, however, the tranquility of this Antarctic Arcadia remains unperturbed, which in itself furnishes a response to the devastated landscape and dislocated communities of Ercilla’s
Segunda and
Tercera partes. I have already noted the persistent tendency in Oña to rewrite a history of the Chilean frontier which is oddly devoid of pathos,
7 As Carneiro notes in ‘Arauco domado y la imitación’, this might also be said of much of Oña’s imitative engagement with the classical epic tradition, with his ‘neutralization of the tragic character of the ancient plots which he reelaborates’ (p. 93). Her subsequent conclusion that pathos is at ‘the core of [Oña’s] poetic exercise’, and an affective dimension which ‘weakens the explicit project of praising his patron’ (p. 103), is somewhat at odds with this foregoing analysis. and the point might be expanded with regards to the female characters in both poems. While the Araucanian women of Ercilla serve many functions within the narrative, one of these in ethical and political terms is to act as a synecdoche for the civilian community. Their relationship to their husbands or suitors captures the reader’s attention, but it is not exclusive; these women are also mothers, daughters, kinswomen and actors in a broader social and political setting. On the one hand, they present a picture of broken communities grimmer with each rendition, whether as the victims or potential victims of the soldiery during a siege, or the tragic heroines who appear almost always as mourners, seeking to find their husbands only to bury them. On the other, their unshakeable ‘fe’ amid utter desolation, undivided in their purity and loyalty even after the death of their beloved, or – in the final case of the wife of Caupolicán – eschewing even the ties of family against the higher call of the ongoing struggle, symbolises the persistence of the republic’s resistance, however complete its losses.
A similar analysis might be applied to Arauco domado with differing conclusions. The Araucanian casos de amor are, as in Ercilla, attractively presented: ‘gentiles en la fe y en la belleza’ [gentile in faith and charming in beauty] (VIII. 33), the lovers are entwined in the perfect innocence of the Golden Age. A ‘bienaventurada […] gente | de pecho limpio y ánimo sincero’ [blessed people of honest heart and sincere mind] (VIII. 5), their paganism is now of the inoffensive variety of Ovidian myth or pastoral romance rather than the horrifying idolatry of the opening. In stark contrast to La Araucana, however, despite the occasional allusion to star-struck couples such as Pyramus and Thisbe or Hero and Leander, the outcome of these requited romances is uniformly felicitous. Each lamenting lover is, in due course, serendipitously reunited with his or her beloved, and readers’ relative omniscience in this regard (we see the two missing warriors escaping the battlefield wounded, but alive) allows them to follow the plot intricacies which accomplish the happy ending with a degree of detachment and aesthetic pleasure in the narrative deployment of suspense. We are presumably expected to marvel with the internal audience to see ‘que aquella mísera tragedia | se concluyese en próspera comedia | allí, en su tosca y rústica morada’ [that that wretched tragedy should conclude in a prosperous comedy there, in their rough and rustic dwelling] (XIV. 44).
Furthermore, for all their ennobling properties, the bittersweet passions of youth do not, in Oña, easily translate into the undying fidelity of a Tegualda or a Dido. Alongside the frequent poetic gaze upon the flawless Petrarchan or exotically orientalised bodies of the female heroines, there is in fact a humorous but consistent current of misogyny in the poet and his characters’ ironic observations on events. Women are, while utterly inflamed by erotic desire once resistance is overcome (VII. 1–6, XII. 91 – again with euphemisms for comic effect), as fickle as the sea (VII. 72). The mysterious appearance of the newly invented warrior Molchén, for instance, reared like many heroes of the chivalric romance far from his true estate, reveals an unrepentant and crafty adulteress married to a tolerant cuckold in an enredo presented as typical (XVII. 58–62). Stubborn (XIV. 49), fearful (VII. 67), pathologically jealous even of their closest friends (XIV. 40), motivated from childhood by the cold sway of self-interest towards their admirers (XVII. 1 ff.), women’s disdain is but a cunning mask for the desire to ‘ser en todo compelida […] porque sólo tiene fortaleza | en ocultar al ombre su flaqueza’ [be compelled in everything, for they are only strong enough to hide from men their weakness] (XII. 90, VII. 68). The maidens of Arauco appear more closely aligned in this regard to those of folkloric or Ovidian comedy than to the unfathomable mistresses of Petrarchan lyric, or even the warrior-heroines of Ariosto.
The implications of this new emphasis on feminine changeability and pliability can best be demonstrated through an examination of the two characters who appear in both La Araucana and Arauco domado: Fresia and Guacolda, the consorts of Caupolicán and Lautaro respectively. The Fresia who in Ercilla shockingly spurns her son and her own womanhood in scorn of her captured husband (LA XXXIII. 73–82) appears in Oña as a totally conventional Petrarchan beauty within a totally conventional locus amoenus, coquettish, fearful, and as if childless (there is one, unelaborated reference to Caupolicán’s possible ‘hijos’). Although her furious departure looks forward to the rage of her counterpart in Ercilla’s Tercera parte, it is nevertheless subsumed into the familiar mould of Virgilian female frenzy – her womanhood is not essentially different from that of the European tradition. The reappearance of the distraught Guacolda who features briefly in the downfall of Lautaro towards the end of the Primera parte is even more poignant. In Oña we glimpse her indirectly through the voice of her late beloved’s ghost, reproaching her for having married a Spaniard:
Al yugo de un hispano sometiste
el cuello de que siempre me colgaste.
¿Assí la prometida fe guardaste
y lo que aquella noche me dixiste?
En vida solamente me seguiste,
y en muerte, como sombra, me dexaste,
que dura mientras luze el sol dorado,
y acávase en haviendo algún ñublado. (XIII. 81)
[To the yoke of a Spaniard you submitted the neck on which I always hung. Is this how you kept your promised faith and what you said to me that night? You followed me only in life, and in death, like a shadow, you left me, which lasts as long as the golden sun shines, but is gone as soon as a cloud appears.]
The language here – of yoked necks and ‘prometida fe’ – is highly charged, evoking for the reader a series of associations with the proverbial ‘cuello indómito’ of Arauco. The consensual Araucanian–Spanish marriage is striking. Such a wish for a harmonious union with the desired land is consistently frustrated in
La Araucana, whose new worlds and peoples remain either stubbornly resistant or fruitlessly raped.
8 See Padrón, ‘Love American Style’; Padrón, The Spacious Word, pp. 185–230. In Oña, it seems, requited conquests are already on the horizon.
9 The slippage between the literature of love and colonial discourse in this period is explored by Roland Greene, Unrequited Conquests: Love and Empire in the Colonial Americas (Chicago, 1999).This shift in representation of the female characters accomplishes what might be called an infantilisation of the civilian community of Arauco in political terms, even as in literary terms it often recalls the popular pastoral romances of the period. Always youthful, absorbed entirely in homage to each other’s beauty, living in leisured privacy in the pastoral age of gold which constitutes the most primitive (if idyllic) stage of civilisation, the couples of
Arauco domado appear as if enthralled in a perpetual adolescence, childless and carefree, while the mature and elderly characters disappear. One might compare here the youthful faces of the Mapuche devotees of Our Lady of Arauco in the engraving in Alonso de Ovalle’s
Histórica relación del reyno de Chile [
Historical Account of the Kingdom of Chile] (1646);
10 Adorno, Polemics, pp. 196–98. this is a people without history, childlike and immature, requiring ongoing tutelage in order to reach its promised potential. Yet this potential is at least clear, and the virtues, mutability and charm of those characters who are temporarily isolated from the terrains of warfare, political decision-making and the epic serve to suggest the plausibility of the opening prophecy (in the mouth of the compelled demon) that:
[…] ya pacífico el estado
[el gobernador] ha de saber trataros de manera
que lo que fuere entonces y lo que era
serán como lo vivo y lo pintado;
lo que por fuerça fue será de grado,
lo que de pedernal de blanda cera,
y al que os hubiere dado mil enojos
le lloraréis después con ambos ojos. (II. 79)
[once the state has been pacified, he [Hurtado] will treat you in such a way that what will be then and what came before will be like real life and painting; what you did by force you will do willingly, what was made of stone will be soft wax, and he who would have grieved you a thousand times will be wept by you when he leaves with both eyes.]
This emphasis is, again, in tune with the paternalist rhetoric of figures such as Acosta, who, while repeatedly comparing the Indians of Peru to children, slaves or animals, nevertheless insisted that full conversion and civility were achievable, since their deficiencies were not inherent, but simply the force of custom. ‘There is no nation’, he insists, ‘however barbarous and stupid it may seem, which does not lay aside its barbarity and clothe itself with humanity and noble customs if it is brought up with care and a generous spirit from childhood’ (De procuranda, p. 150). They simply need to be taught – and made to work.
While in general terms Oña’s approach is common to much of the reformist discourse of the period, it nevertheless takes on a different complexion when applied to the Chilean frontier at the time of composition. By the 1590s, some residents of Peru seem to have felt Acosta’s optimism concerning the evangelising and civilising mission to have been overstated. One might compare the exchanges of ‘conceptos elegantes’ [elegant conceits] by Oña’s Indians (XII. 81), their disputes over the respective merits of force or cunning in situations of rebellion or their application of logic to the enigma of the allegorical sea battle, with the encomendero Diego Dávalos y Figueroa’s own amorous dialogue, the 1602 Miscelánea Austral [Austral Miscellany], in which the two interlocutors explicitly engage with the ‘amorosas historias de los indios de Chile’ [love stories of the Indians of Chile] invented by Ercilla:
[Celia] […] gustaré que me digais si la gente natural y propria de esta tierra, es rendida del amor, o por alguna vía subjeta a sus fueros, porque sigún los juzgo incapaces, no puedo creer conozcan su poder, ni obedezcan sus leyes.
D[elio]: El umor de que los indios más participan es flema, en el qual pocas veces enciende el amor, y si lo haze, es porque otras calidades lo disponen y abilitan […] pues como todo esto falte en esta gente, no se puede creer sean heridos de amorosa flecha, con diferencia olguna [sic] de las bestias. Aunque sus defensores niegan esto, atribuiéndoles mil dulçuras […] afirmo ser todas conformes a sus ingenios, cuyos conceptos jamás se levantan del suelo […] al fin (salvo casos muy raros y particulares) todos son de poca más habilidad de los brutos […]
11 Diego Davalos y Figueroa, Primera parte de la Miscelánea Austral (Lima: Antonio Ricardo, 1602), fol. 154v.[Celia: I would like you to tell me if the native people of this land ever surrenders to love, or is in any way subject to its decrees, because if they are as inept as I think, I cannot believe that they know its power, or obey its laws.
Delio: The humour which most predominates in the Indians is phlegm, in which love can rarely ignite, and if it does, it is because other qualities dispose it to do so. Since all this is lacking in these people, one cannot believe that they could be wounded by the arrow of love, any more than could a beast. Although their defenders deny this and attribute to them all kinds of sweet sentiments, I affirm that they are all true to their nature, and rarely raise their thoughts from the ground. In sum (except for very rare and specific cases) they are all of little more ability than brute beasts.]
Such an outlook was not without its political impact. In the correspondence concerning the unrest in Quito during the 1590s, for instance, the Audiencia, townspeople and
encomenderos of Quito vehemently disagreed with the
oidor Manuel de Barros’s concern for the tributary Amerindians on the grounds that their irredeemable brutishness made any alleviating measures futile.
12 The Memorial of Alonso de las Cabezas de Meneses sent from Quito condenses most of these arguments, presenting the Indians, much as in Oña’s opening cantos, as completely lacking in Christianity and policía, prone to hechicerías and borracheras, cannibalistic, dirty, malicious, infantile, corrupted by liberty and so on; the document is reproduced in Bernard Lavallé, Quito et la crise de l’alcabala (1580–1600) (Paris, 1992), pp. 52–58. Pedro Muñiz, in the case against Oña presented before the Audiencia, alluded to the potential damage the latter’s fictions might have on ‘gente tan flaca de entendimiento’ [people of such weak intellect] as the Indians of Peru, Chile or mestizos, who, he suggests, are intrinsically incapable of distinguishing truth from falsehood.
13 Medina, Biblioteca, p. 63.Nowhere did this growing tide of pessimism weigh more heavily, however, than with regards to Chile. Contemporary documents attest not only to the interminable difficulties faced in securing the territory, but also to the perception of the southern frontier in much of the Viceroyalty, one by this point negative in the extreme. Time and again in his correspondence, Hurtado regrets the difficulty of recruiting and retaining men of quality to serve in Arauco, observing laconically that ‘el que en esta tierra comete delito quiere más que le enbíen a las galeras que no a servir en Chile’ [anyone who commits a crime here would prefer to be sent to the galleys than to serve in Chile].
14 Levillier, Gobernantes del Perú, XII, 151. Two years after the publication of
Arauco domado, on the outbreak of the Curalaba rebellion, the question would be raised over whether it was sustainable to maintain Spanish control of the territory at all.
All things considered, then, while implicitly addressing the vexed situation in which the territory would find itself after Hurtado’s departure, Oña’s representation of the human and natural potential of the state of Arauco seeks to press on the reader the appeal of the region beyond the battleground. The prescient portions of this part of the text are inconclusive, and at times ambivalent. In part apotropaic, they implicitly recognise the failure of Spanish attempts to date to pacify the region and the remaining obstacles to doing so: a peaceful settlement is discarded; the ghost of Lautaro (of Ercilla’s epic?) admonishes the Araucanians to continue the struggle; the introduction of the warrior Molchén suggests rebirth; the very exceptionality of Hurtado and his command is at times an encouragement to his adversaries. When Tucapel expresses regret that Quidora’s dream shows Hurtado leaving Chile alive, Gualeva’s response is an open question, addressing the reader’s uncertainty concerning the colony’s future as much as its chequered past:
y a mí me aflige el cómo quedaremos,
si bien o mal, después de su partida;
mas téngolo por plática perdida
que más sobre este punto platiquemos (XVIII. 22)
[what worries me is what will become of us, good or ill, after his departure: but these are wasted words, and we should talk of this no more]
Beyond this ‘plática perdida’, though, the framing of the Chile of Arauco domado is protreptic; it is a land to satisfy every colonial desire, with its Arcadian retreats, wondrous fertility, malleable maidens and youthful potential. In the later cantos, Chilean veterans are frequently shown in prestigious positions of command, a deliberate emphasis on the opportunities military service presented for heroism and advancement in a province the men of the viceroyalty seem to have so stoutly avoided. Allusions to the features of civilian life shared by Amerindians and colonists – the local peculiarities of natural history, gastronomy or custom – seem intended to bring the poetry alive and strike an immediate connection with the reader: ‘porque es la historia llana imagen muda | que habla, si la pintan de colores’ [because plain history is a mute image, which speaks, if it is painted with colours] (XVII. 7). The ‘colours’ are arguably, in this scheme, not only nostalgic, but also reflections of the poet’s wish to render ‘un servicio a la tierra donde nací’ [a service to the land where I was born] (‘Prólogo’). Amid the increasingly divisive and despondent discourse surrounding the territory, Oña insists that the colonial and evangelical enterprise elaborated by reformers such as Acosta still has a future, that investing in the troubled frontier will more than repay the costs of its maintenance. His protagonists’ escape from the battlefield, all the more poignant for its obvious transience, is, like the halting rhythm of the stanzas, a symbolic refusal to allow Arauco to be exclusively defined by its conflicts and exclusively rendered in epic terms.