Reading Inca History

5. Composition

5Composition Our ability to see a life history in Betanzos’s narrative on Pachacuti is supported by the structural similarities between his account and Sarmiento’s. Like Betanzos, Sarmiento goes into particular detail about the life of Pachacuti . A comparison of the two texts yields a rough image of the underlying source. The similarities between these two texts and the contrast between them and the other accounts that drew from Inca genres (tables 4.2– 4.3) add further support to the hypothesis that their narratives incorporate this Inca source. Drawing out a life history of Topa Inca is a more difficult prospect, but it can and should be attempted. The length of Sarmiento’s treatment of this Inca, even after the information about his conquests from the quipo source is removed, and the similarities between the motifs used by Betanzos to describe the campaigns of both Pachacuti and Topa Inca provoke a conclusion that there is life history material in both Spanish narratives. Now we turn to an examination of the narrative treatment of rulers before Pachacuti, a task that presents new obstacles to the identification of life history material. So far we have made a distinction between Spanish historical narratives that were little more than genealogies and others that incorporated substantially more material: the “long accounts.” We have hypothesized that the genealogical genre was what was painted on tablets kept privately by the dynastic line and that it included at least a genealogy of the direct descendants of Manco Capac and a mention of the panacas associated with each generation, possibly classified into Hanan and Hurin. Molina noted that the painted history also incorporated material on dynastic origins, on the life of each ruler, and on the lands he conquered. Since that is what the life history was also about to some extent, significant potential for overlap between the genealogical genre and the life history exists. The difference between the accounts of Pachacuti in Sarmiento/Betanzos and what we find in Cabello Valboa/Morúa (m2) may be a reflection of a reliance on the genealogical genre in the latter case and on the life history in the former. If, as Betanzos and Sarmiento both state, the accounts of the earlier Incas were composed during the time of Pachacuti, the potential for overlap is even greater. There may have been no really notable c o m p o s i t i o n | 167 difference in subject matter between the two genres. What if the major difference was that one was kept on quipos by the panaca and the other was painted on tablets and kept by the ruler? Moreover, there is no reason to assume that the genealogical genre was a single narrative, temporally ordered. What if it was no more than a series of lifetimes, presented sequentially? Life history materials would have presented some obstacles to the construction of a seamless narrative of the Inca past, particularly when the lives of rulers overlapped. If both the painted history and life history were structured around lifetimes, then there had been no seamless narrative of the Inca past until Spanish historical practice produced one. What may have characterized the painted history was the sequencing of life histories in a genealogical order, not the synchronization of events into a single narrative. Let us examine these questions with the circumstances surrounding the composition of the accounts of the early rulers in mind. The life histories were said to have been composed after the death of a ruler, except in the case of the accounts of the rulers from Manco Capac to Yahuar Huacac. Both Betanzos and Sarmiento tell us that Pachacuti organized a cult to the memory of the earlier Incas. Betanzos locates this incident after the death of Viracocha Inca, Pachacuti’s father, while Sarmiento locates it before Viracocha’s death. Sarmiento specifically notes that Pachacuti had the bodies of the first seven Incas, from Manco Capac to Yahuar Huacac, “disinterred” and brought to Coricancha . They were adorned and placed on a bench, then a purucaya ceremony was held for each one, and stories were composed about their lives. Pachacuti created a public cult to his forebears (Sarmiento de Gamboa [1572], chap. 30; 1906:68– 69). The invention of a cult to the Inca forebears is situated within the historical narrative. Sarmiento’s description of the painted history, however, was incorporated into his narrative in the chapter before he narrates Inca origins...