Not knowing the language of the natives was the same as sailing through a black sea. For him, the Mayans were as inscrutable as the dark side of the moon. Their unintelligible voices made him feel insecure, vulnerable, and he had no trust in his translator. He did not know how faithful Friar Jerónimo de Aguilar was to his words, or how capable he was of betrayal. The friar had arrived practically as if dropped from the heavens. The survivor of a shipwreck years before, Aguilar had been imprisoned by the Mayans. In captivity, he had learned their language and the customs of their culture. Cortés had felt very fortunate when he found out about him and promptly had him rescued. From the very beginning, Aguilar gave Cortés crucial information about the Mayans and, above all, about the extensive and powerful Aztec empire. Aguilar had proved useful as interpreter between Cortés and the natives of the Yucatán, but he had shown little ability to negotiate or persuade since, clearly, had he possessed those skills, the first battles between the Spaniards and the natives would not have been necessary. Cortés preferred to resort to dialogue rather than arms. He fought only when he failed in the field of diplomacy. He soon had no choice.
He had won the first battle. His instinct for victory had led to the defeat of the natives in Cintla. Of course, the presence of horses and artillery had also played a very important role in that, his first triumph on foreign soil. However, far from feeling festive and wanting to celebrate, he was seized by a sense of helplessness.
At an early age he had developed confidence in himself through the ease with which he managed words, interweaving them, applying them, and using them in the most suitable and convincing fashion. Throughout his life as he matured, he confirmed that there was no better weapon than a good speech. Yet now he felt vulnerable and useless, disarmed. How would he be able to use his best and most effective weapon on those natives, who spoke other languages?
Cortés would have given half his life if he could master the languages of that strange country. In Hispaniola and Cuba he had advanced and won positions of power thanks to his speeches, which were embellished with Latin phrases and showed off his knowledge.
Cortés knew that there would not be enough horses, artillery, and harquebuses to achieve dominion over these lands. These natives were civilized, different from those in Hispaniola and Cuba. Cannons and horses were effective when dealing with savages, but in a civilized context, the ideal thing was to seal alliances, negotiate, win over, and all this could be done only through dialogue, of which he was deprived from the very start.
In this recently discovered world, Cortés knew that he had the opportunity of a lifetime in his hands, yet he felt shackled. He couldn’t negotiate and he urgently needed some way to master the language of the natives. He knew that by any other means—sign language, for example—it would be impossible to accomplish his aims. Without the mastery of the language, his weapons were useless; it would be like using a harquebus as a club instead of firing it.
His thoughts came so swiftly that in a matter of seconds he could devise new purposes and new truths that would serve him in maintaining life according to his convenience. But these ideas and goals rested upon the strength of his speeches. He was also convinced that fortune favored the brave, but in this case, courage—which he possessed in abundance—was of little use to him. This was a mission that would be built from the start on the basis of words. Words were its bricks, courage its mortar. Without words, without language, without speeches, there was no mission, and with no mission, no conquest.
The night that had ushered in the new day had filled Montezuma’s head with nightmares. The emperor had dreamed of children who were walking naked on the snow that covered the volcanoes of Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl. They did it willingly, even though they would be sacrificed so that Huitzilopochtli would be nourished. Montezuma saw how those children were drowned in a spring and how their bodies floated. Then he saw that the God of Water was walking over them and that fat drops of water fell from the sky, the same as the emperor Montezuma held in his eyes when he awoke. Later, not sleeping, he imagined that the skulls of the children would be the cups from which all of them would drink water. This image caused him to feel at once both fear and pleasure. Perhaps the latter was what most horrified him. Suddenly, a violent wind blasted the door open and let the sunlight fall on Montezuma’s face.
His eyes would breakfast on wind and light that morning. The violent gusts shook the curtains, ripped things from their place, and cast objects onto the floor of the room where Montezuma had slept. Horror overcame the leader and his mind fabricated at great speed a series of images of exemplary punishments: agave thorns piercing the tongue, or the penis, bloody needles that spoke of guilt, of the great guilt that Montezuma bore on his shoulders because his people, the Aztecs, had betrayed and distorted the principles of the ancient Toltec religion.
The Aztecs had been a nomadic people until they established themselves in Tula. The mythic founder of Tula was Quetzalcóatl, the Plumed Serpent, and Montezuma was sure that the arrival of the Spanish was due to the fact that Quetzalcóatl had returned and was coming to get his due. Fear of the god’s punishment paralyzed his enormous skill for war. Otherwise, he would have wiped out the foreigners in a single day.
THREE
It was the middle of spring when they baptized Malinalli. She was dressed all in white. There was no color on her dress, but a great deal of embroidery. She knew the value of embroidery, of spinning thread and the art of feathers, and had chosen for the occasion a ceremonial huipil, full of meaning, that she herself had made.
The huipiles spoke. They said much about the women who had made them. They spoke of their time, their social condition, their marital state, their connection to the cosmos. Putting on a huipil was a whole initiation; in doing so one repeated daily the voyage from the interior to the exterior. On putting one’s head through the opening of the huipil, one moved from the world of dreams, which was revealed in the embroidery, into everyday life, which appears when the head comes out. This awakening to reality is a ritual morning act that reminds us day after day of the significance of birth. Huipiles keep one’s head centered, with the rest of the body covered in the front, in the back, and on both sides. The cross that is formed by the embroidered parts of the huipil means that one is planted in the center of the universe, lit by the Sun and covered by the Four Winds, the Four Directions, the Four Elements. That’s how Malinalli felt in her beautiful white huipil as she was ready to be baptized.
For her the ritual of baptism was very important, and she was deeply moved to know that it was the same for the Spaniards. Her ancestors performed it according to their own customs. Her grandmother performed it for her after she was born, and it was assumed that at the age of thirteen it needed to be done for her again, but no one did it. Malinalli very much regretted it.
The number thirteen was very significant. Thirteen were the moons in a solar year. Thirteen menstruations. Thirteen, the houses of the sacred calendar of the Mayans and the Mexicas. Each of its houses was made up of twenty days and the sum of thirteen houses, each with twenty days, came to a total of 260 days. When one was born, both the solar calendar of 365 days and the sacred one of 260 days began and did not join again until the fifty-second year, a complete cycle that would begin again. If you add five and two, the numbers in fifty-two, you get seven, which is also a magic number because seven are the days that make each of the four lunar phases. Malinalli knew that the first seven days, when the moon was between the Earth and the Sun, the Moon is dark, for the new moon is on the verge of rising, and this was a time to be silent so that all things that had yet to be born would do so freely, without any interference. It was the best time to “feel” what should be the main objective of the actions one would undertake during the coming lunar cycle. It was the birth of purpose. The next seven days, when the moon rose at noon and fell at midnight, showing only half her face, was the time to put one’s purposes into action. The next seven days, when the Moon was on the opposit
e side of the Earth from the Sun, and shone in fullness over the earth, was the time to celebrate and share our achievements. And the last seven days, when the Moon showed the other half of her face, was a time to reflect on everything gained over those twenty-eight days.
All these aspects of time accompanied each human being from the moment of birth. Malinalli had been born in the twelfth house. The date of birth marked one’s fate and because of this Malinalli bore the name of the house in which she was born. The meaning of the number twelve is resurrection. The glyph that corresponds to the number twelve is a skull in profile, for it represents all that dies and is transformed. Growing out of the skull instead of hair is malinalli, a fiber also known as sacred grass. The glyph for twelve alludes to death, which embraces her dead son and offers him rest. It represents either unity or a mother who snatches from death the bundle of a corpse wrapped in its shroud and bound with malinalli, the sacred grass. She takes him to return him to the unity of the One and give birth to him, renewed. Malinalli was also the symbol of the town, as well as of the bewitching city of Malinalco, founded by the terrestrial-lunar goddess Malínal-Xóchitl, or flower of malinalli.
Curiously, it was the fiber malinalli that was used to make the poncho which Juan Diego was wearing in the year 1531, when the Virgin of Guadalupe appeared to him supported by the moon, on the twelfth day of the twelfth month, and twelve years after Hernán Cortés had arrived in Mexico.
Malinalli was so proud of all these concepts contained in the meaning of her name that she tried to give form to them in the huipil that she had begun to embroider several moons earlier.
It was during the time of silence that she had felt the need to make it, and until now she had believed that it was the proper thing to do. The huipil was the one that she chose to wear in the longed—for ceremony of baptism. Made with cotton thread that she herself had spun and woven in a loom, it had been appliquéd with seashells and precious feathers. The symbol for the moving wind was embroidered on the chest, surrounded by plumed serpents. It was in itself an encrypted message to be seen and appraised by the emissaries of Lord Quetzalcóatl. She was dressed like a faithful devotee, but no one seemed to notice. The only one who seemed to be dazzled by her attire was a horse that drank from a nearby river and that never took its eyes off her throughout the whole baptismal ceremony. Malinalli did not fail to notice and from then on a loving relationship developed between them.
After the ceremony ended, Malinalli approached Friar Aguilar, to ask him about the meaning of Marina, the name they had just given her. The friar responded that Marina was she who came from the sea.
“Is that all?” Malinalli asked.
The friar responded with a simple, “Yes.”
The disappointment must have been evident in her eyes. She was hoping that the name granted to her by the emissaries of Quetzalcóatl would have a deeper meaning since, as she assumed, it wasn’t being granted to her by simple mortals who were completely ignorant of the profound meaning of the universe, but by initiates. Her name had to mean something important. She persisted with the friar, but the only additional answer that she could get from him was that they had chosen the name because Malinalli and Marina shared a certain phonetic similarity.
No. She refused to believe it. But because it was such a momentous day in Malinalli’s life, she did not let herself sink into disappointment, but instead decided on her own to take control of her new name. If her native name meant braided grass, and if the grass and all plants in general needed water, and her new name was related to the sea, it meant that she was assured of eternal life, for water was eternal and it would forever nourish who she was: the braided grass. Yes, that was exactly the meaning of her new name!
She wanted to pronounce it right away but found it impossible. The “r” in Marina got stuck on the tip of her tongue and the most that she could accomplish, after a few attempts, was to utter “Malina,” which left her very frustrated.
One of the things that most amazed her was that with the same oral apparatus, human beings were capable of emitting an infinite amount of different sounds. And she, who considered herself a great imitator, could not understand why she could not pronounce the “r.” She asked Aguilar to pronounce her new name, time and again, and she did not take her eyes once from the friar’s lips, who patiently repeated “Marina” again and again. It became clear to Malinalli that what was needed to pronounce the “r” was to place her tongue behind her teeth for only a moment, but her tongue, up against her palate as she was used to, could not move quickly enough and the results were disastrous. It was obvious that she would need a lot of practice, but she was not ready to give in.
Ever since she was a girl, she had been able to use her tongue to replicate any sound. When she was one, she had loved to babble, to make noises and little bubbles of saliva with her mouth, to imitate any sound that she heard. She paid great attention to the songs of birds, to the barking of dogs. Surrounded by the silence of the night, she liked to discover distant noises and identify the animal that was emitting this or that sound so that she could later imitate it. Until the arrival of the Spaniards, her method of learning had been very effective, but the new language had brought to her life new and complicated challenges.
Wanting to try another word so that she would not feel so frustrated, she decided to ask the friar about his god. She wanted to know everything about him: his name, his qualities, how she might approach him, to speak to him, to celebrate him, to worship him. She had loved listening to the sermon before the baptism—which Aguilar himself had translated for them—in which the Spaniards had asked that they no longer be fooled by false gods who demanded human sacrifice. They said that the true god, whom they brought with them, was good and loving and would never demand such a thing. In Malinalli’s eyes, that merciful god could be none other than the Lord Quetzalcóatl, who in new garments was returning to these lands to reinstate his kingdom in harmony with the cosmos. She wanted to welcome him, to speak to him.
She asked the friar to teach her how to pronounce the name of their god. Aguilar kindly complied and Malinalli, overcome with emotion, realized that the word, not having any “r”s in it, did not present a problem at all. Malinalli clapped her hands like a young child. She was delighted, thrilled by the sense of belonging that she felt when able to pronounce the name that another social group had assigned to something. It filled her with joy, for nothing disturbed her more than the feeling of being excluded. Right away, Malinalli asked the friar the name of the god’s wife. Aguilar told her that he had no wife.
“But then, who is that lady with the child in her arms whom you place in the temple?”
“She is the mother of Christ, of Jesus Christ, who came to save us.”
She was a mother! The mother of them all, and so she had to be the lady Tonantzin. It was no coincidence that when the friar had celebrated the mass before the baptism, Malinalli felt enraptured by a feeling that she could not understand. It was a sort of nostalgia for the maternal arms, a longing to feel enveloped, embraced, sustained, and protected by her mother, as at one time she must have been; by her grandmother, as she definitely had been; by Tonantzin, as she hoped she would be; and by a universal mother, like that white lady who held the child in her arms. A mother who wouldn’t give her away, who wouldn’t let her go, who wouldn’t let her fall to the ground but would raise her to the sky, offer her to the four winds, allow her to recover her purity. All these thoughts kept her company as the Spanish priest said Mass in a language that she did not understand, but could imagine.
Like Malinalli, Cortés also thought about his mother, and the countless times she had led him by the hand to church to pray for the health of her sickly child. She was constantly preoccupied with helping overcome his shortness, his physical weakness, and his condition as only child. It was clear that in a society dedicated to the art of war and in which street fights were common, a boy with these characteristics was destined for failure, and perhaps because of thi
s his parents had made sure they provided him with a good education.
During the Mass, Cortés remembered the moment that he had said good-bye to his mother before leaving for the New World. He remembered her tears, her grief, and the portrait of the Virgin of Guadalupe she had given him so that she would always be with him. Cortés was sure that it was the Virgin who had saved his life after the scorpion had bitten him and he asked at that time that she never abandon him, that she watch over him, that she become his ally and help him triumph. He wanted to prove to his mother that he could be more than a simple page in the service of the new king.
He was prepared to do anything. To disobey orders, to fight, to kill. It wasn’t enough to have been mayor of Santiago de Cuba. He wasn’t troubled over having ignored the instructions of Governor Diego Velázquez, according to which it was recommended not to take risks, to treat the Indians wisely, to gather information about the secrets of that mysterious land, and to find Grijalva, who had led the previous expedition. Cortés had come on a voyage of exploration, not of conquest; with the aim of discovering, not of populating. What Velázquez expected from him was to explore the coastal regions of the gulf and to return to Cuba with some gold as ransom, peacefully obtained; but Cortés was much more ambitious than that.
If his mother could have seen him now—conquering new lands, discovering new places, naming new things. The sense of power that he felt when he gave something or someone a new name must be comparable, he imagined, to that of giving birth. The things that he named were born in that moment and began a new life because of him. The bad part of this was that at times his imagination failed him. Cortés was good at strategizing, forming alliances, conquering, but not at inventing original names. Perhaps that was why he so admired the sonority and musicality of the Mayan and Náhuatl languages. He was incapable of coming up with names like Quiahuiztlan, Otalquiztlan, Tlapacoyan, Iztacamaxtitlan, or Pontonchan, so he searched the Spanish language to name each person and place them under his power in the most conventional way possible. For example, the Totonacan village of Chalchicueyecan he renamed Veracruz, since he had arrived there on the twenty-second day of April 1519, a Good Friday, the day of the True Cross, la Verdadera Cruz: hence, Vera Cruz.