Hydra Head

EPILOGUE

The official maps outline a large rectangle extending from the drilling platforms of Chac 1 and Kukulkán 1 in the Gulf of Mexico to the beds of Sitio Grande in the spurs of the Chiapas Sierras, and from the port of Coatzacoalcos to the mouth of the Usumacinta River.

The maps of memory describe the arch of a coast of luxuriant loneliness, the first seen by the Spanish Conquistadors. Tabasco, Veracruz, Campeche. A lime-colored sea, so green that at times it resembled a great plain, redolent of its riches of porgy, corbina, and shrimp, tangled with seaweed linking the calm waves that sink into the sands of beaches of moribund palm trees: a red, vegetal cemetery; and then a slow ascent through lands red as a tennis court and green as a billiard table, along lazy rivers thickened with floating hyacinths, toward the mists of the native sierra, the seat of the secret world of the Tzotziles: Chiapas, a lance of fire in a crown of smoke.

It is the land of the Malinche. Hernán Cortés received her from the hands of the caciques of Tabasco, along with four diadems and a lizard of gold. She was a gift, but a gift that spoke. Her Indian name was Malintzin. The stars baptized her, because she was born under an evil sign, Ce Malianalli, oracle of misfortune, rebellion, dissension, spilled blood, and impatience.

The parents of the doomed child, princes of their land, were fearful, and secretly they delivered her to the tribe of Xicalango. By coincidence, that same night another baby died, the daughter of slaves of Malintzin’s parents. The princes told that this dead baby was their daughter and they buried her with the honors befitting her noble rank. The doomed child, as if her masters divined the dark augury of her birth, was passed from people to people as part of tributes, until she was offered to the Teúl, the white-skinned, blond-bearded god the Indians confused with the benevolent God Quetzalcóatl, the Plumed Serpent, who had one day fled from the horror of Mexico, promising to return another day by sea, from the east, with happiness on his wings and vengeance on his scales.

Then the voice of the buried slave spoke with the tongue of the doomed princess and led the Conquistadors to the eternal, high, central seat of authority, of the power of Mexico: the mesa of Anáhuac and the city of Tenochtitlán, the capital of Moctezuma, the Lord of the Great Voice.

Cortés converted Malintzin twice: first, to love; second, to Christianity. She was baptized Marina. The people call her Malinche, name of betrayal, voice that revealed to the Spaniards the hidden weaknesses of the Aztec empire and permitted fifteen hundred gold-hungry adventurers to conquer a nation five times larger than Spain. The small voice of the woman defeated the great voice of the Emperor.

But beneath the land of the Malinche lie riches greater than all of Moctezuma’s gold. Sealed in geological pits more ancient than the most ancient empires, the treasure of Chiapas, Veracruz, and Tabasco is a promise in a sealed bottle: to seek it is to pursue an invisible cat through subterranean labyrinths. The patient drillers penetrate two, three, four thousand meters deep into the sea, into the jungles, into the sierra. The discovery of one fertile well compensates for the failure of a thousand sterile ones.

Like the Hydra, the oil is reborn, multiplied, from a single severed head. Dark semen in a land of hopes and betrayals, oil fecundates the realms of the Malinche beneath the mute voices of the stars and their nocturnal portents.