Sudden Death

Cortés’s Coat of Arms

Never has a man done for any faith what Hernán Cortés did for Renaissance Catholicism, and yet five centuries after the greatest religious feat of all time, the Vatican continues to look the other way whenever his name is invoked. What a provincial brute he must have been never to receive recognition for having set at the feet of the pope — his right ball — a world complete with all its animals, plants, temples, and little houses with hundreds of thousands of ladies and gentlemen inside, cavorting like rabbits, taking advantage of the fact that they could run around almost buck naked in the eternal good weather.

One has to see Cortés sweating in his armor, smoke-blackened and splattered by the blood of his enemies, imagine him blasting gods with his cannon. More than a soldier, statesman, or millionaire, the conquistador was the eye of a storm that hovered over the Atlantic for twenty-six years, its winds uprooting houses everywhere from the imperial Vienna of Charles V to the Canary Islands, from the Canary Islands to Tenochtitlan, from Tenochtitlan to Cuzco: one and a half million square miles full of people who sooner or later would become Christians because an uncredentialed man in his forties from the backwater of Extremadura had broken the stewpot of the world without realizing what he was doing.

Each second, 4.787 people are born in Mexico, and 1.639 die, which means that the population increases by an average rate of 3.148 Mexicans per second. A nightmare. Today there are more than 117 million Mexicans, and an unspecified number followed by six zeros in the United States. A rough calculation suggests that between 1821, the year the country gained its independence, and the second decade of the twenty-first century, 180 million Mexicans, more or less, have been born. Out of all of them, only José Vasconcelos considered Cortés to be a hero. His unpopularity is nearly universal.

Take, for example, an inexplicable organization called the Mexican National Front, consisting of thirty-two skinheads. The thirty-two morons who belong to the Front are admirers of Hitler — and even they explain on their website that Cortés was a bastard. With the marquis del Valle we have a case of the most spectacularly bad image-management of all time. His last wish was for his body to be brought back to Mexico, where he wanted to be laid to rest. None of the 1.639 Mexicans dying at this instant visited his tomb; all would be opposed to a monument being raised to him, to his being memorialized on a plaque, to any object in the world reminding them of his existence. The 4.787 who’ve just been born will feel the same way. He did something very wrong, and he knew it: in his will he left alms for four thousand masses to be said for the salvation of his soul. If the masses, paid in advance, were said once a day in the parish church of Castilleja de la Cuesta, eleven years after his death his spirit was still being nervously commended each morning to the souls in purgatory.

All of this explains why no one in Mexico — or Spain either, I presume — has ever seen Cortés’s coat of arms. It has four fields, the first of silver with the double-headed eagle of the Habsburgs representing the Holy Roman Empire, which the conquistador had expanded by dimensions too great to be calculated at the time. The second field is of sable, stamped with the three crowns of the Triple Alliance, which Cortés had overthrown when he subdued the Aztec empire on August 13, 1521, Saint Hippolytus’s Day. A third is of gold with a lion celebrating Cortés’s bravery, and a fourth of blue with a sketch of Mexico City atop the waters. Around the coat of arms is a kind of garland wreathing the four emblems, a chain from which hang the seven decapitated heads of the seven caciques of the towns of Lake Texcoco. Good taste was never Cortés’s strong suit.

The coat of arms and the weapons never reached Mexico, because at the time of Cortés’s death, the conquistador’s daughter Juana was about to turn fourteen and her mother had already decided to return to Spain to find her a match in keeping with their infinite wealth — the worst possible scenario for poor Lope Rodríguez, who lost hope of any profit in the matter.

The Cortés ladies settled in Castilleja de la Cuesta and received the arms and the scapular in a solemn ceremony at which all the ragtag final companions of the conquistador were present, and which lasted about the time it takes to boil an egg. Then they focused their attention on making a marriage with the house of Alcalá, which didn’t take much longer than the surrender of arms, because like all the nobles of Old Spain — as Juana Cortés dubbed the country that she was already beginning to find stifling — they were walled in by debt and clearly in decline.