Sudden Death

On Names, and the Troubled History and Politics of How Things Are Named

Living in Mexico had become a source of more anxiety than pleasure when I moved to New York. My reason for leaving is still hard to put into words, but it has something to do with a problem of nomenclature.

Back home we stopped calling things by their names long ago, and now, as the serpent heads of our plumed Hydra multiply endlessly, we’re left without the spell to counter their poison.

Mexican Spanish, at times so disconcerting and easy to misinterpret, gets its warmth and courtesy from Nahuatl: the gentlest and most gracious of tongues; an airy, birdlike form of speech. When someone from Madrid or Montevideo walks into a room, he says, “Permiso,” and that’s it. In contrast, a Mexican erects a syntactic edifice so complicated that it requires both a negative clause and a verb in the conditional: “If it’s no trouble, might I come in?” If the game recounted in these pages had been played in sixteenth-century Mexico, and if Hernán Cortés had invited the emperor Moctezuma to have it out on the court as Charles V and Henry VIII used to do, they wouldn’t have rudely shouted “Tenez!” but would have said, “Excuse the service, please.”

According to Nahuatl etiquette, the polite way to address a person is with the diminutive tzin. The pre-Hispanic name of the Virgin of Guadalupe was Tonantli, or Our Mother, but no one ever called her that, then or now. She was — and still is — Tonantzin, Our Little Mother. In Spanish we refer to her as La Virgen, but when the faithful petition her for something and address her directly, they call her Virgencita. It’s not that they’re sappier or more sentimental than other Spanish speakers; it’s just that Mexican Spanish is crisscrossed with the scars of Nahuatl. In our mental hard drives, the file of the mother tongue still opens at certain prompts, even though it’s been two or three hundred years since we spoke it.

It’s still hard to believe that during the sixteenth century, there was an enormous empire, governed by an extraordinarily bloodthirsty ruling class, whose prince was addressed as a child: Tizoctzin, Ahuizotzin, Moctezumoctzin. This practice is bizarre and seductive, and I think it’s crucial to make note of it, because it’s still alive today: the bandit and killer Joaquín Guzmán is called Chapo, or Shorty. No one calls the president by a diminutive anymore, but I’m not sure there has been an incumbent of that office who deserved it either. Maybe a diminutive is something one earns. The only twentieth-century president who was truly loved by the people, Lázaro Cárdenas, was called Tata, “Grandpa” in Nahuatl.

Full disclosure: If you are reading this page, you are reading a translation. In some languages, readers don’t flinch as the emperor Cuauhtémoc becomes Cuauhtemoctzin, Guatémuz, or Guatemotzin, depending on who is speaking to him and in what context. In other languages, the mutating names seem to throw readers into a state of confusion. I’m not sorry about that: a whole vision of the universe would be lost if Malinalli Tenépatl, the Mayan princess who was Hernán Cortés’s translator, didn’t refer to Cuauhtémoc as Cuauhtemoctzin. Something would also be lost if it weren’t recorded that Hernán Cortés — who was either very arrogant or very deaf — called the emperor by the hideous name of Guatémuz, which was what he heard and then set down in his letters to Charles V. I don’t know — and it’s impossible to know, of course — whether Cortés ever called him Guatemotzin, as he does in this book when he’s trying to be diplomatic, but the function of a novel is precisely that: to name what is lost, to replace the void with an imaginary archive.

And it works the other way round too: if Cuauhtémoc had ever spoken to Malinalli, he would have called her Malitzin, as if the political class to which he belonged had not given her up as a sex toy to a local leader just because he won a battle. This means something, and if it went unmentioned, this book would no longer be a machine for understanding the world, or the ways in which we name the world. We know that Malinche was the terrible word Cortés came up with for Malinalli. He could not say, or he didn’t want to say, Malitzin. His pronunciation of Nahuatl was so atrocious that it confused people: the Indians who survived the conquest called him Malinche; they didn’t understand that he was simply trying to address his mistress politely in Aztec terms.

During the conquest, some contest played out between the Mayan princess subjected to the indignity of sexual servitude and Cuauhtémoc, the young emperor witnessing the annihilation of his realm. And this duel, I’m convinced, is visible in the succession of names adopted by the woman whose resentment shifted the balance of the world: Malinalli, princess-whore; Malitzin, mouthpiece of the soldiers and politicians who held history in their fists perhaps without realizing it; Doña Marina (her Catholic name), mother of the conquistador’s children and owner of a Spanish palace on the outskirts of Mexico City; Malinche, the bitch who vanished from history after having delivered America to the Europeans. Over the course of her life, Malinalli Tenépatl was many people, like all of us, but she had the privilege of possessing a different name for each incarnation. In today’s Spanish, her name is the root of an adjective: malinchista means someone who prefers the foreign and disdains his own culture.

Caravaggio’s name or lack of a name is so important that Peter Robb, one of his most painstaking biographers, doesn’t dare to name him in the book he wrote about him. It is titled M: The Man Who Became Caravaggio, because no document exists to prove that as a child he bore the name he claimed as an adult: Michelangelo Merisi. It’s a fact that his father’s last name was the Milanese Merixio, and that he changed it to the Roman Merisi when he began to sell paintings; it’s likely that his name was Michele and when he got to Rome he added the “angelo” to emulate the most famous artist of the day. Later he decided to erase it all and adopt the generic and enigmatic “Caravaggio,” the name of his undistinguished and insignificant hometown. It’s as if Andy Warhol had signed his serigraphs “Pittsburgh.”

Certainly Cuauhtémoc could be simply Cuauhtémoc in this book, but to dispense with the enigma of the name changes, or to list them at the end of the book and thus create an illusion of clarity where there is none, would be to banish the reader to the stands, to bounce him off the court. A novel isn’t a Cartesian diagram. Pope Pius IV’s surname was Medici, though he wasn’t related to the grand duke of Florence; there were two Borromeos who were bishops of Milan; all of Hernán Cortés’s male offspring were called Martín and all of the important women in his life were called Juana. These facts were confusing in their own time, and there’s no reason why they shouldn’t be confusing in a novel that doesn’t aspire to accurately represent that time, but does want to present it as a theory about the world we live in today.

The question here is the responsibility I bear in the face of the reasonable fear that what is being said won’t be understood. The risk is worth the weight of that responsibility. The sole duty of a writer is to minister to his readers: to liberate them from inexactitude out of respect for the mysterious and touching pact of loyalty that they make with books. But the problem is that I don’t always know why name changes are significant in Mexico, and my hunch is that there is a whole history and politics behind it. When something is clear to a writer, I think it’s fair to ask him not to obscure it, but when something is unclear I think it should be left that way. The honest thing is to relay my doubts, and let the conversation move one step forward: the readers may know better.