Sudden Death

Ball Game

He took the palm-leaf cone. What are they, asked Cortés through Malinche. By now she had learned enough Spanish to interpret directly. Pumpkin seeds roasted in honey, said Cuauhtémoc to Malitzin. The conquistador waited for the Spanish version, took a handful of seeds, and ate them one by one, his eyes on the ball game. They were sitting in the front row, with their legs dangling over the wall, while beneath them the athletes were breaking their backs trying to keep the ball from hitting the ground without touching it with their hands or feet.

During the break before a serve, Cortés showed signs of curiosity — something he did possess, despite his reputation. Which ones represent the underworld and which ones the heavens, he asked Malitzin to inquire. When Cuauhtémoc heard the question — deposited perhaps too close to his ear by the translator — he spat the pumpkin seed shells so that they landed at the very edge of the court. It’s Apan against Tepeaca, he said, shrugging his shoulders slightly. Then he got up and went to bet a few cacao beans on Tepeaca.

Hernán Cortés and Cuauhtémoc had met in the infamous year of 1519, when the visit of the fearsome ambassadors of the king of Spain to the imperial city of the Mexicas was still a courtesy call. Emperor Moctezuma had tried to dissuade his visitors from coming to the city of Tenochtitlan by all the means at his disposal — especially bribery — and they had resisted every temptation, held in check by their captain’s promise that the imperial gold would be theirs as soon as they had conquered the trumpeted Aztec capital. Moctezuma’s grand fuckup — the mistake that changed the world — was not having killed them when they first disembarked, before they were of any consequence.

When he had no choice but to welcome the recent arrivals to his palace, he waited on them with reluctance and fear. It wasn’t superstition that made him afraid of them, as legend has it. He was terrified because they had arrived at the city gates at the head of a troop of rebellious nations from all over the empire. Never in the two hundred years that the Aztecs reigned supreme in Mexico had anyone put together an army like the one that Cortés mustered from the entire east of the realm. None of the cities loyal to Moctezuma had been able to halt them, and though the survival instincts of Spaniards and Aztecs — the two minority groups in the contest — made it necessary for one side to say that they hadn’t come to conquer anything and for the other side to believe them, everyone knew — regardless of how hard they tried to pretend otherwise — that sooner or later the ground beneath their feet would become a mire watered with the thick broth of slaughter.

Cortés and Moctezuma met at the end of the Tacuba causeway, where the church of Jesús Nazareno stands today, at the intersection of República del Salvador and Pino Suárez. The tlatoani gave the captain a necklace of jade beads and received a pearl necklace in exchange — probably strung by Malitzin. The two of them walked to the royal palace, whose foundations today lie under the Palacio Nacional. The visit, though ominous, wasn’t directly catastrophic: Cortés had presented himself in Tenochtitlan with his Spanish company alone, to avoid the awkwardness of being seen surrounded by sworn enemies of the Aztecs. The emperor was accompanied by the kings of the Triple Alliance, the caciques of all the lakeside estates and their captains, among whom was Cuauhtemoctzin, a cousin of Moctezuma on his wife’s side.

Once they had reached the palace, the full imperial court settled around a courtyard to witness the conversation between Moctezuma and Cortés. It was a conversation in which no one would have understood anything, not only because there could not have been two people in the world more utterly remote from each other, but because what was said in Nahuatl had to be translated first into Chontal and then into Spanish and what was said in Spanish had to be translated first into Chontal and then Nahuatl, since the conquistador didn’t trust any tongue but that of Malitzin, who spoke Chontal and Nahuatl, and that of the priest Jerónimo de Aguilar, who spoke Chontal and Spanish.

They exchanged more gifts and messages of goodwill. When they were done, the emperor returned to his sacred routine, removing himself from view of his guests and subjects — no one would see him again until the day of his death — to concentrate on ruling an empire that by this point had shrunk by nearly half.

Over the next eighteen months this empire, already slim, would grow even slimmer, until it occupied only the Valley of Mexico, and then only Lake Texcoco, and at last only the island city of Tenochtitlan. On August 13, 1521, the empire was nothing but the royal barge, on which Cuauhtémoc was seized trying to escape by water from the wrecked Aztec capital. For once, history was just: a particularly bloody realm reduced to a single barge. Though that didn’t mean the good guys had won. The good guys never win.

Several months after his meeting with the Spanish captain, Moctezuma sent word to Cuauhtemoctzin: now that the Spaniards had recovered from the shock of seeing the biggest and most hectic city in the world, he should take Cortés for a stroll, show him something, anything. Get close to him, the blind eunuch messenger whispered to the emperor’s cousin; listen to him, let him feel that you’re interested in him. Why me, asked Cuauhtémoc. Because you speak Chontal, said the messenger.

The young man had so far been an invincible captain and an intelligent ally of the throne. He was discreet, solitary, trustworthy. Noted for his discipline in a world where discipline was paramount. Tell the emperor I’ll take him to the ball game, he replied.

He waited a few days to approach Malitzin, Cortés’s Chontal tongue; he waited for the end of the first harvest, which was celebrated with games that were anticipated all year and that were definitely a sight for a foreigner to see.