Sudden Death

Ball

The ball court, painted with lime on the turf, was divided in half, and each half was divided into four smaller parts. A player was assigned to each quadrant and couldn’t leave it. Points were scored by passing the rubber ball through a big wooden ring fixed to the wall. If the ball touched the ground, the team that hadn’t made the error won the serve and could shoot for the ring on the first throw. The players rotated and changed court whenever one of the teams had lost the serve thirteen times.

The match was exciting. Apan won. Cortés collected a sum — a dizzying sum, even — from the other gamblers. The Spaniards who had followed him, convinced that they were passing unnoticed as they shrank in their glaring, noisy suits of armor, had watched the match from the opposite side of the trench with no one paying them the slightest attention: if their boss was with Captain Cuauhtémoc, they could do as they pleased. They thought that at last they had been accepted, even commenting among themselves that they should come to see matches more often.

Walking back to the quay, Cortés felt secure enough to ask the prince why he wasn’t taking the opportunity to kill him. My men are far behind, he said; and there are so few of them that the people could easily subdue them. It was the emperor’s request, the prince replied, whispering into Malitzin’s ear. Not to kill me? To talk, make friends; to see whether you would explain why you haven’t left. To the Indian, Malitzin said: I’ve already explained why you spare him, but he doesn’t believe me, and she translated for the Spaniard. Then she asked the future emperor motu proprio: Would you have killed him? So fast that he’d be picking up his own head. You don’t have a dagger. That’s never stopped me, he said, and he explained how a hasty sacrifice to the gods was made on the battlefield: You put the fingers of both hands into the enemy’s mouth, you pull on his teeth in both directions until his jaw snaps, then you break his spine with your knee and yank off his head. She felt a tingling between her legs and the urge to have her breasts touched. He was still staring at her impassively; what he had described was exactly what he would have done. What’s happening, asked Cortés. She told him. He wasn’t amused.

When they reached the outer courtyard of the palace, crammed with bureaucrats hearing the rather vociferous complaints of the inhabitants of the realm, Cortés returned the cacao beans that Cuauhtémoc had loaned him to bet with. Thank him, he said to Malitzin; not for these, but for having kept his word. The Indian looked at him indifferently and answered: Tell him that sooner or later we will face each other in battle, and then I won’t let him go. And yet I will spare his life, answered Cortés, but Malinche didn’t translate.

Six years later, on Shrove Tuesday, 1525, when Cortés gave the Indian Cristóbal the order to garrote the emperor in chains, everything had gone so wrong and everyone had changed court so many times that Malitzin was called Marina and it was Cortés who was called Malinche. By now everyone spoke everyone else’s languages, and without realizing it they had established a third nation, blind to its own beauty, that no one has ever been able to understand. May your God never forgive you, Malinche, said Cuauhtémoc — now in Spanish — to the conquistador by way of farewell. Don’t curse me, replied the captain in Nahuatl; I let you live when your empire was reduced to a barge. I don’t curse you for my death, said the emperor, but for all the other deaths; in this land no one will speak your name without shame. Very likely the four thousand masses that Cortés ordered to be said for the repose of his soul were conceived at that instant.

When I myself visited the convent of the Irish sisters in Castilleja de la Cuesta, I asked the mother superior about the ghost of the conquistador. We’ve never seen him, she said in all seriousness; though there were mothers in the past whom he tried to engage in fornication. And she continued: What he did leave us is a lot of dead people we can’t understand, because they speak a language from somewhere else. There’s a very handsome one, she said, who can’t walk; he has a funny ponytail, on top of his head instead of at the back. Does he make trouble, I asked. He’s sitting in that chair, she said.