Sudden Death

Ex

Hernán Cortés returned from the expedition to Las Hibueras a year and a half after giving the order to garrote Cuauhtémoc, and after bestowing a Spanish husband and the town of Orizaba on Marina. Of the three thousand five hundred men with whom he claimed what would later be called Honduras, he returned with only eighty, all of them Spanish. The Indians — always the overwhelming majority in his armies — had fulfilled what may have been their sacred destiny, hearing the bark of three thousand four hundred and twenty dogs in the night and following through sickness and war their last emperor to his death. Surely many of them, upon finding themselves in strange lands that couldn’t even be conquered because there were no empires to fight, simply took to the bush and swore off the ridiculousness of being Christians and vassals of Charles V.

The expedition to Las Hibueras had been a grand failure. There was the precipitous stretch of Guatemalan mountain on which, between those that were lamed or fled into the wild and those that plunged over the edge, sixty-eight horses were lost. There was hunger. There were ambushes. During one of them, an arrow struck Cortés in the head; no convincing explanation exists of how it was removed and how he was able to carry on. There were illnesses and no Tlaxcalan shaman girls to cure them, only cantankerous old Mayan women to make them worse.

The lives of Cortés and eighty of his thousands of men were saved because at some point on the Honduran coast they found a well-provisioned Spanish ship. The conquistador bought it on credit — lock, stock, and barrel, including the crew — and continued the expedition by sea. Upon his return he even allowed himself the privilege of stopping by Cuba to see his friends, returning to Veracruz plumper and in clean clothes.

He spent the first night of the trip back to Mexico City in Orizaba. There, La Malinche paid a polite visit to the conquistador at the house of the town elder, where he was staying. They sat at the table and talked: bitter enemies now, like all those who have slept together long and well but no longer share a bed. He lied about the success of his expedition and the importance of the three port cities he had founded and let die. She said — as all ex-wives say — that she was glad to be out from under the thumb of a man past his prime, that it was their son — named Martín, of course — whom she missed, though he hadn’t been to visit her despite all the messages and gifts she had sent him. Finally, she handed him the sparrow woven from the hair of the last Aztec emperor. What is it, asked Cortés. After his bouts of fever in the jungles of El Petén, he sometimes forgot things. The scapular you asked me for, said Marina. Cortés smelled it, then held it out before him. You haven’t worn it, he said. I’d have to be crazy. On the face of the pendant was not the silver medallion that the conquistador had sent to her on the day Cuauhtémoc died, but an image in featherwork of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Cortés kissed the image, tilted it until he found the point at which it glowed with refracted light, and smiled with a sincerity that he could come by only very infrequently now. Thank you, he said, clutching it in his fist. He put it on.

When the bard Lope Rodríguez found him lying dead in his house in Castilleja de la Cuesta, outside Seville, he removed it from around his neck. He had never taken it off.