The Orange Tree

The Two Shores

[10]

ALL this I saw. The fall of the great Aztec city in the moan of the conch shells, the clash of steel against flint, and the fire of Castilian cannon. I saw the burnt water of the lake where stood this Great Tenochtitlán, two times the size of Córdoba.

The temples fell, the standards, the trophies. The very gods themselves fell. And the day after the defeat, using the stones of the Indian temples, we began to build the Christian churches. Anyone curious — or who happens to be a mole — will find at the base of the columns of the Cathedral of Mexico the magic emblems of the God of Night, the smoking mirror of Tezcatlipoca. How long will the new mansions of our one God, built on the ruins of the not one but thousand gods last? Perhaps as long as the name of these: Rain, Water, Wind, Fire, Garbage …

To tell the truth, I don’t know. I just died of buboes. A horrible death, painful, incurable. A bouquet of plagues bestowed upon me by my own Indian brothers in exchange for the evils we Spaniards visited on them. I am shocked to see this city of Mexico populated by faces scarred by smallpox, as devastated as the causeways of the conquered city — all in the twinkling of an eye. The water of the lake heaves, boiling; the walls have contracted an incurable leprosy; the faces have forever lost their dark beauty, their perfect profile: for all time, Europe has marked the face of this New World, which, in fact, is older than the European face. Although to tell the truth, from this Olympian vantage point death has given me, I see everything that’s happened as the meeting of two old worlds, both millenarian — the stones we’ve found here are as old as those of Egypt, and the destiny of all empires was written for all time on the wall at Balthazar’s feast.

I saw it all. I’d like to tell it all. But my appearances in history are rigorously limited to what’s been said about me. The chronicler Bernal Díaz del Castillo mentions me fifty-eight times in his True History of the Conquest of New Spain. The last thing known about me is that I was already dead when Hernán Cortés, our commander, embarked on his ill-fated expedition to Honduras in October of 1524. That’s how the chronicler describes it, and he soon forgets about me.

True, I do reappear in the final parade of ghosts, when Bernal Díaz lists the fates of the comrades of the conquest. The writer possesses a prodigious memory: he remembers every name, doesn’t forget a single horse or who rode it. Perhaps he had no other recourse but memory to save himself from death. Or from something worse: disillusion and sadness. Let’s not fool ourselves. No one escaped unscathed from this venture of discovery and conquest — neither the conquered, who witnessed the destruction of their world, nor the conquerors, who never achieved the total satisfaction of their ambitions, suffering instead endless injustices and disenchantments. Both should have built a new world after their shared defeat. I can know that because I’ve already died; the chronicler from Medina del Campo didn’t know it very well when he wrote his fabulous history, which is why he’s got more than enough memory and not enough imagination.

Not a single comrade of the conquest is missing from his list. But the vast majority are dispatched with a laconic epitaph: He died his death. It’s true that some, very few, are singled out because they died “in the power of the Indians.” The most interesting are those who had a singular, almost always violent, fate.

Glory and abjection are equally evident in this affair of the conquest. Cortés sentenced Pedro Escudero and Juan Cermeño to the gallows because they tried to escape to Cuba on a boat, while he only ordered their pilot, Gonzalo de Umbría, to have his toes cut off. Maimed and all, this Umbría had the effrontery to appear before the King and complain, obtaining thereby rents paid in gold and Indian townships. Cortés must have regretted not having hanged him as well. Observe then, readers, listeners, penitents, or whatever you are as you approach my tomb, how decisions are made when time presses and history suppresses. Things could always have happened exactly opposite to the way the chronicle records them. Always.

But it also tells you that in this undertaking there was a bit of everything, from the personal pleasures of a certain Morón who was a great musician, a man named Porras with bright red hair who was a great singer, or an Ortiz who was a great cittern player and dancing master, to the disasters of Enrique something-or-other, a native of Palencia, who drowned from fatigue, the weight of his weapons, and the heat they caused him.

There are crossed destinies: Cortés marries Alfonso de Grado to no less a personage than Doña Isabel, daughter of the Aztec emperor Moctezuma; at the same time, a certain Xuárez, called the Old Man, ends up killing his wife with a corn-grinding stone. Who wins, who loses in a war of conquest? Juan Sedeño came with a fortune — merely his own ship, a mare and a black to serve him, bacon, a good supply of cassava bread — and made more here. A certain Burguillos, on the other hand, acquired wealth and good Indians, but he gave it all up to become a Franciscan. Most returned from the conquest or stayed on in Mexico without saving a single maravedí.

So what can one more destiny — my own — matter in this parade of glory and misery? I’ll merely say that in this matter of destinies, I think that the wisest of all of us was the man called Solís, “Behind-the-Door,” who spent his time in his house behind the door watching the others pass by in the street, not meddling with anyone and not being meddled with by anyone. Now I think that in death we’re all like Solís: behind the door, watching people pass by without being seen, and reading what’s said about us in the chronicles written by the survivors.

About me, then, this is the final statement:

Another soldier, whose name was Jerónimo de Aguilar, passed; I include Aguilar in this account because he was the man we found at Catoche Point, who was being held by Indians and who became our translator. He died crippled with buboes.

[9]

I have many final impressions of the great business of the conquest of Mexico, in which fewer than six hundred valiant Spaniards subdued an empire nine times larger than Spain in territory and three times larger in population. To say nothing of the fabulous treasure we found here, which, shipped to Cádiz and Seville, made the fortune not only of Spain but of the whole of Europe, for all time, right until today.

I, Jerónimo de Aguilar, look at the New World before closing my eyes forever, and the last thing I see is the coast of Veracruz and the ships setting sail filled with Mexican treasure, guided by the most trustworthy of compasses: a sun of gold and a moon of silver, both simultaneously hanging over a blue-black sky that is stormy on high but bloody as soon as it touches the surface of the water.

I want to bid farewell to the world with this image of power and riches in the background of my vision: five well-stocked ships, a large number of soldiers, and many horses, shot, shotguns, crossbows, and all sorts of weapons, piled up to the masts and stored in the holds as ballast; eighty thousand pesos in gold and silver, infinite jewels, and the entire wardrobe of Moctezuma and Guatemuz, the last Mexican kings. A clean conquest operation, justified by the treasure a bold captain in the service of the Crown sends to His Majesty, King Charles.

But my eyes don’t manage to close in peace, thinking above all about the abundance of protection, arms, men, and horses that accompanied the gold and silver of Mexico back to Spain — a cruel contrast to the insecurity, slim resources, and small number of soldiers with which Cortés and his men came from Cuba in the first moment of this dubious exploit. And yet, just look at the ironies of history.

Quiñones, captain of Cortés’s personal guard, sent to protect the treasure, crossed the Bahamas but stopped at the island of Terceira with the booty of Mexico. He fell in love with a woman there, and was stabbed to death because of it; while Alonso de Dávila, who led the expedition, crossed the path of the French pirate Jean Fleury, whose nickname among us is Juan Florín, who stole the gold and silver and imprisoned Dávila in France, where King Francis I had declared again and again, “Show me the clause in Adam’s testament in which the king of Spain is given half the world,” to which his corsairs answered in chorus: “When God created the sea, he gave it to all of us without exception.” And as a moral to the story: Florín or Fleury was himself captured on the high seas by Basques (Valladolid, Burgos, the Basque Country: the Discovery and Conquest finally united and mobilized all Spain!) and hanged in the port of Pico …

And the thing doesn’t end there, because a certain Cárdenas, a pilot born in the Triana district of Seville and a member of our expedition, denounced Cortés in Castile, saying that he’d never seen a land where there were two kings as there were in New Spain, since Cortés took for himself, without any right to it, as much as he sent to His Majesty. For his declaration, the King gave this man from Triana a thousand pesos in rents and a parcel of Indians.

The bad thing is that he was right. We were all witnesses to the way our commander took the lion’s share and promised us soldiers rewards at the end of the war. May it be long in coming! So we were left, after sweating our teeth out, without a pot to piss in … Cortés was sentenced and deprived of power; his captains lost their lives, their freedom, and, what’s worse, the treasure, which ended up scattered to the four corners of Europe …

Is there any justice, I ask myself, in all this? Did we do nothing more than give the gold of the Aztecs a better destiny by pulling it out of its sterile occupation and spreading it around, distributing it, conferring on it an economic purpose instead of an ornamental or sacred one, putting it into circulation, melting it down the better to see it melt away?

[8]

From my grave, I try to judge things calmly; but one image forces itself on my thoughts again and again. I see before me a young man, about twenty-two years old, of clear, dark complexion, of a very noble disposition, both in body and in facial features.

He was married to one of Moctezuma’s nieces. He was called Guatemuz or Guatimozín and had a cloud of blood in his eyes. Whenever he felt his vision blur, he lowered his eyelids, and I saw them: one was gold and the other silver. He was the last emperor of the Aztecs, after his uncle Moctezuma was stoned to death by the disillusioned mob. We Spaniards killed something more than the power of the Indians: we killed the magic that surrounded it. Moctezuma did not fight. Guatemuz — let it be said to his honor — fought like a hero.

Captured with his captains and brought before Cortés on August 13, at the hour of vespers on Saint Hippolytus Day in the year 1521, Guatemuz said that in the defense of his people and vassals he’d done everything he was obliged to do out of honor and (he added) also out of passion, strength, and conviction. “And since I’ve been brought by force, a prisoner,” he said then to Cortés, “before your person and power. Take that dagger you wear on your belt and kill me with it.”

This young, valiant Indian, the last emperor of the Aztecs, began to weep, but Cortés answered him that for being so brave he should come in peace to the fallen city and govern in Mexico and in its provinces as he had before.

I know all this because I was the translator of the interview between Cortés and Guatemuz, who could not understand each other alone. I translated as I pleased. I didn’t communicate to the conquered prince what Cortés really said, but put into the mouth of our leader a threat: “You will be my prisoner; today I will torture you by burning your feet and those of your comrades until you confess where the rest of your uncle Moctezuma’s treasure is (the part that didn’t end up in the hands of French pirates).”

I added, inventing on my own and mocking Cortés: “You’ll never be able to walk again, but you’ll accompany me on future conquests, crippled and weeping, as a symbol of continuity and the source of legitimacy for my enterprise, whose banners, raised on high, are gold and fame, power and religion.”

I translated, I betrayed, I invented. Right then and there, Guatemuz’s tears dried, and instead of tears, down one cheek ran gold and down the other silver, cutting a furrow in them as a knife would, leaving a permanent wound in them which, may it please God, death has healed.

Since my own death, I remember that vespers of Saint Hippolytus, recorded by Bernal Díaz as an eternal night of rain and lightning, and I reveal myself before posterity as a falsifier, a traitor to my commander Cortés, who instead of making a peace offering to the fallen prince offered him cruelty, continued oppression without mercy, and eternal shame for the conquered.

But since things happened as I’d said, my false words becoming reality, wasn’t I right to translate the commander backwards and tell the truth with my lies to the Aztec? Or were my words perhaps a mere exchange and I nothing more than the intermediary (the translator), the mainspring of a fatal destiny that transformed trick into truth?

On that Saint Hippolytus night, playing the role of translator between the conquistador and the conquered, I merely confirmed the power of words: I used them to say the opposite of what Cortés said only to express what he actually did. I’d acquired a knowledge of the soul of my commander, Hernán Cortés, a dazzling mix of reason and folly, will and weakness, skepticism and fantastic naïveté, good luck and bad, gallantry and jest, virtue and malice — all those things went into the man from Estremadura, the conqueror of Mexico whom I’d followed from Yucatan to Moctezuma’s court.

The powers of folly and foolishness or malice and good fortune when they’re not in harmony, when they’re only words, can turn our intentions upside down. The story of the last Aztec king, Guatemuz, ended with him not in the place of power promised by Cortés, not in the honor with which the Indian surrendered, but in a cruel comedy, the very one I’d invented and made inevitable with my lies. The young emperor was the king of fools, dragged without feet by the victor’s chariot, crowned with cactus, and finally hanged upside down from the branches of a sacred silk-cotton tree like a hunted-down animal. What happened was exactly what I had lyingly invented.

For that reason I don’t sleep in peace. Possibilities not carried out, the alternatives of freedom all rob me of sleep.

A woman was to blame.

[7]

Among all the prodigies produced by my captain Don Hernán Cortés to impress the Indians — fire from harquebuses, steel swords, glass beads — none was so important as the horses of the conquest. A shotgun blast fades in smoke; a Spanish blade can be overcome by a two-handed Indian sword; glass may fool people, an emerald as well. But the horse exists, stands there, has a life of its own, moves, possesses the combined power of nerve, gloss, muscle, foaming mouth, and hooves. Those hooves, links to the earth, makers of thunder, twins of steel. Hypnotic eyes. The rider who gets on and off adds to the perpetual metamorphosis of the beast seen now but never before imagined, not, certainly, by the Indians, not even by a single one of their gods.

Could the horse be the dream of a god who never communicated his secret nightmare to us?

An Indian could never overcome an armed Castilian on horseback, and this is the true secret of the conquest, not any dream or prophecy. Cortés exploited his meager cavalry to the limit, not only in attacks or fights in open country but in specially prepared seaside cavalcades where the chargers seemed to shake the waves — so much so that even we Spaniards imagined that if the horses were not there, these coasts would be as calm as a mirror of water.

We stared in astonishment at the unthought-of fraternity between the sea foam and the foam on their dewlaps.

And in Tabasco, when Captain Cortés wanted to astonish the envoys of the Great Moctezuma, he paired off a stallion with a mare in heat and hid them, instructing me to make them whinny at the right moment. The king’s envoys had never heard that sound and succumbed in shock to the powers of the Teúl, or Spanish God, as the Indians called Cortés from that moment on.

The truth is that neither I nor anyone else had ever before heard such a whinny come out of the silence, devoid of a body, and reveal animal desire, bestial lust, with such crude force. My captain’s theatrics far surpassed his intentions and even shocked us Spaniards. It made all of us feel a bit like beasts …

But the emissaries of the Great Moctezuma had also seen all the portents of that year prophesied by their magicians concerning the return of their blond and bearded god. Our marvels — the horses, the cannon — only confirmed what they already carried in their eyes: comets at midday, water in flames, fallen towers, nocturnal shrieking of wandering women, children carried away by the wind …

And lo and behold, Don Hernán Cortés arrives at that precise moment, as white as winters in the Gredos mountains, as hard as the earth in Medellín and Trujillo, and with a beard older than he was. So they wait for the return of the gods and instead get people like the hunchback Rodrigo Jara or Juan Pérez, who killed his wife, known as the Cowherd’s Daughter, or Pedro Perón de Toledo, of turbulent descendancy, or a certain Izquierdo from Castromocho. Some gods! Even in the grave I cackle to think of it.

One image cuts off my laughter. The horse.

Even Valladolid, “the Fat Man,” looked good on horseback; I mean he inspired respect and awe. The mortality of the man was saved by the immortality of the horse. Cortés was right when he told us from the first moment: “We shall bury the dead at night and in secret. That way our enemies will think us immortal.”

The rider fell; never the charger. Never; not Cortés’s bay, not Alonso Hernández’s silver-gray mare that ran so well, not Montejo’s sorrel, not even Morán’s splayfooted, spotted nag. So it wasn’t just men who entered the Great Tenochtitlán on November 3, 1520, but centaurs: mythological beings with two heads and six feet, armed with thunder and dressed in stone. And besides, thanks to the coincidences of the calendar, we’d been confused with the returning god, Quetzalcoatl.

Appropriately, Moctezuma received us on foot, halfway along the causeway that linked the valley to the city built on a lake, saying: “Welcome. You are home. Now rest.”

No one among us had ever seen a city more splendid than Moctezuma’s capital, neither in the Old World nor in the New: the canals, the canoes, the towers and wide plazas, the well-stocked markets and the novel things to be seen there, things never seen by us, things not mentioned in the Bible: tomatoes, turkeys, chili, chocolate, maize, potatoes, tobacco, agave beer, emeralds, jade, gold and silver in abundance, featherwork, and soft, mournful chanting …

Beautiful women, well-swept rooms, patios full of birds, and cages stuffed with tigers; gardens and albino dwarfs to serve us. Like Alexander in Capua, we were threatened by the delights of triumph. We were rewarded for our efforts. The horses were well taken care of.

Until one morning. Moctezuma, the great king who had received us with such hospitality in his city and in his palace, was in a royal chamber surrounded by all of us, when something happened that changed the course of our enterprise.

Cortés’s lieutenant, Pedro de Alvarado, bold and gallant, cruel and shameless, had red hair and a red beard, which made the Indians call him Tonantío, which means the Sun. Likable and brazen, Tonantío had been amusing King Moctezuma with a game of dice — another novelty for these Indians — and for the moment the monarch was distracted, incapable of guessing his fortune beyond the next toss of the dice, even when he was being cheated, as he was at that moment by the irrepressible Alvarado. The king looked irritated, because he usually changed clothes several times a day, and either his serving maids were late or his tunic smelled or itched, who knows what …

Just at that moment, four tamemes, or Indian bearers, walk into the chamber followed by the usual din of our guards, and with impassive expressions drop in front of Cortés and the emperor the severed head of a horse.

It was then that the conquistador’s second translator, an enslaved princess from Tabasco baptized Doña Marina but nicknamed La Malinche, quickly interpreted the messengers who’d come from the coast with news of an uprising of Mexicans in Veracruz against the garrison left there by Cortés. The Aztec troops had killed Juan de Escalante, head constable of the port, and six Spaniards.

Most important, they’d killed the horse. Here was the proof.

I noticed that Alvarado stood stock-still with his hand filled with dice in the air, staring at the hall-open, glassy eyes of the horse as if he’d seen himself in them and as if in the flint-cut neck, slashed as if in rage, the enraged and red-haired captain had seen his own end.

Moctezuma lost interest in the game, shrugging his shoulders a bit, and stared fixedly at the horse’s head. His eloquent eyes, however, silently told us Spaniards, “So you’re gods? Well then, behold the mortality of your powers.”

Cortés, on the other hand, stood staring at Moctezuma with such a face of betrayal that I could only read in it what our captain wanted to see in the king’s countenance.

I have never felt that so many things were said without a word being spoken. Moctezuma, approaching the horse’s head in a devout, almost humiliated fashion, said, without saying anything, that just as the horse died so could the Spaniards die if he decreed it. And he would decree it, if the foreigners did not withdraw in peace.

Without saying a word, Cortés warned the king that it would not be advisable for him to start a war that would ultimately destroy both him and his city.

Pedro de Alvarado, who knew nothing of subtle discourses, spoken or unspoken, violently threw the dice against the face of the horrifying divinity that presided over the chamber, the goddess named for her skirt of serpents. Before Moctezuma could say anything, Cortés stepped forward and ordered the king to abandon his palace and come to live in the one occupied by the Spaniards.

“If you sound an alarm or shout, you will be killed by my captains,” Cortés said in an even tone, impressing Moctezuma more by that than Alvarado had with his physical fury. Nevertheless, after his initial shock and dismay, the king responded by removing from his arm and wrist the seal of Huichilobos, the god of war, as if he were going to order our slaughter.

But all he did was excuse himself: “I never ordered the attack in Veracruz. I shall punish my captains for having done it.”

The handmaidens entered with the fresh clothes. They seemed flustered by the low tavern brawl they’d stumbled upon. Moctezuma recovered his dignity and said he would not leave his palace.

Alvarado then confronted Cortés: “Why are you wasting so many words? Either we take him prisoner or we run him through.”

Once again, it was the interpreter Doña Marina who decided the struggle, forcefully advising the king: “Lord Moctezuma, what I recommend is that you go with them now to their dwelling without making a sound. I know they will honor you as the great lord you are. If you do otherwise, you will be put to death.”

You understand that the woman said these things to the emperor on her own initiative, not translating Cortés but speaking Moctezuma’s Mexican language fluently. The king looked like a cornered animal, but instead of shifting around on four legs he staggered on his own two feet. He offered his sons as hostages. He repeated these words several times: “Do not dishonor me in this way. What will my principal men say if they see me taken prisoner? Anything but this dishonor.”

Was this pusillanimous creature the great lord who had subjugated all the tribes from Xalisco to Nicaragua through terror? Was this the cruel despot who one day ordered that those who dreamed about the end of his reign be put to death so that the dreams would die with the dreamers? I can only understand the enigma of Moctezuma’s weakness before the Spaniards by using words as an explanation. Called Tlatoani, or Lord of the Great Voice, Moctezuma was slowly but surely losing his control over words — more than his control over men. I think that novelty disconcerted him, and Doña Marina had just proven, by arguing with him face-to-face, that the words of the king were no longer sovereign. Therefore, neither was he. Others, the foreigners, but also this treacherous woman from Tabasco, owned a vocabulary forbidden to Moctezuma.

In this second opportunity that stood between things said, things done, and the unforeseeable consequences of both, I saw my own opportunity. That night, under a mantle of secrecy, I spoke to the king in Mexican and told him privately about the dangers threatening the Spaniards. Did Moctezuma know that the governor of Cuba had sent an expedition to arrest Cortés, whom he considered a vile rebel who acted without authorization and who was worthy of being imprisoned instead of making a prisoner of such a great lord as Moctezuma, the equal only of another king, Don Carlos, whom Cortés, with no credentials, sought to represent?

I repeat these words as I said them, in one rush, without taking a breath, with no shade of meaning, no subtlety, hating myself for my betrayal but, above all, for my inferiority in the arts of dissimulation, trickery, and dramatic pauses, in which my rivals, Cortés and La Malinche, were masters.

I ended as abruptly as I’d begun, getting, as they say, right to the point: “This expedition against Cortés is led by Pánfilo de Narváez, a captain as bold as Cortés himself, but with five times as many men.”

“Are they also Christians?” asked Moctezuma.

I said they were, and that they represented King Carlos, from whom Cortés was fleeing.

Moctezuma patted my hand and offered me a ring as green as a parrot. I gave it back and told him that my love for his people was reward enough. The king looked at me without understanding, as if he himself had never understood that he led a group of human beings. I asked myself then and I ask myself now, what kind of power did Moctezuma think he had and over whom? Perhaps he was only acting out some pantomime in front of the gods, wearing himself out in an effort to hear them and to be heard by them. But what was exchanged there was neither jewels nor pats on the hand but words, words that could give Moctezuma more power than all the horses and harquebuses the Spaniards possessed, if the Aztec king would only decide to speak to his men, his people, instead of speaking to the gods, his pantheon.

I told the king the secret of Cortés’s weakness, just as Doña Marina had given Cortés the secret of Aztec weakness, the discord, the envy, the struggle between brothers, which affected Spain just as much as Mexico: one half of the country perpetually dying of the other half.

[6]

Thus I associated myself with the hope of an Indian victory. All my acts, you’ve already guessed and I can tell you right from my intangible shroud, were directed toward that goal: the triumph of the Indians over the Spaniards. Once again, Moctezuma let opportunity slip through his fingers. He got ahead of events, boasting in the presence of Cortés that he knew Cortés was threatened by Narváez instead of hastening to join forces with Narváez against Cortés, to defeat the man from Estremadura, and then to turn the Aztec nation against the fatigued regiment of Narváez. In that way, Mexico would have been saved …

I must say at this point that Moctezuma’s vanity was always stronger than his cunning, although even stronger than his vanity was his feeling that everything was foretold, which was why the king had only to carry out the role set for him by religious and political ceremonial. In the soul of the king, fidelity to forms was its own reward. It had always happened that way, wasn’t that the truth?

I didn’t know how to say it wasn’t, to argue with him. Perhaps my Mexican vocabulary was insufficient, and I didn’t know the subtlest forms of Aztec philosophic and moral reasoning. What I did want was to frustrate the fatal plan, if such a thing existed, by means of words, imagination, lies. But when words, imagination, and lies jumble together, the result is the truth …

The Aztec king was hoping Cortés would be beaten by the punitive expedition sent by the governor of Cuba, but he did nothing to hasten the defeat of our captain. His certainty was understandable. If Cortés, with only five hundred men, had defeated the chiefs of Tabasco and Zempoala as well as the fierce Tlaxcaltecs, wouldn’t more than two thousand Spaniards also armed with fire and horses defeat him?

But the cunning Cortés, accompanied by his new Indian allies, defeated Narváez’s people and captured their leader. Observe the irony of this matter: now we had two prisoners of importance, one Aztec and the other Spanish, Moctezuma and Narváez. Was there any limit to the number of our victories?

“The truth is, I don’t understand you,” the Great Moctezuma, sequestered but quite at his ease being bathed by his beautiful handmaidens, said to us.

But did we understand him?

This question, reader, obliges me to pause and reflect before events once again rush to their conclusion, always more swiftly than the pen of the narrator, although this time he writes from death.

Moctezuma: Did we understand exactly how alien to him treacherous political machinations were, and how natural, by contrast, was the proximity of a religious world impenetrable to Europeans? Impenetrable for having been forgotten: our contact with God and His primary emanations had been lost for a long, long time. In that, Moctezuma and his people were indeed alike, though neither knew it: the clay of creation, the nearness of the gods, still moistened them.

Did we understand him, sheltered as he was in another time, the time of origins, which for him was current, immediate time, portentous as both refuge and threat?

I compared him to a cornered animal. Instead, this refined man seems to me, now that death has made us equal, not only like the scrupulous individual of infinite courtesies we met when we entered Mexico but like the first man, always the first, amazed that the world exists and that the light advances every day before fading into the cruelty of every night. His obligation consisted in always being, in the name of all, the first man to ask: “Will the sun come up again?”

This was a more urgent question for Moctezuma and the Aztecs than knowing whether Narváez defeated Cortés, Cortés defeated Narváez, the Tlaxcaltecs defeated Cortés, or if Moctezuma would fall before all of them: as long as he didn’t fall before the gods.

Would it rain again, would the maize grow again, the river run, the beasts roar?

All the power, the elegance, the very distance of Moctezuma was the disguise of a man recently arrived at the regions of the dawn. He was a witness to the first shout and the first terror. Fear of being and gratitude for being were mixed within him, behind the paraphernalia of plumed headpieces and collars, handmaidens, tiger knights, and bloody priests.

It was a woman, Marina, an Indian like him, from his own land, who actually defeated him, although she did use two tongues. It was she who revealed to Cortés that the Aztec empire was divided, that the peoples subjugated by Moctezuma hated him and hated each other as well, and that the Spaniards could grasp opportunity by the forelock; it was she who understood the secret uniting our two lands: fratricidal hatred, division — I’ve already said it: two nations, each one dying of the other …

Too late. I communicated to Moctezuma that Cortés was also hated and beset on all sides from an imperial Spain as contentious as the Mexican empire he was conquering.

I forgot two things.

Cortés listened to Marina not only as an interpreter but as a lover. And as translator and lover, she paid attention to the human voices of this land. Moctezuma listened only to the gods; I wasn’t one of them, so the attention he paid me was one more manifestation of his courtesy, as rich as an emerald but as evanescent as the voice of a parrot.

I, who also possessed the two voices, European and American, had been defeated. I had two homelands, which perhaps was more my weakness than my strength. Marina, La Malinche, bore the deep pain and rancor but also the hope of her condition; she had to risk everything to save her life and have descendants. Her weapon was the same as mine: her tongue. But I found myself divided between Spain and the New World. I knew both shores.

Marina didn’t; she could give herself entirely to the New World, not to her subjugated past, true enough, but to her ambiguous, uncertain, and therefore unconquered future. Perhaps I deserved my defeat. I could not save the poor king of my adoptive country, Mexico, by telling him a secret, a truth, an infidelity.

Then came the defeat I’ve already told of.

[5]

Doña Marina and I fought, truly fought, in the drama of Cholula. I didn’t always possess the Mexican language. My initial advantage was knowing Spanish and Maya after the long time I spent among the Indians in Yucatan. Doña Marina — La Malinche — spoke only Maya and Mexican when she was given to Cortés as a slave. So for a while I was the only one who could translate into the language of Castile. The Mayas of the coast told me the things I would translate into Spanish or say them to La Malinche, but she depended on me to communicate them to Cortés. Sometimes, the Mexicans would tell the woman things she would say to me in Maya and I would translate them into Spanish. And although in those instances she had an advantage — she could invent whatever she wanted in passing from Nahuatl to Maya — I went on being the master of language. The Castilian translation that reached the ears of the conquistador was always mine.

Then we reached Cholula, after the vicissitudes of the coast, the founding of Veracruz, the taking of Zempoala and its fat chieftain, who revealed to us, huffing and puffing from his litter, that the conquered peoples would unite with us against Moctezuma. We arrived after our fight against the haughty Tlaxcaltecs, who, even though they were mortal enemies of Moctezuma, did not want to exchange the power of Mexico for the new oppression of the Spaniards.

For centuries, people have said that the Tlaxcaltecs are to blame for everything; pride and betrayal can be faithful companions, each one covering up for the other. The fact is that when we — Cortés and our small band of Spaniards, along with the battalions of fierce Tlaxcaltec warriors — drew up outside the gates of Cholula, we were stopped by the priests of those holy places, because Cholula was the pantheon of all the gods of these lands. As in Rome, they were all admitted, with no distinctions made about their origin, into the great, collective temple of divinities. To that end, the people of Cholula erected the greatest pyramid of all, a honeycomb of seven structures one inside the other, all linked together by deep labyrinths of red and yellow reverberations.

I already knew that in this land everything is governed by the stars, the Sun and Moon, Venus, who is her own precious twin at dawn and dusk, and a calendar that provides a precise account of the agricultural year and its 360 bountiful days plus 5 unlucky days: the masked days.

It must have been on one of those days that we Spaniards arrived here, because after sending the Tlaxcaltec host ahead we ran into a blockade of popes, priests dressed in black — black tunics, black hair, black skin, all as black as the night wolves of these lands, with one single flash emblazoned on their hair, eyes, and togas: the shine of the blood, like a sticky, brilliant sweat, that was proper to their office.

Loud and firmly did these priests speak, forbidding admittance to the violent Tlaxcaltecs. Cortés yielded to their demand, on condition that the Cholulans quickly abandon their idols.

“They haven’t even entered, and they’re already asking us to betray the gods!” exclaimed the popes in a tone difficult to define, between a lament and a challenge, between sigh and fury, between fatality and dissimulation, as if they were ready to die for their divinities, but resigning themselves at the same time to give them up for lost.

All this did La Malinche translate from Mexican into Spanish, while I, Jerónimo de Aguilar, the first of all the interpreters, remained in a kind of limbo, waiting for my turn to translate into Castilian, until I realized, perhaps stupefied by the unbearable stench of muddy blood and incense, shit from Andalusian horses, excessive sweat from the soldiers, conflictive cooking of chili and bacon, of garlic and turkey, all indistinguishable from the sacrificial cooking that wafted its smoke and chanting from the pyramid, I realized that Jerónimo de Aguilar was no longer needed. The diabolical female was translating everything, this bitch of a Marina, this whore who learned to speak Spanish. This scoundrel, this trickster, this expert in sucking, the conquistador’s concubine, had stolen my professional singularity away from me, the function where there was no substitute for me, my — to coin a word — my monopoly over the Castilian language … La Malinche had pulled the Spanish language out of Cortés’s sex, she’d sucked it out of him, she’d castrated him of it without his knowing it, by disguising mutilation as pleasure …

This language was no longer mine alone. Now it belonged to her, and that night I tortured myself in my own sheltered solitude within the clamor of Cholula, whose people had crowded into the streets and onto the terraces to watch us pass with our horses and shotguns and helmets and beards; I tortured myself imagining the nights of love of the man from Estremadura and his whore, her body, hairless and cinnamon-hued, with the excitable nipples these women use to attack and the secret and deep sex they hide, sparse in hair, abundant in juices, between their wide hips. I imagined the incomparable smoothness of the thighs of Indian women, used to having water flow over them to wash away the crusts of time, the past, and the pain that clot between the legs of our Spanish mothers. Female smoothness, I imagined her in my solitude, hidden holes in which my lord Hernán Cortés has poked his fingers, tongue, phallus, his fingers adorned with festive rings and wrapped in gauntlets when time came for war: the hands of the conquistador, between jewels and steel, metal nails, fingertips of blood, and lines of fire — luck, love, intelligence in flames, guiding toward the perfumed medlar of the Indian woman first his sex sheathed in a pubic beard which must be as ascetic as the vegetation of Estremadura, and a pair of balls which I imagine tense, as hard as the shot of our harquebuses.

But Cortés’s sex was ultimately less sexual than his mouth and beard, that beard which seemed too old for a thirty-five-year-old man, as if he’d inherited it from the times of Viriatus and his fields of hay set afire against the Roman invaders, from the times of the besieged city of Numantia and its squadrons dressed in mourning, from the times of Pelayo and his lances made from pure Asturian mist: a beard older than the man on whose jaws it grew. Perhaps the Mexicans were right, and a beardless Cortés wore, borrowed, the extremely long beard of that very same god Quetzalcoatl, with whom these natives confused him …

The most terrible, the most shocking thing was not Cortés’s sex, but that from the depth of the forest, from the mourning, from the mist, would emerge his tongue, which was the conqueror’s true sex, and that he would stick it into the Indian woman’s mouth with more power, more seed, and more pregnancy — my God, I’m delirious! I’m suffering, Lord! — with more fecundity than his sex. Tongue-phallus-whip, thrashing, hard, and ductile at the same time: poor me, Jerónimo de Aguilar, dead all this time, with my tongue split up the middle, fork-tongued like the plumed serpent. Who am I, of what use am I?

[4]

The Cholulans said we could enter without the Tlaxcaltecs. They could not renounce their gods, but they would obey the King of Spain with pleasure. They said it through La Malinche, who translated it from Mexican into Spanish while I stood there like a royal ninny, mulling over what my next step would be to recover my tattered dignity. (I’m not going far enough: language was more than dignity, it was power; and more than power, it was the very life that animated my plans, my own program of discovery, unique, surprising, unrepeatable …)

But since I couldn’t go to bed with Cortés, I thought I’d be better off giving the devil her due and decided that at least for now there was no sense crying over spilt milk.

During the first days, the Cholulans gave us abundant food and feed. But soon enough they began to stint on the food. Then they grew obstinate and remiss, and I started looking at Doña Marina with suspicion, while she stared back at me, immutable, firmly supported by her carnal intimacy with our captain.

A perpetual cloud ominously hung over the sacred city; the smoke became so thick we couldn’t see the tops of the temples or the stones under our feet. Cholula’s head and feet dissolved in mist, though it was impossible to know if it came, as I said when we arrived, from the different levels of the pyramid, from the horses’ assholes, or from the bowels of the mountains. The strange thing is that Cholula stands on level ground, but now nothing was level here and instead seemed unfathomable and craggy.

Observe how words transformed even the landscape: Cholula’s new landscape was nothing more than the reflection of the sinuous struggle of words, sometimes as deep as a ravine, at other times craggy, like a mountain of thorns; whispering and soothing like a great river, or stirred up and raucous like an ocean dragging loose stones: a shrieking of mermaids wounded by the tide.

I told the popes: “I lived in Yucatan for eight years. That’s where I have my true friends. If I abandoned them, it was to follow these white gods and find out their secrets, because they have not come to be your brothers but to conquer this land and smash your gods.

“Listen carefully to me,” I said to the priests. “These foreigners really are gods, but they are enemies of your gods.”

I said to Cortés: “There is no danger. They’re convinced we’re gods and honor us as gods.”

Cortés said: “Why then are they refusing us food and fodder?”

Marina told Cortés: “The city is full of sharpened stakes to kill your horses if you use them to attack; take care, sir; the roofs are piled high with stones, they’ve built protective screens of adobe bricks, and the streets are blocked with thick logs.”

I told the popes: “They are evil gods, but they are gods. They don’t have to eat.”

The popes replied: “How can it be they do not eat? What kind of gods can they be? The teúles eat. They demand sacrifices.”

I insisted: “They are different teúles. They don’t want sacrifices.”

I said it and bit my tongue because I saw in my argument a justification of the Christian religion I hadn’t noticed before. The popes exchanged looks, and a chill ran down my spine. They realized what I realized. The Aztec gods demanded the sacrifice of men. The Christian God, nailed to the cross, sacrificed himself. The popes stared at the crucifix raised at the entrance to the house taken over by the Spaniards and felt their minds collapse. In that moment, I would have been delighted to change places with the crucified Jesus, accepting His wounds if this nation did not make the invincible exchange between a religion that demanded human sacrifice and another that allowed divine sacrifice.

“There is no danger,” I said to Cortés, knowing there was danger.

“There is danger,” Marina said to Cortés, knowing there was none.

I wanted to destroy the conquistador so he would never reach the gates of the Great Tenochtitlán: I wanted Cholula to be his tomb, the end of his daring exploits.

Marina wanted to make an example of Cholula to preclude future betrayals. She had to invent the danger. As proof, she brought in an old woman and her son who swore that a great ambush was being prepared against the Spaniards and that the Indians had prepared their cooking pots with salt, chili, and tomatoes to boil us so they could stuff themselves with our flesh. Is it true, or did Doña Marina invent as much as I did?

“There is no danger,” I said to Cortés and Marina.

“There is danger,” Marina said to all of us.

That night, after a shotgun was fired, the Spanish massacre fell on the City of the Gods, and those who did not die pierced by our swords or blasted to pieces by our harquebuses were burned alive. When the Tlaxcaltecs entered, they poured through the city like a savage pestilence, stealing and raping without our being able to stop them.

In Cholula, not one idol was left standing, not one altar unscathed. The 365 Indian temples were whitewashed to banish the demons and dedicated to 365 saints, virgins, and martyrs from our book of saints’ lives, passing forever into the service of God Our Lord.

Cholula’s punishment was soon known in all the provinces of Mexico. In doubt, the Spaniards opted for force.

My defeat, less known, I declare here today.

Because I understood then that, in doubt, Cortés would believe La Malinche, his woman, and not me, a fellow Spaniard.

[3]

It wasn’t always that way. On the coasts of Tabasco, I was his only interpreter. I remember with joy our landing at Champotón, when Cortés depended totally on me, and our rafts plied the river opposite the Indian squadrons lined up on the shores. Cortés proclaimed in Spanish that we had come in peace, as brothers, while I translated into Maya, but also in the language of shadows:

“He’s lying! He’s come to conquer us, defend yourselves, don’t believe him.”

What impunity I had, how I delight in remembering it from the bed of an eternity even more ominous than my betrayal!

“We are brothers!”

“We are enemies!”

“We come in peace!”

“We come in war!”

No one, no one in the thick forest of Tabasco, its river, its jungle, its roots sunk forever in the darkness where only the macaws seemed touched by the sun, Tabasco of the first day of creation, cradle of silence broken by the screech of the bird, Tabasco, echo of the initial dawn: no one there, I say, could know that by translating the conquistador I lied. And yet, I spoke the truth.

Hernán Cortés’s words of peace, translated by me into the vocabulary of war, provoked a rain of Indian arrows. Taken aback, the captain saw the sky wounded by the arrows and reacted by engaging in battle on the very banks of the river … As he disembarked, he lost a sandal in the mud, and because I recovered it for him, I was hit by an arrow in the thigh; fourteen Spaniards were wounded, thanks to me in great measure, but eighteen Indians fell dead … We slept there that night, after the victory I didn’t want, with large torches and sentinels, on the wet ground, and if my dreams were unquiet — the Indians I had induced to fight had been defeated — they were also pleasant, because I proved my power to decide peace or war thanks to my ownership of words.

Poor fool: I lived in a false paradise where, for an instant, language and power coincided with my luck, because when I joined the Spaniards in Yucatan, the former interpreter, a cross-eyed Indian named Melchorejo, whispered into my ear, as if he guessed my intentions: “They’re invincible. They speak with the animals.”

The next morning, Melchorejo disappeared, leaving his Spanish clothing hung from a silk-cotton tree which Cortés, to indicate Spanish possession, had slashed three times with his knife.

Someone saw the first interpreter flee naked in a canoe. I was left thinking about what he’d said. Everyone would say that the Spaniards were gods and that they spoke with gods. Only Melchorejo divined that their power was to speak with the horses. Was he right?

Days later, the defeated chiefs of this region delivered twenty women as slaves for the Spaniards. One of them caught my eye, not only because of her beauty but because of her arrogance: she overawed not only the other slaves but the chiefs themselves. She had what’s called a lot of presence, and her orders brooked no disagreement.

We exchanged looks, and without speaking I said to her, “Be mine, I speak your Maya tongue and love your people, I don’t know how to combat the fatality of all that’s happening, I can’t stop it, but perhaps you and I together, Indian and Spaniard, can save something if we come to an agreement and above all if we love each other a bit …

“Do you want me to teach you to speak Castilla?” I asked.

When I came near her, my blood pounded; one of those times when mere seeing provokes pleasure and excitation. It was perhaps augmented because I’d gone back to using Spanish breeches for the first time in a long time, after having worn a loose shirt and nothing underneath it, allowing the heat and the breeze to ventilate my balls freely. Now the cloth caressed me, and the leather squeezed me, and my eyes linked me to the woman I saw as my ideal partner for confronting what was to happen. I imagined that together we could change the course of events.

Her name was Malintzin, which means “Penitence.”

That same day, the Mercederian Olmedo baptized her Marina, making her the first Christian woman in New Spain.

But her people called her La Malinche, the traitor.

I spoke to her. She didn’t answer me. However, she did allow me to admire her.

“Do you want me to teach you to speak…?”

That evening in March of the year 1519, she disrobed before me in the mangrove swamp, while a simultaneous chorus of hummingbirds, dragonflies, rattlesnakes, lizards, and hairless dogs broke loose around her transfigured nakedness. In that instant, the captive Indian woman was svelte and massive, heavy and ethereal, animal and human, sane and insane. She was all that, as if she were not only inseparable from the earth that surrounded her but also its summary and symbol. And also as if she told me that what I was seeing that night I would never see again. She disrobed to deny herself to me.

I dreamed all night about her name, Marina, Malintzin, I dreamed about a son of ours, I dreamed that together she and I, Marina and Jerónimo, owners of the languages, would also be owners of the lands, an invincible couple because we understood the two voices of Mexico, the voice of men and the voice of the gods.

I imagined her rolling around in my sheets.

The next day, Cortés chose her as his concubine and his interpreter.

I was already the latter for the Spanish captain. I could not be the former.

“You speak Spanish and Maya,” she said to me in the language of Yucatan. “I speak Maya and Mexican. Teach me Spanish.”

“Let your owner teach you,” I answered in rancor.

From my tomb, I assure you, we see our rancor as the most sterile part of our lives. Rancor (and envy, which is sorrow over someone else’s well-being) closely follows resentment as a sorrow that wounds the person suffering it more deeply than it does the person who provokes it. Jealousy doesn’t do that: jealousy may be the source of exquisite agonies and incomparable excitations. Vanity doesn’t do that either: vanity is a human trait that links us to everyone else, the great equalizer of poor and rich, strong and weak. In that, it resembles cruelty, which is the best-distributed thing in the world. But rancor and envy: how was I going to triumph over those who provoked them in me, he and she, the couple of the conquest, Cortés and La Malinche, the couple she and I might have been? Poor Marina, ultimately abandoned by her conquistador, burdened with a fatherless child, stigmatized by her people with the mark of betrayal, and, nevertheless, because of all that, mother and origin of a new nation, which perhaps could only be born and grow against the charges of abandonment, illegitimacy, and betrayal …

Poor Malinche, poor rich Malinche as well, who with her man shaped history, but who with me, the poor soldier killed by buboes and not by Indians, would not have passed from the anonymity that surrounded the Indian concubines of Francisco de Barco, native of Ávila, or Juan Álvarez Chico, born in Fregenal …

Am I humiliating myself too much? Death authorizes me to say that it seems little compared to the humiliation and failure I felt then. Deprived of the desired female, I substituted the power of the tongue for her. But you’ve already seen how La Malinche took even that away from me even before the worms dined on it forever.

Cortés’s cruelty was refined. He ordered me, since she and I spoke the Indian languages, to take it upon myself to communicate to her the truths and mysteries of our holy religion. The devil has never had a more unfortunate catechist.

[2]

I mean to say that I speak Spanish. It’s time to confess that I had to relearn it, because after eight years among the Indians I almost lost it. Now with Cortés’s troops, I rediscover my own language, the one that flowed toward my lips from my Castilian mother’s breasts. And I quickly learned Mexican, so I could speak to the Aztecs. La Malinche was always one step ahead of me.

The persistent question, nevertheless, is a different one: Did I rediscover myself when I returned to the company and language of the Spaniards?

When they found me among the Indians of Yucatan, they thought I was an Indian.

This is how they saw me: dark, hair cropped short, an oar on my shoulder, wearing ancient sandals long beyond repair, an old, ruinous shirt, and a loincloth to cover my shame.

Thus they saw me then: sunburned, my long hair a tangle, my beard shaved off with arrows, my sex old and uncertain under my loincloth, my old shoes, and my lost tongue.

Cortés, as was his custom, gave precise orders to overcome any doubt or obstacle. He ordered me dressed in shirt and doublet, breeches, pointed cap, and hemp sandals, and ordered me to tell how I came to that place. I told him as simply as I could:

“I was born in Ecija. Eight years ago, fifteen men and two women, making our way from Darien to the island of Santo Domingo, got lost. Our captains fought each other over money matters, since we were carrying ten thousand gold pesos from Panama to La Española, and the ship, with no one at the helm, smashed against some reefs in Los Alacranes. My comrades and I abandoned our incompetent, unfaithful leaders, taking the lifeboat from the wrecked ship. We thought we were heading toward Cuba, but the heavy currents pushed us far from there toward this land called Yucatan.”

At that instant, I could not keep from looking toward a man whose face was tattooed, and whose ears and lower lip were pierced with plugs, surrounded by his wife and three children, whose eyes were begging me for what I already knew. I went on, turning my eyes back to Cortés and seeing that he saw everything.

“Ten men reached this place. Nine were killed, and only I survived. Why did they leave me alive? I’ll go to my grave not knowing. There are mysteries it’s better not to inquire into. This is one of them … Imagine a shipwrecked man, almost drowned, naked, and washed up on a beach as hard as mortar, with a single hut and in it a dog that did not bark when it saw me. Perhaps that saved me, because I sought protection in that shelter while the dog went out to bark at my shipmates, provoking the alarm and attack of the Indians. When they found me hidden in the hut, with the dog licking my hand, they laughed and joked. The dog wagged his tail with joy, and I was taken, not with honors but with camaraderie, to the cluster of primitive huts erected next to the great pyramidal constructions now covered with vegetation …

“Ever since, I’ve been useful. I’ve helped to build. I’ve helped them plant their poor crops. But I also planted the seeds of an orange tree that came, along with a sack of wheat and a cask of red wine, in the lifeboat that tossed us up on these shores.”

Cortés asked me about my other comrades, staring fixedly at the Indian with the tattooed face accompanied by a woman and three children.

“You haven’t told me what happened to your comrades.”

In an attempt to distract Cortés’s insistent gaze, I went on with my story, which I didn’t want to do, finding myself obliged to say what I then told.

“The chiefs in the area divided us among them.”

“There were ten. I see only you.”

Again I fell into the trap: “Most were sacrificed to the idols.”

“And what about the women?”

“They died. The Indians made them grind corn, and they weren’t used to spending that much time on their knees in the sun.”

“And what about you?”

“They kept me as a slave. All I do is bring in firewood and weed the cornfields.”

“Want to come with us…?”

Cortés asked me that, again staring at the Indian with the tattooed face.

“Jerónimo de Aguilar, born in Ecija,” I blurted out hastily to distract the captain’s attention.

Cortés walked over to the Indian with the tattooed face, smiled at him, and patted the head of one of the children, who had curly blond hair despite his dark skin and black eyes. “Cannibalism, slavery, and barbarous customs,” said Cortés, staring directly at my unrecognizable companion. “Do you want to stay in this life?”

My only concern was to distract him, capture his attention. As luck would have it, in my old mantle I’d kept one of the oranges, the fruit of the tree Guerrero and I planted here. I showed it to him as if for a moment I was the King of Coins in our Spanish playing cards: I had the sun in my hands. Could any image verify a Spaniard’s identity better than the sight of a man eating an orange? I sank my teeth avidly into the skin until they found the hidden flesh of the orange, her flesh, the woman-fruit, the feminine fruit. The juice ran down my chin. I laughed, as if saying to Cortés, What better proof could you want that I’m a Spaniard?

The captain didn’t answer me, merely expressing his pleasure that oranges could grow here. He asked me if we had brought it, and I, to distract his attention, which was fixed on the unrecognizable Guerrero, said we had, but that in these lands the oranges were larger, not as highly colored, and more bitter, almost like grapefruit. I told the Mayas to gather a sack of orange seeds for the Spanish captain, but he insisted on asking that same question again, staring fixedly at the imperturbable Guerrero: “Do you want to stay in this life?”

He said it to the man with the tattooed face, but I quickly answered that I didn’t, that I renounced living among these pagans and would be delighted to join the Spanish troops to wipe out all abominable customs or beliefs and to implant our Holy Religion here … Cortés laughed and stopped patting the child’s head. He told me then that since I spoke the language of the natives and a bad but comprehensible Spanish, I would join him as his interpreter to translate from Spanish to Maya and from Maya to Castilian. He turned his back on the Indian with the tattooed face.

I had promised my friend Gonzalo Guerrero, the other survivor of the shipwreck, that I wouldn’t reveal his identity. It was, in any case, difficult to discern. His tattooed face and pierced ears. His Indian wife. And the three mestizo children Cortés patted on the head and stared at with such prolonged curiosity.

“Brother Aguilar,” Guerrero said when the Spaniards arrived. “I’m married, I have three children, and among these people I’m a chief and captain in war. You go your way, but my face is tattooed and my ears pierced. What would the Spaniards say if they saw me this way? And you can see how adorable my children are, and how sweet my woman is…”

She scolded me angrily, telling me to go away with the Spaniards and to leave her husband in peace …

I had no other intention. It was indispensable that Gonzalo Guerrero remain here so that my own grand enterprise of discovery and conquest be carried out. Ever since we’d arrived here eight years before, Guerrero and I had taken great pleasure in seeing the great Mayan towers at night, when they seemed to come back to life and reveal in the moonlight the exquisite carved script that Guerrero, who came from Palos, said he’d seen in Arab mosques and even in the recently reconquered Granada. But during the day, the sun whitened the great structures to a blinding degree, and life concentrated in the minutia of fires, resin, dyes, and washing, the crying of children, the savory taste of raw deer meat: the life of the village that lived right next to the dead temples.

We entered into that life in a natural way. It’s true, of course, that we had no other prospects, but most of all it was the sweetness and dignity of these people that conquered us. They had so little and yet wanted no more. They never told us what had happened to the inhabitants of the splendid cities that resembled biblical descriptions of Babylon and watched over the details of everyday life in the village; we felt it was a kind of respect reserved for the dead.

Only little by little did we learn, connecting bits and pieces of stories here and there as we acquired the language of our captors, that once there were great powers here, which, like all great powers, depended on the weakness of the people and needed to fight other strong nations to convince themselves of their power. We were able to deduce that the Indian nations destroyed each other while the weak people survived, stronger than the strong. The greatness of power fell; the small lives of the people survived. Why? We’ll have time to understand why.

Guerrero, as I said, married an Indian and had three children. He was a seaman and had worked in the Palos shipyards. So when the expedition led by Francisco Hernández de Córdoba came to this land a year before Cortés, Guerrero organized the Indian counterattack that caused the calamitous defeat of the expedition right on the coast. Thanks to that, he was raised to the rank of chief and captain, becoming part of the defensive organization of these Indians. Thanks to that as well, he decided to stay among them when I left with Cortés.

Why did Cortés leave him when he’d guessed — his facial expressions all revealed it — who Guerrero was? Perhaps, I later thought, because he didn’t want to bring a traitor along. He could have killed him right then and there: but then he couldn’t have counted on peace and the good will of the Catoche Mayas. Perhaps he thought it was better to abandon Guerrero to a destiny devoid of destiny: the barbarous wars of sacrifice. But it’s also true that Cortés liked to postpone revenge, just to enjoy it more.

In any case, he brought me with him without suspecting that I was the real traitor. Because if I went with Cortés and Guerrero stayed behind in Yucatan, it was by mutual agreement. We wanted to ensure, I with the foreigners and Guerrero among the Indians, that the Indian world would triumph over the European world. I will tell you briefly, with the little breath left to me, why.

While I lived among the Maya, I remained celibate, as if I were waiting for a woman who would be perfectly mine, who would complement my character, passion, and tenderness. I fell in love with my new people, with their simple way of dealing with the matters of life, letting the daily necessities of life take care of themselves naturally but without diminishing the importance of serious things. Above all, they took care of their land, their air, their precious, scarce water hidden in deep wells: this plain of Yucatan has no visible rivers but is crisscrossed by underground streams.

Taking care of the land was their fundamental mission; they were the servants of the land — that’s why they’d been born. Their magic stories, their ceremonies, their prayers, I realized, had no other purpose than to keep the land alive and fertile, to honor the ancestors who had in their turn kept it alive, inherited it, and had passed it quickly on, abundant or scanty, but alive, to their descendants.

Endless obligation, long succession, which at first could have seemed to us an eternally repetitive labor of ants, until we realized that doing what they did was its own reward. It was the Indians’ daily offering: in serving nature, they created themselves. It’s true: they lived in order to survive; but they also lived so the world would go on feeding their descendants when they died. Death for them was the price for the life of their descendants.

Birth and death therefore were equal celebrations for these natives, events equally worthy of joy and honor. I shall always remember the first funeral ceremony we attended, because in it we discerned a celebration of origins and the continuity of all things, identical to what we celebrate when born. Death, proclaimed the faces, gestures, musical rhythms, is the source of life, death is the first birth. We come from death. We cannot be born unless someone dies for our sake, for us.

They owned nothing, but held everything in common. But there were wars, rivalries incomprehensible for us, as if our innocence deserved only the bounty of peace and not the cruelty of war. Guerrero, spurred on by his wife, decided to take part in the wars among the nations, admitting he did not understand them. But once he’d shown his ability as a shipwright in repelling Hernández de Córdoba’s expedition, his desire and mine — the art of making boats and the art of ordering words — joined forces and silently swore an oath, with a shared intelligence and a definite goal …

[1]

Little by little — it took us eight years to discover it — Gonzalo Guerrero and I, Jerónimo de Aguilar, gathered enough information to divine (we’d never know it for certain) the destiny of the Mayan peoples, the proximity of fallen grandeur and surviving misery. Why did greatness collapse, why did misery survive?

During those eight years, we saw the fragility of the land and wondered, both of us after all sons of Castilian or Andalusian farmers, how the life of the great abandoned cities could be sustained by such meager soil and such impenetrable forests. We had the answers of our own ancestors: Exploit the riches of the forest lightly, exploit the riches of the plains well, and take care of both. This had been the behavior of the peasants since time immemorial. When it coincided with the behavior of the dynasties, Yucatan lived. When the dynasties put the greatness of power above the greatness of life, the thin soil and the thick forest could not produce enough to meet the demands of kings, priests, warriors, and bureaucrats. Then came wars, the abandonment of the land, the flight to the cities at first and then from the cities later. The land could no longer sustain power. Power fell. The land remained. Those who remained had no power other than the land.

Words remained.

In their public ceremonies, but also in their private prayers, they incessantly repeated the following story:

The world was created by two gods, one named Heart of Heaven and the other named Heart of Earth. When they met, between them they made all things fertile by naming them. They named the earth, and the earth was made. Creation, as it was named, dissolved and multiplied, calling itself by turns fog, cloud, or whirlwind of dust. Named, the mountains shot from the depths of the sea, magic valleys formed, and in them grew pines and cypresses.

The gods filled with joy when they divided the waters and caused the animals to be born. But none of this possessed the same thing which had created it: language. Mist, ocelot, pine, and water: silent. Then the gods decided to create the only beings capable of speaking and of naming all things created by the word of the gods.

And so people were born, with the purpose of sustaining divine creation day by day by means of the same thing that brought forth the earth, the sky, and all things in them: language. When we understood these things, Guerrero and I understood that the real greatness of these people was not in their magnificent temples or their deeds in war but in the most humble vocation of repeating in every minute, in every activity in life, the greatest and most heroic thing of all, which was the creation of the world by the gods.

From then on, we strove to strengthen that mission and to restore to our native Spanish earth the time, beauty, candor, and humanity we found among these Indians … Language was the double power shared by gods and men. We found out that the fall of the empires liberated language and men from a falsified servitude. Poor, clean, owners of their words, the Maya could renew their lives and those of the entire world beyond the sea …

In the place called Bay of the Bad Fight, the very place where Gonzalo Guerrero’s knowledge allowed the Indians to defeat the Spaniards, forests were leveled, planks sawed, hardware manufactured, and the frameworks raised for our Indian fleet …

From my Mexican tomb, I encouraged my comrade, the other surviving Spaniard, to answer conquest with conquest. I failed in my attempt to make Cortés fail; you, Gonzalo, must not fail. Do what you swore to me you would do. Look: I’m watching you from my bed in the ancient lake of Tenochtitlán, I the fifty-eight times named Jerónimo de Aguilar, the man who was the transitory master of words who lost them in an unequal fight with a woman …

[0]

All this I saw. The fall of the great Andalusian city in the moan of the conch shells, the clash of steel against flint, and the fire of Mayan flamethrowers. I saw the burnt water of the Guadalquivir and the burning of the Tower of Gold.

The temples fell, from Cádiz to Seville; the standards, the towers, the trophies. And the day after the defeat, using the stones of the Giralda, we began to build the temple of the four religions, inscribed with the word of Christ, Mohammed, Abraham, and Quetzalcoatl, where all the powers of imagination and language would have their place, without exception, lasting perhaps as long as the names of the thousand gods of a world suddenly animated by the encounter of everything forgotten, prohibited, mutilated …

We committed a few crimes, it’s true. We gave the members of the Holy Inquisition a taste of their own medicine, burning them in the public plazas, from Logroño to Barcelona and from Oviedo to Córdoba … We also burned their archives, along with the laws about purity of blood and being “old Christians,” and if some convents (and their tenants) were violated, the ultimate result was an increased mixing of bloods — Indian and Spanish but also Arab and Jew — that in a few years crossed the Pyrenees and spread over all of Europe … The complexion of the old continent quickly became darker, as that of southern, Arabian Spain already was.

We revoked the edicts of expulsion for Jews and Moors. They returned with the frozen keys of the houses they’d abandoned in Toledo and Seville in order to unlock once again the wooden doors and to put back into their clothes-presses, with burning hands, the old prayer of their love for Spain, the cruel mother who expelled them and whom they, the children of Israel, never stopped loving despite all her cruelties … And the return of the Moors filled the air with songs sometimes deep, like a sexual moan, sometimes high, like the voice of the muezzin punctually calling the faithful to prayer. Sweet Mayan songs joined those of the Provençal troubadours, the flute joined the cittern, the flageolet joined the mandolin, and from the sea near the Port of Santa María emerged sirens of all colors who had accompanied us from the islands of the Caribbean … All those of us who contributed to the Indian conquest of Spain immediately felt that a universe simultaneously new and recovered, permeable, complex, and fertile, had been born from the contact among the cultures, frustrating the fatal, purifying plan of the Catholic Kings, Ferdinand and Isabella.

But don’t think the discovery of Spain by the Maya was an idyll. We could not restrain the religious atavism of some of our captains. The fact is, however, that the Spaniards sacrificed at the altars of Valladolid and Burgos, in the plazas of Cáceres and Jaén, had the honor of dying in a cosmic rite and not in one of those street fights so common in Spain. Or, to use a more gastronomic image: they might have died of indigestion just as well. It’s true that this rationale was badly understood by all the humanists, poets, philosophers, and Spanish Erasmists, who at the beginning celebrated our arrival, considering it a liberation, but who are now wondering if they haven’t simply exchanged the oppression of the Catholic Kings for that of some bloody popes and Indian chiefs …

But you will ask me, Jerónimo de Aguilar, born in Ecija, dead of buboes when the Great Tenochtitlán fell, and who now accompanies, like a distant star, my friend and comrade Gonzalo Guerrero, native of Palos, in the conquest of Spain: What was our main weapon?

And while we’d have to mention an army of two thousand Maya which sailed from the Bay of the Bad Fight in Yucatan, joined by squadrons of Carib sailors recruited and trained by Guerrero in Cuba, Borinquén, Caicos, and Great Abaco, we would immediately have to add another reason.

Disembarked in Cádiz, amid the most absolute astonishment, we gave the same answer (you’ve already guessed) as that of the Indians in Mexico: surprise.

Except that in Mexico, the Spaniards — that is, the white, bearded, and blond gods — were expected. Here, on the other hand, no one expected anyone. The surprise was total, because all the gods were already in Spain. The fact is they’d been forgotten. The Indians managed to reanimate the Spanish gods, and the greatest surprise, which I share with you today, readers of this manuscript which we two shipwrecked Spaniards abandoned for eight years on the Yucatan coast have stitched together, is that you are reading these memoirs in the Spanish language of Cortés, which Marina, La Malinche, had to learn, and not in the Maya language that Marina had to forget or in the Mexican language which I had to learn to communicate in secret with the great but apathetic king Moctezuma.

The reason is obvious. The Spanish language had already learned to speak in Phoenician, Greek, Latin, Arabic, and Hebrew; it was ready now to receive Mayan and Aztec contributions, to enrich itself with them, to enrich them, give them flexibility, imagination, communicability, and writing, turning them into living languages, not the languages of empires but the languages of people and their encounters, infections, dreams, and nightmares as well.

Perhaps Hernán Cortés himself suspected it, and for that reason dissimulated his feelings the day he discovered Guerrero and me living among the Maya, dark, hair cropped short, an oar on my shoulder, wearing one ancient sandal with the other tied around my waist, an old, ruinous shirt, and a loincloth in even worse condition; Guerrero with his tattooed face and pierced ears … Perhaps, as if he’d guessed our destiny, the Spanish captain left Guerrero among the Indians so that one day he’d attempt his enterprise, a copy of his own, and conquer Spain with the same spirit Cortés conquered Mexico, which was that of bringing another civilization to one he considered admirable but stained here and there with excesses: sacrifice and fire, oppression and repression, humanity sacrificed to the power of the strong under the pretext of the gods … Once Hernán Cortés himself had been sacrificed to the game of political ambition, necessarily reduced to impotence so that no conquistador would ever dream of placing himself above the power of the Crown, and humiliated by the mediocre, suffocated by the bureaucracy, rewarded with money and titles when his ambition had been exterminated, did Hernán Cortés have the brilliant intuition that if he pardoned Gonzalo Guerrero, Gonzalo would return with a Mayan and Carib armada to get revenge for him in his native land?

I don’t know. Because Hernán Cortés, for all his malicious intelligence, always lacked that magic imagination which, on the one hand, was the weakness of the Indian world, but, on the other, might someday be its strength: its contribution to the future, its resurrection …

I say this because while accompanying Gonzalo Guerrero with my soul from the Bahamas to Cádiz, I myself became a star so I could make the voyage. My ancient light (all luminous stars, I now know, are dead stars) is only that of my questions.

What would have happened if what did happen didn’t?

What would have happened if what did not happen did?

I speak and ask questions from death because I suspect that my friend, the other shipwrecked Spaniard Gonzalo Guerrero, was too busy fighting and conquering. He doesn’t have time to tell stories. More to the point: he refuses to tell stories. He has to act, decide, order, punish … On the other hand, from death, I have all the time in the world to tell stories. Even (especially) stories about the deeds of my friend Guerrero in this affair of the conquest of Spain.

I fear for him and for the action he has undertaken with such success. I wonder if an event that isn’t narrated takes place in reality. Because what isn’t invented is only chronicled. Moreover, a catastrophe (all wars are catastrophes) is disputed only if it’s told. The telling outlasts the war. The telling disputes the order of things. Silence only confirms that order.

Which is why, in telling, I necessarily wonder where the order is, the moral, the law in all this.

I don’t know. Nor does my brother Guerrero, because I’ve infected him with a painful dream. He goes to bed in his new headquarters, the Alcazar in Seville, and his nights are unquiet because the painful gaze of the last Aztec king, Guatemuz, pierces them like a ghost. A cloud of blood covers his eyes. Whenever he feels his vision blur, he lowers his eyelids. One is made of gold, the other silver.

When he wakes up, weeping over the fate of the Aztec nation, he realizes that instead of tears, down one cheek ran gold and down the other silver, cutting a furrow in them as a knife would, leaving a permanent wound in them which, may it please God, death has healed.

This, I realize, is a doubtful thing. On the other hand, my only certitude, you see, is that language and words triumphed on the two shores. I know because the form of this tale is like a countdown, which has been associated too often with mortal explosions, overcoming a rival in the ring, or apocalyptic events. I’d like to use it today, beginning with ten and ending with zero, to indicate instead a perpetual rebeginning of stories perpetually unfinished, but only on condition that they are presided over, as in the Mayan story of the gods of Heaven and Earth, by language.

That is perhaps the true star that crosses the sea and links the two shores. The Spaniards — I must clarify this point while I still have time — did not understand it at first. When I reached Seville mounted on my verbal star, they confused its fleetingness and its light with that of a terrible bird, the combination of all the birds of prey that fly in the deepest obscurity, but less frightening in their flight than in their landing, their ability to drag themselves along the earth with the mercurial destruction of a poison: a vulture in the skies, a serpent on the ground, this mythological being that flew over Seville and dragged itself over Estremadura, blinded the saints, and seduced the demons of Spain, frightening all with its newness, was, like the Spanish horses in Mexico, invincible.

Transformed into a monster, this beast was, nevertheless, only a word. And the word unfolds, made of scales in the air, made of feathers on earth, like a single question: How long before the present arrives?

Twin sister of God, twin sister of man: over the lake of Mexico, along the river of Seville, the eyelids of the sun and the moon open at the same time. Our faces are streaked by fire, but at the same time our tongues are furrowed by memory and desire. The words live on the two shores. And they do not heal.

London — Mexico, Winter 1991–1992

June 1, 1992