The Orange Tree

Sons of the Conquistador

MARTÍN 2

MY father, Hernán Cortés, conqueror of Mexico, had twelve children. From the youngest to the oldest, there are three girls he had with his last wife, the Spaniard Juana de Zúñiga: María, Catalina, and Juana — a bouquet of pretty little ladies who were born late and didn’t have to bear the burden of the harm done to their father, only his glorious memory. Also by the Zúñiga woman he had my brother Martín Cortés: we have the same name. Not only that, the same destiny. There were also two stillborn children, Luis and Catalina.

My father conquered a lot of flesh, as much flesh as land. From the conquered king Moctezuma he stole his favorite daughter, Ixcaxóchitl—“Cotton Flower”—and by her had a daughter, Leonor Cortés. With a nameless Aztec princess he had another daughter, this one born deformed, the so-called María. With an anonymous woman, he had a son named Amadorcico, whom, he told us, he loved, then forgot about, leaving him dead or abandoned in Mexico. A worse fate befell another son, Luis Altamirano, whom he had by Elvira (or perhaps Antonia) Hermosillo in 1529. Our prodigal, astute, conquered father disinherited him in his last will and testament. But no one suffered greater misfortune than his first daughter, Catalina Pizarro, born in Cuba in 1514. Her mother’s name was Leonor Pizarro.

Our father pampered her, but the widow Zúñiga persecuted her, deprived her of her property, and condemned her to live out her life — against her will — locked away in a convent.

I am the first Martín, the bastard son of my father and Doña Marina, my Indian mother, the so-called Malinche, the interpreter without whom Cortés wouldn’t have conquered anything. My father abandoned us when Mexico fell and my mother was no longer of any use to him in conquests and actually hampered his ability to rule. I grew up far away from my father, my mother having been given to the soldier Juan Xaramillo. I watched her die of smallpox in 1527. My father legitimated me in 1529. I am the firstborn but not the heir. I should be Martín the First but I’m merely Martín the Second.

MARTÍN 1

Three Catalinas, two Marías, two Leonors, two Luises, and two Martíns: our father didn’t have much imagination when it came to baptizing his children, and that sometimes leads to tremendous confusion. The other Martín, my elder brother, the son of the Indian woman, delights in the tale of the difficulties we’ve had. I prefer to recall the good times, and there was none better than my return to Mexico, the land conquered by my father for His Majesty the King. But let’s proceed step by step. I was born in Cuernavaca in 1532. I’m the product of the eventful trip my father made to Spain in 1528—his first since the conquest — which he undertook in order to be married and to reclaim the rights the colonial administration wanted to deny him by means of a trial instigated by certain envious parties. Spain, let me state this before going any further, is the land of envy. The Indies, and I can vouch for this in no uncertain terms, emulate and surpass the mother country in this category. Well then: it was in Béjar that Hernán Cortés entered into matrimony for the second time, now with my mother, Juana de Zúñiga. The King confirmed the rights and privileges owed to my father: titles, lands, and vassals. But when my parents and my grandmother returned to Mexico in March 1530, they were all held in Texcoco during my father’s trial. He was not able to enter Mexico City until January of the following year and took up residence in Cuernavaca, where, as I say, I was born. From then on, my father wore himself out in lawsuits and equally fruitless expeditions until, when I was eight, he returned with me to Spain, this time to fight not against Indians but against officials and lawyers.

At my father’s side, I left Mexico for Spain in 1540. We went to reclaim our property, our rights. The intrigues, the lawsuits, and the bitterness cost my father his life: to have fought so hard and with such good fortune in order to win for the King dominion nine times larger than Spain and then to end up wandering from inn to inn, owing money to tailors and servants, being the object of jokes and dirty tricks in the court! I was at his side when he died. A Franciscan and I. Neither of us could save him from the horrible wasting away brought on by dysentery. The stench of my father’s shit could not, however, wipe out the fresh scent of an orange tree that grew to the height of his window and which, during those months, bloomed splendidly.

He spoke some incomprehensible words before dying in Castilleja de la Cuesta, near Seville. He wasn’t allowed to die in peace in his Seville house because hordes of creditors and rogues buzzed around it like horseflies. Be that as it may, a great gentleman and better friend than the King himself, the Duke of Medina Sidonia, arranged a splendid funeral in the monastery of San Francisco in Seville: he filled the church with black hangings, burning wax tapers, flags and banners emblazoned with the coat of arms of the marquis, my father, yes sir, Marquis of the Valley of Oaxaca, Captain-General of New Spain, and Conqueror of Mexico, tides the envious could never strip him of. Titles which should have been mine since by my father’s will I was declared his successor and heir to his estate. Of course I abstained from promulgating the codicils in which my father ordered me to free the slaves on our Mexican lands and restore those lands to the conquered Indian communities. An old man’s attack of conscience, I told myself. If I did it, I’d be left with nothing. Did I beg his forgiveness? Of course. I’m not an evil person, even though I refused to carry out his dying wish. But seeing the fate of the contents of our Seville house was enough to make me feel no scruple whatsoever. Copper pots, kitchenware, trunks, torn tablecloths, sheets and mattresses, even old weapons that had fought their last battle long ago: all of it sold off at infamously low prices by the gates of the Seville cathedral when my father died. Was the final fruit of the conquest of Mexico to be an auction of mattresses and old saucepans? I decided to go back to Mexico and reclaim my inheritance. But first I opened the coffin in which our father, Hernán Cortés, was lying in order to see him for the last time. I was horrified, and my scream scratched its way through my teeth for a long time. Covering my dead father’s face was a dusty mask of jade and feathers.

MARTÍN 2

I’m not going to weep for my father. But as I am a good Christian — and I am — I must feel compassion for his fate. Just look at what happened to him after the fall of the Great Tenochtitlán and the conquest of the Aztec empire. Instead of staying in the capital to consolidate his power, he took it upon himself to embark on a mad, spectacular, noisy adventure in which he got lost and ruined himself in the jungles of Honduras. What worm did this man, our father, have within him that he could not rest with the fortune and glory he’d worked so hard to achieve but always had to be looking for more adventure and more action, even if it cost him both his fortune and his glory? It’s as if he felt that without action he would have gone back to being the humble son of the Medellín miller he was originally; as if action owed him an homage identical to itself — more action. He could not stand still to contemplate his accomplishments; he had to risk everything in order to deserve everything. Perhaps, aside from his little Christian God (which is ours too, let there be no doubt about that), he had within him a great big pagan god — savage, secular, and pitiless — who asked him to be everything, thanks to action.

To be everything: even to be nothing. There were two men inside him: one blessed by fortune, love, and glory, the other ruined by vanity, display, and mercy. What a strange thing to say about my dear old dad. Vanity and mercy united: one part of him needed recognition, wealth, and caprice as a way of life; the other demanded for us, his new Mexican people, compassion and rights. That he came to identify himself with us, with our land, may well be true. What is certain, something I learned from my mother, is that Hernán Cortés fought with the Franciscans, who demanded that the temples be pulled down, while my father asked that those houses of idols be left standing for memory’s sake.

And my brother Martín already told you that he intended in his testament to free the Indians and return their lands to them. Stillborn words. How many stillborn words. But you see, despite all of them, I recognize my father’s virtues. But being my mother’s son and speaking today with all the truth and clarity I possess — besides, when will I have another chance to do so? — I must confess that I was overjoyed by his failures. The contrast between the honors accorded him and the powers denied him tickled my fancy. He abandoned my mother and me when we got in the way of his political and matrimonial plans, so how could we not secretly take pleasure in his disasters? If he hadn’t abandoned the government of Mexico City to go off and conquer new lands in Honduras, his enemies would not have been able to strip him of authority and take over his property. Even if my father’s friends threw his enemies into cages, when he returned from Honduras he found that judges had arrived from Spain to try him and deprive him of his power to govern.

My Indian soul trembles in wonder. While my father was in Honduras, he tortured and hanged the last Aztec king, Cuauhtémoc, because he wouldn’t reveal the hiding place of Moctezuma’s treasure, and in Mexico City, my father’s friends were tortured to reveal the whereabouts of Cortés’s treasure and then hanged. When he returned to Mexico, my father was accused of all these things: of illicitly enriching himself, of protecting Indians, of poisoning his rivals with lethal cheeses, of not fearing God, of who knows what else …

I’m going to talk about the only thing that really fascinates and perturbs me: my daddy’s sexual life, its violence, its seduction, and the promiscuity of the flesh. He had myriad women according to the accusation, some in Mexico, others in Castile, and he had carnal knowledge of all of them, even if some were related to one another. He would send the husbands out of the city in order to deal freely with their wives. He had sexual relations with more than forty Indian women. He was also accused of murdering his legal wife, Catalina Xuárez, called La Marcaida. Jerónimo de Aguilar, the translator who had been shipwrecked on the Yucatan coast and rescued by my father, accused him of crimes, infinite corruption, and a rebellious desire to take possession of this land and rule over it himself. Six old, illiterate maids accused him of carnal abuses. Between the traitorous translator and the gossipy chambermaids, I interpose myself: I, Martín Cortés, the bastard, son of the loyal interpreter Doña Marina, also illiterate, but possessed by the demon of language. I interpolate myself because both sides, Aguilar and the old hags, agree that my birth is what drove the sterile Catalina Xuárez mad with jealousy. My father married her in Cuba and brought her to Mexico when the empire fell: the only woman my father had who never gave him any children. Sick, always infirm, always reclining on a sofa, useless and complaining: it was my fault this woman fought one night with my father — according to the maids — about Indian slaves. La Marcaida claimed all of them for herself, excluding my mother and me. My father answered that whatever was rightfully hers, including Indian labor, was hers and he wanted nothing of it, but that what was his, including my mother and me, was his.

Sobbing and ashamed, she went to her bedroom. The next day the maids found her there, dead, with bruises on her neck, the bed stained with urine. Cortés’s friends rebutted the maids: the woman died of menstrual flow. This Marcaida was always sick during her periods. Her sisters, Leonor and Francisca, bled to death because of the abnormal abundance of their menstrual flow.

My vision begins to cloud over with blood. Rivers of blood. Menstrual blood, the blood of war, the blood of sacrifice on altars, drowning us all. Except my mother, La Malinche. Her menstruation stopped, the war was over, the sacrificial dagger stopped short in midair, the blood dried, and in La Malinche’s womb I was conceived in a pause between blood and death, as if in a fertile desert. I am the son of dead seed, that’s all I am. I prefer, nevertheless, drowning in blood to drowning in papers, intrigues, lawsuits; drowning in blood to drowning in things, things we struggle to possess until we dry out, without them and without our souls. My brother would admit that, at least. Would the other Martín admit that great deeds fell to our father while to us, his sons, there fell only lawsuits? Heirs to deserts and shacks.

MARTÍN 1

Hernán Cortés always loved elegance, display, and beautiful things. And he would do anything to get them. Bernal Díaz writes how in Cuba before the expedition to Mexico got under way, my father began to dress himself up, using a plumed helmet, medals, gold chains, and velvet clothes embellished with gold ribbons. But of course he had nothing with which to pay for that luxury; at that time he was deeply in debt and poor because he spent whatever he had on himself and on finery for his wife. I admire my father for that; he’s a likable sort, fully capable of admitting he gathered supplies for his Mexican armada by scouring the coast of Cuba like a gentle pirate, robbing or appropriating chickens and cassava bread, arms and money from the inhabitants of the fertile island, who were shocked by the audacity of the man from Estremadura, my father. The son of millers and soldiers who fought in the war against the Moors, my father inherited from them their toughness if not their resignation. He created his own destiny for himself and created it, prodigal as he was, twice over: one ascending, the other descending. Both astonishing.

From him, I inherited my taste for things. The King deprived my father of power in the Mexican lands he conquered. My father requested the governorship of Mexico from His Majesty; the King refused because he thought no conquistador deserved it. King Carlos’s grandfather, Ferdinand the Catholic, did the same thing, denying Columbus the governorship of the Indies he’d discovered. At the same time, the King covered my father with honors and titles, which from the time I was a boy I learned to enjoy. Captain-General of New Spain, Marquis of the Valley of Oaxaca. The King assigned to my father twenty-three thousand vassals and twenty-two towns, from Texcoco to Tehuantepec, from Coyoacán to Cuernavaca — Tacubaya, Toluca, Jalapa, and Tepoztlán … To gain title to all that and to silence his enemies, my father returned to Spain in 1528.

No captain from the Indies ever returned in such glory, all paid for out of his own pocket and not the King’s. From the port of Palos, where he landed, my father made his way to the court, at that moment in Toledo, with a retinue of eighty people brought from Mexico, Besides the Spaniards who accepted the open invitation to join the troop of soldiers of the conquest, there were Indian nobles, circus players, dwarfs, albinos, and many servants as well as hummingbirds, parrots, quetzals, buzzards, turkeys, desert plants, wildcats, jewels, and illustrated codices, which it took my father two ships to bring to Spain. He then hired mules and wagons to travel north from Andalusia to Castile, passing through his hometown of Medellín, where he knelt at the tomb of his father, my grandfather, in whose honor I was named. He kissed the hand of Catalina Pizarro, his widowed mother: mother to one conquistador and aunt of another, Don Francisco Pizarro, also from Estremadura.

The difference between them was that my father knew how to read, while Pizarro didn’t. Cortés and Pizarro met this time on the road, when one was already everything while the other was still no one — although in the end bad luck makes all of us equal. Everyone noticed the insane glint in the eye of the other Estremeño as he watched my father scattering gifts to get favors, giving ladies tiaras with green feathers, all covered with silver filigree, gold, and pearls, ordering a supply of liquid amber and balsam so the women he met in courts and royal towns could perfume themselves. In that style, he made his way to the court in Toledo, amid banquets and parties, preceded by a fame and display that impressed everyone. When he reached the court, he entered Mass late and walked in front of the most illustrious gentlemen in Spain to sit down next to the King Don Carlos, amid whispers of envy and disapproval.

Nothing stopped my father! He squandered everything except five extremely fine emeralds he got from Moctezuma and which he always carefully kept for himself, as proof, in my opinion, of the great deeds he’d accomplished. One emerald was carved into a rose, another into a trumpet, the third into a fish with golden eyes, while the fourth was like a little bell with a rich pearl for a clapper and all edged in gold, with the inscription “Blessed is he who raised you.” The fifth emerald was a little cup resting on a gold base and attached to four little chains that are fastened to a pearl the size of a button.

My father always bragged about those emeralds, so much so that when the Queen found out about them, she demanded to see them and then wanted to keep them, saying that the Emperor, Don Carlos, would pay one hundred thousand ducats for them. Bur my father prized them so highly he denied them even to the Empress, using the excuse that he’d promised them to my mother, Juana de Zúñiga, to whom he’d recently been married … And that’s how it was: he brought her back to Mexico, and if he set out from Cuba to conquer Mexico in ostentatious display and if he returned from the conquest of Mexico to Spain in ostentatious display, now he once again returned to the vanquished land in maximum luxury. Until his enemies, the usual jealous suspects, stopped him at Texcoco outside Mexico City, besieging him in hunger while the suit initiated against him in his absence was resolved. They denied my father bread. They denied bread to my grandmother, Doña Catalina Pizarro, whom my father brought to Mexico so she might see what her son had won for Spain and the King. My grandmother, Doña Catalina, newly widowed, was seduced by her son’s words: “Leave Medellín, where you’ve been a tough, religious, but impoverished woman and come to Mexico to be a great lady.” Well, gentlemen, my grandmother died of hunger in Texcoco, of hunger, Catalina Pizarro, my grandmother, died of hunger … Of hunger, believe it or not, of hunger! Why in this family is there no pause between happiness and disaster, between triumph and defeat? Why?

MARTÍN 2

My brother speaks of riches, jewels, servants, finery, titles, powers, and lands, but also of hunger … I talk about papers. Each thing you’ve mentioned, Martín my brother, surrendered its hardness and turned into paper, mountains of paper, labyrinths of paper, paper vomited out by lawsuits and eternal trials, as if each thing conquered by our father had one single postponed destiny: the accumulation of briefs in the courts of the two Spains, the old and the new. Victim of an eternally deferred trial in which material things ended up showing they carried within their souls a paper double, flammable and drownable. Things erased by the fire and water of erased paper.

Take a look, Brother: the lawsuit of Hernán Cortés against some parties named Matienzo and Delgadillo over the lands and gardens between the Chapultepec and Tacuba causeways. Another lawsuit, one month later, against the same parties over a dispute about tributes and services from Indians in Huejotzingo. Letters listing grievances against the Crown. Lists of eighty, a hundred, a thousand repetitive questions. Expenditures for scribes, scriveners, messengers. More than two hundred royal documents relevant to our father, denying his grievances, putting off his claims, paying him in chilly gall for the blazing gold of the conquest. A world of shyster lawyers, of laws obeyed but never carried out, of ink-stained hands, pyramids of legal briefs, quills plucked to write a thousand legacies — more feathers in the inkwells than geese in the ponds! The unending residency trial against your father and mine in Mexico over everything already mentioned: corruption, abuse, carnal promiscuity, rebellion, and murder.

And as you well know, the trial involving our father was never resolved. It was consigned to two thousand folios and sent from Mexico to the Council of the Indies in Seville. Thousands of pages, hundreds of documents. The ink itself grows impatient. The pen scratches. The mountain of parchments is interred in the archives, the dead destiny of history. Don’t fool yourself, tell the truth with me, Brother Martín: two thousand folios of legal prose were buried forever in Seville because the point was to keep the case unresolved, like a sword of Damocles over the heads of my father and his children. You are moved, my imbecilic brother, by the fatal hand of fame and paternal luxury, but you lack the cunning that always accompanied the fates of my father, his glory and his ruin. Was he great in both? I still don’t know. The true history, not the dusty archives, will tell it all one day. The living history of memory and desire, Brother, which always takes place right now, not yesterday, not tomorrow. But what better example can I give than I myself, letting myself be dragged into your mad adventure by you, whom I know so well even though I don’t know whether to scorn or fear you. A shame, Brother. Why did it occur to me to confide in you?

MARTÍN 1

I’m not as stupid as you think, Martín the Second. Second, second-rate, although that grieves you. I wound you to wound myself and to show that I too know how to see what’s happening quite clearly. Don’t think I’m blind when it comes to destiny, an Oedipus from the Indies. I love and respect our father. He died in my arms, not in yours. I understand what you’re saying. Hernán Cortés had two destinies. How could he not flee from that eternal lawsuit, from that sedentary courtroom, to throw himself into one insane adventure after another? The same way he left behind the Estremadura of his boyhood to discover the New World for himself, the same way he abandoned Cuba and its placid life to set about the conquest of Mexico. He did the same thing leaving behind the world of intrigues and paper wars that followed the conquest to rush off to Honduras first and then to the exploration of the most sterile territory in the world, that long coast on the Southern Sea, where he did not find, as perhaps he dreamed he would, either the kingdom of the Seven Cities of Gold or the loves of the Amazon queen Calafia, All he found were sand and sea. How could he not feel himself humiliated when on his return from the Californias he found that the sinister and cruel Nuño de Guzmán would not allow him to pass through the lands of Xalisco?

With a rare display of sarcasm, our father, before he died, told me that perhaps there were two things worthwhile on that expedition. The first was discovering a new sea, a deep, mysterious gulf with water so crystal clear that from the beach it looked as if those in the water were swimming in air, except that there were myriad silver, blue, green, black, and yellow fish swiftly playing around the knees of the soldiers and sailors delighted to find that pleasant paradise. Was it an island? A peninsula? Did it really lead to the lands of Queen Calafia, Cíbola, and El Dorado? It didn’t matter, he said — for an instant it didn’t really matter. The meeting of desert and sea, the immense cactuses and the transparent water, the sun as round as an orange …

That was his other pleasure. He remembered that when he reached Yucatan, he was astonished to see an orange tree whose seeds had been brought there by the two disloyal castaways, Aguilar and Guerrero. Now my own father, humiliated by the satrap of Xalisco, the murderer Nuño de Guzmán, had to get back on his ship at the Barra de Navidad and sail to the bay of Acapulco, where he disembarked to continue to Mexico City. He had an idea. He asked the ship’s chief petty officer for some orange seeds and put a handful in his pouch. Then, on the Acapulco coast, he found a well-shaded spot and, opposite the sea, dug deep and planted those seeds.

“It will take you five years to bear fruit,” my father spoke to the orange seeds, “but the good thing is that you grow well in a cool climate, like ours, where the cold lets you sleep away the whole winter. Let’s see if here, too, in this aromatic and burned-out land, you can bear fruit. I think the most important thing, Orange Tree, is always to dig deep to protect yourself.”

Now, the perfume of the orange flowers was filtering through the window of his dying hour. It was the only gift of his broken, humiliated death …

MARTÍN 2

Just a moment now. How your vanity pains me. You see everything as a loss of dignity, a humiliation, a besmirching of nobility. Shitass criollo! Admit our father was not as astute as people say. What an incredible rash of naïveté in such a wise man! Admit what I’m saying is true, Brother Martín. Only once did his astuteness marry another astuteness. Then they were divorced, and one astuteness was left without a mate, while the other married naïveté. Very foxy, but very dumb at the same time. Why don’t you admit it? Are you afraid the flame you think you’re going to light with your filial piety will go out? Are you afraid your father will bequeath you not triumph but failure? Are you fleeing the damned and frivolous side of his fate because you’re afraid it will be yours? Don’t you prefer my frankness? Don’t you know that his imperial return to Spain with his own court and a flood of wealth confirmed the King’s suspicion that this soldier wanted to be king of Mexico? His exaggerated gifts to women infuriated their husbands. His insolence in passing without permission ahead of the grandees at Mass to sit next to the King, his impudence when he didn’t give or even sell the emeralds to the Queen: don’t you think all that chilled the King and the court, predisposing them against our father, getting their backs up? Did he keep those famous emeralds for your mother? Well, he would have been better off throwing them to the hogs. Don’t look at me like that.

MARTÍN 1

I’m leaving you, Brother. Once again, I relegate you to the third person, not even to the second in which, without your deserving it, I’ve been addressing you until now. You are not going to strip me of the desperate frankness of my speaking badly of my mother. Did you mention papers? Possessions, things, inheritance? I can accept the fact that the King, our master, granted Indians and towns to my father only to take them away bit by bit later on, taking away an Acapulco here, a Tehuantepec there … But that my mother would try to take things away from her own children … I’ve been frank. I recognize that I violated my father’s will in order to avoid the squandering of Indians and lands in the name of some senile, disorderly humanism. I didn’t know then that my own mother, Juana de Zúñiga — imperious and arrogant as she was, devoured by envy and by my father’s absences in Spain (seeking what was his by right and finding only his death), humiliated first by his abandonment and later by his demise, only too aware of his carnal weaknesses, isolated for years with six children in an Indian village like Cuernavaca, irritated by the facility with which her husband contracted debts to finance insane expeditions, maintain his houses, procure women, pay his lawyers, and meet the exorbitant sums he owed Sevillian bankers and Italian moneylenders (who wouldn’t lend money to the man who conquered Moctezuma, he of the Golden Chair?!), and insulted by my father’s will (in which he returned the two thousand ducats he received as her dowry but gave her nothing else) — would become when our father died a pitiless crow pecking at her own children.

With affection and attention, my father always overindulged the bastard daughter he had with Leonor Pizarro, the fruit of his early loves in Cuba, named simply Catalina Pizarro. Doña Juana, my mother, vented her rage especially against her, using sinister lawyers to trick her, forcing her to sign papers in which she ceded her property to my mother, and then, with the help of the hypocritical Medina Sidonia, who flattered my father so much in Seville, confining her by force to the Dominican convent of Madre de Dios, near Sanlúcar, where the poor, defenseless thing lived the rest of her days, in anguish and confusion.

All of that should have told me what my own destiny would be: when my mother, Hernán Cortés’s widow, refused to allow the executors of my father’s will into our house in Cuernavaca, having the lawyers received by her servants, refusing to allow the inventory and even less the ceding of what was mine to me. She sued me for board; for the dowries of her two daughters, my sisters Catalina and Juana, married by then to men of rank in Spain; for the lands, ever more scattered and reduced, that were part of the Marquis’s estate. She sued me for food, for dowries, for benefits from my father’s estates I had supposedly appropriated without right, for a life pension which, according to her, I was supposed to pay to a brother of hers who was a monk. She alleged that I was ten years in arrears in payments to my sisters Juana and María, two thorns from my father’s bouquet of Mexican daughters.

But my mother stripped my unfortunate sister Catalina, Hernán Cortés’s eldest daughter, of her properties in Cuernavaca, and, as I’ve said, had her locked up forever in a convent. So much for maternal love, so much for filial piety. She never trusted my generosity, which I never withdrew. She did not understand that I had to concentrate all the wealth of our family in my hands to make a strong impression on my return to Mexico after the death of my father and reestablish our fortune on a foundation of political power. Her greed and ambition transformed her into a statue. Forever on her knees, pretending to pray to God, my mother of stone lives on her knees in the House of Pilate in Seville, covered by a veil of dissimulation, peering at the world with avid, bulging eyes, her lips pursed, her jaw protruding. The old hypocrite prays with her hands joined, wearing no jewels. But even now it’s possible to hear, sounding like a reproach, the beating of the wings of a falcon, which was the only thing my father committed to her care when he died: “Madam: I implore you to take care that my falcon Alvarado be cured. You know how much I love him, and for that reason I commend him to you.” When will that falcon swoop onto the praying head of my mother? He will smash against her, poor thing. The good lady had a head made of stone. Things and papers, hard materials, inflammable paper erased by the waters of the Ocean sea: how sad … You are right, Martín, son of La Malinche. The world is made of stone: papers, water, and flames can do nothing to fight against it.

MARTÍN 2

I’m making an effort to ingratiate myself with you, Brother Martín. I accept that, for different but ultimately shared reasons, we have something to do together. We’d be better off doing it with a good will, I think, like good pals. It doesn’t matter if you treat me formally and relegate me to the third person. Look: to please you, I’ll personally tell the manner in which you returned to Mexico at the age of thirty, in the year 1562. Your return took place amid the joy of all the sons of the conquistadors: by then there was a second generation of us, and in you they saw the justification of their Mexican wealth, if they had it, and the justice of demanding it if they didn’t.

They all gathered in the main square of Mexico City to receive the criollo son of the conquistador. They all contributed out of their own pockets: Mexico City was rich — there wasn’t a poor Spaniard in it. There was such an abundance of silver that even the beggars got rich because the least amount of money anyone ever gave was four silver reales. We all know that in Mexico fortunes are made quickly; but in the years just after the conquest, if you were a poor Spaniard all you had to do was become a beggar and in a short time you could found an entailed estate, even if that annoys the children and grandchildren, ennobled now, of those beggars.

This is a country, as you well know, where money grows on trees: after all, the most common form of money among the Indians is cacao, which grows on a bush the size of an orange tree and whose fruit is the size of an almond. A hundred of them are worth a real. All anyone has to do is sit back on a mat in the marketplace and sell cacao, and he can end up, like that gentleman Alonso de Villaseca, with an estate worth a million pesos. That should give you an idea of how monstrous a celebration the arrival of my brother Martín Cortés was when he came from Spain and entered the main square of Mexico City: it was crowded with more than three hundred horsemen on very fine horses and saddles, wearing silk livery and cloth of gold. Then they put on mock jousts and duels in honor of the conquistador’s son. Later, two thousand more horsemen wearing black capes to make a greater effect entered the plaza, and at windows appeared the ladies (as well as some who weren’t) wearing jewels and tiaras.

The viceroy himself, Luis de Velasco, came out of the palace to receive my brother with an embrace. But if the viceroy was looking at a square which had only been loaned to him, my brother could look at his own property: the center of Moctezuma’s capital, where our father took the palaces of Axayacatl to build the Old Houses for himself and his people and, on top of Moctezuma’s palace, the New Houses, that is, the palace from which the viceroy emerged to greet you, Brother Martín. I saw it all from the construction site of the cathedral of Mexico, which had just been begun. I was there, amid scaffolding and screens, no different from the bricklayers and carriers crowded together, they so far from the luxury surrounding you, they without silver, without entailed estates, without even the cacao beans, their faces scratched by smallpox, snot running out of their noses because they still weren’t accustomed to those vile European colds.

And I, Brother, watching you, surrounded by glory, make your entrance into the city conquered by our father. I, Brother, standing on what was left of the vast Aztec wall of skulls, on top of which the cathedral was beginning to rise. I stopped looking at the horsemen and their mounts. I looked at the grimy people around me, wearing only cotton smocks, barefoot, their foreheads wound with ropes and their backs loaded with sacks: I thought to myself, My God, how many Christians will someday come to this cathedral to pray and never imagine that on the base of each column of this Catholic temple is inscribed an insignia of the Aztec gods? But, with your permission, the past was forgotten and the Crown restored a part of our father’s estate to my brother, a reduced portion, but still the greatest fortune in Mexico.

MARTÍN 1

That’s what I like to remember! Just imagine that in the great Mexico City the art of toasting was unknown. It fell to me to introduce that Spanish custom at dinners and soirees. No one in Mexico knew what it was! I made toasts fashionable, and there were no gatherings of hidalgos, descendants of conquistadors, or mere viceregal officers where there weren’t toasts, amid joy, drunkenness, and disorder. Let’s see who can drink the most, who can be the wittiest, and who would refuse to carry through to the end! The toast became the center of every party, and if someone refused to accept a challenge, we would snatch off his cap and cut it to shreds before everyone. Then a hundred of us, wearing masks, would ride out on horseback and go from window to window talking to the women and entering the houses of gentlemen and rich merchants to speak with ladies, until those good men became enraged at our behavior and locked their doors and windows. But they did not take our ingenuity into account: we reached the balconies of the ladies with long blowguns, whose darts carried flowers. Nor did they take the audacity of the ladies into account: defying paternal and marital orders, they would peek between the shutters to look at us gallants. My life in the capital of New Spain at that time was pure pleasure: joy, wit, honor, and a thousand seductions.

Who did not see in me my father reborn and now enjoying the benefits of the well-earned fruit of the conquest? Who didn’t admire me? Who didn’t envy me? Who among the handsome and elegant in this capital of novelties — male or female — did not gather seductively around me? I already know what you are going to say. You. Martín Cortés, the second-rate, the mestizo, the son of the shadows. Without you, I could do nothing in this land. I needed you, son of La Malinche, to carry out my destiny in Mexico. What a disgrace, my disgraced brother: to need you, the least seductive of men!

MARTÍN 2

There was no one more seductive, of course, than Alonso de Ávila, whose richness of attire could not be found even in the courts of Europe. To his luxury he added the natural wealth of a land of gold and silver, and to those Mexican metals, he added the contrast of the whitest skin ever seen on a man, here or there: only the whitest women were as white as Alonso de Ávila, who perhaps looked even whiter in a dark-skinned land. And what he allowed others to see were his dazzling hands, which moved and led and, sometimes, even touched, with an airy lightness that made air itself seem heavy. My, how light this Alonso de Ávila was, forced to walk on mere earth only because of the richness and gravity of his damask and jaguar-skin suits, his gold chains, and his tawny mantle decorated with a reliquary — all of it lightened, let me assure you, by the feathers in his cap and the volutes of his mustache, the wings of his face.

Martín and Alonso became friends; together they organized and enjoyed the toasts and masquerades; they admired each other, like young, rich hidalgos who are surprised to find themselves occasionally (as I surprised them more than once from the shadows) admiring each other more than they admired the women they courted. They competed to conquer a beautiful lady only in order to imagine her in the arms of the other; they screwed, the bastards, so each one could imagine himself in the place of the other. That’s how close Alonso de Ávila and Martín Cortés were.

What’s so strange about that in this realm of luxury and parties, disorder and feasting, mirrors and more mirrors, perfumes, and mutual admiration? What’s so strange about Martín and Alonso, Alonso and Martín, the son and heir of the conquistador, Hernán Cortés’s prodigal son, embracing the nephew of another headstrong captain of the conquest, Ávila the King’s commissioner? He was the rogue who dared put his hand (Mother herself saw it and told me) on Moctezuma’s gold vestments, the son of Gil González, commissioner and land dealer, who stripped the real conquistadors of their lands, confidence man and fraud, who wisely hid his wealth only so his sons, Alonso and Gil, could show it off and spend it. The two joined in a whirlwind of pleasure. My brother Martín and this Alonso de Ávila brought their pleasure to its greatest heights in a singular party. The pleasure of telling about it I leave to my brother Martín.

MARTÍN 1

By God in heaven: I didn’t invent the parties and uproar of the Mexican colony; by His Holy Mother, I reached a capital already enamored of luxury and parties, where wild bulls were run in Chapultepec and excursions on horseback echoed through the forests: jousts, rings, mock duels. The viceroy, Don Luis de Velasco, said that even if the King were to deprive the criollos of their towns and estates the viceroy would see to it they were consoled by having bells rung in the streets. So, when the viceroy died, there was great sadness. Everyone, young and old, wore mourning, and the troops about to sail for the Philippines dressed for the funeral with black flags and emblems of grief, their drums muted, dragging their pikes. A gray, weak, and boring Interim Council took over the government while a new viceroy was being named, but Alonso and I, royal heirs to New Spain, because we were sons of conquistadors, respectful of the dead viceroy and the viceroy to come — though not of the mediocre Council — decided to keep alive joy, luxury, and the rights of heirs in these lands conquered by our fathers.

The viceroy died; he wasn’t the first and wouldn’t be the last. The viceroys changed; we, the heirs of the conquest, remained. The viceroy died, but I had twin sons and felt that was sufficient reason for shedding the mourning I wore for the viceroy and showing the Council who the real owners of New Spain were. My brother wants me to tell it: I’ll give him that pleasure. On our own, we took over the main square; half the houses in it were ours in any case. I had a raised wooden walkway constructed from my house to the cathedral to open a path for the procession, so I could carry my sons to the Door of Pardon and announce to the world that now there were grandsons of Hernán Cortés to maintain our dynasty. I announced it with noise, of course. Artillery, tourneys on foot on the walkway, and feasts to which all were invited, Spaniards and Indians. Roasted bulls, chickens, and game, pipes of red wine for the Spaniards. For the Indians, an enclosure of rabbits, hares, and deer, following tradition, along with myriad birds. When the enclosure was broken open, they all came out running and flying, to be shot with arrows and given to the humble people, who were delighted and thankful. Jousts, fireworks, piñatas … A week of feasting, surrounded by the people, with toasts, masquerades, and, at the end, a grand dinner and soiree as a culmination of the celebration, given by my true brother Alonso de Ávila at his house.

What a beautiful surprise we gave to all — to our relatives and friends but also to the rancorous Council: the enviable contrast of one table made up of insignificant lawyers and ink-pissing officials and the other, opulent one made up of hidalgos who, if we piss anything at all, it’s pure gold! Laughing childishly, I followed the suggestions of my trickster friend Ávila. We dramatized, to the astonishment and praise of the guests, the interview between my father, Hernán Cortés, and the emperor Moctezuma, when my father was the first — the very first, are you all listening? — white man to see the grandeur of the Great Tenochtitlán.

I of course played the part of my father. Alonso de Ávila dressed up as Moctezuma, placing around my neck a chain of flowers and jewels, telling me in a loud voice: “Not only do I venerate and respect you but I obey you. I am your vassal.” (In my ear he whispered, “I love you like a brother.’) Everyone applauded the pageant with pleasure, but I felt how the joy settled into another kind of delight when Alonso de Ávila, catching me unawares, placed a crown of laurel on my head and, smiling, awaited the exclamation of the guests: “Oh, how well the crown suits your lordship!”

MARTÍN 2

I wasn’t invited to those celebrations. But I watched them from a distance. Actually from close up, from very close up, I was keeping an eye on things. I mixed in with the crowd, at the barbecue pits, the pulque stands, next to the people making wicker chairs, tortillas, carrying pots of drinking water; next to the ditches and dumps and eating stands, I listened to the new, secret language being forged between Nahuatl and Spanish, the secret curses, the secret sighs of this man who just yesterday was a priest and is now an old pockmarked ruin, or that man who was as much the son of an Aztec prince as my brother and I are sons of the Spanish conquistador, but now he was carrying loads of firewood from house to house, and my brother had his twins baptized in the cathedral, but the sons and grandsons of Cuauhtémoc were entering the same cathedral on their knees, their heads bent forward, their scapularies like chains pulled by the invisible hand of the three gods of Christianity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the dad, the kid, and the succubus: Which one do you like best, new little Mexican boy, Indian and Castilian like me, the daddy, the brat, or the ghost?

I saw them there in the festivities with which my brother celebrated his progeny, saw them inventing for themselves a color, a language, a god — three instead of a thousand. Which language? Will you call him the son or the escuincle, a boy or a chaval, a turkey or a guajalote, Cuauhnáhuac or Cuernavaca, where my brother was born, agave or maguey, black beans or frijoles, kidney beans or ejotes? Which God: mirror of smoke or Holy Spirit, plumed serpent or crucified Christ, god that demands my death or God that gives me His, sacrificing father or sacrificed Father, obsidian knife or cross? Which Mother of God: Tonantzín or Guadalupe? Which language? If it happens to be Spanish, much of it comes from Arabic: Guadalupe herself, Guadalquivir, Guadarrama, alberca, azotea, acequia, alcoba, almohada, alcázar, alcachofa, limón, naranja, ojalá? Which language? If it happens to be Nahuatl: Seri, Pima, Totonaca, Zapoteca, Maya, Huichol?

At night, I stroll around among the fires from the torches lit to celebrate the criollo descendants of my whoremongering and insatiable father, wondering about my own blood, my progenitors and my progeny as well. Which will it be? I look at the dark skin, the glassy eyes, the averted eyes, the laden backs, the callused hands, the split feet, the pregnant wombs, the worn-out teats of my Indian and mestizo brothers and sisters, and I imagine them — barely forty years ago! — occupying their proper places, hoarding fortunes, doing what they pleased, commanding sacrifices, demanding tribute, receiving the solar gold on their heads and shooting it forth from their haughty stares, overcoming the sun itself, overcoming gold itself!

Exactly the same as my brother Martín and his pal Ávila, and the damned twins baptized today in the name of the God who conquered my mother with one single, outrageous announcement: Stop dying for me; look, I died for you. Son-of-a-bitch Jesus, king of faggots, you conquered my mother’s people with the perverse pleasure of your phallic nails, your sour semen, the lances that penetrate you, and the humors you distill. How to reconquer you? What name shall I give to our next time: reconquest, counterconquest, anticonquest, retroconquest, cuauhtémoconquest, preconquest, shitconquest? What will I do with it, with whom will I make it, in whose name, for whom? My mother, Malinche, without whom my father wouldn’t have conquered anything? Or my father himself, stripped of his conquest, humiliated, dragged to court, worn out in banal trials and perverse paper wars, accused a thousand times, and only punished in an eternally postponed decision? Sword of Damocles, Cuauhtémoc’s flint knife, the stiletto of the Hapsburgs, it all hangs over our heads and my brother Martín knows it. He amuses himself, sharing Alonso de Ávila’s arrogance, he doesn’t realize how the Council sees him. As the owner of the city. He doesn’t realize the Council can do nothing against him: a junta of mediocre men, cowards immersed in an unresolved collegiality, lacking authority. They see that a conspiracy is forming, that danger approaches, but they fear Martín, my brother, they fear him … And he doesn’t know it. Nor does he know that they restored our father’s property to him to keep him quiet and lead him out of the temptations of political power. I tell him and he almost hangs me, calling me envious, the son of a whore; he has his money with no conditions, like a free man. He shouted that at me, and I say, in my perpetually opaque, perpetually obsequious voice, high-pitched with melancholy: “Well then, prove it. Do what they fear most.”

THE TWO MARTÍNS

What has my brother come to say to me? That there is no higher authority in New Spain than I myself? That I only want to enjoy my wealth and show it off to others as I do, in toasts and masquerades, soirees and baptisms, processions and entertainments? Has he come to remind me that I am the firstborn by right of inheritance, the heir of the entailed estate of a humiliated father who depends on me to do what he wished to do but couldn’t? I, greater than my father? I, superior to Hernán Cortés, Conqueror of Mexico? I, capable of doing what my father did not do? Rebel? Rebel and take over the land? Revolt? Revolt against the King?

My brother says he’s gone to the tomb of his Indian mother, a flooded grave near Ixtapalapa, moist but surrounded by nervous flowers and floating plots of land. He’s gone to that tomb and told his mother, Malinche, that thanks to her my father conquered this land. He comes to me to ask if I’m less than his Indian mother. He offends me. He riles me up. He shits on me, as he says himself. He starts talking a language I don’t recognize. But he uses it well, with malice and temptation. Because if he talks to his mother, I can’t talk to mine, Doña Juana de Zúñiga, walled up in her Cuernavaca palace, surrounded by ravines, constables, and watchdogs. She denies me access to my inheritance — well, to a part of it.

My brother, on the other hand, speaks directly to his mother and tells me he says this to her: Dear Mother Malinche, what more would I want than to be king of this land. But look at me, dark and with averted eyes, what the hell do you want me to be? On the other hand, my brother is as beautiful as the sun, an all-powerful marquis, coddled by fortune, and yet he will not dare, will not dare. He’s afraid of taking over the land. The land. Yesterday I brought him (my brother the mestizo brought me) to the highest point on Chapultepec, and there I showed him (he showed me) the beauty of this Valley of Mexico.

It was morning, and the cool air announced a hot day. We both knew that the dawn would smell of roses pearled with dew and ripe fruit, open to pour the secret juices of the papaya, the cherimoya, and the guanabana. The beauty of this valley is that it makes mirages tangible. Distances change thanks to the trickery of mountains and plains. Faraway things seem close, and what’s close seems faraway. The lakes dry up and evaporate, but they still mirror the trees newly born next to them, laurels, pirús, and weeping willows. The century plants reclaim their ancestral dominance over the dust. And the bluish mountains, the volcanoes crowned with white whirlwinds, the hillsides covered with thick forests, the liquid air, the breath of the sun like an oven, the punctual afternoon shower: all that, we two brothers contemplated one morning.

And then one afternoon, he says to me that what counts is power over this land, not over things, not over the inventory that gave my father sleepless nights and that now threatens, Brother, to overwhelm you: the houses, the furniture, the jewels, the vassals, the towns … Be careful: back in Seville you saw the auction of our father’s house, and you feared the conquest of Mexico would end in a junk-shop sale of pots and old mattresses. Be careful. Take the land; forget the things. Do what your father didn’t do. Look at the earth and remember. Hernán Cortés wasn’t the only one to see it for the first time. Many men — soldiers, captains, a few criminals, a few other hidalgos, the majority honorable people from towns in Estremadura and Castile — came over with him. You aren’t alone. Our father was never alone. He triumphed because he kept his ear to the ground and listened to what the land had to say. Don’t be like Moctezuma, who waited to hear the voice of the gods; the gods never spoke to him because they’d already run away. Be like our father. Listen to what the land says.

These arguments were useless in the face of the physical enchantment of this Valley of Mexico. In it, there was room for all climates at the same time: summer and spring, autumn and winter all linked together, as if eternity had decided to meet itself in that transparent air. The shock of that purity engulfed us. And we trembled together, listening to the noise of the city to come, the incessant arguing, the growl of a million tigers, the plaintive howl of hungry wolves, the terror of serpents that revealed a skeleton of metal when they changed their skin. The valley fills with multicolored lights, as bright as the liquid silver of a sword pointing between the eyes of the world, red as a breath exhaled from hell, but all of them overcome by an evil-smelling mist, a foam of gas, as if the valley were a flatulent belly, pitilessly opened by a knife to carry out a premature autopsy. We, the two Martíns, plunge our hands into that open stomach, we smear ourselves with blood up to our elbows, we remove the guts and viscera of Mexico City, and we don’t know how to separate the jewels from the mud, the emeralds from the gallstones, the rubies from the intestinal chancres.

Then, from the bottom of the lagoon, unexpectedly, there surges up a chorus of voices, which at first we two brothers can’t manage to understand … One sings in Nahuatl, another in Castilian, but they end up blending together: one sings the unfolding of the flower-like Quetzal mantles, another the swaying of the Sevillian poplars in the breeze; one begs that the flowers not die, that they last in someone’s hands; another, that the wounded, love-struck crane not die … The voices fuse to sing together in the fleeting passage of life; they wonder if we’ve come in vain, we pass through the earth: we touch the flowers, we touch the fruit, but a loud, disconsolate scream remembers, adding another voice to the group: Within the garden I shall die, within the rose garden shall I be slain, words that fuse with the responsory of the Indian land, No one, no one, no one, in truth, lives in the land: we’ve only come to dream, and the words flow far from the valley, into a distant sea where the silent rivers of life come to a halt; We, says the Nahuatl voice, shall have to go to the place of mystery … And then, as if borne along by a wind that scatters the pestilential smoke and puts out the cruel lights and silences the strident noises, the singing ends without ending:

My flowers will never end,

My songs will never end.

I raise them up,

I am only a singer …

MARTÍN 1

He wants me to forget my existence, my honors and pleasures. He doesn’t realize that those things are enough for me. I have no plan to govern this land. Let the others govern it; the more mediocre they are, the more they will envy me. What’s wrong with that? He thinks I don’t know how to read his arguments. Anyone who lives here understands them. He wants to avenge his mother. He seduces me by convincing me I should avenge my father. Our revenge does not unite us. It goes beyond that. He reminds me that our father ended loving Mexico more than he loved Spain, that he considered Mexico to be his land and wanted to return here to die. Spain, time, papers, and official perversity denied him that wish. Perhaps, my brother alleges, the reason is that the presence of our father in Mexico was feared. The long court trial was in reality an exile. Hernán Cortés wanted to save the Indian temples; the Franciscans stopped him. He wanted to end the system that made the Indians into bound vassals; the commissioners prevented that from happening. In our father’s humanism, the King saw the thing he most feared: the unrestricted government of the conquistadors. Their caprice. Their insolence. For the good of all, the King had to impose his will on the conquistadors — they weren’t to think their deeds gave them the right to govern.

Didn’t Gonzalo Pizarro take up arms against the King in Peru? Didn’t the traitor Lope de Aguirre go deep into the Amazon to found a new kingdom against the King of Spain? Better to corner the conquistadors, surround them, strip them, leave them to die drowned in ink and papers or stabbing each other to death; let Pedro de Mendoza die of hunger and syphilis on the banks of the Río de la Plata; let Francisco Pizarro die assassinated by the supporters of Diego de Almagro, his rival; let Pedro de Alvarado die crushed by a horse; and let our father Hernán Cortés die of rage and despair. Does my brother, the son of the Indian woman, want me to add my name to theirs? Like hell: my resentment is not his, and he does not share my secret. I know my father wanted to free both the land and the vassals. I violated my father’s testament. Let others sing his glory and his humanism — Father Motolinia for example: “Who loved and defended the Indians in this new world as Cortés did?” I base my pride on my modesty. I did not carry out my father’s will in his testament, which was to free this land. How could I possibly reclaim that same freedom now? Especially if it’s going to cost me my toasts, my masquerades, my baptisms, my envies, and my fortune.

MARTÍN 2

My poor brother. Blinded. Deluded. Proud. He has an immense power in this land, but he doesn’t know how to use it. He is a mirror held up to the deeds of our father. A presentable mirror. On the other hand, I … He: annual rents paid him: fifty thousand pesos. Educated, refined. I see him. I see myself. I am his distorted mirror. There is no gentleman more powerful than he in the colony. All the honors and income owed my father, denied my father, were given to him. Unlike my father, he represented no political danger. Arable land, estates, tributes, tithes, first fruits: everything was given him as if to say: Keep quiet. We are giving you all the honors, all the wealth. But we deny you power, just as we did your father.

I tell him: “Take power, too.” He doesn’t want to: he accepts things as they are, and that’s his nature. But the idea of rebellion to win Mexican independence is not an idea born of my rancor (as he sees it) or his vanity (as I see it). These things happen despite us. Behind our backs. They have their own laws. Mexico is no longer Tenochtitlán. But it is not Spain, either. Mexico is a new country, a different country, which cannot be governed from a distance and at one remove, just like that. We are the Crown’s stepsons. My father knew it, but he as yet did not have a Mexican homeland, although he did want it. He wanted it; I want it. We, his sons, not only have a new country. We are the new country. I hear its voices and tell my brother, “Don’t make a sound, keep quiet, speak softly, rape with dissimulation; Mexico is a country wounded at birth, nursed on the milk of rancor, brought up with the whisper of the shadow. Talk to it tenderly, coddle it, support it, and make it yours in secret. Don’t tell anyone about your love for Mexico. Public light offends the sons of the shadow. Go on dying discreetly, find supporters, promise everything to everyone, then give out just a little and no more (since no one here ever expects anything; they’re happy with a little, which to them seems a lot). Take advantage of political opportunity.”

The viceroy died. There were three justices in expectation of a new viceroy. They went on taking care of the affairs of the day, almost through inertia. The permanent subject of the administration was still just one: to define the powers of the Crown and those of the conquistadors. The sons of the conquest presented their briefs to the Council. The Council put them off — weakly. But the descendants saw in it an insolent affront and responded with insolence of their own: “Let’s hope that what they say about those who want everything — that they lose everything — doesn’t happen to the King.” The arrogant Alonso de Ávila said that, and everyone attributed the idea to my brother. Two sides formed, and all because of some gloves. A certain Don Diego de Córdoba was given twenty thousand ducats by the criollos under the pretext that he buy them Spanish gloves not made here. It was a pretext for this Don Diego to negotiate the rights of the criollos in court, without any appearance of bribery.

Since Don Diego got nowhere and kept the ducats, and no gloves reached the hands of the hidalgos, two sides formed. One approached my brother to ask him to lead the revolt and take advantage of the weak Council. The other group went directly to the impotent Council to denounce my brother, Ávila, and their friends. The Council, fearful of my brother’s power, vacillated. My brother, fearful of royal power, also vacillated.

Offstage, those who did not hesitate acted. In my brother’s name, his supporters seized the symbolic opportunity offered by a memorable date: August 13, 1565, the anniversary of the capture of Mexico City-Tenochtitlán by Hernán Cortés. It was the so-called Festival of the Banner. The conspirators decided to take advantage of the revelry, the crowds of people who would be present, and the tradition of mock duels and skirmishes to put a boat with cannon on wheels and pretend to attack a rolling tower, which would also be filled with artillery and soldiers. The acting governor would pass between them with his banner. Just then, armed men would pour out of both, seizing the Council and its banner and proclaiming Don Martín Cortés King and Master of Mexico.

Oh … What I feared most took place: you lost the initiative, Brother.

They were one step ahead of you.

MARTÍN 1

All of that went on behind my back, I swear it. Buying gloves for rich hidalgos! Who could think up something like that … It is true that they came to see me, to compromise me, to sing me the eternal litany of criollo woes — that no one ever took them into account, that they were badly governed by inept people sent from Spain, that the judges and governors got in the way of their business, that they did not have the right to govern the country as their fathers, the conquistadors, did, without consulting anyone. I let them talk. I didn’t discourage them. But I did warn them: “Do you really have people behind you?” “Many,” they answered, and they named them. One was a certain Baltasar de Aguilar, a captain in the army. “Well, let’s hope that it all doesn’t fall apart”—I warned them—“and we lose our lives and estates. As far as I’m concerned,” I said (and I repeat it here and now as proof of my sincerity, which has never been denied), “if you don’t go forward, I’ll keep quiet. But if you make some headway, I’ll step forward and denounce you to the King. I’ll say, ‘Majesty, my father gave you this land. Now I give it back to you.’”

But before anything like this could happen, this Baltasar de Aguilar person, named captain by the plotters, stole the march on all of us and went to the Council to tell everything he knew about the uprising, about how they were going to make me king and about how he was supposed to be captain of all the plotters. I knew nothing. I was at the time deeply involved with a lady, and because of her influence, I favored members of her family, who were convinced both that I had Moctezuma’s treasure hidden and that it would ultimately turn up in her skirts. Now you tell me if I had any time to think about becoming king, when my lady love’s relatives, not seeing any signs of the treasure, grew impatient, locked her up, started spreading libelous papers about me all over town, and walked in front of me on the street without tipping their hats.

I recovered from those insults by celebrating the birth of another son of mine and by trying to repeat the festivities of the previous year: triumphal arches, artificial forests, music, lots of pomp and circumstance. There was a jolly masquerade and then a grand dinner given by my dear friend Alonso de Ávila. Now, he was master of the town of Cuautitlán, which specialized in making little clay pitchers. He had some made up marked like this: a U with a crown above and a tiny yardstick below to express the idea: YOU SHALL RULE. The soiree was interrupted by a squad of armed men led by a man I’d never seen before — large-headed, powerful, badly dressed, whose thin hair, like that of a mandrake root, grew above a scraped face, as if he’d washed it with pumice stone. The contrast between his vulgar clothing and the identical outfits which for that gala evening Alonso and I were wearing could not have been greater. It was a summer night in July of 1565: we were both wearing long damask robes with black tunics — and our swords. Which is what the man with the stone face, as square as a die painted orange by a miserly rather than a just nature, demanded of us: “Your lordships will please give me your swords. You are under arrest by His Majesty’s order.” “Why?” we asked in one voice, Alonso and I. “You will be informed in due course.” “By whom?” we asked, once again at the same time. “By Dr. Muñoz Carrillo, a newly appointed judge, which is to say, me myself,” said this apparition made of a flesh that was much too solid for him to be a ghost. Then he picked up the Cuautitlán pitcher and smashed it violently against the floor. We were clay, he stone.

MARTÍN 2

They accused him of such banal things. That he fancied himself a Don Juan. That he had Moctezuma’s treasure hidden somewhere. Utter crap. The real accusation was about seizing control of the land. That is, rebelling against the King. And to my eternal sorrow, that accusation included me. They dragged me out of the shadows. That night, the streets and entryways to the plaza were patrolled by men on horseback and foot soldiers. Everyone was in an uproar, and my brother deeply distressed. They put him in a very closely guarded room in the government house, completely surrounded by troops. But the room did have a window that faced the small square on the side of the cathedral under construction, where a platform was immediately built. He was disarmed, but they left him his elegant damask summer suit; they never laid a hand on him. Me the Indian, on the other hand, they threw onto a burro, stripped me, tied me down, and then tossed me into the same jail where they held my brother, just to see if my rancor would grow, to see if his pity would insult me.

On the way, tied naked to the burro, facedown, ass to the breeze, I had to put up with the jokes of every beggar in the city: Since when does one burro carry another, which one was the real burro? and the embarrassment of having my tiny little John Thomas compared with the burro’s huge phallus: Hey boy, don’t you long for that thing down there? or, Do you really think little things mean a lot? or, Are you going or coming, getting in or getting out, taking or giving, screwing or screaming? And there I am, facedown with the blood pounding in my temples and eyes, my testicles cold, emptied, and shrunken from fear.

I look at the city’s garbage and realize that I’ve always tried to look up — at the palaces being built, the balconies from which my brother and his friends used their blowguns filled with flowers, the niches of the saints (this stone city slowly sinking into the mud; the water went when the gods departed). Now my position forced me to look into the gutters flooded with garbage, the mud streets marked with animal tracks and cart wheel ruts, footprints in the dust, the dog prints indistinguishable from the human prints. I try to look up, although it pains my neck, at the cathedral under construction. A force that doesn’t touch me makes me bend my neck again. Every single thing I took for granted, I realize now, has been taken away from me. I look at Mexico’s soil, and I realize it changes ceaselessly, that the seasons change it, that sorrow changes it, that weeping changes it, footsteps, fainting, the disintegration of this porous, sunken ground that can’t decide between water and dust, between heaven and hell.

The burro stops and a small, misshapen woman wrapped in a black rebozo comes over to me, caresses my hand, slaps me. Then from her sunken, toothless mouth, from her dwarfish cheeks, from her wet tongue that can’t hold back her saliva decently, come the words I expected, the words that have hung over my life like that sword of Damocles that hangs over the heads of all Hernán Cortés’s descendants in their perennially postponed trials. The little misshapen woman violently raises my head by yanking on my hair and says to me what I expected to hear: “You’re a son of a bitch. You’re my brother. You’re the fucking son of la chingada.”

MARTÍN 1

They’ve thrown my brother, the other Martín, into the same jail I’m in. How little imagination our father had. Always the same names. Martín, Leonor, Catalina, María, Amadorcico. What ever became of him? What ever became of the humpbacked María? I look toward the platform that’s been set up in the plaza, next to the scaffolding that will one day be that cathedral, and I tell my poor brother, the son of the Indian woman, to get up and come see the dawn, as we did one day from Chapultepec. But the other Martín’s ribs ache. They brought him in naked and beaten, filthy and stinking. No matter. It’s in situations like this when more than ever we’ve got to be good Christians, which I swear I am. “Look,” I told my brother, “it’s going to rain at daybreak; what a strange thing.” “Sometimes it does happen,” he painfully answers me. “The fact is”—he added—“that you never get up early.” I laughed. “But I do go to bed late. I would hear the raindrops; my hearing is very sharp.” “Well then, try to tell the difference between the rain and the drum that announces death,” said my ailing brother.

I leaned out the window. The little plaza had filled up with rabble, held back by horsemen. The Ávila brothers, Alonso and Gil, marched in between two ranks of armed men. My brother Alonso was wearing the finest stockings and a satin doublet, a damask robe lined with jaguar skin, a cap decorated with gold ornaments and feathers, and a gold chain around his neck. I could just make out a rosary made of tiny, white orangewood beads in his hand. A nun had sent it to him for days of affliction, and he, laughing, told me he’d never touch it. Next to the brothers were the Dominican friars. I took no notice of his brother Gil. He must have been coming into the city from some town when they arrested him because he was dressed plainly, in greenish cloth, and was wearing boots.

The Ávila brothers climbed onto the platform. First Gil lay down with his head stretched forward, but I could only keep my eyes on Alonso, my friend, my comrade, seeing him there, holding his cap in his hand, the rain soaking the hair he always took such pains to curl, he was so careful about his hairdo to make himself look handsome, seeing him and hearing the clumsy chopping of the executioner until he’d finally managed to cut off Gil’s head in bad style, amid the shouts and sobs of the people.

Alonso stared at his decapitated brother and heaved such a huge sigh that even in our prison I could hear it. Still staring, he went down on his knees, raised his white hand, and twisted his mustache, a habit of his, until the monk Domingo de Salazar, who later became bishop of the Philippines, helped him to die with dignity. He told Alonso it was not time to fix his mustache but to arrange his affairs with God. A voice intoned the Miserere; the monk said to the crowd, “Sirs, I commend these gentlemen, who say they are dying unjustly, to God.” Alonso made a sign to the monk, who bent down over the kneeling man and heard something in secret. They blindfolded Alonso. The executioner took three swings, as if he were cutting the head off a lamb, and I bit my hand, asking myself: Alonso, what things did we forget, did we forget to say to each other, Brother? Are we departing without doing something we should have done, be closer, talk to each other, love each other more? Were you unfaithful to our friendship in the hour of your death? Did you die without me, my adored Alonso? Are you condemning me to live without you? Condemning me to live desiring you, regretting everything that wasn’t?

MARTÍN 2

I know my city well. Something is changing it. I hear the haste. I see the ugliness. I don’t need anyone to tell me that the execution scaffold outside our window was put up overnight: something is changing the form, the face of Mexico City. It isn’t only the heads of the Ávila brothers that have been displayed on pikes in the great plaza. They’ve been placed such that my brother and I can’t avoid seeing them. Judge Muñoz Carrillo, always with his freshly washed face, does not have to visit us to say that these lodgings are only temporary, because he has ordered a jail to be built within two weeks so that all those who conspired against the King — and there are many — will be able to fit inside it. As soon as it’s ready, we’ll be brought there, to a jail, he tells us, where not even a bird will be able to fly over without his seeing it. He looks us up and down and warns us that those found guilty are sentenced at midnight so they have no time to send word to anyone, not even themselves. At dawn, the proper authority will simply appear at our door with two burros for us to ride and two crucifixes for us to carry in our hands. We will all hear the bells of the Town Hall. The executioner and the crier will accompany us to the place of execution.

The crier will shout out: “This is the justice His Majesty and the Royal Council, acting in his name, order meted out to these men as traitors to the royal Crown.” Etcetera. That’s what I say to the judge: “Etcetera.” It’s one of those Latin expressions my mother taught me. Newly converted to Christianity, she was excited by the idea that the language of religion should be different from the language spoken by the people. Since she would have liked to be, or go on being, a translator, that seduced her and she began to dot her everyday speech with the occasional hallelujah, oremus, dominoes woesbiscuits, requestete in patchy, paternostro, and especially etcetera, which, according to what she told me, means “everything else, the lot, the whole boring thing. In a word: the law.” But on hearing me, the judge took it the wrong way and gave me a huge slap in the face. Then my brother Martín did something unexpected: he punched the insolent Council officer back. He defended me. My brother stuck his neck out for me. I looked at him with a love that saved me, if not him, from all the differences that separated us, some serious and some silly. At that moment, I would have died with him. Begging your pardon now, and if it’s not too much of a bother, I’ll repeat myself to make things clear. I wouldn’t die for him. But I would have died with him.

MARTÍN 1

I can’t explain why they neither sentenced nor executed us. The entire city is a jail and a torture chamber. It’s easy to see, to know, to smell, and, besides, we’re told. Opposite us, the platform where we, like the Ávila brothers, would have our heads cut off was already finished. Why don’t they get it over with? Is this the judge’s torture for my having slapped him? Well, the Quesada brothers paraded past us, crucifixes in hand, still stunned by the rapidity of their sentence, convinced right down to the last minute they weren’t to die; Cristóbal de Oñate was drawn and quartered; Baltasar de Sotelo was found innocent of any wrongdoing in the Mexico conspiracy, but he was executed in any case for having served in Peru during Gonzalo Pizarro’s uprising against the King — a victim of guilt by suspected association; right before our eyes passed Bernardino de Bocanegra mounted on a mule, preceded by the crucifix and the crier, followed by his mother, his wife and family, the women all barefoot and hatless, their hair as tangled as Mary Magdalene’s, dragging their mantles in the dust, weeping, begging that the gentleman be granted a pardon. That was the only time the dreaded Muñoz Carrillo showed compassion: he commuted Bernardino de Bocanegra’s sentence to destitution of all worldly possessions, twenty years in the King’s galleys, and, after that, perpetual exile from the kingdoms and territories of His Majesty Don Felipe II.

Thus my brother and I had no idea what to expect. Would we lose our heads, be exiled, or row for the rest of our lives? The wily Muñoz Carrillo dropped no hints, but had bells rung at our door as if it were already dawn and our turn to go to our final rendezvous. He had crucifixes paraded under our noses and tied burros under our windows. Why didn’t anything happen? We saw the heads of those already executed displayed on pikes and then disappear from the plaza and the government buildings. The town councillors protested. The heads on display were a sign of treason. But the city had not been disloyal. The orgy of executions, however, went on.

Each time a head fell, that hypocrite judge Muñoz would intone these words: “He was merciful to himself, he went to enjoy the presence of God because he died a good Christian and was rewarded with many Masses and prayers.” I told my brother Martín, the son of Malinche: “The judge is doing all this to show that His Majesty is being well served and will, in his turn, grant the judge many favors.” More astute than I, my brother saw a sign of Muñoz Carrillo’s waning power in all this. Then he added, “But you’re right. He’s trying to get on the good side of the King. He’s a miserable lackey. The motherfucker.” I’d never heard that word and supposed it was one of the many La Malinche had taught my half brother. Even so, I liked the expression: Hijo de la chingada.

It gave me great pleasure to apply it to the man who’d informed on us, Baltasar de Aguilar, when the new viceroy finally reached Mexico. Don Gastón de Peralta, Marquis of Falces, found himself in a city silently rebelling against Judge Muñoz Carrillo. The first thing he did was to decide that my brother and I should be immediately sent to Spain because the Council of Mexico was not impartial and could not try our case properly. And that was the intent of the King himself, Don Felipe II, with regard to the sons of a man who had given such glory to Spain.

The moment that pimp Baltasar de Aguilar, the informer, learned the viceroy was proceeding benevolently with us, he withdrew his accusations in order to appease all sides. I think it was then, only then, that the divine flame of justice began to blaze within me. I requested the opportunity to meet the motherfucker (I’m talking like my brother now) face-to-face, and Muñoz Carrillo decided to be present. Contrite, Baltasar de Aguilar knelt before me and begged forgiveness. I told him there was no way to forgive the death of Alonso de Ávila, my most beloved brother, which was his fault. Aguilar was beside himself, but not the judge, who had only a few days left of power. “Why didn’t Alonso de Ávila defend himself?” the judge asked me. I didn’t know what to say. The boorish Muñoz Carrillo dragged his callused hands across his face and in a cavernous voice, in whose depths neither laughter nor resentment could be detected, told us: “Among his possessions were found a multitude of love letters from the most highly placed women in this city.” “Then he died in order not to compromise them,” I said, full of admiration. “No. He died because in his little notes Don Alonso bragged about his conspiracy, described it in detail, and promised the ladies infinite riches and privileges when he and you, Don Martín, would share the governing of Mexico,”

The sentence was just. I was a perfect fool.

MARTÍN 2

I think that out of all these errors we were saved only by the innate sense of justice of the viceroy, Don Gastón de Peralta, who determined that in the case of this conspiracy to seize the land and tear possession of Mexico away from the King of Spain he would proceed according to the following criteria. The first to denounce the conspiracy would receive benefits. When he heard that, Aguilar shouted for joy. But the second to denounce the conspiracy would only be pardoned. Aguilar’s face became serious. And the third to denounce the conspiracy would be executed. The miserable Aguilar went down on his knees, imploring: “And what about those of us who simply repented and backed down?”

I mean that there is some justice in all this after all. That bastard Baltasar de Aguilar was sentenced to ten years in the galleys for perjury, with the loss of all his property and the towns he possessed, as well as perpetual exile from all the Indies of the Ocean Sea and Terra Firma. Returned to Spain in a schooner, Judge Muñoz Carrillo suffered a fit of apoplexy when he read a letter in which King Felipe removed him from office, becoming even squarer than he was already by nature: “I ordered you to New Spain to govern, not to destroy.” He lost the ability to speak, and to cure him the doctors pried open his mouth with sticks so he could swallow their concoctions. He died, this man with the sandpapered face and strands of mandrake hair on his head. Everyone knows that these homunculi are born at the base of the gallows. Our particular homunculus, Judge Muñoz, had to be gutted and salted so he wouldn’t be buried at sea. Just before dying, he managed to say: “I want to be buried at El Ferrol.” But storms broke out, and the sailors mutinied. Carrying a dead body on a ship brings bad luck. They threw him overboard, tightly bound and wrapped in filthy mats covered with pitch.

My brother Don Martín, the man who could have been king of Mexico, was sent back to Spain. Why? His enemies rejoiced, thinking that there things would go worse for him and the King would bring the full rigor of justice down on him for his crimes. His friends were also happy, seeing in the decision a way of protecting Martín and deferring sentence. I, on the other hand, fully aware of my failure, told him, “Brother, stay in Mexico, take a chance, but hurry the sentence. Don’t you realize that if you go back to Spain the same thing will happen to you as happened to our father? Your trial will never end. It will go on eternally. Cut the thread holding the sword over our heads. If you go back to Spain you will be deprived of all power, just like our father. That’s the secret of bureaucrats in Spain and everywhere else: to prolong matters until everyone forgets about them.” But my brother answered me simply: “Neither I nor they want to see me here anymore. Neither they nor I want what awaits me here. Fighting and perhaps martyrdom. I don’t want it.”

MARTÍN 1

Carlos V gathered a great armada in 1545 to strike against the eunuch Aga Azán, who governed Algeria. Twelve thousand sailors, twenty-four thousand soldiers, sixty-five galleys, and five hundred other ships gathered in the Balearic Islands. The Emperor led the armada. With only eleven ships and five hundred men, my father had conquered Moctezuma’s empire. Now they didn’t even give him command of a galley. But he took the galley. I was thirteen years old. My father enlisted as a volunteer and took me by the hand to take possession of the galley Hope. No one knew more about war than he, not even the Emperor. He warned them about bad weather. He warned them about the excessive size of the expeditionary force. All they had to do was wait for good weather and launch a surprise attack with a reduced force. No one paid him any attention. The expedition failed amid the storm and the confusion. My father always traveled with his five emeralds. Fearing to lose them in the Algiers disaster, he wrapped them in a handkerchief. He lost them swimming for his life. Now I would like to sink in the Mare Nostrum until I find them: one carved like a rose, another like a trumpet, another like a fish with golden eyes, another like a little bell, another like a little cup resting on a gold base.

But were those his real treasures? I remembered then the death of my father, the scent of the flowering orange tree entering through the window in Andalusia, and I tried to imagine that in his purse, from when he disembarked one day in Acapulco and there planted an orange tree, my father had carried those well-kept seeds, and they were not lost, they did not go to the bottom of the sea, they allowed the twin fruits of America and Europe to grow, flourish, and, one day, to meet without rivalry.

Very forgotten things reappear at moments that cause pain. I curse until the fourth generation all those who caused us pain.

MARTÍN 2

Mother: Only with you did our father triumph. Only at your side did he have a rising fortune. Only with you did he experience the seamless destiny of power, fame, compassion, and wealth. I bless you, my mother. I thank you for my dark skin, my liquid eyes, my hair like my father’s horse’s mane, my bare pubis, my short height; my singsong voice, my obstinate silence, my diminutives and my curses, my dream longer than life, my suspended memory, my satisfaction disguised as resignation, my desire to believe, my longing after paternity, my face lost amid the dark-skinned human tide, subjugated as I am: I am the majority.

MARTÍN 1

I don’t want to be a martyr. I prefer this farce to an interminable court case that wears down both my judges and me. I’m leaving Mexico, as they asked me. They want to keep me quiet. Fine. I’m leaving and placing my property under the care of my older brother, the son of the Indian woman. In Spain, they pursue the case against me and I’m sentenced to exile, fines, and loss of property. That happens in 1567. The punishments are reversed in 1574, except for the fines. I’m forty-four years old. My properties are restored to me, but they force me to make a loan of fifty thousand ducats to the Crown for the war effort. A worthy cause. My Mexican power is dismembered when the Crown annexes my Tehuantepec and my Oaxaca. Lord and Master! Not me, although I will leave something to my descendants. More money, ultimately, than power. That’s how it will always be. No dictator will last long in Mexico. The country doesn’t want tyrants. It’s too fond of tyrannizing itself, day after day, rancor after rancor, injustice after injustice, envy after envy, submission after submission, from the lowest to the highest. I will never return to Mexico. I will die in Spain on August 13, 1589, at the age of sixty-seven, the anniversary of the taking of Tenochtitlán by my father and of the failed conspiracy for the independence of the colony. I leave my property to my children, but in dying I sink into the sea off Algiers seeking my father’s five lost emeralds. They are the same ones Moctezuma gave him. They are the same ones that, to his grief, my proud and blinded father did not want to give, or even to sell, to the Queen of Spain.

MARTÍN 2

I was tortured in Mexico and exiled to Spain. I died at the end of the century. How old was I? Seventy, eighty? I lost count. The truth is I was always just eight years old. I nestled in the arms of my mother, the Indian Marina, La Malinche. In each other’s arms, every night, that’s the only way we saved ourselves from terror. We heard the gallop of horses. That’s the terror, that’s the strange new thing. Horses gallop and birds fly, flies buzz. We hug each other, my mother and I, shivering with fear. We know we shouldn’t be afraid of the horses my father brought to Mexico. We should fear the incessant upheaval of the world over our heads. I remember my mother’s worn, sick skin. I would have wanted to see, as did my brother Martín, who embraced him in death, my old father: his skin. Now I see my own, I’m so old, and I remember the morning my brother and I spent staring at the Valley of Mexico. My skin is a field. My wrinkles and my veins are plowed fields, accidents on the land. My bones are rocks. The lines on my palm are skin, field, and paper. Written land, suffering land as sensitive as a skin, inflammable as a codex. My mother and I embrace at night to defend ourselves, poor us, from the dream of the land. In nightmares, we’ve seen the spectacle of death. My father’s escorted by death. He’s dying. How many died before he did? With how many is he dying? How many in fact survive us? I tell all this and I am astonished by the world, and at times I wish I hadn’t been in it. We lose our illusions about what we wanted so much. I’m sick of the spectacle of death. I don’t understand how a nation is born.

El Escorial, July 1992