After he had rested, Cortés watched the cloud of smoke and ash that rose from the volcano. Then his glance turned to Malinalli. Cortés watched her closely. With her eyes closed, huddled under a blanket lent to her by Bernal Díaz del Castillo, she seemed small, vulnerable, but still not far away from the truth. Hernán pondered on how admirable a woman she was. She had not complained once. She kept pace with all of them without uttering a word. She had never fallen ill, or wept, or become an annoyance. It was impossible not to compare her to his wife. Catalina Xuárez was a weak and sickly woman, who had not been able to give him children. He was sure that his wife, Catalina, if placed in the same position as Malinalli, would already be dead.
Cortés was in turn being watched by Malinalli, out of the corner of her eye. She didn’t want to speak with anyone, so she pretended to be asleep. She didn’t even have any energy to ask for help. She liked watching Cortés’s body, his build, his strength, his courage, his audacity, his gift as a leader. Thousands of times, standing on the shore and meditating on the eternal return of the tides, she had wished for the return of her father, or someone like him, who could protect her. At that moment, she asked herself if Cortés could be that man and she decided that he couldn’t be. The protection that she longed for had nothing to with her annihilation as a person. The protection and defense that the Spaniards said they would provide against false gods and pagan practices had more or less left them in a defenseless state, made them into weak children who did not know what was good for them and who needed someone superior to tell them. To be protected by Cortés would undeniably mark her as a weak and ignorant woman.
But she was so tired that she did not want to think about anything except the sun. It was not in vain that her ancestors had said that first came the fire and from it, was made the sun, and from it mankind. The sun was fire in motion. She closed her eyes. The altitude was ravaging her well-being. She had a headache and felt that there was not enough air to breathe. She was as dizzy as when her grandmother lifted her by the arms and spun her around and around like the flying men of Papantla, those men who created beautiful dances in the air as they fell to the ground held up by ropes tied around their ankles. There were five members altogether, of which four descended toward the ground, little by little, twisting and turning as they fell, while the fifth remained up above the great pole, signifying the center. The four dancers that flew through the air represented each of the cardinal points. Malinalli saw them various times in her youth, and she loved when her grandmother made her into a flying dancer, grabbing her by the feet and making her spin. When her grandmother tired, she would spin and spin with open arms on her own till she grew dizzy and fell to the ground laughing.
The grandmother explained to her that this happened because she had lost her center.
“God is in the center, there where there is no shape at all, no sound, no movement. Whenever you are dizzy, sit down, stop moving, remain silent, and you will find Our Lord there, in your invisible center, that which unites you with him. We are like the beads in the necklace of creation, and we are joined one to the other, each taking up the place and space that corresponds to us. When you stumble to one side or the other, you alter the order of the skies and the sky opens, the earth opens. When you get separated like that you will not fall where you are meant to fall, you will not walk where you are meant to walk, you will not die where you were meant to die, because the cord has been broken, because everything is part of everything else and everything affects everything else. Because of this, god grows sorrowful when we do not see him, when we do not recognize him, when we go through our lives with our backs to him.”
“Where is god? How can I see him?”
“To see the invisible is complicated, but you should know that he for whom we live is in the air we breathe, in each drop of water, each body, each plant, each animal, in all forms of his creation. In the center, in the invisible in all things, is where you can find him. Each celestial body is united in its center with the other stars and with us. It’s as if a silver string had linked us together at the time of creation. To see the invisible in others is to see god in them. To listen to the invisible in their words is to listen to god. To feel the water in the air before it rains is to feel god. It doesn’t matter how different the faces that you see are, how different each one’s song is; beyond the body, beyond their words, dwells the lord of all things. That is why performance, song, movement, and everything we do is so important. If we do it according to our center, according to divinity, it will have a sacred quality; if we do it dizzily, it will throw us to the ground, cast us aside, disconnected from god. We all spin. Each man, each moon, each sun, each star spins around its center. The movement of stars is sacred and so is ours. It unites us to the same invisible.”
But perhaps the most important thing that her grandmother’s knowledge passed on to Malinalli was the notion that behind each divine representation—whether it be in paper, in stone, in flower, or in song—god dwelled. The shape, the color, and the sound that was chosen to represent them did not matter.
“My sweet Malinalli, even before you took the shape of this body you were already one with god and you will remain so even when your form is erased from the earth.”
Later, she continued.
“When I die, when I will be outside of time, it will be difficult to see me, to hear me, to feel me, and that is why I am going to give you this Tonantzin stone. She is our mother, and you can ask her whatever you desire. I will be dancing in the sky near her and we will both be watching you.”
And now Malinalli took in her fingers the ceramic bead necklace with the image of Tonantzin that she had made with her grandmother, and asked that her center be restored, to control the dizziness that was driving her mad and to help her regain her well-being. There wasn’t a long way to go before they reached the Valley of Anáhuac. She wanted to see it. She wanted to survive. After making this wish, her eyes closed. Malinalli left her body and was converted into thought, idea, dream. She had no problem interweaving her thoughts with the other slaves, and she instantly experienced an unimaginable freedom. She knew that she had settled into another reality, and that what she saw was part of a dream, but she also knew that in that dream she could discover a better reality, a reality more collective than individual.
In her dream she saw herself as part of a united feminine mind that was having the same dream. In the dream, a group of barefoot women walked over the ice of a river that had frozen at the moment the light of the moon had been reflected on its surface. The soles of their feet cracked open when coming in contact with the ice, and the wounds formed stellar maps. The light of the full moon fell forcefully on all of them and they became one mind, one body, they were all one woman holding herself up in the wind and nourished on the faith of all who want to free themselves from the nightmare of sensation, of touching, of weeping, of loving, of bleeding, of dying, of having, and of letting go. Malinalli, in the body of this unified woman, saw herself surrounded by a dozen moons and held up by the antlers of a thirteenth one. With her hands she picked up prayers and pieces of pain that she made into roses. Later she felt the moon underneath her feet completely afire and the flames devoured her thoughts. Her mind was a blaze that created images that nailed themselves into the hearts of men like blades of fire, as they spoke to them of the true meaning of language. When Malinalli felt that the moon, now beside her, was completely ablaze, she opened her eyes. There were tears there, and in her heart a premonition of flowers.
Malinalli was this, reflection of a reflection. The light of the moon fell at her back, and the lengthening shadow that left her body covered a great part of the distance that separated her from the Stone of the Sun, located in the Great Temple of Tenochtitlán.
Malinalli had decided to go out in the middle of the night to stroll in the Plaza in silence, without having to translate or interpret, without having to feign indifference before the gods of her ancestors, so that she would not be marked an
idolator. They had arrived in Tenochtitlán the day before and Malinalli had been as impressed as the Spaniards, if not more so, with the great city’s beauty. The Great Temple was the center. It was the place that reflected the vision of the universe of its founders. From that place originated great avenues toward the four cardinal points.
There, standing before the Stone of the Sun, Malinalli was at the exact center of the city, the universe. The Sun, the Moon, she herself, and the Stone of the Sun created all that was unique and indivisible and at that moment she understood that the Stone was an image of the invisible, that it was a circle that represented not only the Sun and the Winds, the forces of creation, but the invisible at its center.
For the first time she saw the invisible and she understood that time was something different than what she had thought. She was used to understanding the passing of time through the movement of the stars in the skies, through the cycles of sowing and reaping, of life and death. When she sewed she could also understand time. A beautiful huipil was proof of time inverted, of the way that time is interwoven. In each embroidery, Malinalli gave her time to others and shared with them beauty.
It had been a long time since she had had time to sew, much less embroider. Her life alongside the Spaniards had changed her concept of time completely. Now she measured it by the days of the march, by the number of words translated, by the number of intrigues and strategies developed. Her experience of time seemed to have been accelerated, and it did not leave her a single free moment to place herself at the center of knowledge. It was a confusing time, in which her time and Cortés’s time were ineluctably interconnected, laced, tied together. It was as if through a native custom, in a traditional ceremony, someone had tied the ends of their vestments together and made them man and wife. It was an uneasy feeling. Feeling tied down stole her freedom. She wanted to go one way and Cortés veered toward the other. It was an enforced union that she had not decided on but that seemed to mark her always. Her time was without fail now interwoven with Cortés’s time. But that night, before the Stone of the Sun, Malinalli felt balanced, restored, at one with time, or even better, outside of it.
That night, Montezuma also reflected on the concept of time, his time, and the cycle that was ending. Like Malinalli, he could not sleep. He went out to the palace balcony and from there watched a resplendent woman, dressed in white, who was crossing the plaza. His heart jumped. She looked like Cihuacóatl, the sixth disastrous omen, who appeared at nights and wandered through the streets of the great city, weeping and letting out great yelps for her children. Moreover, he very clearly heard a voice that said, My little ones, we must flee! Where will I take you, so sorrow cannot reach us? He felt goose bumps. The sight left him frozen. He wanted to move, but could not. He tried to calm down, to rein in his thoughts, but they did nothing but lead him to images of misfortune. Not exactly sure why, he thought of the strange bird with a mirror in its head that years before some fishermen had brought to the palace. The finding of the bird was the last of the ill omens. As soon as Montezuma looked at the bird, it disappeared from his sight. He tried to remember what was reflected, and in place of the memory, a tremendously painful image came to his mind: of a heavy rain falling on the Stone of the Sun. And each drop of rain that fell on the stone wore it down, leaving it completely smooth. Montezuma then understood that death was everything that had no meaning and could not be measured, and he shuddered. His time had definitely ended and he feared for the future of his children, especially the younger ones, Tecuichpo, who was nine, and Axayácatl, who was seven.
Extending this strange game of mirrors, Malinalli’s fear for her children reflected that of Montezuma, with the difference that she had yet to have them. It was a night of magic, of light, of peace, before the war. Malinalli returned to this world on hearing the splashing of fish that were jumping in the canals surrounding the Great Plaza. With each jump, they made a sound similar to a stone falling into the water, but the noise of the fish was more delicate, continuous, and calming. Fish jumped on a night of the full moon because of the light. Thanks to the brilliance of the moon reflected in the water, the fish could see the insects flittering on its surface and jumped up to devour them. Malinalli expected that in the same manner, Tlazolteotl, the “devourer of filth,” would eat up her sins, or what she thought of as sins, which were nothing more than nonconformity, misfortune, a series of contrary feelings.
Immediately she went into the temple of Huitzilopochtli, God of War, a place where she knew she could find the goddess, for Tlazolteotl didn’t have a temple of her own. She was a lunar deity, the goddess of passionate love, of those who unleashed lust and broke the laws against adultery. She was also the great pregnant mother, the patron saint of births, of medicines, and steam baths that cleanse and purify more than the body. This goddess was feared, for just as easily as she set on passion and sexual appetite, she could take them away or cause venereal diseases. To prevent all of this, if you committed a sexual transgression, it was necessary to confess to one of the goddess’s priests, who in her name received “the filth” and mandated a penance that could be anything from a simple four-day fast to the perforation of the tongue with an agave thorn. Since the fast had to take place during the four days preceding the celebration of the Chihuateteos, the feminine deities that had died during childbirth, and this date had already passed, Malinalli decided on her own that the punishment that befitted her case was perforation of the tongue.
Of course, she didn’t confess to any priest. She couldn’t, for Cortés had not approved it, and she immediately realized that he would not approve of having her tongue perforated. What excuse could she give the day after, when she couldn’t talk? There had to be another way for her to punish herself, but she couldn’t find it. She felt dirty, sinful. She longed to cleanse her soul. So that she wouldn’t be seen, she had gone looking for relief at that hour of night. Recent events had left her feeling pained, overwhelmed, and anxious.
First of all, there was the fact that during the first meeting between Montezuma and Cortés she had been the translator and during her performance she had looked directly into the eyes of Montezuma, the great governor. The Supreme Ruler. Her legs had shaken. Looking at his face had been an act of great transgression. She knew perfectly well that it was prohibited to look at Montezuma’s countenance and that whoever did so was condemned to death. And yet, she did it. The look that she got in return indicated that Montezuma did not like her attitude at all, but instead of showing his annoyance, he allowed her to continue to translate his welcome speech. Malinalli did it reverently. She considered it the greatest honor of her life to transmit Montezuma’s words. What she never expected was that Montezuma would dispossess his throne in favor of Cortés, and that she, being the translator, would be the one who practically handed Cortés his kingdom. She also did not imagine the profound sorrow she would feel on doing so. It was sad to realize that her faith meant nothing when compared to Montezuma’s. To see an emperor, a man who had been educated for power, give up his kingdom, moved her deeply. To be a witness to Montezuma’s intense faith, to the spiritual grandeur that allowed him to detach himself from his tremendous power before a spirit: that of Quetzalcóatl. To feel Montezuma’s pride at being the emperor who was chosen to witness Quetzalcóatl’s return caused her to shudder. Only a man who had been spiritually transformed could undertake such an exchange.
To see Montezuma offer his kingdom, not to a person, nor a face, nor an ambition, but to the spirit of Quetzalcóatl, was in and of itself, a mystical, sacred act. And Malinalli knew in her heart that Quetzalcóatl was truly grateful, truly welcomed, wherever he was, even though it was not in Cortés’s body. As she translated Montezuma’s speech, Malinalli also experienced a spiritual transformation and acted as a true mediator between this and the other world. Her voice rose forcefully from her chest.
“O Our Lord,” she told Cortés, “thou art welcomed. Thou hast reached thy land, thy city, thy home Mexico. Thou hast co
me to sit on thy throne … which I, in thy name, have possessed for some time. Other lords, now dead, possessed it before me: the lords Itzcóatl, Montezuma the Elder, Axayácatl, Tizoc, and Ahuizotl. Oh, how brief was the time that they kept and dominated the city of Mexico for you. Under their wings, under the mantle of their power, the people lived…. Oh, how I wish one of them would come and see; he would be amazed at what I now see before me. Me, the remaining one, the survivor of all our lords.
“Our Lord, I am neither sleeping, nor dreaming. With my eyes I see thy face and thy person. For days have I been expecting this, for days has my heart been looking at those parts whence thou came.
“Thou emerged from among the clouds and the mists of the place hidden to everyone. This is certainly what the kings who came before us had said, that thou wouldst prepare to return and reign in these kingdoms, that thou wouldst sit on thy throne. Now I see that what has been said is come to pass.
“Be thou welcome. Thou must needs have endured great labors coming from so far. Rest now! Here is thy house, and thy palaces; take them and rest in them with all thy captains and companions that thou hast brought with thee.”
A great silence fell from the sky in response. Cortés could not believe what he was hearing. Without firing a single bullet, he had been invited to be ruler of those immense and rich lands.
The more than four thousand nobles and principal lords of the Mexica kingdom, dressed in their finest outfits, their best skins, feathers, and precious gems, were also amazed at these words.
Cortés asked Malinalli to translate these words in response:
“Tell Montezuma to take comfort, not to be afraid. That I love him very much, as do all who come with me. No one will do him any harm. We have been filled with great joy on seeing you and meeting you, something we have looked forward to for many days. Our wish has been fulfilled.”