“Hearts of stone can also fly.”
On saying this, a fascinating and terrifying image captured her attention. The stone carving of the mutilated body of the goddess Coyolxauhqui—who was sister to the god Huitzilopochtli, and who had died torn to pieces when she tried to prevent the birth of her brother from the womb of his mother, Coatlicue—came to life. She abandoned her stillness to bring together her mutilated parts; the fragments of the legs and the arms that had been separated reunited with the torso and the stone turned to flesh and the sculpture became a living thing.
“When stone turns to flesh, the heart turns to stone.”
As if Malinalli had called them, some of the hearts of stone approached her face and burst into a thousand pieces, spitting streams of blood; others fell like hail and pummeled Montezuma, burying him. Malinalli’s butterfly wings were bathed in blood and became heavy. Unable to fly, she fell noisily to the ground. Malinalli, having then turned into one of the dancers, tried to flee from the shotguns and the shower of stone hearts, stepping over the dismembered to scale the walls, but the blood dripping from the stones made that impossible. Her feet and hands slipped and made her fall. At that moment, she wanted to scream, to plead to heaven for help, but no voice came from her throat. Turning her face, she saw a rain of stone hearts fall on Montezuma until he was buried under them, and then a rain of swords was directed at Malinalli’s chest, piercing her heart in countless spots, from which beautiful bloody feathers emerged. At this point, Malinalli opened her eyes, out of breath and full of tears.
It did no good to open her eyes. The nightmare continued. Malinalli walked without walking, saw without seeing, spoke without speaking, was there and was not there. She lived through the dramatic events of the killings without having seen them, heard them, or registered them in her memory. She had no space in her mind for the present because the images of the past, images of horror, took up all the room.
She experienced the return to Tenochtitlán as in a dream. They returned through Lake Texcoco, their canoe sliding smoothly through its waters. This time there was no welcome, no escort of nobles awaiting them, for the majority of them were dead. It had been a month since the massacre in the Great Temple and the smell of death still lingered in the air. As they made their way into the city, Malinalli’s heartbeat grew faster as sorrow ran through her veins. To calm herself, she closed her eyes and tried to think of nothing. She did not want to see the signs of the calamity.
When they arrived at the place of Axayácatl, Cortés went directly to Pedro de Alvarado to ask for explanations. He had left him in charge because he had thought that he would be able to handle the Tenochans, who looked on him as a representation of Tonatiuh, the God of the Sun. When they addressed him they did not use his name but instead called him “Sun.” Cortés had not counted on the fact that the responsibility he entrusted the man with would be more than he could handle. The fear of losing control had caused him to organize the massacre.
It was true that ever since the Spaniards arrived, the proud Tenochans looked on them with suspicion. They did not understand the actions of their governor Montezuma. As a ruler, he had distinguished himself for his valor, his wisdom, his intense religiosity, and his firm hand in controlling the empire. Confronted with the Spaniards, however, he proved to be weak and submissive, which did not cease to amaze the Tenochans. People in the street asked themselves if Montezuma had lost his mind, if Tenochtitlán was without a head, without a leader. It did not take long for a resistance movement to arise, headed by the lords Cacama of Tezcoco, Cuitláhuac of Iztapalapa, and Cuauhtémoc, Ahuizotl’s son. From this perspective, it seemed logical that Pedro de Alvarado, fearing an insurrection that he could not control with the few men that he had been left with, decided to murder the finest warriors and most distinguished nobles who had participated in the celebrations.
The massacre provoked the feared insurrection. Cortés asked Montezuma to speak to his people from the roof garden of his palace to pacify them, but the governor was not well received by the people. The Tenochans, enraged, hurled insults and stones at him. Montezuma was hit three times. The Spanish said that this had been the cause of his death, but according to the testimony of the natives, he was assassinated by the Spaniards themselves.
Malinalli did not enter the game of explanations. She did not say anything. The effect of having been the last one to have looked into the emperor’s eyes before they took him to his quarters kept her living in a time that wasn’t the present. She asked herself if her nightmare was part of reality or reality part of her nightmare. And where was she anyway? Without knowing it, she saw how the Mexicas elected Cuitláhuac, Montezuma’s brother, as the new emperor, who immediately organized his people to confront Cortés and his men. He did it so well that he forced the Spanish to initiate a retreat. They decided to flee at night, when the city was peaceful, so that they could take with them all the treasures that they had accumulated.
The only time that Malinalli reacted and placed herself in the present moment was when they were fleeing. The Tenochans were chasing them. One of their arrows wounded the horse that had always been her ally, the one who had been with her during the baptism, at the massacre in Cholula, in the battle against Pánfilo de Narváez; her eternal and unconditional friend. When Malinalli saw him fall wounded, time stopped. The sounds of the battle froze in the air. She could not hear anything. Everything that surrounded her disappeared from her field of vision. Only the horse existed, only the horse was dying. Malinalli felt a profound sorrow. She did not want to leave him there fallen and suffering. She embraced him and in his eyes saw fear, pain, suffering. Immediately it brought to mind Montezuma’s eyes after he had been wounded by the stones. There was kindness in those eyes. There was greatness. There was elegance. Malinalli forcefully grabbed the cudgel she was using to fight the Tenochans and delivered a mortal blow to the horse’s head. Then she pulled out a blade and in a fit of madness cut off its head. She wanted to take it with her, to honor it as it deserved. She did not want it to be a feast for worms. She was so wound up in her task, that she lost sight that she was still fleeing, that the battle continued, that her life was in danger. Juan Jaramillo was the one who noticed a Tenochan grab Malinalli by the hair, about to behead her. Jaramillo fired his harquebus and killed him, then ran and took hold of Malinalli, who was still cutting the horse’s head off, and dragged her to the outskirts of the city, where they sat to lament their defeat. Malinalli, again absent, remained with her head on the shoulder offered by Jaramillo. He had displayed great strength and courage that night. Malinalli regretted not having made off with the horse’s head; Cortés, with all of his treasures.
The defeated Cortés took up refuge in Tlaxcala, where he recovered and gathered his strength. Meanwhile, an epidemic of smallpox, brought over by the Cuban slaves that had arrived with the Spanish, ravaged the people. One of the victims was the emperor Cuitláhuac himself, who perished from it.
Then Montezuma’s cousin, the young Cuauhtémoc, took the throne. One of his first actions was to order the execution of six of Montezuma’s sons who were attempting to yield to the Spaniards. In spite of the epidemic, he gave orders and took measures for the defense of the city. He knew that Cortés, supported by the Tlaxcaltecans, was preparing a new invasion of Tenochtitlán.
Cortés had thirteen ships built to seize the city from the lakes surrounding it. Warriors from Cholula, Huexotzingo, and Chalco joined him. According to his calculations he would be able to bring together more than seventy-five thousand men.
Cuauhtémoc confronted the Spaniards by attacking them from the rooftops as they passed through the streets. Cortés ordered all houses destroyed, and so began the devastation of the city.
In one of his campaigns, Cortés was able to reach the Great Temple, but the Mexicas attacked him from the rear and were able to capture more than fifty Spanish soldiers. That night, from their camp, the Spaniards heard the hymn of triumph, and knew that the captured soldiers had b
een sacrificed in the Great Temple itself.
Cortés decided to lay siege to the city, taking hold of the roads that connected it to the mainland, while controlling access by water with the ships and canoes of his allies. At the same time, he had the aqueducts of Chapultepec, which provided Tenochtitlán with fresh water, destroyed. He intended to make them surrender from thirst and hunger.
The Tenochans resisted in Tlatelolco. It was in the market, in the heart of the empire, that the final blow was dealt to the people of Tenochtitlán. There had been so many deaths from smallpox and hunger that the Spanish were finally able to overcome them. The day of the fall, they killed and captured over forty thousand natives, amid a loud chorus of screaming and weeping.
Cuauhtémoc tried to flee, but was captured and brought before Cortés.
“Lord Malinche,” he said when in his presence, “I have done my duty in defense of my city and vassals and I cannot go on. So I come by force, a prisoner before your person and power. Take that knife from your belt and kill me with it.”
Cortés did not kill him, but instead took him prisoner, having his feet burned until he would reveal where the gold was hidden, the gold that his troops had lost during their flight on the Sorrowful Night.
When Cortés went to Hibueras, he took the emperor with him. A Tlatelolcan in the expedition accused Cuauhtémoc of planning an insurrection against Cortés. Cortés then, after having christened the emperor with the name Fernando, ordered that he be hanged from a great ceiba, the sacred tree of the Mayans, in a place near Tabasco.
There was no wind. The sun was hidden behind thick gloomy gray clouds, appearing like a dull, weak moon that struggled to remain in the sky behind the smoke that rose from the funeral pyres. It could be stared at without its rays causing harm. It had lost its brilliance and with that, the ability to see its reflection in the lakes and canals of the Valley of Anáhuac, whose dark turbid waters were soiled with blood.
The zoological garden in Montezuma’s palace was empty. There were no animals. Nothing was left of the beauty and elegance of the empire.
In the ovens, the countless customary dishes for Montezuma were no longer being cooked.
The craftsmen who made jewels and clothes for the emperor were dead or had fled.
The silence was interrupted by the cries, the weeping of Cihuacóatl/Tonantzin, the snake woman known as “Our Mother.”
And the fate of Cuauhtémoc passed in a whisper from mouth to mouth.
“Today our sun has been concealed; our sun has gone hiding and left us in complete darkness. We know that one day it will again shine over us. But as long as it remains hidden there in Mictlán, we should join together during this long night of this our sun of consciousness, which is the fifth sun, and we will do so by concealing in our hearts all that is dear to us: our way of speaking and rearing our children, our way of organizing and coexisting, and in so doing come to the aid of one another.
“We will conceal our Teocaltin (temples), our Calmecameh (schools of higher learning), our Tlachcohuan (ball games), our Telpochcaltin (schools for the young), and our Cuicacaltin (hymn houses), and leave the streets deserted to lock ourselves in our homes.
“From this day forth, our homes will be our Teocaltin, our Calmecameh, our Tlachcohuan, our Telpochcaltin, and our Cuicacaltin.
“From this day forth, until the day the new sun rises, the fathers and mothers will be the teachers and guides who while they live will lead their children by the hand. May the fathers and mothers never forget to tell their children what the Anáhuac has been to this day, under the protection of the Lord of All Things, our Lord Ometeotl—Ometecuhtli, and resulting from the customs and teachings that our elders instilled in our parents, and that with such great effort they in turn instilled in us. Also never forget to tell your children what one day this Anáhuac will be again; that after this long night the sixth sun, the sun of justice, will rise.”
Malinalli asked herself what she had done wrong. Where had she failed? Why hadn’t she been granted the privilege of helping her people? Just as Cortés had been the answer to Montezuma’s fears, and the gold obtained, to Cortés’s ambition, she wanted to know what end was fulfilled by Tenochtitlán’s destruction. The wishes of the Tlaxcaltecans? Of the gods? A necessity of the universe? To a cycle of life of death? She did not know at all. The only thing that she was certain of was that she hadn’t been able to save anything.
Malinalli thought about her grandmother, about how fortunate she had been not to see the destruction of her world, her gods. Malinalli was confused. She felt guilty and responsible for what had happened. To justify herself, she thought that perhaps what was dying was not dying at all; that it was clear from the human sacrifices that the only thing that died on the stone was the body, the shell, but in exchange for the liberation of the spirit. The lives of the sacrificed belonged to the gods and to them they returned when sacrificed; the priests did not destroy anything, for the life that they freed from the prison of the body continued its destiny in the heavens in order to feed the Sun. Her emotional well-being depended on accepting all this as certain, but she did and did not agree, believed and did not believe.
If she looked around her, everything spoke of an eternal cycle of life and death. The flowers died and became fertilizer for other flowers. The fish, the birds, the plants nourished each other. Yes, but she was convinced that Quetzalcóatl had come to this world to proclaim that the gods did not feed on the blood of the sacrificed, but rather, on their thoughts and intentions. That the dream of mankind was the apprenticeship of the gods and the apprenticeship of mankind was the eternal thought of the gods. And that the gods fed off their own essence, from the soul they had created. This was not accomplished through physical death, but through the medium of the word. When one prayed, when one named the gods, nourished them, honored them, returned to them the life that they had given us at birth.
The warriors believed that the body is what maintains the soul prisoner. Whoever controlled the body was the owner of the spirit it sheltered. That was one of the beliefs that had worked against the Mexicas. In their first confrontations with the Spaniards, they were surprised to see that their intention was the annihilation of the enemy, and not the capture. Their own great forces of war functioned in completely the opposite way. The Mexicas believed that a good warrior should capture the enemy. If he did so, he became a sort of god, for the control of the body gave him access to the control of the spirit. That is why they did not kill in the battlefield, but took prisoners. If they killed their enemies, they immediately liberated the spirit and that was a defeat, not a victory. Capturing them to later sacrifice them before their gods was what gave their deaths meaning.
Malinalli agreed only in the sense that life was defended not by struggling to save a body from death, but its spirit. Only if the idea of death did not exist, could she understand eternity, and from that perspective she had not acted wrongly. The only thing she had wanted was to save the spirit of Quetzalcóatl, which the Mexicas had kept imprisoned for so long through the practice of human sacrifices; to free it from its captors and allow it to purify itself and be reborn to men, completely renewed. But who was she for such lofty ambitions? Could she really decide what should live and what should die? At least she was sure that in her own self she could, and there Quetzalcóatl’s spirit was more alive than ever. The Spaniards could not destroy it because they could not even perceive it. They had only destroyed what they could see and touch. The rest was intact.
Malinalli embroidered feathers on a cape she had made for her son, with feathers that she had saved from the palace of Montezuma; with cotton that she had found in what had been the market of Tlatelolco; with jade stones and sea shells that Cortés had given her because for him they held no value. It was a cape for a prince. That’s how Malinalli wanted him to appear on the day of his baptism. He had been born a week before, in a house in Coyoacán, where she lived with Cortés. She gave birth to him as her mother had given birth to her
, squatting. Except that she did not have a bathhouse, or a midwife, or a burial for the umbilical cord in the field of battle so that the boy would become a warrior. That was fine with Malinalli. She did not want her son to kill. She was tired of the dead. Cortés’s eyes were also sick of looking at death, so many mutilated bodies, so much destruction. His arms were tired of taking up the sword, of cutting, of severing. That is why, months before, they had gone to live in Coyoacán and seek rest. They both yearned to rest.
Nevertheless, Cortés was not a man who could live in repose. If he was not planning strategies of attack or defense, he felt as if time was getting away from him. The worst was that when he had time to think on his own, feelings of guilt assaulted him. He did not know if it had been the right thing to demolish so many pyramids, burn so many codices. His justification was that there had been no choice, that he had done it defending life, but sometimes he asked himself for what. Before him he had the opportunity to create everything anew. He had destroyed everything to create everything. But what? He could design plans for new cities, distribute lands, approve laws, but deep down—very deep down—he knew that life continued to be a mystery. It didn’t belong to him. He could destroy it but not create it. That made all the difference. In other words, he was not a god.
Suddenly he had been overcome with the desire to create a life and had sought out Malinalli to do it.