“Those who are able to unravel within themselves the secret of everything become mirror people who know how to transform themselves into the Sun, the Moon, or Venus,” Malinalli had told Jaramillo when, during one of their first conversations, they had discussed the design of their house. Together they decided that water would be its center.
Both were delighted by water. They liked to caress each other while one washed the body of the other with water that Malinalli had perfumed with spikenard from the garden. Sometimes, they had to interrupt the bath to kiss, to lick each other till they were exhausted, till they ended up dripping in sweat and semen and had to wash again. The bath was the ritual that first united them. For Jaramillo water was essential. He had visited the Alhambra as a child and had been fascinated by that mirror of the sky, with its interior courtyards, its canals, its fountains. He felt that God was there. When Malinalli spoke to him about Tula, another mirror of the sky, they both felt that there was something that joined them together far beyond the body, time, war, or the dead: a liquid god. The house that they designed together and built was a small Eden. Malinalli could not help but bless the Muslims who built the Alhambra and stamped in the soul of the child an indelible fingerprint. Thanks to them—among others—their house was a gift to sight, to smell, to the ear, to touch. The games of light, of shadows, the flowers and aromatic plants, the constant gurgling of water, the taste of the fruit from the garden, provided them with daily happiness. Happiness, a word that acquired meaning late in Malinalli’s life, but that had finally done so.
Her heart was pleased when she watched the new shoots of corn in the field behind the house. The first harvest was obtained from the grains of corn that had come from her grandmother, which Malinalli had always kept with her. Next to the cornfield there was a garden where plants of European origin lived peacefully next to Mexican plants. Malinalli loved to create new dishes. She would try new combinations of onions, garlic, cilantro; of basil, parsley, tomatoes, cactus; of pomegranate, plantains, mangos, oranges, coffee, wheat, corn, and cacao. The new flavors in the food arose without resisting their mestizo origins. The different ingredients accepted each other without problems and the result was surprising.
It was the same result that she had achieved within her womb. Her children were the product of different bloods, different smells, different aromas, different colors. Just like the earth brought forth corn that was blue, white, red, and yellow—but allowed them to mix—t would contain them all. A race where the Giver of Life could be remade, with all manner of names and shapes. That was the race of her children.
She loved to watch them run around the patio and play in the waters of the fountains that were reminiscent of Tula and the Alhambra at once. She liked that they spoke both Náhuatl and Spanish; that they ate bread and tortillas. But it pained her that they would not see what had been the Valley of Anáhuac, what had been Tenochtitlán. The more she tried to describe it to them, the more impossible it seemed. So she decided to sketch for them a codex—her familiar codex—and teach them how to decipher its language, understand her signs. It was important that aside from learning to read Spanish, they learn how to read codices. A Mayan poem said that “those who are looking, those who are telling, those who noisily turn the pages of painted books, those who have in their power the black ink and the red ink, the paintings, they take us, they guide us, they show us the way.”
It was important that she and her children knew the same things to be able to speak about the same things, to walk down the same paths. Perhaps if she and Jaramillo had not gone through the same events it would be difficult for them to understand what the conquest had been. Malinalli wanted the same complicity between her and her children and because of this she was willing to learn to read and write Spanish.
In the mornings, with Martín, she forced herself to scribble letters and numbers. The one that caught her attention was the number eight. She felt that it was the symbol of mixed ancestry. There were two circles united by the center, through the same invisible point, forever within each other.
In the afternoons, she liked to play with her children, grab them by their feet and spin them through the air, like her grandmother had done with her. When she got tired, she let them play by themselves and sat down to embroider huipiles as her children kept running around and Jaramillo, her husband, dedicated himself to carving wood.
Malinalli considered embroidering and wood carving more than just artisan activities; each was an exercise that nourished patience. Patience was the science of silence, where rhythm and harmony flowed naturally from stitch to stitch, from hammer to chisel. It was through such ritualistic and quotidian exercise that both were able to achieve luminous states of consciousness, where inner peace and spiritual richness were their objective and reward.
That afternoon, while they drank tea made from orange leaves, Jaramillo stopped working on a carving of the Virgin of Guadalupe for the children’s bedroom.
“Marina,” he asked. “Do you want to go to Mass tomorrow?”
“No. Do you want to go?”
“No.”
Every year, a Mass was celebrated for the fall of Tenochtitlán. Malinalli did not like to go. She didn’t like to bring back to mind the dead, the weeping, the crying. But what really bothered her was that the prayers were said before a crucified Christ, before the image of the new god, the god whose flesh was nailed to wood, the god with the bloodied body. It was horrifying for her to see it, for her mind had always rejected human sacrifices. It bothered her that the wound on the side reminded her of the wound made by obsidian knives in the chests of the men sacrificed in the temple of Huitzilopochtli. The crown of thorns bothered her also, and the dry coagulated blood. It made her want to save that man from the torment, to free him. She couldn’t stand to look at him. His sacrifice was eternal and it spoke to the fact that, in spite of the conquest, there had been no change in these lands. The fall of the empire had meant nothing. The ritual of sacrifice had survived and it would be the heritage of those that remained. That Christ on the cross was pain without end. He was death eternal. Malinalli did not believe that the sacrifice had created light, let alone that light could have been found within such a sacrifice.
So she would rather not attend the ceremony and not see the sacrificed Christ. She would rather see life than death. She would rather see her children, products of the conquest, and not bring back the dead. She would rather kiss Jaramillo, love him and bless him, than to have to bless an image of eternal sacrifice. Thanks to Jaramillo she had found peace, heaven on earth; thanks to Cortés, war, exile, and hate. His presence gave rise to an uncontrollable disappointment. To see him unnerved her, bothered her, angered her. Inevitably, they would end up arguing.
That afternoon, he had shown up at their house and shattered a delightful day. They offered him a cup of chocolate with vanilla and invited him to sit with them by one of the fountains. Cortés, as always, had problems he wished to discuss. He was about to face a trial, in which he was charged with infidelity to the crown, tyrannous intentions, disobedience of royal orders, arbitrary crimes, and cruelty during the war; the failure to give the King of Spain what was due to him, the wrongful appropriation of large parcels of urban and rural lands, and the murder—among others—of Catalina Xuárez, his wife.
Confronted with the gravity of the accusations, Cortés had given the names of Malinalli and Jaramillo so that they could make declarations as his witnesses. By his tone in addressing them, Malinalli felt as if Cortés were not simply asking them, but had come to collect old debts. Cortés, aside from giving them the land where they now lived, had given them parcels in the towns of Oluela and Jaltipan, towns near Coatzacoalcos, where Malinalli was born. They had much to be grateful to him for; primarily, that he had married them. But Malinalli did not like the way in which he was demanding loyalty.
“And what do you want from me? To lie?”
“No, I expect you to be loyal.”
Suddenly the afternoon
acquired a gray cast and the sun was devoured by the humidity in the sky. Malinalli’s eyes were wet, beautiful, and sorrowful; as if tired of looking, they wanted to silence the images in the brain and erase from memory all shapes and all reflections of a conquest and a deceitful illusory world. Pronouncing the word Cortés in a grave tone, she said:
“Cortés, I will forever be grateful for my son and the husband that you gave me, the piece of land that you kindly gave to Jaramillo and me so that we might spread our roots, but do not ask me to speak on your behalf, not in that tone. I am no longer your tongue, Lord Malinche.”
It had been a long time since anyone had called him Malinche. They had stopped calling him that when Malinalli married Jaramillo, when she stopped being his woman, when they separated. Fire came out of his eyes and in a contained rage he responded:
“Who do you think you are, speaking to me like that?”
Jaramillo, who knew his wife better than anyone, saw the fit of anger in her eyes and he realized that she was going to vomit all of her hatred on Cortés. Excusing himself, he got up, took the children by the hand, and led them to their rooms.
Malinalli waited before answering Cortés. First she put together all the words that she had gathered in her moments of pain and desperation. She was tired, extremely tired of Cortés and all his strategies. She was tired of being his reflection. It was true, she could be his best witness, but what could she declare that wouldn’t harm him? She, the most humble, the blindest of all, what could she have seen? She took a deep breath and spoke slowly.
“The worst of all the sicknesses born of your ambition hasn’t been smallpox, or syphilis. The worst of all sicknesses are your cursed mirrors. Their light wounds like your sharp blade wounds, like your cruel words wound, like the balls of fire that spit from your cannons over my people wound. You brought your clear, silver, luminous mirrors. To see myself in them pains me, for the face that the mirror returns to me is not my own. It is an anguished and guilty face, a face covered by your kisses and marked by your bitter caresses. Your mirrors reflect back to me the fright of open grimaces in the face of men who have lost their language, their gods. Your mirrors reflect the stone without the volcano, the future without the tree. Your mirrors are like dry wells, empty, without spirit and eternity. In the images of your mirrors there are wails and crimes devoured by time. Your mirrors distort and drive mad whoever looks at themselves in them; they infect them with fear, they deform their hearts, destroy them, bleed them, and curse them. They deceive with their elusive, breakable, false spirit. Looking at yourself for long in your mirrors has made you ill, has shown you a mistaken glory and power. But worst of all is the fact that the face that you look at in the mirror—thinking that it is your face—does not exist; your mirrors have made it vanish and in its place you see a hallucinatory hell. Hell! That word I learned from you, that word that I do not understand, that place created by your people to eternally damn everything that lives. That terrifying universe that you have fabricated is the one that cuts out your image and freezes itself in the mirror. Your mirrors are as terrible as you are! What I most hate, Hernán, is to have looked at myself in your mirrors, in your black mirrors.”
The search for the gods is the search for oneself. And where do we find ourselves hidden? In the water, in the air, in the fire, in the earth. We are in the water, hidden in the river. Water makes up part of our body, but we do not see it; it courses through our veins, but we do not feel it. We only see the water on the outside. We only recognize ourselves in our reflections. When we look at ourselves in the water, we know too that we are light or we would not be reflected. We are fire, we are sun. We are in the air, in the word. When we say the names of our gods, we say our own. They created us with their word and we re-create them with ours. Gods and men are the same. Child of the sun, child of the water, child of the air, child of the corn; born in the womb of Mother Earth. When one finds the sun, the moving fire, the water, the hidden river, the air, the sacred song, the earth, and the flesh of corn within oneself, one is transformed into a god.
For Malinalli it was urgently necessary to find herself once again, by finding once again her gods. After the terrible argument with Cortés the previous day, she felt as if she wasn’t inside her own body, that her soul had escaped, that it had fled, that it had evaporated with the rays of the sun. To see herself reflected in Hernán Cortés had left her confused. She had to confront her dark side before recapturing the light. To achieve this, she had to take the same journey that Quetzalcóatl had taken through the inner earth, through the underworld, before becoming the Morning Star. The cycle of Venus was the cycle of purification and rebirth. At a certain moment, Venus-Quetzalcóatl disappears, is not seen in the sky because he enters the womb of Mother Earth, he descends to recover the bones of his ancestors. Bones are the seed, the origin of the human body planted in the cosmos. Before recovering his body, Quetzalcóatl has to face his desires, see himself in the black mirror to achieve purification. If he is able to do it, the sun under the earth, under the hills, will lend its strength so that the earth opens and lets sprout the seed that is nourished with water from the hidden river. Quetzalcóatl, who descended as a fleshless spirit, in contact with the forces that bring forth life, will reunite his bones with his flesh.
Malinalli spent all night preparing for the journey. At dawn, she said goodbye to Jaramillo, her dear husband, and entrusted him with taking care of the children while she went in search of herself on the hill of Tepeyac. She felt aching, wounded. She felt that by attacking Cortés she had attacked herself. As she climbed the hill, she said: Water does not attack water. Corn does not attack corn. Air does not attack air. The earth does not attack the earth. It is the man who doesn’t see himself in them that attacks them, destroys them. The man who attacks himself does away with the water, with the corn, with the earth, and stops saying the names of his gods. The man who doesn’t see that his brother is also wind, also water, also corn, also air, cannot see god.
Malinalli wanted to see Tonantzin, the feminine deity, the Mother. She wanted to say her name to be part of her, to be able to look into her children’s eyes without the fear of seeing anger reflected in them. She knew that to achieve integration with the forces of nature, of the cosmos, the first thing she had to do is keep silent and turn her heart toward heaven, full of devotion. Tepeyac, according to the tradition of her ancestors, was where Tonantzin could be found, but Malinalli was not sure where.
“Where are you?” she asked in silence. “Where are you, soul of things, essence of the visible, eternity of the stars? Where can I search in order to find you, if you are forbidden, if they have made you disappear, if they have ripped you from our faith, if they have tried to erase you from our memory?”
As she formulated these questions, she received the answers. It was truly as if, on the moment of thinking about her, she had entered into communication with Tonantzin. She heard in her mind that the essence of Tonantzin had returned to the depths of the mirror, the depths of the water, to be renewed as well. She too required it. In the deepest earth she had undone her appearance, her word, her touch, her strength. Now she was wind, water, fire, earth contained in a seed, and would soon reappear in new garments, a new form. She would arise from the dreams, the desires, the voices of those who summoned her, who remembered her. She would appear when her people awoke from the dream of death they had sunken into, the deceitful dream that made them believe that the reflection of their body had been erased from the sky. When they recovered their faith in the forces of nature, of creation, along with her they could paint her spirit. She would come dressed in the rays of the sun, sustained by the moon, in midair. Trembling in the wind, in a new shape, since the transformation of man, the transformation of the world, is the transformation of the universe. The Mexicas had changed, and so had the gods.
Our rituals would change in form, our language would become another, our prayers others, our communication different—Tonantzin told Malinalli—but t
he ancient gods, the immovable ones, the gods of all things, those that have no beginning and no end, will only change in form.
After listening to these words, Malinalli felt as if the air around her became perfumed, making evident the presence of the sacred. It was in the stillness of her mind that she had established contact with Tonantzin, and in the same manner she now addressed her reverently.
“To you, silence of the morning, perfume of thought, heart of desire, luminous intention of creation; to you, who give rise to the caresses of flowers, and who are the light of hope, the secret of the lips, the design of the invisible; to you I entrust that which I love, I entrust my children, who were born from the love that knows no flesh, who were born from the love that has no beginning, who were born from the noble, from the sacred; to you, who are one with them, I entrust them, so that you will dwell in their minds, guide their steps, inhabit their words, so that they never grow sick from their feelings, so that they never lose the will to live. Of you, dear mother, I ask that you be their reflection, so that on seeing you, they feel pride, they who do not belong to my world or to the Spaniards’, they who are a mixture of all bloods—Iberian, African, Roman, Gothic, Native, and Middle Eastern—they, who along with all those now being born are the new vessel whereby the true thought of Christ-Quetzalcóatl is installed again in the hearts of men and casts its light on the world. Let them never be afraid! Never feel alone! Present yourself to them in your jade necklace, in your quetzal feathers, in your blanket of stars, so that they may recognize you and feel your presence. Protect them from illness; let the wind and the clouds sweep away all danger, all evil that pursues them. Don’t allow them to gaze into a black mirror that tells them they are inferior, not worthy, that they should accept mistreatment and violence as their only due. Make sure that they never come to know treason, or hatred, or power, or ambition. Appear to them in their dreams so that the dream of war never establishes itself in their heads, that dream of collective madness, that sorrowful hell. Heal their fears, erase their fears, make them vanish, flee, drift away; erase all their fears along with mine, dear mother. That is what I ask of you, Great Lady. Strengthen the spirit of the new race that with new eyes looks on itself in the mirror of the moon, so that they may know that their presence on the earth is a fulfilled promise of the universe, a promise of plenty, of life, of redemption, and of love.”