She didn’t even have the comfort of seeking refuge in her gods, because, to be fair, she had to admit that Quetzalcóatl had done nothing to defend his followers. The truth was that she, as well as the Cholultecans, had thought up to the last minute that Quetzalcóatl would reveal himself, that he would flood Cholula, that he would find some way to defend his faithful. But he was never heard from. A feeling of vulnerability seized Malinalli. Suddenly, all her fears and all her guilt took up arms in her heart. They struggled to be acknowledged, valued, and accepted. The eternal fear of abandonment, of loss, of being an unwanted girl, not appreciated or taken into account, presented itself more forcefully than ever before. It had been reborn! It had a new name, a new identity, new gods, but she did not yet know how it was going to punish her.
Yes, she felt that she deserved a punishment, she had always felt it. She had never understood why, but each time that she had been given away, she had felt in the depth of her heart that it was because of a wrong that she had committed, perhaps the simple act of being a woman, or some other thing, but that was how she felt and that was how she experienced it, as an immense punishment. Now she understood less what was happening, her mind unable to absorb so many changes in so little time.
So many words, so many ideas. The one that proved the most difficult to understand was the devil as the incarnation of evil. The concept that the devil was a fallen angel, distant from the mercy of the heavenly father and condemned to live in darkness—who at the same time had the power to do away with all of divine creation—was never very clear to her. If he had such power, why didn’t he use it? And if to do it he needed for men to open their hearts to him, then he wasn’t as powerful as they said. What kind of a demon was he? On the other hand, was the true god so dimwitted that he had created a power capable of destroying him? And was he so weak that each moment he risked that his children would forget him and give in to sin? No, she could not at all understand the Spaniards’ ideas about good and evil.
For her, the spiritual world had an intimate relationship with Nature and the cosmos, with their rhythm, with the movement of the stars through the skies. When the Sun and the Moon had been born in Teotihuacan, they had freed mankind from the darkness. She knew from her ancestors that the light emitted by the stars was not only physical, but spiritual as well, and that their passage through the heavens served to unify the thoughts of men, the cycles of time and space. The contemplation of the skies, like a game of mirrors, became an internal contemplation, an instrument of transformation. It was something that happened inside and out, in the sky and in the earth. Year after year, cycle after cycle, interlacing it, as if dealing with a bed of snakes, in this manner incorporating oneself into the fabric of life, where it is not necessary to die to go to heaven, but only to be intimately bound with the earth in order to remain in the presence of the gods, for whosoever dedicated themselves to observing the ordered proceedings of the sky, was made into a sun, into a god.
She did not understand a god that you could not see in the sky—like the Sun—with your own eyes, a god with which you could not become one, a god outside of time, in another heaven where only those free from sin could enter. A vengeful god, a destructive god whom she feared and did not want to annoy, but could not fathom how to avoid doing so. She didn’t know what to do from now on. She felt like dust scattered in the wind, like a feather without the quetzal, like a husk without grains of corn, with no purpose, no desire, no life. Why had she been born? To help the Spaniards destroy her world, her cities, her beliefs, and her gods? She refused to accept it. There had to be another reason. She had to find a new meaning for her life. To see the world in a different manner. She had to stop seeing the past in each river, each stone, each plant, each huipil, in each tortilla that she brought to her mouth. She had to see things in the way the Spaniards did. Her life depended on it, because it was clear that up to that moment they had never been speaking about the same thing, had never seen the same thing nor wanted the same thing. The change that she wished for her people was simply to put an end to human sacrifice, but she expected everything else to remain the same, especially when it came to the cult of Quetzalcóatl. Of course, she understood that it wasn’t about what she wanted or had wanted. Nobody cared about her opinion and for the moment she didn’t care to return to the city to see what was left of the great Cholula.
Standing beside the horse, she was silent for a long while. Neither of them had plans to do anything. Some butterflies approached them. They were spattered with blood. Malinalli wept without tears, for there were no more left in her eyes. She wanted to escape so as not to see, not to hear, not to know. Her mind took flight and found itself outside of time with her grandmother, on the day that she had taken her to a sanctuary of monarch butterflies.
It had been a joyful spring day. Malinalli was dressed all in white with necklaces of feathers and jade bracelets and anklets. She was excited, for her grandmother had told her that the butterflies had returned and she was taking her to see them. The child did not understand why they left each year or why they returned and, curious, she asked her grandmother why the butterflies didn’t stay in their homes so that she could see them all year long. The grandmother explained that the butterflies, like so many winged creatures, were great travelers and that this was good, for moving with the wind is what makes one change, renew, become stronger. Each journey of the butterfly was a struggle for life. They migrated in search of food and a climate that would allow them to survive the cold winters; otherwise they would perish. This way they fulfilled a promise of life.
Her grandmother explained to her that within the human body we all had a traveling butterfly buried in our pelvic bone. That was the bone that symbolized them.
“When the flower opens, the butterfly comes,” her grandmother said. “When the butterfly comes, the flower opens.”
This meant that the energy generated by the butterfly, at a certain moment, liberated itself from its source and flew upward through the innards of the bone through the spinal column until it reached the bones of the skull, which symbolized the celestial dome. This journey was a repetition of the one that Quetzalcóatl had taken on the moment of his initiation and his transformation into the Morning Star. Whoever went through it, like him, became a god. And for the grandmother the return of the butterflies to their sanctuary anticipated the eventual return of Quetzalcóatl.
The child was very excited about the trip, overcome at the prospect of seeing so many butterflies. Malinalli’s mother had been opposed to the idea of the journey, saying that it would be impossible for the blind old woman to endure such a trip, and on top of that, to care for Malinalli, who according to her was such a restless and disobedient child. The trip would have been canceled had the grandmother not argued energetically and forcefully that to travel to sacred places it was not necessary to see, and that her years did not matter, for fatigue did not exist there, and that no one was going to stop her or convince her not to go, because aside from everything else, it was important for Malinalli to come to know the origin and eternal return of life’s creation.
“And I will not die in peace, nor leave this world, until I have made this journey with my granddaughter.”
So she asserted, and thus, hand in hand, Malinalli and her grandmother left on the road to the sanctuary on the first day of spring. They walked for three days, resting in small towns along the way, where they joined a group of men and women who were traveling to the sanctuary, to the ritual of initiation where, each spring, the wind and the abundance of elements are summoned so that people may obtain from the earth and the skies the riches necessary to fulfill their tasks.
During their pilgrimage they passed through a town where men and women dedicated themselves to the carving of stone, projecting on them the image of all the gods, all the suns, and the graven thoughts that would become eternally scripted into the stone. This task fascinated Malinalli, who learned that even the hardest thing was malleable and that the entire un
iverse was flexible to goodwill. The child then asked the grandmother if, since there was a butterfly inside the body, there were also stones like these.
“Like these? Mmmnn … Not like these, no. But sometimes the heart of a person can turn to stone. On the one hand it is good to be firm, not to be shaken up by any little thing, but it is not good to be too hard, for it will take longer to understand the truth, to be set afire with love.”
That night they slept in the town. Malinalli gathered stones of all sizes and saved them to take with her.
One day they came upon the fossil of a seashell.
“What is this?” the girl asked, placing the seashell in the grandmother’s hand, who, feeling it, immediately answered as if she were seeing it:
“It is a memory in stone.”
“Did they make it here?”
“No,” the grandmother responded with a laugh, “it was made by Mother Earth, it is her work.”
Malinalli saved it also in her sack and they kept walking. Bearing so much weight, the girl soon grew tired and pretended that she could not go on for her knees and her feet were in great pain. Her grandmother paid no attention to her, didn’t stop, didn’t sympathize, kept on going. Malinalli felt as if her grandmother could disappear forever and ran as never before in order to catch up with her.
“I am very excited to see the butterflies,” she said, after she had reached her grandmother. “But why do we have to walk so much?”
“Your task is to walk,” the grandmother replied. “A still body limits itself to itself, a body in movement expands, becomes a part of everything. But you have to learn to walk lightly, not with heavy steps. Walking fills us with energy and changes us to allow us to look into the secret of things. Walking transforms us into butterflies that rise and see truly what the world is. What life is. What our body is. It is the eternity of consciousness. It is the understanding of all things. That is god within us. But if you want, you can remain sitting, and turn into stone.”
As a response to this, the girl took out of her sack all the stones that she had gathered and grabbed her grandmother’s hand to keep walking.
Malinalli did not complain again. A short time before arriving, they rested from the midday sun inside a cave with an echo. The girl was amazed when she found the echo returning her words. The grandmother explained that this was why it was so important to honor the word. Each sound that we emit travels through the air, but it always returns to us. If we want the right words to resound in our ears, all we have to do is pronounce them beforehand.
On the fourth day, they reached the sanctuary of the monarch butterflies. There was a great crowd. Everyone had arrived from different regions, spoke different dialects, had different customs and habits, but one thing brought them together—the sacred ritual of witnessing the flight of the butterflies who, with the mingling of their forms in flight, sketched sacred codices in the air, messages from the gods and songs that only the soul could hear. It was amazing to see thousands of butterflies gathered around a giant tree, flying all over the place, emitting light from the air.
“Why are all the butterflies together?” Malinalli asked, brimming with enthusiasm.
“They come together to unite distances, to unite the cold with the heat,” the grandmother explained. “They are together so that we may read what they project with their forms. Study their shapes, their movements, their sounds, concentrate on them.”
The little four-year-old girl went into a sort of trance. She stopped seeing the butterflies and instead saw codices, manifestations of sacred art, as if she was one sent by the gods, a child prophet. Her mind understood how to read the codices without anyone having to explain, without them having to be there. She saw all of them and understood their meaning.
“What do you see?” the grandmother asked.
“Codices,” the girl responded.
“And if you close your eyes, do you still see them?”
“Yes.”
“Well then, now open your eyes. Do you still see them?”
“No,” Malinalli asserted.
“This shows that you are awake, and don’t live in illusions. You will see what you wish to see.”
Now she wanted to forget. She didn’t want the images of the destruction of Cholula to sketch a codex in her mind. She wanted to forget the day in the bathhouse also, in which she believed that Quetzalcóatl had moistened Cortés with the memory of god. She no longer wanted to speak, to see, to struggle for her freedom. Not at such a price. Not through the death of so many innocents, so many children, so many women. She rather wished that serpents would come out of her womb and wrap themselves around her body, that they would suffocate her, leave her without breath, turn her into nothing, a word in the moistness of the tongue, a symbol, a hieroglyph, a stone.
SIX
The cold was unbearable. Six They had been walking for days. Cortés stubbornly insisted on reaching Tenochtitlán at whatever the cost. After having lost their way various times, he found out that they had been given false information on how to reach the great city of the Mexicas, and so, against all advice, he decided to cross between Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl, the volcanoes that watched over the valley of Anáhuac.
The path was almost four thousand meters above sea level. It was November, and the cold was hellish, if such an adjective may be used. According to what they had told Malinalli, in hell there was an eternal fire that caused eternal suffering, and this image appealed to her, to equate such cold with hell. She could not imagine a time when it would go away. She felt it under her skin, in her bones. Her teeth chattered like bells during a feast day. Some of the Cuban servants that had come with the Spanish had already died due to the weather.
Malinalli was convinced that her hour would soon come. She was very tired. Her feet felt as if they did not belong to her, she could not feel them. They were completely frozen, numb. So much so, that she could not feel the wounds from the giant open blisters on her toes, caused by wearing closed shoes which she had taken from one of the Cuban slaves who had died along the way. She did not mind using a dead person’s shoes. She would do anything to relieve the cold in her feet. The problem was that she had never worn closed shoes, and before long she was already blistered and in great pain, but was not allowed to stop. She kept on going despite the bleeding blisters, until she could no longer feel pain in her stiffened feet.
Now she was only drowsy, very drowsy. She was incapable of conceiving of a sunny, warm, and joyful day. She wanted to imagine the heat that she felt all over her body during the summer days, but it was impossible. She so much needed to warm her skin! Not knowing why, she thought of grasshoppers.
Every summer, she used to catch them in the cornfields. She liked surprising them in mid-hop. She kept them in a small gourd, and later, in the communal kitchen, would drop them into boiling water. It was an instantaneous death for the grasshoppers. Afterward, she rinsed them till the water was completely clear and roasted them in a ceramic pot. There was nothing more delicious than a handful of roasted grasshoppers on a summer afternoon, after having bathed and played in the river’s cold waters.
At that moment, she wished with all her soul to be a grasshopper, so someone would catch her and throw her into a pot of boiling water. To be heat, to be fire, instead of a wounded aching body. If she had to die for this, then let it be. She didn’t care. At least she would die nice and warm, her spirit would be absorbed by the sun, and her body, which would remain on the earth, would become succulent food. Her flesh would delight others. She thought that the best thing, considering the taste buds of the Spaniards, would be for them to season her with a bit of crushed garlic, that plant that they had brought with them, that they ate so often that she could smell it in their sweat and on their breath. The cravings were killing her! At that moment she would have given anything for a roasted grasshopper. But in this cold, it would be impossible to find one. And now she knew why. In this weather the only thing one wanted was to cover oneself under the
earth and not go hopping here and there. Malinalli could not walk any further. She remembered the journey that she had taken with her grandmother, and the words that she had been told on that occasion resonated in her mind.
“You task is to walk. Walking transforms us into butterflies that rise and see truly what the world is.”
Through her own experience, Malinalli knew that ritual walking effectively caused a detachment from the body, a spiritual elevation, an assimilation with everything. It is what happened when you defeated the body, when you triumphed over it, when the flesh renounced the walker and allowed her to integrate herself into the nothing where everything is, where all is found. Malinalli, completely exhausted, closed her eyes to see if she could become one with her grandmother, but she wasn’t able to. Her body kept her prisoner.
Cortés watched her from a distance. They had decided to rest and wait for Diego de Ordaz’s expedition to return from Popocatépetl. Cortés had sent ten scouts under Diego de Ordaz’s command to explore Popocatépetl up close. The volcano, according to what he had been told, had erupted several times in the past few years. For most of the conquistadors, the sight of an active volcano was something new that they did not want to miss.