“Don’t fool yourself. Here there’s no rest or joy.”
And he told him to fast and to sleep without a woman.
Moctezuma obeyed. He made a long penitence. The eunuchs shut tight the quarters of his wives; the cooks forgot about his favorite dishes. But things got worse. The black crows of distress came in flocks. Moctezuma lost the protection of Tlazoltéotl, the goddess of love, also the goddess of shit, she who eats our nastiness so that love is possible; and thus the soul of the solitary emperor was drowned in garbage and blackness. He sent more messengers to Huémac on several occasions with entreaties and gifts, until finally the king of the dead gave him an appointment.
On the night arranged, Moctezuma went to meet him. His boat headed for Chapultepec. The emperor stood in the bow, and the mist over the lake opened up for his flamingo plume.
Shortly before reaching the foot of the mountain, Moctezuma heard the sound of oars. A canoe appeared, moving rapidly, and somebody shone out for an instant in the black mist, naked and alone, his paddle raised like a lance.
“Is that you, Huémac?”
Whoever it was kept moving nearer until he almost grazed the emperor. He looked into the emperor’s eyes as no man can look. “Coward!” he said to him and disappeared.
(60, 200, and 210)
1519: Tenochtitlán
The Capital of the Aztecs
Dumbfounded by the beauty of it, the conquistadors ride down the causeway. Tenochtitlán seems to have been torn from the pages of Amadís, things never heard of, never seen, nor even dreamed … The sun rises behind the volcanos, enters the lake, and breaks the floating mist into shreds. The city—streets, canals, high-towered temples—glitters before them. A multitude comes out to greet the invaders, silent and unhurried, while innumerable canoes open furrows in the cobalt waters.
Moctezuma arrives on a litter, seated on a soft jaguar skin, beneath a canopy of gold, pearls, and green feathers. The lords of the kingdom go ahead sweeping the ground he will tread.
He welcomes the god Quetzalcóatl:
“Thou hast come to occupy thy throne,” he says. “Thou hast come amid clouds, amid mists. I am not seeing thee in dreams. I am lot dreaming. Unto thy land hast thou come …”
Those who accompany Quetzalcóatl receive garlands of magnolias, necklaces of flowers around their necks, on their arms, on their breasts: the flower of the shield and the flower of the heart, the flowers of fine perfume and of golden hue.
Quetzalcóatl is a native of Estremadura who landed on American shores with his whole wardrobe on his back and a few coins in his purse. He was nineteen when he set foot on the wharf at Santo Domingo and asked: Where is the gold? He is now thirty-four and a captain of great daring. He wears armor of black iron and leads an army of horsemen, lancers, crossbowmen, riflemen, and fierce dogs. He has promised his soldiers: “I will make you in a very short time the richest men of all who ever came to the Indies.”
Emperor Moctezuma, who opens the gates of Tenochtitlán, will soon be finished. In a short while he will be called woman of the Spaniards, and his own people will stone him to death. Young Cuauhtémoc will take his place. He will fight.
(60 and 62)
Aztec Song of the Shield
On the shield, the virgin gave birth
to the great warrior.
On the shield, the virgin gave birth
to the great warrior.
On the mountain of the serpent, the conqueror,
amid the mountains,
with war paint
and with eagle shield.
No one, for sure, could face him,
The ground began to spin
when he put on his war paint
and raised his shield.
(77)
1520: Teocalhueyacan
“Night of Sorrow”
Hernán Cortés reviews the few survivors of his army while Malinche sews the torn flags.
Tenochtitlán is behind them. Behind, too, as if bidding them farewell, the column of smoke spewed by the volcano Popocatépetl, which no wind seemed able to bend.
The Aztecs have recovered their city, the roofs bristling with bows and lances, the lake covered with battle canoes. The conquistadors fled in disorder, pursued by a storm of arrows and stones, while war drums, yells, and curses stunned the night.
These wounded, mutilated, dying men left to Cortés saved themselves by using corpses as a bridge: They crossed to the other shore stepping on horses that slipped and drowned and on soldiers killed by arrows and stones or drowned by the weight of the gold-filled sacks that they could not bring themselves to leave behind.
(62 and 200)
1520: Segura de la Frontera
The Distribution of Wealth
Murmurings and scufflings in the Spaniards’ camp. The soldiers have no alternative. They must surrender the gold bars saved from the disaster. Anyone hiding something will be hanged.
The bars come from the works of Mexico’s goldsmiths and sculptors. Before being turned into booty and melted into ingots, this gold was a serpent about to strike, a tiger about to jump, an eagle about to soar, or a dagger that snaked and flowed like a river in the air.
Cortes explains that this gold is mere bubbles compared with what awaits them. He takes out the fifth part for the king, another fifth for himself, plus the shares due to his father and the horse that died under him, and gives almost all the rest to the captains. Little or nothing remains for the soldiers who have licked this gold, bitten it, weighed it in their hands, slept with their heads pillowed on it, told it their dreams of revenge.
Meanwhile, branding irons mark the faces of Indian slaves newly captured in Tepeaca and Huaquechula.
The air smells of burned flesh.
(62 and 205)
1520: Brussels
Dürer
These things must be emanations from the sun, like the men and women who made them in the remote land they inhabit: helmets and girdles, feather fans, dresses, cloaks, hunting gear, a gold sun and a silver moon, a blowgun, and other weapons of such beauty that they seem made to revive their victims.
The greatest draftsman of all the ages does not tire of staring at them. This is part of the booty that Cortés seized from Moctezuma: the only pieces that were not melted into ingots. King Charles, newly seated on the Holy Empire’s throne, is exhibiting to the public the trophies from his new bits of world.
Albrecht Dürer doesn’t know the Mexican poem that explains that the true artist finds pleasure in his work and talks with his heart, because he has one that isn’t dead and eaten by ants. But seeing what he sees, Dürer hears those words and finds that he is experiencing the greatest happiness of his half century of life.
(108)
1520: Tlaxcala
Toward the Reconquest of Tenochtitlán
The year is close to its end. As soon as the sun comes out, Cortés will give the order to march. His troops, pulverized by the Aztecs, have been rehabilitated in a few months under the protection of their Indian allies of Tlaxcala, Huexotzingo, and Texcoco. An army of fifty thousand natives is under his orders, and new soldiers have come from Spain, Santo Domingo, and Cuba, well provided with horses, arquebuses, crossbows, and cannon. To fight on the water when they reach the lake, Cortés will have sails, iron fittings, and masts to equip three brigantines. The Huexotzingo Indians will lay down the timbers.
The first light throws the volcanic skyline into relief. Beyond, rising out of the prodigious waters, Tenochtitlán awaits defiantly.
(56)
1521: Tlatelolco
Sword of Fire
Blood flows like water; the drinking water is acid with blood. To eat, only earth remains. They fight house by house, over the ruins and over the dead, day and night. Almost three months of battle without letup. Only dust and the stink of corpses to breathe; but still drums beat in the last towers, bells tinkle on the ankles of the last warriors. The strength-giving battle cries and chants continue. The last women take up battle-
axes from the fallen and until they collapse keep hammering on shields.
Emperor Cuauhtémoc summons the best of his captains. He puts on the long-feathered owl headpiece and takes up the sword of fire. With this sword in his fist, the god of war had emerged from his mothers belly, back in the most remote of times. With this serpent of sunbeams, Huitzilopochtli had decapitated his sister the moon and had cut to pieces his four hundred brothers, the stars, because they didn’t want to let him be born.
Cuauhtémoc orders: “Let our enemies look on it and be struck with terror.”
The sword of fire opens up an avenue. The chosen captain advances, alone, through the smoke and debris.
They fell him with a single shot from an arquebus.
(60, 107, and 200)
1521: Tenochtitlán
The World Is Silenced in the Rain
Suddenly, all at once, the cries and the drums cease. Gods and men have been defeated. With the gods’ death, time has died. With the men’s death, the city has died. This warrior city, she of the white willows and white rushes, has died fighting as she lived. No more will conquered princes of all the regions come in boats through the mist to pay her tribute.
A stunning silence reigns. And the rain begins to fall. Thunder and lightning fill the sky, and it rains all through the night.
The gold is piled into huge baskets. Gold of shields and insignia of war, gold of the masks of gods, lip and ear pendants, ornaments, lockets. The gold is weighed and the prisoners priced. One of these wretches is hardly worth two handfuls of corn … The soldiers gather to play dice and cards.
Fire burns the soles of Emperor Cuauhtémoc’s feet, anointed with oil, while the world is silent, and it rains.
(60, 107, and 200)
1521: Florida
Ponce dc León
He was old, or felt he was. There wouldn’t be enough time, nor would the weary heart hold out. Juan Ponce de León wanted to discover and win the unconquered world that the Florida islands had announced. He wanted to dwarf the memory of Christopher Columbus by the grandeur of his feats.
Here he landed, following the magic river that crosses the garden of delights. Instead of the fountain of youth, he has met this arrow that penetrates his breast. He will never bathe in the waters that restore energy to the muscles and shine to the eyes without erasing the experience of the mature spirit.
The soldiers carry him in their arms toward the ship. The conquered captain murmurs complaints like a newborn baby, but his years remain many and he is still aging. The men carrying him confirm without astonishment that here a new defeat has occurred in the continuous struggle between the alwayses and the nevers.
(166)
1522: Highways of Santo Domingo
Feet
The rebellion, the first by black slaves in America, has been smashed. It had broken out in the sugar mills of Diego Columbus, son of the discoverer. Fire had spread through the mills and plantations of the whole island. The blacks had risen up with the few surviving Indians, armed with sticks and stones and sugar-cane lances that broke against armor in futile fury.
Now from gallows scattered along the highways hang women and men, the young and the old. At the traveler’s eye level dangle feet by which he can guess what the victims were before death came. Among these leathery limbs, gashed by toil and tread, are frisky feet and formal feet; prisoner feet and feet that still dance, loving the earth and calling for war.
(166)
1522: Seville
The Longest Voyage Ever Made
No one thought they were still alive, but last night they arrived. They dropped anchor and fired all their guns. They didn’t land right away, nor let themselves be seen. In the morning they appeared on the wharf. Shaking and in rags, they entered Seville carrying lighted torches. The crowd opened up, amazed, for this procession of scarecrows headed by Juan Sebastián de Elcano. They stumbled ahead, leaning on each other for support, from church to church, fulfilling pledges, always pursued by the crowd. They chanted as they went.
They had left three years ago, down the river in five elegant ships that headed west, a bunch of adventurers who had come together to seek the passage between the oceans, and fortune and glory. All fugitives, they put to sea in flight from poverty, love, jail, or the gallows.
Now the survivors talk of storms, crimes, and marvels. They have seen seas and lands without map or name; six times they have crossed the zone where the world boils, without ever getting burned. To the south they have encountered blue snow and in the sky, four stars forming a cross. They have seen the sun and the moon moving backward and fish flying. They have heard of women whom the wind impregnates and met some black birds like crows that rush into the open jaws of whales and devour their hearts. On one very remote island, they report, live little people half a meter tall, with ears that reach down to their feet. So long are their ears that when they go to bed, one serves as pillow and the other as blanket. They also report that when the Molucca Indians saw the small boats launched from the ships, they thought those boats were small daughters of the ships, that the ships gave them birth and suckled them.
The survivors say that in the South of the South, where the lands open up and the oceans embrace, the Indians light huge bonfires night and day to keep from dying of cold. Those Indians are such giants, they say, that our heads hardly reached their waists. Magellan, who headed the expedition, caught two of them by putting iron fetters on their ankles and wrists as adornments; but later one died of scurvy and the other of heat.
They say that they had no alternative to drinking stagnant water, holding their noses, and that they ate sawdust, hides, and the rats that showed up to dispute with them the last wormy biscuits. Anyone who died of hunger they threw overboard, and as they had no stones to sink them, the corpses remained floating on the water: Europeans with faces to heaven and Indians face down. When they got to the Moluccas, one sailor traded the Indians a playing card, the king of diamonds, for six fowls, but couldn’t even take a bite of them, so swollen were his gums.
They have seen Magellan weep—tears in the eyes of the tough Portuguese navigator when the ships entered the ocean never before crossed by a European. And they have known his terrible tempers, when he had two rebellious captains beheaded and quartered and left other rebels in the desert. Magellan is now carrion, a trophy in the hands of Filipino natives who shot a poisoned arrow into his leg.
Of the 237 sailors and soldiers who left Seville three years ago, 18 have returned. They arrived in one creaky ship with a worm-eaten keel that leaks on all four sides.
The survivors. These men dead of hunger who have just sailed around the world for the first time.
(20 and 78)
1523: Cuzco
Huaina Cápac
Before the rising sun he throws himself down and touches his forehead to the ground. He grasps the first rays in his hands, brings them to his mouth, and drinks the light. Then he rises, stands, and looks straight at the sun, without blinking.
Behind Huaina Cápac his many women wait with bowed heads. Waiting, too, in silence, the many princes. The Inca is looking at the sun, he looks at it equal to equal, and a murmur of scandal grows among the priests.
Many years have passed since the day when Huaina Cápac, son of the resplendent father, came to the throne with the title of young-and-potent-chief-rich-in-virtues. He has extended the empire far beyond the frontiers of his ancestors. Eager for power, Huaina Cápac, discoverer, conqueror, has led his armies from the Amazon jungle to the heights of Quito and from the Chaco to the coasts of Chile. With flying arrow and deadly battle-ax, he has made himself the master of new mountains, plains, and sandy deserts. There is no one who does not dream about him and fear him in this kingdom that is now bigger than Europe. On Huaina Cápac depend pastures, water, and” people. His will has moved mountains and men. In this empire that does not know the wheel, he has had buildings constructed in Quito with stones from Cuzco so that in the future his greatness may be known
and his word believed by men.
The Inca looks fixedly at the sun. Not defiantly, as the priests fear, but out of pity. Huaina Cápac feels sorry for the sun, because, being his father and father of all the Incas since the most ancient of days, the sun has no right to fatigue or boredom. The sun never rests, plays, or forgets. He may not miss his daily appointment and runs today the same course across the sky as yesterday and tomorrow.
While he contemplates the sun, Huaina Cápac decides: “Soon I’ll be dying.”
(50 and 76)
1523: Cuauhcapolca
The Chief’s Questions
He delivers food and gold and accepts baptism. But he asks Gil González de Avila to explain how Jesus can be man and god; and Mary, virgin and mother. He asks where souls go when they leave the body and whether the holy father in Rome is immune to death.
He asks who elected the king of Castile. Chief Nicaragua was elected by the elders of the communities, assembled at the foot of a ceiba tree. Was the king elected by the elders of his communities?
The chief also asks the conquistador to tell him for what purpose so few men want so much gold. Will their bodies be big enough for so much adornment?
Later he asks if it is true, as a prophet said, that the sun, stars, and moon will lose their light and the sky will fall.
Chief Nicaragua does not ask why no children will be born in these parts. No prophet has told him that within a few years the women will refuse to give birth to slaves.
(81 and 103)
1523: Painala
Malinche