by Unknown
13
‘How did you sleep?’ enquires the nurse.
‘Indifferently,’ says Claudia. ‘I had a nightmare. In which I now realise I was present at one of the more gruesome moments of the early sixteenth century. The flight of the Spaniards from the Aztec capital of Tlacopan.’
‘Gracious,’ murmurs the nurse, shaking pillows. ‘I’ll put the back rest up for you, shall I?’
‘Along the causeway. Horses clattering on the paving-stones. Arrows. Screams. Blood, steel, muskets firing. Smoke. Yells. And the boats swarming, swarming, the water thick with them, and the Indians coming out of the boats up the sides of the causeway, wave upon wave of bodies. Men being dragged from the horses, rolling into the water, the Indians falling on them. Arrows like rain. The noise.’
‘Sounds like a film,’ says the nurse, ‘the way you tell it.’
‘Now it’s interesting you should say that,’ says Claudia, ‘for one reason and another. But it was much more real than that, I assure you. I too was sweating and screaming. And the curious thing about this nightmare – the impenetrable way in which evidently the subconscious works – is that it started as a vision of the Thames. London Bridge. With buildings – those little ramshackle cantilevered houses – and a mass of barges and other boats below, almost covering the water. An image, obviously, of some painting I’ve seen and forgotten except in the mind’s eye.’
‘Dreams are funny,’ says the nurse. ‘I once…’
‘And while I was a spectator of the London scene – a kind of benign omniscient eye – I became a participant in Mexico. It was I who was going to be gashed, blown apart, sliced open, stabbed, impaled at any moment. I was fighting for my life. But was I a Spaniard or an Aztec?’
The nurse, who has had enough, cranks the bed a few inches higher, gathers up sheets and pillow-cases and leaves the room.
I wrote my Mexico book out of incredulity. Hernando Cortez cannot be true. There cannot have been a human being so brave, charismatic, obstinate and apparently indestructible. How could anyone be so greedy, fanatical, and unimaginative as to lead a few hundred men into an alien continent of whose topography he was ignorant, swarming with a race devoted to the slaughter and sacrifice of strangers, in order to take prisoner their leader in his own capital city? And succeed. And then, when the tables are turned and he is driven out, set to and build thirteen vessels of war and carry them back one hundred and forty miles across mountains because the only way you can tackle a city sited in the middle of a lake is with superior shipping. And succeed again. Is a man who is impelled to do such things a hero or a maniac?
Prescott, peering back from Boston in 1843, thought him the mirror of his time. And wrote great history about him. History which is also, of course, a mirror of the mind of an enlightened, reflective American of 1843. Just as my view was that of a polemical opinionated independent Englishwoman of 1954.
No wonder it all hangs around in the subconscious, surfacing in dreams. Here is one of the most extraordinary confrontations of people and of cultures there has ever been. It is also a dark hint of the world to come: technology triumphs. Cortez is outnumbered by fifty, a hundred, a thousand to one – but he has armour, he has gunpowder, he has ships and cannon. More than that, he knows what it is he has got and the Aztecs do not. At first they, who have never seen horses, think the mounted Spaniards are strange magical Centaur-like creatures. They also think that they are immortal; the Spaniards, feeding this belief, bury the corpses of their slain in secret and by night. Cortez has technology and he has what Prescott calls the pale light of reason. Pale because of the inferior strength of reason in 1520? Or pale because of what it was up against? Either way, it is going to be too much for the Aztecs. They will disintegrate before a few hundred bigoted avaricious adventurers – armies, cities, the whole ancient fragile fabric of their society. Civilisation comes to Mexico.
The victory, in a way, is of one mythology over another. The Aztec – Prescott’s ‘untutored savage’ – has to cope with gods who require continual appeasement if day is to succeed day and the sun is to go on shining. The Spanish God requires sacrifices too: an expanding empire of converts plus good conduct on earth as a passport to eternal life. Each appals the other. It is interesting to note that the Aztecs, who sacrificed captives to their gods by carving their living hearts from their bodies, were deeply shocked by the Spanish custom of burning transgressors at the stake. Cruelty, evidently, lies in the eye of the beholder.
My book was a success. It reached best-seller lists. I was interviewed by journalists. A well-known scholar attacked me in the TLS, which did me an inordinate amount of good. And two years later a film producer telephoned me. I listened to him with almost as much incredulity as I had first read about Cortez. When I put the receiver down I began to laugh.
‘I have grave doubts about the feathers,’ says Claudia. ‘Some of them look like ostrich to me. There aren’t ostriches in Central America.’
‘Check those feathers,’ says the producer to a minion. ‘What about the general effect, though? Powerful, isn’t it?’
‘The general effect is… remarkable.’
It is indeed. For here in this Spanish valley are assembled the opposed armies of Montezuma and Cortez. In the background are mountains and also the rooftops of the little Spanish village that will of course remain out of shot, along with the telegraph poles along the road, the collection of parked cars and the three immense catering vans. In the foreground is Cortez’s troop, all flashing armour and jinking harness and stamping hooves, and the Aztec hordes, brilliant in their plumed head-gear, their quilted tunics, their gold-trimmed boots and their dubiously feathered cloaks. Admittedly, corners have been cut on the hordes; the forty thousand cited by the researchers are represented by a hundred odd extras who – since this is one of the interminable breaks from filming – are sitting around smoking and drinking Coca-Cola. Montezuma himself is having his make-up fixed in his personal caravan. Claudia had dinner with him yesterday in a Toledo restaurant; he is an actor of Venezuelan extraction, a man of devastating sexuality and unbelievable stupidity. At one point during the dinner, struggling to make intellectual contact at any level whatsoever, she came to the conclusion that such a person must be thought of not as human but as an exquisite animal endowed with limited powers of speech and reason.
Claudia’s name will appear on the credits of this film as Historical Adviser. She thought long and hard – well, for ten minutes or so – about whether or not to agree to this. Avarice won, in the end, along with curiosity. She could not afford to pass up the interestingly large sums of money offered by the film company for the tag of her respectable name (plus a little token respectable advice); and besides, it might be amusing – at least it’s something different. Claudia at forty-six is restless. Even more restless than she has always been.
The director is now bawling at the extras through a megaphone. Cigarettes are stubbed out; feathers are adjusted. Montezuma emerges from his caravan and Cortez from his.
‘They’re doing the confrontation scene again,’ says the producer. ‘There was trouble with the horses in the last take.’
‘I suppose you realise they never actually met in battle?’ says Claudia.
The producer gives her a look. ‘Well, we’re stretching a point, eh? Besides, you gave me a long lecture yourself about conflicts of evidence. This is a bit of conflicting evidence. Looks good, doesn’t it?’
And out on to this barren valley battlefield of scrub and rank grass rides Cortez, a chunky figure whose face is instantly familiar. One has seen him peering out of oilskins over the wheel of destroyers, lurking under lamp-posts in fedora and belted raincoat, shooting it out in frontier towns – an international cipher of the century, known to all and to none. Claudia, meeting him just now, had the curious feeling that the hand he held out might be made of cardboard; it was disconcerting to touch ordinary warm flesh.
The armies are deployed; they form up and wheel around and hurtle
upon one another; there is tumult and shouting; stout Cortez is seen to fall and rise again; Montezuma flees; trucks bearing cameras and frantic cameramen circle around and around. Claudia, the wind in her hair and the sun in her eyes, watches with interest and a kind of disbelief. The disbelief has nothing to do with the authenticity of the Aztec feathers, or the cleanliness of the combatants, or the sound of megaphones and combustion engines but with something quite else; she cannot believe her own presence at this expensive charade. She is amused but also a little queasy. She thinks of those wretched real Mexicans and Spaniards, who have furnished the story and lined many pockets including in a small way her own.
Jasper was to fling that point at me, years later, over a breakfast table in Maidenhead, when I had attacked his own traducing of history. I defended myself as a spectator, no more. Well, yes; up to a point. Touché, Jasper.
My Mexico book was a sober, if controversial, piece of narrative history. It told the tale. In my history of the world the fall of Tezcuco will be differently seen.
Or perhaps not seen but heard – told in a Spanish dialect that we have lost and Indian languages of which we have no notion, against the chanting of the Latin mass and the irretrievable rituals of that other hideous creed that demanded human blood day after day after day. Yes, that is how it should be done. Sights one can conjure up in the head; sound is more elusive. My readers shall hear, at this point – they shall become listeners. They shall hear the tramping of Cortez’s long march to the interior, the rain, the wind, the swearing and the grumbling, they shall hear the awful hiss of Popocatepetl into whose smoking maw the Spaniards descend – having inconveniently run out of sulphur for gunpowder. They shall hear the sounds of the massacre at Cholulo, when the Spaniards, becoming short-tempered, dispose of three thousand Indians – or maybe six thousand, or maybe more, again we have a slight problem with conflicting evidence, but the noise would have been much the same. They shall hear the gardens of the Aztec city of Iztapalapan – the jungle sounds of the birds in the aviaries, the purr of humming-birds and bees feeding on the aromatic shrubs and the creepers that cover the trellises, the rustle of the gardeners’ brooms sweeping the paths. They shall hear Montezuma’s welcome to Cortez, and Cortez’s affirmation of friendship and respect. They shall hear the clink and clatter of the gold and silver gifts heaped upon the Spaniards – the collars and necklaces and bracelets and other ornaments, the drinking vessels and platters. They shall hear the interested comments of the Spaniards upon the workmanship, the weight, the probable value. They shall hear the scratch of pen upon parchment as Cortez reports back to base, and perhaps even the mutterings of the Emperor Charles V in Madrid wondering if he controls the whole of the New World yet, or only part of it, which would not be enough. And at the end they shall hear the concerted howl of the mass of humanity – Spaniards and Indians, men, women, and children – who died because they were unfortunate enough to be around at a climactic moment in history.
And what, you may ask, does that moment in history have to do with me, Claudia, except that I wrote a book about it? Added a few more to the millions of words already written. How does it defy chronology and mesh into my unimportant seventy-six years?
Like everything else: it enlarges me, it frees me from the prison of my experience; it also resounds within that experience.
The smell of leather. The expensive smell of the upholstery of the chauffeur-driven car in which she sits with Cortez. Stout Cortez. Unarmoured now and wearing the off-duty dress of a very rich mid-twentieth-century actor, but stout none the less. James Caxton is pushing fifty, but plays down ten years, or fifteen at a pinch with a good cameraman. He is not exactly fat, but has the tight, glossy look of a man whose skin fits a little too well. His shirt, his trousers, his navy blazer are all craftily cut to give the impression of a body more lithe than it actually is. He holds himself carefully. His face, unmade-up, has a most peculiar texture – it continues to look as though someone has been at it with eye-liner and grease-paint; the light suntan does not seem natural, the brows and lashes are too sharply defined. His voice is a rich compelling bass; it makes everyone else stop talking, as though anything he said would be of great significance. In fact, as Claudia is learning, he is a profoundly uninteresting man. He seldom says anything of any note whatsoever; it is simply that his voice is hypnotic. He is talking, right now, about the scenery.
‘I adore mountains.’
‘Ah,’ says Claudia. What else could one say?
‘Thank God they didn’t decide to shoot this movie in Mexico. The climate’s appalling. The coast is tolerable. I’ve taken some vacations at Acapulco. Super beaches.’
Claudia considers saying ‘Ah’ once more. The landscape cruises by as the chauffeur swings the car down the hairpin bends. Instead, she asks James Caxton if he has ever seen any of the Aztec sites – the pyramids, the temples.
James Caxton ponders. He thinks not. Not absolutely sure. Possibly. One has been to so many places.
But one could hardly have failed to notice such things, Claudia thinks. Never mind. She persists for a while, talking of pre-Columban sculpture. The poor man is monumentally bored but he is, way back, despite Hollywood and Pinewood Studios and Cinecittà, an English gentleman and he knows how to behave to a lady; he arranges his famous face into an expression of interest and allows her to finish. Then he counters with a long story about when they were shooting his Napoleon film in Egypt (Claudia can see the train of association, though pyramids and temples in fact do not feature in the story). He has done his Napoleon, and his Francis Drake, and his Mark Antony, and his Byron. They are all, in his head, jumbled into a mosaic of disassociated personalities who have nothing to do with anything except an isolated dramatic sequence. Napoleon is mixed up with Josephine, and supervises battles. Drake has a prickly relationship with Elizabeth, and must be played with a Devon accent. In fact it becomes apparent that his grasp of chronology is extremely weak. He can hitch Napoleon to the nineteenth century, but is vague as to which end. Dates mean nothing to him, since he cannot relate them to each other. Here is a man, Claudia gleefully realises, who is adrift in time – a historical innocent. How did he achieve this purity? Cunningly, she probes (not difficult, since she is inviting him to talk about his favourite subject – himself); he was privately educated, it emerges, or rather, barely educated at all, because considered delicate as a boy. No wonder directors find him so pliable; a man without conditioning is without preconceptions.
He glances at his watch. ‘Mike’ll be having kittens. We’re shooting the banquet scene this afternoon. Step on it a bit, can you, Charlie.’ The chauffeur nods; the landscape flows by a little faster. They have been lunching in a town some distance from the location site because James Caxton was not needed in the morning and is fed up with canteen meals. Claudia is his companion because he does not hit it off with Montezuma (appropriately enough), his leading lady has a migraine and other members of the cast are required for a run-through. The meal was lavish and lengthy; the conversation laboured. At least so far as Claudia was concerned it was barely classifiable as conversation. For Caxton, she realised, it might have seemed quite adequate. He is totally incurious. In three days she has rarely heard him ask a single personal question of anyone. This insularity seems to be not so much egotism as a deficiency induced by years of having other people intensely interested in his every word or action.
He approves, evidently, of Claudia. He has been affable, positively gracious, since first she arrived. He is impressed by her status as patron intellectual; she lends cachet. But she is also not the sort of woman to whom he is accustomed. Over lunch, he became almost inquisitive.
‘What took you into the stuff you do – the sort of books you write?’
‘Ignorance. Immodesty. Hubris. And fate, of course. I was a war correspondent during the war. That rather put me off reporting on the present.’
Caxton nods. ‘I was in the Far East. ENSA. Not exactly the front line, but things were a b
it dodgy once or twice. Convoy we were on was torpedoed off Singapore. I was bloody glad to get home.’
‘All the same, we neither of us appear to have suffered unduly.’
This does not go down very well. He says stiffly, ‘Well, possibly… In any case, I’ve always believed in taking the rough with the smooth.’ His incomparable voice invests the words with distinction, for a moment.
‘Very wise,’ says Claudia.
‘Don’t you?’
‘Not really. Probably more a matter of temperament than belief.’
‘Women,’ says Caxton, ‘are always less philosophical about the ups and downs of life. My wife…’
‘They also deal them out, of course.’
He stares at her. ‘What?’
‘The Fates,’ says Claudia, ‘are traditionally represented in Greek mythology as women. Three of them. Spinning.’
‘As I was saying, my wife…’
‘The Furies too. Remorseless atavistic maternal punishment. But also the Muses. In fact we have all the best parts. I’m sorry – your wife?’
‘I’ve forgotten what I was going to say about her. You’re a very peculiar person, Claudia. You don’t mind my saying that?’