When Montezuma Met Cortes

by Matthew Restall

  Of particular relevance here is one key feature of the Nahuatl language. Whereas European languages (such as sixteenth-century Spanish) had ways in which vocabulary choices and use of grammar could make speech more polite, Nahuatl had a way of changing almost every word into a more formal, polite version of itself. By adding particular prefixes or suffixes to nouns, pronouns, prepositions, and many adverbs—and by changing the verb roots—regular speech could be turned into reverential speech. In the words of a Spaniard who studied Nahuatl in Mexico just a century after the Conquest war, the effect was “to elevate the Mexican language [Nahuatl] greatly and in this it outdoes even the languages of Europe.” Speaking with reverential forms was thus a subtle, high art. Their use was sometimes determined by the status of the speakers (all Aztecs would have addressed Montezuma reverentially), but as a general rule it was the occasion that determined their use.13

  One would never use reverential forms to refer to oneself; not even Montezuma would do that, and indeed his high status made it even more important that he speak modestly, even derogatively, about himself. But conventions of politeness and reverential address would have determined the way in which the emperor spoke to a visitor of status; thus the more reverentially Montezuma spoke to the Caxtilteca captains, the better it reflected on the emperor himself. In other words, the literal message of an address such as Montezuma’s would be that the speaker was lower and lesser in every way than the recipient of the speech, but the status of the speaker and his use of reverential Nahuatl conveyed the real message—which was the opposite, that he was in fact of higher status and greater importance. This inversion was deeply built into the language, so that, for example, the terms for “noble” and “child” were virtually identical, allowing a nobleman to call himself someone’s child, in the politest of language, thereby simultaneously conveying his nobility.

  The impossibility of adequately translating such language is obvious. The speaker was often obliged to say the opposite of what was really meant. True meaning was embedded in the use of reverential language. Stripped of these nuances in translation, and distorted through the filter of multiple interpreters (the Aguilar-Malintzin system), not only was it unlikely that a speech such as Montezuma’s would be accurately understood, but it was probable that its meaning would be turned upside down. In that case, Montezuma’s speech was not his surrender; it was his acceptance of a Spanish surrender.

  * * *

  Walk with me through the streets of Tenochtitlan, simultaneously through the city on the day of the Meeting, across the Mexico City of the midcolonial period, and into today’s downtown. Our stroll will cover a singular piece of ground, as we visit four locations on what was, for thousands of years, a small island on a spectacular lake. But it requires going back in time while remaining in the present—something we do all the time, whenever we watch historical dramas, read historical novels, or travel to places where the layers of the human past are still visible in the present.

  We enter Tenochtitlan from the south, as the invaders did on November 8, 1519 (our entry point and walk through the city are marked with an arrow on the 1692 map that is “Mexico City Idealized” in the Gallery). What was the edge of the city in 1519 had become, by the seventeenth century, a small plaza several blocks in from the lake. The precise spot where Cortés attempted to embrace Montezuma has been hotly debated, but there are really only two candidates, and they are a short block apart. The first, near a diagonal canal in the biombo map, is today still a small plaza, but now also a bustling city intersection, below which is a subway station, and the remains of a small Aztec temple—underground but visible through an opening in the plaza. All around is the color and movement, smell and din, of modern Mexico City. The Aztec past is there, but buried, literally, belowground.14

  The other Meeting site is just a stone’s throw away, and in fact the short block between the two locations probably accommodated the two hundred or so Spaniards who stood there on November 8. To mark the spot, Cortés built a chapel, attached to a hospital for Spanish settlers. Known for centuries as the Hospital de Jesús (introduced earlier), the original structure still exists and still functions as a medical center—the oldest hospital in continuous use in the Americas. Sigüenza y Góngora called his book on the Hospital de Jesús—published in 1663 when it was called the Hospital de la Immaculada Concepción de Nuestra Señora—the Piedad Heroyca de Don Fernando Cortés. “Cortés’s Heroic Piety”: as if all the medical good works done by generations of hospital staff reflected back on the conquistador as the institution’s founder, just as the saving of Mexican souls was to the credit of the captain who led the Conquest company, both enterprises representing a healing of some kind.15

  But that was three and a half centuries ago. Today, “no street, no statue, no city, just a few places that mark his journey (the Sea of Cortés in California, the Pass of Cortés between the volcanoes, the Palace of Cortés in Cuernavaca) dare to mention the cursed name” (as Krauze has put it). The Hospital de Jesús is now a tribute to Cortés and his “Conquest of Mexico” only in a surreptitious, almost apologetic way. The ancient hospital is wrapped in a mid-twentieth century extension, its historical core invisible from the main street. Cortés’s bones are hidden in the chapel, in an unmarked location separate from the unobtrusive brass plaque on an inside wall. A copy of the small bust made for the 1794 mausoleum is set up between the two sixteenth-century interior courtyards, near a modern mural of the Meeting; but they are seldom visited in the dark and secluded space, transparent to the hospital staff going about their daily business. Finally, there is the three-quarter-length oil-painted portrait of Cortés, often reproduced (and introduced earlier). It hangs in a beautiful, colonial-era room with period furnishings and other Cortesian portraits. But the room is a private, locked office.16

  The room’s seclusion is of course what makes it worth visiting. It has been preserved for its own sake, not as a tourist attraction, and it therefore acts as a portal to the sixteenth century—one that contrasts strikingly to the time portal of the submerged Aztec temple a block away. But the room evokes the past in another, more surprising way. For among those who gained access to this room in ages past were the senior officers of the foreign army that occupied the city in 1847. One of them, General William Jenkins Worth, was so struck by the Cortés portrait that he had a copy made and delivered as a gift to the First Lady of the United States. So the story goes; I suspect that Worth stole a colonial-period original. But whether it was a respectful copy, or war loot, the painting hung in the White House for the remaining months of the Polk administration, and in 1849 Sarah Childress Polk took it with her to the Polks’ Nashville mansion. There it was displayed prominently in the front hall, a reminder that the acquisition of half of Mexican territory, resulting from her late husband’s “Mexican war,” was (in her words) “among the most important events in the history of this country” (on the day she hung the painting, she heard of Worth’s death from the cholera epidemic that a month later killed her husband too). After Sarah Childress Polk died in 1891, the painting remained part of the Polk estate, and it can be seen today in the President Polk Home and Museum in Columbia, Tennessee.17

  On the exterior, fortresslike wall of that secluded room in the Hospital de Jesús, out in the busy street, there was until recently a concrete plaque to commemorate the location of the Meeting. Its crumbling surface, with its message periodically rewritten by vandals, is long gone (but captured as the closing image in our Gallery). The applicability of the term genocide to the Spanish-Aztec War is debatable (as suggested earlier)—but debatable in both senses of the word: questionable, yet also worth debating for as long as the war remains disguised behind the old narratives of the “Conquest of Mexico.” For as we are attempting here to view specific spots in Tenochtitlan/Mexico City at multiple moments in time, let us imagine what the early conquistador-settlers might have made of that recent graffito—“Genocide / Long Live Tenochtitlan!”—on the walls of the hospi
tal chapel. I suspect that of all the historical details just mentioned—the half-millennium persistence of the hospital, the periodic disputes over Cortés’s bones, the U.S. invasion and military occupation of Mexico City, the Worth copy of the Cortés portrait still hanging in Tennessee—the detail that would have been least surprising to the conquistadors would have been that plaque and its graffiti. Explanations would have been required (genocide would not exist in any language for centuries; the city was still Tenochtitlan, or “Temixtitan,” to Spaniards as well as Nahuas into the 1530s, and Tenochtitlan to Nahuas for centuries). But an act of protest or rebellion would not have surprised them; they would have assumed that it was carried out by the descendants of the people against whom they had waged a brutal war of slaughter and enslavement.18

  IF THE DUAL SPOT of the Meeting is a provocative reminder of how the “Conquest of Mexico” is both distant history and an unresolved problem of the present, the same is true of the zócalo, as the city’s massive central plaza became known. It was, and is, a few blocks’ walk to that plaza from the plaque marking the Meeting (on our map, we enter the plaza from its top, right corner). Those exact same blocks were walked by the conquistadors—and the Taínos and Totonacs and Nahuas and Africans who came with them, led by their Aztec hosts—that November morning in 1519. As they entered the Aztec plaza, to their left stood the palace of Axayacatl (where the Caxtilteca would spend the next five months), and to their right, Montezuma’s palace. On that site, Cortés would build his own palace, but it was soon appropriated by the Crown and became the palace of viceregal government. Rebuilt many times (it was largely destroyed in the riot of 1692, within months of the painting of the map that is guiding our walk; would that act of rebellion by the descendants of Tenochtitlan’s defenders have surprised the conquistadors?), it is now the Mexican republic’s Palacio Nacional.19

  That corner of the zócalo is also one of the ways whereby U.S. troops entered the city’s center on September 14, 1847—as conscious then as they had been throughout their march from Veracruz that they were walking in the footsteps of the conquistadors. Here, at last, were “the halls of the Montezumas.”

  In George Wilkins Kendall’s classic account of the war between Mexico and the United States, published within a few years of the conflict and influential for many decades after it, his description of General Winfield Scott’s “Entrance into the City of Mexico” was accompanied by a Carl Nebel lithograph of the zócalo. This now-famous image was a virtual copy of an earlier lithograph by Nebel, only with the stunning addition of U.S. troops filling much of the plaza. Kendall did not explicitly draw the parallel to the last time a foreign invasion force entered the city’s central plaza, but he hardly needed to do so. Likewise, the tenor of his depiction of responses by the city’s residents to the surrender and U.S. occupation echoed Spanish accounts of the Aztec uprising following Montezuma’s supposed surrender (and, again, would not have surprised the conquistadors of the 1520s). Kendall was indignant that despite Mexican capitulation and the raising of “the American flag” on the presidential palace, the “dastardly inhabitants,” particularly the city’s “lowest scum” and its thousands of “idle yet able-bodied vagrants,” engaged in “treacherous” and “cowardly” hostilities. Regardless of the legitimacy of the original invasion—indeed, eclipsing the very question—the flight of Santa Anna and the surrender speech of Montezuma validated and legalized the Spanish presence in the city in 1519 and the U.S. presence there in 1847. The Halls of Montezuma had been taken. Subsequent local resistance was illegitimate revolt.20

  The connection between the two invasions was made explicit in Lewis Foulk Thomas’s play Cortez, the Conqueror. This “Tragedy, in Five Acts” (which was “also prepared as a Dramatic Equestrian Spectacle”), published in 1857, was dedicated to John A. Quitman, the Mississippi general and congressman who showed “high chivalry” in “the late war between our country and Mexico.” The play was inscribed to the general, wrote Thomas, because its plot was “founded on events of old occurrence on the same fields where you so lately and so largely contributed to render the name of our country and your own, illustrious.” A scene in the play’s middle featured four conquistadors eating and drinking one night in a house in “Chohula.” Raising their glasses to the impending march to victory, their dialogue (quoted at the top of this Epilogue) ended with the “Halls of the Montezumas!” toast. In a note, the playwright admitted that the phrase was “an anachronism,” and that “the words were uttered on a memorable occasion, by the hero of San Jacinto,” General Sam Houston, “who, in a spirit of prophesy, foretold and pointed the path of our countrymen to ‘the Halls of the Montezumas.’”21

  The phrase persisted through to the twentieth century, during the decades that Prescott’s Conquest of Mexico was read by generation after generation of English-speakers, while U.S. expansionism took troops to territories that had been or still were Spanish colonies—from the Philippines to the Caribbean to Central America; and back to Mexico, with the occupation of Veracruz by the U.S. Navy and Marines in 1914. A few years later, the new battle hymn of the Marine Corps was written with the opening lines “From the Halls of Montezuma, / To the shores of Tripoli, / We fight our country’s battles, / On the land and on the sea.” Since then, the phrase’s specific reference has become lost in a more general association (used, for example, as the title of a 1951 movie about the Corps fighting on a Japanese island in World War II, and the name of a 1990 video game featuring the “battle history” of the Marines).22

  Arguably, it is not important whether the phrase accurately evokes the invasion wars of 1519–21 or 1546–49. Like “Genocidio / Viva Tenochtitlan!” the phrase acts as an icon, calling up images and ideas relevant to the present. Such words are not intended to be a key to unlock the truths of the past, and that places them firmly within the long tradition of writing, singing, engraving, and otherwise appropriating and representing the “Conquest of Mexico.” The Mexican-American War is both “the forgotten war” and one of the United States’ most controversial, because its justification remains elusive. As long as Mexico and the United States exist as nation-states, that war will not go away; just as the Spanish “Conquest of Mexico” will not go away as long as the descendants of Spaniards and Aztecs and other Mesoamericans live together in the lands once ruled by Montezuma.23

  Thus to stand in the zócalo of Tenochtitlan/Mexico City and to contemplate the layers of history that are both invisible and visible (from the exposed foundations of the Aztec Great Temple, to the sequence of imperial, viceregal, and national palaces, to the massive open space where people have paraded and protested, danced and died) is to surround oneself with ghosts. The great plaza is a place of cosmic resonance, a magnet for centuries of festivals and fights, of celebrations and conflicts. There are specters here; Mesoamerican and Aztec, Spanish and African, Mexican and American.

  Now stand at the foot of the Great Temple and mentally walk due west out to Montezuma’s zoo. This requires imagination, as the Great Temple is an archaeological site, and the skull racks and other Aztec structures through which one would walk have long been razed or buried beneath the cathedral (what’s more, there are no signs pointing the way to the zoo). But by walking around the front of the cathedral, one can exit the zócalo from a street at its lower middle (marked in the 1692 map by a stone fountain, long since removed). Walk straight ahead along a street that in Aztec times led to the zoo, in colonial times was called Calle San Francisco, and today is a pedestrianized shopping street. At that street’s end is one of those Mexico City corners about which a book could be written. But our focus is, first, just one of the buildings that we can see today from that corner. In the 1692 map, we are at the edge of the small park nestled beside the Aztec-Spanish aqueduct and the convent of Santa Isabel. Both aqueduct and convent are long gone, but on the convent’s site now sits the Palacio de Bellas Artes.

  In this beautiful theater—built between 1904 and 1934, and featuring an Art Deco
interior and murals by the pantheon of Orozco, Rivera, Siqueiros, and Tamayo—Antonio Vivaldi’s opera Motezuma was recently performed. The performance was noteworthy for several reasons. To start with, this was the first time the opera had ever been sung in the land of the Montezumas. Although the libretto of the opera had survived since Vivaldi’s day (it was published in 1733), the music was lost for centuries. The score was only discovered in 2002 in a library in Berlin (after the library’s contents, looted in World War II and deposited in Kiev, were returned to Germany). Following a legal dispute over the library’s rights to charge for performances, the score was made public in 2005; the Bellas Artes debut was in 2007.

  For the Mexican performance, the libretto and its newly rediscovered score were altered to fit the time and place. Some phrases in Nahuatl were added, and some pre-Columbian instruments were included. The Mexican violinist Samuel Máynez Champion, in consultation with the venerable Mexican historians Alfredo López Austin and Miguel León-Portilla, made plot adjustments, muting the original opera’s happy ending with a reminder to audiences of Montezuma’s tragic death. Máynez felt that the original libretto, based on Solís’s Historia de la Conquista and with “an invented and very trivial romance” plot, was “hog-wash, absurd, and tragicomic farce.” In fact, Tenochtitlan in 1520 was no more than an exotic backdrop to the use by Vivaldi and Giusti (the librettist) of a romantic-comedy plot that was conventional to opera (as it is in Hollywood movies). That plot—absurd indeed—focused on a pair of fictional lovers, a brother of Cortés’s named Ramiro, and a daughter of Montezuma’s named Teutile. Montezuma opposes the romance, but his wife intervenes, permitting a final matching of the lovers—despite their mismatched identities and the Conquest context.24