For the villagers here, as for the ancient Mexicans, the world has already been created and annihilated four times. And the Fifth Sun, which passes over us today, will also die, and will be the last. At the end of every fifty-two-year cycle, their universe hovers between a final, eternal destruction and a temporary renewal.
When Hernán Cortés first stepped ashore in America on Good Friday, four vast myth systems came into collision. Like four great ships rafted grindingly together in a turbulent sea, with mankind in the water, struggling not to be crushed, not to be drowned, fighting to clamber aboard any one of them and gain the shores of a new world. Good Friday, 1519, marking the death of the Son of God, was also the first day of One Reed, the year of Quetzalcoatl’s death, and also the year of his promised return. Good Friday that year fell on the first day of the Mexican new century.
In Cortés the first Mexicans saw Quetzalcoatl. In this Feathered Serpent, who forbade human sacrifice and yet sacrificed himself, the first Spaniards saw a parody of Christ, and Cuadros now sees Saint Thomas. Your Athanasius Kircher finds, in Christ, Osiris resurrected. You have seen Narcissus. In Quetzalcoatl, the god led unwittingly to incest and his own destruction, who would fail to see Oedipus?
While in you … in you, Mexico sees the Phoenix.
29th day of January, 1668
Pital
Juana,
There is so much more to this settlement than we realized. Last week I think I mentioned that a string of islands reaches almost to the shore. During a walk through the village I thought to take a certain route to meet them at the beach, drawn as I was by a curious configuration of rock there. At the edge of a clearing behind the village stand two thin jagged spires and between them a gap of perhaps three armspans. The spires are not more than two storeys high, and glisten with minerals deposited by countless small springs leaking from the rock. The formation itself is not man-made, but the hollowed-out trunk that spans that gap undoubtedly is, for through a string of perforations in the wood trickles a fine mist of spring water. When I made inquiries as to its purpose I was told at first that the mist kept the clearing cool, which indeed it does. And in reason of this coolness, I thought, many women and children work there at the water’s edge, on the fresh green grass, at looms and metates.
But what we have at last been shown is how this archipelago once was linked by bridges. Whatever its present purpose, I think this veil of mist was originally intended to conceal that first bridge from the casual onlooker. The islands constitute what I believe to have been a string of fine craters, high-sided along the periphery yet flat and open through the centres, which apparently still house many fine buildings. Even when fully populated, this city on a string of jagged emeralds would have been not just invisible from most angles of approach but virtually impregnable. And yet there is every evidence that already by the time of the Conquest, the city was abandoned save for a coterie of priests….
Juan de Alva has persuaded our hosts to take us by canoe tomorrow to the islands. It turns out that the women and children of the village live there, in comparative safety, while the men defend the approaches. But then why, I bade Juan ask, do we see women and children in the clearing on the shore? There are no villages without women, the answer.
From the beginning this place has been an illusion maintained for our benefit. And at last we are being allowed to peer through the mist. Tomorrow night I will write with a full report.
Carlos
24th day of February, 1668
Pital
Juana,
Thank you for writing after all this time. I will take your anger as a sign our work has at last piqued your interest.
Yes, there was darkness in the Mexican past. But Fray Cuadros and I have seen on these islands the warmth and light and joy that were its counterpoint. Juan de Alva is seeing it too—perhaps, like us, for the first time. Last night he spoke to us with enormous passion of the work of reform that his kinsman the poet-emperor Nezahualcoyotl began.38 The poet’s son continued it, as did Juan de Alva’s grandfather, until his work and his life were ended by the Inquisition. It is hard, even here, not to speak of this in whispers. Talk of reformation is as dangerous for Catholics and Creoles now as it ever was for the Mexicans.
Our work of transcription is nearly done. You are right of course—our theories may, in the end, accomplish no more than making the Indians imitators of not the Christians but the Egyptians. But then so are we, it seems. Which would make our similarities to the native Americans almost inevitable, I suppose, as those between more or less faithful copies of one original. But there is so much more at stake here than originality, as the followers of Sepulveda tirelessly press the argument that these Indians no more have souls than do apes, and may therefore be uprooted and enslaved without conscience or compunction.
And yes I deserve to be reminded that it was sometimes the blood of slaughtered children the Mexicans used to bind their sacred dough. Tell me, is this why you seem so determined to turn your back on these stories of your childhood?
And no I had not stopped to consider that in one obvious respect the Mexican rite is the opposite of ours: for us, the wafer and the wine become the flesh and blood of God. For them, human flesh and blood become the divine ambrosia and soma.39 They are more literal-minded in this than even we. But was it not the unfinished work of Nezahualcoyotl to sing of an unseen god whose hungers were less material?
These Indians are not, I know, the same people as the Mexica of the past. During these peaceful weeks here, perhaps I have been too willing to overlook the daily hardships and horrors of that past. Cuadros has reluctantly recited for me the gruesome calendar of passion plays—tearing the still beating heart from a victim’s chest … decapitation … searing off the living victim’s skin in a brazier of coals … riddling the victim with volleys of arrows … flaying and wearing his or her skin over one’s own …
But is it not always to the stupefying scale of the carnage that the discussion inevitably turns, as it now has with even you and me? The thousands of victims scaling steep temple steps to be stretched out over the spine of a sacrificial stone. The endless, mind-dulling repetition, the stones grown slick under foot, the gut-lifting stench … With all the emotion of a peasant husking corn, a priest plucks a palpitating heart from a man’s chest and sends the still conscious carcass flopping down the pyramid steps.
This picture you paint is not false. And Juan de Alva admits that where once the sacred flesh was to be eaten only sparingly by the reverent few, the capital’s markets soon fairly bulged with meat for sale to any merchant hoping at the banquet table to impress a client with that most prized of dishes, the Precious Eagle Fruit. No one denies that by 1519 the Mexican empire had become a terrible engine of death. But Brother Cuadros insists the numbers we learn as schoolchildren are grossly exaggerated. One hundred and thirty thousand skulls found in one heap—who could have counted them? Where were they supposed to have been found, where are they now? What’s more, this wild story of eighty-five thousand victims sacrificed on one temple top in the span of a single day—no fewer than sixty per minute? It is all but physically impossible.
And I ask you this: How do we weigh their hunger for mass sacrifice against our thirst for massacre?40
Our sky, like theirs, is dominated by eternity, but the eternities these two skies conceal are mirrored opposites—ours a brief death and an eternal life, theirs a brief life and an eternal death. For these strange and wondrous people of our America, the world, the cosmos entire, is a flowery temple dedicated to death, with the sacrificial stone its central altar and the temple itself poised at the edge of an abyss. Four suns, all destroyed. The close of every cycle a time of terror and omen and reproach—when a tenuous New Fire must somehow be struck in the open chest of Night.
I wonder, did you already know they call this wrenching-free of the heart ‘husking the corn’? That to give birth is to ‘take a prisoner,’ and to die in childbirth is to be made a sacrifice?
I confess it leaves me sick at heart to contemplate the bloody strangeness of this history, the awful poetry of our Eden. Yet how extraordinary it must have felt, to be desperately needed by one’s gods.
And I have been giving thought to what you seem to be suggesting: Christ, Osiris, Quetzalcoatl, Oedipus, Narcissus—all tricked or betrayed and brought low by love. All loved by goddesses, nymphs, priestesses. Woman as deceiver, as nemesis and whore—or the woman of sorrows, who has failed to protect….
Indeed the Mexican war god BlueHummingbird of the South triggers his first war by arranging for the daughter of a neighbouring king to be married to a Mexican. The father arrives at the wedding ceremony to see a Mexican priest standing in the bride’s place wearing her flayed skin. At the end of another fifty-two-year cycle, the BlueHummingbird beheads his own sister to spur the Mexicans to wage war for the promised land. Another woman of discord, another century of violence. After the office of Emperor, the second highest in the Mexican hierarchy is that of the Snake Woman, so called after the goddess Cihuacoatl, who leaves a sacrificial blade in the cradle of every newborn. It is to the man who occupies her office that the greatest number of blood sacrifices is made.
More Snake Women—Coatlicue, Serpent Skirt, wearing an obsidian blade swaddled like a child on her back, and a necklace of skulls. Chicomecoatl, Seven Snake, crying out in the road at night, some say for a lost child, others, for human hearts and blood.
The Mexicans did everything possible to exaggerate her monstrosity and, killing her, unleashed their wars.
Here in Pital, in the broken temple of their war god, the blood trail is still fresh, the pug marks still distinct. Is that it, is this the book you would have us resist opening? That in these signs—not so ancient, not quite buried—lies the contour of the Apocalypse, the key to its violence, its symbolic notation, its codex….
2nd day of March, 1668
Pital
Juana Inés,
Until your last letter I had been thinking about going on to Yucatan. Fray Cuadros is leaving soon for Veracruz. From there, he and a few others will launch their peaceful conquest of the Maya, among whom there have been heard legends of a bearded god called Votan and of an underground treasure of books guarded by his priestess. I believe in Cuadros at least and wish them Godspeed.
Today Juan de Alva has asked me if I thought I could stay and live here. But for all the peace and beauty we have found, so unexpectedly, I cannot reconcile myself. Cuadros has the gift for living among an alien people; I do not. I have for too long felt an alien in my own land. For his own reasons, Juan cannot stay either, and bound together in our separate exiles, the Creole and the half-caste, we have I think become true friends.
Now that we have finished the translation and finished asking all our foolish questions, the elders of the village have come forward and offered, as a parting gift, to perform the codex for us tonight. Is it truly a parting gift, I wonder, or as a seal on our promise to leave? Brother Cuadros is worried we will be called on to share this food of visions they call peyotl.
I sit here alone at the top of a ruined temple in the midst of a jungle calling out to itself. The monkeys are roaring like lions. In the forest it is already night. It speaks to me, day and night, this hot forest, but in tongues I do not know. Birds that croak like goats, the buzz and clatter of insects shaped to inconceivable ends. The soughing of branches in the wind off the lake, and back in the trees a rich belling, like bottles half full of water dropped into a pool….
Over the lake a half-moon rises pocked and golden. A buttery light sits on the skin like a second skin. Young girls go about the clearing lighting torches. Musicians arrive with their instruments. Slit drums, little gourds on sticks, flutes of clay and reed, notched thigh bones. A man brings a kind of vihuela or guitar with a pumpkin belly. A few dancers gather, bringing animal masks, shell tunics, colour whisks of iridescent feathers.
From the black forest at my back, moths the colour of vellum float past towards the clearing, eyes glinting ruby…. I sit brooding on the implications of the drama about to play itself out below me.
So accustomed are we to seeing Cortés as protagonist that this new codex cannot help but startle; for revealed therein as neither god nor apostle, he drives the plot merely through his insatiable appetite for the abstractions of power and gold. Meanwhile, Moctezuma, captive in his own palace, brooding on his fate, retreats to the seclusion of the fabled Black Room, its stinking walls smeared in blood. Is he the blood-spattered devil rumoured by the Mexicans themselves to gorge daily on his favourite dish, the tender flesh of newborns? Is he a monster of vicious passions with four hundred concubines, among them his insatiable sister? Or is he the chaste and mystic philosopher-king described by the Spaniards who knew him, and who after all would have had every motive to vilify?
Moctezuma knows that choosing the warrior’s death at the hands of his captor means submitting unflinchingly to its ironies and humiliations. Their chief instrument is Cortés’s ignorant and slow-witted country chaplain, Father Olmedo, more mercenary than priest, who has the effrontery to lecture, to try to convert Moctezuma II—the most learned man in the New World, its equivalent of Saint Augustine. The emperor whose title is the Speaker. Yet now, who else is there to talk to, who else will enter the Black Room, who else can help sort through the haunting intersections of their hopes and faiths?
The Mexicans are a chosen people, with a duty to convert by force the peoples of this earth—force them to worship and to nourish the Sun, keep it moving through the heavens, serve the god of war who takes and holds all other gods prisoner. Moctezuma is not merely responsible for his people, his empire. No, he has custody of the very universe, the frail Fifth Sun. Has any mortal known such a crushing destiny? In his place what man, Christian or pagan, would not have succumbed to doubt, to guilt? For by now the brief rise of the Mexica must seem, to the prisoner Moctezuma, more and more like a time of cataclysm, famine and death, perpetual war. And sin—the Mexicans understand sin, know the stench of rotting roots, of a sacred tree overwatered…. Fifty thousand sacrifices a year, ten to purchase each hour of sun.
You and I, Juana, have spoken often of destiny. Mine, I thought, was a simple one, until I met you. Their destiny has led them here, and his, to this: to suffer until his death the insolence of a dullard and the mocking eyes of this woman who sees everything but whose own outline is constantly shifting. If he is elusive, she is multi-form. One name could never suffice. She is forever sloughing skins, mistress of tongues, master of language, oracle. La Malinche interprets for him, who speaks for the people. But, a prisoner now, without her he cannot speak to the people. And so for a brief time one person—a woman—occupies the two highest offices of Tlatoani and Cihuacoatl, Snake Woman and Speaker. Small wonder the Indians revere the woman they claim to revile.
This woman controls the information. Without her he cannot act. But she serves Cortés, and her words have the power to humiliate and deceive. She knows just how to goad him, to accent the ironies, to underscore the chaplain’s plodding insolence, just as once she knew how to temper and smooth the rash words Cortés first spoke to him. But the emperor knows that, more eve
n than words, she interprets actions. This is why he needs her now, and she understands. La Malinche understands how to exploit the confusions that surround her. She knows too how to exploit the growing confusion in Moctezuma’s mind.
She is everywhere, the great mother whore in the arms of all his adversaries. She tempts him with her beauty, offers to become his lover as she has with Cuauhtemoc, FallingEagle, the commander designated to replace him. But she also knows at times Moctezuma still thinks of Cortés, his captor, as his father and so must not lie with her. Mother of mercy, she holds the power to comfort and forgive. She holds the key to his redemption and to the encrypted destiny of the world. Woman of discord, she grows to fill his mind.
I cannot help reading our transcription of the codex with a sense of what might have been if not for her. And for me, had I not met you….
In a marketplace, two women sit gossiping, suspended in time, on the eve of one battle and the morrow of another, reducing all battles and all outcomes to this one moment. One woman tells the other of an emperor she has known, how just before his death she held up to him his own fallen image, how she became his eyes, his ears, his voice. His nemesis.
Leaning back against a warm stone in the midst of a nervous, bustling market, this woman who is all women and none complacently pats her belly that ripens with Cortés’s son, with the fruit of a new and hybrid race on a continent that she, the new Eve, has given a new destiny.
This jungle all about me lies littered with the shattered symbols of our New World, yet I think of nothing but you. And I am not alone. The Viceroy’s cousins offered me a parting gift also. It is one I had thought to keep to myself but now share with you: that secretly they have begun calling you the Pythoness of Delphi.
Whenever I have asked you to join me, you have always said no, but in this last letter you say you cannot, you say it is too late. What has happened? Something is wrong, I know it. I will be in Mexico in two weeks. Please, hold on. Too late for what?
Hunger's Brides Page 44