It was worth nothing to them.
Guerrero’s body still lay on the battlefield. It had been stripped of everything of value, but the wind ruffled its panache slightly, as it lay there, in the midst of a landscape haunted by itself.
Yet who is not haunted by himself? We take the doppelgänger and we go. If we are lucky, when the time comes, we go away complete.
For him it was complete. He had had his victory. He had helped it to go on.
For in Tayasal there was still somebody left to see that moon. The joys there may have been visible, but false, the chagrins hidden, but real, yet they too intended to go away complete. The last coming of Katun 8 Ahau would not occur until 1697. They were a people to whom coherence and tradition meant everything, and if we have respect for such things, it does not matter that life is meaningless. There is still order. We must still put things back where we found them. And so up there they managed to hold out until then.
The Spanish, who thought it a poor place, could never understand why.
And yet the victory of honour, though never admitted to, is sometimes felt, by those who conquered it, since, to go, with honour, is the signal victory over a world which has none, and the conqueror, who has none, feels that.
As for Tayasal: now it is an island, with a few huts, a stone wall, and some palm trees. It has not been dug up again. We prefer to restore Chichen, which means less.
For the world is full of Mexicos, of Yucatans, and the emblem of Mexico disturbs us. There is the eagle, seated on the cactus, holding the snake. It was by that sign that they founded Tecnoctitlán, 600 years ago.
Eagle succeeds eagle, but each holds the same snake, the worm Ouroboros, the snake of the world, the snake of Eden, the snake of Lilith, whatever snake you call it, we are all held in the same claws.
As for those Spaniards, whoever our Spaniards may be, they may take away from us our lives, as they have taken away our reasons for living, but they shall not take back those things given at birth, which are inalienable, dignity, honour, the ability to bend but not break; a little insight; and the ability to admire that which will not love us: the world of nature; a sense of order, and the ability to be kind, out of a sense of duty; the cruelty to punish those who offend the idea of grace, by taking away their ability to besmirch anything, even at the cost of suiciding what they would besmirch; the willingness to die, for it takes self-restraint not to bolt at the last moment; and a vast tenderness to oblige those who are themselves tender.
Where have all those virtues gone?—those virtues which, willynilly, whatever our choice might be, make us virtuous despite ourselves, those things innate to the self, bred to the bone, and affirmative, unlike those vulgar little nervous Christian virtues, by which we have lived too long, only to find ourselves, out of honesty, pagans again?
They are still there, waiting to receive us. They have gone ahead of us. We shall join them soon. We cannot join them yet.
And walking round those ruins of Yucatan, one takes thought. We look up at that indelible sky. The hawk in the air, we have seen his course, and like the rabbit in the field, dodge as we may, we know we are the object of his hunger. For we, too, have been that hawk. That is why we have this interregnal leisure to observe his passage.
The watching is unendurable.
In the meantime we wander round these ruins, with a curiously tentative movement. The truth is so horrible that there is nothing for us to do but face it. Yet who, not a Medusa, could stare the Medusae down? Who could outface those snakes?
And in the Ball Court at Chichen, since we avoid it, perhaps we remember the eternal judges of the secret court, whose horror is to pass no judgment. It is we, before them, who stand self-condemned.
And so we search for someone, anyone, to teach us how to die. It is the only way, any longer, that we have to live. Is there no one, anywhere, to teach us even that?
Not even Guerrero?
*
Saddlebag
November 1958–April 1959
Copyright
This ebook edition first published in 2014
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© David Derek Stacton, 1960
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ISBN 978–0–571–32013–4
A Signal Victory Page 24