Feathered Serpent, Dark Heart of Sky

by David Bowles

  “Let us destroy our temples, our schools, our ball courts. Let our roads be abandoned and our homes seal us up until a new sun emerges. May the revered mothers and fathers never forget to guide the young. May they remind their children how good she has been to us until now—our beloved Mother Earth, this land we call Anahuac.

  “Our destiny stands as both shelter and protection, along with our respect and ethics, handed down by our ancestors and planted deeply in our hearts by our honored parents. Now we must charge our children to tell their own sons and daughters—things will be good again! She shall rise again! She shall gain the strength to carry out her holy destiny, so she shall, our beloved Mother Earth, this land we call Anahuac!”

  That night the rain began to fall in thick curtains. The people sealed themselves up in their homes. Cuauhtemoc led a group of canoes against the Spanish flotilla on the lake, seeking to ram a barkentine and attack it, shield and macana in hand. But the archers and riflemen sent volley after volley, and the emperor finally surrendered.

  Cuauhtemoc was brought before Cortés. There was a moment of tension when the Mexica ruler reached out and seized the pommel of the captain’s dagger, sheathed at his belt. Yet the emperor was kneeling, with no intention to attack.

  “You have destroyed my people and my city despite every effort I could make,” Cuauhtemoc declared, his heart broken. “I beg you now to take my life as well. So would you end the kingship of Mexico as you have everything else. This is the clear will of the gods.”

  But Cortés refused to kill the emperor. He wanted a figurehead to control the Mexica. Cuauhtemoc ordered his remaining forces to surrender. Soon Spanish soldiers were ransacking the city, avid for gold. Homes were destroyed. Corpses were piled high and set ablaze. The effigies of the gods were toppled and smashed. People fled from Tenochtitlan and its sister city of Tlatelolco, rushing to the water’s edge, but there was nowhere to go.

  A singer of the time composed a sad lament for this devastation:

  In cruel diaspora, you conquer

  Your vassals of Tlatelolco.

  The burning spreads

  And we learn misery

  Because, through our weariness,

  We became lazy, O Giver of Life.

  Wailing echoes all around,

  Tears spatter like rain in Tlaltelolco.

  The Mexica women rush down

  To the water’s edge.

  An exodus of souls—

  But where will we go, my friends?

  Thus is it true:

  They abandon the city of Mexico.

  Smoke rises from the ruins,

  A haze shrouds everything.

  This is your doing,

  O Giver of Life.

  Remember, you Mexica—

  It is our God who brings down

  His wrath, His awesome might

  Upon our heads.

  Heedless of the Mexica’s suffering, the Spanish scoured the city. Eventually they found riches hidden away, but not nearly as much as they had imagined. Of the supposed treasure of Motecuhzoma, there was no trace. The conquerors were furious, as even the gold they had left behind was missing.

  Cortés was dumbfounded that not a single native would reveal the location of the precious metals. No matter how hard his men questioned and sought, the Mexica were silent.

  Cortés ordered his treasurer Julián de Alderete to force the information out of the remaining rulers through torture. Alderete called for three men: Cuauhtemoc, his counselor Tlacotzin, and the king of Tlacopan, Tetlepanquetzal. Soldiers smeared these nobles’ hands and feet with oil and then held them over a fire.

  The pain was excruciating, but Cuauhtemoc endured it in silence, as did his counselor. But the king of Tlacopan could barely stand the agony, so he turned to Cuauhtemoc and moaned, “My liege, I am in great pain.”

  Cuauhtemoc narrowed his eyes and sneered at his ally. “Do you think this is a delightful steam bath for me?”

  When it became clear that the nobles would not speak, Cortés ordered an end to the toruture. Gazing upon the weakened emperor and his blackened extremities, the conqueror shook his head in disbelief.

  “I do not understand you,” the Spaniard muttered. “Why not simply tell me where your people’s riches lie? Where is Motecuhzoma’s treasure?”

  Cuauhtemoc returned his gaze with dispassion. “My nation’s treasure is hidden all around you, within the margins of this mighty lake. You are just too blind to see it.”

  For years, Cortés dredged the water, unable to understand, thinking the Mexica had hurled gold and silver into the depths as they fled the city.

  But the real treasure of the Mexica was the transformation of the island, the vast canals, the rich chinampa gardens, the towering temples, the expansive marketplace, the painted books of ancient lore.

  None of those things mattered to the Spanish, of course.

  For three and a half years, Cuauhtemoc lived in captivity, serving as a figurehead, a puppet king. Then, on February 27, 1525, an informant named Mexicalcingo informed Cortés of a plot to kill him and other Spaniards. Cuauhtemoc and ten other nobles were hanged the next day.

  The last emperor of Mexico was dead. The empire had ended.

  The Anguish of Citlalli

  Can you hear the cries of those indigenous mothers, lamenting the deaths of husbands and children, sobbing bereft at the burning of homes, howling at the pain in their own flesh, at the clutch of conquering hands? What a heart-rending chorus, echoing still in the shadows of Mexico.

  One voice rises above the others, eerie and unforgettable. As children we learn to flee her anguished call, to keep away from the waters she haunts.

  La Llorona, we call her, whispering the name so she cannot hear us.

  The Wailing Woman.

  After the fall of Tenochtitlan, the nearby city of Xochimilco—famed for its floating gardens or chinampas—was the first to fully embrace the transition to Catholicism and the Spanish crown. King Apochquiyauhtzin, the last Xochimilca ruler, converted to Christianity. At his baptism in June of 1522, he was christened Luis Cortés Cerón de Alvarado. Outfitted with this new name, he was permitted to continue as a figurehead in his city, overseeing its reconstruction along a more European model.

  The king’s family was also baptized, including his youngest daughter, who was christened Clara Perpetua Cortés. Though she accepted the Spanish name with impassive dignity, within herself she would always be Citlalli—star of heaven.

  By arrangement between her father and Hernán Cortés, Citlalli was given to a low-ranking officer, Diego Fernández. Arranged marriage was the norm among the nobility in Xochimilco, so the princess accepted her father’s will wordlessly, even as she quailed at the unending changes to her people’s culture.

  Don Diego was kind to her in that strange barbaric way the Spanish had. He lavished her with gifts and attention from time to time while largely ignoring her otherwise, leaving the management of their modest household to her alone. Aside from the occasional visit from Don Gregorio Villalobos, a fellow officer of Diego’s who leered at Citlalli with a wolfish grin, she had few complaints and suffered no overt mistreatment.

  In time, Citlalli bore Diego two sons—Martín and Sebastián, whom she named in secret Ehcatzin and Pocuixin. The boys were a delight, impish and brave. The little family lived in relative peace and joy, despite the social upheaval all around them. Diego took some interest in the history and traditions of his wife’s family, and their relationship deepened into a sort of easy friendship. Even the strange mysteries of her husband’s god became clearer, dovetailing with the lifelong beliefs of the princess in unexpected ways.

  Citlalli—Clara Perpetua—began to embrace her new life. Her Spanish improved. She learned to read, reviewing the scriptures of the Catholic priests. Blending cultures in the house that she ruled, Clara was just making peace with life when Diego came to her with devastating news.

  “Clara, I must return to Spain,” he explained. “My father ha
s taken ill, and there is important family business I must attend to. In the interim, I entrust to you the care of my land and my sons. I have asked Don Gregorio to look in on you when I am away. Should you need anything, he will take care of it.”

  “But Diego, you have brothers in Spain. Can they not manage your family affairs? And if not, will you not take us with you?”

  “Take you…surely you jest, Clara. I can only imagine my mother’s reaction were I to bring an Indian woman into her home.”

  Citlalli bristled at this slight, her pride stung. “I am a princess, Diego. She should feel honored at my presence.”

  The Spaniard shook his head and gave a feeble laugh. “You understand nothing. Listen, I cannot take you with me. You and the boys will be fine—I shall only be gone six months at the most.”

  Diego left, and Citlalli made do without him. All went well until Gregorio began to visit. Without her husband around to impose a sense of respect, the cruel Spaniard began to take advantage of Citlalli’s hospitality, first by demanding food and drink while he berated her in ugly racial terms.

  The mistreatment soon edged into harassment and physical abuse.

  “If you say anything, try to go to your brothers or your father with complaints,” he murmured one day, pushing her against a wall and attempting to kiss her, “I’ll see to it you and your half-breed brats are thrown into the streets or worse. Doubt me not, wench.”

  Citlalli did not doubt him. She knew what men were capable of, especially these Spaniards. So she endured as long as she could, awaiting Diego’s return. Even if her husband refused to believe her, his presence would impose some respect on his villainous countryman.

  Then a letter came.

  It began with pleasantries and well-wishing as if to soften the blow, but Citlalli skipped down to the meat of the matter.

  “To secure financial stability for our family, I have had to agree to a marriage. Isabel Zúñiga is her name, from a wealthy and aristocratic lineage. When I return to Xochimilco, she will be with me. It will be challenging for you, I know, but I shall have to make adjustments to our household. As my concubine, you cannot possibly live under the same roof as my wife, Clara. I shall arrange for you and the boys to stay in a nice home nearby, unless you prefer to move back to your father’s estate.”

  The letter went on in this vein, but Citlalli dropped it into the fire. Her heart was raging. Concubine? As far as Xochimilca traditions went, she and Diego were married, and by one of his people’s effeminate priests. How dare this simple barbarian treat her like a whore? What kind of savages were these Spaniards that they understood so little of the civilized intricacies of conquest? When the Mexica had conquered Xochimilco, they had not ripped down its buildings, shattered its gods, renamed its nobles. They had not treated its royal family like beasts.

  Looking around at her Spanish-style home, Citlalli clenched her fists, wanting to obliterate every trace of Diego Fernández.

  The door swung open without a knock. It was Gregorio Villalobos, drunk and leering.

  “I’m hungry, little Indian princess,” he slurred. “Want some food. Then I want you.”

  Seizing the statue of the Virgin from its niche in the wall, Citlalli gritted her teeth and struck the captain in the temple. He dropped to the floor and lay unmoving.

  The next few minutes were a blur. Dragging the body from the entrance, Citlalli woke her two sons and walked them through the starlit night toward the flower-edged canals for which her city was renowned.

  “Where are we going, mother?” Martín—Ehcatzin—asked in a groggy little voice.

  “To pick flowers,” she answered with distracted calm. “We shall sell them in the market.”

  Inwardly, though, her furious thoughts swirled around different women. Chief among them was Cihuacoatl, goddess of motherhood and fertility. Though she had created life, working with Quetzalcoatl to form human beings at the beginning of this age, she had also abandoned her son at a crossroads. Legend had it that she returned to that place again and again, crying out in anguish for her lost child. Reflecting this pattern were the Cihuateteoh, women who had died in childbirth and whose mighty spirits returned every four years to scour crossroads, looking for the children they had never had the chance to meet.

  Cihuacoatl was also said to provide protection for any zohuaehecatl—a woman transformed by tragedy and hate into a weeping ghost of revenge. In her youth, Citlalli had been taught that this fierce divinity lived with her wailing protegees within the lake and its canals. When the Spanish had begun to cross the great expanse of sea, the goddess had emerged from the water to wander the streets of Tenochtitlan, Xochimilco, Chalco, announcing her people’s coming doom.

  Citlalli remembered awakening in the dead of night as a child to the sound of sobbing and cries. She had gone to the window and heard a voice calling out in eldritch tones, “Oh, my children, your destruction has arrived, for we must soon depart! My children, where shall I take you?”

  Mother and sons were now standing by one of the canals, edged with floating gardens and flowers that gleamed bone white under the baleful eye of the moon. The boys, too, looked pale, their Xochimilca blood effaced by lunar light.

  Citlalli thought of Marina, the concubine of Hernán Cortés himself. After all she had done, the devastation she had wrought alongside that conqueror, Cortés had recently taken their son from her and moved with him back to Spain.

  Pride, fury, fear, despair—these all came together in Citlalli’s heart in a deadly conflagration. Stepping into the water, she called to her sons. “It is easier to pick the flowers down here, boys. Come to your mother. I shall take care of you.” When they waded toward her, she pulled them into one last loving embrace before plunging them with her beneath the moon-silvered surface of the canal.

  It was the price of her transformation, the heavy cost of her revenge. Among the roots of the chinampas, Citlalli died with her children.

  Then she was reborn, a spectral embodiment of vengeance, a sobbing creature of the night hungry to strip the joy of motherhood from others, just as it had been stripped from her.

  A zohuaehecatl, her people whispered when children began to disappear.

  La Llorona, the Spaniards called her, trembling at her unbridled, weeping wrath.

  As a cathedral was erected and Xochimilco transformed, she remained. Nightfall would be announced each evening by the tolling of church bells. If there was a moon high in the sky, children sought refuge in their beds, trembling in fear of those moans, echoing out from the twisted mouth of a woman in great moral and physical pain.

  Adults at first simply crossed themselves at the fearful sound of that mournful cry that surely came from some strange native beast. But the moans were so long and repeated that a few brave souls dared the darkness, wanting to see with their own eyes what the source of the sobbing could be. First from doorways, windows or balconies and later upon the very streets, these bold or mad adventurers managed to make out a whispy figure of fog and moonlight making its way through the night.

  It was a woman, dressed in white blouse and skirt, face obscured by her wild shock of hair. With slow and silent steps, she walked through the entire city, searching, weeping. From time to time she would lift her crazed eyes and turn her ghastly head from side to side, calling out, “Children! Children! Where are my children?” as she fell to her knees in horror.

  Those witnessing this scene would be terrified, standing mute and immobile like marble statues, shuddering at the depths of such despair.

  Then, at the very witching hour, the Llorona would make her lonely way back to the lake, followed perhaps by some intrepid spectator, who would watch her slip into those black waters, disappearing beneath the surface without a trace.

  From time to time, that sobbing revenant would bear a living child in her arms.

  Erendira

  Desperate, broken, brave, rebellious—the women of Mexico found many ways to resist. But no image embodies this resistance like fig
ure of proud Erendira, mounted on a white stallion that rears to kick at the enemy.

  The Spanish Conquest soon spread from the Nahuas of the central highlands. Cortés, ever-greedy, sought to bring all the nations of Mesoamerica under Spanish rule. One region he set his eyes on was Michoacan, home of the Purepecha people.

  They would prove difficult to conquer.

  Generations had passed along the teeming shores of Lake Patzcuaro. The Purepecha Empire had become legendary. The air was clear and clean, the landscapes of indescribable beauty, and those fortunate enough to be born in that region felt themselves blessed by the gods. They lived in harmony with their surroundings, developed a unique culture, expanding their nation, acknowledging the gods for the rich natural bounty.

  The economic and social splendor of the Purepecha Empire, under the rule of its venerable king, Ziguangua, made itself manifest in the peaceful existence of its inhabitants, guided by a responsible government. Among the councilors of the aging king, Timas was the most respected, known for his sage opinions and advice that fortified the decisions made by the noble elders for the benefit of the empire.

  Timas had a daughter named Erendira—“the smiling one.” At sixteen, she radiated a fearsome beauty heightened by her particular grin, a haughty and mocking smirk that set her apart from other young women. As she turned this terrible smile on her swooning admirers, her black eyes scintillated with cruel playfulness, catching the glinting light of the Tarascan sun.

  Among the many warriors yearning for that dark-complexioned nymph was Nanuma, commander of the Purepecha army, whose thoughts often turned to the wind and water of the lake or the silhouettes of the mountains, accompanied always by the incomparable face of Erendira. Nanuma’s love for her was more than just desire—he admired over all her great intelligence and wit.

  But Erendira lacked such easy emotions—instead, the one great passion she felt was for the plains and mountains of her nation, for the vast lakes and woods, its winds and sky.