Aztec

by Gary Jennings

  Well, so was every other Mexícatl still alive, including even our Revered Speaker. The end came not long after that, and it came quickly when it came. We had been for countless days devoid of every commodity that could be remotely regarded as food, and our very ability to move about, even to talk to each other, was enfeebled to listlessness. Cortés and his army, as relentless and numerous and voracious as those ants that strip whole forests clean, finally reached the Tlaltelólco marketplace and began tearing down the pyramid there, meaning that we fugitives were so huddled in what little space was left to hide that we scarcely had even a place to stand in comfort. Still Cuautémoc would have stood, if he had had to do it on one foot, but, after I and the Snake Woman and some other counselors had privately conferred, we went to him and said:

  “Lord Speaker, if you are taken by the outlanders, the whole of the Mexíca nation falls with you. But if you escape, the rulership goes where you go. Even if every other person on this island is slain or captured, Cortés will not have bested the Mexíca.”

  “Escape,” he said dully. “To where? To do what?”

  “To go into exile, with just your closest family and a few of your chief lords. It is true that we no longer have trustworthy allies anywhere among the lands closest to here. But there are farther countries from which you can recruit supporters. It may be a long time before you can hope to return in force and triumph, but however long it may take, the Mexíca will still be unvanquished.”

  “What farther countries?” he asked, without enthusiasm.

  The other lords looked to me, and I said, “To Aztlan, Revered Speaker. Go back to our very beginnings.”

  He stared as if I were mad. But I reminded him how we had, only comparatively recently, renewed our ties with our cousins of our first homeplace, and I gave him a map I had drawn to show him the way there. I added, “You can expect a hearty welcome, Lord Cuautémoc. When their Speaker Tliléctic-Mixtli left here, Motecuzóma sent with him a force of our warriors and a number of Mexíca families skilled in all our modern crafts of city building. You may find they have already made of Aztlan a miniature Tenochtítlan. At the very least, the Aztéca could be the seed kernels—as once before they were—from which to grow a whole new and mighty nation.”

  It took a good deal more persuasion to get Cuautémoc to agree, but I will not relate it all, since it all went for naught. I still think the plan should have succeeded; it was well conceived and executed; but the gods decreed that it should not. At twilight, when the battle boats ceased their day-long barrage and began to turn homeward toward the mainland, a goodly number of our men accompanied Cuautémoc and his chosen companions down to the edge of the island. They all got into canoes, and at a signal the many canoes paddled into the lake, all at once but each in a different direction, moving fast, appearing to be a sudden mass scurry for safety. The acáli carrying Cuautémoc and his abbreviated court headed for the little mainland bay between Tenayúca and Azcapotzálco. Since there were few if any habitations at that spot, it was presumably unguarded by any of Cortés’s camps or sentries, and Cuautémoc should easily have been able to slip inland from there and keep going northwest to Aztlan.

  But the battle boats, spying the sudden eruption of acáltin from the island, turned back and began to whisk busily about among them, seeking to determine if they really were in rout. And, by ill chance, one of the boat captains was astute enough to notice that one of the occupants of one canoe was rather too richly dressed to be a mere warrior. That boat dropped iron hooks, and grappled the canoe fast to its side, and hauled aboard the Revered Speaker, and carried him straight to the Captain-General Cortés.

  I was not present at that meeting, but I learned later that Cuautémoc spoke, through the interpreter Malíntzin, saying, “I did not surrender. It was for my people’s sake that I sought to elude you. But you caught me fairly.” He pointed to the dagger at Cortés’s belt. “Since I was taken in war, I deserve—and I request—the death of a warrior. I ask that you slay me now, where I stand.”

  Magnanimous in victory, or at least unctuous, Cortés said, “No, you did not surrender, and you have not ceded your rule. I decline to slay you, and I insist that you retain your leadership of your people. For we have much work to do, and I pray you will help me do it. Let us together build your city to a new grandeur, my esteemed Lord Cuautémoc.”

  Cortés probably pronounced it Guatemoc, as he always later did. I think I long ago mentioned, reverend friars, that the name Cuautémoc meant Swooping Eagle, but I suppose it was inevitable and even fitting that, after that day—by our calendar the day One Serpent of the year Three House; by your calendar the thirteenth day of August in the year one thousand five hundred twenty and one—our last Revered Speaker’s name was ever afterward translated into Spanish as Falling Eagle.

  For some while after the fall of Tenochtítlan, life was not much changed in most of The One World. Outside the immediate area of The Triple Alliance, no other part of these lands had been so devastated, and there were probably many parts where the people were not yet aware that they resided not in The One World but in a place called New Spain. Though they were cruelly ravaged by the mysterious new diseases, they seldom saw a Spaniard or a Christian, so they had no new laws or gods imposed on them, and they went on with their accustomed ways of life—harvesting, hunting, fishing, whatever—as they had done through all the sheaves of years before.

  But here in the lake lands, life was much altered, and it was hard, and it has never got easier, and I doubt that it ever will. From the day after Cuautémoc’s capture, Cortés concentrated all his attention and energy on the rebuilding of this city—or I should say our energy. For he decreed that, since it was entirely the fault of us fractious Mexíca that Tenochtítlan had been destroyed, its restoration as the City of Mexíco should be our responsibility. Though his architects drew the plans, and his artificers oversaw the work, and his most brutal soldiers wielded the whips to make the work get done, it was our people who did the work, and we who supplied the materials, and if we would eat after our labors, it was we who had to provide the food. So the quarriers of Xaltócan worked harder than ever in their lives, and foresters laid naked the lakeside hills to cut beams and planks, and our former warriors and Pochtéca became foragers and carriers of what foodstuffs and other necessities they could forcibly extort from the surrounding lands, and our women—when they were not being openly molested by the white soldiers, even raped before the eyes of all who cared to watch—were pressed into service as porters and messengers, and even small children were put to work mixing mortar.

  Of course, the first things attended to were those most important. The broken aqueducts were repaired, and then the foundations were laid for what would be your cathedral church, while directly in front of it were erected the pillory and the gallows. Those were the first functioning structures in the new City of Mexíco, for they were much exercised to inspire us to unceasing and conscientious labor. Those who slacked at any job were strangled on the gallows, or were branded with the “prisoner of war” mark on the cheek and then were exposed in the pillory for the outlanders to pelt with stones and horse droppings, or they were broken by the whips of the overseers. But those who worked hard died almost as frequently as did the slackers, from such causes as being forced to lift a stone so heavy that they ruptured their insides.

  I was far more fortunate than most, for Cortés gave me employment as an interpreter. With all the orders and instructions to be relayed from architects to builders, with all the new laws and proclamations and edicts and sermons to be translated to the people, there was more work than Malíntzin alone could manage, and the man Aguilar, who might have assisted to some degree, had long ago died in a battle somewhere. So Cortés engaged me, and even paid me a small wage in Spanish coin, in addition to giving me and Béu accommodation in the splendid residence—what had once been Motecuzóma’s country palace near Quaunáhuac—which he had appropriated for himself and Malíntzin and his ranking off
icers and their concubines, and where he also kept under his eye Cuautémoc and his family and courtiers.

  Perhaps I should apologize, though I do not know to whom, that I took employment with the white men, rather than die defying them. But, since the battles were all over, and I had not perished in the struggle, it seemed my tonáli ordained that for at least a while longer I should struggle not to perish. I had once been bidden, “Stand! Endure! Remember!” and that was what I determined to do.

  For some time, a major part of my interpreting duties consisted in my translating Cortés’s incessant and insistent demands to know what had become of the Mexíca’s vanished treasury. If I had been a younger man, and able to work at any other trade that would have supported myself and my ever-ailing wife, I would right then have quit that degrading occupation. It required me to sit with Cortés and his officers, as if I were one of them, while they bullied and insulted my fellow lords, calling them “damned, lying, greedy, treacherous, clutching Indians!” I was especially ashamed of myself when I had to participate in the repeated interrogations of the Uey-Tlatoáni Cuautémoc, whom Cortés no longer addressed with unction or even the least respect. To Cortés’s reiterated queries, Cuautémoc could or would say nothing but a disclaimer:

  “To the best of my knowledge, Captain-General, my predecessor Cuitláhuac left the treasure in the lake where you threw it.”

  At which, Cortés would snarl, “I have sent down my best swimmers and yours. They find nothing but mud!”

  And Cuautémoc could or would make only the rejoinder, “The mud is soft. Your cannons made the whole Lake Texcóco tremble. Any objects as heavy as gold would have settled ever deeper in that ooze.”

  I felt most ashamed on the day I had to watch the “persuasion” of Cuautémoc and the two old men of his Speaking Council who had accompanied him to that session of questioning. After I had many times translated those same words so many times exchanged before, Cortés exploded in a temper. He ordered his soldiers to rake from the palace kitchen’s hearth three large bowls of embers, and made the three lords of the Mexíca sit with their bare feet in those smoldering coals while he again asked the identical questions and they, gritting their teeth against the pain, gave the identical replies. At last, Cortés threw up his hands in a gesture of disgust and stalked out of the room. The three cautiously stood up from their chairs and stepped out of the bowls and began gingerly to make their way to their quarters. The two old men and the younger one, doing their best to support each other, hobbled on their blistered and blackened feet, and I heard one of the elders moan:

  ”Ayya, Lord Speaker, why do you not tell them something else? Anything? I hurt unbearably!”

  “Be silent!” snapped Cuautémoc. “Do you think I am this moment walking in a pleasure garden?”

  Though I loathed Cortés and myself and our association, I refrained from any deed or remark that might arouse his displeasure and endanger my soft situation, because, within a year or two, there were many of my fellows who would happily have replaced me as Cortés’s collaborator, and could adequately have done so. More and more of the Mexíca and other peoples—of nations both inside and outside The Triple Alliance—were hastening to learn Spanish and to apply for baptism as Christians. They did it not so much from servility as from ambition, and even necessity. Cortés had early promulgated a law that no “Indian” could hold any position higher than that of common laborer until and unless he was a confirmed Christian and proficient in the conquerors’ spoken tongue.

  I was already recognized by the Spaniards as Don Juan Damasceno, and Malíntzin was Doña Marina, and the other Spaniards’ concubines were Doña Luisa and Doña María Inmaculada and the like, and some few nobles succumbed to the temptation of the advantages of being Christian and speaking Spanish; the former Snake Woman, for instance, became Don Juan Tlácotl Velásquez. But, as might have been expected, most others of the onetime pípiltin, from Cuautémoc on down, disdained the white men’s religion and language and appellations. However admirable their stand, it proved to be a mistake, for it left them nothing but their pride. It was the people of the lowest classes, and the lowest-born of the middle classes, and even slaves of the nethermost tlácotli class, who did besiege the chaplains and the missionary friars for instruction in Christianity, and for baptism with Spanish names. It was they who, to learn the Spanish tongue, eagerly gave their own sisters and daughters in payment to the Spanish soldiers who had enough education and intelligence to teach it.

  Thus it was the mediocrities and dregs of society who, having no inborn pride to discard, freed themselves of the drudge work and got themselves put in charge of the drudges—who in an earlier day had been their superiors, their leaders, even their owners. Those upstart “imitation whites,” as others of us called them, eventually were given posts in the increasingly complex government of the city, and were made the chiefs of outlying towns, even of several negligible provinces. It might have been regarded as praiseworthy: that a nobody could uplift himself to eminence; except that I cannot recall a single one who utilized his eminence for the good of anyone but himself.

  Such a man was suddenly superior to all who had been his superiors and equals, and that was as high as his ambition reached. Whether he achieved the post of provincial governor or merely that of timekeeper at some building project, he became a despot over everyone under him. The timekeeper could denounce as a trifler or drunkard any workman who did not fawn on him and bribe him with gifts. He could condemn that workman to anything from a cheek brand to a hanging on the gallows. The governor could debase onetime lords and ladies to garbage collectors and street sweepers, while he forced their daughters to submit to what you Spaniards call “the rights of the señorío.” However, I must in fairness say that the new nobility of Spanish-speaking Christians behaved equally toward all their countrymen. As they humiliated and tormented the formerly highest classes, so did they similarly mistreat the lower classes from which they themselves had sprung. They made everybody—except their own appointed superiors, of course—far more miserable than any meanest slave had been in years gone by. And, while the total reversal of society did not physically affect me, I was troubled by my realization that, as I told Béu, “These imitation whites are the people who will write our history!”

  Though I had my own snug position in the new society of New Spain during those years, I can slightly excuse my reluctance to give it up on the ground that I sometimes could use my position to help others besides myself. At least once in a while, and if Malíntzin or one of the later-engaged other interpreters was not present to betray me, I could word my translating in such a way as to enhance the plea of some petitioner seeking a favor, or to mitigate the punishment of some accused malefactor. In the meantime, since Béu and I were enjoying free sustenance and lodging, I was able to hoard away my wages against the day when—perhaps through my own fault, or because of some visible worsening of Béu’s condition—I should be expelled from my employment and from the Quaunáhuac palace.

  As it happened, I left the position of my own accord, and it happened like this. By the third year after the Conquest, that impatient man Cortés was becoming impatient with his no longer adventurous role as administrator of many details and arbitrator of petty disputes. Much of the City of Mexíco had by then been built, and the building of the remainder was well under way. Then as now, about a thousand new white men arrived each year in New Spain—most of them, with their white women, settling in or about the lake region, carving out their own Little Spains of the best lands, and appropriating our sturdiest people as “prisoners of war” to work those lands. All the newcomers so swiftly and firmly consolidated their positions as overlords that any uprising against them was unthinkable. The Triple Alliance had become irreversibly New Spain, and was functioning, I gathered, as well as Cuba or any other Spanish colony—its native population subdued and resigned, if not notably happy or comfortable in that subjection—and Cortés appeared confident that his under-officers and
his appointed imitation whites were capable of maintaining it so. He himself wanted new lands to conquer, or, more precisely, he wanted to view more of the lands he regarded as already his.

  “Captain-General,” I said to him, “you are already acquainted with the country between the eastern coast and here. The lands between here and the western coast are not greatly different, and to the north are mostly wastelands unworth the looking at. But to the south—ayyo, southward of here are majestic mountain ranges and verdant plains and impressive forests and, south of all, the jungle that is awesome and trackless and infinitely hazardous, but so full of wonders that no man should live out his life without venturing into it.”

  “Southward it is, then!” he cried, as if ordering a troop to move out that very moment. “You have been there? You know the country? You speak the languages?” I said yes and yes and yes, at which he did give a command: “You will guide us there.”

  “Captain-General,” I said. “I am fifty and eight years old. That is a journey for young men of strength and stamina.”

  “A litter and bearers will be provided—and also some interesting companions for you,” he said, and left me abruptly, to go and choose the soldiers for the expedition, so I had no chance to tell him anything about the impracticality of litters on steep mountainsides or in the jungle’s tangle.