Since the night when a squad of Tlaxcaltecas had captured him as he tried to leave Mexico City to muster a last stand at one of the ports on Lake Texcoco, Cuauhtémoc had prayed to all his gods every day to bring him death. For reasons that have never been clear, Hernán Cortés decided to keep him alive along with Prince Tetlepanquetzal, who was by his side on the last royal barge afloat on the Lake of Mexico.
The emperor Cuauhtémoc, a young man who had organized the defense of Tenochtitlan the best he could and who had no kin left to inherit the crown, was captured on August 13, 1521, Saint Hippolytus’s Day. The news spread immediately through the city, whose defenders simply went out into the streets unarmed, possibly hoping for a drink of fresh water before they were butchered: on the first day of the siege the Spaniards had cut off the water supply, and Lake Texcoco was sulfurous and poisonous. They came out of their houses in a state vacillating between defiance and apathy: they had sworn to their gods that if there was no City of Mexico—“the root of the world”—there would be no Mexicas, so they surrendered themselves to the ritual of being sacked, raped, beheaded, and devoured by dogs, almost happy to go quickly.
There was a muted quality to the fall of Tenochtitlan. Though it caused more planetary aftershocks than the equally monumental falls of Jerusalem and Constantinople, and though in all three cases entire worlds were toppled and swallowed up by the pool of blood and shit that history leaves when it goes mad, in Tenochtitlan everything was filtered through the melancholy of guilt, as if the men who finally got their way were certain that they were breaking something they wouldn’t be able to put back together again.
There isn’t a trace of gloating in the letter in which Cortés tells the king that the spine of the Aztec empire has finally been broken and its Mexica rulers crushed. It’s as if the three months of siege had left him as exhausted and prey to hunger and thirst as those he had defeated. There was no victory ceremony or triumphal procession. A Te Deum was said amid the ruins, and the next day everyone embarked on the tedious task of reconfiguring the smashed city.
The thirteenth of August, 1521, survives in the written record only as a perfunctory accounting of the arrest of Cuauhtémoc, and there would have been no hero in this war—and perhaps no villain either—if not for the fact that when the pillaging Spaniards reached the palace of Moctezuma, it was discovered that it hid no treasure. The gold won in battle wasn’t nearly enough to pay the troops who for years had been desperate to get their deserts, and the captain general decided, in the first of his terrible administrative decisions, to keep Cuauhtémoc alive, to use him as a scapegoat, torturing him in the public plaza to make him confess where he was hiding the mountains of gold that clearly didn’t exist.
They scalded the emperor’s hands and feet with boiling oil. They didn’t kill him even though he begged Cortés, politely at first, then in screams, and finally with curses. Bernal Díaz del Castillo—or whoever wrote his testimony—has nothing but pity for the emperor and shame on behalf of his captain in his account.
One thousand two hundred and seventy-six nights after the torture, on Shrove Tuesday, 1525, when an Indian by the name of Cristóbal Mexicaltzingo entered the improvised cell in what is now Campeche to bring the emperor and the lord of Tacuba before Cortés, they were smiling.
Cuauhtémoc was strangled that same morning, in the dark and without trial. A rumor accused him of planning an impossible mutiny of cripples against the conquest expedition of Las Hibueras and El Petén, on which the captain general had dragged him in chains so as not to leave him alone in a Mexico City still under reconstruction.
It’s funny in a way that he was killed on Carnival Tuesday: maimed as he was, and in chains, he played the rather obvious part of the ugly king who must die so that the world is submerged in the primal waters of Ash Wednesday and forty days later rises up, saved.
As soon as the prince of Tacuba and the emperor of Mexico had breathed their last stale breaths, Cortés gave the order for their heads to be cut off and displayed in the most visible spot of the town where they had spent their last night, for the edification of anyone who might think it was a good idea to mutiny in the confusion of the jungle. It was the Indian Cristóbal who was charged with severing the heads and mounting them on two spikes driven into a pochota tree. The local cacique didn’t protest at this scandalous profaning of the village’s sacred tree: he had been doing his best to survive by putting on a convincing show of Christianity ever since an army of starving men had sprung from the woods like a nightmare on the morning of Carnival Monday.
Before Cristóbal set the imperial head on its stake, Cortés asked him to shear it. Make a bundle of the hair and take it to Doña Malinche, he said to the Indian, folding down his sleeves as he sat for breakfast in the cacique’s hut. Tell her, he went on, to weave me a scapular that will grant me the protection of God, the Holy Virgin, and Guatemotzin’s demons. From around his neck he took a chain with a silver medallion of the Virgin of the town of Guadalupe in Extremadura and gave it to him: Tell her to set this in it.
The rest of the emperor’s body was hacked to pieces, burned, and scattered. Cortés had read his Julius Caesar and he didn’t want anyone to steal the body of this Vercingetorix that fortune had set in his path. That was why he had him brought to the Términos Lagoon, and that was why he disposed of the body before the most organized southern cities could see any kind of message in it.
He forgot all about the scapular that he had ordered to be made because, liberated of Cuauhtémoc, he turned his back on all his recent past; once begun, he also got rid of Malinche, his translator, political adviser, military strategist, and lover. He ordered one of his men to marry her and take her back to Orizaba. As a wedding gift he gave them the village’s communal land and the Indians who worked it, to do with as they pleased.
No Catgut for Spain
Racket. In ball games it is a thick board with which the ball is struck. It is about two spans, with a grip or handle, which grows broader until it ends in a kind of half-moon. It is generally covered in parchment, which is stuck on with glue so that no stroke may score the board.
Diccionario de autoridades, Madrid, 1726
The Second Burning of Rome
A portrait that does Pius IV justice would have to be taken at table—a painting of light and shadow in which he presides over a grand Baroque dinner. After all, his papacy was the amuse-bouche of all the pyres of modernity.
In this ideal portrait of Pius IV, he sits with a glass of white wine in one hand and a fistful of almonds in the other. His royal purple soutane is tacky with salt, his beard greasy from the thick slices of wild boar sausage he has eaten. By his side is a small table, upon which rests a china plate with strips of tuna. The pope, food, wine. But there is more: The table is set on a patio. It is nighttime, there are torches; there is an army of servants swaddled in velvet, attentive to the wishes of His Holiness. In the portrait, Pius IV is up in the heights, watching Rome burn—the pyre and modernity, the pyre of modernity making room for itself—and then all Europe, the flames, his face alight. Europe had overheated with the discovery and occupation of the Caribbean, the conquest of Mexico and the subjugation of Peru, the rebellions of the reformist bishops. He, a practical man with no agenda, only contributed the spark that started the blaze when he signed the accords of the Council of Trent into law.
Let’s not leave him alone as the inferno licks at his silk slippers. With him, naturally, is Carlo Borromeo, the ideologue and publicist par excellence of the Counter-Reformation, and Montalto, the inquisitor who executed it in blood and fire.
Montalto would rise to the papacy as Sixtus V—a backward name, which is perhaps why he was granted a nickname for the ages: the Iron Pope. Borromeo didn’t have the imperial gravitas of his interlocutors, but he was the éminence grise behind Pius IV and Gregory XIII. He died young and was raised to sainthood immediately upon his death. His body is buried under the pr
esbytery of the cathedral of Milan in what is today the Scurolo di San Carlo, in a sarcophagus of rock crystal like Snow White’s. His creepy mummified body—a little black masked thing, covered in gems and robes—can still be seen for the price of two euros.
In order for the three cardinals to be gathered in an ideal portrait of Pius IV watching the blaze, a reason must be concocted here. The pope, for example, knowing that Borromeo was away from Milan on a business trip to the Vatican, might have invited him to report on how the city was recovering from the plague. Montalto, attending to practical matters with the pope, might have stayed for dinner with them.
Or it might be Borromeo who had invited the pontiff and the inquisitor to a private conclave at the loggia of the Palazzo Colonna, the official residence of the Milanese nobility in the papal city. A secret, breakaway conclave of three men who, though on different courses, had found common cause at Trent when they articulated the shape of the Baroque century to come. They were brothers-in-arms.
If the meeting were to happen in 1565—when Spain took possession of the Philippines and the world at last became round as a tennis ball—Pius IV, the oldest of the three, would be feeling the call of death in his bones, his Lombard eyes fading from their customary placid blue to the transparent color that allows the passage of visions. This, then, would be the last private meeting of the three men. The pope is sixty-six, his beard white, his breathing labored from the excess weight visited on him by the satisfaction of his wants. Carlo Borromeo is twenty-seven: gaunt, wiry, with the long, poorly shaven face of an El Greco model. Cardinal Montalto, all-powerful inquisitor with too many scores pending, is at the brutal crossroads of forty-five: too old for everything, too young for everything. During the meeting he’ll learn that when Pius dies he’ll be left out in the cold because he’s been working so hard to hang, draw, and quarter half of Europe that he hasn’t developed the political relationships in the Roman Curia to survive the papal change of guard.
In this ideal portrait of Pius IV looking out over the conflagration with his brothers-in-arms, the three are in good humor, in a mood to render judgment. They sit on the slope of the Esquiline Hill, in the loggia of the garden of the Palazzo Colonna, watching Rome from the spot where in the sixteenth century the ruins of a Roman temple still stood, the temple from which Nero watched the city burn. The three men are on the terrace, spellbound by the dancing of the flames; servants and guards among the toppled ivy-covered columns, the vegetation exuding its oils in something like a futile last stand against the blaze of the Counter-Reformation, which in the end will lay waste to everything.
Miserliness
On March 14, 1618, Quevedo wrote a letter to Pedro Téllez Girón in which he described in minute and cruel detail the greed with which the duke of Uceda, the king’s favorite, had received a bribe. Quevedo says that the people at the Palace of Uceda were so miserly and so quick to snatch up any small dispensation that they didn’t even return his packing materials: “Even the cotton was not scorned, being used for candlewicks.” A use was also found for the boxes in which the gifts came: “The wooden boxes in which everything was packed thought to escape notice, being flawed, but when it was discovered that they were made of poplar, with great celebration they were shared out to be used for tennis rackets.”
On Names, and the Troubled History and Politics of How Things Are Named
Living in Mexico had become a source of more anxiety than pleasure when I moved to New York. My reason for leaving is still hard to put into words, but it has something to do with a problem of nomenclature.
Back home we stopped calling things by their names long ago, and now, as the serpent heads of our plumed Hydra multiply endlessly, we’re left without the spell to counter their poison.
Mexican Spanish, at times so disconcerting and easy to misinterpret, gets its warmth and courtesy from Nahuatl: the gentlest and most gracious of tongues; an airy, birdlike form of speech. When someone from Madrid or Montevideo walks into a room, he says, “Permiso,” and that’s it. In contrast, a Mexican erects a syntactic edifice so complicated that it requires both a negative clause and a verb in the conditional: “If it’s no trouble, might I come in?” If the game recounted in these pages had been played in sixteenth-century Mexico, and if Hernán Cortés had invited the emperor Moctezuma to have it out on the court as Charles V and Henry VIII used to do, they wouldn’t have rudely shouted “Tenez!” but would have said, “Excuse the service, please.”
According to Nahuatl etiquette, the polite way to address a person is with the diminutive tzin. The pre-Hispanic name of the Virgin of Guadalupe was Tonantli, or Our Mother, but no one ever called her that, then or now. She was—and still is—Tonantzin, Our Little Mother. In Spanish we refer to her as La Virgen, but when the faithful petition her for something and address her directly, they call her Virgencita. It’s not that they’re sappier or more sentimental than other Spanish speakers; it’s just that Mexican Spanish is crisscrossed with the scars of Nahuatl. In our mental hard drives, the file of the mother tongue still opens at certain prompts, even though it’s been two or three hundred years since we spoke it.
It’s still hard to believe that during the sixteenth century, there was an enormous empire, governed by an extraordinarily bloodthirsty ruling class, whose prince was addressed as a child: Tizoctzin, Ahuizotzin, Moctezumoctzin. This practice is bizarre and seductive, and I think it’s crucial to make note of it, because it’s still alive today: the bandit and killer Joaquín Guzmán is called Chapo, or Shorty. No one calls the president by a diminutive anymore, but I’m not sure there has been an incumbent of that office who deserved it either. Maybe a diminutive is something one earns. The only twentieth-century president who was truly loved by the people, Lázaro Cárdenas, was called Tata, “Grandpa” in Nahuatl.
Full disclosure: If you are reading this page, you are reading a translation. In some languages, readers don’t flinch as the emperor Cuauhtémoc becomes Cuauhtemoctzin, Guatémuz, or Guatemotzin, depending on who is speaking to him and in what context. In other languages, the mutating names seem to throw readers into a state of confusion. I’m not sorry about that: a whole vision of the universe would be lost if Malinalli Tenépatl, the Mayan princess who was Hernán Cortés’s translator, didn’t refer to Cuauhtémoc as Cuauhtemoctzin. Something would also be lost if it weren’t recorded that Hernán Cortés—who was either very arrogant or very deaf—called the emperor by the hideous name of Guatémuz, which was what he heard and then set down in his letters to Charles V. I don’t know—and it’s impossible to know, of course—whether Cortés ever called him Guatemotzin, as he does in this book when he’s trying to be diplomatic, but the function of a novel is precisely that: to name what is lost, to replace the void with an imaginary archive.
And it works the other way round too: if Cuauhtémoc had ever spoken to Malinalli, he would have called her Malitzin, as if the political class to which he belonged had not given her up as a sex toy to a local leader just because he won a battle. This means something, and if it went unmentioned, this book would no longer be a machine for understanding the world, or the ways in which we name the world. We know that Malinche was the terrible word Cortés came up with for Malinalli. He could not say, or he didn’t want to say, Malitzin. His pronunciation of Nahuatl was so atrocious that it confused people: the Indians who survived the conquest called him Malinche; they didn’t understand that he was simply trying to address his mistress politely in Aztec terms.
During the conquest, some contest played out between the Mayan princess subjected to the indignity of sexual servitude and Cuauhtémoc, the young emperor witnessing the annihilation of his realm. And this duel, I’m convinced, is visible in the succession of names adopted by the woman whose resentment shifted the balance of the world: Malinalli, princess-whore; Malitzin, mouthpiece of the soldiers and politicians who held history in their fists perhaps without realizing it; Doña Marina (her Catholic name), mother
of the conquistador’s children and owner of a Spanish palace on the outskirts of Mexico City; Malinche, the bitch who vanished from history after having delivered America to the Europeans. Over the course of her life, Malinalli Tenépatl was many people, like all of us, but she had the privilege of possessing a different name for each incarnation. In today’s Spanish, her name is the root of an adjective: malinchista means someone who prefers the foreign and disdains his own culture.
Caravaggio’s name or lack of a name is so important that Peter Robb, one of his most painstaking biographers, doesn’t dare to name him in the book he wrote about him. It is titled M: The Man Who Became Caravaggio, because no document exists to prove that as a child he bore the name he claimed as an adult: Michelangelo Merisi. It’s a fact that his father’s last name was the Milanese Merixio, and that he changed it to the Roman Merisi when he began to sell paintings; it’s likely that his name was Michele and when he got to Rome he added the “angelo” to emulate the most famous artist of the day. Later he decided to erase it all and adopt the generic and enigmatic “Caravaggio,” the name of his undistinguished and insignificant hometown. It’s as if Andy Warhol had signed his serigraphs “Pittsburgh.”
Certainly Cuauhtémoc could be simply Cuauhtémoc in this book, but to dispense with the enigma of the name changes, or to list them at the end of the book and thus create an illusion of clarity where there is none, would be to banish the reader to the stands, to bounce him off the court. A novel isn’t a Cartesian diagram. Pope Pius IV’s surname was Medici, though he wasn’t related to the grand duke of Florence; there were two Borromeos who were bishops of Milan; all of Hernán Cortés’s male offspring were called Martín and all of the important women in his life were called Juana. These facts were confusing in their own time, and there’s no reason why they shouldn’t be confusing in a novel that doesn’t aspire to accurately represent that time, but does want to present it as a theory about the world we live in today.
Sudden Death Page 9
