The Wonder Trail

by Steve Hely

  That was Tenochtitlán, or Mexico, the city of the Mexicans. Two years later it was destroyed, it was burned to the ground and the stone buildings were torn down, knocked down, and almost everyone who lived there was dead. That was maybe 100,000 people, and their bodies were spread out so thick across the city that you could walk through the streets, from one end of the island to the other, stepping only on their dead bodies.

  That was here. That was right under where you’re standing. That was Tenochtitlán, and it became Mexico City.

  No sooner was it destroyed than it started to grow again. Like a seed from the ash of a wildfire.* It grew so fast, if you watched it from the tower of the cathedral—well, first of all, you’d see construction the whole time because they started the cathedral in 1573, and they weren’t done until 1813—you’d see earthquakes and fires and riots and cannon fire, but then, very fast, you’d see the city explode in size, going all up the mountainsides in wild, unplanned neighborhoods that are still going up fast. Yes, you’d see all that from the cathedral, you’d see the rise of these incredible neighborhoods around you.

  It all rose up from the ruins of Tenochtitlán because the Spanish were genius conquerors. They knew the way to conquer. They knew all you had to do to conquer a nation was:

  1) knock down their gods,

  2) put up your gods,

  and then

  3) that’s it.

  * * *

  That’s it, that’s all you need to do. Knock down their gods, put up your gods. Game over after that. Don’t sweat the details, either. If they want your gods to look kinda like their gods? Fine. Get their guys to paint it, the Mexicans were amazing painters. Get their guys to do almost everything. Relax and count the money.

  That’s how the Spanish “conquered Mexico.” The more you study it, the less it seems like they really conquered it—the Spanish king had lost it by, oh, 1821 or so. Plus, it happened so fast of course that everybody got mixed up, racially. There were kids who were half Spanish and half—oh, let’s pretend she was a Mexican princess and not look back much further, and then their kids and their kids and so on until there was, of course, a whole new place.

  That’s Mexico, and you’re in its capital. If you turn around, you will see the presidential palace. Astounding, no? But you only have an hour, so come with me down the busy street to El Moro Churrería, where you can have one of four kinds of hot chocolate: mexicana (lightest of all), francia (darker, but with a hint of vanilla), española (thick and extra sweet), or suiza (with extra cream).

  I say if you’re only here once, then goddammit be a champion and order all four, find a friend if you have to, won’t be hard, and dip in those churros they give you and admire the white tile floor, you have to admit a classy touch. This place has been here since the 1930s, what a wondrous refuge from the busy city, and yet through the window, you can watch all the city pass by on the wide Eje Central Lázaro Cárdenas. The last Aztec emperor, Montezuma, used to drink hot chocolate before visiting his many wives.

  Uhp! Boom hour’s up. That’s it, you’re teleporting out.

  But as you shimmer away, think about how baller that is of the Spanish. Where they put the cathedral. They put it right on top of the smoking (okay, maybe not smoking but the) ruins of the Mexican temple, right in its rubble. Right on top of your temple we will put our temple, BIIIITCH!

  Except look at that cathedral—just real quick, remember it, and wonder if it doesn’t look more than anything like an Aztec temple, like a Mexican temple, like just a twisted version of what was there before?

  This was my third time in Mexico City, and my third time at El Moro Churrería. Over the years, I’d tried to learn, as best I could, how Mexico City got to be the way it is.

  In the year 1519, this was the biggest city in the Western Hemisphere.

  The First White People in Mexico

  Wait, let’s say:

  The First Europeans in Mexico

  Because talking about “white people” and what that even means gets thorny awful fast.

  Race in Mexico is very tricky, just like it is in the USA. You start making decisions about what race somebody is and before you know it, you’re unsticking yourself from ugly arguments that have been going on for four hundred years at least.

  It’s silly. One of the first two Europeans in Mexico had mixed-race kids, and after that, forget about sorting out who’s white.

  The first Europeans in Mexico washed up after a shipwreck. When Columbus hit the New World he hit the Caribbean, and that’s where the Spanish Empire started setting up shop. Soon they’d found Panama. They knew there was more, the navigators sensed it. In 1511 a Franciscan monk named Jerónimo de Aguilar was sailing from Panama to Santo Domingo, where he was involved in a lawsuit with some guy. There were others on the ship, all kinds of adventurers, men and women. When their ship was wrecked, fifteen of the men and two women managed to get to the shore of Mexico. But it was bad times for them there.

  They were captured by local natives, a people who called themselves the Calachiones. They spoke a Mayan language. Some of the shipwreckees got made into human sacrifices, offered to various gods. The two women were made to grind corn (and who knows what else) and died of overwork.

  The only two survivors were Jerónimo the monk and a sailor named Gonzalo Guerrero. Jerónimo was made into a slave. He had to haul water and chop wood and work in the cornfields and haul heavy loads. The whole time, he stuck to his monkish vows, which baffled the local chief. Once, to test him, the chief made him spend the night in a hammock with a hot fourteen-year-old girl who’d been told to try to have sex with him.* Jerónimo fought temptation all night. When he got back, the chief was really impressed (according to Jerónimo).

  Gonzalo the sailor, on the other hand, joined the natives, got a face tattoo, two ear piercings, and a native wife, had three kids, and became a famous warrior renowned for his bravery.

  Seven years after the shipwreck, Jerónimo was sitting around his village, when some Indians showed up carrying letters they’d been given by strange men who’d landed on a nearby island. Letters in Spanish.

  Jerónimo was ecstatic. He sent a message to Gonzalo saying something like “Oh my God! We’re saved!” Gonzalo wrote back (I paraphrase), “Um, actually, I’m good here with my wife and kids.” Jerónimo wrote back, “What about your eternal soul?!” to which he never heard from Gonzalo, who disappeared into the Mexican jungle. Years later Gonzalo’s naked and tattooed body was found after a battle in what’s now Honduras. He’d died helping his new Mayan countrymen fight off the Spanish.

  Having tried his best with his countryman and gotten nowhere, the excited monk went down to the beach, where Hernán Cortés was just finishing up having some of the men in his expedition flogged.

  Cortés the Killer

  You may have heard of Cortés. Hernán Cortés, he is usually called now, though he sometimes signed his name as Ferdinando. I’m not sure what people called him. Almost nobody called him by his first name, I’m sure of that.

  He was the man who led 508 Spanish soldiers and fifteen horses from the shore and through the jungle and across mountain passes in the snow and down into the very heart of Mexico, where they destroyed and burned to the ground the capital city of an empire of hundreds of thousands, and filled the rivers that fed the lake with dead bodies.

  I say soldiers, but most of them, before they signed on with Cortés, were just guys. By the time they were done, they’d all seen human heads cut off, among a thousand other horrors, if they were still alive, which half of them weren’t.

  Cortés was born in a town called Medellín. His dad was a kind of low-level nobleman, a hidalgo. When he was a young man, Cortés left Spain and went to the Spanish colony on Cuba. There he promised a girl he’d marry her. Then he maybe hooked up with her sister for a while, tried to weasel out of the engagement, and was finally more or less forced to ma
rry her. Then, years later, he maybe murdered her.

  That was his personal life. In his professional life, Cortés was also pretty treacherous. In his early twenties, Cortés helped Diego Velázquez take over Cuba, and then he several times conspired against Velázquez. He kept getting locked in irons and then escaping. Finally he and Velázquez patched things up. Cortés got some land in Cuba and some gold mines, and made himself rich, but along the way he was so vicious to the enslaved natives that even other conquistador types were kinda weirded out.

  There is no question Cortés was also insanely brave. Even if you detest Cortés, you have to give him that. It’s easy to see why he was thought to be demonic, because he moved across the countryside like an angel of death. There was no force that could stop him, and what trailed him in the villages and towns of those who opposed him was death and desolation and fear.

  He was personally terrifying. He can seem psychotic. And yet in the letters he sent to his “Very High, very Powerful, and most Excellent Prince very Catholic and Invincible Emperor King and Lord,” he tells of his conquest in a very calm and rational way. He seems to have been a genuine religious fanatic, stern, determined, and violent in his mission to exterminate the idolatry he believed he found everywhere he went.

  He was not fucking messing around. That was the message that began to reach Montezuma, emperor of the Mexicans, when Cortés landed on the coast in the year 1519.

  Montezuma of the Mexicans

  Let me apologize in advance for possibly using the wrong terms. The single book I read that I thought about most, almost every day in Central and South America, is 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by the great Charles C. Mann. He suggests that Aztec is an inaccurate term. The empire Cortés found he calls the Triple Alliance, and the dominant partner in the Triple Alliance was the Mexica, and their emperor was Montezuma.

  Much of what we can say about the Mexica comes from a book called the Florentine Codex. It’s called that because it turned up in a library in Florence, Italy, in 1793. The words of the Florentine Codex are written in Nahuatl, the language of the Mexica. They were written there by a Spanish monk who was trying to understand the native people he’d found. There are twelve volumes of the Codex, and even if you can’t read Nahuatl, you can follow the book—it’s all available online—like a graphic novel or a comic book because the Florentine Codex is full of illustrations, hundreds of them, vivid and incredible.

  For eleven volumes you look at pictures of the whole spectrum of Mexica life. The gods, the ways of living, hunting, fishing, lush drawings of plants. Old legends and stories. Beautiful princesses, styles of clothes, beautiful landscapes of special places. Then you come to volume 12.

  The illustrations change. Horses. The Spanish coming. The Spanish firing guns. Indians with their arms, legs, and heads chopped off.

  Montezuma was about forty when Cortés landed. Himself the son of a dominating ruler—he was actually Montezuma II—he was a canny operator at the head of a vast and violent kingdom or theocracy or dictatorship or something. The Mexica were no joke. They’d come into the great Valley of Mexico with its enormous lake sometime around the year 1323, when their wizard had a vision of an eagle eating a snake on a cactus. Where they saw that, they would found a city and build an empire. They saw it, they built Tenochtitlán, and then they conquered everything around. By the time of Cortés, everyone for two hundred miles paid tribute to Montezuma.

  The Mexica had themselves conquered an empire. The tribes and peoples that Cortés encountered didn’t always think he was the worst option. Enemies of the Mexica came to pay tribute to the Spanish, and told them that Montezuma’s guys came to their villages and took everything they wanted, including wives and daughters.

  From the frontiers of his country, word came to Montezuma that some new guys were coming. You can see this rendered in drawings in creative and inventive ways in the Florentine Codex. Montezuma consults omens.

  Meanwhile, in the Florentine Codex, there appear drawings of Mexicans with a new disease, smallpox, that seemed to follow the Spanish.

  The Fall of Tenochtitlán

  Bernal Díaz was there when Cortés and Montezuma met. When he was eighty-four, Díaz sat down and wrote or dictated what he remembered of the greatest adventure of his life, one of the wildest and most violent adventures anyone ever experienced.

  The book Díaz wrote, The Conquest of New Spain, is one of the most incredible true stories I’ve ever read. It’s like a lost volume from an epic series of fantasy novels: deranged battles, massacres, human sacrifices, abandoned temples, plagues, landscapes wondrous and horrible. Writing fifty years later, Díaz can scarcely believe he survived it all. I read the translation by J. M. Cohen, and even he admits he left out more good parts—he’s a gentleman, that J. M. Cohen.

  As much as I don’t like Cortés, I gotta say I admire Díaz. Who was he on the expedition? A nobody, basically. Respected but not consulted on anything. Why did he write his book? He dictated it, actually, because with old age he’d gone blind and deaf. He says unfortunately he had no wealth to leave to his children and descendants “except this true story,” which he promises to tell “plainly, as an honest eyewitness, without twisting the facts in any way.”

  By the time Díaz and the other men with Cortés climbed the mountains to the east of the Valley of Mexico, where the peaks were covered with snow, the men with Cortés had survived battle after battle, including disputes with each other. Natives they passed had warned them they would all be killed and cooked with chillies. As they climbed the mountain, they found the paved road of the Mexica Empire blocked by trees. But natives of the country who’d gambled on the new guys or been forced into their service told them to keep going. Then they came at last to a ridge where they could all see down into the Valley of Mexico.

  “We were astounded,” says Díaz. “Some of our soldiers asked whether it was not all a dream. It was all so wonderful that I do not know how to describe this first glimpse of things never heard of, seen or dreamed before.”

  How many people were in the city Díaz saw? Maybe 200,000, say some scholars. Maybe 100,000, maybe 50,000, with another 100,000 in the towns around.

  The lake was ringed with towns. But right in the middle of the lake was the island city where the stone buildings towered up. The water of the lake, which was maybe fifty miles across, was thick with boats.

  On one of the causeways that led to the city, Montezuma invited Cortés and the Spanish to follow him into the city.

  What was his plan? Maybe to trap the Spanish and kill them? Maybe to convince them to leave? Maybe he wasn’t sure.

  Díaz never forgot what he saw in Tenochtitlán. In the streets of the city, there were sellers of silver and gold and feathers and slaves and birds and rabbits and fruit and pitch pine and cloth and rope and sandals and the skins of jackals and jugs and honey and boards and cradles and furniture and axes. There were vendors who sold human shit, which was used for tanning. There were women who cooked all kinds of food. Díaz goes on and on listing things, before giving up and saying he can never describe it all. He says you could hear the noise from the central market from three miles away. There were gardens and an aqueduct that brought in fresh water. Díaz says Montezuma had zoos full of animals, and dwarves and clowns to amuse him, and stilt walkers and acrobats. He says there were so many of these people that they filled a whole neighborhood—Tenochtitlán’s Hollywood.

  Less than two years later the whole place would be destroyed.

  If you want to know how that happened, you can read Díaz, who somehow survived. He describes days and nights of battle, heads chopped off and thrown at the enemy, fires, buildings destroyed, the Spanish constructing rolling wooden attack towers, trying and failing to build a catapult, fighting from house to house, watching as their comrades had their hearts cut out and their arms and legs chopped off and their faces cut off. Meanwhile thousands of
natives were arriving and joining the fight. Maybe ninety days of continuous fighting. Díaz says he saw sixty-two Spanish prisoners being sacrificed alive. He says he used to piss himself once or twice before every battle.

  When it was finally over, when Montezuma was dead and the new emperor had been captured, the buildings nearly all destroyed, the few survivors fleeing the destruction, Díaz says you couldn’t walk through the city without stepping on the bodies and heads of dead Indians.

  That’s what’s now Mexico City. From the ashes and dead bodies, it grew up again. Now it has, oh, I dunno, if we’re counting the whole population that comes there during the week maybe . . . twenty million people?

  Lost on La Condesa’s Racetrack

  In Mexico City, what I did was: walk around.

  That’s all I did, all day. On my Big Southern Trip, I stayed for three days and nights and spent all of them walking around.

  A good place to walk around in Mexico City is the Museo Nacional de Antropología. There’s room after room of astounding objects and gigantic sculptures and whole pieces of buildings hauled back from the ancient cities of Mexico, from Zaachila and Desconocida and Cacaxtla and the shaft tombs of Jalisco, things carved and painted and formed by the Aztecs and the Maya and the Olmec. You could easily walk the halls of this enormous museum for a distance you’d have to measure in miles, and not see even a fraction of it.

  But it’s also good to walk in the park that’s across the street, the Bosque de Chapultepec, where you can stroll in the shade and children are playing and women and men are selling all kinds of delicious or amusing things. Fresh water from nearby springs was brought down to the markets and temples of Tenochtitlán. On the hill there now is Chapultepec Castle, where the Niños Héroes, the Hero Children, fought to the death against the invading American army in 1847.