"I have not had the experiences of a world traveler and soldier, as yourself," I said to flatter him, "but even in my young life I have encountered many strange things. I witnessed a sacrifice once before, and I am certain that another one took place last night."
"Go find the body." He covered his head, ending any further discussion.
¡Ayya ouiya! I was no one's fool. I would lead Mateo and a troop of soldados into the jungle to find the body, but I was not about to do so alone. I walked down the dirt road, kicking rocks, when I saw the naualli ahead. He was camped with another man a few minutes walk from our own camp. I went into the bushes and found a spot from which I could sit and spy upon the camp.
After the two men left the campsite, heading for the village, I came out of hiding and slowly walked in the same direction. As I came by the camp, I saw a bundle lying on the ground, an indio blanket with ropes wrapped around it.
The bundle shook!
I kept walking, looking straight ahead. But my legs would not carry me any farther. I knew the dwarf was in that bundle. Mustering my courage, I turned on my heel and hurried back, drawing my knife. I broke into a run.
Kneeling beside the bundle, I began slashing at the ropes. "I'm cutting you loose!" I told the trapped dwarf, first in Spanish and then repeated it in Náhuatl. He began struggling to get free even as I was slashing the ropes.
When the last rope was cut, I jerked the blanket off. A pig looked up at me and squealed.
I gawked as it got to its feet to run. I threw myself at it, grabbing it with both arms and hands to keep it from escaping. The pig let out screeching squeals that would have disturbed the dead in Mictlán. Slipping out of my hands, it raced into the jungle. I got up to run after it, but it was hopeless. It was gone.
The noise had attracted some undesirable attention. The naualli was coming back, and he had been joined by several men.
I ran for our camp.
¡Ay de mí! To keep me from being arrested for pig stealing, Mateo had to give me his gambling winnings. This put my picaro amigo into a black mood, and I spent the day away from the camp to keep the wrath of his boot toe away from my backside.
SIXTY-FIVE
Intensely interested in my Spanish roots, I questioned Mateo frequently during our travels about the history of Spain and the conquest of the Aztec Empire. In order for me to understand Cortes and the conquest, I soon learned I had to know more about my indio roots. I had learned a great deal when the flower weaver sent me on a walk with the gods. In my discussions with Mateo, I learned not only about the conquest, but more about Aztecs.
My reverence for Doña Marina, an india girl who was Cortes's savior, was not only fed by my sympathy for the way she had been abandoned but because the fray would often tell me that like the doña, my mother was an Aztec princess.
I had learned much about Doña Marina and Cortes from Mateo. In truth, I had heard the names most often, especially that of the great conquistador, but like the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghosts, the names were more legendary than real.
I knew that Tenochtitlan suffered the same fate as the other cities and villages of New Spain after the conquest—the indio character was destroyed and the name was changed to City of Mexico. The city was still the beating heart of the region, but the Aztec temples had been replaced by cathedrals.
While the Aztecs dominated the heart of preconquest New Spain from Tenochtitlan, there were not only striking differences between the indio cultures but great hatred. No indio culture was as bloodthirsty as the Aztecs. They made war for booty, conquered and enslaved other cultures for tribute, but the main objective of the wars and tribute was not glory, territory, or gold—it was human hearts.
I had learned during the dream created by the flower weaver that my Aztec ancestors had a covenant with their gods—they gave the gods blood and the gods blessed them with rain for their crops. The more blood they gave the gods, the more hearts they ripped from sacrifice victims while the hearts were still hot and pounding, the more the gods favored the Aztecs over others.
The Aztecs had risen to dominance only about a hundred years before Cortes landed in 1519 on the coast of the Eastern Sea. The tale of how conquistadors conquered twenty-five million indios with about five hundred-odd soldiers, sixteen horses, and fourteen cannons has been told and retold many times to me—the priests speak of this miracle in almost as much awe as they do the birth of my namesake Jesus Christ. But often when I hear a Spaniard retell the story of the conquest, they leave out an important detail—the Aztecs were defeated not only by the men, horses, and cannons of Spain, but a coalition of indio nations who fielded thousands of warriors against them.
Today Spain is the greatest military power in the world, dominating not just the European continent, but ruling an empire that it is truly said the sun never sets upon. Christopher Columbus had laid the seeds of the empire by running into a whole new continent on his way to that vast land in Asia called India. But Columbus and the generation that followed were mostly concerned with Caribbean islands. Although they knew there was a great land mass to the west beyond the islands, little of it had been explored several decades after the 1492 discovery.
One of the men who followed in the wake of Columbus had been sent off to study law at a university but set aside his pen to take up the sword.
Hernando Cortes was born in Medellin, in the province of Estremadura, Spain, in 1485, seven years before Columbus sailed to the New World. He grew up in an almost fever-pitched atmosphere of tales of glory and adventure as more and more stories of riches and conquest came back from the early explorers. In truth, the Caribbean islands, which were the first conquests, were actually poor in everything but indios, whom the conquerors could use as slave labor.
Even though the New World had not yet fulfilled its promise of lands paved with gold, Cortes and his compatriots still dreamed of faraway places to be conquered. The fray said they had read too many "chivalric romances" in which a knight-errant found love, treasure, and glory. The most famous of these books I have mentioned before: Amadis of Gaul. Amadis was a prince cast out to sea on an ark at birth because his mother couldn't reveal who his father was. The prince grows up, falls in love with a princess, and has to go out into the world as a wandering knight and win her hand. He fights monsters, visits enchanted islands, and returns to his love.
To young men like Cortes, Amadis was not just a story, but a sign to seek to their God-given chance at "love, treasure, and glory" in the New World across the sea.
At the age of seventeen, Cortes left university and managed to get the promise of a berth aboard a ship bound for the New World, but fate—and his young man's lust—dealt him a bad hand. Scaling a stone wall to gain access to the apartment of a woman with whom he was engaged in an intrigue, the wall gave way and he fell, almost buried by the rubble.
Too injured to cross an ocean, two more years passed, and he was nineteen when he next got the opportunity. When he arrived at Hispaniola, the Caribbean island that was the main seat of Spanish rule, he went to see the governor and was told, because of family connections, that he would get a grant of land and a repartimiento of indios for slave labor. His reply to the governor's secretary was that he had not come to the New World to farm. "I came for glory and gold, not to till the soil like a peasant."
Mateo told me that this man of destiny, Hernando Cortes, was of medium height, slender, yet had a surprisingly deep chest and broad shoulders. His eyes, hair, and short beard were dark as any Spaniard's, yet his complexion was unexpectedly pale.
At first, he found no opportunity for conquering new worlds. While a number of Caribbean islands had been discovered, and the Crown was aware of a great, mysterious land mass beyond, no one realized that great empires already existed in what were to become New Spain and Peru.
Cortes impatiently worked his land and indios, but his hot-bloodied temperament kept him in trouble, mostly of a feminine nature. Amorous affairs turned into affairs of honor played out
with swords, and he carried these scars to the grave.
During this time he obtained experience fighting against indios, putting down insurrections, and serving in the conquest of Cuba. Despite his good military record, he became embroiled in controversy with the new governor of Cuba, Velasquez, after a romantic entanglement with a daughter of the powerful Xuarez family. When Cortes refused to consummate the affair by marrying the girl, Governor Valasquez had him arrested and put into iron shackles. Cortes managed to work himself free of the fetters, pried apart iron bars, and leaped from his prison window. At a nearby church, he called upon the sanctuary of the Church—the civil authority could not arrest him while he was in God's house.
The governor placed guards near the church waiting for Cortes to make a move. When the young man got careless and wandered a few feet from the church grounds, one of the governor's men jumped him from behind and pinned his arms until other guards joined the fracas.
Put into irons again, he was put aboard a ship bound for Hispaniola, where he was to be tried for his defiance. He managed to get out of the shackles again, this time stealing a small boat being towed behind the ship, and made his way back to shore, abandoning the rowboat and swimming ashore when the small boat became unmanageable. He made his way back again to the sanctuary of the church.
Rather than maintaining a dispute he could not hope to win, he agreed to marry the wronged young woman, Catalina Xuarez, and reconciled with Governor Velasquez. Following his marriage, Cortes settled down to farm his land with several thousand repartimiento indios he had been granted. By this time he had a slash on his face from a duel over a woman.
He was thirty-three years old and a prosperous landowner when news came that an expedition had made contact with an indio culture along the Caribbean coast of what was to become New Spain. The news sent shock waves through the Spanish—another land to explore and plunder! An expedition was organized by Velasquez to explore the area and Cortes was granted his plea to lead it. Despite their past problems, Velasquez recognized in Cortes a bold, aspiring spirit who craved gold and glory.
Cortes immediately set out to put together the expedition, getting the men, supplies, and ships necessary, selling or borrowing off everything he owned to cover much of the cost. Velasquez, seeing the lengths of Cortes's efforts, realized that the man was likely not only to succeed but to claim all glory for himself. Jealous, he was about to revoke Cortes's authority when Cortes surprised him by setting sail without completing the preparations. Velasquez's orders to stop and arrest Cortes chased the adventurer as he went from port to port to gather men and supplies. Often he had to use his cannons to persuade the local authorities to ignore the governor's orders.
He finally set out for the area to be explored, landing on the west coast of New Spain with 553 soldiers, fourteen cannons, and sixteen horses. He told his men that they were setting out on a noble venture that would make them famous throughout the ages, that he was leading them to a land richer than any found before.
"Great things are achieved only by great exertion," he told them. "Glory was never the reward of the sloth!"
On April 21, 1519, Cortes landed at the place he called La Villa Rica de la Veracruz, the Rich Town of the True Cross. He came for glory, gold, and God.
Wrapped up in the religious zeal was the conception by the Spaniards that the indios were guilty of every kind of vice. But the most heinous crimes committed by the indios in the eyes of the Spanish were not on the battlefield or the sacrificial block but in bed. The Spaniards continuously charged them with the crime against nature, the crime that dare not speak its name: sodomy.
Despite the view of the Spanish, the practice of sodomy was not universal. The Aztecs punished sodomy harshly. The indio acting as a female had his virile parts cut off and a hole cut between his legs. Then his entrails were removed through the hole. I shuddered at the thought of someone taking a knife, spreading my legs, cutting out a hole, and sticking their hand up the hole to remove my guts.
After the insides were removed, the victim was tied down to a peg and covered with ash until he was buried. Wood was piled on top and burned.
The punishment for the indio acting as a man was simpler: He was tied down to a log and covered with ash, to remain there until he died.
Who had the worse punishment, you ask? The one who acted as a woman or the one who acted as a man? While the man-woman's punishment makes my flesh crawl, he would die quickly from the incision. The man tied down and left to die would wither slowly, his pain and suffering enduring much longer. But I would take a lingering death over someone cutting a hole between my legs and reaching up to rip out my entrails.
Not all indio groups prohibited sodomy, and a few openly practiced it. Some Mayan tribes trained their boys to engage in sodomy during their youth. Until a boy was old enough to marry, well-to-do parents provided him with a male companion, a slave boy, to meet his sexual urges. This way he did not pursue girls, permitting them to remain virgins until marriage.
Balboa, who discovered the Pacific Ocean after trekking through the jungles of Panama, found homosexuality practiced among the chiefs at Quarequa. When he discovered that the king's brother and the brother's friends wore women's clothing and entered each other through the backdoor, he threw forty of them to his savage dogs.
One Caribbean tribe first castrated their young male prisoners, then used them sexually until they grew to adulthood, at which point they were killed and eaten. Heinous behavior, but there are many tales told today of unscrupulous Christians in Spain conducting a trade in Christian penes and foreskins to the Moors.
I have heard the Christian priests damn sodomy. They tell the indios that if they practice the crime against nature and do not repent, when they die they will descend to hell joined with their lover.
The fray once recounted to me that Saint Thomas Aquinas sanctioned prostitution on the grounds that it saved men from sodomy.
Sodomy was not the only crime against nature the Spaniards found existed in the New World. Some indio nobles had special wives who were trained to use their mouth to suck on their husband's pene in the manner of vipers.
Of course, such matters of the flesh were not restricted to the indios. Fray Antonio told me that Pope Alexander VI of the Spanish Borgias had five children. He betrothed his daughter Lucrezia at twelve to one nobleman—then broke it off when the girl was thirteen in order for her to marry another. When that marriage did not bring the political and financial rewards the pope anticipated, he had the marriage annulled on the grounds of impotency—despite the fact that his daughter was pregnant. Not to be daunted by such trivialities, the good pope issued one bull stating that his son, Lucrezia's brother, was the father—and another naming himself as the father of his daughter's child. Poor Lucrezia—her next husband was the son of the king of Naples, but her jealous brother strangled the man with his own hands.
Good King Filipe III, who has sat on the throne of Spain and Portugal during most of my lifetime, is said to have had thirty-two children from consorts. That is more than most Aztec kings fathered.
SIXTY-SIX
In one of those marvelous acts of fate that seemed so often to clear the path for Cortes, he had the great fortune to take possession of a slave girl who had been born a princess. Doña Marina, as she came to be called, had been born in the province of Coatzacualco, on the southeastern border of the Aztec Empire. Her father, a rich and powerful cacique, died when she was very young. Her mother married again and had a son. She conceived the nefarious idea of securing for her son Marina's rightful inheritance.
She accordingly feigned that Marina was dead but secretly delivered her into the hands of some itinerant traders of Xicallanco. She availed herself, at the same time, of the death of a child of one of her slaves in order to substitute the corpse for that of her own daughter and celebrated the obsequies with mock solemnity. The merchants sold the india maiden to the cacique of Tabasco, who delivered her to the Spanish as tribute.
&nb
sp; In a strange way, my own childhood speaks so much of the intrigues and tribulations of Doña Marina's that, while my indio ancestors considered her a traitor, she earned that special place in my heart that I have spoken about.
Cortes had landed on the coast and encountered the indio culture but soon discovered that he was on the fringes of a vast empire ruled by a mighty emperor. He was in desperate need of information from the indios he encountered and in need of allies because alone, with a few hundred men, he could not hope to overwhelm a large empire.
Doña Marina brought along with her charms—she was to become Cortes's mistress and mother of his son, Don Martin—a gift for languages. She not only spoke the language of the indios that she had been sold into slavery to, but her native Aztec tongue, Náhuatl, as well. She was able to quickly pick up enough Spanish to act as interpreter and negotiator with the indio leaders Cortes came into contact with.
And her experiences from noble woman to slave and finally lover of the Spanish leader, gave her insights that she used to lead Cortes from danger. It was she who realized that fifty indios sent ostensibly as peace delegates to him were spies and assassins. Cortes had the hands of the men chopped off and sent them back to their leaders as examples of how he would deal with treachery.
It was Marina, too, who would interpret for Cortes when he finally reached Tenochtitlan and stood before Montezuma II. The emperor, whose imperial title was Revered Speaker, was informed by his messengers of the Spanish landing. Cortes in turn learned that the ruler of the vast empire was in a golden city in a high valley far from the blazing sands of the Caribbean coastline.
Aztecs scribes painted picture writing so that the emperor would be able to see what the Spaniards looked like. It was the Spanish horses more than anything that struck fear in the hearts of the indios. There were no beasts of burden in Mexico, no horses, mules, donkeys, or even oxen. The horses, strange and terrifying to the indios, were as fearsome to them as the cannons. They saw the rider and horse moving in unison, as if parts of the same animal, and they assumed that gods were mounted upon these fearsome beasts.
Aztec Blood a-3 Page 34
