A Signal Victory

by David Stacton

  In 1524 he started south, through Guatemala and Honduras. He had no choice, and was a little tired. In order to maintain himself, he had to find out new worlds, for the demands of Spain were insatiable, and had to be satisfied. Guatemala and Honduras were rich, so they said.

  So they had been, a thousand years before.

  Cortés marched into those treacherous uplands through Chiapas, with six hundred men to carry the baggage, and, as hostages, the Lord of the Province and the Emperor Cuauhatemoc. The latter he could not leave behind, lest he become the centre of some uprising.

  After two and a half years of confinement, surrounded by a mockery of attendants, Cuauhtemoc was probably glad enough to go anywhere.

  At first all went well; and then Cortés began to lose his luck. But then, that goddess, if personified, goes off blandly upon her own affairs at once. Thus found the Caesars. Thus Cortés.

  The rains were a solid assault of water. Savannahs became quagmires, and quagmires, lakes. Most of the region had been abandoned centuries before, so that they had to hack their way through tropical jungle and met no-one. The men were for turning back, and so were the priests. There were quarrels. There was always whispering behind Cortés’ back.

  That had never been so audible before. They were waiting to pull him down.

  With Cuauhtemoc he played chess. It was a game Cuauhtemoc had learned easily and played well, for it was like his native game of Potelli, but more subtle. Potelli was a game with four fields but only one kind of counter. He had always felt its limitations as a symbol. But in chess one played with the world, and the whole game was a parable. In the beginning the king could do nothing, and yet he directed the pieces. He was the object of the game. In the end one did not capture him. One merely made it impossible for him to escape. He could appreciate the irony of that.

  They played not on the board we know now, but on that circular Hindu board the Spaniards inherited through the Arabs. It is the peculiarity of that board that the king cannot castle, but goes to sanctuary once during the game, and only once. He is safe for the moment. Yet he knows that on the next move he must come out and face the game again, on a slightly changed board and himself changed, by that same move into sanctuary, which destroyed his immovable sanctity for good.

  The king was defeated by the ineptness of his own supporters.

  Potelli was sacred to Macuilxochitl, the Five Flower god of youth and games, but also a god of the south, the unlucky direction; and were not he and Cortés playing out this game in the south? He understood the parable all too well, and defeat has certain advantages. One can fill up one’s days by playing the whole game out again, unblinded by self-interest.

  Cortés would find himself staring into those polite and knowledgeable eyes. It was, after all, a royal game, and Cuauhtemoc had lost it. But sometimes, on that damned symbolic board, Cortés lost it. Cuauhtemoc would then quietly smile, but somehow that smile lingered in the mind, for he was a vivid man, fearless, and quite as capable of irony as his captor. He had a special little grimace when he was checkmated, particularly if the board had been swept clean.

  He had also a special offensive, when he won in turn, which was not to sweep the board clean, but to trap Cortés behind his own pieces, so it was they, rather than Cuauhtemoc’s, which checkmated him.

  He must be doing that deliberately, and lately he had done it too often.

  Something rather peculiar happens if you play chess, not mathematically, as we affect to do now, but skilfully, thoughtfully, as though the pieces were only something to twiddle with. We pretend that the pieces are not symbolic, but the game is a communion and a rite. One is soon swallowed up by that parable and becomes part of it. Suddenly, three or four moves in, plotting five or six moves ahead, as you reach your hand forward, the board vanishes, the pieces vanish, you and your opponent vanish, and you are off in some other place.

  The board then becomes whatever your real quarrel with the world is about. The game becomes a test of strength between two wills. As you move, so are you judged, not personally, but essentially, neither by yourself or your opponent, but by those judges of the secret court whose sessions never cease. It does no good to plead before that tribunal. Eloquence means nothing, for they have the documents in the case, and there is no jury. They are far, far worse than Atropos, Lachesis, and Clotho, for they ordain nothing, they reach no conclusion, they administer no punishment. They simply know.

  That is the worst punishment and the worst fate: that anyone should know, except ourselves, when even we prefer not to know.

  The game then tells you things about yourself, you should not know. Cuauhtemoc was content to lose. He did it more and more cleverly, it now took more of an effort on Cortés’ part before Cuauhtemoc’s will snapped and he allowed himself to be beaten.

  Outside their tent it rained. It became harder and harder to discipline oneself to make that effort, while Cuauhtemoc sat there, a graceful man, somehow not defeated at all, and sadly smiling. One had only to look at the board, to see that he knew too much.

  Cortés hanged him.

  *

  There must have been something else. And yet, though the official reports make mention of an Aztec plot against the Spaniards, apparently there was nothing else. Cortés had disgraced himself. The Judges of the Secret Court exchanged glances, and that, too, he saw. He looked at the man’s wilted body, the way a hunter looks at the body of a pheasant one more than he had meant to kill. The dignity and the rebuke were of the same quality. The standards of the world mean nothing, but once fall from our own, and we never again feel the same certainty. We begin to fall apart. A dishonourable act is irreparable. We become indign.

  After that there is nothing to accept but defeat. For though outwardly we may prosper, inwardly we shrink. We lose authority because we no longer have it ourselves.

  He marched on, but it was the end of him. The natives could see that. He had the look of a man whose luck has changed. They breathed easier. He had been a great man, and a great man is difficult to deal with. Now they would not have to deal with him at all. He was no longer great.

  But though difficult to deal with, great men can be dealt with. Having a two-class society, they had no concept of the inexorability of the infinitely small, those men in the middle, who take from rich and poor alike, and who, since they have not the courage to face their own appetites, can never be appeased.

  In the world of honour there is no place for the middle class. Therefore, the world of honour must go, in order to make the world safe for those who have none.

  So Cortés, so God, so beauty, and so Yucatan. One cannot defeat an enemy of whose nature one is unaware, and this race of lawyers and small clerks was so recent that as yet no-one knew anything of them, nor that to them the world was a department store, in which they could safely shop, since every man had his price, and if he had none, must be thrown away.

  If one is a gentleman or a peasant, one does not throw such things away, for if one does, one has nothing left, for the one has too little, the other too much, ever to be taken in by that modern mass delusion that the meaning of life can be deposited in a bank.

  Yet this old order of things, being swept away for a time, this immutable order of the soul, had one advantage over its conquerors. It had certainty, and so the poise to die.

  But not unless death were unavoidable, for like all those who accept the fact of mortality, it also had an immense joy to live.

  XIV

  It did not take long for the news of Cuauhtemoc’s murder, for that was what it was, to reach Chetumal, for those uplands through which Cortés was marching were so thinly settled, that news came all the swifter through them for being ungarbled along the way.

  Cortés had turned back at Tayasal. That he had reached it at all was sobering enough, for Tayasal was the sacred last redoubt. In all Guerrero’s years in Yucatan he had seldom heard it mentioned, for it was not mentioned. For it was there, when they were beaten back by the Mexican In
vasion after the league of Mayapan, that the Itza had retreated, going back to the place from which they had come, to await the preordained end of the Maya world, at the final return of Katun 8 Ahau. For they were a determined people. No matter what disasters might overwhelm them in the interim, they had the piety to conform to their own calender, and to survive to see the end of their own world, rather than to have that end imposed upon them. And since that world was not to end until 1697, they maintained up there their palladium. That there should be Itzas at Tayasal was their palladium. It was the whole centre of their being not to pass away before the proper time. They would neither commit that impiety, nor allow anyone else to do so.

  Even Nachancan, who was himself of the Itza, never mentioned Tayasal. But you could see in his eyes, as you could see in the eyes of all the Maya, that it was there, waiting, an extensive lake, surrounded by upland jungle whose roots were steeped in those waters, with in the centre the city on its islands, like Technoctitlán, but without the causeways, the tombhouse of the race, furnished for that last journey with everything they had ever done or believed in, ready for that day when it would close on the race, which would then go completely furnished back into oblivion.

  There was something a little sad about that, but then about grandeur there is always something saddening. It lasts such a little while, and is yet so noble.

  Now Cortés had penetrated there. It filled them with despair. Unlike other foreigners, he was comprehensible. He arrived on the appointed black days. He went into the evil directions. He was that secret clause in that pact they had made with the gods, who can never be trusted because we can never help but suspect that there is a secret clause. A bargain among equals is one thing, but a bargain with one’s superiors means nothing. They are always breaking it. It is because they know everything, that the gods never tell us the truth, for they cannot be bothered to shrink themselves down into anything so limited as what we call truth. Even the calendar is only a moment in oblivion, endless though for the Maya that moment was. There are other calendars. Perhaps they had calculated the wrong one. Perhaps they were to end now.

  Even in Chetumal the priests were busy in the temples now, like surgeons in an emergency, turning panic into a last moment efficiency. Nachancan, himself, went often there.

  Then Cortés turned back. They found out what he had done to Cuauhtemoc. No god would have done such a thing, and no instrument of God, for it was inconsistent with his virtues. He had betrayed himself, therefore he must be merely a man, as much a victim of his destiny, which was to say his nature, as they were of theirs.

  It filled them with relief.

  Guerrero could not understand that. He knew so well what was happening, for he had seen it happen, when he was a child and then a young man, in Spain.

  When they had displaced the last Moors, when they carried on their brutal wars with Catalonia, what then became of all that dynastic grace, that charm, those people who should never be touched by any but equals? The Moors, like the Maya, had been a little decadent. And yet they too, like the Maya, had been much concerned with tradition, with grace, with beauty, with some way of filling up the time, as pleasantly as possible, between now and the end of life.

  His wife, Ix Chan, that beauty in her own world, with the soft confiding grace of her nights, with so much beauty expended, and how happily, merely in bending over a cradle, with her gravity, her breeding, and her mental reservations about everything, her cleanliness, and her little humour, must always be allowed to go on as she had always lived. He adored her. He found her touching. Like the last flower on any vine, she was determined not to wilt. She kept her youth a little longer.

  He did not want to see her the victim of some coarse savage in steel armour, who would not understand her. Like any civilized person, her wits might go swift, but her body went slow. She had great dignity. But what would that mean, in war, carnage, and rape?

  And Nachancan. Nachancan he loved as one man loves another man, not to ask anything, but simply for being there. Love, the passions, marriage, they are transitory. They are real, and not real, all at once, so that we never get to the end of them. If they are there, why then they are there for life.

  But friendship and admiration are more excruciating virtues. For we feel them for someone we cannot touch, we cannot lie with, who yet touches us more than anyone or anything could do. He had found a father.

  Did he want to see such a man strung up, as Cuauhtemoc had been, his body slowly turning above the ground, after that last involuntary gurgle in the throat had turned to the silence which always precedes death.

  Did he want to see, from the ground, the slightly soiled pattern of his feet? It is not the murder of a man we mind so much. Once he is dead, that is the end of it. There is nothing to say. It is is the overthrow of everything we respect or cherish, represented in that murder, by those who respect and cherish nothing, that turns the knife in us.

  It is not so much that we die, who minds that, if it be inevitable, as that everything we love and live for can be overturned by the greed of those who love nothing, that we find horrible.

  He could see Nachancan, twirling in the air, twisting at the end of that rope. And it made him furious. Take everything from us, he wanted to say. “Kill us, if you wish. But leave us at least our dignity. Otherwise death is not worthwhile. Better yet, take me, but leave him his dignity.” Then it would be worth while.

  But since Alexander, no conqueror has done that. For more than anything the conqueror wants, he wants dignity, which he thinks he may have by taking it from the conquered.

  Whereas dignity is innate. Either one has it, or one has not. Like honour, it is not to be acquired.

  And what he hated most, was to see a new look in Nachancan’s eyes. Not, certainly, a look of fear. A man like that was incapable of fear. But a look of defeat, even though Nachancan would fight beyond even the limits of fighting. But yet, it was the look of defeat.

  For no man should ever dangle at the end of a rope, even with the saving courtesy of a blue silk thread in it, at least no real man ever should.

  He could see Nachancan dangling so. And yet Nachancan said nothing. He was perhaps a little quieter than he had been before. And he watched his grandchildren with a slightly different look, a look that tore the heart out of Guerrero.

  Guerrero wanted someone to fight. He wanted the enemy there, to be dealt with. But there was no enemy to deal with. The defeat would be by a creeping paralysis.

  It was the first time he had ever faced the fact of defeat. And he knew there could be one. One must either die or win.

  Where was the enemy to fight? It made him restless not to have one, for the forces against them were somewhere gathering in. Why would they not appear?

  And Nachancan, as he bent over his grandchildren, had such a curious expression on his face, that it made Guerrero doubly love this world of which he was only outwardly a part and which made him curse aloud.

  For why, out of what hunger, must you others tear this ancient, grave, hieratic, and not by you to be understood world apart? Five hundred years from now, when you have reduced everything to barbarism, and are trying painfully to build again, you will look back and be sorry. You will make a romance of it. You will learn to be rueful, as conquerors always are, about the defeated. You will want to save something out.

  But by then it will be too late. We shall be dead, and beyond all power of sorrow. But you will feel sorry. You will want it back. You will want anything to keep you from that awful cold knowledge, that having destroyed what you wanted, just because you could not have it, you must now, painfully, make it all over again, to be destroyed by somebody else, and so time goes, the awful war between the hungry, who have forgotten the taste of food, and the well-fed, who have forgotten hunger.

  Where was the enemy? Whom could he fight?

  Could they not come forward and identify themselves?

  And so he fell into a bed, felt incompetent, loved Ix Chan, wished always to pr
otect her, wanted to see her grow old, wanted to go through all the stages of love’s ageing, but loved Nachancan even more, as a man loves a man, not as a body, not even as a person, but as an embodied principle.

  Nothing must ever happen to that wrinkled, knowledgeable, and austere old man.

  Nothing must happen to Ix Chan.

  And of what was happening to him, he was not even cognizant.

  It was, if you like, a Passion, such as all religions and all lives have. But a Passion with different symbols, and so, to any Christian, to any, as to him, non-Christian, unconscious and unintelligible. It could only be endured.

  There was also Aguilar. Where was Aguilar? Aguilar, not these soldiers of the conquest, not even Cortés, who in his failure of himself, hanged Cuauhtemoc, summed up the inexorable quality of the world. For Aguilar thought himself a saint, and the man who thinks himself a saint is only a fury in disguise. Saints are not among the living. They are only what we remember of those among whom we move. Saints among the living are, by example, a Torquemada to all true belief.

  He had only to go out into the jungle, he had only to look at the fields of tasselled maize, to realize that life has a meaning which brings tears to our eyes, a meaning holy and exact, that none of those who search for meaning and tell us what life means would ever have the dignity to respect, the pride to love.

  For God, the gods and we, nothing is possible, without a mutual respect.

  Which no man will allow possible. For Christians grovel, and that is not the way, either of God or of a man.

  It is because men cannot bear to be defeated.

  And yet defeat, on honourable terms, is the only honour we can have, in such a situation. Oh yes, he knew that. He had felt it always.

  As the Moors went away, to Africa, but remembered what they had been, and therefore knew what they were, so would he. So would they all. The vain man cries, gives us back our world again. But the man of honour says, you shall not have it.