A Signal Victory

by David Stacton

  “You don’t understand. We’ve got to drive them out.”

  Nachancan smiled. It was a wistful smile. “Oh yes. I understand. You have taught me a great deal. But what can one do? One plays greed against greed. And what do you have to play with? It is all we can do to hold our own provinces. And you will see. They will be driven out. For a little while. And what can we ever have of life, but a little while? Then we will be driven out. We are so old, you see. And the old can never fight the new. They have not the energy. Only the skill. But if the enemy has a different kind of skill….” He shrugged his shoulders. “Why then….”

  “But you must do something.”

  “That is not something to say to someone who is powerless,” said Nachancan. “You forget. We have been waiting a long time.”

  It was not something to say to the young, who because they are young, think the world they live in also has the vigour to fight back.

  “Very well. Send out your embassies. You must learn that way. But we get what we deserve,” said Nachancan.

  “You don’t understand.”

  “We only understand what we know. How could we understand anything else?”

  “But I know them.”

  “You would not be here, if you did. If you really knew them, you would be one of them. So you must only know about them.”

  “It isn’t any time for philosophy,” shouted Guerrero.

  “Can you think of a better one?” Nachancan went to the doorway and looked out, across the courtyard, at the temples and the jungle. “Oh yes, we shall fight them when they come. But not to win. Only not to lose. That is all our world can do.”

  And Nachancan looked out across the city as though he had never seen it before.

  “I don’t want you to leave,” he said. “I want you with me. I am an old man, and we are an old people. It is dreadful to think ever that we might see the young for the last time. And in a way you are my son.”

  “But if the Sotuta and the Xiu knew the danger, they would drive them out of here.”

  “But we never do know the danger,” said Nachancan. “We are too busy turning it to our own advantage. And then, we never believe we can lose, until we have lost.”

  There was nothing Guerrero could do, but fret. There was nothing to be done with Nachancan. The man was too used to too much security. Yet was that because he knew too little, or too much?

  Guerrero was a forthright man. He was not accustomed to doubt. It made him uneasy. He preferred action. Action cancelled doubt, and even if the action were the wrong one, at least it put an end to uncertainty.

  He wanted the Spanish out of there.

  Therefore, despite Nachancan’s advice, he set out across the peninsula, both to spy out the Spanish and to try to unite the Maya against them. Being a fighting man, he had no knowledge of diplomacy. So he had much to learn, all of it saddening.

  That was what Nachancan did not want to have happen. He did not want to see him saddened so. Now there would be no choice. They could only hope that he would return safely, for he would be needed soon enough. That being so, he was foolish to risk himself on the field, but there was nothing to be done about that either. He must learn this way.

  They did so want him to come back. They wanted everyone to come back who had ever had the privilege of living. For they found the world well worth the burden, which it would not have been, if, once having laid down that load, one could not pick it up again.

  Hence their calendar, and hence their character. It is only your Christian who wants to live once, and as a reward for that condition which is reward enough in itself, were not every Christian too much a Manichee to see it, be given heaven. Whereas to them, the thirteen heavens, though honourable, were only a poor substitute for life, a consolation for mortality, but nothing more.

  XVIII

  The Spanish were driven out of there, but not by him. The country had its own revenge on them, for that plague that they had brought, the easy death. For Yucatan had deaths of its own, and they were not easy.

  They had come at the beginning of the rainy season. In that part of the world it was almost always the rainy season. They had had a vision of white skies, white cities, and rich fields whose corn was every colour from champagne to gold. But now that view was cut off from them. They were surrounded by rain that glittered as though they sat at the hub of a roll of steel mesh.

  It cleared every two or three days only long enough for them to see where they could not go. And the rain rattled like those musical instruments the Maya loved, now an angry shake, and then the double incessant boom of a two-tongued wooden drum.

  At home, in Spain, they were accustomed to drought. Now they understood why the worst of these idols about them, Tlaloc, the god of rain, was in some aspects a demon who took your life. There is more than one way to drown.

  But to Guerrero, the rain meant nothing.

  It was strange, since he was born in a yellow landscape, how he took to this, which was every shade of blue and green, which slithered with life, which was never still, and wherein a Cattleya burst out of a tree like a sour trumpet voluntary, shocking in the Byzantine mosaic of the jungle, where there are always glitters in the gloom, as though the vegetable world were a damp building, holy not to any idea of goodness, but to life itself, which is neither good nor bad. Decorated piers of mahogany, buttressed with liana, and a choir screen of snakes and vines, on which the monkeys perched like patron saints, lit some green fuse in him, which burst into an explosion of pleasure, despite a scorched youth.

  Perhaps it was because, if one relaxes into the rhythms of nature, one finds one has a double strength, and he liked to be strong. He liked his body. The two of them, himself and it, they were good friends.

  It was what had never made him give in and be a Christian, that enthusiastic collaboration, for no Christian ever loves his body. He was older now. His skin no longer had the sheen of youth. His biceps, his pectorals, the fan muscles of his back, were no longer all of him. Maturity makes us shrink into thought, which does not fill our shape the way emotion used to do. But the body was there, he liked it, it had its graces, and if we accept the fact of mortality, then each age has its pleasures, and since we have it no longer, but love it, then we love youth in any shape or form, the youth of the world, our own children, the dew at dawn. And that, given that attitude, still makes the world agreeable.

  It is only your ascetic who hates the world, because he never had the courage to accept its conditions, and therefore despises himself. But to Guerrero, what he was, and what he had become, was an infinite source of amused curiosity. He sat in himself and watched. It is the best we can ever do.

  He was one of those people, they are always neglected, always overlooked, and despised by the articulate, who are not verbal, who do not express themselves in concepts, and so all their philosophy goes ignored. And all their insight too. For they do not talk about it. Maybe they do not even know it is insight. Yet, they have something that takes them out of themselves, some parallel activity, to the life they lead, which makes them selfless. Insight made him happy in the world, even in its bad occasions. So few mystics can ever say so much. So padding through the forest, at an agile forty filled him with an endless, impersonal, and yet personal joy.

  One could not go from Chetumal to Salamanca de Xelha by boat. The currents were in the wrong direction. He had first to go to Bacalar, and then through the jungle and its cleared states. He did not know all the diversity of that peninsula. He began to learn it now. And travelling now as an honoured member of this world was far different from fleeing through it, as he had done over fifteen years ago, as a fugitive.

  In a week he came out at Tulum. Salamanca de Xelha was near Tulum. He had not seen that city since his captivity there. He saw at once that something had gone wrong with it. It had died a little more, more of its palaces were empty, the weeds were thicker in its streets.

  For the pilgrims had stopped coming. Cozumel was desecrated by the foreigner
, and so no longer, though it still was holy, efficacious. And there was also less trade than formerly. The conquest of the rich land of Mexico had everywhere disrupted trade. It was no longer safe for the merchants to set out on the Ocean Sea, and so they did not stop at Cozumel to pray for good commerce, nor at Tulum, to pray for a safe passage there.

  Guerrero went to the temple of the Diving God. For in the absence of the nobility, it was the priests who would receive him now.

  The square where he had been held captive, where the priests had danced in a dead man, the altar where Valdivia had been despatched to a Valhalla unknown to him, they all had their ghosts. But the worst ghost was perhaps the Diving God himself.

  Blue and immense, he hurtles down, through a knotted rope of sacrifice, immune to currents in the air or sea, for the saviour descends like a pilgrim hawk. Then he soars up and away.

  As light from the sea made ripples on the ripples of the murals, so in that ghost of a temple, what they did only gave a flickering life to what they were.

  But the priesthood, unless its prerogatives are in question, is always a hundred years behind events. He could do nothing with them.

  Yes, the foreigners from the sea had built a town. They discussed them as a man would discuss a cancer. It may destroy us. It may interfere with our natural functions. But it has nothing to do with us. That nodule is only the body’s guest, in the groin, at Salamanca. There was nothing to be worried about.

  “There wasn’t, was there?”

  Their assurance had a question in it. And that was ignoble. He did not want to see that.

  He set out for Salamanca de Xelha. That town, the original Salamanca, which he had never seen, wrested from the Moors, a university in a sea of mud, and a cathedral bland above squalor, meant something to Montejo. Otherwise he would not call his new towns always after it. But what did it mean? The middle classes are always trying to invent an aristocracy, even while their basic cautiousness prevents the existence of one. They want a title. But how can they know what a title means, when they will not even accept the risk of pre-eminence. For property is only half the story. Property gives one the right to be free, but the acquisition of it makes one a captive for life.

  No, such vaunting gestures could never vault the bar, if only because those who made them would not let go of the pole. And therefore they could not land where they wished, with that special ease of the ankle, that spurt of dust, that shows where one has been, up and over, but which leaves one unchanged, unmaimed by the experience, and eager to try that sport again.

  It is exhilarating, so, to raise the bar, and yet never, out of what one is capable of, to shake it loose.

  That sort of thing was beyond Montejo, as it was beyond the middle class. The middle class never dares itself on. For it does not love the game for itself. It only wants to win.

  Guerrero came to that town, and squatted in the weeds, to watch, his legs slim and bare. He watched everything, and the posture did not bother him. Always in Spain, he had watched his betters so, from hiding, as any man who sees through them must.

  But here, now, he had something better than a hut to go back to. And therefore he could see them plain.

  He summed up Montejo and his efforts very well.

  Salamanca de Xelha was nothing but a name on either side of a muddy swamp some men might call a street. You can live on a name, the noble Spaniards did, but you cannot live in one.

  Besides, it was a town, and these men were no colonists. They were conquistadores. In those days men had certain limitations. No matter how ambitious they might be, at best they were only good for destroying each other. They did not have the means to destroy the world they lived in as well. Therefore, when the world fought back, they found it unfair. It made them fret. The world did not play according to the rules men devise. And so the Spanish were frightened. They were frightened of the full weight of the world itself. They were accustomed to winning, but you cannot win against the world. Either it annihilates, or else it waits.

  Heat, heat, despite the rain, it steamed with heat. Their armour alternately sweated and then rusted. But heat has advantages as well as particulars. It served the peninsula of Yucatan very well.

  Having no one else to destroy, they began to plot among themselves.

  Montejo made things worse. He was not a coward. He was not stupid. But he was an administrator, looking desperately to find something to administer. And an administrator does not appear. He does not chat with the men. He issues directives. He was courageous in a battle, but he thought the real battles were fought indoors. He thought of Yucatan as an office in which one intrigues, according to the rules, for position, and is rewarded at last.

  Yes, Guerrero, by watching and by sending for messengers, and taking their reports, could see that very well. He even saw, one day, Montejo. The man was pale. He seldom ventured out in the sun.

  He seldom ventured out into the world at all. It was not necessary, though he had bravery of a kind. But this was the bravery that defends its investment, the bravery of a vixen at the end of its earth. And his burrow was his desk. He was one of the first to see Heaven as a sort of bureau, with God at the end of His desk, and Montejo, as deputy, at the end of his. Salvation and sanctity were investments, like any other. Everything was an investment. It paid its per cent. That was not usury. It did not involve the lending of money, which was, of course, accursed. But it did involve the giving of money, in return for a pourboire, which was not.

  And to Montejo, one had only to see him squinting to the sun to know that, the world went that way.

  Guerrero belonged to the older dispensation, the one the middle classes despise, but always have to come to terms with, when they come conquering in. But Guerrero was no conqueror. He did not have that greed to possess which makes the conqueror congenial to the entrepreneurs of this world. He was righting for what he had, not for what somebody else wanted. It was perhaps a fatal point of view. But it was his.

  Watching Montejo taking his outing, around the sloughs of that pompous, meaningless, transitory town, he felt nothing but disgust. Did that cautious, parsimonious, watchful, economic little blob of fat actually think it was a man?

  He overlooked that other kind of courage, the courage of tenacity. And so he did not see the better, and therefore, the more dangerous, side of Montejo.

  He had not the knowledge to see that Montejo was ahead of his time. He would have made an excellent Colbert, but in his own day men murdered and stole for what they got, and murdered and stole to keep it. The world had progressed once more to the extent of having lawyers for afterwards, which was a gain for lawyers. But his conquistadores had not yet reached the afterwards. They were living now. They wanted not a vice-president in charge of the board, but a commander.

  And even the bravest commander cannot very well lead his men against the rain, when he does not know what lies beyond it.

  If a man has the same stubborn thought, that rhythm makes it grow to an obsession.

  A few of these men had been with Cortés. They could make comparisons, and did. The country felt wrong.

  Montejo had his problems. Some of them he knew. Some he did not. He was a city man. The country was inimical to him. He did not understand the country.

  There was first of all this plague, to which the natives were immune. They took baths every day. They knew how to build a drain. The Spanish never bathed and had seldom seen a drain. They began to sicken and die. To a man called Luzan fell the honour of being the first Spaniard to be buried in that place. It was an honour the others deeply felt, for it is difficult to bury a man in the rain. Over his grave they put a cross made of two stripped palm leaves. The cross blew down.

  Very strange things sometimes live in palm trees. At first they did not know what was the devil of their death. But the men had little wounds that oozed, and made them feverish, before they died.

  There are so many devils in the world. Even the true believer is not protected against another man’s god
s, which, since they are demons, serve him, not us.

  Or were there men out there waiting, with some magic weapon of their own?

  The wounds multiplied. The men were too delirious to tell what had struck them down. At last, one of them saw it, a fluttering, timid, but voracious ball of fur, with very sharp teeth, red pig eyes, and an avid expression, its half-folded wings rumpled back, sitting on an arm or a neck, biting greedily, and sucking up the blood. Then it whirled squeaking away, and they could see there were others, chattering around the palm trees, as they set out to feed, swerving haphazard but sudden through the dense night air: vampire bats, something they had not heard of before, and did not want to see. They left an awkward wound.

  There were also blood-suckers, fleas, ticks, chiggers, mosquitoes, and gnats, centipedes and scorpions waiting in the warmth of an empty boot, and elaborate spiders, of which all men are afraid.

  The weeks went by and Montejo did nothing. There was nothing he could do. Food gave out. All this time the Catalan merchants had waited in their ships off shore, with only the soldiers for customers. They did not make good ones. Perhaps when the rains lifted, Montejo would get them customers.

  He seized their stores and fed his men. That might not have been so bad. He was a rich man and gave them letters of indemnity. But in their holds their fine cloth trade goods were rotting away. There was in particular the cloth of Courtrai. It was already mildewed and fallen to holes. Who here could buy the expensive cloth of Courtrai? It was no good for armour.

  The chief merchant was Juan Ote Duran. He began to plot. He wanted to turn back. There was no profit here.

  Guerrero saw his chance, he knew how desperate and how narrow-minded men such as Duran could be. The local natives did not like such strangers in their midst. Guerrero went to work. He did not have to work very hard. It was a new kind of war, the war of attrition, a war he was not adjusted to, but he learned fast.

  Quite quietly, the local Indians cut off supplies. Montejo was forced to send out raiding parties to scrounge for food. At first they stole it. Later they had to be more cautious. The Indians were clever at ambush. A few of the Spanish were killed or led away, and not heard of again.