A Signal Victory

by David Stacton

  It was a large snail. It had been whitewashed over almost a year ago. The thing was impossible. But here it was, alive. God knows how it had survived, but it was beginning to move again. It felt damp against his hand, and its head moved to and fro, its antennae were like two drops of quivering dew.

  He put it down in a clump of weeds and laughed. It made all the difference. He had a reason for going on. He would wait and watch and survive, and when the Spanish came back, he would fight them. He would fight them until he died, wherever he could find them. All he needed was the chance. He had something to live for again. He had death.

  He strode out of the courtyard, and on the edge of the plaza, stopped. Across it his son was wavering out of the ruins of the priests’ quarters. The figure dodged back, and then came into view again, hesitated, and then beckoned.

  Guerrero stood stock still. He did not want to be recognized by anything that had come to that. That would be too much. He tightened his lips. He had not had any use for that younger son for years, but what had happened to him was another reason for fighting back. He strode erect across the plaza.

  He need not have feared. He was not recognized. He had forgotten. He was still dressed as a noble and a warrior. His son remembered nothing. He saw only someone in authority, and that was what he wanted, someone in authority. It was the absence of anyone to tell him what to do which had driven him to this state. He was one of those people who cannot survive the destruction of what they believe in, not because they believe in it so much, but simply because they have no spine of their own.

  Guerrero let himself be led inside the building. He had never been there before. It was a rabbit warren of little rooms with high corbel vaulting and almost no light, narrow courts, and a shambles everywhere. The Spanish had obviously used it as a stable.

  They came to a small room, smelly and occupied. On a stone bench was a pile of books, folded out every way, like little screens. Guerrero did not know what they were, but his son began to babble.

  They were the katun books and histories. Across the sized sheets the bright little gods and symbols confronted each other, each panel what had happened and what would happen again. They proved everything. His son said so. Life was not around them. Life meant nothing. Life was in the books. They told you what would happen. They told you what to do. They made the world safe and predictable. So long as they existed, the world would exist, unchanged.

  His son looked up for a gloating moment of shy and stubborn pleasure. It said here they would all come back. The city would live again. Nothing was wrong. The high priest, now dead, had miscalculated, that was all. He had rectified all that, by collating copies. One had only to look here, to see that. The world was safe wasn’t it? He pleaded to know. For an instant there was a dim echo of recognition in those eyes, but to Guerrero’s relief it went away. He felt sick.

  It said, it said, it said, the poor crazy voice rambled on and on, eager and cajoling, pointing a grimy finger now at this little ideogram and now at that. It was true wasn’t it? It had to be.

  Guerrero said yes. He had to get out of there. He was beginning to lose his temper with the world. Why couldn’t this poor creature die?

  It was worse than Aguilar. It was a punishment, but for whom and to what? Some people are born faulty. We cannot blame ourselves for that.

  He did not get out of there, without having to take one of the books with him. He saw in his son’s eyes the awful cunning of paranoia. The book was the future. He was to hide it somewhere, so the future would be safe. So the priests and the gods would come back again, and everything would be the way it was supposed to be. He wanted nothing for himself.

  Guerrero took it and fled. He went on to Bacalar, where Nachancan’s nephew now ruled. He wanted very much now to see Nachancan’s nephew. But that afternoon he held the codex across his knees, in a clearing, glad that he could neither read nor interpret it. For madness is one thing, but suppose it told the truth? The future is something no one but a madman would want to know, for only the future can give us hope.

  At Bacalar he learned that his elder son was safe at Sotuta. The headman was dead, and he had taken service there, under the cacique.

  He sent for him at once, for he had learned something else. The Spanish were back, though not yet in Yucatan, and so was Montejo, though now he was younger and had a different name. He was called Alvarado.

  He knew what to do now. That glimpse of his younger son had given him back his self again. Now he had no doubts. For he had seen something. Life is a little exercise. When we are young we think it is a rehearsal, and everything we do badly now, we will do better later. But he had changed lives, from a childhood in Spain, to what he had always wanted and respect, here. He had taken up another self. So more than most, he could see that anything we selflessly love, even it be our persona, is a parallel activity, less elementary than the Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyala, by which we achieve selflessness, even through absorption in ourselves, if our own lives be our hobby.

  But like the process by which a mystic attains insight, every life has both a progression and a shape, which, if we follow it, gives us insight on our death-bed, but which if we flinch from that inevitable terminal act, and try to find a way out, means nothing.

  He would no longer flinch. Like the society he had been accepted into, he wanted to go away complete. And he so attained insight, and could not be beaten. Every life has its signal victory, and the victory over the self is the best o these, for it leaves us free to be ourselves. And to be ourselves, we must sometimes die.

  But die in the right way.

  Now he knew that way. It too was inevitable.

  And as do all irreversible acts, decision gave him a magisterial freedom. It gave him back that second youth, which comes after decisions have been made, a second adolescence, if you wish, since adolescence is the age of choice.

  He felt young again, but a little heavier about the gut and chest. And yet the gravity of a trim fifty is very like the gravity of youth: at least in a man.

  XXIX

  Events were to assist him.

  For Montejo was also a man who could not be beaten, because he could only be killed. Perhaps he wanted Yucatan merely because he could not have it, perhaps because there was nothing else he could have. He wrangled a grant from the Crown which made him Governor of all the disputed land between Tabasco and Honduras, not because he was greedy, but because he believed that every piece of land on which he or his lieutenants set foot belonged to him, just because there might be some profit in it, and because he had your true banker’s innate respect for real estate.

  But Honduras was far away and inaccessible over mountains to the south. It was closer to Guatemala than to Mexico. Therefore Alvarado, the conqueror of Guatemala, appeared in Higueras, the capital, and took it for himself.

  That was what Alvarado was, a conqueror. He was one of the men who had helped Cortés sack Mexico, but he was also a man who would be young on his death-bed, and who was incapable of an interest in cautious investments, long-term gains, or real estate. He did not see the world in those terms, for his passion was for power, pomp, and war. Like a feral creature, say a jaguar of these jungles, he suffered from boredom. It was boredom that drove him to kill more than he could eat. He killed for sport.

  Of all that Guerrero knew nothing, but refugees from Honduras brought the news soon enough, that the Spaniards were back, marching from the mountains of the interior, towards Higueras and the coast. The battle was on again. And the only way to keep these devils out of Yucatan, was to fight them where they were.

  Even the Maya were willing for once to co-operate, for the uplands of Guatemala and Honduras were their heart land. It was from there they had first come, and to there, a hundred years ago, that the Itza had gone, back to their origins, on an island in Lake Tayasal.

  The Spanish were driven out of Yucatan, and yet you heard a little about Lake Tayasal everywhere now. It was the palladium, the redoubt, the refuge of t
heir world, the last stronghold, a place no Spaniard could touch. Their world was in ashes. But there, it was said, it still burnt and flickered on, as in the days before the Spanish arrival.

  A good many priests, in particular, had gone there, to keep themselves and the old religion alive, to be able to go on bribing the gods for the good things of life, and for the survival of the Maya. It was said that the Christian friars were coming back to Champoton, and a priest knows a fellow fanatic when he sees one. It was better to take the gods off to some place of security. It was better to take the old life off somewhere where it was still understood, and where there would be no one to touch it.

  Honduras was holy. But that did not prevent Cerezeda, the Spanish governor at Higueras, from beginning a campaign against the cacique of Coçumba, in the valley of the Rio de Ulua. That was too close to Tayasal to be countenanced. So far he had had no success, but now Alvarado was coming, and everyone knew what that would mean.

  Guerrero agreed to lead a force of Maya warriors across the Bay of Honduras to Coçumba. But he refused to leave without his son. Yet time went on, it was the summer of 1536, and still his son did not come. Guerrero could not delay much longer. He set out for Sotuta to fetch him.

  Yucatan had already become unreal to him, as a place does once we have decided to leave it. Since we never expect to see it again, already, even though we are still there, we do not see it. He knew what he was doing. He knew he could not win. His journey had the unendurable pathos of a prolonged good-bye.

  Yucatan was still like a garden, in which he had played for years, it was still recognizable, but it was like a garden after the heat of summer, when the flowers, though still gorgeous, wilt, and the last buds, even though the sun has sprung them open, we know will never bloom. There was a tendency to move on tiptoe, where formerly they had moved with assurance. There was a desperation now in what had once seemed a matter of course, the doing of the same old daily things.

  And again and again he heard that word, Tayasal.

  Never mind. He had his own plans for Tayasal.

  Everyone knew he was raising an expedition. A few of those who saw what had happened to their world, looking at that mask which his face had become, may even have known, and agreed with, his real purpose. There were many who were willing to go with him. He had his pick, and a pick was what he needed. He would take only those men who had had experience in fighting the Spaniards, and, as he crossed the peninsula and found them, he sent them back to the rallying point at Bacalar, where canoes were being prepared for the crossing of the gulf. One never knew. Because one has decided to die, does not mean that one will not fight for one’s life. Indeed, honourably, such a decision makes one fight all the harder. One must meet the conditions.

  And all those who had something more than themselves to lose, the caciques, the priests, those who were less individual men than embodiments of the sacred nature of the race, chose to go with him, for the same reason that he himself was going: because it was better to take their world away with them, than to survive it.

  He travelled swiftly, through partially dismantled, partly damaged towns. Nothing had been repaired. It was as though even the common people knew, or were at least waiting, to see if perhaps, against all hope, their worst fears might not be unjustified.

  He soon reached Sotuta, found neither his son nor the caciques were there, learned they were south, at the smaller capital of Otzmal, on the borders of Mani, and hoping that did not mean another suicidal internecine petty war, hurried on.

  He was now travelling in some state, suitable to a man of his age and position, or the pomp with which Cleopatra was conducted the first time to her pyramid, with the difference, that being a man, he knew that hope, though a good companion, is a poor adviser, and therefore meant to go to that pyramid only once.

  As for pomp, he could not be bothered about such things himself, but it was the habit of the country, and made travelling much easier.

  No matter what we do, even if, as he had done, we have changed worlds to free the self, eventually we become trapped in our own character. Even though we think differently than we have conditioned ourselves to do, believe otherwise, feel in another way, as soon as life begins to turn down, we cannot resist or hold back, even though we want to, our lives flow down the same groves of habit, willy nilly, in response to the gravity of that character we inhabit, which is not the shell of the hermit crab, but the creature inside it, who too late to change shells finds the one he has chosen leaves him no more room to grow.

  So every man of public eminence, as he was now, every person of decided character, as he had always been, is, if you look, only an impersonal mask, a work of art, a jointed doll, out of whose eye-holes stare the eyes of a trapped child, who moves the arms and legs, speaks through the mouth, articulates the facial muscles, but absent-mindedly, expertly, wanting very much some less constricting persona to play with, but doomed all the same always to be shut up in the same inexpressive, mortal, and decaying automaton, saying, I am young, let me out.

  A group of such people, talking, is not very reassuring. For they all share the same trade secret, they all want to get out and play with each other, say what they really mean, confess at last to someone like themselves, that they are only seven, but they have so perfected the performance with those jointed dolls, themselves, that they cannot even say so. They have to go through the same motions. Only the expression in the eyes allows them sometimes to show what they really are. For to be locked up in the self is so lonely, and quite inevitable. It is only before the character is formed that we can get out for a while, with someone else, and be ourselves.

  So Guerrero thought, I am killing this body, because I do not want to live in this world any more. I would prefer to die myself, rather than see what they will do to this body, to this world. And yet, since the performance was about to be over, he rather liked to watch it, as an actor, finally giving in to curiosity, on the 1,000th night of the play, lets his understudy go on, only however, if the understudy is not apt to make a sensation, and slipping into the back of the house, watches himself in the play.

  For really, he had never got over the sense of wonder that here was he, Gonzalo Guerrero of Nieto, who might have seemed a peasant to the world, fitting the role of Ah Ceh so well, that never again would he be allowed to play, or even want to play, any other part. For do not character actors become, for all but a small either delighted or discomfited segment of themselves, the part which has so well served them in the world? Your actor with a genius for disguise, who never plays the same part twice, is a rarity, an anomaly, and personally, a distress. For an actor like that has never become aware of himself. He seeks the self in a diversity of appearance, becomes a plural schizophrenic who changes so often, that he had never been caught out in one role long enough for the disease to be identified, or to catch up with him. No, the actor is not himself. So he is the person he has become. It is a form of protective mimicry. One becomes oneself, in order to escape detection. But under what a thing is lies what it really is. It is a great collaboration, a secret entente, which in turn has secret treaty clauses, which we call mental reservations, and which give the play its true though not its apparent meaning.

  Indeed, we are so lonely, in this busy emptiness of life, that it is only so, wandering in our persona on the stage, that we can meet other people at all. For we can never meet other people at all. We can only meet personas like ourselves, with whom we act out an intimate drama, to the applause of the cosmic opera house. Drawing-room comedy is only Greek tragedy for those who cannot feel any more; the morality play, the miracle play, and Everyman, only the best part for those whose abilities are limited.

  The analogy was endless.

  Before the cathedral, on that two-storied cart the world, the tinker acts out the drunkenness of Noah, the privations of Job, and the madness of Nebuchadnezzar. Before the altars and the palaces of Otzmal, he danced, as years ago the priest of Tulum had in dancing inside the skin of V
aldivia given Valdivia a meaning, the life of Ah Ceh. But the play was over. The repertory company had split up. His wife, his daughter were dead, his younger son was mad, and had always been despicable. The theatre was condemned.

  And now, he was here for one last theatre party, on the familiar stage, but with the houselights out.

  Of course Guerrero did not think of it in those terms.

  But he did think of it in that way.

  He looked at his son. He was no Job, nor was there much dignity in the Lamentations of Jeremiah. He preferred this Maya world. It was the highest honour and the best place, it meant something, he hated to see the old traditions torn down, or what was worse, made meaningless. He knew they would be. The old order passes and no one seems to care, in particular, the greater number of those who will pass with it do not seem to care. Only long afterwards, when the time has come to dig the old order up again, do those who won out over it see how much they thereby lost.

  The Maya were a processional people. They looked neither to left nor right. In a stately manner they moved off gravely into eternity, and he had joined the procession. That was as it should be. It was what he had wished. It even filled him with a certain awe. But he was almost fifty. His son must go on. The name must survive.

  For even more than what we are, we want what we love always to be there, untouchable, after us.

  But in his day they were not so far from reality as that. The Spaniards, though ignorant of India, still played circular chess. The prime minister was called a queen. Time had elapsed so much as that. But a bishop was still a bishop, a rook a rook, a knight a knight, and a pawn was a pawn. All of them, in the co-operation of that enormous two-sided parable the board, which in circular chess, such is the refinement of the oriental mind, had no sides at all, knew their movements and their places.

  But the Maya were an oriental people. It was the Wheel of the Sun they followed, not the triune verity. They were a subtler people than the Occidental. They could see that we know where we are only because the same constantly revolving pattern reaches over and over again the same position, only to pass on to the next, and that nothing, like a pyramid of smoke, goes up to heaven and that’s the end of it. Even the gods die and are replaced and come back again. Brahma breathes the world in and out, and is himself breathed in and out. It and he are the same in all respects each time, and yet they are not the same example of themselves. He does it by the katun, the aeon, and momently. Just because it is, nothing is. And simply because it is not, it is eternal. Everything is passing, because it does not pass.