A Signal Victory

by David Stacton

  Each night, if they could, for sometimes the current kept them offshore, they ate and slept on the beaches. There were no habitations, and very few natives. The region was poor, swampy, and impassable.

  Slowly the shore on their right began to rise, until at last they saw the faint blue of hills above the line of the forest. They were exhausted, and had not even come half-way. Their passage was now more difficult, floating among islands, a few feet above vast submerged sand bars. They had to move swiftly, or the tide would strand them on one of them.

  Off the mouth of what is now the Belize river, his son’s wife began to have labour pains. There was a settlement at Belize. He signalled to the others to follow, and then urging on his own rowers, peeled off from the flotilla, and headed for the shore.

  It would be a good place to rest and get provisions, and the child could be born there.

  To his surprise he was expected. The natives came out to meet them, bearing gifts of fruit and food. They had no news of Yucatan, but much of Honduras. Alvarado had arrived and founded two towns. Everyone knew what that meant.

  The natives called a midwife and settled Guerrero and his relatives in the stone building of their chief. Where was their chief? He had gone to Tayasal. When would he be back? They did not know.

  There was a reason for that welcome after all. Their leaders had all gone to Tayasal, for good. Their river led up country, to the uplands, and was the chief local means of getting there. Many travellers came through, and they hired themselves out as guides. There was a party here now, on the way. Things were disturbed in Honduras. The caciques there had not been able to hold Alvarado. He was now in the valley of the Rio de Ulua, trying to defeat the cacique Coçumba. The Spaniards could not be held. Neither could they be borne. They pulled down the temples.

  At Tayasal the temples could not be torn down. They stood in the middle of the lake. Even Cortés had had to turn back there.

  Guerrero went to talk to the party on its way, small nobles from Honduras. They did not have much to say. They had had more of the Spaniards than they had yet had in Yucatan. Refugees are much the same everywhere, but the rich are exiles, and exiles are different. It is not so much that they have more to lose than the poor, but they have power to lose, and that makes them haughty. They wander over the face of the earth, trying to find someone who remembers who they were. They are much given to waiting, like birds ruffled in an unexpected storm. Unlike refugees, they have no now. That made them shiver in their pomps. It made Guerrero shiver. One does not have to die to become a ghost.

  His son’s wife was in labour for eighteen hours. It gave him a long time to find out about Tayasal. At least the old life went on there, or something very like it. And something very like it is better than nothing, when we have been pushed too far.

  But how long could they hold out there?

  Longer perhaps than any other where, unless the Spanish could be defeated.

  He went down to see his men. It was now twilight. There had not been room enough for them in the village, so they were bivouacked on the beach. Out there, somewhere, across the dark gulf, lay Honduras and the Spanish army, perhaps a week away.

  When he got back to the chief’s house, the child had been born. A slave brought it out to show it to him. It was purple, wrinkled, and male. It made him feel angry. He knew now what must be done, for it contained a little bit of Ix Chan, Nachancan, his son, and even of himself. The child, its mother, and his son must go to Tayasal.

  For he knew now why they loved children and hated death so much. It was because they loved the world so much that they wanted someone else always to be there to see it too, even though they were dead and could no longer see it themselves. And indeed their world was beautiful. It must be allowed to go on. It was well worth the seeing. It would be some victory over the Spaniards if even this little of it could survive to be seen.

  And what did men like Montejo and Alvarado see? The better of them marvelled at what they saw, but all the same they destroyed it.

  This was something they should not have.

  It took him a while to talk his son around. His son was eager to fight. But his wife and child could not make the journey alone, and someone would have to treat with the rulers of Tayasal. Guerrero was still a rich man. His wealth had shrunk to a bag of jades, but jade, for which the Spanish had no use, was to the Maya the most valuable of all substances. And a warrior of the prestige of his son would not be unwanted in Tayasal, for the city was, among other things, a heavily armed camp.

  Guerrero went with them up the river, saying he would be back in a week. His men could use a week’s rest. They did not grumble. Something about his manner must have told them he would be back.

  He did not go with Hun Imix all the way. There was not the time, and besides something inside him did not want to see Tayasal. The men of the village were excellent guides, and there were slaves along for portage, when the river turned into rapids and became impassable.

  They passed out of the foothills, and came into the rolling mountain savannah country. The going here was easier. And here he left them. From the edge of the forest he watched them out of sight. They disappeared round a bend. Then he was alone, as he had been at the beginning, when first he had come to this world. He had said he would send word to his son in a month or two, but he knew that no word would be sent. Instead he sent them on, into that future which to the Maya was always the past of their race come round again.

  Perhaps, one day, he would come round again, but somehow he did not think so.

  What does one say to a son? It is someone one sends into the future, to get things ready for the family worship of the gens. The gens is even more important than the lares and penates, which by and large are only superstitious vanities, of whom we ask the same profitless questions, generation after generation.

  But though we think we are thinking creatures, thought is just one of the hard-bought little luxuries of the nature of the beast. Since usually our grandfather’s bought it we think it both our nature and our right. But if we buy it for ourselves, in our own lifetime, we see it differently, and understand it is nothing, beside the perpetuation and the unconscious worship of the gens.

  Yet it is just that worship which alienates our children. We can never know them. They resent us too much, first for loving them, and second for refusing to let them be themselves. For we love in them not themselves, but the perpetuation of the gens and the repetition of ourselves. And since it is not until forty that they realize they do repeat us, or take any pleasure from the fact even if they do realize it before, since it will not be until then that they will feel about their own children and the gens as we do, then alas, there is always the barrier between. He might adore Ix Hun’s physical perfection, the muscular certainty of his calves, the open, innocent honesty of his chest, but these things he adored only as an idealized summary of his own lost youth.

  So parents and children can never get along, except uneasily. And yet we love our children. We miss them. We always want to see them again. We never give up hope, that at least they will survive, and that one day, though the day never comes, we and they may be at ease because equivalent.

  He had sent Ix Hun not to Tayasal, but to the future. It was what Ix Chan would have wished. Now he was left with the present. It seemed a little empty.

  The guides and bearers left him alone. He was glad of that. He felt empty and torn to shreds. He had so much to remember, and so little, now, to do. But still, it is better to feel, even though it hurts, than not to feel. It was good to be alive, even though some men would say contrariwise. It was good to know that one would be continued, up there, at Tayasal.

  But good or not, it did hurt. He had loved them all. He had even loved this son, who was half Ix Chan.

  He had even loved the other one. For fool or not, the other one was also his.

  So he did not go back at once. He had one last thing to do. The bundle of jade he had given to his son. But there was another bu
ndle.

  That night he spent in the ruins of Tikal, which was not far away. It was, though he did not know it, the oldest of the Maya cities, the one they had come from. The bearers did not like to be there very much. It was two thousand years old, and like all such places, was not exactly reassuring.

  He had spent much time in their ruins, and always times like this, in between, just after or just before something. He sat up very late, beside a campfire, in the rustling clearing that had once been the main plaza. The tall narrow temples climbed up to the sky, confused with shrubbery and trees. The foliage seemed full of their gods, but they did not frighten him. Like himself, like forest animals, they were going away. There was only the sound, now and then, of a twig incautiously stepped on and so broken.

  They had gentler gods in their pantheon as well as fierce. But those were always the first to leave. Those had already gone: the goddess of maize, the goddess of childbirth, the goddess of marriage, and even, sometimes, the god of death.

  He fell asleep.

  In the morning, some distance outside the ruins, he found what he was looking for, a shallow cave in the limestone, half hidden by ferns, but dry. Caves were sacred places. The others would not go in. He went in alone. There was a rude stone shelf, packed with little clay idols, old and dusty and brittle to the touch. He placed his bundle there, without bothering to unwrap it.

  It contained that katun bundle codex his second son had given him, without recognizing him. Alone in the cave, wrapped in hemp, the little coloured gods would march after each other year after year. Perhaps someone would be able to read them someday. He stood there for a moment and then left.

  Outside the cave he interrupted the intently meaningless ruminations of a female deer. It stared at him and then loped away, but its eyes had been soft and large.

  It would have been an omen, had he believed in omens. As it was he was merely touched. He went back downstream to the village, and set out across the Gulf.

  Yet his name was Ah Ceh, which meant “the deer”, so he must have thought about that deer a little. He must not forget his name.

  For the deer is the symbol of loss. They come down to the water, they watch us from the edge of the meadow, those creatures. Slim, spotted, young, by their nature aristocratic, tentative, uncertain, wide-eyed, innocent, naked, they yet know what the world means. Their sides quiver. Their slim, brittle, dangerous legs scarcely seem to support them. They stare and stare. They reach that kind of decision which is no decision, but only an experience older than they are. They watch, they examine, they whirl and gallop, as though strangulated, away.

  In a stream, deliberately, they drop their green excrement.

  And with a slightly painful, heart-twisting elegance of their necks, they droop to browse, and even so, they watch, their big lustrous eyes full of the pain of beauty.

  Together, as at a signal, no matter how harmless our intent, how surprised our wonder, they turn and stare at us, with the awful gravity of the condemned, who condemn us, just by being, for hunting them.

  And their little pleasures, their little sexual delights in a moonstruck meadow powdered with flowers, have such a stolen transience, and such a pathos. They are aware, and yet have not the brains to know they are. It is because they see everything always for the first time.

  And their vulnerable streaked and spotted foals, wet, and hiding in the grasses, have such a slightly bothered, wet-muzzled, reserved way of finding themselves alive.

  And then they stand up, rickety, their glass legs wobble, their bob tail going up has the effect of the midwife’s smack into life, and utterly astonished to find themselves where they are, they have to go on living.

  They grow a little thick. They grow a little sedate. Though always aware of danger, they are always willing to play.

  And then, sometimes, they come down to the stream, and if we are there, they watch us, watch us, watch us. Their big eyes are mirrors, in which we may see what we know of ourselves, which is not what they know of us.

  And when, having made up their minds, they dart away, it is as though we too had vanished. As though we had been ripped away, out of the now where we think we are.

  And so they are the animal of leave-taking, of loss, of parting.

  And while we watch them, our hearts are torn out.

  XXXI

  He was right. The Spaniards could not be beaten. And behind him, somewhere, Sotuta and Mani were at war. The Xiu, it was said, had sent for some friars who had arrived at Champoton. The Xiu meant to win. What could they win?

  Honduras was not Yucatan. The people were more fierce, and the landscape gave better cover. But Alvarado was not Montejo, either. The cacique of Coçumba was locked up in a strongly fortified town on a plateau above the Rio de Ulua, and Alvarado was outside it, and had been outside it for two weeks. He had cut off supplies, and water was running short. Guerrero had glimpsed him once or twice, in the distance, riding along his lines, a tall, black clad figure who knew exactly what to do. Among other things he knew how to keep himself and his men out of arrow shot, and safe from marauders.

  He had harquebuses, archers, and small cannon. He had settled down to wait.

  It seemed to Guerrero that he had seen him once before, somewhere, he could not remember where, but only that wherever it was, it had been raining. He crouched to watch, but he knew it was only a matter, now, of days. How much of his life had he spent crouched in the weeds, watching? How much of his life does any man spend in those weeds, watching?

  Inside the fortification they could wait no longer. They knew very well the battle could not be won, for Alvarado was not the man to be taken by surprise, but they also knew they did not mean to be starved into submission either.

  To die in battle is not exactly suicide, but if his world was going down, Guerrero wanted to go down with it. So, apparently, did the cacique of Coçumba. Neither man said anything, but each dressed with care. The men could desert. They could not.

  Coçumba was only a strongly fortified hill fort. It was austere. Yet it had within it all the elements of their own world, which were precious to them, and which they must leave, because they were not precious to this new world outside.

  They knew that. It did not make them solemn. It made them a little too gay.

  Self-immolation, unlike suicide, or the terminal taunts of self-contemptuous saints, is not such an easy, and yet is a more amiable matter. Iphigenia, at least, though at the behest of the inexorable, had the justification of personal, reasons for her sacrifice, was translated, and ascended, even out there, at the end of the Black Sea. But this was a final situation. Hers was a personal world, but theirs an impersonal situation. The decision had made it so.

  And yet, even when we are glad to leave, we are never glad to say good-bye. They took a last look round, and a little after dawn, on 14th August 1536, they left their fortifications and attacked. The men did not desert. There is some contagion in a good example, after all. They streamed, screaming and yelling, the last exemplars of an exemplary race, uphill towards the slight rise where Alvarado’s men were mustered.

  Alvarado was a good commander. He was not taken by surprise. He was only surprised, and a little suspicious, that it should be so easy. He fired his cannon.

  The Indians wavered, but came on. It took time to reload a cannon in those days. Therefore he brought up the harquebuses.

  Guerrero had hoped for a last personal duel. He and the cacique were out in front of the charge. The splay of shot hit them both in the face, and that was the end of it.

  It was what in the despatches is called an instantaneous death. Merciful, they say. Yet no death is instantaneous. They must have had the time to think of everything before they fell. The world must have looked so agonizingly crisp and worth living for, just because it was there. They must have found so much to say good-bye to in so little time.

  Then they lay still.

  The Spaniards went on fighting. It was easy for them. There were so many on the oth
er side who wished to die. So of course they won. They had the cannon.

  Then the smoke cleared and the battlefield came up into focus, with its abandoned dolls, lying here and there.

  The Spaniards went out to loot the dead, found Guerrero, and reported his death to Alvarado. A little uncomfortable, despite himself, Alvarado went out to look.

  He had no idea why he felt uncomfortable. Yet as he stared down at that body, he had a feeling of lost identity, a sort of panic went through him about who he was, about what life was.

  Yet he saw, since the Spaniards, like most people, recognized no excellence but their own, only the body of a common sailor, a renegade, and no Christian, disgracefully got up like one of the heathen, but for that reason, a dangerous enemy, and now at last dead.

  He was not a man ever to ask difficult questions. He spat and walked back to camp.

  And yet he felt uneasy. Something, he felt, had got away from him.

  XXXII

  It was the end. The Maya would fight on, they fought until 1917, they will always fight, but still it was the end. They were left, but their world had gone away.

  At a few of their altars, even now, deep in the jungle, you may find a candle burning, as they left copal burning, in their day, in empty Chichen or Coba. But that means nothing. That is only piety that has forgotten what it worships.

  But in 1536, even the Spanish, surrounded by that suddenly hushed world, sitting in their canteen, who had no use for the world, felt awkward all the same. Perhaps they felt all around them the presence of something they did not even know the name of, the inexorability of lost time.

  That night the moon rose as usual, over all the ruined cities and the cities soon to be ruined of that empire. It was a solemn sight, it was like a sigh, but there was no Spaniard out to see it. They were an indoor people, like all those who feel safer when the landscape is bleak. They were not haunted by the beauty of the now, except to know what it was worth to them, and if it was worth nothing to them, to tear it down.