A Signal Victory (12 page)

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.

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 Invasion 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 protect 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.

It was, for Guerrero, so beautiful a world. And therefore, these people insensitive to beauty, they should not have it.

And looking at his father-in-law, looking at his wife, he said, no man shall pull them down.

For those who do not understand love should never be allowed to see it. Better suicide, than to allow another man to pull such beauty down.

Two anxious years went by.

For the moment there was nothing Guerrero could do. You cannot help people until they realize they need help, and the Mayas were not yet alarmed. Until such time as they were, he could only send out spies and watch.

Besides, perhaps the Mayas were right. Time had gone by, and in Chetumal they were secure enough. It was easier to believe so. He pretended to himself that, like them, he did not know better. When the time came, they would fight.

But when is it time? To the losing side somehow it is always a little sooner or later, to the winning the time is always now. Yet it is sidereally the same time.

It was a problem to leave to the astronomers, who in this world were priests. It was something he did not wish to think about, for to him this was an important day.

Still, if they had founded a town, no matter where, that was dangerous.

His elder boy had come of age.

Chetumal had a special brightness, as though it had been burnt white between the twin mirrors of the sky and bay. He went early to the temple to make sacrifice, a matter of jabbing blood from the upper part of his ear with a thorn, and from his tongue. The contrived pain jerked him into an awareness of things such as others got from religious drugs. Too much time had made them sleepy. These imported Mexican rites helped to wake them up. It made familiar things new again, and there is nothing that better reassures us than a walk through the same dewy world again for the first time.

He liked his world so much. He got such relish out of it, for way back in memory, he had something to compare it to. It is a good thing, sometimes, to have these reminders of the scale of things, a person we once were, like a child, by which we can measure the extent of what we are now.

This boy would be a warrior. The younger one, as often in their ruling houses, would be a priest. It was a little like Europe, that arrangement, only better, for here, if you were born at the top, you stayed there. The ruler might change, few rulers were dynastic, but the ruling class itself was small. Like any secret society, it could not afford to lose a member. Now it had two more, for though he himself might still be an exotic, his sons were not.