Hunger's Brides (63 page)

Sleep well,

Carlos

8th day of December, 1667

Pital

Juana,

I am sorry to take so long to reply. Your letter took longer to reach me here.

Today Pital is just a fishing village on a lake, one of many linked in a network of canals and streams. The beaches are black, laced by the runnels of freshwater springs—some steaming, others deliciously cool. The shore lies shrouded in jungle and studded with curious hillocks; but on closer inspection one sees these arranged along straight broad avenues starting out from the shore. Only those building mounds immediately surrounding the village have been kept clear of the encroaching jungle.

Your letter might have taken longer still, had not Brother Cuadros's interpreter brought it in from the monastery on his way down from the capital. We thought he had come too late, but it turns out he is just in time. Just as we were preparing to return to the monastery last week, a village youth came to offer his help with the codex.

Although Fray Cuadros seems perfectly fluent to me, this new science, as practised by the Franciscans, requires that the Indian testimonies be recorded with rigorous precision. Which means, in this case, two interpreters—one whose mother tongue is Castilian, the other a native speaker of Nahuatl. The two must constantly check each other's assumptions and understandings, which are in turn tested against the testimonies of others.

This former student of his is most impressive. Brother Cuadros tells me Juan de Alva Ixtlilxochitl has become their foremost translator of the Bible into the Mexican language. Their secret project is to prepare together a version of the Song of Song
s
for the day when the Church deems it safe to translate. Incredibly enough, Juan's direct ancestor was
Nezahualcoyotl himself, the legendary poet-emperor. I indulge in the hope that this might finally be incitement enough to bring you here—this
is
your grandfather's work we are at. As for myself, I feel at last that my life might be close to acquiring a more weighty purpose. Surely at twenty-three it cannot be too late for me? I am like a man from the mountains first finding the sea.

And yet for all the combined skill and vast knowledge of our interpreters, the work proceeds haltingly. We suspect the boy either knows more than he lets on, or has not been completely initiated. “Did someone send you?” we ask but get no reply. At least we now have full access to the codex.

Juan de Alva and Fray Cuadros now concur: The book travelled here with a party of Mexican priests fleeing after the sack of their capital. Our codex begins where, after the kidnapping and subsequent death of Moctezuma, Cortés's army—routed and driven from the capital—returns battered and bloody to Cholula, a city swirling with rumours. Everyone, including the Spaniards, is desperate to understand what has just happened. Then, as now, so much depends on the translation. The conquest of our New Eden hanging in the balance …

The picture script shows us the wife of a Cholulan general, who goes to meet Cortés's beautiful interpreter in the market—the Spaniards have not eaten for three days. Each woman angles for information. The interpreter Malintzin apparently wins the contest, since at some point her new friend, thoroughly captivated, first warns then begs her not to go back to the compound where the Spaniards are housed. An ambush is planned. Malintzin is able to spin out their talk for long enough to piece together all the details of the attack. She then returns to the compound on the pretext of salvaging her personal affairs and forewarns the Spaniards.

This codex, then, contains the gossip she left with the general's wife, an account of Moctezuma's last days as a captive in the very heart of his own empire.

As I sit here among the ruins and conjure up the scene of these two women gossiping amiably in a marketplace, yet with such deadly implications, I think of Scheherazade. And of you, the palace's most enchanting songbird singing for her life.

ever yours, Carlos

2nd day of January, 1668

Pital

Dear Juana Inés,

I wish you a prosperous new year. I truly hope you celebrated it surrounded by friends, as I have.

Cuadros is kind and learned and generous, and our Juan de Alva looks every bit the Indian prince in face and bearing yet conducts himself in all humility. He is without a doubt the most handsome man I have seen. A
mestizo
, and therefore more an exile in America than even we are, he works ceaselessly, speaking with the natives, learning details of their dialect, patiently listening, gaining their trust. He and Cuadros are teaching me some of the Mexican language. So you and I shall be able to converse a little in the language of your childhood when I get back to Mexico….

For my part I have been unwell, too feverish to concentrate long. At the fever's highest pitch, their healer came to sit with me. He examined me closely for evidence of bites, then, presumably to join me in my delirium, ingested quantities of a dried toadstool in order to complete his diagnosis. I give Brother Cuadros great credit for permitting his visit. It appears my condition was precarious and Cuadros had seen native healers work wonders with fevers similarly severe. My recovery has been equally wondrous. I am being treated for a loss of soul.

Cuadros smiles and tells me the diagnosis is only natural, since the native Americans have three souls to the Christians' one.

With the worst over now, I divide my time between short, shaky walks around the village and visits to the healer, where I strip naked to be swept clean of noxious spirits by egret's wings. I then drink a bitter broth and, perspiring rivers, sleep a peaceful siesta beneath leaves the size of parasols.

My walks have been fascinating. More than once have I heard the Indians' capacity for work praised in the same measure as their short lifespan is lamented. But then, I had never seen an Indian settlement not in service to the Crown. While I do see great industry, I see also many old white heads….

What strikes me most forcibly is what I can only call a genius for fashioning fine tools and materials from this wild place. Cylindrical fish traps of woven reeds, three-pronged spears tipped with horn and bone. All manner of baskets and platters and ladles. Polished and painted gourds. Spinning drills for piercing jewellery, and a sort of
tarabilla:
by
pulling at handles mounted on a drum one drives an axle that in turn twists fibres of hennequen and agave into ropes fabulously strong. The principle of the wheel, Juana, they seem to have mastered quite nicely on their own.

On the twentieth, we helped the people of Pital mark the winter solstice. Even in the ruins, they preserve the ancient knowledge of the heavens. How this gladdens my astronomer's heart! Four days later we celebrated Christmas Mass. I should not have been surprised that these villagers have at least a rudimentary knowledge of the sacraments. Christians have after all passed through here from time to time. But Juanita, to see a native American so willingly taking the host into his mouth …

I know you are not a little disdainful of this theory of ours bringing Saint Thomas to the New World. Much more troubling to me is your observation that our theory risks making the spiritual glories of the Americas mere mimicry, and the Indians incapable of getting the details straight. But consider for a moment the Mexican conception of the Eucharist. For the centrepiece of their most holy festival, their priests grind seeds and grains into maize flour, then, stirring in quantities of blood, make out of this dough a man-sized figure. After which, at the close of a month of processions an arrow is shot through the figure's chest by an archer whom they equate with the Feathered Serpent, Quetzalcoatl. Each member of the community then receives with great awe and weeping a portion of the body and, having swallowed its flesh, cries out—
Teocualo!
God is eaten.

God is eaten
, is this the savage hunger of a cannibal or the hunger of the human spirit for communion with its god? They even possess an equivalent to our Holy Wafer, in the form of little idols of dough, which they call ‘food of our soul.' Who could help but recall the Gospel of John?

Whosever eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life…
.

The great glory of the Mexican spirit is to have perceived as well as any Christian theologian the deepest intent of Christ's ultimate sacrifice. We ourselves might well have worshipped exactly as they did, had Christ not revealed to us He wished otherwise. Indeed, the Mexicans understood this alternative perfectly, for it was from the Feathered Serpent that they had chosen to turn away, their god-prince who forbade the sacrifice of men and yet sacrificed himself.

You knew, perhaps, that the Mexicans baptized their infants as we do,
and that they practised confession leading to absolution. That their earthly paradise was lost when a woman ate of a forbidden fruit. Heresy, the Inquisition will call it, but how can it be heresy when we have so miserably failed to communicate a deeper understanding of our Faith? Monasteries and convents, the symbol of the Cross, and a young man-god who willingly sacrifices himself while promising to return—so much our peoples already shared! So much in fact that the Dominicans have convinced themselves Satan, no less, must have visited America to propagate a perversion of the Gospels. Who, indeed, could blame them?—to cross an ocean and find a faith in many ways more similar to ours than that of the Jews or the Moors.
³⁶

No, Juana, it is undeniable. An overwhelming series of correspondences exists between the Old World and the New—if, as you have often argued, Egypt shaped our beliefs as much as did Greece, perhaps we should really be looking much further back than Saint Thomas. Lucian writes of grain ships of two thousand tons' displacement leaving your beloved Alexandria. If the Egyptians could sail around Africa, and the Phoenicians dispatch fifty ships to colonize its west coast, then why not here?

Such similarities in weaving, pottery and metal work. Both architectures developing spiral staircases, sculptured doorways and lintels—pyramids and hieroglyphs. The same insignia of kingship—sceptres, canopies, palanquins, the conch shell as royal trumpet …
³⁷

I walk through the ruins of this city that encompasses the village and see glimpses of these things. A long colonnade … pillars weeping lichen and lime. Fragments of fresco under moss, itself bright as paint—a face in profile, a bundle of reeds, daubs of hectic red, cobalt. Pale lintels carved with stone flowers and leaves. Sprouting from the midst of these, living rose-pink polyps, sprays of orchids and other leaves green and alive.

I have come to see this city laid out around me as a text, a living palimpsest slowly being rewritten by older scribes of Time and Vegetation—and deciphered at hazard now as I turn, wander, glancing this way and that, as if to follow the waver of a finger down a page….

So now I turn your question back to you: If not through the visit of an Old World apostle how to explain such bewildering similarities in the New? We have been talking here about little else lately. Fray Cuadros can go on relentlessly reciting the lists he's compiled. Still more wondrous to me than these twinned inventions of the world are those of the spirit. In
both the Mexican and Egyptian skies, a hero is birthed from the waters of darkness, beset by dragons, forges a hazardous passage through the heavens, is devoured at dusk in the Western lands of death …
then is resurrected
.

For the villagers here, as for the ancient Mexicans, the world has already been created and annihilated four times. And the Fifth Sun, which passes over us today, will also die, and will be the last. At the end of every fifty-two-year cycle, their universe hovers between a final, eternal destruction and a temporary renewal.

When Hernán Cortés first stepped ashore in America on Good Friday, four vast myth systems came into collision. Like four great ships rafted grindingly together in a turbulent sea, with mankind in the water, struggling not to be crushed, not to be drowned, fighting to clamber aboard any one of them and gain the shores of a new world. Good Friday, 1519, marking the death of the Son of God, was also the first day of One Reed, the year of Quetzalcoatl's death, and also the year of his promised return. Good Friday that year fell on the first day of the Mexican new century.