Malinche (8 page)

“Life always offers us two possibilities,” the grandmother said after she was completely caked in mud, “day and night, the eagle or the serpent, creation or destruction, punishment or mercy, but there is always a third possibility hidden that unites the other two. Find it.”

After saying these words, the grandmother raised her mud-covered eyes to the sky.

“Look, my child! The swimmers of the sky!”

Malinalli observed the amazing flight of eagles soaring above them.

“How did you know that they were there if you can't see them?”

“Because it was raining and when it rains, the waters speak to me. The waters tell me the forms of the animals as it caresses them. They tell me how tall and how hard a tree is by the way it sounds on receiving the rain. And they tell me many other things, like the future of each person as it is sketched in the sky by the fish of the air. One has only to interpret it, and mine is very clear: the four winds have given me their signal.”

At that moment their surroundings turned orange and a burst of light surrounded the mind of those two females who looked enraptured, transformed, lifted from the severity of this life to float in the lightness of their dreams. The grandmother sang in different dialects and in unintelligible voices as she embraced her granddaughter with nostalgia and eternal affection. After a while, she asked her to go gather as much dry grass as she could find. When the child had fulfilled her command, they went inside the house and built a new fire with the previous day's embers.

“All birds take their shape from fire,” the grandmother said as the dry branches burned. “Thought also has its origin in fire. The tongues of flame pronounce words as cold and exact as the fieriest truth that lips can utter. Remember that words can remake the universe. Any time that you feel confused, watch the fire and offer it your mind.”

Fascinated, Malinalli watched the thousand shapes hidden in the fire until it had consumed itself.

“Always remember,” the grandmother smiled, “that there is no defeat that the fire cannot consume.”

The girl looked at her grandmother again and noticed how tears were flowing through the dry earth that covered her eyes. Then the grandmother took a jade necklace and bracelet from the basket where she kept her belongings and, her voice serene as she put them on her granddaughter, she made a final blessing.

“May the earth become one with the soles of your feet and keep you firm, may it sustain your body when it loses its balance. May the wind cool your ears and offer you at any hour the answers that will heal all that your anguish might invent. May the fire nourish your gaze and purify the victuals that will feed your soul. May the rain be your ally, may it offer you its caresses, cleanse your body and mind of all that does not belong to you.”

The girl felt as if her grandmother was saying her good-bye.

“Don't abandon me, Citli,” she said in a wounded voice. “Don't leave.”

“I already told you that I would never leave you.”

And as she hugged her tightly and covered her in kisses, she offered her granddaughter to the sun. She blessed her in the name of the gods and without words said, “May Malinalli be the one who chases fear away. The one who triumphs over fear, makes it disappear, sets it on fire, banishes it, erases it, the one who is never afraid.”

Malinalli remained tangled in her grandmother's arms until she felt completely at peace. When she finally separated herself, she noticed that her grandmother was still. She had ceased to belong to time. She had evaporated from her body, and her tongue had returned to silence.

The child understood that it was death and she wept.

Now, beginning her new life, lighting a new fire amongst her new owners, she felt happy. Until now, everything had been as she had expected. She wanted to believe that the time of tears was behind her. She felt renewed inside. The few days that had passed since she arrived in the Spanish camp had been unforgettable. She had never felt threatened or unsafe. Of course she had not arrived alone, and not just because she had come accompanied by nineteen other women slaves, but because she had come clothed in her past: the familiar, the personal, the cosmic. She wore a jade necklace that had belonged to her grandmother, tiny bells around her ankles, and covering her body a
huipil
that she herself had sewn and embroidered with precious bird feathers symbolizing a stairway to the sky that she would climb in order to be reunited with her grandmother.

M
alinalli was washing clothes in the river, on the outskirts of the town of Cholula. She was upset. There was too much noise. Far too much. Not just the noise made by her hands when she scrubbed and rinsed the clothes in the water, but the noise inside her head.

Everything around her spoke of this agitation. The river where she washed the clothes charged the place with music through the force of the waters crashing on the stones. Added to this sound was that of the birds, who were as agitated as ever, the frogs, the crickets, the dogs, and the Spaniards themselves, the new inhabitants of this land, who contributed with the clamorous sounds of their armor, their cannons, and their harquebuses. Malinalli needed silence, calm. In the Popol Vuh, the Sacred Book of their elders, it stated that when everything was at silence—in complete calm, in the darkness of night, in the darkness of the light—then would creation arise.

Malinalli needed that silence to create new and resonant words. The right words, the ones that were necessary. Recently she had stopped serving Portocarrero, her lord, because Cortés had named her “The Tongue,” the one who translated what he said into the Náhuatl language, and what Montezuma's messengers said, from Náhuatl to Spanish. Although Malinalli had learned Spanish at an extraordinary speed, in no way could it be said that she was completely fluent. Often she had to turn to Aguilar to help her to translate it correctly, so that what she said made sense in the minds of both the Spaniards and the Mexicas.

Being “The Tongue” was an enormous responsibility. She didn't want to make a mistake or misinterpret, and she couldn't see how to prevent it since it was so difficult translating complex ideas from one language to the other. She felt as if each time she uttered a word she journeyed back hundreds of generations. When she said the name of Ometéotl, the creator of the dualities Omecíhuatl and Ometecuhtli, the masculine and feminine principles, she put herself at the beginning of creation. That was the power of the spoken word. But then, how can you contain in a single word the god Ometéotl, he who is without shape, the lord who is not born and does not die; whom water cannot wet, fire cannot burn, wind cannot move, and earth cannot bury? Impossible. The same seemed to happen to Cortés, who couldn't make her understand certain concepts of his religion. Once she asked him what the name of God's wife was.

“God doesn't have a wife,” Cortés answered.

“It cannot be.”

“Why not?”

“Because without a womb, without darkness, light cannot emerge, life cannot emerge. It is from her greatest depths that Mother Earth creates precious stones, and in the darkness of the womb that gods and humans take their forms. Without a womb there is no god.”

Cortés stared intently at Malinalli and saw the light in the abyss of her eyes. It was a moment of intense connection between them, but Cortés directed his eyes somewhere else, abruptly disconnected himself from her, because he was frightened by that sensation of complicity, of belonging, and he immediately tried to cut off the conversation between them, for, aside from everything else, it seemed too strange speaking about religious matters with her, a native in his service.

“What do you know about God! Your gods demand all the blood in the world in order to exist, while our God offers His own to us with each Communion. We drink His blood.”

Malinalli did not understand all of the words that Cortés had just uttered. What she wanted to hear, what her brain wanted to interpret, was that the god of the Spaniards was a fluid god, for he was in the blood, in the secret of the flesh, the secret of love; that he was contained in the eternity of the Universe. And she wanted to believe in such a deity.

“So then your god is liquid?” Malinalli asked enthusiastically.

“Liquid?”

“Yes. Didn't you say that he was in the blood that he offered?”

“Yes, woman! But now answer me, do your gods offer you blood?”

“No.”

“Aha! Then you shouldn't believe in them.”

Malinalli eyes filled with tears as she replied.

“I don't believe that they have to offer blood. I believe in your liquid god, I like that he is a god who is constantly flowing, and that he manifests himself even in my tears. I like that he is stern, strict, and just, that his anger could create or make the universe vanish in one day. But you can't have that without water or a womb. For there to be songs and flowers, there needs to be water; with it, words rise and matter takes on form. There is life that is born without a womb, but it does not remain long on the earth. What is engendered in darkness, however, in the profundity of caves, like precious gems and gold, lasts much longer. They say that there is a place beyond the sea, where there are higher mountains, and there, Mother Earth has plentiful water to fertilize the earth; and here, in my land, we have deep caves and within them, great treasures are produced—”

“Really? What treasures? Where are these caves?”

Malinalli did not want to answer him and said that she did not know. His interruption bothered her. It proved that Cortés was not interested in talking about his religion, or his gods, or his beliefs, or even about her. It was clear that he was only interested in material treasures. She excused herself and went to weep by the river.

This and many other things made it difficult for them to understand each other. Malinalli believed that words colored memory, planting images each time that a thing was named. And as flowers bloomed in the countryside after a rainfall, so that which was planted in the mind bore fruit each time that a word, moistened by saliva, named it. For example, the concept of a true and eternal god, which the Spaniards had proclaimed, in her mind had borne fruit because it had already been planted there by her ancestors. From them she had also learned that things came to exist when you named them, when you moistened them, when you painted them. God breathed through his word, gave life through it, and because of this, because of the labor and grace of the God of All Things, it was possible to paint in the mind of the Spaniards and Mexicas new concepts, new ideas.

Being “The Tongue” was a great spiritual duty, for it meant putting all her being at the service of the gods so that her tongue was part of the resounding system of the divinity, so that her voice would spread through the cosmos the very meaning of existence. But Malinalli did not feel up to the task. Very often, when translating, she let herself be guided by her feelings and then the voice that came out of her mouth was no other than the voice of fear, fear of being unfaithful to the gods, of failure, fear of not being able to bear responsibility. And truthfully, also fear of power, of taking power.

Never before had she felt what it was like to be in charge. She soon found that whoever controls information, whoever controls meaning, acquires power. And she discovered that when she translated, she controlled the situation, and not only that but that words could be weapons. The finest of weapons.

Words were like lightning, swiftly crossing valleys, mountains, seas, bringing needed information as readily to monarchs as to vassals, creating hope or fear, establishing alliances, abolishing enemies, changing the course of events. Words were warriors, be they sacred warriors like the Lord Aguila, or simple mercenaries. As to their divine character, words transformed the empty space in the mouth into the center of Creation, repeating there the same act with which the universe had been made, by uniting the feminine and masculine principles into one.

Malinalli knew that if life was to thrive, and these two principles remain united, she had to position herself in a circular place to safeguard them, to blanket them, since circular forms were what best contained and protected all of creation. Sharp forms, on the other hand, broke things apart, separated them. The mouth, as feminine principle, as empty space, as cavity, was the best place for words to be engendered. And the tongue, as masculine principle, sharp, pointed, phallic, was the one to introduce the created word, that universe of information, into other minds in order to be fertilized.

But what would fertilize it? That was the great unknown. Malinalli was convinced that there were only two possibilities: union or separation, creation or destruction, love or hatred, and that the outcome would be influenced by “The Tongue,” that is, by herself. For she had the power with her words to include others in a common purpose, to clothe them, to shelter them. Or she could exclude them, making them into foes, separate beings with irreconcilable ideas; or into solitary beings who were isolated and destitute as she had been in her status as slave, feeling for so many years what it was like to live without a voice, without being taken into account and forbidden to make any decisions on her own.

But that past now seemed very far away. She, the slave who listened to orders in silence, who couldn't look directly into the eyes of men, now had a voice, and the men, staring into her eyes, would wait attentively to hear what her mouth uttered. She, who had so often been given away, who so many times had been gotten rid of, now was needed, valued, as much as if not more than cacao.

Unfortunately, this privileged position was unstable and could change at any moment. Even her life was in danger. Only a victory by the Spaniards would guarantee her freedom, for reasons that she had not been afraid to state on various occasions in veiled language, that the Spaniards truly had been sent by the Lord Quetzalcóatl, and not only that, but that Cortés himself was the incarnation of the revered god.

Now it was she who could decide what was said and what went unsaid, what to confirm and what to deny, what would be made known and what kept secret. It was a grave dilemma, for it wasn't simply a matter of saying or not saying, or substituting one name for another, but that in doing so she ran the risk of changing the meaning of things. When translating, she could change what things meant and impose her own vision on events, and by doing so enter into direct competition with the gods, which horrified her. Because of her insolence, the gods could very well become annoyed with her and mete out their punishment, and this absolutely frightened her. She could avoid this fate by translating everything as closely to the meaning of the words as possible. But if the Mexicas were to question for a moment—as she herself had—whether or not the Spaniards had been sent by Quetzalcóatl, she would be destroyed along with them in the blink of an eye. So she found herself in a delicate position. Either she remained faithful to the gods and to the meaning that they had given to the world, or she followed her instincts, her most earthly and primary instincts, and made sure that each word and each action acquired the meaning that most suited her. The second choice was clearly a rebellion against the gods, and their eventual reaction filled her with fear and guilt, but she saw no other alternative.

Malinalli's feelings of fear and guilt were at the least as powerful as those of Montezuma. Weeping, trembling, filled with dread, he awaited the punishment of the gods for how the Mexicas had destroyed Tula long before and in that sacred place dedicated to Quetzalcóatl, had engaged in human sacrifice. Before, in the Toltecan Tula, there had been no need for such practices. It was enough that Quetzalcóatl lit the new fire and accompanied the sun on its path through the celestial dome to maintain balance in the cosmos. Before the Mexicas, the Sun did not feed on human blood; it did not ask for it, did not demand it.

The great guilt that Montezuma bore on his shoulders made him certain that not only was it time to pay old debts but that the arrival of the Spaniards signaled the end of his empire. Malinalli could prevent this from happening. She could proclaim that the Spaniards had not been sent by Quetzalcóatl, and they would be destroyed in a moment … along with her, and she did not want to die a slave. She yearned to live in freedom, no longer to be given from one to another, no longer to lead such an errant life.

There was no going back, no way to come out unharmed. She knew too well Montezuma's cruelty, and she knew that if the Spanish were defeated in their venture, she would be condemned to death. Faced with this possibility, she understandably wanted the Spanish to triumph. And if to assure their victory she had to keep alive the idea that they were gods come from the sea, she would do so, although by now she wasn't very convinced of the idea. The hope that one day she would be able to do whatever she wanted, marry whom she wanted, and have children without the fear that they might be taken into slavery or destined as sacrifices, was enough to make her take a step back. What she most wanted was a piece of earth that belonged to her and where she could plant her grains of corn, the ones that she always carried with her and that had come from her grandmother's cornfield. If the Spaniards could make sure that her dreams would crystallize, then it was worthwhile helping them.