Feathered Serpent
Authors: Colin Falconer
My Thanks to Angela Volknant in Munich, who first edited this project and gave it life; to Miriam Martinez and Beatriz Bustamante in Mexico for their kindness and hospitality and their enthusiasm for my Malinali, and special thanks to Diana Mackay at Curtis Brown in London who twisted my arm and persuaded me I should write this. Your foresight has found me readers all over the world. Thank you. Thanks also to Kate Cooper, at the same agency for her endless enthusiasm and assistance for my work. My gratitude also to Jane Gelfman at Gelfman Schneider, who decided that the States was ready for me and found Aztec its home in New York. You are wonderful. Thanks to Tim Curnow, my agent in Australia, the best mate a writer could ever have. And, finally a thank you to Rachel Kahan, my editor in New York who said she might like to take a look at my manuscript and then bought it. What more could a man ask for?
The strangest part of this story is that it is not a work of fiction.
I have not strayed from the actual historical facts of the Mexican Conquest; I have merely interpreted the motivations and characters of the participants.
I have tried to keep faith with the known characters of those conquistadores such as Cortés and Alvarado and others who took part in the enterprise.
The woman Malinali did exist, and her actions are still a matter of passionate debate in Mexico. However, almost nothing is known about the personal history of this most extraordinary woman before the Spanish insurgency.
At the time of the Spanish conquest the ruling tribe of the Mexican valley called themselves the Cuhlua Mexica. The term 'Aztec' did not come into common usage until the nineteenth century.
Mexico City, October 2000.
Map of Tenochtitlán
conquistador
Hernando Cortes
La Malinche (Cortes, with Malinali translating)
Hernando Cortes meets Aztec Emperor Motecuhzoma
An Aztec Sacrifice
La Noche Triste
The Fall of Tenochtitlán
I am an old, old woman, dressed in the rags of an Indian, and I will walk the streets of the city tonight, crying for my lost children; the dirty streets, the ancient streets, the streets of the homeless and the dispossessed. I stumble across the great square, near the ruins of the Temple, shouting at the ghosts who haunt me.
See me shuffle along the arcades of the plaza, keeping close to the shadows, where the great cathedral leans like a drunken Indian, its old stones sinking into the lake that lies beneath our feet. Hear me crying at night among the stranded ruins of the Temple Mayor, now the gringos with their Nikons and video cameras are gone.
The tourists are shut away in their expensive hotels on the Paseo. In the Republica de Cuba a frightened Indian hears me weeping and, making the sign of the cross, he hurries home across the plaza with an eye cast fearfully over his shoulder for me, La Llonora, the weeping woman of Mexico.
I have reason to weep for what I have done, and what was done to me. And if you venture with me a little way, into this darkened catholic doorway that smells of age and piss, if you can bear to sit this close to an old Indian woman, wrinkled like a monkey and smelling of death, I will tell you my story, the only story Mexico has.
