Hunger's Brides (65 page)

Now that we have finished the translation and finished asking all our foolish questions, the elders of the village have come forward and offered, as a parting gift, to perform the codex for us tonight. Is it truly a parting gift, I wonder, or as a seal on our promise to leave? Brother Cuadros is worried we will be called on to share this food of visions they call
peyotl
.

I sit here alone at the top of a ruined temple in the midst of a jungle calling out to itself. The monkeys are roaring like lions. In the forest it is already night. It speaks to me, day and night, this hot forest, but in tongues I do not know. Birds that croak like goats, the buzz and clatter of insects shaped to inconceivable ends. The soughing of branches in the wind off the lake, and back in the trees a rich belling, like bottles half full of water dropped into a pool….

Over the lake a half-moon rises pocked and golden. A buttery light sits on the skin like a second skin. Young girls go about the clearing lighting torches. Musicians arrive with their instruments. Slit drums, little gourds on sticks, flutes of clay and reed, notched thigh bones. A man brings a kind of
vihuela
or guitar with a pumpkin belly. A few dancers gather, bringing animal masks, shell tunics, colour whisks of iridescent feathers.

From the black forest at my back, moths the colour of vellum float past towards the clearing, eyes glinting ruby…. I sit brooding on the implications of the drama about to play itself out below me.

So accustomed are we to seeing Cortés as protagonist that this new codex cannot help but startle; for revealed therein as neither god nor apostle, he drives the plot merely through his insatiable appetite for the abstractions of power and gold. Meanwhile, Moctezuma, captive in his own palace, brooding on his fate, retreats to the seclusion of the fabled Black Room, its stinking walls smeared in blood. Is he the blood-spattered devil rumoured by the Mexicans themselves to gorge daily on his favourite dish, the tender flesh of newborns? Is he a monster of vicious passions with four hundred concubines, among them his insatiable sister? Or is he the chaste and mystic philosopher-king
described by the Spaniards who knew him, and who after all would have had every motive to vilify?

Moctezuma knows that choosing the warrior's death at the hands of his captor means submitting unflinchingly to its ironies and humiliations. Their chief instrument is Cortés's ignorant and slow-witted country chaplain, Father Olmedo, more mercenary than priest, who has the effrontery to lecture, to try to
convert Moctezuma II
—the most learned man in the New World, its equivalent of Saint Augustine. The emperor whose title is the Speaker. Yet now, who else is there to talk to, who else will enter the Black Room, who else can help sort through the haunting intersections of their hopes and faiths?

The Mexicans are a chosen people, with a duty to convert by force the peoples of this earth—force them to worship and to nourish the Sun, keep it moving through the heavens, serve the god of war who takes and holds all other gods prisoner. Moctezuma is not merely responsible for his people, his empire. No, he has custody of the very universe, the frail Fifth Sun. Has any mortal known such a crushing destiny? In his place what man, Christian or pagan, would not have succumbed to doubt, to guilt? For by now the brief rise of the Mexica must seem, to the prisoner Moctezuma, more and more like a time of cataclysm, famine and death, perpetual war. And sin—the Mexicans understand sin, know the stench of rotting roots, of a sacred tree overwatered…. Fifty thousand sacrifices a year, ten to purchase each hour of sun.

You and I, Juana, have spoken often of destiny. Mine, I thought, was a simple one, until I met you. Their destiny has led them here, and his, to this: to suffer until his death the insolence of a dullard and the mocking eyes of this woman who sees everything but whose own outline is constantly shifting. If he is elusive, she is multi-form. One name could never suffice. She is forever sloughing skins, mistress of tongues, master of language, oracle. La Malinche interprets for him, who speaks for the people. But, a prisoner now, without her he cannot speak
to
the people. And so for a brief time one person—a woman—occupies the two highest offices of Tlatoani and Cihuacoatl, Snake Woman and Speaker. Small wonder the Indians revere the woman they claim to revile.

This woman controls the information. Without her he cannot act. But she serves Cortés, and her words have the power to humiliate and deceive. She knows just how to goad him, to accent the ironies, to underscore the chaplain's plodding insolence, just as once she knew how to
temper and smooth the rash words Cortés first spoke to him. But the emperor knows that, more even than words, she interprets actions. This is why he needs her now, and she understands. La Malinche understands how to exploit the confusions that surround her. She knows too how to exploit the growing confusion in Moctezuma's mind.

She is everywhere, the great mother whore in the arms of all his adversaries. She tempts him with her beauty, offers to become his lover as she has with Cuauhtemoc, FallingEagle, the commander designated to replace him. But she also knows at times Moctezuma still thinks of Cortés, his captor, as his father and so must not lie with her. Mother of mercy, she holds the power to comfort and forgive. She holds the key to his redemption and to the encrypted destiny of the world. Woman of discord, she grows to fill his mind.

I cannot help reading our transcription of the codex with a sense of what might have been if not for her. And for me, had I not met you….

In a marketplace, two women sit gossiping, suspended in time, on the eve of one battle and the morrow of another, reducing all battles and all outcomes to this one moment. One woman tells the other of an emperor she has known, how just before his death she held up to him his own fallen image, how she became his eyes, his ears, his voice. His nemesis.

Leaning back against a warm stone in the midst of a nervous, bustling market, this woman who is all women and none complacently pats her belly that ripens with Cortés's son, with the fruit of a new and hybrid race on a continent that she, the new Eve, has given a new destiny.

This jungle all about me lies littered with the shattered symbols of our New World, yet I think of nothing but you. And I am not alone. The Viceroy's cousins offered me a parting gift also. It is one I had thought to keep to myself but now share with you: that secretly they have begun calling you the Pythoness of Delphi.

Whenever I have asked you to join me, you have always said no, but in this last letter you say you cannot, you say it is too late. What has happened? Something is wrong, I know it. I will be in Mexico in two weeks. Please, hold on. Too late for what?

Carlos

G
UADALUPE

[12 Dec 1994, Hotel Xanadu]

G
OOD MORNING
G
UADALUPE
, it's your big day today, how are you? We are so calm after this night of firecrackers, siren-night of writing shooting stars through my mind and through this pleasure dome in stereo. All the stately joys of home, my Hotel Xanadu. Lifted now its latex siege of Paradise's milk machines rolled back its fell artillery / decamped the Trojan whores. Their honey-dew melodies plucked on dulcimer / before the Tartar hordes….

Up at dayglo dawn by Dupont friends my compliments, tanks for the chemistries. Down at nine to seize the day, notebook in one cramped hand. Down through mildly maidly ribaldries, Hoover wheeze, crusted sheets … slow day in the ancient trade. At the reception Deskclerk Beetlebrows fingers breathmints, condoms in a candy dish. Bordello eyes boring into mine—sleazesmirk: sleep well,
señorita?

See him browbeaten now at my reply. Not at the Basilica today, infidel?

Ah, Guadalupe—nervous fingers start from the delving dish—Some protector, she is—seven people died up there last year. Don't tell me you're going there.

Al banco primero
, I turn to go—why talk to him.

The bank!—yes even better, he answers smiling now. The pickpockets on the hill will thank you. The banks are closed today—but you all use machines don't you. Careful they don't kidnap you in the little room. What, you haven't heard the stories? Come back—
amiga, ven un ratito, que te lo diga
. Sometimes these guys kill you but then one married a
victima
just last week in jail. Better pray to Guadalupe you get one of these,
cabrones banditos románticos
. I'll pray too.

Thanks for the bulletin. Enter the streets. Banco ProMex on the corner. Jangle of nerves but it's not the romantic bandits, it's you, Mother Protectress of Mexico. I could stay away, not go—like the cathedral yesterday—fly eight long hours from Canada, just to ride the metro again.

But the corner brings more succour than bargained for—know this traveller: the ATMs, their uniformity, are your friends. We too have our rites, universal truths—polling booth verities. Insert card here, strip down, strike coded blow for global shopocracy. Out on the sidewalk
sandalled pilgrims pause, hats-doffed, as the supplicant withdraws absolved / from greed's confessional.

I swell by a single insignificance the tide of pilgrims lining up to ride battered breadbox buses to her Basilica. Brown hills shorn like sheep, or bristling with TV-towers. All, save the slate Basilica on Tepeyac, her sainted montecule. Guadalupe it's years I've dreamed of you.

The traffic tangle slows, checks, bogs, on this pilgrim flood swelled on tributary lust. Bus after bus stuck fast in amber. We get down to walk, we are a hundred thousand here. On foot we follow a shattered causeway over the dustbed of an ancient lake. An Aztec avenue of skulls straight as a die / straight as an assembly line kilometres long. Cookiecuttered babycrania one thousand two thousand three carved in stone, I try to count these low reliefs alone isn't anyone keeping score?

More, ever deeper without relent—last metro stop: Talpa. Thousands stream out jostle to cross this
burning plain
to meet the mother of their maker, Virgin Bride. Muttered prayers parched on lips slaked on hopes fed on highway dust from across all Mexico. Most walk others crawl on bludgeoned knees. Some now fall to join this bloody joinery of unhinged martyrdom. A brother and sister hand in hand, unspeakable torment in their unlined faces gory knees, smoky eyes defiant. Please get up please stand take my hand.

There an old man, his running sores—is this leprosy?—is that plague over there
Welcome to the Decameron
—bring me your disease I shall make it holy.

From up North / from the icecrystal palaces borealis we never get a view like this.
I will never forget this
.

Stop! Hey you can't stop here to rest
to write?
—are you a journalist what are you doing?

I am afraid.

Between two grandsons a shrunken waif on a litter—
abuelita, abuelita
it's not much farther it's very near now we will get you there don't fear we have carried you this far we would carry you a million miles to her she's just ahead.

Guadalupe.