A Signal Victory (28 page)

They had gentler gods in their pantheon as well as fierce. But those were always the first to leave. Those had already gone: the goddess of maize, the goddess of childbirth, the goddess of marriage, and even, sometimes, the god of death.

He fell asleep.

In the morning, some distance outside the ruins, he found
what he was looking for, a shallow cave in the limestone, half hidden by ferns, but dry. Caves were sacred places. The others would not go in. He went in alone. There was a rude stone shelf, packed with little clay idols, old and dusty and brittle to the touch. He placed his bundle there, without bothering to unwrap it.

It contained that katun bundle codex his second son had given him, without recognizing him. Alone in the cave, wrapped in hemp, the little coloured gods would march after each other year after year. Perhaps someone would be able to read them someday. He stood there for a moment and then left.

Outside the cave he interrupted the intently meaningless ruminations of a female deer. It stared at him and then loped away, but its eyes had been soft and large.

It would have been an omen, had he believed in omens. As it was he was merely touched. He went back downstream to the village, and set out across the Gulf.

Yet his name was Ah Ceh, which meant “the deer”, so he must have thought about that deer a little. He must not forget his name.

For the deer is the symbol of loss. They come down to the water, they watch us from the edge of the meadow, those creatures. Slim, spotted, young, by their nature aristocratic, tentative, uncertain, wide-eyed, innocent, naked, they yet know what the world means. Their sides quiver. Their slim, brittle, dangerous legs scarcely seem to support them. They stare and stare. They reach that kind of decision which is no decision, but only an experience older than they are. They watch, they examine, they whirl and gallop, as though strangulated, away.

In a stream, deliberately, they drop their green excrement.

And with a slightly painful, heart-twisting elegance of their necks, they droop to browse, and even so, they watch, their big lustrous eyes full of the pain of beauty.

Together, as at a signal, no matter how harmless our intent, how surprised our wonder, they turn and stare at us,
with the awful gravity of the condemned, who condemn us, just by being, for hunting them.

And their little pleasures, their little sexual delights in a moonstruck meadow powdered with flowers, have such a stolen transience, and such a pathos. They are aware, and yet have not the brains to know they are. It is because they see everything always for the first time.

And their vulnerable streaked and spotted foals, wet, and hiding in the grasses, have such a slightly bothered, wet-muzzled, reserved way of finding themselves alive.

And then they stand up, rickety, their glass legs wobble, their bob tail going up has the effect of the midwife’s smack into life, and utterly astonished to find themselves where they are, they have to go on living.

They grow a little thick. They grow a little sedate. Though always aware of danger, they are always willing to play.

And then, sometimes, they come down to the stream, and if we are there, they watch us, watch us, watch us. Their big eyes are mirrors, in which we may see what we know of ourselves, which is not what they know of us.

And when, having made up their minds, they dart away, it is as though we too had vanished. As though we had been ripped away, out of the now where we think we are.

And so they are the animal of leave-taking, of loss, of parting.

And while we watch them, our hearts are torn out.

He was right. The Spaniards could not be beaten. And behind him, somewhere, Sotuta and Mani were at war. The Xiu, it was said, had sent for some friars who had arrived at Champoton. The Xiu meant to win. What could they win?

Honduras was not Yucatan. The people were more fierce, and the landscape gave better cover. But Alvarado was not Montejo, either. The cacique of Coçumba was locked up in a strongly fortified town on a plateau above the Rio de Ulua,
and Alvarado was outside it, and had been outside it for two weeks. He had cut off supplies, and water was running short. Guerrero had glimpsed him once or twice, in the distance, riding along his lines, a tall, black clad figure who knew exactly what to do. Among other things he knew how to keep himself and his men out of arrow shot, and safe from marauders.

He had harquebuses, archers, and small cannon. He had settled down to wait.

It seemed to Guerrero that he had seen him once before, somewhere, he could not remember where, but only that wherever it was, it had been raining. He crouched to watch, but he knew it was only a matter, now, of days. How much of his life had he spent crouched in the weeds, watching? How much of his life does any man spend in those weeds, watching?

Inside the fortification they could wait no longer. They knew very well the battle could not be won, for Alvarado was not the man to be taken by surprise, but they also knew they did not mean to be starved into submission either.

To die in battle is not exactly suicide, but if his world was going down, Guerrero wanted to go down with it. So, apparently, did the cacique of Coçumba. Neither man said anything, but each dressed with care. The men could desert. They could not.

Coçumba was only a strongly fortified hill fort. It was austere. Yet it had within it all the elements of their own world, which were precious to them, and which they must leave, because they were not precious to this new world outside.

They knew that. It did not make them solemn. It made them a little too gay.

Self-immolation, unlike suicide, or the terminal taunts of self-contemptuous saints, is not such an easy, and yet is a more amiable matter. Iphigenia, at least, though at the behest of the inexorable, had the justification of personal, reasons for her sacrifice, was translated, and ascended, even
out there, at the end of the Black Sea. But this was a final situation. Hers was a personal world, but theirs an impersonal situation. The decision had made it so.

And yet, even when we are glad to leave, we are never glad to say good-bye. They took a last look round, and a little after dawn, on 14th August 1536, they left their fortifications and attacked. The men did not desert. There is some contagion in a good example, after all. They streamed, screaming and yelling, the last exemplars of an exemplary race, uphill towards the slight rise where Alvarado’s men were mustered.

Alvarado was a good commander. He was not taken by surprise. He was only surprised, and a little suspicious, that it should be so easy. He fired his cannon.

The Indians wavered, but came on. It took time to reload a cannon in those days. Therefore he brought up the harquebuses.

Guerrero had hoped for a last personal duel. He and the cacique were out in front of the charge. The splay of shot hit them both in the face, and that was the end of it.

It was what in the despatches is called an instantaneous death. Merciful, they say. Yet no death is instantaneous. They must have had the time to think of everything before they fell. The world must have looked so agonizingly crisp and worth living for, just because it was there. They must have found so much to say good-bye to in so little time.

Then they lay still.

The Spaniards went on fighting. It was easy for them. There were so many on the other side who wished to die. So of course they won. They had the cannon.

Then the smoke cleared and the battlefield came up into focus, with its abandoned dolls, lying here and there.

The Spaniards went out to loot the dead, found Guerrero, and reported his death to Alvarado. A little uncomfortable, despite himself, Alvarado went out to look.

He had no idea why he felt uncomfortable. Yet as he stared down at that body, he had a feeling of lost identity, a
sort of panic went through him about who he was, about what life was.

Yet he saw, since the Spaniards, like most people, recognized no excellence but their own, only the body of a common sailor, a renegade, and no Christian, disgracefully got up like one of the heathen, but for that reason, a dangerous enemy, and now at last dead.

He was not a man ever to ask difficult questions. He spat and walked back to camp.

And yet he felt uneasy. Something, he felt, had got away from him.

It was the end. The Maya would fight on, they fought until 1917, they will always fight, but still it was the end. They were left, but their world had gone away.

At a few of their altars, even now, deep in the jungle, you may find a candle burning, as they left copal burning, in their day, in empty Chichen or Coba. But that means nothing. That is only piety that has forgotten what it worships.

But in 1536, even the Spanish, surrounded by that suddenly hushed world, sitting in their canteen, who had no use for the world, felt awkward all the same. Perhaps they felt all around them the presence of something they did not even know the name of, the inexorability of lost time.

That night the moon rose as usual, over all the ruined cities and the cities soon to be ruined of that empire. It was a solemn sight, it was like a sigh, but there was no Spaniard out to see it. They were an indoor people, like all those who feel safer when the landscape is bleak. They were not haunted by the beauty of the now, except to know what it was worth to them, and if it was worth nothing to them, to tear it down.

It was worth nothing to them.

Guerrero’s body still lay on the battlefield. It had been stripped of everything of value, but the wind ruffled its
panache slightly, as it lay there, in the midst of a landscape haunted by itself.

Yet who is not haunted by himself? We take the
doppel
gänger
and we go. If we are lucky, when the time comes, we go away complete.

For him it was complete. He had had his victory. He had helped it to go on.

For in Tayasal there was still somebody left to see that moon. The joys there may have been visible, but false, the chagrins hidden, but real, yet they too intended to go away complete. The last coming of Katun 8 Ahau would not occur until 1697. They were a people to whom coherence and tradition meant everything, and if we have respect for such things, it does not matter that life is meaningless. There is still order. We must still put things back where we found them. And so up there they managed to hold out until then.

The Spanish, who thought it a poor place, could never understand why.

And yet the victory of honour, though never admitted to, is sometimes felt, by those who conquered it, since, to go, with honour, is the signal victory over a world which has none, and the conqueror, who has none, feels that.

As for Tayasal: now it is an island, with a few huts, a stone wall, and some palm trees. It has not been dug up again. We prefer to restore Chichen, which means less.

For the world is full of Mexicos, of Yucatans, and the emblem of Mexico disturbs us. There is the eagle, seated on the cactus, holding the snake. It was by that sign that they founded Tecnoctitlán, 600 years ago.

Eagle succeeds eagle, but each holds the same snake, the worm
Ouroboros,
the snake of the world, the snake of Eden, the snake of Lilith, whatever snake you call it, we are all held in the same claws.

As for those Spaniards, whoever our Spaniards may be, they may take away from us our lives, as they have taken
away our reasons for living, but they shall not take back those things given at birth, which are inalienable, dignity, honour, the ability to bend but not break; a little insight; and the ability to admire that which will not love us: the world of nature; a sense of order, and the ability to be kind, out of a sense of duty; the cruelty to punish those who offend the idea of grace, by taking away their ability to besmirch anything, even at the cost of suiciding what they would besmirch; the willingness to die, for it takes self-restraint not to bolt at the last moment; and a vast tenderness to oblige those who are themselves tender.

Where have all those virtues gone?—those virtues which, willynilly, whatever our choice might be, make us virtuous despite ourselves, those things innate to the self, bred to the bone, and affirmative, unlike those vulgar little nervous Christian virtues, by which we have lived too long, only to find ourselves, out of honesty, pagans again?

They are still there, waiting to receive us. They have gone ahead of us. We shall join them soon. We cannot join them yet.

And walking round those ruins of Yucatan, one takes thought. We look up at that indelible sky. The hawk in the air, we have seen his course, and like the rabbit in the field, dodge as we may, we know we are the object of his hunger. For we, too, have been that hawk. That is why we have this interregnal leisure to observe his passage.

The watching is unendurable.

In the meantime we wander round these ruins, with a curiously tentative movement. The truth is so horrible that there is nothing for us to do but face it. Yet who, not a Medusa, could stare the Medusae down? Who could outface those snakes?

And in the Ball Court at Chichen, since we avoid it, perhaps we remember the eternal judges of the secret court, whose horror is to pass no judgment. It is we, before them, who stand self-condemned.

And so we search for someone, anyone, to teach us how
to die. It is the only way, any longer, that we have to live. Is there no one, anywhere, to teach us even that?

Not even Guerrero?

*

Saddlebag

November 1958–April 1959