Malinche (13 page)

T
he cold was unbearable. Six They had been walking for days. Cortés stubbornly insisted on reaching Tenochtitlán at whatever the cost. After having lost their way various times, he found out that they had been given false information on how to reach the great city of the Mexicas, and so, against all advice, he decided to cross between Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl, the volcanoes that watched over the valley of Anáhuac.

The path was almost four thousand meters above sea level. It was November, and the cold was hellish, if such an adjective may be used. According to what they had told Malinalli, in hell there was an eternal fire that caused eternal suffering, and this image appealed to her, to equate such cold with hell. She could not imagine a time when it would go away. She felt it under her skin, in her bones. Her teeth chattered like bells during a feast day. Some of the Cuban servants that had come with the Spanish had already died due to the weather.

Malinalli was convinced that her hour would soon come. She was very tired. Her feet felt as if they did not belong to her, she could not feel them. They were completely frozen, numb. So much so, that she could not feel the wounds from the giant open blisters on her toes, caused by wearing closed shoes which she had taken from one of the Cuban slaves who had died along the way. She did not mind using a dead person's shoes. She would do anything to relieve the cold in her feet. The problem was that she had never worn closed shoes, and before long she was already blistered and in great pain, but was not allowed to stop. She kept on going despite the bleeding blisters, until she could no longer feel pain in her stiffened feet.

Now she was only drowsy, very drowsy. She was incapable of conceiving of a sunny, warm, and joyful day. She wanted to imagine the heat that she felt all over her body during the summer days, but it was impossible. She so much needed to warm her skin! Not knowing why, she thought of grasshoppers.

Every summer, she used to catch them in the cornfields. She liked surprising them in mid-hop. She kept them in a small gourd, and later, in the communal kitchen, would drop them into boiling water. It was an instantaneous death for the grasshoppers. Afterward, she rinsed them till the water was completely clear and roasted them in a ceramic pot. There was nothing more delicious than a handful of roasted grasshoppers on a summer afternoon, after having bathed and played in the river's cold waters.

At that moment, she wished with all her soul to be a grasshopper, so someone would catch her and throw her into a pot of boiling water. To be heat, to be fire, instead of a wounded aching body. If she had to die for this, then let it be. She didn't care. At least she would die nice and warm, her spirit would be absorbed by the sun, and her body, which would remain on the earth, would become succulent food. Her flesh would delight others. She thought that the best thing, considering the taste buds of the Spaniards, would be for them to season her with a bit of crushed garlic, that plant that they had brought with them, that they ate so often that she could smell it in their sweat and on their breath. The cravings were killing her! At that moment she would have given anything for a roasted grasshopper. But in this cold, it would be impossible to find one. And now she knew why. In this weather the only thing one wanted was to cover oneself under the earth and not go hopping here and there. Malinalli could not walk any further. She remembered the journey that she had taken with her grandmother, and the words that she had been told on that occasion resonated in her mind.

“You task is to walk. Walking transforms us into butterflies that rise and see truly what the world is.”

Through her own experience, Malinalli knew that ritual walking effectively caused a detachment from the body, a spiritual elevation, an assimilation with everything. It is what happened when you defeated the body, when you triumphed over it, when the flesh renounced the walker and allowed her to integrate herself into the nothing where everything is, where all is found. Malinalli, completely exhausted, closed her eyes to see if she could become one with her grandmother, but she wasn't able to. Her body kept her prisoner.

Cortés watched her from a distance. They had decided to rest and wait for Diego de Ordaz's expedition to return from Popocatépetl. Cortés had sent ten scouts under Diego de Ordaz's command to explore Popocatépetl up close. The volcano, according to what he had been told, had erupted several times in the past few years. For most of the conquistadors, the sight of an active volcano was something new that they did not want to miss.

After he had rested, Cortés watched the cloud of smoke and ash that rose from the volcano. Then his glance turned to Malinalli. Cortés watched her closely. With her eyes closed, huddled under a blanket lent to her by Bernal Díaz del Castillo, she seemed small, vulnerable, but still not far away from the truth. Hernán pondered on how admirable a woman she was. She had not complained once. She kept pace with all of them without uttering a word. She had never fallen ill, or wept, or become an annoyance. It was impossible not to compare her to his wife. Catalina Xuárez was a weak and sickly woman, who had not been able to give him children. He was sure that his wife, Catalina, if placed in the same position as Malinalli, would already be dead.

Cortés was in turn being watched by Malinalli, out of the corner of her eye. She didn't want to speak with anyone, so she pretended to be asleep. She didn't even have any energy to ask for help. She liked watching Cortés's body, his build, his strength, his courage, his audacity, his gift as a leader. Thousands of times, standing on the shore and meditating on the eternal return of the tides, she had wished for the return of her father, or someone like him, who could protect her. At that moment, she asked herself if Cortés could be that man and she decided that he couldn't be. The protection that she longed for had nothing to with her annihilation as a person. The protection and defense that the Spaniards said they would provide against false gods and pagan practices had more or less left them in a defenseless state, made them into weak children who did not know what was good for them and who needed someone superior to tell them. To be protected by Cortés would undeniably mark her as a weak and ignorant woman.

But she was so tired that she did not want to think about anything except the sun. It was not in vain that her ancestors had said that first came the fire and from it, was made the sun, and from it mankind. The sun was fire in motion. She closed her eyes. The altitude was ravaging her well-being. She had a headache and felt that there was not enough air to breathe. She was as dizzy as when her grandmother lifted her by the arms and spun her around and around like the flying men of Papantla, those men who created beautiful dances in the air as they fell to the ground held up by ropes tied around their ankles. There were five members altogether, of which four descended toward the ground, little by little, twisting and turning as they fell, while the fifth remained up above the great pole, signifying the center. The four dancers that flew through the air represented each of the cardinal points. Malinalli saw them various times in her youth, and she loved when her grandmother made her into a flying dancer, grabbing her by the feet and making her spin. When her grandmother tired, she would spin and spin with open arms on her own till she grew dizzy and fell to the ground laughing.

The grandmother explained to her that this happened because she had lost her center.

“God is in the center, there where there is no shape at all, no sound, no movement. Whenever you are dizzy, sit down, stop moving, remain silent, and you will find Our Lord there, in your invisible center, that which unites you with him. We are like the beads in the necklace of creation, and we are joined one to the other, each taking up the place and space that corresponds to us. When you stumble to one side or the other, you alter the order of the skies and the sky opens, the earth opens. When you get separated like that you will not fall where you are meant to fall, you will not walk where you are meant to walk, you will not die where you were meant to die, because the cord has been broken, because everything is part of everything else and everything affects everything else. Because of this, god grows sorrowful when we do not see him, when we do not recognize him, when we go through our lives with our backs to him.”

“Where is god? How can I see him?”

“To see the invisible is complicated, but you should know that he for whom we live is in the air we breathe, in each drop of water, each body, each plant, each animal, in all forms of his creation. In the center, in the invisible in all things, is where you can find him. Each celestial body is united in its center with the other stars and with us. It's as if a silver string had linked us together at the time of creation. To see the invisible in others is to see god in them. To listen to the invisible in their words is to listen to god. To feel the water in the air before it rains is to feel god. It doesn't matter how different the faces that you see are, how different each one's song is; beyond the body, beyond their words, dwells the lord of all things. That is why performance, song, movement, and everything we do is so important. If we do it according to our center, according to divinity, it will have a sacred quality; if we do it dizzily, it will throw us to the ground, cast us aside, disconnected from god. We all spin. Each man, each moon, each sun, each star spins around its center. The movement of stars is sacred and so is ours. It unites us to the same invisible.”

But perhaps the most important thing that her grandmother's knowledge passed on to Malinalli was the notion that behind each divine representation—whether it be in paper, in stone, in flower, or in song—god dwelled. The shape, the color, and the sound that was chosen to represent them did not matter.

“My sweet Malinalli, even before you took the shape of this body you were already one with god and you will remain so even when your form is erased from the earth.”

Later, she continued.

“When I die, when I will be outside of time, it will be difficult to see me, to hear me, to feel me, and that is why I am going to give you this Tonantzin stone. She is our mother, and you can ask her whatever you desire. I will be dancing in the sky near her and we will both be watching you.”

And now Malinalli took in her fingers the ceramic bead necklace with the image of Tonantzin that she had made with her grandmother, and asked that her center be restored, to control the dizziness that was driving her mad and to help her regain her well-being. There wasn't a long way to go before they reached the Valley of Anáhuac. She wanted to see it. She wanted to survive. After making this wish, her eyes closed. Malinalli left her body and was converted into thought, idea, dream. She had no problem interweaving her thoughts with the other slaves, and she instantly experienced an unimaginable freedom. She knew that she had settled into another reality, and that what she saw was part of a dream, but she also knew that in that dream she could discover a better reality, a reality more collective than individual.

In her dream she saw herself as part of a united feminine mind that was having the same dream. In the dream, a group of barefoot women walked over the ice of a river that had frozen at the moment the light of the moon had been reflected on its surface. The soles of their feet cracked open when coming in contact with the ice, and the wounds formed stellar maps. The light of the full moon fell forcefully on all of them and they became one mind, one body, they were all one woman holding herself up in the wind and nourished on the faith of all who want to free themselves from the nightmare of sensation, of touching, of weeping, of loving, of bleeding, of dying, of having, and of letting go. Malinalli, in the body of this unified woman, saw herself surrounded by a dozen moons and held up by the antlers of a thirteenth one. With her hands she picked up prayers and pieces of pain that she made into roses. Later she felt the moon underneath her feet completely afire and the flames devoured her thoughts. Her mind was a blaze that created images that nailed themselves into the hearts of men like blades of fire, as they spoke to them of the true meaning of language. When Malinalli felt that the moon, now beside her, was completely ablaze, she opened her eyes. There were tears there, and in her heart a premonition of flowers.