Malinche (20 page)

The child was playing in the patio of the house, caressed by the sun, amidst trees and puddles of water. When she saw him, Malinalli recognized him right away. He had grown. He was making mud figures, creating a fantastic universe which, painfully, she was not a part of. The child fit the same image of tenderness and beauty that Malinalli kept in her memory. The child was the same, yes, but also so different! She noticed that some of his gestures were like hers, but his manners were like his father's. Beautiful and proud. Loving and innocent. Whimsical and horrible. Full of nuances, full of colors, full of songs, such was the child she had abandoned.

She walked toward him full of love, full of tenderness, full of anxiety. She wanted to feel his skin on hers, his heart on her heart. She wanted to return to him in an instant, all her presence, all her company, erase with one stroke the months of absence, the months of abandonment.

When she embraced him, when she said his name, when she touched him, Martín looked at her as if he did not know her, as if he had never seen her, and went off running. Malinalli, in a fit of rage, of despair, of madness, ran after him, ordering him to stop, screaming that she was his mother. The boy did not stop, he continued to run as if he wanted to flee from his destiny, flee from her forever. The more his mother ran after him, the more he was afraid, and the more he was afraid, the more full of rage Malinalli became. Rage chased fear. The wound chased freedom. Guilt chased innocence. Finally, Malinalli was able stop her son by force, and doing so, without meaning to she hurt him and the boy looked at her full of panic and began to cry. His cries were so deep, as razor-edged as a sharpened knife, that they were easily able to penetrate the mantle of flesh that covered Malinalli's heart, and opened an unhealed wound, that of her own abandonment. In a great paradox, the abandoned one wounded the abandoned one with his scorn. Malinalli felt as if each caress, each attempt at love toward her son was torture, a nightmare, an injury to both of them. Then in a gesture of madness, she slapped her son so that he would calm down, so that he would not try to flee from her.

“Maltín!” she screamed in a thunderous voice. “Don't run from me!”

“I am not Maltín. I am Martín. I am not your son.”

Malinalli wanted to rip out her tongue, break it, make it flexible so that it could finally pronounce the letter “r.” In the pain that her child's words caused, Malinalli turned to the Náhuatl so that she would not make any mistakes, to speak from her heart.

“You have already erased me from your memory? I haven't. I have kept you in my memory all this time. You are my human creation, born from me. You are my quetzal feather, my turquoise necklace.”

The boy, not understanding her well—since no one else had spoken to him in Náhuatl—but absolutely feeling all of his mother's energy, her body language and what her look said, remained paralyzed, still, silent and on looking at her recognized in the eyes of his mother his own eyes, and he cried in a different manner. He cried to retch through his eyes all the emotional poison that a four-year-old child can keep. Then he ran again, as he screamed at his mother.

“Let me go! I'm scared of you! Leave! I hate you!”

Malinalli, even more hurt, went after him again. The boy screamed desperately, “Palomaaaa! Mama, Paloma!”

The fact that her son thought of another woman as his real mother drove her crazy. Malinalli felt as if she was leaving her body. Her head was about to burst. Her heart was a war drum. The child reached the arms of the woman named Paloma and hugged her tightly. Malinalli, who had thought that she had felt the wound of love before, realized that nothing had been as painful and as hurtful as this moment that presented itself like a nightmare. Beside herself, having lost all control, she ripped the child from the arms of Paloma, even though he was kicking and swinging. Malinalli took him by force by one of his arms and dragged him violently the whole way home.

The child cried until he grew tired, until there were no tears left in him, until his hoarse voice gave out. When her son closed his eyes, it was Malinalli's turn. She cried so much that her eyes became deformed, till she made peace with herself. Silence reigned. Malinalli looked at the light of the stars through her window, her face as innocent as when she had been four. That night, Malinalli was a girl frightened that love was not certain; she was a girl frightened that the fruit would not recognize the seed; a girl frightened to imagine that the stars disdained the sky. She turned and looked at the beautiful face of her son. For some strange reason, she remembered her father, whom she had never seen, whom she knew only in spirit. She came near him and with a timid hand caressed her son's brow. Afraid that he would wake up, she whispered.

“My tiny son, my hummingbird feather, my jade bead, my turquoise necklace, eyes lie, they make mistakes, they see things that don't exist, that are not there. My boy, look at me with your eyes closed. See me that way and you will remember me and know how much I love you. For a time I stopped looking with my eyes and I was mistaken. Only when we are children do we see the truth because our eyes are true, we speak the truth because what we feel is true. Only when we are children do we not betray ourselves, do we not deny the rhythm of the cosmos. I am only eyes that cry for your pains. When you cry, my chest tightens and my thoughts are lost in your memory. You are engraved in the bottom of my heart, with my grandmother, with my gods of stone, with the sacred songs of my ancestors. I put flesh and color in your spirit. I washed your skin with tears when you were given to me by the Lord of All Things.”

The child, with his eyes closed, in that blindness that sees everything, seemed to hear her, seemed to forgive her, seemed to love her.

“If I could only feel that you love me, that you understand me, that I am not a stranger to you, that I am not what frightens you, that I am not what hurts you, I would be capable of abandoning my life, leaving everything, if with it you, my adored son, son of my blood, son of my heart, could receive my love.”

Malinalli tenderly kissed her son's eyelids and sang him a beautiful lullaby in Náhuatl, the language of his ancestors. It was the same song with which hundreds of times she had put him to sleep in her arms when he was an infant. Her son's soul seemed to recognize the song and at that instant the room where he was seemed to acquire a new light. It was as if it were illuminated by a light source that came from none other than Malinalli's heart, a blue light that passed through the body of the boy, who couldn't help but feel the profound love, and even though he was asleep, he smiled and the smile said everything. For Malinalli, that smile became an instant of love much more powerful than the long months of separation. Understanding and beauty had settled in the hearts of both mother and child. Malinalli remained awake till dawn, till the first light of day grazed her son's eyelids and he awoke. When the boy looked at his mother he did not cry, but amply took her in, before falling asleep again in her lap.

Martín, like his blind great-grandmother, experienced that in the silence of the gaze is where one can truly see. For Malinalli this was a knowledge that she had acquired as a child.

In all the months that she had been apart from her son and it had been impossible for her to see him, she had imagined him much better than now as she watched him at length. Inspired by that truth that illuminates all things, she spoke to her son in Spanish. It was at that moment that she discovered the beauty of Cortés's language and appreciated that god had given her that new method with which to express herself, in a language which opened new spaces in her mind. Thanks to it, her son could understand his mother's love.

The relationship between Martín and Malinalli improved little by little, and the silver cord that nourished their union was reestablished completely.

T
he sky had tones Eight of orange and pink. The air carried the aroma of spikenard and orange trees in bloom. Malinalli embroidered and Jaramillo, next to her, smoked. Martín and María played in the patio of the house that their parents had built together. It was a beautiful patio surrounded by a series of arches and with a fountain in each of the cardinal points. From each fountain there was a canal that carried water to the center of the patio, forming a silver cross.

The patio was not only an architectural creation, a harmonious play of spaces, but it was a mythical center, a point of convergence for various spiritual traditions. It was the place where Malinalli, Jaramillo, and the children interwove the threads of their souls with the cosmos. In the water they recognized each other, they reencountered themselves. They were renewed.

“Those who are able to unravel within themselves the secret of everything become mirror people who know how to transform themselves into the Sun, the Moon, or Venus,” Malinalli had told Jaramillo when, during one of their first conversations, they had discussed the design of their house. Together they decided that water would be its center.

Both were delighted by water. They liked to caress each other while one washed the body of the other with water that Malinalli had perfumed with spikenard from the garden. Sometimes, they had to interrupt the bath to kiss, to lick each other till they were exhausted, till they ended up dripping in sweat and semen and had to wash again. The bath was the ritual that first united them. For Jaramillo water was essential. He had visited the Alhambra as a child and had been fascinated by that mirror of the sky, with its interior courtyards, its canals, its fountains. He felt that God was there. When Malinalli spoke to him about Tula, another mirror of the sky, they both felt that there was something that joined them together far beyond the body, time, war, or the dead: a liquid god. The house that they designed together and built was a small Eden. Malinalli could not help but bless the Muslims who built the Alhambra and stamped in the soul of the child an indelible fingerprint. Thanks to them—among others—their house was a gift to sight, to smell, to the ear, to touch. The games of light, of shadows, the flowers and aromatic plants, the constant gurgling of water, the taste of the fruit from the garden, provided them with daily happiness. Happiness, a word that acquired meaning late in Malinalli's life, but that had finally done so.

Her heart was pleased when she watched the new shoots of corn in the field behind the house. The first harvest was obtained from the grains of corn that had come from her grandmother, which Malinalli had always kept with her. Next to the cornfield there was a garden where plants of European origin lived peacefully next to Mexican plants. Malinalli loved to create new dishes. She would try new combinations of onions, garlic, cilantro; of basil, parsley, tomatoes, cactus; of pomegranate, plantains, mangos, oranges, coffee, wheat, corn, and cacao. The new flavors in the food arose without resisting their mestizo origins. The different ingredients accepted each other without problems and the result was surprising.

It was the same result that she had achieved within her womb. Her children were the product of different bloods, different smells, different aromas, different colors. Just like the earth brought forth corn that was blue, white, red, and yellow—but allowed them to mix—t would contain them all. A race where the Giver of Life could be remade, with all manner of names and shapes. That was the race of her children.

She loved to watch them run around the patio and play in the waters of the fountains that were reminiscent of Tula and the Alhambra at once. She liked that they spoke both Náhuatl and Spanish; that they ate bread and tortillas. But it pained her that they would not see what had been the Valley of Anáhuac, what had been Tenochtitlán. The more she tried to describe it to them, the more impossible it seemed. So she decided to sketch for them a codex—her familiar codex—and teach them how to decipher its language, understand her signs. It was important that aside from learning to read Spanish, they learn how to read codices. A Mayan poem said that “those who are looking, those who are telling, those who noisily turn the pages of painted books, those who have in their power the black ink and the red ink, the paintings, they take us, they guide us, they show us the way.”

It was important that she and her children knew the same things to be able to speak about the same things, to walk down the same paths. Perhaps if she and Jaramillo had not gone through the same events it would be difficult for them to understand what the conquest had been. Malinalli wanted the same complicity between her and her children and because of this she was willing to learn to read and write Spanish.

In the mornings, with Martín, she forced herself to scribble letters and numbers. The one that caught her attention was the number eight. She felt that it was the symbol of mixed ancestry. There were two circles united by the center, through the same invisible point, forever within each other.

In the afternoons, she liked to play with her children, grab them by their feet and spin them through the air, like her grandmother had done with her. When she got tired, she let them play by themselves and sat down to embroider
huipiles
as her children kept running around and Jaramillo, her husband, dedicated himself to carving wood.

Malinalli considered embroidering and wood carving more than just artisan activities; each was an exercise that nourished patience. Patience was the science of silence, where rhythm and harmony flowed naturally from stitch to stitch, from hammer to chisel. It was through such ritualistic and quotidian exercise that both were able to achieve luminous states of consciousness, where inner peace and spiritual richness were their objective and reward.

That afternoon, while they drank tea made from orange leaves, Jaramillo stopped working on a carving of the Virgin of Guadalupe for the children's bedroom.

“Marina,” he asked. “Do you want to go to Mass tomorrow?”

“No. Do you want to go?”

“No.”

Every year, a Mass was celebrated for the fall of Tenochtitlán. Malinalli did not like to go. She didn't like to bring back to mind the dead, the weeping, the crying. But what really bothered her was that the prayers were said before a crucified Christ, before the image of the new god, the god whose flesh was nailed to wood, the god with the bloodied body. It was horrifying for her to see it, for her mind had always rejected human sacrifices. It bothered her that the wound on the side reminded her of the wound made by obsidian knives in the chests of the men sacrificed in the temple of Huitzilopochtli. The crown of thorns bothered her also, and the dry coagulated blood. It made her want to save that man from the torment, to free him. She couldn't stand to look at him. His sacrifice was eternal and it spoke to the fact that, in spite of the conquest, there had been no change in these lands. The fall of the empire had meant nothing. The ritual of sacrifice had survived and it would be the heritage of those that remained. That Christ on the cross was pain without end. He was death eternal. Malinalli did not believe that the sacrifice had created light, let alone that light could have been found within such a sacrifice.

So she would rather not attend the ceremony and not see the sacrificed Christ. She would rather see life than death. She would rather see her children, products of the conquest, and not bring back the dead. She would rather kiss Jaramillo, love him and bless him, than to have to bless an image of eternal sacrifice. Thanks to Jaramillo she had found peace, heaven on earth; thanks to Cortés, war, exile, and hate. His presence gave rise to an uncontrollable disappointment. To see him unnerved her, bothered her, angered her. Inevitably, they would end up arguing.

That afternoon, he had shown up at their house and shattered a delightful day. They offered him a cup of chocolate with vanilla and invited him to sit with them by one of the fountains. Cortés, as always, had problems he wished to discuss. He was about to face a trial, in which he was charged with infidelity to the crown, tyrannous intentions, disobedience of royal orders, arbitrary crimes, and cruelty during the war; the failure to give the King of Spain what was due to him, the wrongful appropriation of large parcels of urban and rural lands, and the murder—among others—of Catalina Xuárez, his wife.

Confronted with the gravity of the accusations, Cortés had given the names of Malinalli and Jaramillo so that they could make declarations as his witnesses. By his tone in addressing them, Malinalli felt as if Cortés were not simply asking them, but had come to collect old debts. Cortés, aside from giving them the land where they now lived, had given them parcels in the towns of Oluela and Jaltipan, towns near Coatzacoalcos, where Malinalli was born. They had much to be grateful to him for; primarily, that he had married them. But Malinalli did not like the way in which he was demanding loyalty.

“And what do you want from me? To lie?”

“No, I expect you to be loyal.”

Suddenly the afternoon acquired a gray cast and the sun was devoured by the humidity in the sky. Malinalli's eyes were wet, beautiful, and sorrowful; as if tired of looking, they wanted to silence the images in the brain and erase from memory all shapes and all reflections of a conquest and a deceitful illusory world. Pronouncing the word Cortés in a grave tone, she said:

“Cortés, I will forever be grateful for my son and the husband that you gave me, the piece of land that you kindly gave to Jaramillo and me so that we might spread our roots, but do not ask me to speak on your behalf, not in that tone. I am no longer your tongue, Lord Malinche.”

It had been a long time since anyone had called him Malinche. They had stopped calling him that when Malinalli married Jaramillo, when she stopped being his woman, when they separated. Fire came out of his eyes and in a contained rage he responded:

“Who do you think you are, speaking to me like that?”

Jaramillo, who knew his wife better than anyone, saw the fit of anger in her eyes and he realized that she was going to vomit all of her hatred on Cortés. Excusing himself, he got up, took the children by the hand, and led them to their rooms.

Malinalli waited before answering Cortés. First she put together all the words that she had gathered in her moments of pain and desperation. She was tired, extremely tired of Cortés and all his strategies. She was tired of being his reflection. It was true, she could be his best witness, but what could she declare that wouldn't harm him? She, the most humble, the blindest of all, what could she have seen? She took a deep breath and spoke slowly.

“The worst of all the sicknesses born of your ambition hasn't been smallpox, or syphilis. The worst of all sicknesses are your cursed mirrors. Their light wounds like your sharp blade wounds, like your cruel words wound, like the balls of fire that spit from your cannons over my people wound. You brought your clear, silver, luminous mirrors. To see myself in them pains me, for the face that the mirror returns to me is not my own. It is an anguished and guilty face, a face covered by your kisses and marked by your bitter caresses. Your mirrors reflect back to me the fright of open grimaces in the face of men who have lost their language, their gods. Your mirrors reflect the stone without the volcano, the future without the tree. Your mirrors are like dry wells, empty, without spirit and eternity. In the images of your mirrors there are wails and crimes devoured by time. Your mirrors distort and drive mad whoever looks at themselves in them; they infect them with fear, they deform their hearts, destroy them, bleed them, and curse them. They deceive with their elusive, breakable, false spirit. Looking at yourself for long in your mirrors has made you ill, has shown you a mistaken glory and power. But worst of all is the fact that the face that you look at in the mirror—thinking that it is your face—does not exist; your mirrors have made it vanish and in its place you see a hallucinatory hell. Hell! That word I learned from you, that word that I do not understand, that place created by your people to eternally damn everything that lives. That terrifying universe that you have fabricated is the one that cuts out your image and freezes itself in the mirror. Your mirrors are as terrible as you are! What I most hate, Hernán, is to have looked at myself in your mirrors, in your black mirrors.”