Mexico (30 page)

For three years the great Cactus warrior led the Aztecs to victories on the extended fronts of their empire. He fought the Tlaxcaltecas, the Pueblas, the Oaxacans and the Pachucans and from each foray he returned with many captives and much booty. But in 1486 the time came when it was unavoidable that he lead the Aztecs against his own Cactus People, and this he refused to do. Presenting himself before King Tizoc he said: "I have led your armies to victory at many parts of your empire, and I would willingly continue to do so, for I have never known men braver than the Aztecs. But I cannot lead your army against my own people. If you press me to do so, I would be a traitor and this would be a shameful conclusion to my life. So the time is at hand when I must offer myself as a sacrifice to your war god, and this I do willingly, for I have served him long and would join my companions in heaven."

Of his own accord, the great Indian warrior Tezozomoc, who if he had lived might have successfully countered the wiles of Cortes, dressed himself in ceremonial robes, both Aztec and Cactus, and, while drums throbbed and flutes shrilled warlike music, marched alone up the steep steps to the altar of Huitzilopochtli the war god, where priests laid reverent hands on him and conveyed him to the convex slab, where his heart was ripped out and fed to the god. When news of his death reached City-of-the-Pyramid no one lamented. His daughter, known to history as Lady Gray Eyes, was nine years old at the time, and when she \yas told of her father's death in the remote Aztec capital and of the manner in which he died, she said gravely: "He should have died in battle."

Because the Indians of this later age focused their attention and their art so strongly on death and in such hideous forms, history has dealt rather harshly with them, as if they were barbarians whose sole concern was human sacrifice. This was not so, and in order to strike a balance in evaluating my ancestors I have always liked to think of Lady Gray Eyes, one of the great people of Mexican history.

She was given her peculiar name not by fellow Indians but by Europeans who came to Mexico from abroad and who, in their moment of victory over the Cactus People, came into contact with this resolute woman. They noticed that her eyes were not the usual jet-black but a kind of gray--this could have been an illusion because she was certainly not of mixed blood, but her eyes were, as one of the conquerors wrote, "of a soft gray color that could turn to steel as she gritted her teeth and fought to protect the rights of her people."

As the daughter of Tezozomoc, she was naturally brought up in a warlike world; she never saw her father after she was six and maintained only a dim memory of what he was like, but in later life Spanish chroniclers recorded what she told them:

I think of him not at war but in our home at the edge of the city that later became Toledo. We had about an acre of land on which slaves he had taken in battle grew vegetables and raised turkeys. In fields somewhat removed from the house he also raised a lot of cotton, and I remember him primarily tending his garden.

My mother was encouraged to weave, and she had slave women who worked under her direction making a cloth that other cities cherished. As a little girl I wore dresses made of cotton, feathers and silver strands, all miraculously woven together so that I looked like a silvery bird in flight.

I was very fond of candy made from cactus, but my father made me recite songs to him before I could have any. At six I couldn't have known anything but children's songs, but he enjoyed them and I remember that he often joined me.

He assured me even then that I was destined to be the wife of the king, so that later when he sacrificed himself, my mother continued to impress upon me the importance of my future duties, and I learned not only about sewing and weaving and the making of tortillas but also about the management of a house that contained many rooms and many servants. I was especially good at music and played the flute in the quietness of our home, and at one time I must have known most of the songs of my people.

Most Spaniards I have met have asked me what I thought about human sacrifice, and I have grown tired of explaining that up until the age of twenty-one I had never seen the rite and did not really comprehend it. My mother, I noticed, kept us at home whenever the great drum sounded at the pyramid, and even on the days that celebrated my father's greatest triumphs, when thousands of captives were executed, my mother refused to attend. I remember when I was six and Father returned triumphantly from Guadalajara. After the drum stopped beating, he came home, washed, played with me and then tended his garden. I can't recall ever having heard sacrifices mentioned in my home, and that is why my reaction to the Mother Goddess was so unexpected and so spectacular.

In two short articles my magazine once asked me to write about the Cactus People, I tried to speak well of them, for there was much about these ancestors of mine that was admirable, but I admit that my task would have been easier if the Mother Goddess had not become part of their history.

In the late 1400s, when the triumph of War God was as complete as it could be, and when there were no further refinements in the grisly rites honoring him, a convocation of priests of City-of-the-Pyramid convened and heard the high priest reason in this manner: "If our War God is wholly omnipotent, and if there is nothing further we can do to honor him directly, we ought to consider other oblique ways in which to pay him respect. And it seems to me that what we have overlooked is the fact that he could never have become so powerful if he had not had a mother even more terrible than he."

Consequently, to fulfill a religious need, the Cactus priests created a Mother Goddess who as a sheer abomination has never been equaled. Her head was two horned serpents on the verge of devouring each other. Her hands were talons, each tearing apart a human heart. Her breasts were coiled vipers, and her navel was an eagle's beak plucking out the eyes of an infant. Her skirt was a writhing mass of snakes and her feet were the teeth of animals rending flesh. She wore a necklace of human hearts, rings of human eyes and beads of teeth. Hers was the most repulsive statue ever carved in Mexico, a squat, sullen, hideous travesty of both god and woman. When she was unveiled, in her own temple atop a small pyramid that occupied the space where the cathedral now stands, there was revelry and feasting, for it was recognized that a worthy goddess had at last been found to accompany War God in his lonely rule of the high valley.

What made the Mother Goddess such a dreaded deity was the refinement in torture that the priests had devised for her: since she was the mother of War God, she was satisfied only with perfect things, so each year only the youths who were flawless in every way were set aside for her. Since she also represented motherhood, she was also entitled to numerous sacrifices to empower her to ensure continued fertility, and therefore hundreds of victims were thrown alive into huge fires that roared at her feet.

When, in her twenty-second year, Lady Gray Eyes first saw the rites she was so overcome that she would have fainted had not her strong-minded mother gripped her arm and whispered: "If you disgrace yourself before the Mother Goddess you too will be chosen as a sacrifice." Lady Gray Eyes then learned the need for extreme discretion. Because her reputation was unsullied by any suspicion that she was less than devout, there were no obstacles to her marrying the young king, who was much in love with her.

The position of the young queen at this crucial moment in history was a curious one. There was no way in which she could have known that powerful strangers from Europe were about to land in Cuba and would soon be heading for Mexico, but she sensed that great change was in the wind. This nebulous suspicion made her feel that Cactus society could not remain as it was, especially the hideousness of Mother Goddess and the abomination whereby the priests were able to convince the Cactus women that their noblest function in life was to produce handsome, intelligent sons to be sacrificed at the feet of the Mother Goddess. "It's evil," she muttered to herself as she contemplated the perverting of motherhood and the waste of human lives. "No woman can want to see her son, her brother or her husband slain in such a horrible way. Killing scores so the sun will come back north! Of course it will return! It always has and always will."

When she asked her mother: "Surely you know that the sun will always come back, whether the goddess has victims or not?" her mother drew back and counseled: "Daughter, don't think along those lines or you'll endanger the king." But when Lady Gray Eyes asked: "Surely you must deplore the ritual sacrificing of our best young men?" her mother nodded. "Yes." She would say nothing more.

From that moment Lady Gray Eyes became a kind of subversive citizen. By patient listening and oblique questioning she began to probe the minds of others, which led her to suspect that many women had sickened of the bloody rites and that a general revulsion against them was developing among the population. However, she was not yet daring enough to speak openly, as noted in a report by the wife of a Cactus general:

She overtook me one morning as I was drawing water at the well and asked me casually, "How is your son?" and I replied, "He was taken, you know." That was how we phrased it when the priests selected your son. Very quietly she asked: "And do you miss him?" We were forbidden to discuss such matters, but she was the queen and this made me feel free to speak, so I said: "Yes, I do," and tears, which were rigidly forbidden, came to my eyes. And for a moment I wept, but when I looked at her, she was as hard as rock, all of her, hands clenched, teeth gritting together and her remarkable eyes tearless but almost flashing fire, and I knew that she and I thought alike. That accidental meeting was why, when the great test came, I stood with her and handled one of the wooden levers.

The secret opposition launched by Lady Gray Eyes came to a head in 1507. Since that autumn marked the end of a fifty
-
two-year cycle that coincided with some important date regarding the movement of the sun and the planet Venus, the high priest ordained ceremonies that were especially gruesome. 'To ensure the regeneration of the world" he explained, "we must all make unusually difficult sacrifices."

It had long been a belief of the Cactus People that with the culmination of any fifty-two-year cycle the world might end and the sun not rise. Only by extraordinary human sacrifice could the sun be coaxed from darkness and a tradition had developed that when the cycle ended, all human possessions had to be destroyed so that life could begin anew with the rebirth of the world. Accordingly, as the year 1507 drew to a close, there was wholesale destruction of personal belongings; and here Lady Gray Eyes first came into open conflict with her gods. Her father had left her a shield that he had worn in battle against the Guadalajarans, but before he had given it to her he had decorated it with designs drawn by his own hands, and from the age of six she had treasured it. This shield she was determined not to sacrifice, even though she was warned that for a queen to hold back anything of value would especially incense the gods and cause them to terminate the world instantly. When she went to hide the shield in a closet whose door was masked, she found that her mother had already secreted there many objects of sentimental value.

What had led to this initial break with the gods was a series of events so profoundly malignant that Lady Gray Eyes later told the chroniclers: "If I had suffered those cruelties without revulsion and anger I would have been less than human." What happened was that the high priest of the Mother Goddess required for the ceremony of relighting the world a man of exemplary character, a man of vital importance to the kingdom whose sacrifice would mean a grievous loss to the city; only by kindling a sacred fire on his living heart as he lay with his chest cut open would the sun be lured back to embark on its next cycle of fifty-two years.

The man they had chosen was her own kin, the king's learned brother, and when she heard of the decision Lady Gray Eyes cried to her mother: "This is senseless. He's the wisest man in the kingdom. We need him."

"Ssssssh!" the mother warned. "You may think these things, but you must never speak them."

The king's brother was killed, the ritual of fire was completed; and obediently the sun rose again. The priests then launched an orgy of sacrifice to celebrate the rebirth of the world: hundreds were killed, then more hundreds, then thousands until the mind was numb from counting and the air was thick with smoke. In her quarters as Lady Gray Eyes listened with mounting anger to the throbbing drum she was oppressed by the thought that for the past three hundred years there must have been countless women like herself who had hated this abomination of endless sacrifice but had never spoken out because of fear.

The horror did not end with her brother-in-law's murder. A disaffected servant reported to the priests of the Mother Goddess that the queen's mother, the widow of General Tezozomoc, had sequestered personal treasures and not destroyed them to ensure the rebirth of the world. An inspecting party had been immediately dispatched to the royal palace, where the servant led them to the secret closet where they found the hidden items. Among them, of course, was General Tezozomoc's shield, which would have incriminated the queen herself had not her mother stepped forth and calmly said: 'The shield was given me by my husband."

She was hauled off to the temple of the Mother Goddess. Even the king was powerless to intervene; and the brave old woman prevented Lady Gray Eyes from confessing that she too was a culprit. I will not describe what the priests did to the old woman, nor how her cries of denunciation, before she was burned, ignited the first public doubts about the horrible Goddess who ruled City-of-the-Pyramid.