A Signal Victory (11 page)

This was the wrong man. It was the other man he was after. The other man, by all accounts, had done well in this world, therefore he must understand it, and would have been worth the having.

For Cortés, like Guerrero, had no illusions. He belonged to the little company of those who are sane, even though they may have to change worlds in order to remain so. That little company has been piped away a thousand times, but thank God, it does not matter whose, it always comes back again.

While Aguilar slept the message from Guerrero arrived. It was hard to interpret it, without an interpreter, and yet
“no” is never hard to interpret. The other man would not come, and perhaps Cortés respected him for that, knowing that the men worth having are not those so easily to be had.

He must do with Aguilar.

Aguilar knew very well he was the second-best choice. He had to raise himself somehow in his own estimation, and now that he had borrowed a Franciscan robe, and had something to justify him, he had his explanation ready. Guerrero, he explained, had had his hands tattooed, his nose, lower lip, and ears pierced, and was living in sin with the natives. No doubt he had been ashamed to show himself.

Somehow Cortés did not think so. Men such as Guerrero, if what he had heard of Guerrero were true, were never ashamed of themselves. Nor did he believe what Aguilar said.

But he could not loiter here. He weighed anchor and swept north, and then west, around the peninsula, bound for Tabasco and his place in history.

As a matter of fact, Guerrero had had his lower lip pierced. It was the ultimate honour, and the honour was a heavy one, made of gold, in the Aztec fashion, a serpent with a flickering tongue, held by a stud on the inner side of the lip. When nothing was worn there, one could press one’s tongue in and out of the hole, which helped one to think.

It also made certain other things possible. When Ix Chan was pleased, she had so many gestures to prove that she was so.

Meanwhile, he settled down to await developments. He waited, first, until 1521. It was a respite, after all. His sons were growing up, and Nachancan was growing older. He kept himself informed, but also he had his daily life to lead. It seemed the more precious now, that perhaps it was in danger.

He learned the news, the Maya learned the news, in September of 1521. At first it frightened all of them. But
then, should they not rather rejoice in the destruction of their hereditary enemy, and was not Mexico very far away? Surely what happened there, could have nothing to do with them?

Guerrero could do nothing to rouse them, nothing to put them in a state of defence. Yet even he had heard of the glories of Mexico, and that they could be swept away so easily filled him with despair.

It was the traders who brought the news: on the 13th of August Technoctitlán had fallen.

It was the chute of a world.

That city of the robber barons, that great city in the middle of its lake, that city of the eagle on the cactus, who holds the snake, that city had been swept away.

A few years ago it had glittered there, white, polychromed, and secure, its altars fed on human hearts, smoking to heaven, the greatest city in the known world.

Now it was gone. And those people who had come from the dark bat-hung caves of the north, perhaps in Sonora, who knew where, with their wooden hell and their hell on earth, they too were gone. The Spaniards had marvelled, but knew no mercy. Aguilar was with them, somewhere. Faced with a culture higher than their own, they could think of nothing better to do than to destroy it.

The traders said it was terrible. The Maya were not impressed. Guerrero, looking at the intact temples of Chetumal, swore, but listened to the traders’ tale.

Once we know how bad things are, then there is hope, for then we can begin to plan.

The Spaniards had levelled the great temple and the city, and ignorant of sanitation, had filled the drainage canals with the massive carved blocks of an alien world.

They were ignorant of so many things. It gave them, as it gives all such, a dreadful strength.

Moctezuma, the Great Speaker, had been stoned by his own people and then tortured by his conquerors. That, too, was the way the world goes. What they wanted, said the
Spaniards, was gold. Moctezuma did not understand. Gold was only an ornamental mineral, of no value in itself. Would they not rather have jade?

Bernal de Diaz, being prudent, took a little jade. It was to ransom his life later. But the others wanted only gold.

Moctezuma II, who had never doubted his own preeminence, but only the survival of the world that made his own pre-eminence possible, died, was succeeded by Cuitlahuac, and he, in four months, by Cuauhtemoc. As usual the Indians had fought among themselves. That was what had, as usual, defeated them, until Cuauhtemoc, that true and supple hero, had nothing left to defend but his own four acres of palace in the desolation of Tenochtitlán. Again and again these hairy savages attacked him, across the raped boulders of the city.

The traders made a chronicle of it, that Guerrero had no will to hear. He had heard of none of these people, but a rehearsal is a rehearsal.

Finally Cuauhtemoc had fled, with his favourite wife, across the shallow lake, by night, in search of allies. Since he had none left, the Spaniards had taken him easily.

All around that lake, the subsidiary cities were empty, deserted, and smoking, He had the bitterest fate of all, the one war gives us, unless we are careful to die: he survived his own world.

Guerrero quite understood that. He knew it must not happen to him. His boys were now seven and six, and he had had a daughter. Men not male want sons, but men most male, once the continuance of their name is assured, a daughter. For women are the conservators. They could not make something out of nothing, like men. They needed something already there, to rearrange and pass on in order. Hence his daughter, who would be beautiful, no doubt. Ix Chan was so pleased. They had not the habit of kissing, and yet he kissed her.

Somehow, by some miracle, though he was alert to trouble, they lived in peace for three years. He knew the dangers of
that peace, but could not make even Nachancan understand them. The Maya had been conquered themselves. It meant no change in the order of their days. One treated with the conqueror to keep one’s place, that was all. That far Nachancan could understand, but no further. Even the old tales the travellers brought from Mexico could not dissuade him from a belief that the world went on as it had always done, conqueror or not. Chetumal had been secure for too long, and besides, the Maya could conceive of a moderate hunger, but the immoderation of Europe was something beyond their ken.

There was nothing Guerrero could do, except wait, and undertake a certain modest diplomacy. So much of his time, during those three years, was taken up in travel and the effort to make allies. But allied, the natives wanted to know, against what, and to what advantage to themselves?

He could not make them understand that the advantage was their own survival. Had they not always survived?

Yet, if the whole peninsula was to be some day one battleground, at least he had the opportunity to learn the topography of that coming war.

And then, in 1524, came the terminal event, the event that stunned even Nachancan. The event which proves that even the noblest man cannot avoid one fatal error, the event that, in proving each life a tragedy, improves, somehow, the sense of comedy, for without tragedy, there could be no comedy.

When a man does something against his own nature, he begins to fail. That is what happened to Cortés.

In 1524 he started south, through Guatemala and Honduras. He had no choice, and was a little tired. In order to maintain himself, he had to find out new worlds, for the demands of Spain were insatiable, and had to be satisfied. Guatemala and Honduras were rich, so they said.

So they had been, a thousand years before.

Cortés marched into those treacherous uplands through Chiapas, with six hundred men to carry the baggage, and, as hostages, the Lord of the Province and the Emperor
Cuauhatemoc. The latter he could not leave behind, lest he become the centre of some uprising.

After two and a half years of confinement, surrounded by a mockery of attendants, Cuauhtemoc was probably glad enough to go anywhere.

At first all went well; and then Cortés began to lose his luck. But then, that goddess, if personified, goes off blandly upon her own affairs at once. Thus found the Caesars. Thus Cortés.

The rains were a solid assault of water. Savannahs became quagmires, and quagmires, lakes. Most of the region had been abandoned centuries before, so that they had to hack their way through tropical jungle and met no-one. The men were for turning back, and so were the priests. There were quarrels. There was always whispering behind Cortés’ back.

That had never been so audible before. They were waiting to pull him down.

With Cuauhtemoc he played chess. It was a game Cuauhtemoc had learned easily and played well, for it was like his native game of Potelli, but more subtle. Potelli was a game with four fields but only one kind of counter. He had always felt its limitations as a symbol. But in chess one played with the world, and the whole game was a parable. In the beginning the king could do nothing, and yet he directed the pieces. He was the object of the game. In the end one did not capture him. One merely made it impossible for him to escape. He could appreciate the irony of that.

They played not on the board we know now, but on that circular Hindu board the Spaniards inherited through the Arabs. It is the peculiarity of that board that the king cannot castle, but goes to sanctuary once during the game, and only once. He is safe for the moment. Yet he knows that on the next move he must come out and face the game again, on a slightly changed board and himself changed, by that same move into sanctuary, which destroyed his immovable sanctity for good.

The king was defeated by the ineptness of his own supporters.

Potelli was sacred to Macuilxochitl, the Five Flower god of youth and games, but also a god of the south, the unlucky direction; and were not he and Cortés playing out this game in the south? He understood the parable all too well, and defeat has certain advantages. One can fill up one’s days by playing the whole game out again, unblinded by self-interest.

Cortés would find himself staring into those polite and knowledgeable eyes. It was, after all, a royal game, and Cuauhtemoc had lost it. But sometimes, on that damned symbolic board, Cortés lost it. Cuauhtemoc would then quietly smile, but somehow that smile lingered in the mind, for he was a vivid man, fearless, and quite as capable of irony as his captor. He had a special little grimace when he was checkmated, particularly if the board had been swept clean.

He had also a special offensive, when he won in turn, which was not to sweep the board clean, but to trap Cortés behind his own pieces, so it was they, rather than Cuauhtemoc’s, which checkmated him.

He must be doing that deliberately, and lately he had done it too often.

Something rather peculiar happens if you play chess, not mathematically, as we affect to do now, but skilfully, thoughtfully, as though the pieces were only something to twiddle with. We pretend that the pieces are not symbolic, but the game is a communion and a rite. One is soon swallowed up by that parable and becomes part of it. Suddenly, three or four moves in, plotting five or six moves ahead, as you reach your hand forward, the board vanishes, the pieces vanish, you and your opponent vanish, and you are off in some other place.

The board then becomes whatever your real quarrel with the world is about. The game becomes a test of strength between two wills. As you move, so are you judged, not personally,
but essentially, neither by yourself or your opponent, but by those judges of the secret court whose sessions never cease. It does no good to plead before that tribunal. Eloquence means nothing, for they have the documents in the case, and there is no jury. They are far, far worse than Atropos, Lachesis, and Clotho, for they ordain nothing, they reach no conclusion, they administer no punishment. They simply know.

That is the worst punishment and the worst fate: that anyone should know, except ourselves, when even we prefer not to know.

The game then tells you things about yourself, you should not know. Cuauhtemoc was content to lose. He did it more and more cleverly, it now took more of an effort on Cortés’ part before Cuauhtemoc’s will snapped and he allowed himself to be beaten.

Outside their tent it rained. It became harder and harder to discipline oneself to make that effort, while Cuauhtemoc sat there, a graceful man, somehow not defeated at all, and sadly smiling. One had only to look at the board, to see that he knew too much.

Cortés hanged him.

*

There must have been something else. And yet, though the official reports make mention of an Aztec plot against the Spaniards, apparently there was nothing else. Cortés had disgraced himself. The Judges of the Secret Court exchanged glances, and that, too, he saw. He looked at the man’s wilted body, the way a hunter looks at the body of a pheasant one more than he had meant to kill. The dignity and the rebuke were of the same quality. The standards of the world mean nothing, but once fall from our own, and we never again feel the same certainty. We begin to fall apart. A dishonourable act is irreparable. We become indign.

After that there is nothing to accept but defeat. For though outwardly we may prosper, inwardly we shrink. We lose authority because we no longer have it ourselves.

He marched on, but it was the end of him. The natives could see that. He had the look of a man whose luck has changed. They breathed easier. He had been a great man, and a great man is difficult to deal with. Now they would not have to deal with him at all. He was no longer great.

But though difficult to deal with, great men can be dealt with. Having a two-class society, they had no concept of the inexorability of the infinitely small, those men in the middle, who take from rich and poor alike, and who, since they have not the courage to face their own appetites, can never be appeased.