Aztec Rage (34 page)

He stared at me, wonder enveloping his face. “Don't you find that incredible, Juan? Scholars with telescopes have discovered that we are not alone in the universe. The church doesn't want us to know this, that's why they prosecuted Galileo after he asked the bishops to peer through his telescope. The bishops weren't afraid they would see heaven; they feared sighting habitable planets.”

I didn't tell him I found it more frightening than incredible. People on the moon and Mars? An infinite universe rather than heaven? If the inquisitor-priest got his hands on the paper Carlos had read from, he'd rack us both right there in the jungle and broil us at the stake.

“I told you about encyclopedias, about how scholars in many nations are following the lead of the French and producing them, compiling and organizing the wisdom of the ages so that all may access and learn from it. What I didn't tell you is that I am working on two Spanish encyclopedias.”

“Two? At the same time?”

“Yes, two. One for the king and the other for all mankind. The version the king gets will have been censored by the Inquisition and the pack of narrow-minded court hangers-on who find it to their advantage to keep the
people in intellectual darkness. But the other, Juan, the one I compile in secret will be the truth. Do you know what that is, what I mean by the truth?”

I shrugged. “As things are, señor?”

“Yes, as they
really
are, not what the narrow dogma of the Inquisition says is truth, not what the professors who teach lies in our schools and universities say is the truth because they are too ignorant or too afraid to speak the truth.”

I rubbed the stubble on my chin and looked around the camp. Most of the men were sweating in their tents, suffering the heat to hide from the mosquitoes.

My friend Carlos was getting more complicated every day. It would be better if I carried the bags of a priest rather than those of a heretic.

“I know what you're thinking, Juan, that I am bait for that Inquisitor over there.” He jerked his head in the direction of the inquisitor-priest's tent. “But I don't care; I'm tired of being afraid, of hiding in the dark. Because of men like him I have had to hide knowledge like a thief hides his plunder. Do you know what they did to my teacher, the man who first took me by the hand and showed me the light beyond the darkness of religious dogma? One night they came to his house and took him to their dungeon, the place the Inquisition maintains to frighten us. They accused him of giving forbidden books on the Church's ‘Index Librorum Prohibitorum' to his students to read—”

“A lie, of course.”

“No, it was true. He gave us forbidden fruit. But do you break a man's bones for reading a book?”

FORTY-FIVE

A
S WE NEARED
the ruins of the ancient city, Carlos told me that like Teotihuacán, the true name of the place had been lost in time. “It's called Palenque because that's the name of the nearest settlement of any consequence, San Domingo de Palenque, an indio pueblo three or four leagues from the ruins. If the bishops had not been so intent upon destroying every vestige of indio history and culture after the Conquest, we would know the real name of this great city.”

Nearing the ruins, we traversed a less relentless country, part savannah, part forest. We crossed streams and a small river, a respite from the swamps and mires we had trudged in for days.

One night we stayed at the casa of a hacienda, camping against the outer wall. Like other haciendas in underdeveloped regions, the amount of
ground owned by the hacendado was vast, but only a small fraction of it could be used for crops and cattle. A hospitable gentleman, he roasted two cows over an open fire for our dinner.

That night as we lay in the darkness, Carlos expanded on the culture that built Palenque and the other Mayan centers.

“The Mayas rose as a great civilization hundreds of years before the Aztecs,” Carlos said. “In terms of the history of the indios, the Aztecs had been a mighty empire for only a relatively short time, perhaps a century or so, prior to the Conquest. But many scholars believe the Mayas had been a powerful empire centuries before, reaching back to the time of our Lord Christ.”

He explained that the Mayan culture rose to power sometime after Christ's birth and reigned supreme up to the beginning of Europe's Dark Ages.

“The first stage of Mayan civilization lasted up to around 900 a.d. During that time, at least fifty significant Mayan cities dominated this region, places like Copan, Tikal, and Palenque, some with populations of fifty thousand or more. After that period, most of the great Mayan centers were abandoned for reasons we don't know.

“During the next stage, the wondrous city of Chichén Itzá became a Yucatán center, along with the cities we call today Mayapán, Uxmal, and others. The civilizations of the Mayas extended from the neck of territory between the two great oceans, the isthmus, to the Yucatán Peninsula and down to the Guatemala region.”

The Mayan society had rituals similar to those of the indio civilizations to the north, he said. “Like their cousins the Mexica, Toltecs, and other indio civilizations, the Mayas practiced human sacrifice as part of the blood-for-corn covenant with the gods. They frequently fought savage wars, yet like the other indios, the Mayas were also passionate seekers of knowledge. Their observations permitted them to construct an amazingly accurate calendar. Like the Aztecs, the Mayas preserved their great wells of knowledge in books and encriptions. And, just as the zealots of the church destroyed the evidence of other indio accomplishments, they committed the same sin against the Mayas.”

He shook his head. “Do you not find it unbelievable that our knowledge of the rich culture of the Mayas is lost because of zealots?”

Having lost everything, including my bloodline, not so long ago and having learned that my life had been a folly and a fraud perpetrated by a man consumed by grotesque greed, I found nothing my fellow man did unbelievable.

FORTY-SIX

A
S WE CAME
to our destination of the ancient city, Carlos said, “I found out from the majordomo last night that Cortés had passed near here several years after the Conquest of the Aztecs. A fascinating man, I suppose the great conquistador exemplified what it took to discover, conquer, and exploit new worlds. Are you familiar with his Honduras trek?”

“Once again, I confess my ignorance.”

“Like so many events in the era of the Conquest, it is a tale of adventure, murder, and perhaps even a bit of madness. It began when Cortés sent one of his captains, Cristóbal de Olid, to start a colony in Honduras. Far removed from Cortés's supervision, Olid swelled with ambition, and his good senses took flight. Cortés learned in Mexico City that his captain would no longer obey his commands, that he was now acting independently.

“I tell you, Juan, Olid was foolish. He knew how tough Cortés was, knew the conqueror was so tenacious that he burned his own fleet to force his men to fight the Aztecs after they became frightened and wanted to return to Cuba.”

No guts, no glory, eh.

“Olid thought that, given the distance between himself and Cortés, he could defy him. He was wrong. Cortés first sent a trusted captain, Francisco de las Casas, to show Olid the error of his ways. Shipwrecked on the coast, las Casas fell into Olid's hands. Even though he was held captive, las Casas still rallied Olid's men, raised an insurrection, arrested Olid, and beheaded him. However, only word of the shipwreck reached Cortés in Mexico City, so he set out for Honduras with an army of about a hundred and fifty Spaniards and several thousand indios along with a troupe of dancers, jugglers, and musicians. Still the rough terrain made the journey a miserable one.

“Guatemozín, the last emperor of the Aztecs, was with Cortés, possibly because Cortés feared leaving him in the capital.

“When the men became exhausted and near starving, Guatemozín and other indio notables, plotted to kill the Spaniards and to parade Cortés's head on a stake all the way back to Mexico City, stirring the indios to rally against the Spanish.

“Cortés learned of the conspiracy, again through Doña Marina. Holding an impromptu trial, in which Guatemozín protested his innocence, Cortés had him and other leaders hanged.”

Carlos shook his head. “Whether Cortés was correct about Guatemozín's
guilt, the Cholula plot, or the many other victories and atrocities attributed to him, for certain he was a man of decision. He shared three attributes with the Emperor Napoleon, character traits that have made Napoleon the conqueror of Europe—decisiveness, boldness, and utter ruthlessness.”

Each time Carlos mentioned the amazing feats of Marina, I was reminded of the touch and courage of my Marina.

When we finally arrived at Palenque, I felt like Columbus when he spotted land after his nightmarish voyage. Another city of the dead, long abandoned by its occupants, perhaps even centuries before, Palenque had been swallowed whole by the jungle. Unlike Teotihuacán, whose towering pyramids dazzled everyone, even from a distance, the ruins had to be cleared of their entanglement to be observed.

It would have taken a small army to hack the city free of the jungle's grip, a luxury we were short of, forcing the scholars to choose only specific parts of edifices to be cleared and studied.

Carlos told me these ancient ruins were discovered shortly after the Conquest, but two centuries passed before a priest, Padre Solís, was sent by his bishop to examine the site. Little came of the mission; like so many of the antiquities of the New World, no one cared about the sites once they had been stripped of treasure.

How large had the city been? It wasn't possible for us to tell, but we discovered structures overrun by jungle for a league in each direction.

“They call this the Palace,” Carlos told me as we examined a huge complex. An enormous oblong structure with tall walls surrounding buildings, courtyards, and a tower, the Palace, like other structures of Palenque, was covered by a coating of a stucco that dried hard and kept its shape for long periods. The structures were dark and dank, with many halls and rooms, including a series of underground storerooms.

“It's huge,” I said to Carlos, as I slowly grasped the Palace's scope and significance. “You could put Méjico City's whole main square into it.”

“It may have been the administrative center of the empire the city ruled,” Carlos said.

Near the Palace was the Temple of Inscriptions, a pyramid consisting of nine successive terraces, the ancient indios used to communicate and record important events. Over fifty feet high, it contained hundreds of hieroglyphic carvings.

A smaller pyramid, the Temple of the Sun, almost matched its vertiginous height when the spacious chamber at its top was included. To the left and right of the entrances, life-size human figures were sculpted in stone. The sun was sculpted in bas-relief, ten feet wide and over three feet high. Carlos called it a “masterwork of art.”

Immersion in the ancient indio culture was slowly transforming me. As I stared at the magnificent edifices from the past, I realized that, starting
weeks ago at the Avenue of the Dead in Teotihuacán, a new world had begun to open up for me. I now understood that everything I'd been taught about the indios was wrong. Rather than the dray animals and jungle savages I thought them to be, they were a magnificent people who had been horrifically harmed. I also finally understood why the padre in Dolores insisted that, given the chance, the Aztec was as capable as anyone else.

Too bad I came to these revelations one step ahead of the hangman.

FORTY-SEVEN