Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories (23 page)
MYSELF: Your Majesty… Your Holiness!… Emperor!… General!… I don’t know how to address you, am obliged to resort to terms that only partially convey the prerogatives of your position, forms of address that in my modern language have lost much of their authority, sound like echoes of lost powers… As your throne high on the Mexican plateau is lost, the throne from which you reigned over the Aztecs, most august of their sovereigns, and the last too, Montezuma… Even calling you by your name is a problem for me: Motecuhzoma, it seems that’s what your name really sounded like, but in our European books it’s distorted to Moteczuma, Moctezuma… A name that some writers say means ‘sad man’. To tell the truth, it’s a name you would have well deserved, for you saw the prosperous, well-ordered empire the Aztec world then was, invaded by incomprehensible beings, armed with unheard-of instruments of death. It must have been as if our cities here were suddenly to be invaded by extra-terrestrials. But we have already imagined that moment in every possible way: or at least we think we have. And you? When did you begin to realize that you were witnessing the end of a world?
MONTEZUMA: The end… Day rolls towards sunset… Summer rots in muddy autumn. Thus every day—every summer… You can never be certain they will return. That’s why man has to ingratiate himself with the gods. So that the sun and stars may continue to revolve over the fields of maize—one more day—one more year…
MYSELF: You mean to say that the end of the world is always there hanging over us, that amid all the extraordinary events you were witness to in your lifetime, the most extraordinary was that everything went on, not that everything was collapsing?
MONTEZUMA: It’s not always the same gods who reign in the sky, not always the same empires collecting their taxes in city and country. Throughout my life I honoured two gods, one present and one absent: the Blue Hummingbird, Huitzilopochtli who led us Aztecs in war, and the banished god, the Plumed Serpent, Quetzacoatl, an exile beyond the ocean, in the unknown lands of the West. One day the absent god would return to Mexico to wreak his revenge on the other gods and those peoples faithful to them. I feared the threat that hung over my empire, the upheaval that would usher in the era of the Plumed Serpent, but at the same time I looked forward to it, inwardly I was impatient that this prophecy should come to pass, even though I knew it would mean the ruin of our temples, the slaughter of the Aztecs, my own death…
MYSELF: And you really believed that the god Quetzacoatl led the Spanish conquistadores off their ships, you recognized the Plumed Serpent in the iron helmet and black beard of Hernán Cortés?
MONTEZUMA
(a sorrowful wail)
MYSELF: Forgive me, King Montezuma: that name reopens a wound in your heart…
MONTEZUMA: Oh enough… This story has been told too many times. That this god was traditionally depicted as having a pale bearded face, and that seeing
(he groans)
the pale and bearded Cortés we supposedly thought him our god… No, it’s not that simple. Correspondences between signs are never conclusive. Everything must be interpreted: the scriptures handed down by our priests are not made of letters, like yours, but of images.
MYSELF: You mean that your pictographic scripture and reality were each to be read in the same way: they both had to be deciphered…
MONTEZUMA: In the images of the holy books, the bas-reliefs in the temples, the feather mosaics, every line, every frieze, every coloured stripe can have a meaning… And in the things that come to pass, the events that unfold before our eyes, every tiny detail can have a meaning that points us to the intentions of the gods: the flutter of a robe, a shadow that forms in the dust… If it is thus for all things that have names, think how many things crossed my path that had no name, things I was constantly having to ask myself the meaning of! Wooden houses appear floating on the sea, their cloth wings bellied with wind… My army lookouts try to explain everything they see in words, but how to say something if you don’t know what it is? Men land on the beaches dressed in a grey metal that glitters in the sun. They climb on beasts we have never seen before, a sort of sturdy stag but with no antlers and leaving half-moon prints on the earth. Instead of bows and spears they carry some kind of trumpet that unleashes thunder and lightning, smashing bones from afar. Which were the stranger, the images of our holy books, the small terrible gods all in profile under flashing heads of hair, or these bearded, sweaty, smelly beings? They pushed deeper into our daily space, they robbed the hens from our coops, roasted them, gnawed the flesh from the bones just as we did: yet they were so different from us, incongruous, inconceivable. What could we do, what could I do, I who had so long studied the art of interpreting ancient temple images and dream visions, but try to interpret these new apparitions? Not that the one resembled the other: but the questions I was prompted to ask in the face of the inexplicable events I was experiencing were the same as those I had asked myself when poring over gods grinding their teeth in parchment paintings or in sculpted blocks of copper plated with gold and studded with emeralds.
MYSELF: But what lay behind your hesitation, King Montezuma? You saw that the Spanish didn’t stop advancing, that sending ambassadors with lavish gifts only aroused their greed for precious metals, that Cortés was forging alliances with those tribes who suffered your oppression, stirring them up against you, that he massacred the tribes who at your instigation laid ambushes for him, and yet at the last you welcomed him and all his soldiers as guests in the capital, and very soon you were allowing this guest to become your master, accepting that he proclaim himself protector of your shaky throne, and, with this pretext, that he hold you prisoner… Don’t tell me that you were so ingenuous as to believe in Cortés…
MONTEZUMA: That the whites were not immortal I knew; certainly they were not the gods we had been waiting for. But they possessed powers that seemed beyond the human: arrows broke against their armour; their fiery blowpipes—or whatever devilry it was—projected darts that were always lethal. And yet, and yet, one could hardly deny that we had our superior side too, and sufficient perhaps to even the scales. When I took the Spanish to see the marvels of our capital they were so amazed! It was we who really triumphed that day, over those rude conquerors from beyond the sea. One of them said that not even reading their books of adventures had they ever imagined such splendour. Then Cortés took me hostage in the palace where I had made him my guest; not content with all the presents I gave him, he had his men dig an underground tunnel to the treasure chamber and sacked it; my destiny was twisted and thorny as a cactus. But the boorish soldiers guarding me spent their days playing dice and cheating, making vulgar noises, fighting over the gold ornaments I tossed them as tips. And I was still king. I demonstrated as much every day: I was superior to them, I, not they, was the victor.
MYSELF: Were you still hoping to turn the tables?
MONTEZUMA: Perhaps there was a battle going on amongst the gods in the sky. A sort of equilibrium had established itself between us, as if our destinies were held in the balance. Surrounded by gardens, our lakes flashed with the sails of the brigs they had built; their arquebuses fired volleys from the shore. There were days when I was seized by an unexpected happiness, and laughed till I cried. And days when I only cried, amidst the laughter of my prison guards. Peace shone from time to time between clouds heavy with war. Don’t forget that the foreigners were led by a woman, a Mexican woman, from a tribe hostile to our own, but of the same race. You say: Cortés, Cortés, and you think that Malitzin—Dona Marina, as you call her—was only his interpreter. No, she was Cortés’s mind, or at least half of it: there were two heads directing the Spanish expedition; the plan for the Conquest arose from the union of a noble princess from our own land and a little man who was pale and hairy. Perhaps it would have been possible—I felt it would—to establish a new era in which the invaders’ qualities—which I believed divine—would be fused with our own more ordered and refined civilization. Perhaps it would be we who absorbed them, with all their armour and horses and mortars, to appropriate their extraordinary powers for ourselves, to have their gods sit down to eat at our gods’ banquet…
MYSELF: Wishful thinking, Montezuma, so as not to see your prison bars! Yet you knew there was another way: you could have resisted them, beaten them, overcome the Spanish. That was the way your grandson chose when he organized a conspiracy to free you… and you betrayed him, you lent the Spanish what was left of your authority to quell your people’s rebellion… Yet Cortés only had four hundred men with him at the time, he was isolated in an unknown continent; and what’s more he had fallen out with the authorities of his own government across the sea. Of course, whether for Cortés or against, the fleet and army of Emperor Charles V’s Spain was a threat to the New Continent… Was it their intervention you were afraid of? Had you already realized that the balance of forces was crushingly against you, that defiance of Europe was hopeless?
MONTEZUMA: I knew we weren’t equals, but not in the way you speak of, white man. The difference that held me back was not something to be weighed or measured… It was not the same as when two highland tribes—or two nations on your continent—seek to dominate each other, and courage and strength in battle decide the outcome. To fight an enemy you must move in the same space as he does, exist in the same time. Whereas we watched each other from different dimensions, without quite touching. The first time I received him, Cortés violated all the sacred rules and embraced me. The priest and dignitaries of my court covered their faces before this scandal. But to me it was as though our bodies hadn’t touched. Not because my position placed me beyond any alien contact, but because we belonged to two worlds that had never met, nor could meet.
MYSELF: King Montezuma, that was Europe’s first real encounter with the ‘other’. Less than thirty years had passed since Columbus had discovered the New World, and so far it had been nothing but tropical islands and mud-hut villages… Now the first colonial expedition of a white army was meeting not the famous ‘savages’, survivors of a prehistoric golden age, but a complex and wealthy civilization. And it was precisely at that first meeting between our world and yours—I say your world as an example of every other possible world—that something irreparable happened. This is what I ask myself, what I ask you, King Montezuma. Faced with the unexpected, you were prudent, but hesitant and submissive too. And your approach certainly didn’t spare your people or your country the massacres and ruin that have been going on for centuries. Had you met those first conquistadores with determined resistance perhaps that would have been enough to get the relationship between the two worlds going along different lines, to give it a different future. Warned by your resistance, the Europeans would perhaps have been more prudent and respectful. Perhaps there was still time for you to root out the dangerous weeds just sprouting in European minds: the conviction that they had the right to destroy everything that was alien to them, to plunder the world’s riches, to spread the uniform stain of misery and wretchedness across every continent. Then the history of the world would have taken a different path, you understand, King Montezuma, you do see, Montezuma, what a modern European is telling you, a man coming to terms with the end of a supremacy in which so many remarkable talents were turned to evil ends, in which everything we thought and did in the conviction that it was a universal good, bore the hallmark of a limitation… Answer a man who feels he is, like yourself, a victim, and like yourself responsible…
MONTEZUMA: You too speak as though reading from a book long written. For us, at that time, the only thing written was the book of our gods, the prophecies that could be read in a hundred ways. Everything had to be deciphered, the first thing we had to do with every new fact was to find a place for it in the order that upholds the world and outside of which there is nothing. Everything we did was a question waiting for an answer. And for every answer to have a further reliable confirmation I had to formulate my questions in two ways: one in one sense and the other in the opposite sense. I asked a question by making war and I asked a question by making peace. That’s why I led the people in their resistance and at the same time stood beside Cortés as he cruelly subdued them. You say we didn’t fight? Mexico City rebelled against the Spanish; rocks and arrows rained down from every roof. It was then my subjects stoned me to death, when Cortés sent me to appease them. Then the Spanish got reinforcements; the rebels were massacred; our peerless city was destroyed. The answer from that book I had been trying to decipher was: no. That is why you see my shadow creeping stooped about these ruins, as it has ever since that day.
MYSELF: But you were as alien to the Spanish as they were to you. You were the other, the incomprehensible, the unimaginable for them. The Spanish had to decipher you as much as you them.
MONTEZUMA: You appropriate things for yourselves; the order that upholds your world is one of appropriation; all you had to understand was that we had something which, as you saw it, was more worthy of appropriation than anything else, while for us it was just an attractive material for jewellery and ornaments: gold. Your eyes sought gold, gold, gold; your thoughts circled like vultures around that one object of desire. For us on the other hand the order behind the world consisted in giving. Giving so that the gods’ gifts might go on being heaped upon us, so that the sun might go on rising every morning slaking its thirst on the blood that issues forth…
MYSELF: The blood, Montezuma! I was afraid of mentioning it, and now you bring it up yourself, the blood of human sacrifice…
MONTEZUMA: That again. That. And what about yourselves? Let’s add it up, let’s add up the victims of your civilization and ours…
MYSELF: No, no, Montezuma, that argument won’t wash, you know I’m not here to justify Cortés and his men, you certainly won’t catch me playing down the crimes that our civilization has committed and still commits, but now it’s
your
civilization we’re talking about! Those young people lain on the altar, the stone knives dashing out the heart, the blood showering all around…
