Palimpsest
2015 Mexico City
1519-1521 Tenochtitlan
On 18 March 2015, above the revered stone slabs of Mexico City’s Plaza de la Constitución and across from the double-horned Catedral Metropolitana, a large piece of cotton droops from its pole. The air is stagnant, the Zocolo under a sunny hush. On a breezier morning, perhaps, that limp textile would unroll in a spectacular fashion, unravelling to display the Mexican flag, taut and trim, rippling over the square, the aorta of both old and new Mexico. On the flag, a bronzed eagle balances on a single talon amid a bed of nopal cactus leaves. In its beak and the claws of its second talon, a rattlesnake scraps for survival. The serpent’s mouth is ajar and enraged, its fangs acuate, its body coiled and pressured, ready to strike. In the eagle’s eye shines a stoicism, a blank determination, saying to struggle against me is to struggle against the sun.
Over seven hundred years ago, Huitzilopochtli told the wandering Mexica people to look for an eagle devouring a snake, and when they did see the sign, they were to make that spot home. Then one day on a swampy island in the middle of Lake Texcoco, deep in the valley of Mexico, the Mixeca saw the struggle unfold as their god had said it would. They stopped moving that day and set about building a city on a lake in his honour. They built a flat-headed pyramid 60 metres high, with two steep staircases on the western side, topped by two temples painted in blues and reds, which rose skywards like the granite spirals of a mountain. From the reaches of the sacred limestone, the city, Tenochtitlan, as it became known, spilled over the island, growing far and across the lake to other islands and the hinterland. Holy men would watch muscled farmers in loincloths tilling their soggy farms, which yielded maize and beans and squash, and the women beside them weaving tunics from cotton bundles. For these riches, the Mixteca always thanked the gods, whose presence suffused the city, their shrines everywhere. But it was the central temple, templo mayor, which dominated the skyline and defined the polis. From every corner, it loomed. To see it, men and women only had to look up.
And it was here on this spot, below the limp flag, in the Zoloco, the soul of one of world’s largest metropolises, that the Mixteca spotted the eagle perched with a serpent in its beak. And it was here, just to the northwest actually, beyond the National Palace, half a kilometre more, past the barricades the police have assembled, where templo mayor, the holiest of sites, was patched together over hundreds of years. And it was here five hundred years ago, when this ground was mere island, that Hernan Cortes crossed the great causeway into Tenochtitlan with his retinue and confronted the Tlatoani, the one who speaks, the emperor Montezuma II, dressed in wealth. Not long after, Cortes cut the stone from the temple and used the hunks of rock to lay a new world and to plant a better God, right above where the eagle sat, concluding the greatest and most consequential encounter in the history of the world.
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On 8 November 8, 1519, after nine arduous months walking from Veracruz, the Castilians, led by Hernan Cortes, saw Tenochtitlan, the great island capital of the Mixteca Empire, for the first time. They surveyed the city in awe and surprise as if they had happened across this lost civilization by serendipity alone. The monumentality of its design and the vastness of its reach impressed the Castilians. A series of interlocking causeways connected the metropolis to the hinterland, giving fine views: stone palaces rose from the water’s depths, manic markets traded in cotton and sisal, wonderful birds of rainbow plumage floated above, and fires licked cedar branches sending sweet smells. The city was greater than Sevilla, as magnificent as Constantinople. Humbled by its ostentation, cowed by its pomp, the army crept down the great causeway, over its smooth limestone, and sensed the hovering eyes descend as a fog would.
Cortes touched his horse’s mane and the great equine halted. He descended. His almost forty years of life, his two decades of toil in Hispaniola and Cuba had not lessened his agility—that alacrity which he had known since childhood, that had driven him from his studies at Salamanca and the legal ruminations more suited for a sedentary body and mind. Not Cortes. He embodied the rapacious spirit of the times, the haughty zeitgeist of the Reconquista, the defeat of the Moors, the reunification of Castile, Columbus conquering the unknown seas, Pope Alexander splitting the New World into two and readying it for Christ. He became the rebel child his parents had always worried he would be, not a chivalrous gentleman of the plains but a ragamuffin, a rough waif who stumbled from town to town, lured by ungodly pursuits, the shine of gold bullion. And it was his defiance, his carefree flouting of custom and creed, that had led him to not only acquire wealth and status on the islands, becoming mayor of Santiago de Cuba and winning cattle, land, mines, and people, but to defy Governor Velazquez’s orders of submission and invade Mexico under his own reconnaissance, as a mutineer, to alone bathe in the riches of the Mexican mountains, to be the master of his fate, the only protagonist of future history books.
Cortes removed his helmet and stared across the gentle waters, his eyes as sharp as flint. The cavalrymen behind him, hundreds of men in plated armour and cotton tunics, swayed atop their horses, their steel resting firmly in their hands. Behind them still stood the army of Tlaxcalans, the Castillians’ newfound allies, with their clubs and hardened faces, who, experienced with Mixteca malice, had warned Cortes in frantic Nahua that the warriors of Tenochtitlan would eat their hearts. After the treachery of Choula people, after he was forced to massacre thousands of nobles, priests of Quetzalcoatl, Cortes now trusted only himself, only his faith, his reason. He was better than all. In the waters around him floated hundreds of canoes, which had come to rest, paddles calmed, drops of waters dripping from the obsidian spears that fell across the bow, the wind slight, only the smallest of waves visible, rippling subtly through the great maze of dugouts. Warriors sat in them, and Cortes felt a thousand twitchy eyes on him. Everything was silent save for the horses’ breath and the gentle prattle of commerce deep in the city’s entrails.
Towards the causeway’s end, beneath the steep-stoned pyramids mushrooming into the sky, two to three dozen chieftains dressed in burgundy cloaks stepped forth. They walked as a chorus; then, the lead man stopped, disrobed, and after spreading his cloak across the ground, fell to his knees and then further forwards, laying his lips to the fabric’s edge. Each chieftain followed the pattern until a red line had unwound to Cortes’s boots, a devotional display of power that gave Cortes a moment of pause. He sheaved his sword. Within the city, then, came a roar, a wave of discordant yelps that scattered the low-flying hawks, a ravaged howl that shamed the Castilians, reminding them that they were the interlopers, the trespassers, the guests of a god man.
Then Montezuma appeared carried by men with rounded shoulders and rough bodies in a canopy of green feathers adorned with fulgent metals. In a headdress of quetzal feathers, the monarch was helped down to the first cloak, careful to avoid any unclean stone, and moved towards Cortes and his army. Montezuma, also pushing past forty, showed the heavy expectations of power with each lumbering step. His gait was faulty and unsure, bespeaking the recent tremors unnerving his empire, a domain which under his tutelage had spread to the old Mayan lands south of the Yucatan, encompassing more tribute and subjects than ever before, people who had begun to tire of his demands, the bloodletting, the finery, the jade and jewelry of the self-professed jaguar. But it was not so much the rumours of discontent that bothered him, as people were mere flesh and bone, weak, ineffectual, mortal; it was the unending need to satiate the demands of the gods and their ravenous desire for hearts and gold and trinkets. Huitzilopochtli was always hungry. He was always voracious. He demanded so much in return for glory, for conquest, for harvest, for life. He wanted everything. The gods, all of them, were tough, taxing, and truculent, interceding in the lives of men with unrivaled glee. Thus, Montezuma’s head was full of demons that November morning, full of whispers of prophecy spoken by his priests, those worry mongers, who said that Quetzalcóatl, the feathered serpent god, was set to return, they read it in the stars, and demand his ordained place atop the temple.
So when Montezuma peered at the strange newcomers, especially their rugged leader, whose lighter skin surprised many, he felt a measure of restrained relief, a little levity, the hope that maybe he would be relieved of the weighty duties of god on earth but dared not speak that desire aloud. On the bridge, facing each other, the two men bowed. Montezuma extended a hand, which Cortes took before draping a necklace around the king’s neck. Cortes raised his helmet in the air, and from the crowd behind, a young woman in a plain shawl, with basalt-black hair that touched her hips, emerged and took her place beside her man. She was a young woman of the interior, somewhere behind the mountains, from a tributary tribe, who, because of her beauty and intelligence, had given her to Cortes as a present. Her eyes danced with the naivety of youth, big spheres of half-grown wisdom. She had a quick tongue and even quicker mind, and she digested the Castilians’ words with relative ease and, having known the Nahua language since birth, she became the bridge between two men, two worlds. Cortes spoke in fat clauses full of lofty adjectives, extolling the greatness of Montezuma, his fine, unequaled city, with its merchandise of metals. He thanked the king for his generosity, his words as saccharine as honey, for sending them the crates of gifts upon their arrival at Veracruz, the ornaments of gold and silver, the regalia of brass and copper. His men, he said pointing to the battalion behind him, had to lay their eyes on the place from whence they came—a great city of gold, the el dorado of their childhood imagination. Cortes looked at the young woman next to him and pointed to her mouth. When she spoke the words they recognized, long compounded words laden with prefixes and suffixes which halved Cortes’s turgid ones, when she reiterated what the bearded man said to match his world to theirs, aligning two cosmologies, two ontologies, the men in feathers and cottoned tunics looked aghast, terrified of this powerful girl who understood the strangers’ language, who could disclose their secrets, their esoteric knowledge and ways of being, who under the cover of blankets, in a stupor of acquiescence, could whisper the cipher to destroy them all, a harlot who could suffocate their earth with twisting, carcinogenic grass. The young woman stopped talking. Montezuma smiled and motioned for the group to follow him.