- ISBN-10:
- 1864487801
- ISBN-13:
- 9781864487800
- Pub. Date:
- 05/01/2000
- Publisher:
- Allen & Unwin
- ISBN-10:
- 1864487801
- ISBN-13:
- 9781864487800
- Pub. Date:
- 05/01/2000
- Publisher:
- Allen & Unwin
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781864487800 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Allen & Unwin |
| Publication date: | 05/01/2000 |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 256 |
| Sales rank: | 800,357 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.50(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Malinche's Conquest
By Anna Lanyon
Allen & Unwin
Copyright © 1999 Anna LanyonAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-86448-780-0
CHAPTER 1
The Absent Figure
In September 1997 I put a telephone call through to Mexico City, to the famous Museo Nacional de Antropologia. The receptionist told me the person I wanted to speak to no longer worked there. She had transferred to another institute in Colima, on the west coast of Mexico. Would I like her number?
I called Colima and waited nervously while the secretary went to find Rosamaria Zuñiga. How would I explain who I was and what I was doing? Would she think I was crazy? I heard the sound of footsteps on a wooden floor, then her voice: 'Bueno?' I began. I explained that I had tried to find her when I was last in Mexico in 1994. I had wondered about her ever since because I had heard that, like me, she was researching the life and legend of Malinche. That's why I had finally summoned the courage to ring.
I need not have worried. That was the first of many long conversations Rosamaria and I would have, by telephone, by mail. She told me she had moved to Colima, beneath its beautiful volcanoes called 'Fire' and 'Ice', Fuego and Hielo, to escape the pollution and crime of Mexico City.
She was an anthropologist and linguist. As well as her native Spanish she spoke several other European languages and two indigenous Mexican tongues: Zapotec and Nahuatl. I explained that my background was also in language, but I knew only Spanish and Portuguese. As for Nahuatl, it interested me greatly, although I had only a passing knowledge of this beautiful tongue.
On one occasion Rosamaria remarked on the curious nature of our friendship; about how strange it was that we should have been brought together by a woman who had disappeared five hundred years ago. Something else she said about Malinche has stayed with me. She described her as the absent figure always present in the history of the Conquest of Mexico. 'El personaje ausente siempre presente' were her precise words. Even after all this time I can think of no better definition of Malinche.
Malinche really lived. It is important to say this at the outset because the little that remains of her story is so fragmentary and so elusive as to suggest a mirage, a fantasy. Even in Mexico, where she is remembered with such bitter and enduring poignancy.
It is, as Rosamaria Zuñiga said, almost five hundred years since Malinche was born. Five hundred years, perhaps a little less. It is difficult to be certain because the year of her birth, like almost every other detail of her brief life, has either been forgotten or was never recorded.
We know, however, that when the Spaniards first encountered her in 1519, she was a young woman, possibly about eighteen or nineteen years of age. The same age, in other words, as the extraordinary, catastrophic century into which she had been born.
She was living among the Maya at that time, in a city which no longer exists, on the gulf coast of what we now call Mexico. But she was not a Mayan. Her birthplace lay some 200 kilometres to the west, on a slender land bridge, an isthmus, well outside Mayan territory.
She had learned to speak the Mayan tongue, or more specifically, the branch of Mayan spoken in that remote coastal region at the base of the Yucatan Peninsula. She also knew Nahuatl, which belonged, and still belongs, to an entirely different family of languages from Mayan. In Malinche's day it was spoken by various peoples of central Mexico, including, most famously, the Aztecs. Nahuatl is essential to Malinche's story, because it was the language the Aztecs spoke, and because she retained it throughout her years among the Maya. As if in preparation for what was to come.
I saw Malinche first in Mexico City, on the walls of the Palacio Nacional. She was a solitary woman in Diego Rivera's famous mural; a woman amid a sea of conquistadors and priests, warriors in jaguar skins, ghostly penitents in their pointed hats. She stood there framed within an arch at the base of a great staircase. Her long black hair was swept back from her face. She wore the graceful white cotton tunic, the huipil, I had seen worn by the Mayan women of the south, and like them, her only adornments were a pair of earrings and a long string of beads, coiled twice around her neck.
I noticed that she clasped a small boy to her and that the child's face was buried in her dress, in an attitude of fear. Her own expression, as she glanced toward Hernan Cortés, was vigilant. She was surrounded by people but she seemed entirely alone with her child.
I turned to the friend who had brought me to the National Palace.
'Who is she?' I asked him.
'That's Malinche,' he said. 'Have you never heard of her?'
I shook my head, but I didn't take my eyes off the woman.
'She was Cortés's guide,' he said, 'and his interpreter throughout the Conquest.'
'And who is this child with her?'
'That is their son,' he replied. 'I don't recall his name, but he was the first of us.'
'The first Mexican?' I asked him, puzzled.
'Yes,' he said. 'In a way, yes. He was the first child of a Spanish father and an Amerindian mother. The first mestizo.'
It was January 1974. Walking outside in the wintry streets of this mountain city I could see my breath, and even inside those thick palace walls, the air was cold. I stood there looking at Malinche and I was moved by her watchful solitude and by her tenderness toward the child in her arms.
In the months that followed I heard her name frequently, or rather, a derivative of her name, Malinchista. I noticed that politicians hurled it at each other, like a lightning rod. It sounded to me like a derisive war cry.
'Why do they do that?' I asked my friend. 'What do they mean when they say that word, 'Malinchista'?
'It is an insult,' he explained. 'It implies that one is not truly Mexican. That one is too susceptible to foreign influence. A traitor. Like Malinche.'
I listened quietly. I had no argument. I still knew very little of Mexico and almost nothing of this woman's story.
Most mornings I would rise early to watch the twin volcanoes as they loomed above the city, snowcapped, remote, a menacing trail of smoke floating high above the larger of the two. It was still possible, in those days, to glimpse them in the rosy light of dawn, before they disappeared behind their concealment of cloud.
As a child I liked to recite their wondrous, polysyllabic names. 'Popo-catepetl ', I would whisper to myself, 'Iztac-cihuatl'. I even knew what they meant: 'Smoking Mountain', 'White Lady'. Those extravagant, alluring words were my first encounter with Nahuatl, but I mistakenly assumed they were Spanish since that was the official language of Mexico.
I had longed to visit Mexico City. To me it was the eternal city of the Americas. But I hadn't counted on modernity. Who does? My eyes wept caustic tears in the contaminated air and I felt lost in its noise and complexity. I found my way, however, to the secluded plazas of the old quarter, to the leaning palaces and churches, the narrow lanes leading into the great central square they call the Zocalo.
I felt that shock of recognition when you gaze upon a building or a streetscape you have long known from drawings and etchings, from paintings and photographs. Moctezuma's city, Cortés's city. The oldest continually inhabited metropolis in the Americas. This was the Mexico City of my imagination. It did not disappoint me.
I walked each day through the pretty Alameda Central. This peaceful woodland was once the city's official burning place, the quemadura, where Jews and heretics had met a fiery death at the hands of their tormentors. I knew this, but still I found it difficult to imagine such horror amid such beauty.
A few blocks away I saw a huge plumed serpent which Aztec hands had carved from stone without ever knowing that their sacred sculpture would one day form the cornerstone of a foreign palace thrust down upon the ruins of their proud city. I sat in a primitive Spanish church that had extinguished an older shrine to an earlier god. In all these places, like everyone who comes to Mexico City, I sensed the ancient pulse of the Amerindian past. But I didn't see Malinche's house that first time, or realise that it stood so close nearby, silent and forgotten beside the Plaza de Santo Domingo.
I no longer recall where I stayed on that first visit to Mexico City. Somewhere in the district of Tacuba, I think, on an upper floor where an unbearable neon sign outside the window disturbed my sleep each night.
At breakfast on the morning of the day I was due to leave, I was leafing through a tattered art book on the shelf in the vestibule, and read about another painting of Malinche in Mexico City.
I asked the concierge for directions, left my bags with her and took a bus to the central plaza. I hurried past the cathedral and along Calle Donceles, determined to see this work before leaving.
In 1923 the old Jesuit College of San Ildefonso became the National Preparatory School, and along its gallery walls Diego Rivera painted a series of luminous murals. While he was working on them he met Frida Kahlo, who later became his wife. The College is filled with great art, not only Rivera's but that of his magnificent rival muralist, Jose Clemente Orozco. It was one of Orozco's paintings I had come to see: Cortés and Malinche.
I walked quickly through the galleries and halls. I searched and searched but I couldn't find it. Time was running out when I finally located an attendant who told me to walk across the courtyard, up a staircase that I had not noticed, and when I reach the first landing, turn and look back.
I took the steps leading up from the courtyard and turned as instructed. I saw her there in the shadows, on the sloping underside of the staircase. It was an inspired work which almost leapt from the grey stone on which it was painted. Orozco's Malinche wears no ornament. She is naked, sullen and brooding. Her copper skin glows in the darkness beneath the staircase, but her eyes are cast down, her arm hangs by her side. She seems barely conscious, unknowable, hermetic, silent, immense.
Hernan Cortés is there, ghostly pale but unassailable, with his arm thrust like a barricade across her body. Is he restraining or protecting her? I couldn't tell. He grasps her hand in his and glares out at the world, fearless, implacable in his place beside her. Beneath his feet a vanquished Amerindian warrior lies face down, his arm raised toward the inert, unseeing Malinche.
Orozco's Malinche is an intensely carnal, disturbing portrait, and it seemed to me the artist had deliberately concealed it in that sombre place beneath the stairs. But I was wrong. Later, as I learned more about the polemical storm which rages forever around Malinche, I came to understand this painting differently. I saw it as the artist's own defiant, public memorial to this illicit mother of modern Mexico.
That night as I flew out of Mexico City, I farewelled the lights spread out before me and the strange dark patch in their midst which is all that remains of the lake on which the old Aztec capital was originally constructed.
As we flew north across the sierra, I remembered the mural on the walls of the National Palace, and the painting beneath the stairs in the Colegio de San Ildefonso. I went away, but I never forgot about Malinche.
* * *
It was another three years before I returned to Australia. When I did I became a language student. I had acquired a fumbling, hesitant brand of Spanish, but I felt ashamed and desired something better. Besides, like so many others at that time, I had fallen in love with the Latin American poets. 'I would learn Spanish just to be able to read Pablo Neruda and Borges and Mistral and Juana Inez de la Cruz,' I explained to anyone who would listen.
One of my professors in the years that followed liked to remind us of the complexity of the translators' task. It was essential, she said, to preserve, at all costs, the perfect symmetry of sound and meaning for which the poet had struggled, alone, through the long dark nights.
Should translation of poetry even be attempted? she asked. Was it possible? There were times, she told us, when she still wasn't certain. When you love a poet's work, she warned us, it could feel like a betrayal.
'Traduttore, traditore,' she would murmur at these moments, with a cautionary smile. 'Translator, traitor ... Wise words, don't you think?' Each time I heard her say that, my mind would wander from the work before me. I would look out across the treetops of the university, across the lagoon and the geese sheltering in the reeds, and I would think about Malinche.
She too had been a translator, but in far more dangerous circumstances than those I would ever have to face. Was she also a traitor? I wasn't sure what to think. And although I should have been engaged in other pursuits, I began, instead, to search for her.
I presumed I would find a biography of Malinche on the shelves of the university library. I thought it would be easy, but it wasn't. She was usually just a footnote, a paragraph or two at best, in the many great histories of the Spanish Conquest, or sometimes just a puzzling entry in the index: Marina, see Malinche. Malinche, see Marina.
A woman of several names, of uncertain origins, of unknown purpose. Who was she? Why did she do what she did? Had she betrayed her people, as I had heard in Mexico? Who were her people anyway?
One thing I learned quickly and with extreme regret. Although Malinche was there at all the great moments of the Conquest, although she spoke for Cortés, although the phrases she learned to utter on his behalf were carefully recorded, she left not one word of her own to tell us what she made of the apocalyptic events in which she participated. It is one of the many ironies of her story — that she was famous for her voice, but we never hear her speak.
The little we know of her has come down to us almost entirely through the eyes and ears of one man, a Spaniard, a former conquistador. His name was Bernal Diaz del Castillo. He said he knew Malinche, and the fragmentary glimpses he offered of her in his memoirs of the Conquest became precious to me beyond estimation.
Bernal Diaz was there in 1519 when the Maya gave Malinche to Cortés. He observed her as she travelled with the Spaniards up from the coast, through the highest mountain passes, to the remote Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan, whose soaring pyramids and temples stood then where Mexico City stands today. He noted that after the Conquest she bore a child to Cortés, and that later she was reunited, briefly, with her family in the Isthmus. Diaz told me more about Malinche than any other historian I had read, and his words had the convincing and compelling power of an eyewitness.
In his closing chapters Diaz gave a meticulous account of the fortunes of each of his comrades in arms. This man died of his wounds, he said, and this man lived to a great old age, and this one drowned, and this one died in such and such a battle. Line after fascinating line, his words went on, like an old soldier's roll-call to his dead companions. But about Malinche's fate he said nothing.
In 1988, some years after I completed my studies, I attended a seminar devoted to Mexican history. Discussion arose about the great seventeenth-century poet, Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz, and I was surprised when one of the speakers invoked Malinche's name. It was not a name I had heard much since leaving Mexico.
'It is interesting to compare,' he intoned, 'the admiration for Sor Juana, as opposed to the contempt reserved for the woman called Malinche.' I glanced at the other participants and guessed from their expressions that they had never heard of her.
'Malinche was Hernan Cortés's guide during the Conquest,' he explained, 'and his mistress. These days in Mexico she is considered a national traitor.' He surveyed the puzzled faces in front of him. 'Have you never heard the expression Malinchista?' he asked. No, they hadn't, but I had, and I flinched to hear this pejorative word pronounced out loud.
Some days later I spoke to a fellow student from the history faculty. Like me he had an interest in Mexico, so I told him I was thinking of basing some postgraduate research on Malinche.
'Malinche?' he said. 'Why Malinche?' He looked genuinely shocked.
'Well,' I said hesitantly, 'because she had such a profound impact on Mexico.'
'But what an impact.' He shook his head.
'Why not research the life of Sor Juana, or Josefa Ortiz de Dominguez, the independence leader?' he said. 'Why not choose a more edifying subject?'
'Much of women's experience in this world is unedifying,' I told him. 'Besides, it seems to me there is something universal about what happened to Malinche, during her lifetime, after her death. It's not just a Mexican story.'
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Malinche's Conquest by Anna Lanyon. Copyright © 1999 Anna Lanyon. Excerpted by permission of Allen & Unwin.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
LIst of Illustrations,Preface,
Map,
I prelude,
The Absent Figure,
Mexico City,
Isthmus,
Exile,
Gift of Tongues,
II conquest,
Malinche,
Malinche and Cortés,
We People Here,
When the Shield Was Laid Down,
III aftermath,
The Place of The Coyote,
Final Journey,
Archives,
IV mythologies,
Avatar,
Traitor,
V malinche's children,
Look Once More at the City ...,
Timeline,
Glossary of Spelling and Pronunciation,
Select Bibliography,
What People are Saying About This
Mesmerizing . . . to be relished. Anyone who loves Mexico, old tales or fine prose should read this book. (Inga Clendinnen, author of Aztecs and Ambivalent Conquests)