FORTY-SIX

AS 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.