Fear

By the time Cortés and Cuauhtémoc met, the Spaniards were more than familiar with Tenochtitlan and had been thoroughly observed by half the city, out on walks that exposed their vulnerability. The Mexica people asked themselves, in ever more insistent tones, why Moctezuma didn’t surround these interlopers and kill them once and for all. It would be interesting if history had taken a turn in that direction. From a contemporary perspective, Cortés and his company would be like those lesser martyrs who made the miscalculation of going to preach the gospel in Japan.

There would have been a Saint Hernán of Medellín and a Saint Bernal of Medina del Campo. Velázquez would have painted an altarpiece in which their heads appeared at the foot of the temple of Tezcatlipoca, and Caravaggio another called The Martyrdom of Saint Jerome of Aguilar: a canvas that captured Cortés’s translator’s terror just before his tongue was cut out. Beside him, covering her mouth, one of Merisi’s tarts would have played an approximate green-eyed Malitzin. It would be a chiaroscuro set in small-town Rome, remote and squalid, as Europe always was and would have continued to be if not for the flow of American ore.

Malitzin told Cortés that Cuauhtémoc had approached her. They had just been making love, as so many cheesy writers would have it, though for La Malinche and the captain—scarcely equipped for such a thing—it was more like the scuffling of two blind children.

The conquistador panted, lying on his belly on the cotton pallet as the Mayan princess turned translator, now lubricated with semen, dug about in her pubic hair in the hope of giving herself the satisfaction her man hadn’t provided. I saw Cuauhtemoctzin in the market today, she said, kneading the clitoris that changed the world. By now, Doña Marina was the only one of Cortés’s associates who could go out into the city without being escorted by an armed company. She was also, at least in Cortés’s not inconsiderable experience, the only woman who could do politics and masturbate at the same time.

The captain moved next to her and sniffed her armpit. He squeezed the hand that she was touching herself with, without preventing its circular motion. Who is that, he asked. Moctezuma’s favorite captain. And why does it make you so hot that this captain wants to talk to me? Still touching herself, she said: Because men who do it with men turn me on. She closed her eyes. Cortés let her continue. Before burrowing entirely into her own pleasure, she added: He said that he wanted to take you to the ball game tomorrow. Then, in order to come, she found her way to a world in which men weren’t animals.

He waited for her to finish, tugging at his beard. When he sensed that she was back, he asked: Do you think it’s to kill me? Her breathing was still ragged when she answered no, that he was a decent sort. Though she had stopped feeling her sex, she protected it with her hand: she hadn’t finished; she was resting. The emperor doesn’t understand why we haven’t left, and he thinks that if someone makes an effort to talk to you, maybe you’ll explain. Cortés lifted her hand with what he imagined was delicacy and blew on her. She shivered. Should we believe him? Cuauhtemoctzin is to be believed—he has no flaws, he’s a hero, a fanatic; everyone knows that sooner or later he’ll be emperor, even he knows it. Cortés made a gesture of unease, indicating that he wasn’t convinced by Malinche’s confidence. He returned her hand to her sex. She scratched her pubic hair. She said: The truth is that I asked him to kill you; if Moctezuma can’t bring himself to do it, sooner or later the people will rise up and nos van a xingar a todos, we’ll all be fucked, not just you, the only one who thinks it’s a good idea for us to stay here and do nothing. We’re reconnoitering the plaza, Cortés explained in the bureaucratic tone he had used many times to tell his men why he was subjecting them to a risk they all found unnecessary, but he realized that Malitzin was already off again. With her head thrown back, the translator was imagining Cuauhtémoc—so smooth and hairless—sodomizing the conquistador. He smelled her neck, let her come, and when she had finished climbed on top of her. She asked him to bite her breasts. He loved them, so dark and erect. She came again. He didn’t. Collapsed on Malinche, he asked: Should I go? You can’t not go; it’s Cuauhtemoctzin, he gives the orders; he said he would be there early because it will be crowded. We’ll have to tell the troops. He wants us to come alone. He’ll betray us. He’s a man of his word. I am too, said Cortés, and raising himself on his arms and the tips of his toes, he left a space for her to turn over to offer him her ass. Your people don’t know what it means to give your word, she said, squeezing his cock between the hemispheres of her buttocks. When he felt that he had recovered his full erection he lifted her up by the hips and thrust into her without ceremony. She whimpered. A talk, captain to captain, he said as he drove down. She turned her face so that she could see his eyes when she said: You aren’t a captain like him. The Spaniard thrust deeper, and pulled her violently by the hair, murmuring in her ear: I’m better. Ay guapo, she said between gasps; he isn’t a peasant who got lucky.

Cortés’s mood deflated too and he rolled back onto the pallet. Acknowledging that he had lost, he turned on his side. He pulled the cotton blanket up from the foot of the cot and covered himself with it, curling into a ball. Don’t be a coward, she said; he’s a killing machine, but only in combat; with us, he’ll be a prince. The Spaniard said nothing. He was listening with all his senses alert to the faintest hint of betrayal in her voice. And you’ll like the game, it’s fun, and all the lords of the city come with their wives. It was only now that Cortés realized that Malitzin, who had been a princess first and then a slave, and was now something in between, simply wanted to be seen in public in casual conversation with the emperor-to-be. All right, Your Highness, he said; I’ll go to the game with Guatémuz, but you can only come if you do what I taught you.

When the princess opened her eyes the next morning, her lover was no longer in bed. He had gone to wake a group of his men to follow them at a prudent distance. I think our next outing should be as a company, on horseback, hightailing it out of here for the Tacuba causeway, said one of his soldiers, who was also named Hernando, which meant that everyone called him by the name of the town he came from—Persona; I don’t think we’ll be able to leave on foot without being killed. As Hernando de Persona spoke, he watched Cortés nervously. No one will make trouble if they see that I’m with Guatémuz, answered the captain; he’s Moctezuma’s favorite. How do you know that? Everyone knows it. The men exchanged doubtful glances.

By the time the future emperor came for them, Malitzin had informed her lover that Cuauhtémoc had commanded his first battle at sixteen and since then he hadn’t lost a single one; that during the five years he’d spent at military college he hadn’t spoken once to anyone; that he didn’t eat game, fish, or fowl, but on feast days he ate the raw flesh of sacrifice victims. This enumeration of his virtues made her flush. A fucking gem, replied Cortés as he rummaged in his travel bag for something to wear that had no holes, or that had them only where they could be hidden under the breastplate and gauntlets of his armor.

Even so, when Cuauhtémoc arrived, he liked him: he was almost a boy. He wasn’t exquisite like the dazzling priests who passed through the courtyards on their way to rites at the temples, or dressed up like an animal like the other soldiers of his rank. He was wearing a white shirt and bloomers, a discreet cloak. No trappings in his hair, which was gathered in a bunch on top of his head. He wasn’t carrying a dagger. Cortés felt more stifled than ever by the embrace of his armor, the weight of the grotesque Spanish broadsword on his belt, but he still believed that suiting up in iron made an impression on the Mexicans. They, of course, thought he must be an utter fool to walk out in the lethal altiplano sun with that massive contrivance on him.

They walked straight for the quay, in the opposite direction of the snaking walls of the sacred city. The ball court is the other way, said Cortés nervously. Through Malitzin, Cuauhtémoc explained that they were going to a much smaller court, in Tlatelolco. Partly to make conversation and also to judge whether this was true, the captain confessed that the Tenochtitlan court had seemed too large ever since they had visited it early on, the walls too far apart and the ring too high. We don’t play there, said the Aztec, we stage performances of the first game; no one could lift the ball that high with his hip. It’s like a play, explained Malitzin. Cuauhtémoc himself pulled on the rope of the royal barge to bring it closer to her foot.