Aztec - Jennings Gary - Страница 247
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"This was the palace of my father, who was one of my predecessors as Uey-Tlatoani. It has been scrupulously cleaned and furnished and decorated to be worthy of such distinguished guests. It contains suites of chambers for yourself, for your lady"—he said that with some distaste—"and for your chief officers. There are ample and suitable quarters for all the rest of your company. There is a complete staff of slaves to serve you and cook for you and attend to your needs. The palace will be your residence for as long as you stay in these lands."
I think any other man but Cortes, in his equivocal situation, would have declined that offer. Cortes knew that he was a guest only by self-invitation, and was more likely regarded as an unwelcome aggressor. By taking up residence in the palace, even with some three hundred of his own soldiers under the same roof, the Captain-General would be in a position far more dangerous than when he had stayed in the palace of Chololan. Here, he would be at all times under Motecuzoma's eye, and within Motecuzoma's reach, should his host's unwillingly extended hand of friendship suddenly decide to clutch or clench. The Spaniards would be captives—unfettered, but captives—in Motecuzoma's own stronghold city, the city perched on an island, the island encircled by a lake, the lake surrounded by all the cities and peoples and armies of The Triple Alliance. While Cortes stayed in the city, his own allies would not be within easy call, and, even if he did call, those reinforcements might have trouble getting to his side. For Cortes would have noticed, as he came along the southern causeway, that its several bridged canoe passages could easily be unbridged to prevent its being crossed. He must have guessed that the city's other causeways were similarly constructed, as of course they were.
The Captain-General could tactfully have told Motecuzoma that he preferred to make his residence on the mainland, and from there to visit the city as their intermittent conferences might require. But he said no such thing. He thanked Motecuzoma for the hospitable offer, and accepted it, as if a palace were no more than his due, and as if he scorned even to consider any danger in occupying it. Though I bear no love for Cortes, and no admiration for his guile and his deceits, I must grant that in the face of danger he always acted without hesitation, with a daring that defied what other men call common sense. Perhaps I felt that he and I had temperaments much alike, because in my lifetime I also often took audacious risks that "sensible" men would have shunned as insane.
Still, Cortes did not trust his survival entirely to chance. Before he and his men spent their first night in the palace, he had them use heavy ropes and great effort to hoist four of his cannons to the roof—uncaring that the process rather thoroughly destroyed the flower garden newly planted up there for his delectation—and positioned the cannons so they could cover every approach to the building. Also, on that night and every night, soldiers carrying charged harquebuses paced all night long around the rooftop and around the palace's exterior at ground level.
During the following days, Motecuzoma personally conducted his guests on tours of the city, accompanied by the Snake Woman or others of his Speaking Council, and by a number of his court priests, who wore faces of extreme disapproval, and by me. I was always in the company, at Motecuzoma's insistence, because I had warned him of Malintzin's cunning aptitude for mistranslating. Cortes remembered me, as he had said he would, but apparently without any rancor. He smiled his thin smile when we were introduced by name, and he accepted my company amiably enough, and he spoke his words as often through my translation as through that of his woman. She also recognized me, of course, and with obvious odium, and she addressed me not at all. When her master chose to speak through me, she glared as if she were awaiting only a propitious moment to have me put to death. Well, fair enough, I thought. It was what I planned for her.
On those walks about the city, Cortes was always accompanied by his second in command, the big, flame-haired Pedro de Alvarado, and by most of his other officers, and naturally by Malintzin, and by two or three of his own priests, who looked about as sour as ours. We would also usually be followed by a straggle of the common soldiers, though other groups of them might wander about the island on their own, while the native warriors of their company tended not to stray far from the security of their barracks at the palace.
As I have said, those warriors wore the new headdress ordained by Cortes: it looked like a clump of high, pliant grass growing from the tops of their heads. But the Spanish soldiers too, since I had seen them last, had added to their military headgear a distinctive adornment. Each of them wore a curious, pale-leather band encircling the crown of his steel helmet, just above its flanged brim. It was not particularly decorative, and served no apparent purpose, so eventually I inquired about it and one of the Spaniards, laughing, told me what it was.
During the affray at Chololan, while the Texcalteca were indiscriminately butchering the mass of the city's inhabitants, the Spaniards had gone looking specifically for the females with whom they had disported themselves during their fourteen days of revel, and they found most of those women and girls still in their quarters, trembling with fear. Convinced that the females had coupled with them only to sap their strength, the Spaniards exacted a unique revenge. They seized the women and girls, stripped them naked, and used some of them a last time or two. Then, though the females screamed and pleaded, the soldiers held them down and, with their sharp steel knives, they cut away from each female's crotch a hand-sized flap of skin containing the oval opening of her tipili. They left the mutilated and sexless women to bleed to death, and went away. They took the warm, purselike pouches of skin and stretched the lips of them around the pommels of their horses' saddles. When the flesh had dried but was still pliable, they slipped the resultant circlets over their helmets, each with its little xacapili pearl facing front—that is, the shriveled, beanlike gristle that had been a tender xacapili. I do not know whether the soldiers wore those trophies as a grisly joke or as a warning to other scheming females.
All the Spaniards remarked approvingly on the size and population and splendor and cleanliness of Tenochtitlan, and compared it to other cities they had visited. The names of those other cities mean nothing to me, but you reverend friars may know them. The guests said our city was bigger in extent than Valladolid, that it was more populous than Seville, that its buildings were almost as magnificent as those of Holy Rome, that its canals made it resemble Amsterdam or Venice, that its streets and airs and waters were cleaner than in any of those places. We guides refrained from remarking that the effluvium of the Spaniards was noticeably diminishing that cleanliness. Yes, the newcomers were much impressed by our city's architecture and ornamentation and orderliness, but do you know what most impressed them? What moved them to their loudest exclamations of wonder and amazement?
Our sanitary closets.
It was clear that many of those men had traveled widely in your Old World, but it was equally clear that nowhere had they encountered an indoor facility for performing one's necessary functions. They were amazed enough to find such closets in the palace they occupied; they were astonished beyond words when we took them to visit the market square of Tlaltelolco and they found public conveniences provided for even the common folk: the vendors and the marketers there. When the Spaniards first noticed the things, every single man of them, Cortes included, just had to go inside and void himself. So did Malintzin, since such conveniences were as unknown in her native backcountry of the uncivilized Coatlicamac as they evidently are in Spain's Holy Rome. As long as Cortes and his company stayed on the island, and as long as the marketplace existed, those public closets were the most popular and most often visited attractions of all that Tenochtitlan had to offer.
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