MALINCHE*
| She who speaks out to you is Malinche, whom Hernán
called Doña Marina...
When my father the cacique of Oluta died, I being eight years, my mother sold me to Tabascan slave traders to secure the inheritance for my half brother. Yet this was the deed that was my destiny... which from my birth kept me on the path I was to follow. |
****************** When one is eighteen, one should never be sad in an ancient world... of great [ceiba] trees... lake like rivers and gay parrots. But when old and young, rich and poor, forget the Feathered Serpent... and find no way back into the earth they were made of... What is one to do.... |
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Whatever Cortés says to my people reaches them through my lips.
Whatever they say to him reaches him through my lips.
I am my lord's mouthpiece and... I am the mouthpiece of my earth.
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TENOCHTITLAN
Tenochtitlán [the Aztec capital]...It is a landscape of water and islands; it is like my native Tabasco and the great rivers...
Water is beautiful and the flowers that bloom upon it and beside it...
The rivers and swamps of my country have no such far vistas as one sees here; but they are more mysterious...
Tenochtitlán is not a city sprung out of the earth itself...
It was built on trees driven in mud by the Aztecs who conquered the country, and who are now to be conquered in their turn...
In the air one breathes always the smell of blood.
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MALINCHE
I am helping Cortés destroy my land...
kill and torture my people.
But if I do not help him, my land will destroy Cortés.
I have had to choose.
I give my life to Cortés because of the locket
he bears about his throat and knows nothing about.
Later, out of his scaled armor will come Quetzalcoatl.
Later, I shall be justified.
But who knows how much later?
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VISION OF MEXICO
To me [Malinche], gold covered flowers mean timelessness,
and the come and go of the streams that are eternity.
I wish that Cortés might gaze at these golden flowers...
in the red fields and see them... now... this minute... in the fine rain.
But there are certain things about the Mexican earth Cortés will never see,
though an old man who is blind and full of days like Xicotenga,
chieftain of the Tlaxcalans, sees them perfectly...
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*NOTE: It is unlikely that the Spaniards could have reached Tenochtitlán without Malintzin. But the peculiar interest Malintzin holds for us does not lie in the assistance she gave the invaders. It lies in her reason for assisting them, in her personal relations with Cortés; and, if ever a man nakedly exemplified male characteristics, it was Cortés. For some brief and blinding months, we see the Indian girl as woman (and human being) working alongside her captain, giving her utmost, for reasons not inscrutable, to the achievement of his purpose... (see Long, Haniel (1939) Malinche (Doña Marina)
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Broken spears lie in the roads;
we have torn our hair in our grief.
The houses are roofless now,
and their walls are red with blood.
(Elegy for Tenochtitlan)