Life of the Great Cortés
When Cortés and his men crested the rampart of porphyritic rock that enclosed the Valley of Mexico, the conquistador dismounted and informed the lieutenant he had dreamed this place when he served as a notary’s assistant at the edge of Valladolid. There, though a minor aristocrat, he felt his life bereft of prospects, and no degree of financial security could abate the tedium afflicting his long rote days enough to diminish the clarity of restless dreams. His work demanded little of his mind, so the vision of gleaming white that reached him through a bedroom window in the warm madrugada was developed through his dull hot hours in a backroom of the notary’s. His vision gained shape and articulation above fair copies of testimony.
While Cortés was tasked with reviewing the content of bitter disputes between pig farmers, or was expected after hours to hone his schoolboy’s Latin, instead he carved his extravagant dream. He deepened grooves in the initial white field of his nighttime vision so they ran like the sinuous folds between the hairs of classical kings. When the sun lay straight overhead the next day, or when the sky above Valladolid filled with the enormous, unyielding clouds endemic to that region, the grooves became very dark, but late in the office or soon after waking when the angle of the sun was low, they shone brighter than the fulgurant substrate, and rippling inconsistencies revealed they brimmed with water. Wherever the water flowed small waves overspilled white bulwarks, and over the course of several nights a lake or sealike moat was made around a pearly core. In that core, hatched with canals, the spillage turned pale sands to loam, and square remnants of the first plain field grew lush down along the perimeter. To the white there was added green and blue that enhanced the former’s gleam, and to enjoy its light the assistant placed in the gardens a bevy of small dark motes that tended the native flora into resplendence, yellow and red, and trafficked between the islands in canoes long after hours—a counterpoise to the legal fictions who massed on his desk and argued from their rank personalities without apparent belief, filling the backroom with dust as they wrestled across dull pages and each one strove to raise himself above each other for air, every hand across a shadowed face, every knee on an unformed shoulder. Against bloodless, gasping disputes over purloined stock that Cortés, the assistant, could not himself see, he looked off into his swimming light and sent his farmers into the core with fruits and surplus grains, and so the market they established might abound with the products of farther dreams, multiplying as he prepared copies of witness reports, he laid three causeways across the lake from its marshes to the radiant center, with a road to the east the width of the causeways that ended under the azure waves. Following out these extravagant roads to the east and to the west, he saw two seas, a light and a dark. Turning then his gaze to the north where the land grew more spacious, he saw deserts of scrub marked by promontories whose walls hung thick with cities scaled with ladders, and past them extended a prairie that rolled hundreds of miles east away to a river several times the width of the widest he knew in Spain… a river lined by manmade hills higher than the highest in the Orient. To the south he found a thousand miles of jungle studded with tropical birds whose song, he heard of birds in the tropics, was not near so alluring as their plumes. From these four corners he augmented the farmers’ crop in the market, and to filigree the streets as he slept he imagined fairytale gold was spun and braided out of his thin bedding.
Golden jewelry and figurines were purveyed next to buckets of fine gold dust in volumes Mansa Musa would have grudged, but to the notary’s assistant the gold was just an accent to more remarkable goods imported there from remote, dimmer dreams, or refined from these same imports. Beneath their lids his eyes darted from street to street of his market, each one reserved for one class of product so that for instance one street abounded with divers species of honey milked from exotic plants, and another, intersecting it, was walled on both sides with building materials for homes to be raised on the floating gardens, sold next to fuels to heat them. There were wild cats and ceramics and breadloaf fish with whiskers, and down one street were even sold facsimiles of all the creatures of the dreamland, real and mythic, woven from the feathers of southern birds with such persuasive skill they seemed almost to crawl and take flight above the stalls of artisans who dawn to night entwined their feathers in the open air. Keeping the artisans’ same hours, Cortés would draw the feathered creatures in the margins of pages he botched, little sketches soon discarded for waste. He would brush the clamoring shades of litigants off his desk and turn his attention, when the notary was out, to his spinning bazaar so rich with smells and images that in words he was confined —he had never been a man of words, not yet at seventeen— to comparisons false and unequal to his visions’ singularity. The buzz of his market exceeded that of Rome and Constantinople, and the street where fine cotton threads were sold he believed might contest the finest display of silks he had seen when he joined his father in Granada. He had neither seen much nor traveled far. He felt scarce pressure to explore beyond the lands of the Reconquista so long as he was allowed his dreams and his office was quiet enough.
When days became short and he buried himself under the woolens at night, he began to raise cold edifices from the yet undeveloped center as if from blocks of ice. They were tall cyclopean structures erected through the course of that laborious winter, but awake or hungry for warmth in his sleep, alike he could quarry rock from the mountains girdling the city and send them across its causeways. Representatives of that people he chose for company over his compatriots crawled up the valley’s rim and then slipped down, across the lake, hauling the sharp sweet corollary of the district’s many volcanos, to which was added stone turned soft and pale by the lake’s persistence, rock returned to the immaculate state of the assistant’s initiating vision but given now body to be cut and stacked. From this rock he made forty towers. He surveyed their progress at all times and saw that each base was carved in relief with scenes exhibiting a strength of line beyond the capacities of the hand with which he covered documents’ margins in hard, flat beasts, but not beyond the limit of the receptive sense through which he was bestowed their luminous models. Amid the towers he raised a steep pyramid aligned at its edges with the four great roads as though after narrowing in from the lake they shed their curbs in open space then followed their same trajectories to where they met the sun itself. This pyramid reached higher than the tallest construction Cortés had ever known, the Sevilla cathedral he saw as a boy, but his cathedral was thicker and more solid. Each face was scored with flights of stairs.
Nothing then remained of the first white field but the light that suffused the finished city like a Lhasa or Athens or Xanadu, which now, at its peak, had no resort but to weather and be tarnished. From his desk, Cortés leaned low across the city and tried to follow his people’s movements into and over the temples, but the sunlight’s strange reverberation in the high plateau’s thin air drew a veil over all ceremonies, and barred from close inspection, he was left a dazzling image of architecture and commerce without the confounding human elements of government and religion, as a lucid dreamer who inspects a hand will find it lacks integrity, that it wavers under examination and hides its dry, hostile source, that surfaces rather than sources might govern in waking life. Turned aside at this last juncture, as the days once more began to grow long, Cortés saw his vision partly slackened, and with the former heat’s return, the scribal caseload swelled. Breathless he combed the city through the night in pursuit of its flighty essence, to know it and maintain its reflection into one more summer, but each time he closed the gap to embrace her, the spirit of the place took a second step. She always faced away from him, and when he was awake odd afflictions started to threaten to unravel not just the city but the mind where she lived. When bent over documents to transcribe them into his careful script, dark blots would appear over the page and come attended by a shiver in his fingers, or a numbness through the face, and soon after he would briefly be robbed of the capacity to read and write. Then he would lose all other capacities to a throbbing pain that occupied only half his head but seemed to extend its roots farther down, so he would be weak and nauseated and would fall behind in his work. In the days after these episodes that he could neither explain nor control, his imagination was made bare… uneasy sleep became dreamless, and as each impediment subsided, the notary’s legal fictions returned in the same boisterous condition they exhibited previous to the dream. They argued the deeds to unfertile land with undiminished strength, brawling into and over the margins, and steadily more of the assistant’s energies were called on to parse their statements and to follow amendments to querulous wills. Shades of complainants and property’s chaff crowded out the phantoms of the city who, if they continued about their business, moved in a region the assistant, interrupted, could now only access slantwise through jagged snatches of memory and pallid inadequate words.
Dissatisfied with the pace of his work, the notary appeared in the backroom more often to chide him for incompetence, and afterimages of the stolid boss’s face encroached on the meager parcels of unreality persisting between his headaches. The notary was a man whose girth demanded more height than he was allotted — a jowled, beardless man with slitted eyes and no hair but the slits’ thick, leaden accents. Whatever virtue he possessed as a notary was negated for Cortés by the facile joy he took in work, in the exceeding comfort he derived from a job that almost always entailed others’ disappointment, however well it was brought off. In the rare event Cortés was visited by the old dream, day or night, he could not but see it below his employer’s face, and the bulk beneath settled into the valley that held the dreamt-of city and filled it up with substance. Longer days, if they were to blame, condemned the city’s inhabitants to a permanent night of warm suffocation beneath the notary’s flesh. The office air lost the softening vapors it formerly borrowed off the azure lake, and the backroom’s occupant was submerged in a dryness that peeled the skin from his lips and quieted even the ink on the pages heaped across his desk. A desert stillness took over the place, and soon he was alone with the notary and what acrid, fleet vibrations fled along his nerves. Nothing remained alive to him but the life he saw directly, and wandering at siesta time past Valladolid’s dun facades, he found little evidence he could credit of his other world. He rarely felt well enough to partake in locals’ summer life, and the most durable font of vitality seemed to him to be the notary, whose vacant mind was revealed down across his unlined face. The grayness of the walls and the silence there enforced allowed this model bureaucrat to assume yet vivider proportions when he would blow into the backroom where, in front of Cortés, lively globes of sweat fell from below his jaw to his coat and ran along it while, as the boss shouted at his charge, bright ripples ran up over his cheeks where blotchy, pockmarked waves displaced the final swells on Cortés’s lake and delivered him, emptied, to a gray and dusty shore. The assistant’s vision forgot, his productivity was not restored, and the notary dismissed him not long past that Noche de San Juan.
He continued his studies at Salamanca, where he did not excel, and within the following schoolyear he felt desperate for exploration. Long stays in far locales would be, he believed, his cure.
His mind reduced to its circumstance, trailing dust where it went, he left for Hispaniola. He performed his duties with extreme dedication, if not special distinction, and despite his youth he would quickly advance in the colonial government there. He did not imitate the social manner of his former employer, but he did adopt his habits of thought, which Cortés found suited to a business like in spirit to the notary’s, as “notary” too was his first title despite his post’s being attended by graver consequence and unknowns. A few years later he joined Velázquez in the conquest of nearby Cuba, and in a few more years his talent for speech, unyoked from impossible images, delivered him to the mayoralty of the village of Santiago. A few years more and still he felt the continent’s magnetic influence, the pregnant shadow of its dark beacon, and again he used his rhetorical talent —his only inborn gift, though unavailable to him before— to assemble an expeditionary force to relieve his drear routine. The false Orient the Spanish constructed of native slaves and harems did not offer adequate distraction, and gave him syphilis besides, and in sailing west he was determined to pursue better ways of living. To steel the will of those who did not share his aversion to home, when his ships achieved the mainland, he ordered the fleet sunk, but he had not suspected the dullness of the stale months that followed, which were taken up entirely by diplomacy and logistics. The army was tossed with indifference between small battles and the sealing of pacts, and in the troughs that intervened, all Cortés’s energies were lost in replenishing their provisions, by entreaty or by force. Duller days he had not known since that spring in Valladolid, and by night the old headaches beset him and required constant attentions from his lieutenant and his interpreter, the only members of the party he allowed inside his tent. He and she would alternate evenings pressing cool, damp cloths to their commander’s brow, which did not abate the pain but did impart the illusion of having taken sensible measures. The lieutenant did not speak except to urge perseverance as he entered and he left, and the interpreter on her perch beside the cot just spoke softly in the easy, languid fricatives of her native language. As before, for days after an acute attack he gave orders through a retardative haze that tripped his speech and held his thought far behind events, but so extreme was the monotony of conquest that his impairments were no hindrance. His judgments of the indigenous peoples were not so sharp as they might have been, but the party continued between vassal cities almost unimpeded toward the capital of the empire whose envoys warned and flattered them with rising incidence as they neared. Monotony was compounded with their steady inland progress, and though the headaches that seemed to wrack his body even below his neck did not relax their grip, Cortés found he could command with less and less exertion, which ease allowed him to inquire at leisure of the latifundistas they passed as to the layout of the imperial capital and the surrounding landscape. In the mornings he passed his questions to the interpreter from the surveys he would prepare and refine with halting diligence through long nights, saying nothing aloud as he attempted thought and as she murmured and stroked his hair, and when she would translate his inquiries for the natives later that day, as often as not the inquisited would disappear in his stately home and return with paints and low-grade paper with which, as he crouched in the dust, he would summon pictures below of salamanders and ziggurats and more exotic sights in a stark and, Cortés thought, naïve style that recalled his marginalia.
These paintings together with the envoys’ gifts of golden jewelry and jaguar pelts awakened Cortés’s dormant attraction and spurred him to hasten the party’s advance. The pace of skirmishes and celebratory feasts increased sharply, and with them came an onslaught of paintings as Cortés more often slipped past battlefields to survey the indigenous nobles and collect their vividly sketched responses, expounded by his interpreter. The lieutenant assumed the heft of the campaign’s responsibilities with success that almost matched his errant commander’s, though he exhibited twice his nerve, and Cortés and the interpreter passed steadily longer nights in the tent, perusing the paintings as though they were drawn from future encyclopedias, which inexplicably returned him images from his ashen past. He did not sleep, and the pain either dissolved or was upstaged as his absorption in rumors of the capital displaced his other interests and out-competed former distractions. Though it had been many years since he dreamed and remembered in the morning, the clean-edged pictures evoked the old sensations, and his engrossment was so complete that he felt no need to dream again. He hoped only to find truer depictions of the image that lurked back of each artwork in his new collection. He was ignorant of local customs and unmoved by the region’s politics, except where they imposed detours on his march to the imperial capital. The army had left the coastal jungle and proceeded up to a high plateau through a variation in climate unknown in Spain and Europe, rising to elevations found only in the Alps, and here unlike at home a mountain could involve half the continent — elements of a novelty unregistered by Cortés, who flipped through painted pages, accepted envoys’ crafts, and insisted his lieutenant recall the destination before which the names of cities they passed would, he knew, be forgotten, whether or not they slowed their course to subjugate or seduce them. Over the foothills, between dry peaks, and across hospitable valleys, Cortés rode abstracted on his horse, flanked by the interpreter and the lieutenant and, but for this couple’s rare attempts to engage him in his environs, insensible to any landscape he could not hold and ponder at will. He was improving the paintings in his mind, adding depth, smoothing edges, and dispersing uniform colors over the spectrum to lend them the range and swirl of life, or life as he would like it. When after months they crested the rampart of cactus and porphyritic rock that enclosed the Valley of Mexico, and Cortés, on spying the gleaming capital, dropped lightly beside his horse, the soldiers and the interpreter gaped at the city with an awe that Cortés understood but could not share. His sense of its identity with the city he had dreamed had grown as they had marched. He believed that he had seen this place.
He turned to his lieutenant, who was mounted, and he told him, “I dreamed this city when I served as a notary’s assistant on the outskirts of Valladolid.” He told him he had seen this view from above, its forty towers, its garden isles, its sun that rippled white on the lake, its small dark motes that blew on the surface . . . building then sustaining their fata morgana below. “I saw it all before,” he said to his lieutenant, and the lieutenant gently asked him to climb back into his saddle, so that the conquest might continue without excessive delay. Their position was too exposed to make a suitable camp, he argued, and the sun already lay near the mountains across the Valley of Mexico, announcing the early evening. Cortés asked by way of reproach, “How do you suggest we enter a dream?” and the lieutenant was forced to concede that he never entered one of his own, so the exact method of doing so, up to then, had eluded him.
“If I could not possess it in my sleep,” reasoned Cortés, “surely we could not take it awake. I can think of no farce ranker than to essay to take a mirage.”
At this the lieutenant dismounted, and he came to Cortés on foot to avoid their talk’s dissemination among the men and the interpreter. With his helmet in his hands before him, he submitted humbly to his commander that he, the lieutenant, never dreamed this place at all, and the prohibition that kept Cortés from descending the slope and crossing the causeway should not apply to him. If the commander wished to remain without in oneiric meditation, it was his prerogative to stay, but the men and the lieutenant, who confessed he did not recall his dreams, were bound to fulfill their expedition’s aims in compliance with their charter. Cortés appeared receptive to his argument, or at least had no counter ready, and the relieved lieutenant took his silence for recognition of defeat. He replaced his helmet on his head and, standing opposite, softly cupped a hand around his superior officer’s shoulder. What’s more, the lieutenant continued, the customs of the native people were odious and unconscionable, and any objective third party could see his dream was a nightmare and had better be extinguished, if only in the interest of the commander’s failing health. He said this with infinite sympathy. In his sympathy, however —as finely as he had calibrated his comfort to stop debate— he gave Cortés fresh ground, and whereas before enough ground was left just for the lieutenant’s boots, now Cortés could stand and contest him on almost equal footing as his strength and wits returned. He saw the lieutenant’s thick face and pinched eyes now clearly, and he stretched to his full height, and he said that he had seen no odious customs, that the natives seemed no less pacific than sailors and conquistadors, that the artistry of their crafts in fact suggested otherwise, and that these marks of civilization could not be sustained in the backward state the lieutenant maligned so freely.
Whatever he claimed to have seen in their temples, or on top of the temples, Cortés knew better than the lieutenant, for he designed them himself.
Whether Cortés spoke the truth, in whatever proportion he spoke it, mattered less in the moment to the lieutenant than the astonishing show of vigor to which neither argument nor observation could be made to respond. The lieutenant, though a product of his time and not one given to dreams, was intelligent, and his prejudice against the capital was inferred from sacred rites he had witnessed during the grueling march uphill, but without continuing into the valley he could not say for certain which Tenochtitlan they now faced, the inferred or the ideal, to an empiricist’s satisfaction. He also acknowledged to himself that even had they entered the city, indisputable proof that its conquest was deserved, much less needed, could not be found for an adversary who rejected his ontological premise . . . who, even if his moral principle were in effect the same, did not attach more significance to experience than to visions, or to speech, or to thin colored substitutes.
While the lieutenant arranged his thoughts, Cortés turned abruptly away from him, and he mounted his horse in one swift motion as though, unarmored, he were leaping a wall. He said nothing more to the lieutenant, and he reversed his horse’s direction with such speed that it raised its forelegs in protest, but he mastered it and cantered away to the main mass of soldiers and native auxiliaries who together composed his army, on horseback and on foot. His interpreter slipped behind him through the crowd, and when Cortés abruptly stopped in the center above his men, she appeared at his side. The lieutenant was left grasping after in a billowing cloud of dust. Events were developing faster than the speed of the lieutenant’s thought, and it was all he could do, when the dust blew off, to turn his back on the capital and face his commander through gaps between the men, over whom he appeared to have grown to a height that made him immune to challenge. With the attention of every member of the party, including the porters, fixed on his mounted person, Cortés indulged his natural talent. He started to speak, and his interpreter shouted behind him, straining visibly to match his eloquence in her native language.
Cortés spoke of a land over the sea rich in the silver and gold of many nations, a land of buildings sparsely columned with room inside for pyramids, with towers ornately carved little less than the height of the capital’s, but hollow and thin and effulgent with many-hued shards of manmade stone that stained the light behind them. It held vast markets for fabric spun by bred and cultivated insects, from which was woven finery threefold softer than any in America, and there the most succulent meat was plentiful because it was taken easily from tranquil dogs heavier than the horse from which he spoke, a meat the natives basted to moist perfection in its milk, also taken with ease. Ingenious machines set on tables could match the progress of the sun and the moon in windowless cells via the miniscule advancement of adjacent, sawtoothed wheels, while larger wheels similar in form to those of Aztec toys were set below boats and palanquins to move riches and travelers and tlatoqueh and messages written in scripts that signified sounds, only sounds, in infinite possible arrangements. Of course, as Cortés informed the Spanish and the native auxiliaries, a people so given to luxury would fall inevitable prey to barbarism, even as they enfeebled themselves, and thus it was with the pale peoples he had known across the sea. The natives grew fat in their cushioned saddles, they employed their enormous dogs to plow the soil they forgot how to tend themselves, but he had seen them burn their own alive to the whoops of heaving crowds. Those among the men who saw this Babylon could and did affirm every word, and though before they viewed these features of their homeland in a more flattering light, even they were compelled by his eloquent speech and its sharp, self-serving logic. Cortés held his sword above them, and he pointed it into the east.
Two jaguar warriors from the auxiliaries were sent as couriers to the north and the south, and the army creaked and whined en masse with the turning of steel and unspun cotton to follow the orator’s hefted blade down toward the darkening sky. Displaced from foreguard to rearguard, the lieutenant lingered behind them and watched—first to the north, then to the south—the recession of the jaguar warriors behind the puffs of arid soil pushed up from below their sandals, soon dissolved in the breathless night. The torches of the imperial capital were punctually set aflame. Its government sent no more envoys. (It was sufficient to the emperor, if the revolt were not defeated, that it stop slightly beside him or proceed in another direction.) The lieutenant, who had led the army he now trailed into confrontations too many to be distinctly recalled, who had mutely feasted on strange dishes and borne false smiles through devilish rites in the interest of tactical friendship, was left unmoved by the rhetoric of his officer, just as many officers before then had left him equally unmoved. He did not believe himself bound to Cortés, nor to the Spanish crown, but he obeyed historical necessity, and so, when no sign remained of the two jaguar warriors, he mounted his horse and raised his own reluctant dust as he allowed himself to fall through the dark that cloaked his eastern fate. Neither he nor the jaguar warriors would return to the imperial capital.
The first jaguar warrior, the stronger of the two, followed the spine of the mountains north into unfathomable desert, where the clouds of dust that attended him through hundreds of miles gave way to puffs of sand that settled nearly as soon as they rose. He had run deep into a district where he recognized no language before he found his quarry at the northern end of that waste. There he met with the criminal Juan de Oñate y Salazar, whom he ordered to the south and east, and then he continued many nights across prairie until he met with Coronado, who had sheltered beside a grass-hut village near a broad, shallow river, where the conquistador’s dream of Cíbola, a hasty, tawdry dream, proved not to be borne out. The warrior sent Coronado and his army south and east, away after Oñate, but he himself followed the river past its junction with another. The swiftly shifting banks of it Cortés would have known in his sleep. Down this wider, deeper river the warrior met with Hernando de Soto, who lay with fever in camp with his men on the opposing shore. The warrior laid his hands on him and granted him a reprieve, that he might walk from his sickbed and guide his men to Santo Domingo. The warrior left them and traveled by canoe to the south until he emerged from a delta as tortuous as the river that dredged it up from the sea, and once it gave way to open water he did not stray from the coast, which the mists seldom left before noon… he paddled back of barrier islands until he arrived in the bay where Ponce de León had anchored, where he passed him the same order he had delivered to all the others.
Far to the south, while the first warrior traced the banks of the Gulf of Mexico, the second, though charged with fewer deliveries, pushed farther from home to make them. Dust had thickened as he ran from the capital, the opposite of dry sand, and instead of fatiguing the high desert he was swept into heavy jungle, through which his progress depended less on endurance than his talent for seeing paths where they were not. The second warrior, the smaller warrior, at times found greater mobility off the earth, and as the continent narrowed with his advance into the tropical south he often moved more efficiently by crawling along heavy branches than by hacking with obsidian through dense vegetation below. The trees reached several times as high as any in his native valley, and where one would fall across his imagined path he saw the roots would extend so far from the trunk that each, turned on its head, could reach its gnarled fingers about a floating garden. He rarely escaped the attentions of packs of monkeys on parallel routes, and at night vigilance against mosquitoes required that he not sleep. With the sunrise he would see their victims, tufts of fur on the earth below, struck down by disease… easy meat for pythons that lurked beneath the duff. Where the eastern and western seas came nearest, he descended into a clearing and discovered Balboa’s aging men, who were assembled to grieve at the spot where they had buried their captain in secret however many years before. The little warrior instructed them to lift him from his grave and follow the body back across the sea they knew, to Hispaniola. The body, he said, would lead them. Before they finished digging up the captain with their hands, the warrior returned to his path, wading through a swamp as fetid as any in America until the continent opened again for him, and soon he was sharing royal roads with couriers like himself, exhibiting no less urgency. They ran in both directions the length of another mountain range, grander still than that which he left at home, and though he passed by hundreds, with dozens of strings about their waists, not one even seemed to acknowledge him. They slipped to either side of the roads as if by happenstance… never speaking nor brushing against him. Eventually the warrior left the great highway along one of many arteries that seemed to link it with the sea, and he followed it there then ran another hundred miles along the coast where the crowds grew very thin, until his way was blocked by a party stepping onto the beach from a rowboat dispatched from a ship in the natural harbor, flying a flag he knew. Here the warrior met with Pizarro and his lieutenant and interpreter. He gave them the order from Pizarro’s cousin, the great Cortés, and though Pizarro wished to reject it, he felt that he could not. The warrior helped him and his men and the interpreter to push the boat back into the sea to make its final journey north, up the western shore.
Far from the two warriors, Cortés made camp near the beach where he had landed months earlier, and he ordered the construction of a fleet of canoes and rafts that would take his now augmented force over to Santo Domingo. He gave his commands aloud. On the beach his lieutenant oversaw the carving of some palm trunks and the lashing together of others, and the interpreter led a party of local divers into the bay, where a mast still peeked out between the highest swells at low tide. The divers held their breath for minutes to salvage whatever could be had from the ships Cortés had scuttled. And Cortés, transformed, moved like a demon through the improvised shipyard, running his fingers the length of keels to assess the quality of hulls. He tore axes out of weary hands to finish felling palms himself, and up to sunset he swam at intervals to the center of the bay where, in a dead man’s float, he opened his eyes under the waves to watch his divers shimmer and descend by kicks from the light to cabins’ remains, where breathless beneath the decks they remained hidden for what seemed hours until, with the passing weeks, they tore the decks themselves away and hauled their planks to shore. It was not many months before each ship was reduced to its green frame as if waiting to be built underwater anew — rather than the future sands, hints of future ships more alluring than the caravels that sloughed them away. The soldiers lived on maize and fish. Cortés did not suffer headaches. When the fleet was finished he went to the closest village to say farewell to the cacique through his interpreter, who agreed to follow the army east. The lieutenant meanwhile presided over the launch of the boats into the bay, the thousands of men ordered among them. Cortés and the interpreter returned to find all but the last canoe afloat, the lieutenant beside its stern in the torn remains of his full dress. The lieutenant wordlessly saw them seated, ran the canoe out of the sand, and where the water kissed the hem of his breeches leaped the gunwale and took up the oar. He paddled them out to the head of the fleet. and Cortés again lifted his sword. He pointed its blade to Hispaniola.
They sailed two weeks and almost depleted their rations of fresh water, but the weather held across the sea, and when they arrived in Santo Domingo, haggard but not diminished, they poured out on the beaches and swarmed across the harbor. On the pier to which his lieutenant attached the lead canoe, Cortés met with Pizarro, Coronado, Balboa’s shade and Velázquez, who had set aside his envy of his rival’s gift for oratory to join him and split the treasure of their conquest of the East. They agreed to lend their ships. As soldiers and sailors milled about the docks and pressed into the town, the citizens packed their worldly goods and dismantled the dun and pastel buildings erected in that century. Foundations were struck and washed in sand. In the rush to prepare for the better colony, all the native slaves were, if not legally freed, left to their own devices, and in the quieter streets they could be seen taking turns with large sharp rocks to split apart their irons. Wherever the assembled ships of the hemisphere were not equal to the space and provisions required to maintain so many thousands, the old rafts and canoes were lashed in formation to the sides like a ray’s wings. Some were improved with sails of their own, from the settlers’ castoff linens. By the day Cortés had arrived with his fleet, many of the necessary measures had already been imagined and taken, and it was not long before his force, doubled or tripled in size and enlarged by civilian colonists, set out on a less generous sea and abandoned Santo Domingo. This journey was rougher than the crossing of the Gulf of Mexico, but canoes were not sunk in such great number that their occupants could not be sheltered aboard the caravels to which they were lashed. They climbed the ropes linking one to the other and cut them when all were evacuated, so that a sparse chain of hollowed palms with twenty miles or more between them followed the New World into the Old.
After many weeks without sight of land, on the caravel helmed by Cortés and his lieutenant, the ocelot warrior on lookout scried the thin white line of Cádiz, the coast receding behind it to the east and to the west. The steel was whetted and cannons primed for an assault on this first bastion. They made their landing with the canoes that remained, and when they subjugated the city and compelled the surrender of Fort St. Sebastian, Cortés ordered the armada sunk in reply to any hesitations. They collected their enemies’ arms and lowered the natives’ flags. From Cádiz they marched to Sevilla and laid that city to waste, emptying out its treasury and stopping hardly even to marvel at the tower of its vast cathedral — which for both the lieutenant and Cortés, standing before it, appeared slight and insubstantial measured against their memories. They left behind a new administration and followed the road northeast to Córdoba, to which city they also laid waste, severing its temple’s thousand columns and again lowering their flags. They appointed another governor and marched east-northeast past the villages of the neighboring hills then crossed the Sierra Morena in a sinuous line of feathers and steel that seemed, to the lieutenant, looking back and up those mountains, a single creeping beast. To his side Cortés seemed a man wholly remote and meditative, despite the pace of the action. At various points, though it was surely an effect of their horses’ staggered gaits, the lieutenant believed he saw him float an inch above his saddle. Floating thus, or appearing to float, Cortés ordered the lieutenant to take Manzanares, and the populace by then was so cowed that there no blood was spilled. The army did not lay it waste. They carried on swiftly over the plain, marching down the royal road and requisitioning the natives’ livestock when rations were exhausted, and though the battle for Toledo was more protracted than all the preceding, the soldiers of the emperor were defeated once again, and the lieutenant ordered the lowering of the emperor’s flags. The city was laid waste, and a governor was installed.
Cortés, his interpreter, his lieutenant, his men, the conquistadors and Balboa’s shade marched to Madrid unopposed, and they directed themselves to the palace where the royal guard agreed to yield. Cortés dismounted at the gate, and his tlatoqueh filed in two lines behind him, hewing close to the walls… the interpreter leading one column, the lieutenant leading the other. They passed through a web of corridors and rooms that Cortés had never seen, and so the path they wended to the throne was necessarily indirect. Several times he was required to circle back before they met at last with the emperor. When Cortés came to the great double doors, the party filed inside with the same formation in which they had traversed the rest of the palace. The tlatoqueh spread along the walls, and Cortés, who did not look so large to the lieutenant as he had since they turned east, stood in the shadow of the throne. Neither Cortés nor the emperor wished to utter the first word, until the emperor suddenly shifted and leaned forward over his subject.
Duly imperious, the emperor asked him why he had come to the palace and why he had not held to his charter, and at first Cortés, as though he had not heard, declined to state his answer. All the length of the throne room’s walls, the tlatoqueh remained stiff. The emperor’s face reddened, but he did not repeat his demand. Then into the ensuing silence between the sovereign and his subject, the lieutenant rushed from one side, and the interpreter rushed from the other. As she began to explain for Cortés, the lieutenant unspooled a scroll pressed from the bark of a ficus stripped on the shores of Lake Texcoco, and kneeling before his king, the great Cortés pricked his calf with a spine of opuntia cactus. He used the blood to wet his brush, and on the paper unspooled before him, he laid the first strokes of a modest room, dark, warm, and poorly lit, on the outskirts of Valladolid.
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Your prose is pure poetry. Thank you for sharing it!
Worthy of a new In the American Grain sequence.