"You can—do this—while your friends are being slaughtered?"
Malintzin only languidly turned to look at Waiting Moon. I was not much surprised that such a woman did not mind being caught in such circumstances, but I should have expected her to make some exclamation of dismay at the news that her friends were being slaughtered. Instead, she smiled and said:
"Ayyo, good. We have an even better witness than the guards, Mixtzin. Our pact will be more binding than I could have hoped."
She stood up, disdaining to cover her moistly glistening body. I grabbed for my discarded mantle, but even in my confusion of shame and embarrassment and lingering drunkenness, I had enough presence of mind to say, "Malintzin, I think you wasted your time and your favors. No pact will avail you now."
"And I think it is you who are mistaken, Mixtzin," she said, her smile unwavering. "Ask the old woman there. She spoke of your friends dying."
I sat suddenly upright and gasped, "Béu?"
"Yes," she sighed. "I was turned back by our men on the causeway. They were apologetic, but they said they could take no risk of anyone communicating with the outlanders across the lake. So I came back, and I came by way of the plaza to look at the dancing. Then... it was horrible—"
She closed her eyes and leaned against the door frame and said, dazedly, "There was lightning and thunder from the palace roof, and the dancers—like some awful magic—they became shreds and pieces. Then the white men and their warriors poured out of the palace, with more fire and noise and flashing of metal. One of their blades can cut a woman in half at the waist, Záa, did you know that? And the head of a small child rolls just like a tlachtli ball, Záa, did you know that? It rolled right to my feet. When something stung my hand, I fled—"
I saw then that there was blood all over her blouse. It was running along her arm from the hand that held up the lamp. I got quickly to my feet in the same moment that she fainted and fell. I caught the lamp before it could fire the floor matting. Then I lifted her in my arms, to carry her upstairs to bed. Malintzin, leisurely picking up her clothes, said:
"Will you not even pause to thank me? You have me and the guards to bear witness that you were here at home and not involved in any uprising."
I stared coldly at her. "You knew. All the time."
"Of course Pedro ordered me to stay well out of danger, so I decided to come here. You wanted to prevent my seeing your people's preparations at the plaza." She laughed. "I wanted to make sure you saw none of ours: the moving of all the four cannons to the plaza side of the roof, for instance. But you must agree, Mixtzin, it was not a boring evening. And we do have a pact, have we not?" She laughed again, and with real amusement. "You can never again raise your hand against me. Not now."
I did not at all understand what she meant by that, until Waiting Moon was conscious again and could tell me. That was after the physician had come and tended to her hand, torn by what must have been one of the fragments discharged by the Spaniards' cannons. When he was gone, I remained sitting beside the bed. Béu lay, not looking at me, her face more wan and worn than before, a tear trickling down one cheek, and for a long time we said nothing. Finally I managed to say huskily that I was sorry. Still without looking at me, she said:
"You have never been a husband to me, Záa, and never let me be a wife to you. So your faithfulness to me, or your default of it, is not even worth discussing. But your being true to some—some standard of your own—that is another matter. It would have been vile enough if you had merely coupled with that woman used by the white men. But you did not. Not really. I was there, and I know."
Waiting Moon turned her head then, and turned on me a look that bridged the gulf of indifference which had for so long divided us. For the first time since the years of our youth, I felt an emanation of emotion from her that I knew was not a pretense or an affection. Since it was a true emotion, I only wish it could have been a more cordial one. For she looked at me as she might have regarded one of the human monsters in the menagerie, and she said:
"What you did—I think there is not even a name for it. While you were... while you were in her... you were running your hands over all her naked body, and you were murmuring endearments. 'Zyanya, my darling,' you said, and 'Nochipa, my beloved,' you said, and 'Zyanya, my dearest,' you said, and 'Again, Nochipa!' you said." She swallowed, as if to prevent her suddenly being sick. "Because the two names mean the same thing, I do not know whether you lay with my sister or with your daughter, or with them both, or with them alternately. But this I know: both the women named Always—your wife and your daughter—they died years ago. Záa, you were coupling with the dead!"
It pains me, reverend friars, to see you turn your heads away, exactly as Béu Ribé turned hers away from me, after she had spoken those words that night.
Ah, well. It may be that, in trying to relate an honest account of my life and the world I lived in, I sometimes reveal more of myself than my closest loved ones ever knew of me, perhaps more than I might have wanted to know. But I will not retract or rephrase anything I have told, nor will I ask you to strike anything from your pages. Let it stand. Someday my chronicle may serve as my confession to the kindly goddess Filth Eater, since the Christian fathers prefer a shorter confession than mine could be, and they impose a longer penitence than I have life left to make it in, and they are not so tolerant of human frailty as was the patient and forgiving Tlazolteotl.
But I meant to tell of that night's dalliance with Malintzin only to explain why she is still alive today, although after that I hated her more than ever. My hatred for her was fired hotter by the loathing of me I had seen in Béu's eyes, and the loathing I consequently felt for myself. However, I never made another attempt on Malintzin's life, though I had other opportunities, and in no way did I seek again to hinder her ambitions. Meanwhile, as it turned out, she had no cause to do me harm either. For, in subsequent years, as she rose high in the new nobility of this New Spain, I sank beneath her notice.
I have said that Cortés may even have loved the woman, for he kept her by him for some years longer. He did not try to hide her even when his long-abandoned wife, the Doña Catalina, unexpectedly arrived here from Cuba. When the Doña Catalina died within a very few months, some attributed it to a broken heart, some to less romantic causes, but Cortés himself convoked a formal inquiry that absolved him of any blame in his wife's death. Not long after that, Malintzin gave birth to Cortés's son Martin; the boy is now about eight years old and, I understand, will soon go to Spain for his schooling.
Cortés did not put Malintzin away from him until after his visit to the court of King Carlos, whence he returned as the Marqués del Valle, and with his newly acquired Marquésa Juana on his arm. Then he made sure that the discarded Malintzin was well provided for. In the name of the Crown, he gave her a sizable land grant, and he saw her married in a Christian ceremony to one Juan Jaramillo, a ship's captain. Unfortunately, the obliging captain was soon afterward lost at sea. So today Malintzin is known to you, reverend scribes—and to His Excellency the Bishop, who treats her most deferentially—as the Doña Señora Marina, Viuda de Jaramillo, mistress of the imposing island estate of Tacamichapa, near the town of Espiritu Santo. That town was formerly called Coatzacoalcos, and the island granted her by the Crown stands in the river from which the onetime slave girl One Grass once gave me a dipperful of water to drink.