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.
The Doña Marina lives because I let her live, and I let her live because, for a brief while one night, she was... well, she was someone I loved—
Either the Spaniards had foolishly been too eager to let loose their devastation in The Heart of the One World, or they had deliberately chosen to make their attack as wanton, punitive, and unforgettable as possible. For it had not yet been quite full night when they blasted with their cannons and then charged the crowd with swords and spears and harquebuses. They had killed or horribly wounded more than a thousand of the dancing women, girls, and children. But at that time of early dark, only a comparative few of our Mexíca warriors had infiltrated into the performance, so fewer than twenty of them had fallen, and not any of the commanding knights or the lords who had conceived the uprising. Then the Spaniards did not even go looking for the chief conspirators, to punish them; the white men, after their explosive emergence from the palace, merely withdrew into it again, not daring to be abroad in the wrathful city.
To apologize for my failure in not having eliminated Malintzin I did not go to the war chief Cuitlahuac, who I supposed must be raging with fury and frustration. Instead, I sought out the Lord Cuautemoc, hoping he would be more sympathetic to my dereliction. I had known him ever since he was a boy, visiting my house with his mother, the First Lady, in the days when his father Ahuítzotl and my wife Zyanya still lived. At that time, Cuautemoctzin had been the Crown Prince, heir to the Mexíca throne, and it was only mischance that had prevented his becoming Uey-Tlatoani before Motecuzóma was insinuated into that office. Since Cuautemoc was familiar with disappointment, I thought he might be more lenient about my not having prevented Malintzin's warning the white men.
"No one holds you to blame, Mixtzin," he said, when I told how she had eluded the poison. "You would have done The One World a service in disposing of that traitress, but it does not matter that you did not."
Puzzled, I said, "It does not matter? Why not?"
"Because she did not betray us," said Cuautemoc. "She did not have to." He grimaced as if in pain. "It was my exalted cousin. Our Revered Speaker Motecuzóma."
"What?" I exclaimed.
"Cuitlahuac went to the officer Tonatíu Alvarado, you remember, and asked and was given permission to hold the Iztociuatl ceremony. As soon as Cuitlahuac left the palace, Motecuzóma told Alvarado to beware of trickery."
"Why?"
Cuautemoc shrugged. "Injured pride? Vindictive spite? Motecuzóma could hardly have been pleased that the uprising was the idea of his underlings, and arranged without his knowledge, to be done without his approval or participation. Whatever his real reason, his excuse is that he will countenance no breaking of his truce with Cortés."
I snarled a filthy word, not generally applied to Revered Speakers. "What is our breaking of the truce, compared to his instigating the butchery of a thousand women and children of his own people?"