Read an Excerpt
Yesterday's Train
A Rail Odyssey Through Mexican History
By Terry Pindell, Lourdes Ramírez Mallis Henry Holt and Company
Copyright © 1997 Terry Pindell
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-8174-7
CHAPTER 1
Apocalypse
Veracruz to Mexico City
The roots of the old tree are twisted; the trunk bends and leans parallel to the ground, just a few feet above, and its branches writhe outward and upward like the arms of a tortured torso. There are leaves. It is alive, but grotesquely so, as if cancered, not to death but to mutation. Trees have always been the scenes of great human tragedy, great human sin: the cross, the gallows, the guillotine, the burning stake, the Inquisition rack, and the mast of the Santa María. So is this tree, surrounded by an ancient sea chain a few hundred yards inland from the river shore in La Antigua, a few kilometers north of Veracruz. This is the tree, according to local tradition, to which Cortés chained his ships when he entered this river in 1519. It has survived hurricanes, fire, the receding of the river shore, and five centuries of human turmoil. Nourished by the Mexican earth, which nonetheless seems to poison it with protest, it is a tree like no other on this continent.
At the ruins of Cortés's house, a little farther up the dusty road, there is a similar tableau. Fig trees and ceibas twist and wend their way up the broken walls of the old hacienda, their extended roots like long, hoary fingers that seem to be all that holds many of the stones in place. They grow deformed and contorted until their tops break free of the shade around the house into the sunlight high above. Lourdes sees nature reclaiming what has been taken. Some might see a motif of heroic enchantment. Again I see the earth itself in protest.
Next to the house of Cortés lives an ancient man who putters with his fishing nets on the dirt floor of his stone-walled back porch. "I am the inheritor," he says. He has been the house's only caretaker for forty years. The property was once owned by some Spanish families who never knew quite what to do with it, and when the government took it over as part of a program for nationalizing historical assets, it promised to retain don Juan on the recommendation of the previous owners. "But they have never paid me, and as you can see, they have done nothing with it. And then they said I was too old," he shrugs. He supports himself as a fisherman and as a member of a productive ejido (community farm). Meanwhile he has continued to clean up the site and to replace the fallen stones without pay. "Someone has to take care of it," he says. "It is the past."
Don Juan wants us to sample a drink he makes from the figs of the trees and another plant, the zapote. "I peel the zapote and cut the centers with the resin into little pieces," he says. "I mix these with the figs from up high where they feed the little birds and add some mescal. Then I let it ferment for over a year."
He pours me a glass of the yellow fluid. I drink. It is strong, sweet, and heady — a communion with the spirits of these trees and this earth. Now the words of a poem carved into a sign in front of the house seem more laden with meaning.
Antigua — sleeping beauty,
Without laurels of victory,
Only the pitiless tyrant
Will erase you from his mind —
But never from history.
And that's all there is to mark the site. In all of Mexico there are only two monuments to Cortés, one in a hospital he founded and capitalized in Mexico City and another in his old fiefdom at Cuernavaca. There is little ambivalence in Mexico about this man who conquered and changed forever the civilization that once existed here. He cannot be honored; he cannot be memorialized. The negative revisionist history that is currently politically correct in the United States regarding the Columbian and Cortesian escapades is here a matter of long-established feeling. What began in La Antigua is widely regarded as a great historical rape.
La Antigua is a quiet town despite the occasional busloads of tourists who come through. The bell still tolls for mass at the continent's oldest chapel, a tiny stucco structure whose only adornments are the stations of the cross, pictured on blue tiles embedded in the interior walls. Burros nod in the shade of the stony avenues, good cooks serve spicy fresh shrimp and mussels at open-air cafés like Doña Carmona's, and fishermen mending their nets by the river will argue among themselves, when asked, about the exact location where Cortés burned his ships in a spectacular gesture of commitment to success or death. Children too young for school climb on the old tree as if it were a jungle gym. Today La Antigua sleeps, but here began a story like no other in human history.
* * *
When the English-speaking colonists came to the northern part of the continent, they sought land. The Indians were on it, so they had to be removed or killed, pure and simple. Cortés and the Spaniards came with radically different motivations. Materially they wanted precious metal, and far from being an obstacle, the Indians they encountered could help them get it. Spiritually they wanted to expand the Catholic realm of saved souls. This colonization of the newly discovered world was to be the last Crusade at a time when Spaniards everywhere celebrated the lesson of their recent victory over the infidel Moors at Granada. Through strength of arms and Catholic faith, they had become at last the masters of their own house with designs for mastery of the world. It was the era of the militant Inquisition, when Spaniards felt their hearts charged by God to expand His spiritual domain while their hands gathered the material rewards in gold and silver.
The men who came to seek fame, fortune, and vindication of their faith in the Caribbean were daring, vainglorious, and so religious that they would not fornicate with native women until their partners had been baptized. They brought to the New World a mind for legal process and order that many of the Indian tribes, so used to arbitrary despotism under the Aztecs, found very attractive. They had no instinct for racial annihilation of their enemies — even the Moors and Jews had been encouraged to convert and live on in Spain. The Spaniards conquered not to eradicate but to win hearts and minds — and treasure.
But make no mistake, the conquistadores were absolutely ruthless in their pursuit of conquest and wealth. After seven centuries of struggle against the Moors, they were masters of land battlefield tactics and not squeamish about slaughter or devastation. Despite the royal prohibition against slavery, they quickly exhausted the labor supply among the weak Indian tribes of the Caribbean islands, through their encomienda system, whereby Indians were cared for and educated in the ways of Christianity in return for their labor. The Spaniards of the colonizing era were also obstreperously individualistic. Unlike the English, who could assert the primacy of individual rights while remaining subservient to class structure and the rules of politics, the Spaniard typically resented subservience to anyone. He passionately needed to assert himself. Latin Americans will contend today that this heritage is one reason for the often chaotic conduct of entrepreneurial and governmental affairs in their part of the world.
It was these two factors, the declining labor force of the colonized Caribbean islands and the cantankerous instinct to make one's own mark, that set Hernán Cortés on his journey of conquest in February 1519. Two expeditions had sailed westward from Cuba in the previous two years with the express purpose of finding new sources of labor and souls to convert. Instead they brought back Moctezuma's gold and silver. Spanish adventurers jockeyed for position to lead the third and perhaps decisive expedition to the newly discovered western land mass. Even after Cortés had been assigned the task, the governor of Cuba, Diego de Velázquez de Cuéllar, revoked his decision and sent troops to stop Cortés as he and his little squadron of eleven ships set sail. Throughout his campaign in Mexico, Cortés endured the fierce enmity of key factions in the islands and back in Spain.
With five hundred soldiers (swordsmen, lancers, and harquebusiers), seventeen horses, and ten small cannons, Cortés landed first on the island of Cozumel, where he encountered mild, timid Indians, like those in the Caribbean islands. To his troops he laid down three commandments that he enforced throughout the campaign: no wanton killing beyond the requirements of his strategy of conquest, no pillage, no rapes. If such a small force was to succeed in conquering a large land mass of who knew how many millions of Indians, the inhabitants must be pacified, Christianized, and induced to willingly accept Spanish rule.
It was on Cozumel that the first of a series of strangely fortuitous incidents occurred. If he was to win over these Indians with means other than massive force, he would have to be able to talk to them, but he had only one Mayan boy — originally brought back to Cuba by one of his predecessors — to act as translator. And this boy had learned only rudimentary Spanish. Cortés made inquiries through him about white men who had been lost here during the previous expeditions, but to no avail. However, after leaving Cozumel to sail farther up the Yucatán coast, one of Cortés's ships sprang a leak and he had to return briefly to Cozumel to repair it. Just as the squadron was about to depart Cozumel the second time, a canoe was seen heading out from the shore. The man paddling it was Jerónimo de Aguilar, a Spanish priest who had survived a Caribbean shipwreck and washed up on this coast, where he lived as a slave with the Yucatán Indians. He was fluent in Chontal Mayan.
In March, Cortés sailed around the Yucatán Peninsula to Tabasco, where he landed and encountered fierce warriors who had harassed one of the earlier expeditions. The Tabascans were again spoiling for a fight, and so Cortés dutifully observed one of the legal niceties of Spanish conquest, the requerimiento. Through Aguilar, who had to shout above the din of the excited warriors, Cortés delivered a legalistic message advising his adversaries that the pope had granted these lands to the Spanish crown, that they must now submit themselves to Christ and king, and that, failing to do so, they would be responsible for any hostilities and calamities that would befall them. Then the battle began and lasted several days.
Quickly the superiority of Spanish weaponry and tactics proved itself. Besides their disadvantage in armaments, the Indians fought as a disorganized crowd, and the disciplined Spaniards mowed them down with a kill ratio of four hundred Tabascans to each dead Spaniard. The Tabascans brought gifts to sue for peace. Among these gifts were young, attractive slave girls, one of whom particularly caught Cortés's eye. Her name was Malinche, and she came to be known, depending on one's viewpoint, as either the mother of Mexico — or the devil's very mistress.
As Cortés sailed farther west along the coast, he encountered Indians of different tribes whose language Aguilar could not comprehend. Anchored near the island of San Juan de Ulúa, at the mouth of today's Veracruz harbor, Cortés entertained a delegation of Indians who appeared eager to communicate but whose language no one could understand — until Cortés noticed Malinche conversing casually with some of them. Having once lived in these lands, Malinche spoke Nahuatl, the language of the entire Aztec empire, as well as the Mayan Aguilar knew. It was Cortés's second stroke of divine luck. For the remainder of the conquest, Cortés communicated with the Aztecs through the language chain of Aguilar-Malinche. Malinche eventually was Christianized, became Cortés's lover, accompanied him throughout the campaign, and bore him a son. In a sense, she became the womb of the eventual mestizo Mexican nation, and if that nation is to be seen as the product of a historical rape, then she is also the traitor aiding those who would ravish them.
It was during this stop at San Juan de Ulúa (near today's Veracruz) that a local chieftain spoke of a great emperor in the mountains named Moctezuma. Cortés cannily responded that his king knew all about the great king of Mexico and expected Cortés to present himself before him. He impressed his visitors with a display of horses and cannon firepower and then posed for drawings to be made by Indian artists. When reports of this foreigner reached Moctezuma, he responded with a shipment of gifts, including, of course, gold. Attached to the giving of these treasures, in time-honored Indian custom, was a wish — that the strangers relinquish their desire to meet with him and go away in peace.
Writers of the history are at odds over the question of to what extent Moctezuma was moved by fear that Cortés was Quetzalcóatl or his descendants returned. For centuries after the conquest it was Spanish dogma that a prophecy about Quetzalcóatl's return was paramount in explaining Moctezuma's timidity toward this tiny force he could so easily have snuffed out with his vastly superior numbers. The theory has been challenged by recent historians. They argue that the gifts-cum-wish are evidence that Moctezuma thought he was dealing with a typical embassy of a foreign tribe far below the status of deity and that the legend of Cortés as Quetzalcóatl was merely the propaganda of the colonial world, since native versions of the Quetzalcóatl story do not always include a prophetic return.
What appears to have happened during Spanish revisions of Aztec history was a confusion of a prophecy, a myth, and a fantasy imagined by Moctezuma himself. There was a well-established prophecy of an apocalypse. There was an unrelated myth of the departed god-king Quetzalcóatl, though not necessarily any foretelling of his return. Moctezuma was well aware of both stories and was particularly disturbed by the prophecy of doom. A troublesome cult of Quetzalcóatl in Cholula had been agitating against the demands for human sacrifice as part of the state worship of Huitzilopochtli at the time of Cortés's arrival. Cortés came from the direction toward which Quetzalcóatl had sailed. Thus Moctezuma didn't need a specific prophecy about the reappearance of Quetzalcóatl to arrive at the fearful conclusion that Quetzalcóatl, or his descendants, had returned to reclaim their lands. The myth the colonial Spanish perpetuated was probably a product of Moctezuma's own mind.
Regardless, it is difficult to see Moctezuma acting out of anything but fear and trepidation of the fulfillment of an apocalyptic prophecy and his own nightmare that Quetzalcóatl would be its agent. Though they were passed to us through scribes of Spanish conquest, the only records we have of Moctezuma's own words would seem to put the argument to rest.
With treasure in hand now, some of Cortés's troops wanted to leave the sultry, mosquito-ridden coast and return to Cuba. Cortés would have none of this and sailed on a few miles farther up the barren beach where a small but deep river offered a semblance of a harbor. Here he unloaded all of his supplies and chartered a town and a colony in the king's name. He built a church and a house and a fort in the town and hunkered down to devise strategy for conquest. The town was named la Villa Rica de la Vera Cruz. But as the burgeoning city named Veracruz grew up adjacent to San Juan de Ulúa, little Villa Rica has come to be known simply as La Antigua — the old one.
* * *
It's a hot Sunday night in Veracruz, a notoriously slow evening in most Mexican cities, but the zócalo is thronged with people dressed for a night out. Every Mexican town, big city, or small village has its zócalo. This is the central plaza or park, usually located in front of the regional cathedral or the largest local church, and it is the focal point of social, civil life for all Mexican places. A hugely amplified version of the traditional, imperiled, and now reviving Main Street, USA, it is, in a Western context, what Ray Oldenburg would call "the third place," after the first — home — and the second — work. In a Mexican context it may be the first place. Mexicans certainly have a stronger connection to their zócalo than they do to their place of work. And the zócalo may not be an alternative to but rather an extension of the home.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Yesterday's Train by Terry Pindell, Lourdes Ramírez Mallis. Copyright © 1997 Terry Pindell. Excerpted by permission of Henry Holt and Company.
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