Free Malinche by Laura Esquivel Page B

bad. Cleanliness was common practice among the natives. The Spaniards, on the other hand, did not bathe, their clothes reeked, and neither water nor the sun could rid them of their stench. No matter how much she scrubbed and scrubbed the clothes in the river, she wasn’t able to wash from them the smell of rotted iron, of metallic sweat, of rusted armor.
    Moreover, the interest that the Spanish and Cortés in particular expressed for gold did not seem right to her. If they in fact were gods, they would be concerned with the earth, with the planting, with making sure that men were nourished, but that was not the case. Never had she seen them interested in the cornfields, only in eating. Hadn’t Quetzalcóatl stolen the grain of corn from the Mount of Our Sustenance to give it to mankind? Didn’t the Spanish care how the gift had affected men? Weren’t they curious to know whether or not they were reminded of its divine origin when they ate it? Whether or not they protected it and venerated it as something sacred? Did they care about what would happen if man stopped planting it? Didn’t they know that if man stopped planting corn, it would die out? That the ear of corn needs man’s intervention to strip it of the leaves that cover it, so that the seed may be free to reproduce? That there is no way for corn to live without man, nor man to live without corn? The fact that corn needed man to reproduce was proof that it was a gift from the gods to mankind, for without mankind there would have been no need for the gods to give away corn, and mankind, on the other hand, would not have been able to survive on the earth without corn. Didn’t the Spaniards know that we are the earth, from earth we were born, that the earth consumes us, and when the earth comes to its end, when the earth is exhausted, when corn no longer sprouts, when Mother Earth no longer opens her heart, it will be our end as well? Then what was the point of accumulating gold without corn? How was it possible that the first word Cortés learned in Náhuatl was precisely the one for gold and not corn?
    Gold, known as teocuitlatl, was considered to be the excrement of the gods, waste matter and nothing else, so she didn’t understand the desire to accumulate it. She thought that when the day came that the grain of corn was not revered and valued as something sacred, human beings would be in grave danger. And if she—who was a mere mortal—knew this, how was it possible that the emissaries of Quetzalcóatl, who came in his name, though under a different guise, who communicated with him, did not know it? Was it possible that these men were more likely emissaries of Tezcatlipoca than Quetzalcóatl?
    Quetzalcóatl’s brother had once deceived him with a black mirror, and that is what it seemed the Spaniards were doing with the natives, but this time with resplendent mirrors. Tezcatlipoca, the god who sought to overthrow his brother, was a magician. Showing off his talents, he sent a black mirror to Quetzalcóatl in which Quetzalcóatl saw the mask of his false holiness, his dark side. In response to such a vision, Quetzalcóatl got so drunk that he even fornicated with his own sister. Full of shame, the following day he left Tula to find himself again, to recover his light, promising to return one day.
    The great mystery was whether indeed he had returned or not. What was most troubling for Malinalli, independent of whether or not the Spaniards achieved victory over Montezuma, was that her life and liberty were at risk. All this had begun months earlier, when Cortés had accidentally found out that she spoke Náhuatl. Since Aguilar—who in all the years that they had spent in these lands had only learned Mayan—couldn’t help Cortés in understanding Montezuma’s messengers, Cortés asked Malinalli to help him translate and in exchange he would grant her her liberty. From that moment on,