Wrapped up in the religious zeal was the conception by the Spaniards that the indios were guilty of every kind of vice. But the most heinous crimes committed by the indios in the eyes of the Spanish were not on the battlefield or the sacrificial block but in bed. The Spaniards continuously charged them with the crime against nature, the crime that dare not speak its name: sodomy.

Despite the view of the Spanish, the practice of sodomy was not universal. The Aztecs punished sodomy harshly. The indio acting as a female had his virile parts cut off and a hole cut between his legs. Then his entrails were removed through the hole. I shuddered at the thought of someone taking a knife, spreading my legs, cutting out a hole, and sticking their hand up the hole to remove my guts.

After the insides were removed, the victim was tied down to a peg and covered with ash until he was buried. Wood was piled on top and burned.

The punishment for the indio acting as a man was simpler: He was tied down to a log and covered with ash, to remain there until he died.

Who had the worse punishment, you ask? The one who acted as a woman or the one who acted as a man? While the man-woman's punishment makes my flesh crawl, he would die quickly from the incision. The man tied down and left to die would wither slowly, his pain and suffering enduring much longer. But I would take a lingering death over someone cutting a hole between my legs and reaching up to rip out my entrails.

Not all indio groups prohibited sodomy, and a few openly practiced it. Some Mayan tribes trained their boys to engage in sodomy during their youth. Until a boy was old enough to marry, well-to-do parents provided him with a male companion, a slave boy, to meet his s.e.xual urges. This way he did not pursue girls, permitting them to remain virgins until marriage.

Balboa, who discovered the Pacific Ocean after trekking through the jungles of Panama, found h.o.m.os.e.xuality practiced among the chiefs at Quarequa. When he discovered that the king's brother and the brother's friends wore women's clothing and entered each other through the backdoor, he threw forty of them to his savage dogs.

One Caribbean tribe first castrated their young male prisoners, then used them s.e.xually until they grew to adulthood, at which point they were killed and eaten. Heinous behavior, but there are many tales told today of unscrupulous Christians in Spain conducting a trade in Christian penes and foreskins to the Moors.

I have heard the Christian priests d.a.m.n sodomy. They tell the indios that if they practice the crime against nature and do not repent, when they die they will descend to h.e.l.l joined with their lover.

The fray once recounted to me that Saint Thomas Aquinas sanctioned prost.i.tution on the grounds that it saved men from sodomy.

Sodomy was not the only crime against nature the Spaniards found existed in the New World. Some indio n.o.bles had special wives who were trained to use their mouth to suck on their husband's pene in the manner of vipers.

Of course, such matters of the flesh were not restricted to the indios. Fray Antonio told me that Pope Alexander VI of the Spanish Borgias had five children. He betrothed his daughter Lucrezia at twelve to one n.o.bleman-then broke it off when the girl was thirteen in order for her to marry another. When that marriage did not bring the political and financial rewards the pope antic.i.p.ated, he had the marriage annulled on the grounds of impotency-despite the fact that his daughter was pregnant. Not to be daunted by such trivialities, the good pope issued one bull stating that his son, Lucrezia's brother, was the father-and another naming himself as the father of his daughter's child. Poor Lucrezia-her next husband was the son of the king of Naples, but her jealous brother strangled the man with his own hands.

Good King Filipe III, who has sat on the throne of Spain and Portugal during most of my lifetime, is said to have had thirty-two children from consorts. That is more than most Aztec kings fathered.

SIXTY-SIX.

In one of those marvelous acts of fate that seemed so often to clear the path for Cortes, he had the great fortune to take possession of a slave girl who had been born a princess. Dona Marina, as she came to be called, had been born in the province of Coatzacualco, on the southeastern border of the Aztec Empire. Her father, a rich and powerful cacique, died when she was very young. Her mother married again and had a son. She conceived the nefarious idea of securing for her son Marina's rightful inheritance.

She accordingly feigned that Marina was dead but secretly delivered her into the hands of some itinerant traders of Xicallanco. She availed herself, at the same time, of the death of a child of one of her slaves in order to subst.i.tute the corpse for that of her own daughter and celebrated the obsequies with mock solemnity. The merchants sold the india maiden to the cacique of Tabasco, who delivered her to the Spanish as tribute.

In a strange way, my own childhood speaks so much of the intrigues and tribulations of Dona Marina's that, while my indio ancestors considered her a traitor, she earned that special place in my heart that I have spoken about.

Cortes had landed on the coast and encountered the indio culture but soon discovered that he was on the fringes of a vast empire ruled by a mighty emperor. He was in desperate need of information from the indios he encountered and in need of allies because alone, with a few hundred men, he could not hope to overwhelm a large empire.

Dona Marina brought along with her charms-she was to become Cortes's mistress and mother of his son, Don Martin-a gift for languages. She not only spoke the language of the indios that she had been sold into slavery to, but her native Aztec tongue, Nahuatl, as well. She was able to quickly pick up enough Spanish to act as interpreter and negotiator with the indio leaders Cortes came into contact with.

And her experiences from n.o.ble woman to slave and finally lover of the Spanish leader, gave her insights that she used to lead Cortes from danger. It was she who realized that fifty indios sent ostensibly as peace delegates to him were spies and a.s.sa.s.sins. Cortes had the hands of the men chopped off and sent them back to their leaders as examples of how he would deal with treachery.

It was Marina, too, who would interpret for Cortes when he finally reached Tenocht.i.tlan and stood before Montezuma II. The emperor, whose imperial t.i.tle was Revered Speaker, was informed by his messengers of the Spanish landing. Cortes in turn learned that the ruler of the vast empire was in a golden city in a high valley far from the blazing sands of the Caribbean coastline.

Aztecs scribes painted picture writing so that the emperor would be able to see what the Spaniards looked like. It was the Spanish horses more than anything that struck fear in the hearts of the indios. There were no beasts of burden in Mexico, no horses, mules, donkeys, or even oxen. The horses, strange and terrifying to the indios, were as fearsome to them as the cannons. They saw the rider and horse moving in unison, as if parts of the same animal, and they a.s.sumed that G.o.ds were mounted upon these fearsome beasts.

But the seeds of Aztec destruction did not begin with the landing of Cortes, but hundreds of years before in a city, a time, and a place when Aztecs were nomadic barbarians who wore animal skins and ate meat raw. When Montezuma saw the picture writing he was deeply disturbed. He was fifty-two years old at the time Cortes arrived, and the news of the landing brought home to him a decade of growing fear and suspicion and to the indios at large the culmination of several hundred years of myth-the return of Quetzalcoatl, the Plumed Serpent.

Ay, poor Montezuma. He was a victim of his own fears-especially when his sister told him of her death dream in which she saw the return of a legend. The legend, of course, was that of the Plumed Serpent. Quetzalcoatl's story had as much love, murder, betrayal, and incest to have been written by Sophocles to entertain the ancient Greeks.

Quetzalcoatl was born in a One-Reed year. It was to become the most momentous date in indio history. He presided over Tula, the fabled Toltec city of gold and pleasure I visited in my dream. A great ruler, he erected wondrous temples and had artisans create sculptures, pottery, word-picture books, and other works of art that glorified the city. He was also a humane king who banned human sacrifice and permitted only the sacrifice of snakes and b.u.t.terflies.

Those who favored human sacrifice feared that Quetzalcoatl was offending the G.o.ds by not giving them blood. They plotted his destruction, enlisting the help of three evil magicians. The evil magicians tricked Quetzalcoatl into becoming drunk on octli, the drink of the G.o.ds, now called pulque. In his drunken state he sent for his beautiful sister. He later awoke to find his sister naked beside him and realized he had bedded with her as he would a wife.

In pain and horror over his sin, Quetzalcoatl fled the golden city, setting sail upon the Eastern Sea with some of his followers on a raft made of intertwined snakes. Later he rose into the sky, becoming the Lord of the Dawn House, turning into the planet the Spaniards call Venus. He was a fiery eye in the sky, watching over the lands of the indios, waiting for the day when he would return to reclaim his kingdom. It was written that he would return in a One-Reed year.

For a decade before the arrival of the Spaniards, ominous signs had struck fear in the hearts of the indios as the One-Reed year approached-a fiery comet had appeared in the sky, earthquakes shook the land, and the mighty volcano Popocatepetl, the Smoking Mountain, had spit fire from the bowels of the underworld.

One of the most frightening events was a violent upheaval of the waters of Lake Texcoco, the lake that surrounds Tenocht.i.tlan. Without warning or excessive rain, the waters of the lake suddenly swelled up as if lifted by a giant hand and overflowed into the island city, sweeping away many buildings.

Fire followed flood as one of the turrets of Tenocht.i.tlan's great temple of Huitzilopochtli suddenly burst aflame without apparent cause and burned in defiance of all attempts to put it out.

Three comets were seen streaking across the night sky. Then, not long before the coming of the Spanish on the Eastern Sea, a strange golden light broke forth in the east. It glowed like a midnight sun, rising in the same pyramidal shape of an Aztec temple. The scribes recorded that fires burned so within it that it seemed "thickly powered with stars." Fray Antonio told me that it was the opinion of Church scholars that this event was a volcanic eruption, but some of the highest and most violent volcanoes in the world stood above the Valley of Mexico and one would think that the Aztecs would know the difference between volcanic eruption and heavenly fire.

At the same time of the golden pyramid of the night, low voices and doleful wailing was heard, as if to announce some strange, mysterious calamity.

Montezuma was terrified of the apparitions in the heavens and of his sister's death dream. When Cortes landed, a One-Reed year was coming around on the calendar wheel. Montezuma a.s.sumed that Quetzalcoatl had returned to claim his kingdom. Of course by now Quetzalcoatl's Tula was an abandoned city of ghostly stone temples, having been destroyed by invading barbarian armies, the Aztecs among them, hundreds of years before; but Montezuma thought he could pay tribute to Quetzalcoatl in goods and human hearts for the way the Aztecs had turned upon and devoured Tula.

Rather than driving the new arrivals into the sea with his overwhelming forces, gripped by fear and superst.i.tion, Montezuma sent an amba.s.sador to salute Cortes and bring him gifts-while forbidding him to come to Tenocht.i.tlan.

Among the gifts, Montezuma returned a Spanish helmet Cortes had sent to him. The helmet was overflowing with gold. There were also two great circular disks of gold and silver, as large as carriage wheels. The sight of golden gifts rather than force of arms did not pacify Cortes and his men; instead, it brought their greed to a boiling point.

But there was a great threat between them and the treasures of the Aztecs. The Spaniards realized that they were not dealing with a tribal chieftain but the monarch of a great nation, in size and population larger than most European countries. While the Spanish had superiority of weapons-the indio arrows and lances bounced off their armor-they were outnumbered a thousand to one. Any concerted attack by the Aztecs would succeed by sheer force of numbers.

The courage of his men wavered and Cortes, desperate that Velasquez would not get his prize, did the act of a man desperate for gold and glory-he burned his ships.

Now his men had only two choices-to fight or die. A handful of sailors and soldiers, around six hundred in all, found themselves stranded on the beach with their back to the water. To survive they had to defeat the army of an empire composed of millions of people.

One might fault Cortes on many levels. He was a womanizer, a slave master, a ruthless opponent, a man without respect for authority. But here was an act of daring and courage and brilliance that won a kingdom. To burn one's ships, to make him and his men cornered rats facing odds of a thousand to one, to have evaded the fate of an ordinary man, an ordinary leader who would have sent sail for reinforcements... this was the act of a muy hombre, very much man, worthy of Alexander the Great at Tyre, Julius Caesar at Munda, Hannibal crossing the Alps with elephants!

Another clever tactic was to work on the hatred the other indios had for the Aztecs to whom they paid tribute.

Using Dona Marina as his interpreter and mentor, Cortes convinced indio states that had been paying the Aztecs tribute in goods and sacrifice victims to ally themselves with him. The Aztec legions were dreaded much as the Roman legions and those of Genghis Khan, which had inspired fear into conquered people who were forced to pay tribute.

The strategy was successful. When Cortes marched upon Tenocht.i.tlan, along with his men came indios numbering in the tens of thousands, the armies of Totonac, Tlaxcalans, and other nations anxious to use the Spanish to revenge countless aggressions by the domineering Aztecs.

Even with indio allies, the Aztecs were still the supreme fighting force in the New World. Without the quirk of fate that the indios believed that Cortes's arrival on the Eastern seash.o.r.e fulfilled the Quetzalcoatl legend, Montezuma would have fielded an army that would have fallen upon the puny Spanish forces and its indio armies, sending the indios in terror from the dreaded Jaguar and Eagle Knights, who'd sworn to never retreat in battle. Montezuma's indecision cost him first his kingdom and then his life. He let the Spanish into his city without a fight.

One of the conquistadors, Bernal Diaz del Castillo, wrote a history of the conquest before my lifetime. A ma.n.u.script of it has circulated widely among the clerics of New Spain, and Fray Antonio had me read it so that I would learn the true story of how the Spanish had come to New Spain. Diaz's description of the city was the final fulfillment of the dream of Cortes and his men that he could find a fabled kingdom as had the hero of Amadis of Gaul. Diaz wrote that when the men saw Tenocht.i.tlan for the first time, they realized that they had arrived at a golden city:

When we saw so many cities and villages built in the waters of the lake and other large towns on dry land, and that straight, level causeway leading into Mexico City, we were amazed and we said that it was like the enchanted things related in the book of Amadis because of the huge towers, temples, and buildings rising from the water and all of masonry. And some of the soldiers even asked whether the things we saw were not a dream.

After permitting the Spanish to enter his city, Montezuma, held prisoner in his palace by his "guests," tried to address his people. While many fell to the ground in awe of his august presence, some began to taunt him as a man who had been turned into a woman by the white men-that he was only fit to suckle babies and knead maize! Rocks and arrows loosened from the crowd and Montezuma fell.

He was as mortally wounded in soul as in body for the way his people turned on him. He knew he had failed them. The Spanish tried to treat his wounds but he tore off the bandages. He refused to survive his disgrace. Dying, he rejected baptism into the Christian faith, telling a priest kneeling at his side, "I have but a few moments to live and will not at this hour desert the faith of my fathers."

Catastrophic disasters erupted in the wake of the Spanish conquest. First came the destruction of the fabric of indio society as almost everything they had ever known and worshipped was trampled by the conquerors. It wasn't just stone edifices that were torn asunder, but the very fabric of society-just as birth and marriage and death revolve around a Christian Church, so was almost every aspect of the indio's life caught up in the priests and temples of their faith. Those temples were torn down and ones of the new faith erected, administered by priests who spoke a strange language.

The second great catastrophe was the plagues that descended upon the indios in the footsteps of the Spaniards. Terrible epidemics of diseases that caused the indios' flesh to boil and insides to wither was the vengeful gift of the Spanish G.o.d. The Christian priests said that the diseases that struck down nine out of every ten indios in New Spain within a few generations of the conquest were fire and brimstone from G.o.d, punishing indios for their heathen ways.