Mexico's Head
In Mexico City, history is decapitated: two distinct periods, then and now, proceed in parallel, concurrently, and unbeknownst to each other. The times exist in different realms - unchained and aloof like boats freed from their moors- and refuse the cries of causation. Imagine: A head floats from its body and from a height, the limp pile of bones and blood appears alien and crude. Up to the heavens it dances unheld into the light sky.
And they never met again.
On November 8th 1519, after nine arduous months from Veracruz, the Castilians, led by the incorrigible Hernan Cortes, encountered Tenochtitlan, the great island capital of the Mixteca Empire. A series of interlocking causeways connected the metropolis, giving fine views: stone palaces rose from the water’s depths, manic markets traded in stones and sisal, wonderful birds of rainbow plumage floated above, fires licked cedar branches sending sweet smells.
Such sublimity did not inspire unfettered awe on their first journey across the great causeway. No. Fear mixed with wonder as if God had summoned them. Thousands of twitchy eyes followed them from rocking canoes, paddles calmed, with a slight wind, obsidian spears at their sides. The Tlaxcalans, the Castilians’ new-found allies, had warned they would not survive the crossing. The swooshing of wings was mistaken for arrows, the banal prattle of commerce for war-cries.
From the distance where steep-stoned pyramids mushroomed came a chorus of chieftains, two or maybe three dozen dressed in deep red cloaks, menacing in their ceremonial power. What gods did they serve? Whose power did they wield? As they walked, they disrobed and laid their cloaks to the ground to where they placed their hands and finally their lips. Behind them, cut men with rounded shoulders carried Montezuma, the Mixteca prince, in a canopy of green feathers adorned with brilliant metals. Montezuma descended and walked along the reddened path, careful not to touch the dirtied earth. Cortes, too, descended, from his horse, removed his steel helmet, sheaved his sword, and prepared to meet the king of the new world.
The two met there in Tenochtitlan on that day in November. They bowed; Montezuma extended his hand and Cortes draped a necklace around his neck. Through translators, they offered rosy compliments to one another; they spoke of the other’s great qualities, their incomparable skills and hoped to be brothers. But each was the other’s other - strange and alien, mysterious and alluring. Of what other fate than bones and ash could have come? On those waterways, history screamed. Worlds hit worlds.
The prince led the visitors through the city streets, up and into his palace where they rested among rooms filled with golden objects that did not fail to soak a Christian’s eye. Cortes spoke of his prince, Emperor Charles, and what a fair ruler he was. He spoke of a brotherhood of Christians and prayed that Montezuma would save his people’s souls. God created the bountiful Earth in only six days, Cortes must have said, the skies, the waters, the forests, the mountains are his gifts to us. Cortes smiled, But our Lord has kept you until darkness until now. We have many gods, Montezuma smiled, surely the world is too big for one to have built.
They followed Montezuma out of the palace past the hawkers selling hares and deer or embroidered cotton with big blue feathers or coin-sized kidney beans and baskets of brown cacao or chained souls whose price was never fixed; past the great metalsmiths bending and breaking gold and silver to their every imaginative whim; past the seamstresses working with strong sisal and cotton, their fingers pulling designs from nothing, a bundle of robes finished at their feet; past the jesters balancing on stilts, the dancers twirling in the air, the clowns bent-double laughing; past the garden with sweet-smelling flowers, home to hummingbirds ve rested amongst the ponds and herbs after drinking in the colour.
They walked slowly, savouring every fresh sight, careful not to forget a smell. They came upon a courtyard with three huge stoned pyramids, each with hundreds of steps falling down from its front. The centered was the most grandiose and had two twin temples sitting on its flat top, white towers of ivory. Each staircase at its foot had a giant serpent’s head of basalt, grinning with curved teeth.
As they ascended the first steps, Montezuma stopped and pointed at the ground. His cheerful demeanor fell silent as his eyes grew into muscle. “She tried to kill him,” he said. The Spaniards moved closer, wanting to see what had so displeased the prince. On the ground, was an image of a woman carved into the stone. Her had been severed and lay floating slightly above her neck; her limbs, too, had been hacked, silently resting by her side. She was naked save for a serpent’s belt and some golden sandals. Her cheeks were pasted with golden bells; long feathers shot from her hair, her earrings and bracelets as big as hearts.
“This is Coyolxauhqui.” Montezuma said. “She tried to kill Huitzilopochtli while he slept in his mother’s womb.”
The Spaniards listened; Cortes shook his head.
“But Huitzilopochtli burst from his mother and slayed Coyolxauhqui before she could do it. He removed her head and she fell from Serpent Mountain. Her body split into many parts.”
Subtle cries rang from above.
“This,” he motioned skywards, “is how we honour Huitzilopochtli. Everything that is ours we owe to Huitz. We owe him much.”
The cries became more.
“Everyday we kill Coyolxauhqui as she tried to kill our God.”
From above, two headless bodies painted blue tumbled down the stairs; they broke and bones unlocked and pierced out through their soft skin before they stopped, twisted and unrecognizable.
“We feed Coyolxauhqui to keep him strong ve makes us strong.”
They climbed and saw the city, and the causeways gradually fell far beneath them. The scope of Lake Texcoco appeared endless as they watched other islands full of cities and people float off into the sun.
Behind them in the altars, more flint knives cut parts, the gurgles becoming less audible with each passing second.
Cortes stood next to Montezuma.
“God does not approve of human sacrifice or your worshipping of idols in his stead.”
Montezuma laughed, as if Cortes were an ignorant child unaware of even the most basic of life’s lessons.
“Victory is never free.”
Blood stained the altar’s walls. Behind the stoned table, where the unfortunates had sacrificed everything, rose a wooden sculpture encrusted with stones, with crater eyes and serpentine hands, a ferocious face demanding restitution. Copal burned. The smoke waved lazily through the heat-trapped room, over the torn parts and huddled flesh before resting on that painted-blue face, lips slightly parted, mid-command: Venerate me. Light bled through tiny cracks.
Montezuma pointed to the horizon.
“We came from beyond the lake. In those times, we wandered. We had no home. Huitzilopochtli said to search for an eagle with a serpent hanging from its peak perched on a cactus. In this lake, our ancestors saw him. We built.”
He turned to Cortes ve was silent and distracted.
“Everything is because of Huitzilopochtli.”
“He is a devil.” Cortes said before summoning his men and trapesing down the long stairs.
The next day Montezuma was taken hostage; the Spaniards’ eyes were frosted with golden specs. Before long the Spaniards were driven from the city; Montezuma was dead. Within years, millions had died from diseases; the Spaniards had taken Tenochtitlan and had burned all those little devils. And from there, the Spaniards spread, thick and sticky, over Mixteca and beyond. The lake was drunk and filled; temples were disassembled and discarded. Ruins now held new cultures, told other stories, venerated a new God.
And when the dust settled, a new power traversed the country’s spine.
I stand in the centre of the Zocolo, Mexico City’s historic ‘base’ and one of the largest squares in the world. In the 1520s, Cortes paved the square with rock taken from the recently destroyed ceremonial heart of the Mixteca Empire – Templo Mayor. Following the Spanish fashion, the square showcases the pertinent institutions of power underpinning the Mexican state: to the north looms the Catedral Metropolitana, begun in 1579 but never really finished; on the east side stands the Palacio Nacional, home to the president’s office and site of Montezuma’s palace joyfully destroyed by Cortes; to the south sit more government offices; and on the western side, the ritzy Portal de Mercaderes houses opulent hotels and jewelry shops.
A few people mingle in the square, walking aimlessly, with hands behind their back in quiet reflection. Streams of people in suits and high-heels emerge from the Zocolo metro station, hurried and haggard, like ants from their hill, with newspapers under their arms or cell-phones tucked between shoulder and neck or heavy bags clinging to their fingers. Shoe polishers set-up their stands outside the Cathedral, their movements languid and practiced. Swarms of shotgun holding police erect barriers at various spots along the square, more and more come flowing from the backs of parked old trucks.
I walk among these people. The morning is languid full of blue skies and lazy breezes. The colossal Mexican flag hangs impotent from its pole. A very unpatriotic wind this morning. But it comes slowly, gaining in confidence like a track-runner picking up speed in the final 30 metres. The flag budges, rises slightly, only to fall flaccid again resembling an alarm clock routine. I feel the wind rustle my hair and turn to see the flag lift, uncurl, expand, and hold: the eagle has its serpent and rests on its cactus. Behind it, the experienced Cathedral beckons, austere and serious, a retired grey-haired teacher, strap-in-hand.
At the time of Cortes’ arrival, Tenochtitlan was one of the most impressive cities on Earth with an estimated population of 200 000. Founded in 1325, the city blossomed from an island in the western portion of Lake Texoco, the largest of the five lakes that filled the Valley of Mexico at the time. Due to evaporation and little precipitation, the lakes were shrinking which made transportation trickier in the dry season. Three massive causeways linked the capital to the mainland. The city had a cosmopolitan flare with merchants and traders from all over Mexico exchanging exotic goods and precious metals, all transported by canoe through elaborate and extensive waterways.
Two other city-states, Tlatelolco and Tlalcopan, joined Tenochtitlan to form the Triple Alliance in 1425. The Alliance ruled through influence not territorial possession; famously, they had no standing army. The empire was decentralized, and left existing political structures in place in all their client states. Mixteca, however, controlled their empire through tribute payments and the forceful addition of Mixteca gods into the local pantheon. Failure to pay resulted in tribute doubling and possibly war. Captives were routinely sacrificed to appease the new gods. Although Mixteca nobles did not directly oversee these territories, psychological terror, along with financial obligations, stitched compliance. All tributaries in the rural lands fed the ballooning metropolis. By the end of the 15th century, Mixteca had seized and controlled large swaths of central and southern Mesoamerica.
I circle the square several times noting its grandeur and sheer pomposity. I wonder what other relics of Mixteca history, lie buried under these gargantuan stones beyond our sight. A woman passes me on her bike. Beneath the flag, we all appear inconsequential, little pieces of dust. For if one of the greatest civilizations of the world can be cavalierly swept aside, its greatest pyramids only excavated in the 1978, what hope for us?
I stop and stare at the Cathedral, the unrivaled showpiece of the contemporary Mexican skyline. From its inception, the church has collected a mélange of different architectural styles, a perpetual work in progress without end. It commands awe and devotion. It is the physical embodiment, for many, of a spiritual connection between the secular and the spiritual – a place of deep reverence that orders the universe and tames its uncertainties. The church is the glue pasting together the uneven shards of existence into a soothing whole.
I glance at my guidebook and try to locate myself on my phone’s GPS. I am looking for Temple Mayor, or, more accurately, its ruins. I dart in and out of colonial alleys circumnavigating the church’s circumference. I see construction fences and eventually signs pointing to the Temple’s entrance. Archeologists continue to excavate the site; rubble piles lie beyond the entrance, massive holes dig into the earth. The church, behind me, looks down upon the site.
After the Mixteca defeat, the Spaniards promptly destroyed Templo Mayo: the sacred nexus of Mixteca and political life. Standing ninety feet high, the Templo Mayor had two staircases accessing two temples dedicated to the gods Tlaloc, deity of rain and water, and Huitzilopochti, the patron deity of Mexica and of war.
The importance of the two gods intertwined. Mixtecas venerated maize. Its cultivation not only allowed settlement and city-building but also subsequently fed and nourished the poorer inhabitants of Tenochtitlan. The agricultural cycle was deeply important to Mixteca identity and cosmology. The rains cycled life and death; birthed plants and gave harvests. Mixtecas did not go to war during the agricultural cycle between May and October while their war path often followed forays into new agricultural zones. Gods were propagated, appeased, to fight metaphysical disasters. Drought had a cosmological explanation, turmoil a reason. A happy god was a giving god. War followed the rains. Success depended on the cycle.
A pathway leads through the stucco foundation of the great temple. Only a few stairs remain, the rest destroyed, or discarded to history. Giant serpent heads sit open-mouth. Helpful signage helps illuminate what would have passed unnoticed to the naïve eye. Archeologists work in tents, dusting and polishing old rock fragments, hidden from the rising sun which has just made its middle-morning presence felt. Artifacts continue to be found. Despite the apocalyptic atmosphere, the magnitude of the place overwhelms: two worlds met here.
Towards the end of the 15th century, the Mixteca state became unhinged. More and more, Mixteca warriors used brutal techniques to subdue an increasingly recalcitrant subject population. Did a displeased god need reassurance? Prisoners were taken, thousands upon thousands, to the Mayor, up the great staircases to the temples of Tlaloc and Huitzilopochti, held on the stoned tables where their chests met flint or obsidian, their heads dropped and rolled down to the adoring masses. The empire trembled; palpitations shook the margins, reverberating in the centre.
Towards the Templo Museum – a wholly extravagant and modern affair – text has been chiseled into huge slabs of rock towering soberly over the grounds languidly worked upon by the team of archeologists. The words originate from the works of Bernal Diaz and Hernan Cortes, both detailing the experience of witnessing Tenochtitlan, and exploring its interior, for the first time. Oh, how they express their amazement, their astonishment. Diaz speaks lyrically of Tenochtitlan’s grandeur for the first time and how the soldiers in his company ve had visited Constantinople and Rome had never laid their eyes on such a city. Cortes speaks approvingly of the Temple itself and how its towers surpassed those of great Cathedral of Sevilla. Within a few mere years, both men would have participated in the destruction of city and its temple.
The church is ubiquitous. Around every turn, and behind every peaking Mixteca remnant, it looms like a tidal wave. Omnipotent. I try to imagine the day Mayor fell, the red evening when one understanding replaced another. I see faces torn and cracked, in violent disbelief, rage falling soundly on impotency’s door. Nothing was the same. Normal irrevocably gone. I hear shrieks of silence, voiceless screams, determined yet resigned. They watch their world unpacked like luggage piece by piece, disassembled like children’s Lego. Everything they ever knew moved stone by stone, tidied away into a corner. With every of the Temple’s stone levelled, I see the church grow and grow and grow. I imagine what the Vatican or Mecca or Varanasi would look like on fire.
It does not matter, the clean museum cases say to me. For this is history with no meaning like dinosaurs bones pieced together for frightened children in red caps and cotton shorts; for this is but a mere blip on our predestined trajectory to a flat future, inevitably written by providence and promised by fate. Every floor of the museum reveals another layer of the Mixteca story, another piece of their culture and heritage highlighted under bright lights and protected by a team of sophisticated security guards. The passage of time massages history’s ache. Or at least dulls it. Fifty years we still feel its weight. For one hundred years we give a moment’s silence. After 500 years, its residue is enclosed in glass, under lock and key, forever admired.
We burn the past in glass.
From Mayor, I cross the Zocolo and head to the National Palace, which houses many of Diego Rivera’s – Mexico’s prodigious artistic son - most treasured and fantastic murals. Bright, vibrant scenes cover the walls ascending to the second floor. Images of Conquistador violence mix with twentieth century land struggle and scenes from the Pre-Colombian past. The murals circling the second level tell the story of the Conquest and the last panel shows the Arrival of Cortez.
Indians branded as cattle, hanging upside down, Cortes, a humpbacked, ghoulish character, near La Malinche whispering Nahuatl secrets, to friars in dark cloaks nose deep in bibles, their hands lecturing below, make note of them, a team of Indians carrying lumber as big as a whale, past a tall wooden Crucifix shielding a team of steeled Conquistadores on horseback, spears loose and ready.
The murals shrink: their intoxicating colours envelope the purveyors pausing to look closer at each magnified detail, each magnificent square-inch of Mexico’s fabled past. We are ensconced in colours as we move with the history, sliding slowly over the polished, shiny floors. We crane our necks, or slither closer, desperate to capture everything. Red-robes prevent starry-eyed visitors from wandering directly into the paintings. We want to digest the past; we want to understand the past.
Flash-less photos are taken; tour-leaders fight for space dispensing knowledge in a cacophony of languages. The pictures show struggle. Centuries of continuous turmoil, fight, compromise, and negotiation explode on the walls. Volcanoes erupt; cannons explode. Blood spills; fire engulfs. It is overwhelming. It is daunting. Alive, the past speaks, resurrected and in tandem with our present steps, foots fall down the stairs and out into the afternoon’s sun. People scurry about their business transforming the morning’s tranquility into a chaotic buzz. The energy is palpable and raw. Outside, an authenticity foretells the future: we are forever moving from the shadows.
And in that second, the two periods collide. In the noise and through the commotion, we surrender to the heavy present.
In Mexico City, the head never escapes too far from its body.