Following the Sun (11 page)

All the Aztec gods had to be fed with human sacrifice, but the sun and his associate, Huitzilopochtli, the god of war, were the hungriest gods of all and lived on blood. Victims selected to feed the sun were frog-marched or dragged up the terraced steps to the very heights of the ceremonial temples; below in the plaza crowds gathered to watch the sacrifice. The victim was stretched over a stone slab and held down by four priests while a fifth plunged an obsidian dagger into his chest and withdrew his pulsing heart to feed to the sun.

The motivation behind the ritual sacrifices was the concept of what the Aztecs called
tonalli
, the animating spirit of all living things, something akin to
mana
of the South Pacific, or
manitou
of the Eastern Woodland Indians of North America.
Tonalli
in humans was believed to be located in the blood, which the Aztecs believed was concentrated in the heart when one becomes frightened, which is why the sun so hungered for the heart. Without this offering, all motion would cease, even the movement of the sun; so the sacrifices were absolutely necessary to assure the continuation of life on earth.

Not all the Aztec gods were as hungry as the sun. The benign wind spirit, Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent, was a gentle god who was able to sustain himself on snakes and butterflies. Quetzalcoatl had deserted the Aztecs for the time being, or had been expelled in a dispute with another god over the necessity of blood sacrifice, but their legends held that he was coming back and would redeem the people. The Aztec priests were careful chroniclers of time, and through astrology and calendar work they claimed to know exactly when Quetzalcoatl would return. The glorious event would occur in the era of the Fifth Sun, in the year Two Rabbit. On the Julian calendar that year would have been 1519.

In that very year, in the great palace at Tenochtitlán, the fiery king Montezuma received messengers from the coast. Castles had been spotted offshore, floating on the sea. These castles had landed on the shore, the messengers said, and had discharged humanlike beings, or godlike beings in the shape of humans, some of them mounted on the backs of magical animals with flowing tails, long manes, and big narrow ears. Montezuma ordered his priests to cast their oracles to determine the nature of these aliens. Were they from the spirit world? Were they gods? Was it, as predicted, Quetzalcoatl himself?

The nobles grew restless. Montezuma, it is said, fell into a depression and retired to his quarters. He instructed that gifts be sent to the coast to appease the newcomers, whoever they were, and settled back to await their arrival.

We, of course, know who they were. Hernán Cortés had landed on the shores near Veracruz.

When I emerged from the Museum of the Americas, the world of the hungry god of the sun was suddenly obliterated by the smells, light, and noise of modern Madrid. The indifferent crowds of people, the cars, the exhaust even, seemed a welcome relief from the dark world of Mesoamerica. Furthermore, the benign southern European spring sun had banished, temporarily, the ominous rain clouds and was filling the Retiro Park with a silvery light. I couldn't resist a walk and purposely got myself lost under the scented flowering of the horse chestnuts.

That night Griggs and Desdemona had a dinner party with a couple of friends who wanted to practice their English, and I had another late night of drinking and eating. Over dinner we all got into a heated discussion in a mix of Spanish and English over the meaning of the epic meeting of the two powerful imperial cultures of Spain and Mexico. Griggs, Old World imperialist that I took him to be, tended to argue the Spanish side, while their two guests, Charro and Pelayo, who were both from the north and left-leaning, tended to favor the oppressed Indians. Charro launched a passionate and unique argument at one point, claiming that the Aztecs were relatively harmless in comparison to the Spanish, and that the numbers of sacrificial dead were overestimated. The Spanish put anyone who wouldn't convert to the sword and sent them down to hell, she pointed out.

“The sacrificed of the Aztecs,” she said, “they would turn into hummingbirds after death and fly up to the sun for eternity. And anyway, if the priests did not sacrifice people, the sun would not rise. This was a known fact. We would do the same thing if we believed that. I would anyway.”

“Yes, but would you be willing to be a sacrificial victim?” Griggs asked.

She shrugged. “
No se
,” she said.

“Here's another thing,” Griggs said. “They kept people in cages before the sacrifices, like cattle. Cortés freed them.”

“Then he kill them if they no convert,” Pelayo said quickly.

“What about this sacred heart of Christ?” I asked. “Isn't it interesting that both cultures opened the chests and revealed the fiery, sunlike heart. Odd coincidence, isn't it?”

“Please, let's stop all this talk,” Desdemona said. “If ever two cultures deserve each other, it is the Spanish and the Aztec. How do you say in English,
¿Que el diablo cargue con los dos?
”

“A pox on both their houses,” Griggs said with a flourish of his wine glass.

The hours in the Museum of the Americas, the discussion over human sacrifice, and my immersion in the whole Spanish experience in the New World kept me awake for a long time that night. Mainly I was thinking about an account I had read on shipboard from Bernal Diaz's
The Conquest of Mexico
that recounts the events surrounding the final days of the Aztec nation.

In February of 1519 Cortés sailed from Cuba with a force of some six hundred men, twenty horses, and ten cannons and worked his way along the coast of the Yucatan. Within months he had subjugated the natives, captured the town of Tabasco, and obtained captives and even gained allies. He then began negotiations with Montezuma, and in August marched inland toward the capital.

By then Cortés had a mere four hundred soldiers, whereas Montezuma had nearly 80,000 warriors in the city. But nevertheless, Montezuma decided to play the waiting game rather than attack this mysterious force. Hearing news of the approach, he planned to welcome the stranger into Tenochtitlán in order to determine his intentions. But as the Spanish grew closer, Montezuma seems to have changed his mind and sent out gifts of food and cloth and female slaves, and offers of gold if the
Teules
, as the Aztecs called the Spaniards, would turn back to the coast and not approach the city.

Cortés marched on. By November he came, finally, to the vast city complex.

What the Spanish beheld had never been seen before in the New World by Europeans. There, in the middle of a wide lake, was a shimmering island city with white towering walls of vast buildings with a major causeway linking the city to the mainland. Other causeways connected the various parts of the city, and there were multiple towers and shining palaces and airy apartments with spacious rooms and courtyards set with flowering trees. Bridges interconnected the causeways, and there were floating islands of gardens and orchards, with a wide diversity of trees, native roses, and the whole of it alive with singing birds.

The Spanish soldiers were overwhelmed by the splendor of it all. Some thought they had fallen asleep and had come into a dream, or a waking dream, and others thought they were seeing a legendary city out of the romance
Amadís de Gaula
, a popular literary work of the period.

As the Spaniards came into view, a great crowd surged out from the city on foot and by canoe to marvel at the newcomers, for they never before had seen so wonderful a thing as a horse. Then a brilliantly attired contingent of caciques and footmen came forward, greeted the Spanish, and instructed them to halt on the main causeway. Montezuma, the great chief, would come forth to greet them in person.

In time he appeared, borne on a golden litter under a canopy of green feathers and carried by robed servants. He was a man of about forty, in fine form, well groomed, with light bronze skin and flashing eyes and attired in bright feathered robes and shod with sandals of gleaming gold.

After a magnanimous exchange of gifts, Montezuma welcomed the newcomers with much ceremony and led the company of four hundred soldiers into the city in a grand procession. Forthwith, in review, marched armed warriors, and elaborately costumed troupes of dancers, masked stilt walkers, frolicking clowns, and lines of maidens bearing flowers. Following this display the Spanish were lodged in the former imperial palace where Montezuma's father had lived.

The astonishment and delight experienced by those first Spanish visitors soon turned to horror when they witnessed the vast scale of ritual sacrifices that were taking place in the city. Before them rose the blood-stained pyramids, vast pagan temples of doom, whose walls were crusted over with dried blood. Inside the temples were long racks of skulls of the victims, proudly displayed. Nowhere in the literature of Europe, perhaps nowhere even in the Western imagination, not even in the Medieval images of the sufferings of the damned or the disasters of war, had the world witnessed such a scale of calculated horrors.

Over a period of weeks, there followed elaborate discussions and negotiations between the Spanish leader and the Indian king, mainly centering around religion and gold. Montezuma, in one of those curious surprises of history, seems to have been strangely humbled, perhaps because he still believed that Cortés may have been a god. Over the next month he was put under house arrest and eventually held hostage while Cortés negotiated for more gold. The Spanish soldiers had at first been given free rein in the city, but by the beginning of the next summer, partly because of the healthy suspicions among Montezuma's family and the Aztec caciques of the Spanish motives, the mood in the city changed dramatically. Finally there was an Indian uprising.

Sensing trouble and realizing the end may be at hand, on a dark, rainy night in June, Cortés and his Indian allies attempted to escape along the causeways. In the chaos of the rain and darkness many Spanish were killed and forty prisoners were caught and placed in cages to be sacrificed. This glorious idea of a public sacrifice of the all-powerful Christian Spaniards to their own powerful sun god, Tonatiuh, caused many Aztec warriors to give up the fighting temporarily and return to the city for the ceremony, and in the confusion Cortés managed to escape. He retreated to the coast and began immediately to rebuild his forces.

At the end of that summer he returned with a full force of Indian allies and laid siege to Tenochtitlán. He constructed thirteen brigantines and had them dismantled, carried over the mountains, and reconstructed just outside of the city. Then he launched an amphibious attack.

Vast flotillas of war canoes sallied forth from the watergates of the city, but the light canoes of the Indians were no match for the larger, better-armed sailing vessels, and the battle began to turn in favor of the Spanish. Day by day, Cortés came closer and soon breached the walls and broke into the city. The Spaniards and their Indian allies filled the canals and causeways; they leveled the odious temples of death; tore down palaces and laid waste to the spacious dwellings of the nobles; and when, after eighty days, it was all over, the marvelous city lay in ruins. Broken spears littered the roads and the houses were roofless and the walls stained with the blood of battle.

After his victory, Cortés wrote home to Spain. In his letter he expressed regret for having had to destroy what was once, as he wrote, “the most beautiful city on earth.”

The heavy rains of Madrid came back in the night after dinner and continued throughout the next day until late afternoon. At dusk the sky cleared and before heading out for our nightly rounds of
tapas
and dinner, Griggs and I went up to the roof of his building. His apartment was located in a high section of the city, which itself sits on a plateau, and we had a good view of the evening sky. Wild bands of horselike herds of clouds with streaming manes were riding across the plains to the west, and beyond the city I could see the rain-freshened green springtime of the countryside. I was anxious to be off.

As we watched, something brushed the back of my head, just a hint of a breeze really, and a bat flitted over the roof, circled, and came back. Then there was another one, and then, beyond the roof on the other side of the streets above other roofs, more bats. Everywhere we turned, there were bats, little dark forms flitting and diving and whirling in tight little circles above the cosmopolitan city.

“I hate those things,” said Griggs.

But I was happy to see them, it seemed a portentous sign, and I made plans to leave the next day.

The following morning was sunny and warm. To save time, I strapped my bicycle on the back of Griggs's car and rode with him to the outskirts of the city, where he dropped me off. I unhooked the bike, secured my gear, restrapped my lunch and a good bottle of
rioja
Griggs had given me for the journey, and bid him farewell. He watched me sadly.

“I would love to go with you,” he said. “Seriously. I'd as soon jump aboard and face the trials of the road than go to work today.”

“Well just drive up to France and I'll see you there,” I said. I wasn't entirely sincere, but I said it anyway. “I promise to call when I get there. You come.”

He shrugged. “I will,” he said.

The last I saw him he was leaning against his car, smoking a cigarette, watching me pedal off.

In one of those moods in which anything seems possible, I headed into a part of Spain I had never before visited and was ready to explore anything. My ancient bicycle seemed to have sprouted wings, and as I sailed onward I felt capable of flying over the dreaded mountain passes of the Sierras and the deep river valleys that stood between me and my goal beyond the wall of the Pyrénées. The road was smooth, and within a few miles I began riding through the old
paisaje
of Castile, with small farms here and there, and little gray brown villages, some with a small bullring, and roadside stands that sold roasted chickens. The sky was cerulean blue, there were little networks of clouds high up, shimmering with light, as in a Fragonard painting, and the weather, finally, was warmer. The wind shifted and was blowing up from the south, speeding me on my route. A fine day for a good cycle, a most excellent outing, fair winds and low hills, and the smell of grass and fresh-turned earth, and it was all brightness and light, and smooth sailing all the way, until I felt the dreaded wobbling instability that I knew meant one thing—flat tire.