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...