The Spanish are Coming! The Spanish are Coming!

An extract from Conquest: Montezuma, Cortes and the Fall of Old Mexico by Hugh Thomas.

A trunk was then brought to Tenochititlan [now Mexico City] from the Gulf of Mexico. It had been washed up on the shore. Inside were several suits of clothes, some jewels and a sword. Whose possessions were they? No one had ever seen anything like them before. The Emporor Montezuma divided the contents between the kings of Tacubaya and Texcoco. A little later a message came from Yucatan, probably sent by a Mexican merchant. It was a folded manuscript. This depicted three white temples at sea floating on large canoes…

Then merchants from Xicallanco seem to have more reports of strange new men. This probably confirmed stories from the other Mexican outposts farther south down the isthmus of Central America. The Mexica would thus perhaps have heard of a colony of white men which had been established in 1513 only a thousand miles (as the crow flies) south east of Yucatan, in Darien.

It was also, later reported that in Mexico, after about 1502 a series of phenomena were observed which seemed to presage difficult times. First, for example, a tongue of fire in the sky, presumably a comet of unusual brilliance, was said to have been seen every night for a year. Then the thatched roof of the temple of Huitzilopochtli caught fire on top of the great pyramid: the flames could not be put out. Another temple, that of a more ancient deity, Xiuhtecuhtli, the god of fire (also known as the lord of the turquoise and even as the father and mother of the gods), was destroyed by what was described as a noiseless thunderbolt. This was especially alarming, since fire, expressed by family hearths and braziers before temples, was looked upon as one of the great achievements of the gods. Then a comet was said to have fallen sharply in the sky, to have divided in three, and to have scattered sparks throughout the Valley of Mexico. The water of the lake [on which Tenochititlan was built] foamed for no reason; many houses built next to the water were flooded…

The most famous tale of this time is the most esoteric: some fishermen were said to have found a bird like a crane, of an ashen colour. They showed it to the Emperor, who saw a mirror on its head. In the mirror, he observed the heavens and the stars, and then a number of men riding on deer, approaching as for war. The Emperor is said to have summoned specialist wise men. He asked them for their interpretation. But when they looked, the vision, the mirror, and he bird had all disappeared…

People in old Mexico were often influenced by far less dramatic events than these. Unaccustomed noises or sights of any kind, from the cry of an owl to the sight of a rabbit running into a house, suggested calamities. The call of a white headed hawk (identified with the sun) might have several interpretations. Anyone whose path was crossed by a weasel might expect a setback. The Mexica spent a great deal of time speculating about the significance of such things. This should not be a matter of surprise. It has been represented that these “portents” never occurred and the interpretations in consequence were invented later. Machiavelli in his Discorsi, in these very years (1515-18) remarked: “Both modern and ancient examples go to show that great events never happened in any town or in any country without their having been announced by portents, revelations, prodigious events or other celestial signs”… In this spirit of scepticism… some have argued that these portents in Mexico were artfully devised in the 1530s or 40s on the ground that simple people find catastrophes easier to bear if it can be argued that they have been foretold.

Yet most of these phenomena in Mexico were unsensational. Assuming that one or other of them occurred at all, they might have been forgotten had the Mexican empire subsequently prospered… Storms on the Lake of Mexico which caused water to foam were not infrequent. Fires on the thatched roofs on the top of  pyramids should have been expected since braziers were nearby. Two-headed beings [also having appeared] could have been Siamese twins. Both they and the bird with the mirror sound as if they were figments in the imagination of someone who had eaten sacred mushrooms… [Finally,] comets and eclipses were in fact seen in these years.

The most likely interpretation of the story of these portents is that some, if not all, of them occurred; that given that rumours of atrocious happenings in Panama and the Caribbean had reached Tenochtitlan, gloomy conclusions were being draw; that though they may have been temporarily forgotten, both the portents and the interpretations were recalled in 1519.

Read Full Post »

Graham Grenne at his Bitchy Best

An extract from The Lawless Roads by Graham Greene, an account of his travels in the Mexico of 1938. Thanks to Sir William Wilmot for giving me the book to accompany me on my travels.

El Retiro is the swagger cabaret of Socialist Mexico, all red and gold and little baloons filled with gas, and chicken a la king. A film star at one table and a famous singer, and a rich men everywhere. American couples moved sedately accross the tiny dance floor while the music wailed, the women with exquisite hair and gentle indifference, and the middle aged American businessmen like overgrown schoolboys a hundred years younger than their young women. Then the cabaret began – a Mexican dancer with great bold thighs, and the American women lost a little of their remote superiority. They were being beaten at their own game – somebody who wasn’t beautiful and remote was drawing the attention of their men. They got vivacious and talked a little shrilly and powdered their faces, and suddenly appeared very young and inexperienced and unconfident, as the great thighs moved. But their turn came when the famous tenor sang. The American men lit their pipes and talked all through the song and then calpped heartily to show that they didn’t care, and the women closed their compact and listened – avidly…

Then the Waikiki, on a lower level socially and morally. Armed policemen (later that night the place was raided for Perez, the drug trafficker).  Lovely sexual instruments wearing little gold crosses, lolled on the sofas; a man had passed out altogether beside a blue soda water bottle. Small intimate parties struggled obscurely with shoulder straps, and presently got up and made for the hotel a little way down the street. My friend thought I might be lonely and insisted on finding me an American girl – there was only one in the place, and she was called Sally. I said I didn’t want her, but she obviously had for him (he was a Mexican) the glamour of foreignness. He said, ‘She’s nice. She’s refined – and interesting. You’ll like to talk to her. You’re a writer. She’ll tell you all about her life.’

I said, ‘I don’t want to talk to her about her life.’ You could see it all around without asking questions – in the red velvet sofas and the blue soda-water bottles and the passed out Mexican. But my friend had got a girl and he wanted me to have an American – somebody I could talk to easily. He kept on asking everybody, ‘Where’s Sally?’ and presently they found her – so there she came, picking a refined way across the dance floor, pasty, genteel, and a little scared, and very badly dressed. She said, ‘Yes, sir,’ ‘No, sir,’ ‘Yes, sir’ to everything I said. The formality, the subservience, the terrible refinement were uncanny.

My Mexican friend said, ‘She’s pretty, eh?’ and I had to look at that infinitely plain pasty face with all the vacancy of drug-stores and cheap movies and say, ‘Yes, fine.’

Read Full Post »

Taste in Men Defined

You remember I said before that Ackley was a slob in his personal habits? Well, so was Stradlater, but in a different way. Stradlater was more of a secret slob. He always looked all right, Stradlater, but for instance, you should’ve seen the razor he shaved himself with. It was always rusty as hell and full of lather and hairs and crap. He never cleaner it or anything. He always looked good when he was finished fixing himself up, but he was a secret slob anyway, if you knew him the way I did. The reason he fixed himself up to look good was because he was madly in love with himself. He thought he was the handsomest guy in the Western Hemisphere. He was pretty handsome, too – I’ll admit it. But he was mostly the kind of handsome guy that if your parents saw his picture in your Year Book, they’d right away say, “Who’s this boy?” I mean he was mostly a Year Book kind of handsome guy. I knew a lot of guys at Pencey [a school] I thought were a lot handsomer than Stradlater, but they wouldn’t look handsome if you saw their pictures in the Year Book. They’d look like they had big noses or their ears stuck out. I’ve had that experience frequently.

An extract from The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger

Read Full Post »

Coketown – the first of two extracts from “Hard Times”

This is the description of Coketown from Hard Times by charles Dickens. It begins to expound one of the main themes of the book, namely the application and continual deference to free market principals in all aspects of existence such that anything non-tangible, not purchaseable,  such as emotional wellbeing, the creative inner mind, and a propensity to wonder at the marvels of the world, are excluded from what in the estimation of the industrialist, constitutes a good life.

It was a town of red brick, or a brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes would had allowed it; but as matters stood it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage.  It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling and trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam engine worked monotonously up and down like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness. It contained several large streets all very like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours , with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work , and to whom every day was the same as yesterday, and tomorrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next.

These attributes of Coketown were in the main inseparable from the attributes of the work by which it was sustained; against them were to be set off, comforts of life which found their way all over the world, and elegancies of life which made, we will not ask how much of the fine lady, who could scarcely bare to hear the place mentioned. The rest of its features were voluntary and they were these.

You saw nothing in Coketown but what was severely workful. If the members of a religious persuasion built a chapel there, as the members of eighteen religious persuasions had done – they made it a pious warehouse of red brick, with sometimes (but this is only in highly ornamental examples) a bell in a birdcage on the top of it. The solitary exception was the New Church      ; a stuccoed edifice with a square steeple over the door, terminating in four short pinnacles like florid wooden legs. All the public inscriptions in the town were painted alike, in severe characters of black and white. The jail might have been the infirmary, the infirmary might have been the jail, the town hall might have been either, or both, or anything else, for anything that appeared to contrary in the graces of their construction. Fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the material aspect of the town; fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the immaterial. The M’Choakumchild school was all fact, and the school of design was all fact, and the relations between master and man were all fact, and everything was fact between lying-in hospital and in the cemetery, and what you couldn’t state in figures , or show to be purchaseable in the cheapest market and saleable in the dearest, was not, and never should be, world without end, Amen.

Read Full Post »