Seattle Aquarium,
Spring, 1995
En La Casa Museo
de Augustín Lara,
Veracruz
Casa de Cortez,
Antigua, Veracruz
ABOUT
GAIL E. TREMBLAY
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Casa de Cortez, Antigua, Veracruz
by Gail E. Tremblay
Light sifts through leaves of trees
that perch atop the walls of this ruin
and send adventitious roots scaling down
to finger dirt beneath red tiled floors
and round stones that pave the patio
of this old house, the first skeletal remains
of a colonial floor plan laid out
to make foreigners feel at home
in someone else's country. One wonders
at Cortez' luck, given as a gift Malinali.
At first, he tried to give her away
to one of his lieutenants, but realized,
it didn't matter whether or not
he found her prettyshe was his fate;
she had the tongue he would use
to reshape a continent, to make allies
he would later betray as he did her.
But at this point in the story,
it was her skill with languages
that amazed himin a mere month,
she could whisper in his ear words
he learned from his mother; she could
answer his million questions, name
the unnamable things he had never seen.
He was her passage out of slavery;
she, a Mexican noblewoman, angry
at being tossed away by her own people.
In this house, she became mistress,
gave orders, advised the conqueror.
It was here that she learned
about a god whose death would end
the need to sacrifice to the sun,
and in whose name millions
would be sacrificed to foreign greed.
One wonders what she understood
of her role in history as she learned
to eat his bread. As she was baptized
Doña Marina, did she ever guess
how much suffering she would help
initiate? The people re-christened her
Malinche, she whose spirit haunts
these shadows trapped by her ancient
desires to have things the world refused,
getting instead an endless notoriety
who by aiding the abuser became also abused.
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