The Conquistador's Mouthpiece
The author of "Like Water for Chocolate" returns with a novel about the ancient Mexicans.
MALINCHE
A Novel
  Laura Esquivel (Lynne Sladky/ap) |
By Laura Esquivel
Translated from the Spanish by Ernesto Mestre-Reed
Atria. 191 pp. $22.95
It ought to be difficult, if not impossible, to make the Spanish conquest of Mexico lyrical, but Laura Esquivel comes close in her fifth novel, Malinche . This is not a good thing either for history or for literature.
Most readers will remember Esquivel for her first novel, Like Water for Chocolate , the story of how a woman transforms heartbreak into culinary astonishments. That book used recipes and magical realism to explore life in early 20th-century Mexico. In Esquivel's new book, the eponymous heroine encounters her share of heartbreaks, but there's little magical or realist about the process.
Mexican national memory hasn't been kind to La Malinche, the Mexica woman who came into the possession of Hernán Cortés as a slave, learned Spanish and as "The Tongue" -- Cortés's translator -- helped talk Montezuma out of an empire, with ghastly, near-genocidal results. She mediated between the Spaniards and the Mexica (Aztec) people whom Montezuma governed. She also bore Cortés a son, Martin -- the first true mestizo Mexican, or at least the most famous one -- before the conquistador married her off to a much nicer man named Juan Jaramillo, with whom, according to Esquivel's account, she had a daughter.
As far as I can tell -- one of the many shortcomings of Esquivel's book is that it leaves the reader grasping for concrete details -- Malinche was one of the names by which Cortés was sometimes known. It means something like captain, so the captain's translating mistress became La Malinche. Esquivel gives her the birth name of Malinalli, which refers to a sacred grass and also seems to have associations with death.
Esquivel deserves credit for attempting the difficult task of imagining herself into the skin and heart of a woman whom history has found it easy to scorn. Some revisionists have argued that La Malinche saved her people from total destruction because she gave Cortes the chance to negotiate (sometimes) with words instead of swords -- not that he was afraid to use those.
It's unclear whether Esquivel shares this particular revisionist point of view, but then many things in this novel are unclear. We get a few scenes of pillage and massacre, fever dreams that interrupt the story that Esquivel really cares about: one woman's spiritual journey -- to use a cliché that fits too well here.
On the positive side, the novelist treats her heroine with refreshing sympathy. How can you not feel for a 5-year-old girl whose mother, eager to remarry after the death of her first husband, gives her away to slave-traders? All the young Malinalli has to hold on to are memories of her grandmother, a loving woman rich in the spirituality of Mexica culture. The flashback scenes of Malinalli's time with her grandmother contain some lovely moments of Mexica lore: how to learn the ways of water, fire and stars in order to come closer to god in his many forms; how to use codices -- stories in pictures -- to train the mind and harness memory. But by the time Malinalli travels with Cortés to Tenochtitlan, Montezuma's great capital, her grandmother's gentle, indigenous lyricism has given way to self-aggrandizing, almost New Age escapism.
Take, for instance, the scene in which Malinalli makes a nighttime visit to the sacred plaza at the center of Tenochtitlan, not long after Cortés has taken control of the place. She stands in front of the Stone of the Sun and, instead of fretting about the end of civilization as she knows it, enjoys a moment of insight: "The Sun, the Moon, she herself, and the Stone of the Sun created all that was unique and indivisible and at that moment she understood that the Stone was an image of the invisible, that it was a circle that represented not only the Sun and the Winds, the forces of creation, but the invisible at its center." Too bad about the slaughters perpetrated by Cortés and his men. Such bloody episodes exist in this book mostly to trouble Malinalli's dreams.
Just as problematic is Malinalli's relationship with Cortés. It's rape as destiny. The conquistador strikes her as a short, hairy megalomaniac, but we're also told that she feels some dubious bond with him. In the plaza in Tenochtitlan, for instance, she ponders their experiences together: "It was a confusing time, in which her time and Cortés's time were ineluctably interconnected, laced, tied together. . . . It was an enforced union that she had not decided on but that seemed to mark her always."
The Spanish encounter with Mexico was many things, but "confusing"? I'm tempted to blame the translator for some of the novel's more unfortunate moments, such as Malinalli's realization that "she was tired, extremely tired of Cortés and all his strategies." But the problem surely goes deeper than diction in whatever language. For instance, in an early scene when the hirsute Spaniard "takes" Malinalli for the first time -- on a riverbank, no less -- Esquivel tells us that the pair "looked into each other's eyes and found their destiny and their inevitable union." Are those literary terms for rape?
In its treatment of plot (sketchy) and character (sketchier) and its emphasis on wifty spirituality, Malinche feels half thought out, its heroine an excuse for the author to indulge her meditations on pre-Columbian (or pre-Cortésian) folkways. Esquivel hints that Malinalli is a kind of Virgin of Guadalupe, a figure in whom the blood of warring races mingles together, the mother of the Mexico that will be born out of the clash of cultures. That's a fascinating idea, but in this book it's only an idea. The more Malinalli retreats from history into spirituality, the more she melds into the universe and the vaguer she becomes as a character -- until she's lost entirely in the mists of myth. From conquistador's mouthpiece to author's is not a fate anyone should suffer. ·
Jennifer Howard, a former contributing editor of Book World, is a staff writer at the Chronicle of Higher Education.
