The Orange Tree

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ALL this I saw. The fall of the great Aztec city in the moan of the conch shells, the clash of steel against flint, and the fire of Castilian cannon. I saw the burnt water of the lake where stood this Great Tenochtitlán, two times the size of Córdoba.

The temples fell, the standards, the trophies. The very gods themselves fell. And the day after the defeat, using the stones of the Indian temples, we began to build the Christian churches. Anyone curious — or who happens to be a mole — will find at the base of the columns of the Cathedral of Mexico the magic emblems of the God of Night, the smoking mirror of Tezcatlipoca. How long will the new mansions of our one God, built on the ruins of the not one but thousand gods last? Perhaps as long as the name of these: Rain, Water, Wind, Fire, Garbage …

To tell the truth, I don’t know. I just died of buboes. A horrible death, painful, incurable. A bouquet of plagues bestowed upon me by my own Indian brothers in exchange for the evils we Spaniards visited on them. I am shocked to see this city of Mexico populated by faces scarred by smallpox, as devastated as the causeways of the conquered city — all in the twinkling of an eye. The water of the lake heaves, boiling; the walls have contracted an incurable leprosy; the faces have forever lost their dark beauty, their perfect profile: for all time, Europe has marked the face of this New World, which, in fact, is older than the European face. Although to tell the truth, from this Olympian vantage point death has given me, I see everything that’s happened as the meeting of two old worlds, both millenarian — the stones we’ve found here are as old as those of Egypt, and the destiny of all empires was written for all time on the wall at Balthazar’s feast.

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