LA MALINCHE: THE SLAVE WHO BECAME THE VOICE THAT TOPPLED AN EMPIRE

Chapter 1 of 6TWENTY WOMEN AND A NAME THAT DOES NOT YET EXIST

The Grijalva River runs thick and hot in March, laden with the silt of the jungle. On its bank, twenty women stand waiting. Two armies are finishing the division of a war already lost by the very men who hand them over. None of them has a name yet for the men who receive them. The Chontal lords of Potonchán had been defeated only days earlier at the battle of Centla, overcome by men with horses no one on that coast had ever seen. They buy peace with gold, with provisions, and with those twenty women. They are counted as part of the inventory, not as persons with lives of their own. Among them is a young woman from the region of Coatzacoalcos. The Spanish do not yet know that within her mouth lives the one key capable of opening an entire empire.

The tradition that the chronicler Bernal Díaz del Castillo would set down decades later tells of an earlier story. It says this young woman was not born a slave, but the daughter of a chieftain. On her father's death, according to that account, her own mother secretly handed her over to merchants from Xicalango, the great trading port of the Términos lagoon, to secure the inheritance of a male half-brother. It is a story no other independent source can confirm. The only certainty is the outcome. From Xicalango she passed into the hands of the Chontal Maya of Tabasco. And from there, after Centla, she came to that bank of the Grijalva, where she now awaits her turn among nineteen other women who likewise did not choose to be there.

The Spanish captain who receives them is named Hernán Cortés. That same month he orders that the twenty be baptized before being distributed among his men. Friar Bartolomé de Olmedo pronounces the rite with the water still warm from the heat of the afternoon. Upon the young woman from Coatzacoalcos he bestows the name Marina. There is something in her bearing, in the way she answers, something that remains visible even beneath the condition of a slave. For this the Spanish begin to address her with the title reserved for women of noble blood: doña Marina. It is an empty courtesy in that instant. No one yet imagines how much that title will weigh within a year.

For on that shore, as the soldiers share out the twenty women as any other spoils of war are shared, a question has gone unasked. No one has yet asked what languages each of them speaks, and that omission would decide the fate of two civilizations. Cortés has an interpreter, Jerónimo de Aguilar, a shipwrecked Spaniard who had spent eight years captive among the Maya. Aguilar commands Yucatec Maya. But the empire Cortés seeks to conquer, the empire Moctezuma rules from Tenochtitlan, does not speak Maya. It speaks Nahuatl. And of the twenty women handed over that afternoon in Potonchán, only one speaks it fluently, learned in childhood, in her native land, before she was sold the first time.

No one on that bank knows it yet. The chieftains who give her up to buy peace do not know it. The soldiers who receive her as part of the share do not know it. Not even Cortés himself knows it, for in that moment he looks at the gold and the provisions with more attention than at the twenty women lined up before him. They turned her into merchandise twice before turning her into a name. No one that afternoon told what had no way yet of being told. Within that woman, nameless to the newcomers, slept two languages that no man present on that shore was able to join to each other. At some point between that afternoon and the following winter, that distance between two languages would become the exact distance between survival and the fall of an entire empire.

The tide rises over the Grijalva and carries away the trail of blood from Centla. Doña Marina walks toward the Spanish camp still unaware that the worse of her two bondages is about to make her the most indispensable woman on the whole continent.