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  In Venezuela, according to Father Pedro Simon, there were Indians with ears so big they dragged along the ground.

  In the Amazon, according to Cristóbal de Acuña, there were natives who had their feet on backward, heels in front and toes in the rear.

  According to Pedro Martín de Anglería, who wrote the first history of America but never visited it, in the New World there were men and women with tails so long they could only sit on seats with holes.

  DRAGON OF EVIL

  In America, Europe encountered the iguana.

  This diabolical beast had been foreseen in depictions of dragons. The iguana has a dragon’s head, a dragon’s snout, a dragon’s crest and armor, and a dragon’s claws and tail.

  But if the dragon was like the iguana is, then Saint George’s lance missed the mark.

  It only acts strangely when in love. Then, it changes color and mood, grows nervous, loses its appetite and its way, and becomes skittish. When not tormented by love, the iguana makes friends with everyone, climbs trees in search of tasty leaves, swims in rivers just for fun, and naps in the sun on flat rocks, hugging other iguanas. It threatens no one, knows not how to defend itself, and is not even capable of giving a stomachache to humans who eat it.

  AMERICANS

  Official history has it that Vasco Núñez de Balboa was the first man to see, from a summit in Panama, two oceans at once. Were the natives blind?

  Who first gave names to corn and potatoes and tomatoes and chocolate and the mountains and rivers of America? Hernán Cortés? Francisco Pizarro? Were the natives mute?

  The Pilgrims on the Mayflower heard Him: God said America was the promised land. Were the natives deaf?

  Later on, the grandchildren of the Pilgrims seized the name and everything else. Now they are the Americans. And those of us who live in the other Americas, who are we?

  FACES AND MASKS

  On the eve of every assault on a village, the Requerimiento of Obedience explained to the Indians that God had come into the world and left Saint Peter in his place and that Saint Peter named the pope as his successor and the pope had bestowed all these lands on the queen of Castile and for that reason they must either leave or pay tribute in gold and in case of refusal or delay they would be attacked and they and their women and their children would be enslaved.

  This Requerimiento was read at night in the wild, in the language of Castile without interpretation, in the presence of a notary and not a single Indian.

  THE FIRST WATER WAR

  The great city of Tenochtitlán was of water born and of water built.

  Dikes, bridges, sewers, canals: along streets of water two hundred thousand canoes traveled back and forth between houses and squares, temples, palaces, markets, floating gardens, planted fields.

  The conquest of Mexico began as a water war, and the defeat of water decreed the defeat of everything else.

  In 1521, Hernán Cortés laid siege to Tenochtitlán, and the first thing he did was take an ax to the wooden aqueduct that carried drinking water from the Forest of Chapultepec. Following many massacres, when the city fell, Cortés ordered the temples and palaces demolished and the rubble thrown into the liquid streets.

  Spain did not like water, the devil’s toy, a Muslim heresy.

  Vanquished water gave birth to Mexico City, raised on the ruins of Tenochtitlán. Engineers picked up where the warriors left off and, over many years, they blocked up with stone and earth the entire circulatory system of the region’s lakes and rivers.

  Then water took revenge, flooding the colonial city repeatedly, which only confirmed that it was an ally of the pagan Indians and the enemy of all good Christians.

  Century after century, the dry world waged war on the wet world.

  Now Mexico City is dying of thirst. In search of water, it digs. The deeper it digs, the further it sinks. Where once there was air, now there is dust. Where once there were rivers, now there are avenues. Where once water flowed, now traffic streams by.

  ALLIES

  Hernán Cortés conquered Tenochtitlán with a force of six hundred Spaniards and innumerable Indians from Tlaxcala, Chalco, Mixquic, Chimalhuacan, Amecameca, Tlalmanalco, and other peoples humiliated by the Aztec Empire and tired of bathing the steps of the Templo Mayor in their blood.

  They thought the bearded warriors had come to liberate them.

  BALL GAME

  Hernán Cortés threw the ball to the ground. And Emperor Charles and his numerous courtiers witnessed an unprecedented marvel: the ball bounced and flew skyward.

  Europe knew nothing of that magic ball, but in Mexico and Central America rubber had been in use forever and the ball game had been around for three thousand years.

  In the game, a sacred ceremony, the thirteen heavens above battled the nine underworlds below, and the bouncing ball flew back and forth between darkness and light.

  Death was the prize. He who triumphed offered himself to the gods so that the sun in the sky would not go out, and rain would continue to water the earth.

  OTHER WEAPONS

  How did Francisco Pizarro, with sixty-eight soldiers, manage to defeat the eighty thousand men of Atahualpa’s army in Peru without a single casualty?

  The invaders, Cortés, Pizarro, astutely exploited divisions among the invaded, torn by hatred and war, and with empty promises they managed to multiply their forces against the centers of Aztec and Incan power.

  Besides, the conquistadors used weapons unknown in America.

  Gunpowder, steel, and horses were incomprehensible novelties. Clubs were useless against cannon and harquebuses, lances and swords, as was cloth armor against steel, or fighters on foot against those six-legged warriors of horseman and horse. No less unknown were smallpox, measles, influenza, typhus, bubonic plague, and other involuntary allies of the invading troops.

  And as if all that weren’t enough, the Indians knew nothing of the customs of civilized life.

  When Atahualpa, king of the Incas, approached to welcome his strange visitors, Pizarro took him prisoner and promised to free him in exchange for the largest ransom ever demanded. Pizarro got his ransom and chopped off his hostage’s head.

  ORIGIN OF BACTERIOLOGICAL WARFARE

  For America, Europe’s embrace was deadly. Nine out of every ten natives died.

  The smallest warriors were the most ferocious. Viruses and bacteria, like the conquistadors, came from other lands, other waters, other air. And the Indians had no defenses against that invisible army advancing with the troops.

  The numerous inhabitants of the Caribbean islands disappeared from this world, leaving not even the memory of their names. Plagues killed many more than the many killed by slavery and suicide.

  Smallpox killed the Aztec king Cuitláhuac and the Incan king Huayna Cápac, and in Mexico City its victims were so numerous that entire families were buried by bringing their homes down on top of them.

  The first governor of Massachusetts, John Winthrop, said smallpox had been sent by God to clear the way for His chosen people. Clearly, the Indians had settled at the wrong address. The colonists of North America lent a hand to His Holiest on more than one occasion by giving the Indians blankets infected with smallpox.

  “To extirpate this execrable race,” explained the commander, Lord Jeffrey Amherst, in 1763.

  OTHER MAPS, SAME STORY

  Nearly three centuries after Columbus disembarked in America, Captain James Cook navigated the mysterious seas of the southeast, planted the British flag in Australia and New Zealand, and opened the way for the conquest of the infinite islands of Oceania.

  Due to their white skin, the natives believed those seamen were the dead returned to the world of the living. And due to their acts, the natives learned that they had come to take revenge.

  And history repeated itself.

  As in America, the recent arrivals took over the fertile fields and the sources of water and pushed those who lived there into the desert.

  As in America, they subje
cted the natives to forced labor and outlawed their memory and their customs.

  As in America, Christian missionaries crushed or burned pagan effigies of stone or wood. A few escaped that fate and, minus their penises, were shipped to Europe to give testimony to the war against idolatry. The god Rao, who now sits on exhibition in the Louvre, arrived in Paris with a label that defined him thusly: “Idol of impurity, vice, and unabashed passion.”

  As in America, few natives survived. Those not killed by hunger or bullets were annihilated by unknown plagues against which they had no defense.

  BEDEVILED

  They will come to teach fear.

  They will come to castrate the sun.

  Mayan prophets in Yucatan had announced this time of humiliation.

  And it was in Yucatan in 1562 that Father Diego de Landa, in a lengthy ceremony, built a bonfire of books.

  And the exorcist wrote:

  “We found a great number of books written in these letters of theirs and, since they contained nothing but the Devil’s superstition and falsehoods, we burned them all.”

  The scent of sulfur could be detected from afar. The Mayans deserved the stake for being curious, for tracking the course of the days through time and the route of the stars across the thirteen heavens.

  Among many other devilish things, they invented the most precise of all the calendars that have ever existed, they knew better than anyone how to predict eclipses of the sun and moon, and they discovered the number zero long before the Arabs kindly brought that novelty to Europe.

  PALACE ART IN THE MAYAN KINGDOMS

  The Spanish Conquest occurred long after the fall of the Mayan kingdoms.

  Only ruins remained of their immense plazas and of the palaces and temples where kings, squatting before the high priests and warrior chiefs, decided the fate and misfortune of everyone else.

  In those sanctuaries of power, painters and sculptors dedicated themselves to exalting the gods and venerating the exploits of monarchs past and present.

  Palace art left no room for the many who worked and remained silent.

  Neither did the defeat of any kings figure in the codices or murals or bas-reliefs.

  A king of Copán, for example, known as 18 Rabbit, raised Cauac Sky as a son and gave him the throne of the neighboring kingdom of Quiriguá. In the year 737, Cauac Sky returned the favor: he invaded Copán, humiliated its warriors, captured his protector, and cut off his head.

  Art never found out. No bark book was written, no stone was chiseled to illustrate the sad end of the decapitated king, who in his days of splendor had been portrayed several times with his courtiers and his robes of feathers, jade, and jaguar skin.

  KILLING FORESTS, THEY DIED

  Ever more mouths and ever less food. Ever less forest and ever more desert. Too much rain or no rain at all.

  Held on by ropes, peasants scratched in vain at the steep flayed slopes. The corn found no water or earth on which to raise its stalk. The soil, without trees to retain it, stained the rivers red and was lost to the wind.

  After three thousand years of history, night fell on the Mayan kingdoms.

  But the days of the Mayans walked on in the lives of the peasants. Communities moved and survived, practically in secret, without pyramids of stone or pyramids of power: with no king but the sun rising every day.

  THE LOST ISLE

  Far from the Mayan kingdoms and centuries later, Easter Island was devoured by its children.

  The European navigators who arrived there in the eighteenth century found it empty of trees and of everything else.

  It was terrifying. Never had they seen a solitude so lonely. No birds in the sky, no grass on the ground, no animals but rats.

  Of the verdant past of long ago, no memory remained. The island was a stone inhabited by five hundred stone giants staring at the horizon, nowhere near anything or anyone.

  Perhaps those statues were asking the gods to rescue them. But not even the gods could hear their mute voices, as lost in the middle of the ocean as the earth in the infinite sky.

  KINGLESS KINGDOMS

  According to historians and practically everyone else, Mayan civilization disappeared centuries ago.

  Afterward, nothing.

  Nothing: community life, born in silence and in silence borne, awakened neither admiration nor curiosity.

  It did evoke astonishment, however, at least at the time of the Spanish Conquest. The new lords were worried: these kingless Indians had lost the habit of obeying.

  Father Tomás de la Torre recounted in 1545 that the Tzotziles from Zinacantán chose someone to run the war and “when he did not do it well, they got rid of him and chose another.” In war, and also in peace, communities elected their leaders, and they chose the best listeners.

  Colonial authorities used lash and noose aplenty to oblige the Maya to pay tribute and perform forced labor. In Chiapas in 1551, Magistrate Tomás López saw that they rejected servitude and he admonished:

  “These are people who work enough to get by and no more.”

  A century and a half later, in Totonicapán, Governor Fuentes y Guzmán had to admit that the new despotism had not made much headway. The Indians continued living “without any superior leader to obey, and among themselves it is all meetings, conversation, advice, and mystery, and for ourselves nothing.”

  DOOMED BY YOUR PAST

  Corn, sacred plant of the Maya, was given several names in Europe. The names recast geography: they called it Turkish grain, Arab grain, grain of Egypt, or grain of India. These errors did nothing to rescue corn from mistrust and scorn. When people learned where it came from, they fed it to the pigs. Corn had a higher yield than wheat and it grew faster, resisted drought, and produced good food. But it was not proper for Christian mouths.

  The potato was also a forbidden fruit in Europe. Like corn, its American origins condemned it. Worse, the potato was a root grown in the depths of the earth, where hell has its caves. Doctors knew it caused leprosy and syphilis. In Ireland, if a pregnant woman ate a potato at night, in the morning she would give birth to a monster. Until the end of the eighteenth century, the potato was fed only to prisoners, lunatics, and the dying.

  Later on, this cursed root rescued Europe from hunger. But not even then did people stop wondering: if not food of the devil, then why are potatoes and corn not mentioned in the Bible?

  DOOMED BY YOUR FUTURE

  Centuries before the advent of cocaine, coca was “the Devil’s leaf.”

  Since the Indians of the Andes chewed it in their pagan ceremonies, the Church included coca among the idolatries to be extirpated. But far from disappearing, coca plantations grew fiftyfold. The Spaniards realized the plant was indispensable to mask hunger and exhaustion among the multitudes digging silver out of the bowels of Cerro Rico in Potosí.

  In time, the colonial lords also embraced coca. As a tea, it cured indigestion and colds, relieved pain, renewed vigor, and eased altitude sickness.

  Nowadays, coca is still sacred to the indigenous peoples of the Andes and it remains good medicine for anyone. But airplanes destroy the fields to keep coca from becoming cocaine.

  Of course, cars kill many more people than cocaine and nobody talks about outlawing the wheel.

  ANANAS

  The ananas, or abacaxi, which the Spaniards called piña and the English pineapple, had better luck.

  Although it came from America, this exquisite delight was cultivated in the greenhouses of the kings of England and France, and was celebrated by every mouth that had the privilege of tasting it.

  And centuries later, when machines hacked off its headdress and stripped it nude and gouged out its eyes and heart and sliced and canned it at a hundred fruits a minute, in Brazil architect Oscar Niemeyer offered it the homage it deserved: the ananas became a cathedral.

  DON QUIJOTE

  Marco Polo dictated his book of marvels in the Genoa jail.

  Exactly three centuries later, Miguel de Cervantes s
ired Don Quijote de La Mancha in the Seville jail, where he had been imprisoned for unpaid debts. And it was another flight of freedom launched from behind bars.

  Stuffed into his tin-can armor, atop his skeletal mount, Don Quijote seemed fated for eternal ridicule. A madman who believed he was a character out of a chivalric novel and that chivalric novels were history books.

  But we readers who for centuries laughed at him also laughed with him. A broom is a horse for a playful child, and while we read we share in his harebrained misadventures and make them our own. So much our own that the antihero becomes a hero, and we even attribute to him things he never said. “They bark, Sancho, the signal for us to ride,” is the quotation most often cited by Spanish-speaking politicians. Only Don Quijote never said it.

  The sad-faced knight had spent over three and a half centuries stumbling along the roads of the world when Che Guevara wrote his last letter to his parents. To say goodbye the revolutionary did not choose a quote from Marx. He wrote: “Once again beneath my heels I feel Rocinante’s ribs. I take to the road again with my shield held high.”