The New World of Martín Cortés
By Anna Lanyon
DE CAPO; 282 PAGES; $24.95
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In 1522, amid the ruins of the Aztec empire's capital, Tenochtitlan, a boy was born to an Amerindian woman named Malinche. This woman is often viewed as both the great betrayer of Mexico as well as one betrayed herself by the stewards of colonialism. The child's father was the infamous conquistador
, and this boy would come to be known as one of the first mestizos (mixed race) of Mexico. Martín Cortés would become a shadow figure living on the fringes of history and as such his story represents a biographical curio.
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Burdened by the heavy hand of its own antiquity, Mexico is also a shadow seeking the light of historical analysis, and Martín Cortés serves as the ideal symbolic mirror from which it can cast its reflection. But like so much of Mexican history (or at least our attempts to understand it), Cortés' life remains mostly hidden under a veil of resistance and obscurity.
The story of Martín Cortés, as Anna Lanyon tells it in "The New World of Martín Cortés," begins with a blessing and ends with a curse. The blessing comes from an Aztec midwife who whispers in his ear, "thy home is not here." This begins Martín's journey into what will ultimately become the curse of his exile. Martín is separated from his mother at a very early age. He will barely know her because when he is 6 he sails with his father to Spain. For the next 40 years, there is little documentary evidence that he even exists, but we do know that Spain will have its influence through Martín's admission into the Order of Santiago and his tutelage at the royal court. Martín also becomes a respected warrior in the service of both Carlos V and Felipe II.
His father seems to have demonstrated a reasonable affection for this son, and even went to the trouble of getting a decree of legitimacy from Rome, but a second Martín Cortés enters the scene. This "other" Martín is Hernán Cortés' third son, who will follow in his father's footsteps to become the second Marqués del Valle. The younger Martín often takes center stage in Lanyon's narrative, and this further clouds our understanding of Malinche's son. An additional problem arises because the presence of two Martíns often creates confusion about which one the author is discussing.
This second Martín is everything his half brother apparently is not: vain, garrulous and full of his own illusory power. He is put in a position of authority over his brothers when Hernán Cortés names him head of the family in his will. The older Martín eventually sues over the financial circumstances surrounding the estate, but he remains loyal to his half brother despite this and even under graver conditions. Both Martíns return to Mexico in 1562, and the second Marqués, unlike his reticent sibling, quickly alienates many of the elite and powerful in the capital.
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In 1566 these brothers were arrested for purportedly fomenting a rebellion against the Spanish crown. Whether a coup was really in the works, or whether it was simply idle rumination, will probably never be known. Nevertheless the supposed conspirators were tortured, and many confess and were condemned for crimes they may not have committed. The Marqués was able to sail for Spain to appeal directly to the royal court, while the older Martín languished in prison. Despite the agonies of his interrogation, Martín Cortés, like an assiduous Bartleby, refused to confess and would only say, "I have spoken the truth" and "I have no more to say."
The descriptions of Cortés' imprisonment and torture are graphic, and it is here that we learn the most about him -- his strength of character, his loyalty and his courage. Despite the fact that he was at best a peripheral player in what was likely a pseudo-rebellion, Cortés' punishment was exile back to Spain. There he continued his martial service, this time against Islamic Spaniards, only to die on the plains of Andalucia in 1569.
Lanyon's intriguing but ultimately unfulfilled task is to unmask the historical entity known as Martín Cortés and to use his story as a prism to capture the light of Mexican history. In some ways she succeeds, but in others history slips through her hands like sand. In pursuing her quarry, she indulges the use of travelogue as one method of inquiry. Her travels through Spain and Mexico are described vividly, and one gets the sensation of watching over the author's shoulder as she gumshoes her way through dusty archives and libraries. This makes for entertaining reading while sacrificing at its core the stringency that historical literature demands for the sake of legitimacy. Cortés is almost always kept in the shadows, and because there is so little that the author could pin down about him, we are left with too many situations where she relies on "must have" and "I imagine" to complete the picture.
Cortés is also regrettably overshadowed not only by his brother but also by his father and many secondary characters such as the great chronicler of the New Spain, Bartolome de las Casas. As the poet and critic Octavio Paz so succinctly put it in "The Labyrinth of Solitude," "The strange permanence of (Hernán) Cortés and La Malinche in the Mexican's imagination and sensibilities reveals that they are something more than historical figures: they are symbols of a secret conflict that we have still not resolved." Martín Cortés is the conjunction of these two, and despite Lanyon's well-intentioned efforts, he also remains part of a secret conflict unresolved.
