Malinche by Laura Esquivel Read Free Book Online

is malinalli, a fiber also known as sacred grass. The glyph for twelve alludes to death, which embraces her dead son and offers him rest. It represents either unity or a mother who snatches from death the bundle of a corpse wrapped in its shroud and bound with malinalli, the sacred grass. She takes him to return him to the unity of the One and give birth to him, renewed. Malinalli was also the symbol of the town, as well as of the bewitching city of Malinalco, founded by the terrestrial-lunar goddess Malínal-Xóchitl, or flower of malinalli .
    Curiously, it was the fiber malinalli that was used to make the poncho which Juan Diego was wearing in the year 1531, when the Virgin of Guadalupe appeared to him supported by the moon, on the twelfth day of the twelfth month, and twelve years after Hernán Cortés had arrived in Mexico.

    Malinalli was so proud of all these concepts contained in the meaning of her name that she tried to give form to them in the huipil that she had begun to embroider several moons earlier.
    It was during the time of silence that she had felt the need to make it, and until now she had believed that it was the proper thing to do. The huipil was the one that she chose to wear in the longed—for ceremony of baptism. Made with cotton thread that she herself had spun and woven in a loom, it had been appliquéd with seashells and precious feathers. The symbol for the moving wind was embroidered on the chest, surrounded by plumed serpents. It was in itself an encrypted message to be seen and appraised by the emissaries of Lord Quetzalcóatl. She was dressed like a faithful devotee, but no one seemed to notice. The only one who seemed to be dazzled by her attire was a horse that drank from a nearby river and that never took its eyes off her throughout the whole baptismal ceremony. Malinalli did not fail to notice and from then on a loving relationship developed between them.
    After the ceremony ended, Malinalli approached Friar Aguilar, to ask him about the meaning of Marina, the name they had just given her. The friar responded that Marina was she who came from the sea.
    â€œIs that all?” Malinalli asked.
    The friar responded with a simple, “Yes.”
    The disappointment must have been evident in her eyes. She was hoping that the name granted to her by the emissaries of Quetzalcóatl would have a deeper meaning since, as she assumed, it wasn’t being granted to her by simple mortals who were completely ignorant of the profound meaning of the universe, but by initiates. Her name had to mean something important. She persisted with the friar, but the only additional answer that she could get from him was that they had chosen the name because Malinalli and Marina shared a certain phonetic similarity.
    No. She refused to believe it. But because it was such a momentous day in Malinalli’s life, she did not let herself sink into disappointment, but instead decided on her own to take control of her new name. If her native name meant braided grass, and if the grass and all plants in general needed water, and her new name was related to the sea, it meant that she was assured of eternal life, for water was eternal and it would forever nourish who she was: the braided grass. Yes, that was exactly the meaning of her new name!
    She wanted to pronounce it right away but found it impossible. The “r” in Marina got stuck on the tip of her tongue and the most that she could accomplish, after a few attempts, was to utter “Malina,” which left her very frustrated.
    One of the things that most amazed her was that with the same oral apparatus, human beings were capable of emitting an infinite amount of different sounds. And she, who considered herself a great imitator, could not understand why she could not pronounce the “r.” She asked Aguilar to pronounce her new name, time and again, and she did not take her eyes once from the friar’s lips, who patiently