Malinche by Laura Esquivel Read Free Book Online Page A

repeated “Marina” again and again. It became clear to Malinalli that what was needed to pronounce the “r” was to place her tongue behind her teeth for only a moment, but her tongue, up against her palate as she was used to, could not move quickly enough and the results were disastrous. It was obvious that she would need a lot of practice, but she was not ready to give in.
    Ever since she was a girl, she had been able to use her tongue to replicate any sound. When she was one, she had loved to babble, to make noises and little bubbles of saliva with her mouth, to imitate any sound that she heard. She paid great attention to the songs of birds, to the barking of dogs. Surrounded by the silence of the night, she liked to discover distant noises and identify the animal that was emitting this or that sound so that she could later imitate it. Until the arrival of the Spaniards, her method of learning had been very effective, but the new language had brought to her life new and complicated challenges.
    Wanting to try another word so that she would not feel so frustrated, she decided to ask the friar about his god. She wanted to know everything about him: his name, his qualities, how she might approach him, to speak to him, to celebrate him, to worship him. She had loved listening to the sermon before the baptism—which Aguilar himself had translated for them—in which the Spaniards had asked that they no longer be fooled by false gods who demanded human sacrifice. They said that the true god, whom they brought with them, was good and loving and would never demand such a thing. In Malinalli’s eyes, that merciful god could be none other than the Lord Quetzalcóatl, who in new garments was returning to these lands to reinstate his kingdom in harmony with the cosmos. She wanted to welcome him, to speak to him.
    She asked the friar to teach her how to pronounce the name of their god. Aguilar kindly complied and Malinalli, overcome with emotion, realized that the word, not having any “r”s in it, did not present a problem at all. Malinalli clapped her hands like a young child. She was delighted, thrilled by the sense of belonging that she felt when able to pronounce the name that another social group had assigned to something. It filled her with joy, for nothing disturbed her more than the feeling of being excluded. Right away, Malinalli asked the friar the name of the god’s wife. Aguilar told her that he had no wife.
    â€œBut then, who is that lady with the child in her arms whom you place in the temple?”
    â€œShe is the mother of Christ, of Jesus Christ, who came to save us.”
    She was a mother! The mother of them all, and so she had to be the lady Tonantzin. It was no coincidence that when the friar had celebrated the mass before the baptism, Malinalli felt enraptured by a feeling that she could not understand. It was a sort of nostalgia for the maternal arms, a longing to feel enveloped, embraced, sustained, and protected by her mother, as at one time she must have been; by her grandmother, as she definitely had been; by Tonantzin, as she hoped she would be; and by a universal mother, like that white lady who held the child in her arms. A mother who wouldn’t give her away, who wouldn’t let her go, who wouldn’t let her fall to the ground but would raise her to the sky, offer her to the four winds, allow her to recover her purity. All these thoughts kept her company as the Spanish priest said Mass in a language that she did not understand, but could imagine.

    Like Malinalli, Cortés also thought about his mother, and the countless times she had led him by the hand to church to pray for the health of her sickly child. She was constantly preoccupied with helping overcome his shortness, his physical weakness, and his condition as only child. It was clear that in a society dedicated to the art of war and in which street fights were common, a boy with these