Cortes' Skull

He had been dead for two hundred and seventy-six years when I stole his head.

I want to be careful about how I explain this, because it is not the kind of action that benefits from being misread. I did not do it out of rage. I do not act out of rage; I burned that fuel out in 1521 and there was not much of it to begin with. What I felt when I tracked the bones through the chaos of the Alaman removal - the historian moving them by night to keep them from the mob, the mob who wanted to scatter the Conqueror’s remains in the street - was closer to recognition. Here was the man whose decisions had organized my exile. The bones had weight.

The tonalli concentrates in the head. My grandmother taught me this before I could read. It is the animating fire of the self, the soul-portion that lives in the skull - not the only portion, but the central one. When a person dies in the tradition I was raised in, the way the body is handled determines whether the tonalli can rest. The Catholics - his people, the people his soldiers were - also believe something about the body: that it should be intact, that the soul returns to it, that the place of burial is sacred and deserves care.

He has been in my care for two hundred years. I want to be precise about what that means.

The sentence is this: his skull rests behind glass in my home. Not displayed as a trophy - displayed as an incarceration. The tonalli cannot complete its journey without the whole of the body to return to. I have the piece that holds the most. His remains in the official crypt have been replaced with the skull of a man I found in an alley in Mexico City in 1823 who would have thought the trade extremely funny had he been alive to understand it. The thief and the conqueror: two skulls in two different states of custody.

Hernan Cortes was a man. I have been alive long enough to understand this without it weakening the sentence. He was a man who made decisions. Not all of them inevitable; not all of them forced by circumstance; not all of them the only path available to someone in his position. He made the decision to burn the libraries. He was a man who could have chosen differently and did not. That ability to choose, and the refusal of it, makes him actually more accountable for the burning than a monster would be, because a monster has no choice and a man does.

He had a wife he left behind in Cuba. He had a son he cared for - the mestizo son, not the legitimate heir, which tells you something about him that is true alongside all the other things that are true. He wrote detailed letters about the land and the people in them with something that functions as wonder, even now, reading the dead-memory of what he saw. He could see the beauty of what he was destroying. That is not exculpatory. It might be what makes it worse.

I have had two hundred years with his tonalli in my custody. He has not spoken to me. I have not spoken to him. This is not an oversight; the silence is the sentence. I hold what remains of his animating fire, and I do not engage with it, and he does not rest, and I carry the skull north when I move north, and it rides in its glass in my home in the desert.

My dead do not explain why I do this. They understand it without explanation. The jailer and the jailed: it is not pleasure. It is the only form of justice available to me in a world where what he did cannot be undone and I cannot die to stop carrying it.

The skull of him and the silence of him, alma. The fire and the holding of it.