From «Converso» to Conquistador: Colonial Desire and Jewish Self-Hatred in Homero Aridjis's «1492» and «Memorias del Nuevo Mundo»
Kimberle S. López
In both Old and New Worlds, Homero Aridjis's fictional protagonist Juan Cabezón, who accompanies Christopher Columbus on his first transatlantic voyage and Hernán Cortés in his conquest of Tenochtitlán, experiences ambivalence toward the Other that ultimately proves to stem from ambivalence toward the self. As a converso, Juan Cabezón's own identity is already divided between a Jewish past and a Christian present. Living in tumultuous times as a New Christian of late fifteenth-century Spain in the years of the most virulent persecution of conversos by the Inquisition and on the verge of the expulsion of the Jews, Aridjis's protagonist alternately accepts and rejects identification with his Hebraic heritage. This ambivalent identification carries over from Aridjis's 1492: Vida y tiempos de Juan Cabezón de Castilla to its companion novel, Memorias del Nuevo Mundo. In this sequel, Juan Cabezón, stranded after the rest of the party left behind on Columbus's first voyage has been massacred, becomes a curandero among the Caribs much as the historical Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca had been among North American tribes. His identification with the indigenous islanders lasts only as long as he is living in their midst, however, as he goes on to participate halfheartedly in the conquest of New Spain. Thus Juan Cabezón's lukewarm identification with his own converso roots in Europe is transported to the Americas where his tentative identification with the Amerindians conflicts with his reluctant but de facto identity as conquistador. In Homero Aridjis's two novels tracing the adventures of Juan Cabezón, the protagonist's ambivalent identity is evident in his Jewish self-hatred in the Old World and his colonial desire toward the indigenous Other in the New World.
My theory of the ambivalence of identification draws on Freudian and Lacanian ideas that adults fear returning to a pre-cultural infant stage if they lose their ego boundaries through excessive identification with the Other. The Hegelian notion that the self is defined in contrast to an Other, in turn, has been central to twentieth-century thought. In the first half of the century, Jean-Paul Sartre discusses how mainstream Western culture ambivalently defines itself in contrast to Others such as the Jew. In the second half of the century, Michel Foucault traces how medical and legal discourses construct a Western identity in opposition to those whom it labels criminal, insane, or sexually deviant. This notion is applied to the colonial context by Edward Said who, with the 1978 publication of Orientalism, introduces the discussion of how Western discourse has constructed its hegemonic cultural identity by constructing myths of the Other, a fundamental concept for understanding the cultural processes of the colonial mentality.
This notion of ambivalent identification as it applies to the colonial situation is informed by Robert Young's Colonial Desire, in which he develops the concept, originating in Frantz Fanon and elaborated by Homi Bhabha, of the colonial situation as an inherently ambiguous one involving simultaneous impulses of attraction and repulsion of the colonizing self toward the colonized Other. Fanon introduced the idea, later developed by Homi Bhabha, that the colonial situation is inherently ambiguous. Drawing on Sartre and Fanon, Foucault and Said, then adding a heavy dose of Freud, Bhabha discusses the colonial situation in terms of not only otherness but also the «other within», making it a question of «[...] not Self and Other but the otherness of the Self inscribed in the perverse palimpsest of colonial identity»
(44).
Both Homi Bhabha and Sander Gilman examine how Western culture creates stereotypes of the Other as a protection against the loss of ego boundaries in the face of anxiety over the «other within». As Gilman has noted in Inscribing the Other, in the process of individuation and separation, we internalize stereotypes of the Other which «[...] serve as our buffer against those hidden fears which lie deep within us»
(11). What Gilman terms «Jewish self-hatred» is a means of protecting one's social identity at the expense of one's ethnic identity by rejecting bonds with groups deemed social outsiders. A prime example are conversos in early modern Spain who distanced themselves from the Jewish community in order to avoid suspicions of crypto-Judaism, but who overcompensated by becoming anti-Semites themselves. Thus both Jewish self- hatred and colonial desire can be seen as defense mechanisms to protect the self socially and psychologically from over-identification with the Other, and both phenomena are evident in the ambivalent self-recognition of Aridjis's fictional character Juan Cabezón.
Homero Aridjis's first full-length novel, 1492: Vida y tiempos de Juan Cabezón de Castilla (1985), begins in the style of a picaresque novel1. Structuralist scholar Claudio Guillén defines this genre as possessing the following characteristics: the novel's protagonist is a social half-outsider, a rogue and an antihero; the narration is usually a first-person, pseudo-autobiography; the narrator's point of view is partial; the perspective of the pícaro is reflective, philosophical and critical on religious or moral grounds; material existence is stressed, with special attention to hunger as motivation; the pícaro is often a servant of many masters or a wanderer who observes a number of collective social situations and employs irony and satire to criticize them; the pícaro moves horizontally through space and vertically through society; and, finally, the novel's structure is episodic2. The picaresque, then, is characterized by its concentration on a marginal character and his3 conflicts with the social hierarchy; geographical and social mobility, which brings the pícaro into contact with a heterogeneous social world; a two-level narration, usually achieved through the first-person retrospective form which divides the pícaro into narrator and character; the unreliability of the narrator, who as pícaro cannot faithfully relate his own life story; and the presence of irony, which is directed at different social types and, significantly, at the antihero himself.
As in the prototypical picaresque novel, 1492 has an episodic structure, in that the protagonist meanders from town to town within Spain avoiding the Inquisition and loitering with a coterie of marginal characters. As in Guillén's definition, the character of Juan Cabezón is the primary narrative element that links the various episodes of the two novels, which take him from Inquisitorial Spain to Columbus's voyage to the Indies, through Cortés's conquest of Tenochtitlán and into early colonial Mexico City. In 1492 Juan Cabezón's adventures are related from a first-person perspective; and although the sequel, Memorias del Nuevo Mundo (1988) is recounted in the third person, the final chapter reverts to Juan Cabezón's narrative voice4. Juan Cabezón is a half- outsider who is marginalized as converso and orphan, and he is something of an antihero and unreliable narrator by virtue of his inability to commit to an identification with his own Judaic background. Although he does not serve a series of masters, his first encounter after being orphaned is, like Lazarillo de Tormes's first master, a blind man, with whom he shares many adventures. Like the typical picaresque narrator, Juan Cabezón experiences geographical displacement that brings him into contact with a variety of characters from different spheres, and he uses irony to criticize the social hierarchy with which he is in perpetual conflict, in particular with the authorities of the Spanish Inquisition.
The picaresque genre lends itself particularly to the narration of moments of sociohistorical crisis and transition, as evidenced by the genre's initial emergence in the early modern age5. In an article on a twentieth-century picaresque novel dealing with the Mexican Revolution and its aftermath6, Ulrich Wicks offers a definition of the genre that is relevant to Aridjis's novels set in the tumultuous period of inquisition, expulsion, and conquest: «The essential picaresque fictional situation -the picaresque mode- is that of an unheroic protagonist caught up in a chaotic world in which he is on an eternal journey of encounters that allow him to be in alternation both victim of that world and its exploiter»
(«Onlyman» 22). This definition seems tailor-made to 1492: Vida y tiempos de Juan Cabezón de Castilla, in spite of the fact that Wick's article was written a decade before the novel was published: Juan Cabezón is an «unheroic protagonist» on an «eternal journey of encounters» in which he is alternately victim and exploiter. This aspect of Juan Cabezón's character is of particular importance to the present analysis of the converso cum conquistador's Jewish self-hatred and colonial desire.
Claudio Guillén's definition also points to the ambivalence of the picaresque character, whom he describes as an orphan and a half-outsider: «[The pícaro] can, in short, neither join nor actually reject his fellow men. He becomes what I would like to call a 'half-outsider'. Hence the ambivalence of the final narrative situation [...]»
(80, emphasis in the original). Because the pícaro lives on the margins of society, he has the unique perspective of the half-outsider; and since there is no single reliable voice represented in the text, the resulting ideological standpoint is necessarily ambiguous. Guillén also refers to the picaresque narrator's «double perspective of self-concealment and self-revelation»
(82). As Victoria Campos notes, the narration of 1492 sometimes gets so invested in recounting historical events that the protagonist's personal story is downplayed, to the extent that we know very little about the protagonist's inner life. When we do get a glimpse of his thoughts, however, we see the extreme ambivalence he feels toward his own converso background, and later, toward the American natives.
While the first unnumbered chapter of 1492 relates the protagonist's pre-history by narrating the birth and death of his Jewish and converso grandparents, the second begins like a picaresque novel: «Yo, Juan Cabezón, nací en Madrid [...] en la calle del Viento, un jueves cuando mi madre, preñada de ocho meses, camino del mercado, tropezó y dio a luz un varón»
(27). This kind of freak incident associated with the protagonist's birth parallels the beginning of the first picaresque novel, the anonymous mid sixteenth-century Lazarillo de Tormes: while Lazarillo is literally born in the River Tormes, Juan is born in the middle of the street, la Calle del Viento, whose name evokes the wind and wanderlust which will carry the protagonist away from Madrid at an early age.
As in the prototypical picaresque novel, material reality, and in particular hunger, is a great concern for the protagonist of Aridjis's 1492. Immediately after narrating his birth, Juan Cabezón recounts the hunger of his early years: «De aquella infancia sólo guardo el recuerdo de mis hambres; que el día de carne y el día de pescado para mí fueron día de aire y día de secado; que en mis noches, mi panza vacía pobló mis sueños de figuras endebles y personajes flacos devorando criaturas desabridas y animalias amargas»
(27). His parents feed him only proverbs such as «Vaca y carnero, olla de caballero» and «A mucha hambre no hay pan malo»
(27). Later, he laments in true picaresque fashion that «yo tengo que ir por el mundo hambriento y desdichado»
(90). While he is still a young lad, his father, a barber, is drawn and quartered for accidentally or perhaps intentionally slitting the throat of a customer while shaving him7. Although his mother pampers him with food after his father's death, Juan Cabezón roams the streets in tattered clothes and is regarded as an orphan.
A few months after his father's execution, Juan's mother begins keeping company with a miller, and the young boy is sent to spend every night out of doors so as not to disturb their lovemaking. After the miller is killed by highway robbers, his mother begins to live with a baker, who later stabs her to death for having an affair with a Flemish merchant whose son she has borne8. Now truly an orphan, the young Juan is left to shift for himself, and like the prototypical pícaro, he takes to the street. On the road, he is befriended by a blind man, Pero Meñique, who takes the hapless lad under his wing, and teaches him to live by his wits in exchange for his services as lazarillo guiding the blind man around Madrid. Unlike Lazarillo de Tormes's first master, who starves and sabotages his young charge, Pero Meñique acts as Juan's protector; and in return, unlike Lazarillo, who purposely leads his blind master onto the worst roads, the narrator of 1492 tries to steer Pero Meñique away from stumbling blocks. Together with the blind man and alone, Juan Cabezón travels the roads of Madrid and of greater Spain in the final decades of the fifteenth century in the type of geographical displacement experienced by the typical pícaro. Pero Meñique, descended from conversos like the narrator, introduces the protagonist to an assortment of other marginal types, many of whom have an ambivalent relationship with Judaism: Pero Meñique himself goes from being a supporter of virulent antisemite Friar Vicente Ferrer to plotting to assassinate the Grand Inquisitor Tomás de Torquemada; two other acquaintances become familiars of the Inquisition, yet these same characters will aid the converso Juan Cabezón to flee the Iberian peninsula without being accused of heresy. Thus the ambivalent identification with the Jewish population of Spain permeates not only the picaresque character of Juan Cabezón, but that of the band of rogues with whom he associates as well. As pícaro and converso, the narrator can identify to a certain extent with the oppressed minority of Spanish Jews and New Christians, however, as half-outsider he vacillates between identifying with the conversos and sympathizing with the established order that persecutes them; this same equivocal dynamic will be repeated in the New World when Juan Cabezón serves first as curandero and later as conquistador.
The novel 1492 begins with the coincidence of Juan Cabezón's grandfather's birth in Seville at the same moment that Archdeacon Ferrán Martínez incited a mob to burn and loot that city's Jewish quarter, the first in a chain of events that would affect Jewish presence in the Iberian peninsula, leading from the 1391 pogroms through the early fifteenth-century antisemitic campaigns of Friar Vicente Ferrer, the establishment and implementation of the Spanish Inquisition in the second half of the century, and the 1492 expulsion of the Jews from Spain. Juan Cabezón narrates: «Mientras mi bisabuela Sancha gritaba sobrecogida por las ansias del parto, Ferrán Martínez y sus seguidores degollaban mujeres y niños, reducían a escombros las sinagogas y dejaban yertos a cuatro mil inocentes»
(11). His great grandmother's house adjoins a Jewish home through whose walls the ravaging can be heard; while she is in labor, she identifies with the Jews on a corporeal level: «[...] creyendo que la furia que deshacía la aljama se le había metido dentro»
(11). She shrieks as if her belly had been pierced by the archdeacon's sword, or as if one of his dead victim's souls had entered the newborn's body. This intense physical and emotional connection with the Jewish people, however, is not consistently shared by her great grandson, Juan Cabezón. Although by narrating these events, he demonstrates his awareness of the historic plight of the Jewish people, Juan's own identification with his Hebraic heritage is tenuous throughout the novel.
When he meets up with the blind man, one of Pero Meñique's first questions is «¿Cristiano, judío o converso?», to which the narrator responds «Descendiente de judíos conversos»
(49). The blind man's own background points to the picaresque; for example, he speaks of growing up on the streets and fending for himself from an early age. His religious antecedents are not entirely clear at the beginning, as he speaks of a Catholic fervor that led him to follow in the footsteps of the fanatic Friar Vicente Ferrer. It is a faith that Pero Meñique abandons for love, however, as he enamors a cleric's concubine who wears the red badge of a Jewess»9. Love will later lead Juan Cabezón also to alter his religious convictions, guiding him back toward his Judaic origins.
Of the blind man's family background, at this stage we only learn that his mother died in a leper colony after years of devotion to Christian charity. Whether or not the religious fervor he and his mother demonstrate is overcompensation for New Christian antecedents of their own is not clarified at this point in the narration; it is apparent, however, that Pero Meñique identifies with Spain's pariahs, as he introduces Juan Cabezón to a diverse cast of marginal characters. These include the ragged King Bamba; the Tuerto; the Moor; and two women, the gluttonous Babilonia and the prostitute Trotera. This band is soon joined by the hunchbacked dwarf Rodrigo Rodríguez, and later by Babilonia's brother, the corpulent friar Agustín Delfín.
These latter two have complicated relationships with the Inquisition but will end up aiding their companion Juan Cabezón when he becomes a fugitive. In his definition of the genre, Claudio Guillén explains that the picaresque novel generally includes a «rogues' gallery» which serves as a fertile ground for social satire. Guillén also mentions the marginal group's tendency toward solidarity: «How could a rogue fail to show some understanding toward other rogues?»
(83). When the dwarf Rodrigo Rodríguez of Toledo is introduced to this merry band, his sympathies would appear to lie with the New Christians, since he boasts that his father fought alongside Don Álvaro de Luna, who was executed for treason after having been accused of supporting and defending conversos in the 1449 Toledo Rebellion10. When Agustín Delfín is introduced a little later, it is within the context of the emerging Inquisition.
Early on, Juan Cabezón comes to identify with the Jewish population of Spain, responding to his own converso background and to a general sense of humanity. He realizes that the Jews are not that different from other Spaniards; regarding an old physician wearing a scarlet badge, he says: «Su tipo castellano era tan característico como el de otros moradores del reino de Castilla, y no se habría distinguido de aquéllos si no fuese por las señales»
(91). Juan identifies with the Jew on a corporeal level to the extent that he imagines, «Al pasar cerca de mí, creí oír su voz en mi propio cuerpo decir con el timbre suave, arcaico del poeta de Tudela, "Todos mis huesos proclaman: Adonay. ¿Quién se iguala a Ti?"»
(91). This psycho-physical connection with a Jewish stranger is reminiscent of Juan Cabezón's great grandmother's sense that as she suffered the pangs of labor, she felt the torment of the pogrom victims in her own body. But in spite of his ancestral connection with the Jews, this picaresque antihero is unable to sustain a continuous identification with a people who are currently being persecuted by mainstream Christian society. For Juan Cabezón, the Spanish Inquisition is a strong incentive to buckle under the pressure of Jewish self-hatred.
As Juan Cabezón and Pero Meñique continue to perambulate around Madrid, they arrive in the town square just in time to hear a crier proclaim that henceforth all Jews must wear badges and that Jews and Moors will be confined to living in designated quarters of the city, those surrounding the synagogue and the mosque, respectively. It is the blind man Pero Meñique, rather than the converso Juan Cabezón, who interprets this as a foreboding sign for the future of the Jews. It is January 1581, and the narrator still has a decade of adventures in Spain ahead of him. It is at this point in the narration that Agustín Delfín is introduced to the novel's gallery of rogues who assemble in the square. He is a gluttonous friar, brother of Babilonia, who upon presenting him to her friends informs them that he has urgent business in Seville, regarding the Inquisition that the Church was in the process of establishing to combat Judaizing among the New Christians11.
The ensuing discussion reveals how the marginal characters alternately reject and identify with the Jews. The conversation begins when Juan Cabezón remarks that the Sephardim have been in the Iberian peninsula since Biblical times, to which Agustín Delfín replies that the Jews have raped nuns, profaned the sacraments, performed witchcraft with the host, scourged images of Christ on the crucifix12 and otherwise mocked the Holy Mother Church. The Tuerto responds that Jews think themselves better than other people because of their long lineage, while Babilonia adds that conversos have acquired high offices and have mixed with Old Christians to the extent that they have been mistaken for good Christians. This latter remark demonstrates a fear of the Other within Spanish society, the anxiety that the Other is not distinct enough to be distinguished from the self, in this case, from Old Christian Castilians.
It is this perceived need to identify mainstream culture in opposition to Jews that leads to antisemitic attitudes in both Old Christian and New Christian characters. The voracious friar, Agustín Delfín, hypocritically accuses Jews of gluttony and also of having dietary habits that deviate from standard Spanish fare, since they eat garlic and onions fried in oil but will not touch blood or bacon, and they eat meat on Christian days of fasting. The friar's comment on their gluttony would especially point to the idea of self-hatred, since he projects his own distinguishing vice upon the Other. His sister Babilonia then repeats the common slander that Jews emit an offensive odor13. Rodrigo Rodríguez adds that even the baptized converts remain Jews and retain their customs, after which Agustín Delfín reiterates his sister's concern that New Christians have come to occupy high positions in Church and State, and Rodrigo Rodríguez follows by recounting an apocryphal anecdote about some Jews who kill a whale thinking it is the Leviathan.
Interspersed with long digressions on the history of the Jewish people in the Iberian peninsula14, the conversation of the band of rogues turns tide, as some members who had been silent before now pipe up. It is one of the women, the Trotera, who begins the «rebuttal» by proclaiming «Yo, como trotera, no puedo condenar a nadie en este mundo [...]»
(108), thus pointing to her own marginal status as a means of identifying with Jews and conversos. She goes on to relate to her peers how when she was a child starving in the streets, an old Jewish man gave her bread to eat: «[...] y no me fijé si su mano era hebrea o de cristiano viejo, que la bondad y la maldad no tienen linaje sino obras»
(108). The rebuttal is continued by King Bamba, who begins by insulting the gluttonous friar and his unwashed sister and asking them the pointed question, «¿os sentís con más derecho a la vida que ellos por ser hebreos?»
(108), to which the friar responds sanctimoniously that it is better for Judaizers to burn on earth than receive their eternal punishment in the fires of hell. Being themselves half-outsiders, the members of the rogues' gallery alternately experience a sense of solidarity with the Jews and conversos, or identify with the Christian hierarchy that condemns crypto-Jews as heretics15.
This identification with the status quo conforms to what Elaine Marks, in Marrano as Metaphor, following Hannah Arendt, says of assimilation: that it is impossible to assimilate to an antisemitic culture without absorbing to some degree that culture's antisemitism (148). As Sander Gilman observes in Jewish Self-Hatred, the desire of a marginal group to belong to the dominant culture leads them to believe in what he calls the «liberal fantasy» that anyone who obeys society's rules is welcome to share in the power of the ruling class; this is a fallacy, however, since the reference group defines itself in contrast to its Others. Disenfranchised groups hear the message that if they abandon their difference they can join the mainstream, but they soon discover that in the mainstream, their otherness is seen as an impediment to social advancement and as an essential characteristic that cannot be cast off at will (2). Gilman further notes that when subalterns identify with the hegemonic class, they experience anxiety over the fear of losing the power they imagine they have attained, and thus they resent their own group of origin (14). Thus New Christians in early Modern Spain find themselves in a double bind in that if they identify with the Jews, they are ostracized from the dominant culture, and if they identify with the established order, they are imbricated in the dynamic of self-hatred. The presence of the Jews is a constant reminder to the conversos of their own past as persecuted outcasts and their ambiguous present as half-outsiders. The greatest example of a self-hating converso would be the Grand Inquisitor Tomás de Torquemada himself, who is reputed by Fernando del Pulgar, official chronicler of Queen Isabel and a self-hating converso in his own right, to have Jewish blood coursing through his veins16.
Pero Meñique, who remained apart from this exchange until the end, himself demonstrates ambivalence toward the conversos. When he first meets Juan Cabezón he tells him that he had been an ardent adherent of the fanatical friar Vicente Ferrer, whose inflammatory speeches incited antisemitic fervor among his followers. Later he cites Ramón Llull, the Catalonian theologian who two centuries earlier had been given royal permission to preach to the Jews to convert them. But it was also Pero Meñique who commented that the proclamation regarding the wearing of badges and dwelling exclusively in Jewish quarters bodes ill for the future of the Jews. In the rogues' debate, after all the others have spoken their piece, the blind man summarizes his own thoughts:
| (108) | ||
As we shall see, Pero Meñique's sentiments will be even clearer later, when he masterminds a plot to assassinate the Grand Inquisitor Tomás de Torquemada. At this stage in the narration, it is not even clear to the reader whether Meñique's own background includes Judaic roots, or if he is of pure Old Christian stock.
The following chapter begins with a long digression on the history of the Inquisition in the third person without so much as a pretense of a framing story narrated in the first person; as 1492 continues, there will be many such historical treatises, such that Juan Cabezón's narrative voice is all but lost in the shuffle. In this lengthy third-person narration, dispersed throughout the text, the emphasis is on the Catholic Monarchs' financial reasons for persecuting the Jews, and it is often repeated that one expected result of the Inquisition and expulsion is that the royal coffers will swell with confiscated property; here it is noted that Seville's wealthiest converso citizens burn in the first auto-da-fe. This particular digression is interrupted as the novel's story continues with Pero Meñique asking Juan Cabezón to offer lodging to a converso brother and sister, Isabel and Gonzalo de la Vega, who turn out to be fugitives from the Inquisition, escaped from Ciudad Real. This action would seem to confirm the blind man's sympathies with the oppressed minority, although Juan Cabezón will continue to waffle in his commitment, in spite of his burgeoning love for the conversa Isabel de la Vega.
As food, or lack thereof, had earlier indicated Juan's status as pícaro, here, certain kinds of food draw him back to his Judaic roots:
| (119) | ||
His past love for his mother and his present love for Isabel make him identify, at least temporarily, with his Hebrew roots. The physical description of Isabel is brief, and merely States that she has long hair, very white skin, and almond-shaped eyes. While the almond eyes signal her Semitic origins, her white skin would not make her stand out among Castillans, and the color and texture of her hair, which could serve as ethnic markers, are unspecified.
With her presence in his house, Juan Cabezón begins to identify ideologically with the plight of the Jewish people. In a conversation with Isabel, he notes that «Hasta el más imbécil, más ruin y asesino morador en estos reinos se cree con derecho a atacar, despreciar y matar a los judíos»
(124). Juan Cabezón categorically declares his identification with the oppressed rather than the oppressor: «Más vale morir como criatura inocente que vivir como verdugo culpable»
(124). Although the narrator's resolve here appears unwavering, it will not prove so when tested, as it will be on many occasions throughout 1492 and Memorias del Nuevo Mundo.
Soon after Isabel de la Vega's arrival in Madrid, Juan Cabezón runs into the blind man's friend Rodrigo Rodríguez, who does not appear to recognize him at first. The hunchbacked dwarf is clad as a Dominican friar; although it appears he is a familiar rather than a friar, he clearly dons this garb in order to demonstrate his informal affiliation with the Inquisition. He begins by warning Juan that he must take care whom he should address in the street. It is Rodrigo Rodríguez who tells the narrator that his friend Pero Meñique is descended from conversos, and moreover, is a crypto-Jew: «[...] practica la pravedad mosaica»
(127). Juan Cabezón responds that according to his knowledge, the blind man's mother was a pious Christian. After the dwarf repeats Ramón Llull's dictum that «Aquel fuego es bueno que abrasa y quema los herejes»
(127), Juan observes that the theologian Ramón Llull himself was nearly burned as a heretic by the author of the Handbook for Inquisitors.
When Juan Cabezón asks why he is dressed as a friar, Rodrigo Rodríguez answers that
| (128) | ||
Here the dwarf describes his own background in very ambiguous colors: on the one hand, he claims Old Christian lineage and purity of blood; on the other hand, he speaks of a Jewish grandfather whose blood he hopes to purge from his own body with the fire of the Inquisition. Although he can be speaking metaphorically of purging the Castilian body politic of tainted blood, he is also very specifically speaking of his own body, thus implying that he not merely consorts with conversos but is himself one. It must be recalled that when this character was first introduced, he observed that he was an hidalgo from Toledo, where his father had been associated with Álvaro de Luna, who was notorious for his affiliations with New Christians. The epitome of the self-hating converso, Rodrigo Rodríguez's virulent antisemitism, which he had expressed earlier in the rogues' debate on Jews, is now directed toward one whom he once called friend, as he asserts that he is disposed to burn Pero Meñique at the stake. Rodrigo Rodríguez explains that he has urgent business with Grand Inquisitor Tomás de Torquemada, leaving Juan Cabezón with the parting words: «Cualquier cosa, Juanito Cabezón, cualquier cosa traemos entre manos, que muy pronto te deslumbrará la mucha lumbre»
(128). This latter comment could be perceived either as a threat, or as an assumption that Jewish self-hatred will provoke Juan Cabezón to sympathize with the Inquisition to the extent of joining the New Christian in denouncing their own friends.
Foremost in Juan Cabezón's mind at this stage is his love for Isabel de la Vega, with whom he unites in passion: «Nuestros cuerpos fueron así reconciliados, no por la Iglesia de los inquisidores, pero por el amor; si no [sic] en una sola carne, en un mismo deseo»
(132). As with his great grandmother's link with the Jews in the pogrom of 1391, here Juan Cabezón identifies with the conversos through a corporeal connection. His spiritual and sexual relationship with Isabel de la Vega leads him to claim: «Mientras los inquisidores quemaban a Isabel en estatua en Ciudad Real [...] en mi pasión no dudaba en acompañarla a la cárcel y a la hoguera, en la suprema alegría de morir con ella»
(134). In a similar vein, he says: «[...] la llevaba al lecho para amarla, dispuesto a enfrentarme por ella con los inquisidores de Castilla y Aragón, Valencia y Cataluña»
(143). Here the narrator confuses love and death, romanticizing the notions of inquisitorial imprisonment and auto-da-fe. His specific resolve to accompany her to the stake is never tested, although at the end of the novel, after searching for her from town to town and finally finding her about to embark from Spain during the expulsion, he is not even willing to take the risk of following her into exile.
After they have lived together some time, Isabel announces that she is carrying Juan's child. This life-affirming event is juxtaposed with a lengthy description of an auto-da-fe. It is March, 1485, and in response to this bittersweet news the two perform their own makeshift marriage ceremony, reciting vows similar to those of a formal wedding, blending elements of Jewish and Christian rites. Soon, however, following many months in hiding, Isabel and Juan unwisely venture out in broad daylight. There they spy his former friend Babilonia, who they know to be in league with the inquisitors, so they duck around the corner. When they suddenly bolt away, they realize they have aroused the suspicions of a familiar of the Holy Office who is dressed like an executioner. In 1492, the familiars of the Inquisition serve as a panoptic web of thousands of eyes whose vigilance is felt throughout the social fabric of Spain17. Since such seemingly innocuous activities as bathing weekly and putting on clean clothes or not eating pork can cause a neighbor or familiar to denounce them, the converso protagonists internalize this gaze and become so anxious that they second-guess their own every movement.
Soon thereafter they discover that some conversos in Toledo have attempted to assassinate inquisitors, and others in Zaragoza have succeeded in murdering inquisitor Pedro de Arbués18; having themselves attracted the attention of a familiar, and knowing that efforts to capture judaizing fugitives will be stepped up in the wake of the Arbués assassination, Isabel is plagued with nightmares. In one dream, she identifies corporeally as Jewish: «Yo, que andaba por una calle estrecha y tortuosa con las ropas judías señaladas que llevaba mi abuela en Zaragoza. Y sin saber si era ella en mí o yo en ella [...]»
(151). Isabel's identification with Judaism is absolute, since she is a conversa only in name, and in her heart remains devoted to the Hebrew faith; Juan, however, who is a second-generation New Christian, has a much more tenuous relationship with his Jewish origins.
Although Juan shields Isabel from the fact that the inquisitorial familiar whom they encountered on the street has come to the house and threatened him with the stake should he be harboring a fugitive, she becomes increasingly anxious and one day, nearing childbirth, she vanishes without a trace. Her absence, like her presence, is experienced by Juan Cabezón corporeally, and is linked again with his ingenuous belief that he could endure an auto-da-fe: «Sentí [...] que mi cuerpo era parte de la ausencia general y no algo animado, a imagen y semejanza de Dios. "Si en este momento me quemaran, las llamas no me dolerían", me dije»
(156). As elsewhere, here it is clear that Juan's convictions are based on his love for Isabel more than on identification with the Jews in general.
The remainder of the novel 1492 focuses on Juan Cabezón's efforts to locate Isabel, as she wanders throughout Spain seeking refuge from the Inquisition, which after having burned her in effigy, continues to pursue her in body. The band of rogues has already dispersed to different parts of Spain: two of them, the Moor and the Tuerto, to fight alongside the Moors in the South where they will die impaled for treason, and three others, the dwarf Rodrigo Rodríguez, the friar Agustín Delfín and his sister Babilonia, to aid the efforts of the Inquisition to burn judaizers. The protagonist's pilgrimage, in turn, takes him to Zaragoza, Calatayud, Teruel, and Toledo, places where Isabel has gone to stay with relatives; each visit is a narrow miss, as Isabel has just left that spot to go on to another.
Before he leaves Madrid, Juan tells Pero Meñique that he would never inform on Isabel or any of his converso friends, even if he were subjected to water torture, tied to the rack and scalded with hot oil. The blind man's face serves as a mirror for the narrator to recognize how hollow his own words are: «Pero Meñique alzó la cara, sorprendido por el coraje de mis palabras, igual que si estuviese hablando con ligereza de tormentos desconocidos para mí, que habían quebrado y trastornado a hombres más fieros que yo»
(160). Juan Cabezón's false bravado becomes evident when the protagonist is faced with any real threat of punishment at the hands of the Inquisition.
Having gone to Zaragoza in search of Isabel, he witnesses an auto-da-fe, and the procession of penitents serves as an occasion for Juan Cabezón to identify with the Jews. The night before the auto-da-fe he experiences insomnia:
| (173, emphasis mine) | ||
In the above, Juan's identification with the prisoners is such that by merit of juxtaposition and the repetition of the subject «yo», it almost appears as if Juan Cabezón himself were in prison awaiting execution, although he is really in an inn far from the fires of the Inquisition. When he finally does fall asleep, he dreams of a little girl on fire. The next day, as he attends the procession of penitents, his identification is more clearly spelled out:
| (177) | ||
This identification causes Juan Cabezón intense anxiety. However, it is not so much the psychic anxiety caused by fear of losing one's ego boundaries by over-identifying with the Other, but rather more simply the fear that identification with crypto-Jews will cause him to be persecuted by the Inquisition. Thus, it is an anxiety that is caused by more external, rather than internalized, mechanisms of control.
When straightforward questions are put to him regarding his religious identity, the narrator varies his response depending upon what his interlocutor represents. The first person to query 'Christian, Jew or Converso?' is Pero Meñique. Although the blind man asks this question before he has revealed his own converso status, the young orphan answers candidly that he is descended from converted Jews. One of the next characters to inquire as to Juan's parentage is the familiar of the Inquisition who knocks on his door in the middle of the night to threaten him with the stake should he be sheltering a fugitive. To this inquiry, Juan responds that his parents lived and died as good Christians, and raised him to be a good Christian as well. These answers are both true, but being an individual of in-between status in a society sharply divided along ethnic and religious lines, Juan Cabezón puts a situational spin on his answers, that is, he judges each context and carefully selects the information he wishes to divulge.
The in-between status of the converso is what causes most anxiety; neither fish nor fowl, Jew nor Christian, he is a hated minority. As one witness to the Zaragoza auto-da-fe in Aridjis's novel comments, «El odio que se les tenía a esos miserables cuando eran judíos ahora se les tiene cuando son cristianos»
(174). When Juan Cabezón arrives in Teruel after failing to find Isabel in Calatayud, he overhears a friar ask a ragged man if he is Jew or New Christian, to which the man responds «Ni lo uno ni lo otro, sino desgraciadamente sólo un hombre»
(189). Here the homeless man clearly critiques late fifteenth-century Spain's division of humans into ethnic and religious groups, and he is accused of heresy as a result. While still in Teruel, Juan Cabezón puts forward his own definition of the liminal category of the New Christian: when asked whether he is a converso, he responds, «Soy un hombre perseguido [...] si eso os parece un converso»
(197). In this instance, the narrator identifies with the conversos as a persecuted minority.
Juan Cabezón is not a man of strong convictions, retaining in regard to his converso heritage a lukewarm identification rooted mostly in his love for the beautiful crypto-Jewish Isabel. A significant example of this occurs while he is searching for his wife and child at the house of the prophetic maid of Teruel, Brianda Ruiz, who tells Juan that he should proceed to Toledo to ascertain Isabel's whereabouts. After she recounts her vision of an ascent to heaven, Brianda's house is stormed by representatives of the Inquisition coming to arrest the crypto-Jews gathered there observing the fast of Yom Kippur, Everyone flees except Brianda Ruiz and Juan Cabezón, who hesitates only momentarily before abandoning the fearless fifteen-year-old prophetess to her doom. Explaining his reasons for leaving this new acquaintance in such a lurch, the narrator relates:
| (196, emphasis mine) | ||
In the above, it is evident that Juan's love for his wife and child is greater than his devotion to the Jewish faith, which ultimately he does not feel to be his own.
Upon fleeing the scene of the raid, the narrator remarks that due to this lack of belief in the Jewish faith, he did not repent abandoning the prophetess: «Por eso, sin remordimiento alguno, escapé [...]»
(196). Nevertheless, he also claims an identification with those crypto-Jews who are captured: «Su captura me sobresaltó, como si hubiese sido la mía y me hallase a merced del alguacil Miguel de Chauz para ser conducido a las cárceles del Santo Oficio»
(197). Although he constantly reiterates his identification with the victims of the Inquisition, after his resolve is tested in the raid of Brianda's house, this avowed identification rings hollow.
Having narrowly escaped capture by the Holy Tribunal, Juan Cabezón seeks refuge in the house of another conversa, Clara Santángel, whose father was immolated by the Inquisition19; it is in this context that Juan defines a converso as one who is persecuted, and counts himself as one. Juan attempts to explain to Clara why he deserted Brianda and why he now refuses to lift a finger to attempt to save her from the clutches of the Holy Office who will most assuredly sentence Brianda to the stake:
| (198) | ||
Juan's response pales in comparison to Clara's own declaration that if she were a man, she would kill all the inquisitors with a weapon or her bare hands. The contrast between Juan Cabezón's lack of conviction and Clara Santángel's valiant declaration -not to mention the palpable courage of Brianda Ruiz as she awaits certain death at the hands of the Inquisition- makes it clear that the reader is not expected to identify with this waffling antihero. Juan Cabezón's pacifism in the name of self-preservation will be further evidenced in his adventures in the New World as recounted in Memorias del Nuevo Mundo.
In Toledo, Juan Cabezón stays at an inn where he is interrogated by a familiar of the Inquisition, who also questions another man, who turns out to be Christopher Columbus, about his origins. Both Cabezón and Columbus deny being conversos, although rumors of Columbus's Judaic origins will continue into the sequel Memorias del Nuevo Mundo. It is while he is in Toledo also that Juan Cabezón witnesses another auto-da-fe, this time one in which his ragged friend from the rogue band, King Bamba, is in the procession as a penitent. Although he has not been sentenced to burn at the stake, King Bamba nevertheless attacks the guards, and is returned to prison after telling his story to Juan Cabezón.
Back in Madrid, the narrator reconnects with Pero Meñique, who reveals his plot to singlehandedly assassinate Tomás de Torquemada. Because he is blind, Pero relies on the aid of Juan Cabezón, who halfheartedly agrees to serve as lazarillo in this formidable endeavor, observing that it is all the more foolhardy considering that the Grand Inquisitor is constantly flanked by hundreds of armed bodyguards. Juan protests that he prefers to die a natural death, rather than a violent one: «Quiero morir lleno de días, de arrugas y de hambres»
(214). Nevertheless, he agrees to accompany the blind man on his reckless mission, «aunque no salgamos vivos de la empresa»
(214). Juan Cabezón has his own reasons to want to kill Torquemada: «En la empresa me movía, sobre todo, salvar de sus manos a Isabel y a mi hijo; los que en mis pesadillas diurnas y nocturnas observaba ya prendidos y quemados en una plaza»
(219). Here, again, the protagonist's tenuous relationship to the religion of his Jewish ancestors and the plight of his converso contemporaries is linked to his love for Isabel.
The two would-be assassins travel to Ávila, where they hope to find Torquemada, who has gone there to conduct personally the case of the alleged crucifixion of a Christian child in La Guardia20. Almost immediately upon arriving in the walled city, they encounter Torquemada on the street, but Juan Cabezón fails to alert the blind man in time for him to take action. As anticipated, the Grand Inquisitor is surrounded by two hundred fifty armed guards. The narrator hesitates, «sin saber si lanzarme contra él y asestarle una puñalada o quedarme inmóvil, mientras pasaba a mi lado»
(226). The antihero's choice, naturally, is to stand idly by. When Pero Meñique realizes that he has unwittingly missed this opportunity -an opportunity that may not repeat itself during their stay in Ávila- he makes Juan swear that he will apprise him the next time Torquemada crosses their path. Juan agrees, and soon they are joined by a fellow converso, Martín Martínez, who also has an ardent desire to kill Torquemada, and who has provided Pero Meñique with privileged information about the trial being conducted in Ávila. The assassins remain in the town for a month waiting for a glimpse of Torquemada, during which time Juan Cabezón becomes increasingly uneasy, losing sight of the purpose of their prolonged stay in a town in which he does not hope to find Isabel. Pero Meñique, for his part, is concerned that when the trial is over, Torquemada will leave Ávila, so he becomes anxious to assault the first person he should encounter on the street, «como si cualquiera fuese Torquemada»
(243).
The story of this ill-fated plot ends tragically soon after the November 1491 auto-da-fe in which the Jews and conversos convicted in the La Guardia child crucifixion case are put to death in what the narrator refers to as a human sacrifice. A few weeks after the auto, the blind assassin Pero Meñique attacks a notary in the street mistaking him for the Grand Inquisitor, and is immediately slain by the familiars of the Holy Tribunal. Although Juan Cabezón had earlier proclaimed his willingness to die in this enterprise while Martín Martínez had expressed his concern that they should fail to achieve their goal and lose their lives as well on account of the blind man's rashness, it is Martín Martínez, rather than Juan Cabezón, who is killed while debating whether to escape or draw his sword to help their mutual friend. The antihero's only thought when he witnesses the fate of his two accomplices is to save himself; gazing at their corpses, he reflects: «Muertos los dos, consideré toda asistencia y resistencia inútiles [...]. Además, para mi propia vergüenza y a mi pesar, al verlos exánimes en el polvo sentí la alegría inmensa de encontrarme vivo bajo la luz del sol»
(250). Thus again, in spite of the bravado of his claims that he would suffer fire and torture for Isabel, when Juan Cabezón is faced with real danger at the hands of the Inquisition, his determination dissolves, and self-preservation becomes his singular aim.
Paradoxically, it is a familiar of the Holy Office, Pero Meñique's former friend Rodrigo Rodríguez, who saves Juan Cabezón from the fires of the Inquisition. Although the dwarf, staring intently at Juan as he stands by, presumably recognizes him and surmises his connection with the events that have just transpired, he nevertheless keeps silent as the protagonist escapes. As scholar Claudio Guillén had observed in reference to the picaresque novel, a rogue cannot fail to understand another rogue. Although Rodrigo Rodríguez is an hidalgo by birth, he is also marginalized by virtue of being a dwarf, a hunchback, and, as discussed above, most likely a converso himself. Here Rodrigo Rodríguez, although he is ascending in the social and ecclesiastical hierarchy by serving as a familiar of the Inquisition, and although he is virulently antisemitic in his words, in this deed he nevertheless appears to identify to some extent with the outcasts with whom he had associated earlier.
Agustín Delfín, in parallel terms, also helps Juan Cabezón in spite of his inquisitorial duties. Like Rodrigo Rodríguez, Babilonia's brother is a familiar of the Holy Office. He reencounters Juan Cabezón in Trujillo, where he is staying at the inn owned by Luz Pizarro, mother of his soon-to-be fellow conquistador Gonzalo Dávila. The familiar beneficently tells Juan of Christopher Columbus's plan to reach the Indies by sailing West, and tells him that if he mentions the name Agustín Delfín, Columbus will surely permit him to embark on the voyage. As in his earlier conversation with Rodrigo Rodríguez, here the conversation is peppered with insults and threats, including the same friendly advice to avoid consorting with heretics if he wants to elude the fires of the Holy Tribunal. It is significant that two familiars of the Inquisition help a friend who fraternizes with conversos, due presumably to their own ambivalent status as former rogues currently associated with the most powerful ecclesiastical organ of the Spanish realms. Although Jewish self-hatred prevents them from being openly friendly toward the converso half-outsiders, they nevertheless remain somewhat loyal to their former friends.
When the Edicts of Expulsion are publicized in April of 1492, mandating that all Jews must leave the realm before August of that same year, Juan Cabezón declares his renewed identification with the Hebrew people in diaspora, «sintiéndome también expulsado [...] [por el] poder soberano que echaba a los judíos de España y de alguna manera me arrojaba a mí mismo, al expulsar a Isabel y a mi hijo»
(260). As elsewhere in Aridjis's novel, this identification is linked primarily to the narrator's love for Isabel rather than to his devotion to own ancestry, and, as elsewhere, his words are not necessarily upheld by his deeds. After he has commented to innkeeper Luz Pizarro that it is financially unsound for the Catholic monarchs to cast out such a productive people, his landlady accuses him of defending the heretical depravity, to which he responds diplomatically that he does not defend the Jews but neither does he rejoice at their sufferings. He is wise not to reveal his true feelings, whatever these may be, since as familiar Agustín Delfín had warned him, many have gone to the stake for telling too many truths. Soon thereafter, he meets Isabel's brother, Gonzalo de la Vega, outside the walls of Trujillo and realizes that Gonzalo has chosen to pose as a Jew in order to follow the others into exile, rather than keep up the clandestine double life of a crypto-Jewish converso. Upon re-entering the walled city, Juan is once again asked 'Christian or Jew', and as in similar situations, he responds according to what his interlocutor wants to hear; although he claims to identify with the expelled Jews, his publicly avowed identity remains Christian.
Isabel de la Vega, like her brother, is posing as a Jewess in order to seek exile in Flanders with her son. The narrator finally meets up with her near the end of the novel as he travels toward the port city of Palos in order to sail with Columbus on his first voyage. Juan Cabezón attempts to convince her to remain with him, since she is a conversa and is thus not required to leave Spain. She is unwavering in her identification with her coreligionists: «La expulsión de los judíos es mi expulsión, su muerte es mi muerte»
(296). Once again, this identification is expressed with corporeal metaphors: «Llevo en mi rostro el rostro de mis padres y en mi cuerpo su sombra, no puedo desprenderme de su carne y sus huesos, su destierro es el mío»
(296). Isabel cannot reconcile herself to remaining in Spain with Juan, since her convictions lead her into exile with the Jews; when Juan insists, she States firmly: «Los inquisidores, a falta de mi cuerpo, han quemado mi imagen; he muerto en estos reinos»
(296).
Juan Cabezón also suggests that he might accompany Isabel and their son, also named Juan21, into exile. Isabel protests, however, that because he is known as a Christian, it is prohibited even for him to be conversing with the Jews as they depart. Because his public identity is Christian, his presence among the exiles would call attention to the fact that Isabel is not Jewish but rather a recanted conversa and a fugitive of the Inquisition who has been burned in effigy. She pleads with Juan to cease talk of accompanying them, since this places her in danger; the two do not even discuss, however, the possibility that he might follow them separately and thus not endanger them. She informs him that her intended destination is Flanders, and although he promises his wife and son that he will search for them there, he never makes any attempt to travel to Flanders, and is not reunited with young Juan or Isabel until they travel separately to Mexico in the sequel, Memorias del Nuevo Mundo. Thus by the end of 1492, Juan Cabezón has proven to be an antihero whose ambivalent identification with his converso ancestry is matched only by his lukewarm loyalty to his friends and family, as he has abandoned his blind friend, Pero Meñique, in his hour of need, and now watches his wife and child go into exile, without making any serious effort to follow them.
The ambivalence of Juan Cabezón's position as converso becomes most poignant when he bids farewell to Isabel, and his attention is called to the religious differences that separate Spaniards:
| (290) | ||
In this scheme, the liminal converso who is neither Old Christian nor crypto-Jew does not fit into any category in Spanish society. There is no place in Spain for Juan Cabezón, who rather than stay and feign conformity, or declare himself Jewish and opt for exile, embarks instead in August 1492, as mast man on Columbus's Santa María.
As seen above, due to the external pressure of the Inquisition, Juan Cabezón cannot fully embrace either a castizo Spanish identity, which implies purity of blood as well as Christian faith, nor a Jewish identity, which is that of his ancestors but not his own. The theme of Judaism is extended into Memorias del Nuevo Mundo, in the form of insinuations that Christopher Columbus is a converso. After the first fraction of the novel dealing with Columbus, sporadic references to the 1492 expulsion continue to resurface throughout the remainder of Memorias, which recounts Cortés's conquest of Tenochtitlán and the early years of the New Spanish colony. As a primary focus, however, the question of Jews and conversos is gradually replaced by an emphasis on the relationship between the conquistadors and the Amerindians. Juan Cabezón's ambiguous status will follow him into this New World relationship as well, as he attempts to be simultaneously conquistador and conscientious objector to the conquest.
The theme of Juan Cabezón's identity is apparent from the first page of Memorias del Nuevo Mundo, as the third-person narrator who replaces the first-person perspective of the earlier novel States that the protagonist set sail on the Santa María «[...] en busca de fortuna y de sí mismo, y para huir de los inquisidores que por esos días quemaban herejes en los reinos de Castilla y Aragón»
(11). This suggests that the New World is expected to serve as a theater where outcasts from the Old World may fashion a new identity for themselves, this time by contrasting themselves to the existing inhabitants of the Americas.
Columbus's alleged converso status is hinted at repeatedly throughout the section of the novel dealing with his first voyage. His men find everything about him suspicious: even the fact that he invokes the trinity and the holy family in his utterances and letters serves only to confirm their suspicions, since it reeks to them of the overcompensation of the outsider. They constantly refer to his foreignness, calling him «el genovés» and suggesting that the Portuguese may have bribed him to fail in his mission to find a passage to the Indies in the name of the Spanish crown. As mentioned above, in the previous novel, 1492, Columbus had appeared only once, at an inn in Toledo where Juan Cabezón was staying, and where a familiar of the Inquisition pointedly asked the adventurer if he was converso, which he denied.
On the Santa María, the members of the crew, including the converso interpreter Luis de Torres, speculate that Columbus may hail from one of the Spanish Colón clans that were presumed to be Jewish22. They further note that the voyage was financed with the assistance of converso treasurer Luis de Santángel. Some of the sailors egg on Luis de Torres, trying to get him to admit that Columbus is a converso; when the interpreter describes himself as New Christian, and asserts that he is not an informer for the Inquisition, his crewmate says «[...] otro judío más cristiano que yo»
(26), alluding again to the need of conversos to overcompensate in order to give the appearance of belonging to Christian society. Another sailor notes «No hay nadie mejor que un converso para descubrir a otro converso»
(26). Luis de Torres protests he has no desire to uncover the discoverer's identity, adding: «Debe un hombre hurgar en el vientre de su madre para conocer su origen? ¿Debe preguntar a qué fe pertenece su natura, si es judía o devota cristiana?»
(26), implying that if they are really curious they should check to see if Columbus is circumcised, but that to do so would be absurd.
The specter of the persecution of the Jews follows the crew to the New World. After they have left port, from his post as mast man Juan Cabezón believes he can still see the ships of the expelled Jews. But while the reader might expect the protagonist's sympathies to extend to other oppressed groups, when they land on the islands, ironically, Juan is the first to suggest to Columbus the idea of enslaving the Amerindians: «¿Queréis esclavizarlos presto?»
(24), to which converso interpreter Luis de Torres responds sarcastically that along with their language and religion, the Spaniards will end up importing the Holy Inquisition to the New World.
Columbus's first voyage soon ends, with Juan Cabezón being among those left behind to settle the islands, where this fictional character becomes the only survivor of the massacre of the Navidad colony. On his second voyage, Columbus finds that Juan Cabezón has been living during the intervening months with a Carib tribe among whom he served as shaman. His external appearance indicates a high degree of assimilation to the island culture: «[...] apareció en la nao capitana Juan Cabezón, desnudo, pintado de blanco y negro, los ojos tiznados y el cabello largo»
(35). The admiral at first does not recognize this former crew member gone native, who tells him the story of how the Spaniards were killed by the vassals of the Taino cacique Caonabó, whose people they had wronged in their greed for women and gold23.
From the massacre, the narrative leads to the account of Juan Cabezón's year living in the midst of an anthropophagous Carib tribe24. Exhibiting the ambivalence of colonial desire, Juan Cabezón experiences simultaneous attraction and repulsion toward the cannibals, who in Memorias are described as drinking the blood of their enemies; castrating, sodomizing and later devouring captured youths; and keeping the women as slaves, in order to eventually eat the children they engender with them25. When he first finds himself among the Carib women, their men having gone off to war, Juan's mind is filled with preconceived notions of the monstrosities that populate the European imaginary: «Desde ese momento, aguardó con miedo y curiosidad el regreso de los caribes, criaturas más conocidas por fama que por vista, y que según había oído tenían un solo ojo sobre la frente y cara de perro»
(36)26. Although the Carib women have frightened him by describing their cannibalism and by showing him gnawed bones, skulls used for drinking water, and a human neck stewing in a pot27, Juan Cabezón nevertheless anticipates the return of the warriors with the mixed emotions of fear and curiosity.
When the warriors return, Juan's apprehension becomes more powerful than his fascination, since he dreads both the notions that he might be eaten or that he might be forced to eat human flesh. Juan shows some glass beads to the chief, but he is unsure how to interpret the look on the cacique's face: «[...] lo miró castañeteando los dientes, sin saber si lo iba a acometer a mordidas o había comprendido que las bolas de cristal tenían virtudes secretas para curar enfermos y para hacerlo señor de las islas vecinas»
(37). Juan is unequivocally repulsed by the idea of eating human flesh even though he tells the Carib leader that he is starving to death: «De manera que éste mandó que le sirviesen el cuello humano que se cocía en la olla. Y cuando Juan Cabezón lo rechazó con asco ordenó que le ofrecieran arañas, gusanos, culebras y un trozo de lagarto»
(37). Although he is starving, Juan Cabezón categorically rejects the human flesh in favor of these other foodstuffs that would also repulse Europeans.
It is because of his fear for his life that Juan Cabezón becomes a curandero or healer in the tribe. Like the historical castaways Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca and Hans Staden, the fictional protagonist of Memorias is compelled by the American natives to serve as shaman, a practice that he continues due to the good fortune of successful outcomes in his early attempts to cure. Like Cabeza de Vaca and Staden, he combines Christian prayers with native healing practices in his own syncretic ritual. Like Cabeza de Vaca, Juan Cabezón not only cures the sick but brings back to life a dead man, thus significantly improving his social standing and guaranteeing his safety among the Amerindians due to their belief that he can not only heal and resuscitate but that he is also powerful enough to cause them harm28. While the historical Cabeza de Vaca is initially forced into shamanism under the threat of having his food withheld, Juan Cabezón is coerced into serving as curandero with the perceived threat that if he refuses or fails he will be the cacique's next meal. He considers protesting that he cannot cure the chief's wounded son because he is not a doctor, but «[...] al oírlo castañetear los dientes amenazadoramente se dio cuenta de que en sanarlo o no le iba la vida»
(37). After the youth's miraculous recovery, the Spanish shaman is given a new name, Anacacuia, meaning 'spirit of the center'.
The protagonist's adoption of the hybrid name Juan Cabezón Anacacuia signals his transculturation. Colonial desire, which tempers identification with the Other with preservation of the self, leads him to maintain a certain distance, however, especially as regards cannibalism. He adapts to the local culture and accepts the four wives offered him by the chief; his fear of being eaten, however, affects his relationship with his fourth wife: «Como ella le había hecho saber que le gustaba mucho comer carne humana él besaba su boca con espanto, tratando de no sacar demasiado la lengua ni hacérsela visible»
(40). Thus in spite of the months he spends living in the midst of the Caribs, Juan Cabezón continues to experience the simultaneous attraction and repulsion of colonial desire toward their cannibalistic practices.
Although he becomes identified with the Carib tribe, forming part of their society in the privileged role of shaman, when the Europeans return it is clear that Juan Cabezón has not abandoned his Spanish identity by going native altogether. While the historical Cabeza de Vaca experiences difficulty readapting to European customs and his first thought is to protect his indigenous companions from the conquistadors, the fictional Juan Cabezón quickly readapts and soon commits his first recorded act of violence toward the Amerindians. Not having forgotten his Spanish alliances, when Columbus's crew captures Caonabó, the Taino chief responsible for the Navidad massacre29, Juan Cabezón kicks him in the head while other Spaniards pin him to the ground: «El cacique asesino besó el polvo y Juan Cabezón le dio un puntapié en el costado en recuerdo de los hombres que había matado en la Navidad»
(45). Thus begins Juan Cabezón's problematic career as a conquistador with ambivalent feelings toward violence; although here he physically attacks an enemy Amerindian, it will be many years before he eventually kills one, after his sword remains bloodless through the first battles of the conquest of Mexico.
The protagonist's ambiguous loyalties are apparent through the end of the portion of Memorias dealing with Columbus's voyages, as Juan Cabezón, having served the Admiral faithfully, later witnesses his downfall without taking any action to prevent it. When Comendador Francisco de Bobadilla is sent by the Catholic monarchs to investigate charges that Columbus has mistreated the Spaniards, Juan Cabezón witnesses every step of the investigation that culminates in Columbus being sent back to Spain from his third voyage in chains, but does nothing to help the Admiral. The Inquisition also continues to haunt the later voyages, as the dwarf Rodrigo Rodríguez from the previous novel 1492 reappears as a Dominican friar intent on exposing Columbus as a crypto-Jew. The section of the novel on Columbus ends in medias res, with Juan Cabezón managing to escape the notice of the inquisitorial familiar Rodrigo Rodríguez.
The next section likewise begins in medias res, with Hernán Cortés already speaking to the natives through La Malinche who will be his interpreter and lover throughout the conquest of Mexico. Nearly thirty years have passed since Columbus's first voyage, and Juan Cabezón is an old man by the time he joins Cortés's expedition. His role as semi-conquistador is confirmed in contrast to the full conquistador status of another fictional character, Gonzalo Dávila, who serves as a foil against whom Juan Cabezón is measured. Significantly, while Gonzalo Dávila's first action on Mexican soil is to obey Cortés's order to place Moctezuma's emissaries in shackles, Juan Cabezón's first action in this section of the novel is to pick up a stone and absentmindedly toss it in the water. Clearly the antihero whose adventures began in 1492 is not to be the same kind of man of action as Hernán Cortés or the fictional Gonzalo Dávila, nor will he be as cruel and sadistic in his treatment of the Amerindians.
Juan Cabezón's initial pacifism is carried to the absurd extreme of defending imaginary Amerindians. When some Spaniards are play-acting on the beach, feigning a skirmish with some invisible foes, Juan Cabezón sticks his neck out to protect the imaginary victims, admonishing the conquistadors to leave them alone. Although Juan accompanies the conquistadors, his personal beliefs appear to diverge from the ideology of the conquest since he is willing to speak out against violence even in this case when the victims are not real. His intervention is met with scorn by the Spaniards, who scoff at the idea of being threatened by «el viejo Cabezón». The first assignment the protagonist receives in Mexico has an air of the fantastic as well, since it consists of hunting down the phantasmal Quintalbor, Cortés's Amerindian double.
The chimerical Quintalbor appears among the Spaniards, imitating Cortés's gestures and following him around like a living shadow. Although the captain's look-alike is a source of fascination for the soldiers, his presence irritates and distresses Aridjis's Cortés. As Sigmund Freud discusses in his essay on the uncanny, the double is one of the most unnerving of entities, because it transgresses ego boundaries and takes us back to a time before our ego was clearly demarcated, that is, back to the psychic indifferentiation that characterized precultural life previous to what Jacques Lacan would subsequently call the mirror stage. Here the conquistador cannot identify with his indigenous Other, since colonial desire kicks in as a defense mechanism to protect the ego of the fictionalized Cortés who is: «[...] herido por la burla de ver a otro semejante a sí mismo en su condición espectral»
(56). Juan Cabezón successfully captures the phantom double, and Cortés interrogates him through interpreters before he vanishes into thin air. Quintalbor reappears periodically throughout the conquest of Mexico, much to the dismay of Cortés, who repeatedly endeavors to kill his alter ego. It is significant that although his orders had been to bring in the simulacrum dead or alive, the protagonist uses cunning rather than brute force to entrap the otherworldly Amerindian, tricking him by pretending to be asleep in the sand. Juan Cabezón is clearly on the Spanish side of this encounter, since he does hand over the indigenous apparition to Cortés, who intends to annihilate him; his own part in the episode, however, is a relatively nonviolent one.
Thus, Juan Cabezón will not be, for example, a renegade who will desert the Spanish conquest and become a leader in the indigenous resistance; nor will he be the most cruel and sadistic of conquistadors, like the fictional Gonzalo Dávila of the same Aridjis novel. One might expect, based on Juan Cabezón's experience of marginalization in late fifteenth-century Spain, that he might identify with the Amerindians and opt for passive resistance, becoming a species of conscientious objector among the ranks of the conquistadors. Based on the protagonist's ambiguous actions and reactions in the context of inquisitorial Spain, however, it would be more fitting to expect him to be in this new setting the same sort of 'betwixt and between' picaresque character that he had been in the previous novel. As in Spain he had identified himself as neither Old Christian nor crypto-Jew, the converso ex-curandero now in the Americas remains in character by refusing to identify as either conquistador or anti-conquest activist.
Throughout the scenes recounting the conquest of Mexico, Juan Cabezón's name is repeatedly coupled with that of conquistador Gonzalo Dávila30: they fight side by side in the battle against the Tlaxcalans; together they deliver the Cholulan priests to Cortés and La Malinche, instigating a series of events leading to the massacre at Cholula31; and later Cortés sends the two soldiers as undercover spies to reconnoiter Tenochtitlán. When the battles begin, however, the two characters diverge significantly: while Gonzalo Dávila becomes the image of the hypermasculine conquistador, forceful, cruel, and unrelenting, Juan Cabezón is reluctant to take an active role in the combat. It is not always clear whether this is due to an identification with the indigenous Other or a matter of sheer cowardice coupled with the instinct of self-preservation.
This divergence is manifest even in their physical appearance. Gonzalo Dávila cuts a fine portrait of a bearded conquistador who, mounted on his mare, fights energetically in the early battles. In contrast, Juan Cabezón dressed for battle resembles Don Quixote on a decrepit nag: «Juan Cabezón, armado con cota, coracinas y una celada con visera negra, llevaba encima una ropa astrosa, dando la apariencia de soldado ruin, de los más dispensables. Montaba un caballo zaino, largo y seco como un palo [...]»
(63).
In the battle against the Tlaxcalans, while Gonzalo Dávila is on the offensive, wounding and killing many men, Juan Cabezón merely defends himself, again reinforcing his ambiguous status within the conquest. Even in defending himself, Juan Cabezón is not successful, since he is portrayed as a victim of assault in need of defense. When he finds himself under attack by a group of Tlaxcalans, including prince Xicoténcatl the Younger and a 'ferocious' dwarf, several Spaniards in turn rush to defend Juan Cabezón, among them Gonzalo Dávila, who kills the dwarf. The contrast between the two Spaniards is apparent in the following: «Gonzalo Dávila, entonces, hundió las espuelas en los ijares de su yegua y arremetió contra sus atacantes, hiriéndolos en la cara y en el pecho. Juan Cabezón, de cuyo caballazo se había colgado el enano, no podía ni con puntapiés ni con lanzazos deshacerse de él»
(64). Here Gonzalo Dávila appears as a man of action, while Juan Cabezón resembles a damsel in distress.
The representation of Juan Cabezón as ambivalent anticonquistador addresses the problematic issue of how Aridjis chose to represent the conquest through the eyes of a marginal protagonist; because he is a half-outsider, Juan Cabezón is a sympathetic character, yet in order for the narration to follow the principal historical events through his eyes, he must be a witness and on some level also a participant in the conquest. After the battle with the Tlaxcalans, Juan overhears Cortés say that «Juan Cabezón, aunque viejo, es gran sufridor de trabajos y un buen hombre de a caballo. Gonzalo Dávila es la mejor lanza que ha pasado a las Indias. Con hombres como éstos tomaremos presto el reino de Moctezuma»
(65-66). Although the reader has seen little evidence of Juan's military prowess, it is apparent here that he is considered a valuable member of Cortés's campaign. His age must be a considerable factor, since in 1492 he had told Inquisitorial familiar Agustín Delfín that he was growing old and needed to seek his fortune, and by 1521 he must be in his mid-fifties. Nevertheless, Cortés counts him among the men who facilitate the conquest of Mexico.
Still on the road to Tenochtitlán, Juan witnesses the preemptive strike on the Cholulans as an out-of-body experience. His detachment begins when he is sent by Cortés to examine the temple of Cholula, from which he gazes at the volcano Popocatépetl: «En su observación, Juan Cabezón se sintió en el centro de la vida, pero muy lejos de sí mismo»
(73). During the battle, the volcano remains his focus, allowing him to distance himself from the violence. In this massacre, Juan Cabezón finally bloodies his virgin sword: «Clavó su espada en un indio de unos cuarenta años y le sorprendió la blandura de su carne, la facilidad de la muerte»
(74). His aloofness from the events in front of him somehow erases the blood from his hands and his conscience: «Juan Cabezón [...] se sintió tranquilo. Su mano, sin huellas de sangre, sin remordimientos de conciencia, estaba quieta. Silencioso, igual que si nunca hubiese matado a hombre alguno, miró los volcanes [...]»
(74). In his own mind at least, this impression of detachment relieves Juan Cabezón of a sense of responsibility for having taken a human life.
His fellow conquistador Gonzalo Dávila, however, is not surprised, since he realizes how attractive violence can be even to an ostensible pacificist like Juan:
Here the ambivalence of colonial desire is patent, as even gentle Juan is drawn in by the simultaneous attraction and repulsion that violence inspires in him. His ambiguous status as conquistador and anticonquistador is underscored by the sentence 'Era como si a la vez condenara el crimen y buscara su espectáculo'. This corresponds to Mary Louise Pratt's definition of the «anti-conquest» as «[...] the strategies of representation whereby European bourgeois subjects seek to secure their innocence in the same moment as they assert European hegemony»
(7). In spite of earlier claims of «innocence» due to his pacific nature and sense of detachment from the violence, Juan Cabezón is now a legitimate conquistador, having at length wet his sword with the blood of conquest.
After the massacre at Cholula, Cortés sends Juan Cabezón and Gonzalo Dávila on a reconnaissance tour of Tenochtitlán. There the two, dressed as natives with their faces tinted, witness a spectacular human sacrifice. In this scene it is apparent that Juan Cabezón has adapted more fully to his surroundings than has his companion. Having experienced marginality as a converso in Inquisitorial Spain, he is more open to transculturation than hardened conquistador Gonzalo Dávila. Juan Cabezón understands the native languages better than his comrade-in-arms, occasionally using indigenous terms in his speech, and at this stage seems to have a greater comprehension and respect for Mexican culture, including its religious aspects. For example, when Gonzalo Dávila considers stealing an emerald necklace from a statue of the god Tláloc, it is Juan Cabezón who prevents him from doing so.
Both Spaniards are horrified by the skeletons and flayed skins they see in the temple, and they sense that they are not only voyeurs, but that they are also objects of surveillance; as Juan Cabezón remarks: «Nos miran desde adentro de nosotros»
(81). As Michel Foucault observes in his essay on the panopticon in Discipline and Punish, those who wield power over others (in this case, the colonizers) exercise the ability to visually scrutinize those whom they subjugate (here, the colonized). In Aridjis's novel, the panoptic gaze goes both ways: «A la luz de la luna, Juan Cabezón y Gonzalo Dávila observaron a esas criaturas, que a su vez los observaban desde los huacales, con el maravillamiento con que había visto Xicoténcatl el Viejo a Hernán Cortés»
(83). In this Mexican novel that represents the conquest from the perspective of the Spanish conquerors, it is significant to observe that Europeans do not gaze unilaterally upon the Amerindians, but as Mary Louise Pratt has noted in her book on travel writing and transculturation, the gaze is multilateral. This can be perceived as a form of indigenous resistance, as has been evident in Aridjis's novel since Columbus's arrival in the Caribbean islands: «A Juan Cabezón se le ordenó vigilar los movimientos de Guacanagarí; quien, a su vez, lo vigiló desde su hamaca»
(41).
First as passive spectator, then as active participant, Juan Cabezón ultimately becomes inured to the violence of conquest: «Juan Cabezón se había acostumbrado poco a poco a percibir a distancia el peligro [...]»
(75). The protagonist's attitude toward the conquest, however, remains ambiguous: upon their arrival in Tenochtitlán, Juan gazes «sin simpatías» upon the wealthy but persecuted emperor. The contrast between Gonzalo Dávila as conquistador and Juan Cabezón as anticonquistador follows them to the imperial capital, where Cortés orders Gonzalo Dávila to shackle Moctezuma, then immediately afterwards orders Juan Cabezón to remove the chains.
In Tenochtitlán, Juan continues to establish his status as anticonquistador. After Cortés has gone to Veracruz to waylay Pánfilo de Narváez, leaving Captain Pedro de Alvarado in charge of the Spanish forces in the capital, some of the conquistadors attend a festival, which will ultimately turn into a bloody massacre. Before the violence begins, the conquistadors converse as they attend the dance of the sacrificial victims. Alvarado remarks: «Cabezón, aún traes espada virgen [...]. La que su dueño ha tenido en la vaina y no ha derramado sangre no conoce todavía su virtud»
(94). After Gonzalo Dávila responds by discussing various ways to wound with his sword, the protagonist takes the verb «herir» out of context: «Herir la cuerda entre músicos es tocarla para que suene -murmuró intencionadamente distraído Juan Cabezón»
(94). The notion that his distraction is intentional underscores the idea that the protagonist is purposely trying to fashion a self-image as «innocent» anticonquistador, detached from the violence, in spite of the fact that his sword has ceased to be virginal since the massacre at Cholula.
The conversation at the festival then turns to the indigenous practice of human sacrifice. When Pedro de Alvarado remarks that, in the year 1487, twenty thousand Mesoamerican prisoners were allegedly sacrificed, adding the value judgment «¿habéis visto tal crueldad?»
(94), Juan Cabezón responds by referring to the Spanish Inquisition: «¿Qué estaba haciendo ese año nuestro piadoso Inquisidor General en toda España?»
(95). Alvarado fails to understand the significance of the comparison, retorting with a guffaw, «Sin duda, quemando herejes, mi viejo Juan»
(95). From the Old Christian perspective, there is no logical connection between the senseless human sacrifice of the Aztecs and the sacred auto-da-fe of the Holy Tribunal. But even more relevant than the fictionalized Alvarado's blindness in this regard is the blind spot that all of the conquistadors share: the obvious answer to Alvarado's query about whether they have ever witnessed such cruelty is that they are currently participating in one of the most brutal acts of genocide in recorded history, the conquest of the Americas. Although Juan Cabezón, as a marginal converso, draws the parallel between the sacrificial priests and the inquisitors, he is incapable of making the additional logical leap from inquisition and sacrifice to conquest. Thus Juan does not identify with the Mesomericans as victims like himself, nor does he foresee or attempt to prevent their destruction.
During the temple massacre in Tenochtitlán, Juan attempts to recover his innocence by reclaiming his former position as detached observer. Defining himself as anticonquistador in contrast to the cruelty of hardened conquistadors like the fictional Gonzalo Dávila and fictionalized Pedro de Alvarado, Juan again resorts to aloofness as a way to insulate himself from the violence of conquest. Although he has just been conversing with Alvarado, in the heat of the battle he cannot identify with him: «Juan Cabezón vio como a un desconocido a aquel hombre que los mexicanos llamaban Tonatiuh; quien era tan agraciado de facciones que aún en la violencia extrema parecía amable, daba la impresión de estarse riendo»
(97).
Although he had killed a man earlier in Cholula, Juan manages to convince himself that his sword has truly reverted to its virginal State. While Gonzalo Dávila is dripping with blood and splattered with gore, and Pedro de Alvarado continues fighting when all he has left of his lance is a stump, Juan remains on the sidelines: «Incapaz de matar a mansalva, Juan Cabezón vio las armas bermejas de sus compañeros [...] parecía que estaban en una feria de muerte, compitiendo por el precio de la crueldad»
(98). During this massacre, Juan Cabezón will waver one last time before finally establishing his identity, as the pendulum swings from conquistador to anticonquistador and back to conquistador.
After the massacre, the ambivalence of colonial desire leads the protagonist to examine his comportment in the battle. Unable to bring himself to identify with the cruelty of the conquistadors, he tries to justify letting himself off the hook:
| (100) | ||
But there is clearly a gap in the logic of the last sentence, such that Juan cannot convince even himself, much less the reader, that it is possible to take part in the conquest without dirtying his hands:
Anduvo, sacó su espada de la vaina, la metió de nuevo, con la vergüenza de que ya no era virgen, sino había vertido sangre inocente y para él esto era como haber maculado toda su existencia. |
| (100) | ||
Even the other conquistadors, who have some stake in maintaining the innocence of Old Man Cabezón, who with his virgin sword had served as a yardstick against which they could measure their own exploits, now claim him as one of their own: «Eres uno de nosotros -le dijo Hojeda el Tuerto, poniéndole con una sonrisa la mano velluda sobre el hombro derecho-. No es posible volver a ser lo que eras»
(100).
In spite of this explicit pronouncement, sealed by the gesture of the conquistador's hand on his shoulder, Juan Cabezón makes one last-ditch effort to protest his innocence to himself: «"Hubo muertos, pero no fueron míos", se dijo, mientras andaba con ansias que oprimían su corazón»
(101). But again, he fails to convince even himself as he murmurs:
| (101) | ||
Ultimately, Juan Cabezón must accept that his participation in the conquest implicates him in its goals and means. There are no innocent bystanders among the conquistadors, since their very presence imbricates them in the imperial enterprise.
Juan Cabezón initially resists identifying with the conquistadors, and because of their brutality, he is able to stand apart, fashioning himself an identity as a pacifist. But, as his comrade-in-arms Gonzalo Dávila points out, Juan is both repulsed and attracted by the violence, and he ultimately cannot resist its pull. Drawn in by the conquest, there is an immediate change in his comportment: while earlier he was a ragged soldier who had to be rescued from a ferocious dwarf, in a new battle, the reborn conquistador is injured but vigorously rips off his clothes to bind his wound. After he accepts his new identity, the contrast between Juan Cabezón and Gonzalo Dávila is blurred: «Juan Cabezón, en su caballazo, se endosó la armadura, blandió la lanza e hirió a un guerrero en el pecho [...] A su lado, estuvo Gonzalo Dávila [...]»
(109-10). There is no turning back: Juan Cabezón is one of the conquistadors.
As pícaro and converso in the Old World, Juan Cabezón had vacillated continually between identifying with the Jews and crypto-Jews who were persecuted and expelled by Inquisitorial Spain, While in the Old World, as converso he had been one of the Others against whom hegemonic Spaniards defined themselves, here Juan looks to the New World as a theater in which he can re-fashion his own identity. But, as in Spain, in America Juan vacillates between the various identities that are available to him. His many years as converso half-outsider in Spain and his year cohabitating with cannibalistic islanders makes him somewhat more sensitive to the Amerindians, but he nevertheless does not hesitate to kick a Taino chief when he is down. In the early battles of the conquest of Mexico, Juan Cabezón stays his hand, repulsed but attracted by the violence, until he is gradually drawn in by it. At first he attempts to remain detached from his own behavior, but he ultimately accepts responsibility for his actions. Having gone full circle from converso to curandero to conquistador, Juan Cabezón's identity now remains fixed for the remainder of the conquest of Tenochtitlán.
After the conquest, however, Juan Cabezón once again becomes the peace-loving man he had been before. This may be due more to his circumstances than to his nature, however, since when the spoils of war are distributed, Hernán Cortés and Gonzalo Dávila get more than their share while «A Juan Cabezón le tocó nada. O tan poco que lo consideró nada. Con las manos vacías [...]»
(125). He remembers what another Spaniard had told him: «Sólo codicia y cólera tenemos, lo demás es hambre. Hambre de todo: de vida, de años, de dinero, de mujeres, de muerte»
(154). Having come full circle from being a hungry, ragged orphan in Spain to a poor ex-conquistador in New Spain, Juan determines to use what little money he has and borrow additional funds from Gonzalo Dávila to open an inn. In the end it is his hunger and poverty that allow him to be a gentle innkeeper rather than a cruel encomendero like Gonzalo Dávila.
Like the pícaro of the Hispanic literary tradition, Juan adapts his behavior and even his personality to his circumstances. As in Spain, in Mexico City he conforms to the status quo, and even attends the auto-da-fe at the end of which don Carlos of Texcoco is burned for heresy and idolatry32.
En su posada, Juan Cabezón comprendió que por más que le repugnara el espectáculo de la quema de un hombre, tenía que estar presente; pues de lo contrario, se levantarían sospechas contra él [...]. |
| (229) | ||
As picaresque antihero, Juan's incessantly wavering convictions do not allow him to be either an unequivocal crypto-Jew in Inquisitorial Spain nor a fully committed conscientious objector in the conquest.
Memorias del Nuevo Mundo continues after the conquest of Tenochtitlán and narrates several years into the early colony of Mexico City, which is being reconstructed with the sweat and blood of Mesoamericans. In this post-conquest period, various characters from 1492 resurface. The inquisitorial dwarf Rodrigo Rodríguez reappears at the end of Memorias and once again propitiously pretends not to recognize Juan Cabezón. Although the blind man Pero Meñique had died in the earlier novel in his failed attempt to assassinate the Grand Inquisitor, his son Pánfilo Meñique comes to New Spain where he works as a botanist and naturalist and falls in love with the Spanish niece of Gonzalo Dávila, who gives him permission to marry her only to see them both die in an epidemic. And Juan Cabezón's son, the friar Juan de Flandes, arrives in the New World after having fulfilled the request of the emperor Carlos V, who has not mastered the Spanish language, that Fray Juan accompany him to Spain.
There the young friar rediscovers his converso roots, and demonstrates an interest in learning more about his Judaic origins. When he tours a Dominican school funded by gold confiscated from conversos convicted by the Inquisition, he realizes that he cannot identify with the Christian religion as it is practiced by the inquisitors: «[...] cruzó por su mente la imagen de su madre perseguida por ellos y sintió la urgencia de entregarse a una religión de amor y no de terror, de amistad y no de odio entre los hombres»
(253). In order to learn more about the Jewish people, he sets about reading the many antisemitic tracts produced by Inquisitorial Spain; as much as he might study these, «[...] aunque desbarataba las razones en las que estaban basados, no podía explicarse el rencor vicioso de esas almas fanáticas»
(258).
He is curious about his mother who was burned in effigy and his father who preferred to «[...] perderse en los caminos oscuros de este mundo, durante los días de expulsión de los judíos de España, que someterse al tribunal del Santo Oficio»
(257). Although he is a member of a religious order, he refuses to reject his converso parents: «[...] en lo íntimo de su alma no había renunciado a ellos [...]»
(257). Rather, he determines to seek out his father in the New World.
Juan de Flandes manages to embark on the same voyage as Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, who is bringing with him the «Leyes Nuevas» of 1542 intended to reform treatment of indigenous peoples. In Mexico, Juan de Flandes falls in love with a Spanish widow who is one of Gonzalo Dávila's lovers and who has a fatal disease. Soon after the widow dies, Juan de Flandes becomes ill also, after a mission to Zacatecas where he impregnates a Chichimeca woman. His mother Isabel de la Vega reaches Mexico and is reunited with Juan Cabezón just in time to see their son die. During the intervening decades, the inconstant protagonist had never made any effort to keep his promise to search for his wife and son in Flanders. Nor does it appear that he was romantically faithful to Isabel, since for most of the conquest he is accompanied by a Tlaxcalan woman.
At the end of Memorias del Nuevo Mundo, the narration shifts from the omniscient third-person narrator back to the previous novel's first-person narration. In the final pages, Juan Cabezón says that if he were a chronicler of Indies, he would describe his own life thus:
| (373) | ||
This is how the protagonist summarizes his own experience as a conquistador on the margins of the conquest.
Now nearly a hundred years old, Juan Cabezón prepares to leave the world as he entered it, «sin nada entre las manos»
(372), a poor, hungry orphan of Castile. Evoking the conversation he had overheard in 1492 upon entering Teruel, when a ragged man, asked whether he was Jew or New Christian, responded that he was neither, only a man, at the end of Memorias Juan Cabezón participates in the following exchange when he is interrogated by a Spaniard in the street: «-¿Sois conquistador, poblador o vagamundo? -Fui conquistador. -¿Qué sois ahora? -Un hombre»
(379). The final word on Juan Cabezón's identity is reminiscent of a passage from Octavio Paz's essay «Los hijos de la Malinche»:
El mexicano no quiere ser ni indio, ni español. Tampoco quiere descender de ellos. Los niega. Y no se afirma en tanto que mestizo, sino como abstracción: es un hombre. |
| (Laberinto 78-79) | ||
Juan Cabezón's ambiguous identity is emblematic of what Paz terms an unresolved identity conflict stemming from the conquest (Laberinto 87).
Aridjis's two novels recounting the adventures of Juan Cabezón are paradigmatic of the corpus of new Latin American historical novels33 that rewrite the conquest because they address the problematic question of how to narrate the imperial enterprise from a marginal perspective34. Such novels must somehow account for the protagonist's presence in the conquest, without changing the basic facts of history. In the case of 1492 and Memorias del Nuevo Mundo, this question is dealt with by making Juan Cabezón a half-outsider in the conquest, an ambivalent antihero who evokes some sympathy in the reader in spite of his vacillation between ideological positions.
Converso, curandero, conquistador, Juan Cabezón refuses to be the unwavering conscientious objector that the reader is led to expect. As Albert Memmi explores in The Colonizer and the Colonized, everyone who lives in a colonized State -or even in the far off homeland of the colonizer- is somehow implicated in the colonial process. As Aridjis's waffling conquistador demonstrates, there is no avoiding this imbrication.
The equivocal figure of Juan Cabezón allows Aridjis to examine the conquest from a perspective that parallels the ambiguous identity of Spanish American criollos and mestizos:
| (Herren 258) | ||
This anecdote addresses the central question of many rewritings of the conquest and colonization of the New World: the problematic role of Spanish Americans as the offspring of both the victims and the victimizers in one of the most atrocious genocides in the history of the world. Without glossing over the bloodshed, 1492 and Memorias del Nuevo Mundo display the gaps in the rhetoric of inquisition and conquest in order to confront head-on Latin America's problematic origins in a violent clash between cultures.
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