November 6, 2024
It would be just like my father Juan Carlos Alvarado to leave me only with a name, and for that name – Malinche – to mean “la chingada,” the one who was raped. And the sixteenth century la Malinche was triply-raped – raped by the Aztec men who enslaved and owned her, raped by the Spaniards who led her to betray her own people, and raped by the verdict of male historians who did not understand her. My father disappeared when I was but a six-year-old, guilty of first-degree murder, condemned to twenty-five years in prison. He left me nothing other than that name – and the memory of his blows to my mother. My mother wanted to give me a pretty name – Mariana, Georgina, or Pilar – but my father had insisted that I be named “Malinche.” La Malinche is a controversial figure, reviled by most Mexicans as a villainous traitor, defended by a few as the mother of the mestizo nation, but no one denies she was raped. And so, I have always thought of myself as being somehow “la chingada” – the raped one – especially now that I am sleeping with Slim John on a regular basis. I suspect that some of my Chicano brothers think the same, that I should stick to my own and not be screwing my gringo oppressor. But who is anybody to tell me that I cannot sleep with a married white boy if I damn well please?
My first memories of childhood are not of opening gifts under a Christmas tree nor of roller skating in the park nor of flying a kite in the sky. No, my first remembrance is the sound of the crack of my father’s hand across the face of my mother and hearing it repeatedly. I remember one time especially, when my father arrived home in a fury wearing his baggage handler’s uniform. As soon as he entered through the door, he screamed at my mother and demanded a beer in his gravelly voice. My father was a large man, blonde-haired, blue-eyed and ruddy, looking nothing like the typical Mexican, though he had been born in Sinaloa and detested the gringos.
“Why are you screaming?” my mother cried.
“I’ve been driving around for an hour, trying to get my temper down. That son-of-a-bitch Reynolds fired me. Who does Reynolds think he is, anyway? He can shove that job up his ass.” And then my father shouted, “Give me a beer, Norma. I want it now!”
“There is no beer,” my mother responded in her even voice. “You and your buddies finished all that was left last weekend.”
“What do you do with all the money I give you? I can’t believe it! I can’t even have a beer!” And then he proceeded to strike her. Once, twice, three times, he kept hitting her, beating her to the rhythm of my child’s excited heart, until I moved toward my father and pulled at him hard by his navy-blue pants.
“No, please no!” I cried. “Don’t hurt my mother!”
And then my father did something I did not expect; he angrily took me by the shoulders and threw me hard against the wall. Immediately afterward, he looked at me quizzically, as if he himself could not believe what he had done. I could feel the warm wet blood oozing out of the back of my head, and I felt suddenly dizzy. It was a pain I had never felt before, a sensation of burning, and I could not believe it had been inflicted on me by my own father. That was my baptism in violence, with my skull dipped in red instead of holy water. Years later, when two of my Anglo lovers beat me, punched me, slapped me, I would return to that well once again, attracted to my tormentors like a moth to the heat of a light bulb.
My parents had to take me to a hospital, the doctor put stitches on my head, and one of the nurses asked me what had happened. I glanced at my father, who looked at me nervously, and I knew I had to lie.
“I was climbing a tree,” I said to the nurse, “and I fell on the ground.”
“Are you sure, honey?” she asked, “Is that how you got hurt?” and somehow, I had the sense that she was looking at my father, that somehow, she suspected what had happened.
“I am sure,” I lied to her. “The tree is a very tall tree, the biggest tree in our backyard.” It was the first time I ever lied, and my father seemed to be pleased. He looked like a Spaniard who had miraculously dodged an Aztec’s arrow.
Like me, la Malinche the indigenous woman was fucked ever since she was a child. After her father died, about ten years before the Spanish conquest of Tenochtitlan, her mother sold her to a group of slave traders, who in turn handed her over to an Indian tribe, which forced her to become everyone’s whore. It is one of the ironies of history that her original name was Malinalli, which means “princess of suffering” in Nahuatl. And how she suffered! From a very young age, la Malinche’s body was public property, rented to anyone who would pay. Her mother’s excuse for abandoning her was that she had remarried, had had a son with her new husband, and her new husband wanted la Malinche banished so that his son would inherit everything. To hide her unmotherly conduct, la Malinche’s mother announced in the public square that la Malinche had died and conducted a mock burial of her abandoned daughter. She and her husband even created elaborately dressed effigies of la Malinche, as was the custom, and burnt them in a special ceremony at night. Finally, they placed the empty casket at the foot of a pyramid and an Aztec priest blessed it before burying it in the ground next to the temple to Huitzilopochtli, never to be remembered again.
My mother’s excuse for abandoning me and for erasing me from memory was similarly heartless, or “desalmada” as I would call it, meaning “without a soul”. She claimed to be suffering from some great depression, some mental illness, supposedly caused by my father’s mistreatment, and my mother placed me in foster care, supposedly for a brief time but it proved to be forever. If it had not been for Doña Maria – a kind and old Yucatecan woman who took me into her home – I do not know how I would have ended up.
As a Yucatecan, Doña Maria knew not only what can be learned from books, but also the stories that had been passed on from generation to generation about la Malinche, who had been a slave in Yucatan. And so, she described how la Malinche, a thirteen-year-old sold by her mother for a mere nine-hundred cocoa beans and a few copper tejaderas, was first raped by her captors. Initially Doña Maria did not fill in all the details, but with the passage of years, she told me the whole story. I think she was trying to warn me about the evil that lurks in the hearts of men; I wish that I had listened. By the time I was fifteen I knew exactly how la Malinche had been raped by two drunkards when she was just thirteen.
I was hired by the Border Patrol in part because I can understand and translate into English the words of Mexican and Central American immigrants whom we capture at the border. Malinchista? you ask. Malinchista, which means traitor in Mexican Spanish, betrayer of the Mexican people, an indigenous Judas. Well, what difference does it make? After all, there are more than sixteen thousand agents patrolling the southern border, about half of whom are Hispanic. I am but a drop of water in an ocean, a grain of sand in the desert, and if I did not work “protecting” the border, someone else would take my place. La Malinche was instrumental in the victories of the Conquistador Hernan Cortes, the first chingon, over the doomed and star-crossed Aztecs. By contrast, all I do is prevent a few souls, a few of my carnales, from entering the United States, from crossing the so-called border. And unlike la Malinche, my actions have never resulted in the killing of a single one of my brothers, not in all of these years. So if people want to call me a Malinchista, they are welcome to it. Quite frankly, I simply don’t give a damn.
Slim John Reynolds is my partner on patrol duty along the border, and we also mess around. The first time was virtually a rape since I was so drunk that I was not even conscious when he took me. All I remember was at some point telling him in a groggy voice, “I need to sleep, Slim John, I’m so tired, maybe tomorrow.” And then I remember waking up, several hours later, with the smell of semen and sweat on my body and Slim John lying on the bed next to me, wearing only his shirt, wide awake and staring at me as if he wondered what my reaction would be. But I made nothing of it that first night. Like the original la Malinche, I have a capacious panocha – especially when it comes to white boys – and I’m sure that with time I would have slept with Slim John anyway, since we spend so much time together alone at night in remote locations. So, I began to sleep with him on a regular basis, knowing that he was married.
Slim John is blonde-haired and blue-eyed, about six feet tall, with a strange resemblance to my father Juan Carlos Alvarado, and a habit of chewing tobacco. Unlike my two prior boyfriends, he is kind – at least to me – and has never struck me like Steve and Paul. They were brutal like my father, and I can still remember the sting of their open palms across my face, the black eyes, the sores, the insults, the daily humiliation. Slim John, on the other hand, can be tender at times, despite his gruff exterior. I remember soon after we started messing around, he gave me a pendant with the Virgin of Guadalupe on one side and the words “so that you may always be protected” on the other. Then there was the time that he drove all the way to Los Angeles to attend the funeral of Doña Maria. “I know you loved her as much as I loved my grandmother, my beloved Anna Lee. I was at her side every weekend, as she struggled with an inoperable cancer.” And in telling me about his love for her, I saw a side of Slim John – a vulnerability, a tenderness, a compassion – which I had never seen before and which somehow helped me forget, for a time at least, that our first encounter had been a rape.
La Malinche’s body was traded like a commodity, first among the Indians, who shared it as if it belonged to all, then among the Spaniards to whom it was offered by the natives as a gesture of peace after the battle of Tabasco, given so that la Malinche could be raped by one white man and then another, finally violated and taken as a lover by Hernan Cortes the Conquistador. At first, Cortes had turned over la Malinche to one of his men, by the last name of Hernandez, who treated her like an animal to be mounted, never showing her any gentleness, nothing approximating love, and willingly letting his fellow Christians rape her whenever they wanted, and this after they had insisted that she be baptized in the Catholic faith. And then, after discovering her gifts as an interpreter and her great intelligence – la Malinche had learned Spanish in a mere six weeks – Cortes had decided to take her as his own.
Doña Maria told me that for the first time in her life, la Malinche was treated with kindness. Although la Malinche did not want to sleep with him, Cortes did not beat her, and he was gentle that first night. He began by caressing her face, something which she had not experienced in all her years as a sex slave, and although she knew the end was preordained, he did not rush her. Cortes was patient with her, slowly disrobing her, kissing her softly, letting her take her time. When she started sobbing gently, he told her, “Do not worry, from this day on, you shall only be mine,” although that would prove to be a lie. And when he finally took her, he made an effort to also please her, but she was too afraid, despite his gentleness, despite his caresses, to achieve jouissance. After all, it was still a rape, she could not say no. And yet she was thankful for small mercies. Cortes did not leave her after satisfying his lust, as so many other men had done; he let her fall asleep in his arms.
Slim John’s face is that of a boy with freckles, and at the same time somehow angular and hard. He has a deep-seated dislike for those he calls “illegals,” but he has made it clear to me that he doesn’t mean Mexican-Americans, just those immigrants who “jump” their place in line.
“After all,” he repeatedly says, as if it went without saying, “we cannot have open borders. If all those ‘illegals’ were to be allowed into America, we would lose our country.”
Last week, Slim John and I were driving through the desert in our white SUV in southern Arizona, searching for illegal aliens who had breached the border. All we viewed during most of the trek were towering cactuses and every so often a paloverde tree. Suddenly we saw a long pole crowned by an orange flag. Slim John said, “Wait,” and parked the vehicle, and I exited it at the same time as he did. The temperature must have been more than a hundred-and-ten degrees. There was a big cooler at the base of the flagpole, filled with plastic water bottles and things to eat. Then Slim John did something unimaginable: he took the water bottles, opened their lids, and spilled the water onto the hot desert sands. He did the same with each of the ten bottles, as methodical as a pharmacist. Then he took out the sandwiches and proceeded to tear them to pieces as he laughed himself into a tizzy.
“This way the ‘vatos’ will realize that crossing the desert is not easy, they’ll understand it means their certain death. Those water bottles were left there by priests or bleeding hearts, who don’t give a shit about securing our border. Once the illegals figure out there are no water bottles in the desert, they’ll do what they should and just stay home.”
“What are you doing?” I protested. “Do you want people to die of thirst? Those migrants need the water.”
“Don’t worry,” he responded. “Word will get around, Malinche, and no illegals will dream of crossing the desert to get into our country ever again.”
“That is criminal,” I exclaimed.
“You think they’re all saints, don’t you, Malinche?”
“Neither saints nor villains, just people hoping to make a decent living.”
“Well, I haven’t told you about this, but last month I attended the trial of two members of Mara Salvatrucha who had raped my cousin Monica during a burglary. They were both covered in tattoos, one of them even had a tattoo of the Virgin of Guadalupe on his arm, if you can believe it. And you know what happened? They got off with less than a year in jail because they were minors. One of the bastards even smiled at me mockingly after the verdict was rendered.”
I do not know how I could have forgiven Slim John for his senseless cruelty. I can only think of the desperate face of the Salvadoran man dying of thirst who sees an orange flag in the distance – which means water, which means life – and then, upon arriving, finds nothing, to his horror, and collapses, only to die upon the burning desert sands. That is what Slim John has wrought, that is what he has made certain by his actions. That some day a man or an entire family, perhaps young children who look like me, with the same brown skin, the same jet black hair, will perish in the desert because they could not find a wretched bottle of water beneath an orange flag, because the racist Slim John had emptied it out to teach the despised illegals a lesson. And still I sleep with him, knowing that he’s a monster, drawn to him like a mouse to a mousetrap. Oh yes, Malinche is an apt name for me! I can’t think of any better.
“La Malinche used her gifts to betray her indigenous brothers,” Doña Maria would often tell me, “not only as an interpreter but also as a spy for Hernan Cortes as he tried to best the Aztec emperors Moctezuma and Cuauhtemoc. La Malinche’s defenders can argue all they want that la Malinche had no option, that she was a slave of the Spaniards and had to help them as an interpreter. But la Malinche went far beyond that, and helped Cortes achieve victory in a number of battles against the native Mexicans.”
At one point la Malinche was with Cortes, when he and about five-hundred of his men were encamped at a site next to the town of Cholula. Cortes met with the Cholulan cacique and as usual, la Malinche served as his interpreter, as his voice. The Cholulan leader, a slim olive-skinned man with the slightest of moustaches, greeted the Conquistador warmly, promised him an alliance against the Aztecs. He brandished a golden chalice filled with wine and offered it to Cortes to cement their friendship. But la Malinche was dubious. She knew that the Cholulans had been longtime allies of the Triple Alliance, which included the Aztec Tenochtitlan, as well as Texcoco and Tlacopan, and after the meeting was over, she whispered into the ear of Cortes her rapist-lover: “I wouldn’t trust the Cholulan leader. I wouldn’t trust him at all.” By then, la Malinche was firmly in the Spaniards’ camp. According to Doña Maria, the only explanation possible was that la Malinche had fallen in love with Cortes, that she loved him more than she loved her own people, even though Cortes was married to a Spanish woman at the time, even though la Malinche’s relationship with Cortes had begun with a rape.
The day after the meeting with the cacique, la Malinche visited the open-air market in the center of Cholula, ostensibly to buy some produce, but with the secret intention of obtaining information that would be helpful to Cortes. At some point, an old indigenous woman, her head covered by a purple shawl, her face wrinkled like a raisin, approached La Malinche and making an intimate gesture with her left hand, beckoned la Malinche toward her.
“I know you are a slave of the Spaniards,” the old woman said almost in a whisper, as if she didn’t want anybody else to hear her.
“Yes, that is true,” la Malinche replied. “I am the slave of Hernan Cortes.”
“Well, I wanted to give you a warning,” the old woman answered. “I trust you because you are one of our own. Tomorrow the Cholulans will ambush the Christians in their camp. If you do not escape, you may be killed in the tumult.”
“At what time will the ambush take place?” la Malinche asked.
“At the crack of dawn,” the old woman answered. “Come with me right now and you will be safe. You will be welcomed by our community. And you are a beautiful woman. I shall marry you to one of my sons.”
“If I flee right now, the Spaniards will be suspicious,” la Malinche said. “I shall leave tomorrow just before the crack of dawn, before the Cholulans begin their attack.”
“Good,” the old woman said and gave la Malinche a kiss on the cheek.
Immediately la Malinche went to Cortes in his tent and warned him about the impending attack. Not for an instant did she consider heeding the old woman’s advice. The Spaniards launched an immediate surprise assault against the Cholulans and ultimately massacred the Indians, thousands of them, all in front of la Malinche’s eyes. The Cholulans’ arrows were no match for the Spaniards’ muskets and cannons and Cholula was covered by the Indians’ blood. It is not for nothing, Doña Maria concluded, that Cortes once admitted that after God, the person most responsible for his conquest of Mexico was la Malinche herself.
At some moment Slim John and I receive a call from headquarters. Apparently, they’ve found a boxcar full of “illegals” some thirty miles from the border. We’re advised to go to the scene immediately, that at least three of the aliens have survived and need to be processed. We are not told the condition of the others, though Slim John tells me that they are probably all dead, trapped in an overheated metal box from which there was no exit.
“These are the dog days of summer,” Slim John says without emotion, “when the rattlesnakes come out of the earth. Hard not to suffocate to death in a boxcar in this heat, especially if it’s crowded. Those stubborn illegals simply will not give up. I bet some of them even brought their kids along for the ride. I tell you, if it wasn’t for us, half of Mexico and Guatemala would be living in L.A.”
If it wasn’t for us… I repeat the words in my mind and think thoughts which I have repressed for a long time. If it wasn’t for us – the United States Border Patrol – migrants would not brave the deserts. Entire families would not have to die in rivers. Señores and Señoras, respected in their towns as gente de bien, would walk peacefully to the homes of well-off gringos, where they would find jobs as nannies and gardeners, never to bother anyone again. They would escape grinding poverty, crime, gangs, you name it, a lack of medical care. If it wasn’t for us… the words stick to my mind. If it wasn’t for us, there would be no unaccompanied minors, no tent cities full of squalor on the southern side of the border, no kids separated from their parents, certainly no boxcars full of desperate day laborers, dying a slow and grueling death. If it wasn’t for us…
When we arrive at the scene, a police officer approaches us and tells us that there are three men waiting for us. We walk across the yard, and I get a view of the inside of the train: cadaver piled upon cadaver, all of them mostly undressed, brown bodies like mine, who must have died in the dark, who must have perished making a desperate effort to somehow make a hole in the corrugated walls of the boxcar. Three men are squatting on the ground, with their bodies against the freight car, all of them visibly exhausted, all of them sweaty and disheveled, their t-shirts ripped, their faces blackened by dust, their blue jeans cut off at the knees. When Slim John and I walk toward them, one of the men stands up and makes a plaintive cry in Spanish: “They have my son!” he exclaims amid tears. “I want them to return my son!”
“Tell him that is not possible,” says Slim John with his usual voice of command. “That all of the victims will be taken to the morgue, and that he has to return with us, so we can take him back to Mexico.”
I explain to the man in Spanish that he has to come with us and that there is no way he can bring along his son’s cadaver.
“Are you a Mexican?” he asks incredulously, having noticed my accent. “And you work for la migra? You are telling me I have to leave without my son, without my thirteen-year-old son? I am not going to leave until I figure out how to make arrangements to take him with me to Durango.”
I ask him his name.
“Diego,” he meekly responds.
I pat him on the shoulder. “Come on, Diego, come with us. Everything will be all right.”
He pushes away my hand angrily and begins to cry out inconsolably. “I am not going to leave without my Javiercito! I don’t want to leave him alone!”
Slim John moves toward him. “Come on, amigo,” Slim John says in his middling Spanish. “Don’t make this difficult for us.” Then he tells Diego, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.”
Suddenly Diego and Slim John are tussling on the ground as the other two migrants watch in silence.
“Cuff him!” Slim John yells, once he has his knee on Diego’s back. I instinctively proceed to take out my handcuffs and put them on the man’s wrists.
“Please, Diego,” I tell him. “Just walk with us to the SUV. I’m sorry about what has happened.”
“Malinchista!” he cries out, as if he could read my mind. Then, sobbing in a mere whisper now, he follows me to the vehicle, leaving his Javiercito behind, probably never to see him again, since the boy’s cadaver will in all likelihood be buried in a mass grave, along with all the others who died on the train.
“No need to have been such an asshole,” I tell Slim John once we are driving through the desert. “That man just went through torture, seeing everyone die around him, and he even lost his son. You didn’t have to treat him so roughly.”
“It’s all part of an honest day’s work,” Slim John responds, a tone of satisfaction in his voice. “Those illegals only face such calamities because they disobey the law. So, I don’t feel any pity for him, Malinche. It was a punishment of his own making.”
During the rest of the ride, I am silent, seething really, over Slim John’s insensitivity. And this is the man you choose to sleep with, I think to myself, as I look at the black winding road ahead of us.
The Mexicans, since the time of the Conquest, have called themselves “hijos de la chingada” – sons of the fucked one – sons of la Malinche, the product of a rape, both literal and symbolic. Hernan Cortes did not just rape la Malinche with his Spaniard’s body– he also raped the entire native people of Mexico when he forced the Aztecs to turn over Tenochtitlan to the power of his muskets and cannons, to his men dressed in bright armor, to the Spaniards riding on horses with their weapons of steel. And during the final Spanish onslaught against the island capital of Tenochtitlan – city of wonder, city of pyramids, city of ancient temples – la Malinche had been at the side of Cortes, witnessing the annihilation of the Aztecs from the sidelines, forgetting they were her own people. There is no denying that la Malinche was an alcahueta, the mediator who facilitated the rape of an entire nation. The question is why la Malinche acted in the way she did, why she stayed with Cortes given that she had multiple opportunities to escape?
This afternoon, Slim John and I are sitting in the SUV, in front of a property close to the border whose owner has reported that over the prior few days a number of illegal aliens have crossed in plain sight on their way al norte. With the air conditioning on, it’s comfortable inside the vehicle, but outside it’s a punishing sun.
We’ve been sitting in our seats for two hours when suddenly Slim John rolls a joint, lights it, and then offers it to me.
“No,” I tell him. “Not during work hours.”
He shrugs his shoulders and says, “It’s not as if anybody would know, Malinche.”
And then Slim John spends the rest of the afternoon smoking marijuana; he says it’s good for the lungs, especially on such a boring day. By five o’clock he’s thoroughly high and his voice gets groggy.
“Come on, Malinche,” he slurs. “Give me a kiss, it’s a good time for some loving.” I push him away and tell him to stop smoking weed and to turn his attention to the task at hand.
I take out my binoculars and in the distance, coming out of the thorn scrub, I see a human figure. I start the engine of the SUV and drive towards him. I reach him in less than a minute. He’s an adolescent boy, who looks like a walking advertisement for the Virgin of Guadalupe. He has her image tattooed on his left arm, he has the image of her on his t-shirt and even on his baseball cap. As I exit the vehicle, I tell Slim John to stay inside, but he does not listen to me and follows me, moving somewhat clumsily, as I walk towards the boy. The young immigrant – he must be around sixteen – takes a few steps behind the thorn scrub and instead of running away, he stands his ground, apparently waiting for us. He has olive skin like me and sharp, vivacious eyes.
“Come on, amigo,” Slim John says in unsteady, stoned Spanish. “You’re going to have to go on a ride with us.”
To my great surprise, the youth answers in English, “I’m on the Mexican side of the border, amigo. So, you can’t touch me. I’ll be back in a couple of weeks. I’ve crossed the border many times, and there’s nothing the migra can do to stop me.”
“You insolent prick!” Slim John exclaims. “So you’ve been to America before.” Then in a muddled voice he adds: “I’m going to arrest you – you – you damn illegal…”
“Can’t touch me dude!” the boy retorts, with a voice full of a defiant joy. “I am standing in Mexico, my amigo.”
But Slim John lunges at him, and the boy clocks him hard in the face. “You son-of-a-bitch,” cries out Slim John and then he takes out his pistol and shoots the boy straight in the jaw. The boy collapses and his blood splatters across his face and chest, covering the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe on his t-shirt with a crimson streak. I feel very hot, my heart palpitates. I look at the boy’s destroyed face and am filled with horror. I have never seen a man die, not in all of my days, certainly never seen anyone shot straight in the jaw from a short distance. On the ground, dying, the boy looks like a hunted animal, like the bloodied carcass of a slaughtered cow. He barely moves, he only twitches as he looks at the reddish desert in the distance, looking at America, the object of his unfulfilled desires. And then he attempts to mutter a few words under his breath, but I cannot understand him, his voice is garbled, his blood keeps coming from his mouth. And yet I am sure it is a final prayer to the Virgin of Guadalupe.
From that moment on I see everything in slow motion, like a series of slides against a screen: Slim John is suddenly alert, he tells me the boy is dead, then he opens the trunk of the SUV and brings out his toolbox, takes out a switchblade, makes sure not to leave any of his prints on the knife, then puts it into the boy’s left hand, tells me, “It’s o.k., Malinche, that’s a Mexican chaveta bought in Tijuana, I’ve always carried it in my toolbox just in case something like this happens, nobody will ever know, Malinche, you just have to remember he came at me with the knife and I had to shoot him in self-defense, let’s just wait a minute, wait for the pot to get out of my system, you’ll see, we won’t get into any trouble, we just have to cover each other’s backs, it’s a simple story, Malinche, must have happened a hundred times…”
Here we are, Slim John and I, on either side of the dead immigrant boy, a grotesque re-enactment of a nacimiento, a Mexican crèche. For some reason I remember a painting by Jose Clemente Orozco in a glossy book about the Mexican muralists which Doña Maria cherished, a depiction of Cortes and la Malinche naked, Cortes white as milk, la Malinche dark as brown sugar, with a dead Aztec boy at their feet. There is nothing more to be done, the boy killed by Slim John has no pulse, his face is completely disfigured. In my mind I repeat what Slim John has said: it must have happened a hundred times…
“What have you done?” My voice is a scream, a complaint, an accusation. I am suddenly beset by fury. I’m sure my face is red like the desert horizon, and my eyes begin to well up as I stare at the dead immigrant boy lying on the ground.
“I don’t know,” Slim John wanly responds, lifting both arms in the air as if to excuse himself.
“You have killed an innocent child, and over nothing, Slim John. Don’t you realize what you have done?” And then the tears begin to fall from my eyes, I cannot stop crying. Lloro a mares, as they say in Spanish – I am weeping oceans.
“I don’t understand what happened,” Slim John replies, his voice a distant whisper, still a little groggy, his face as pale as that of the dead boy lying prostrate on the desert sands. “I think – I don’t know – perhaps he reminded me of the gang member who attacked my cousin. He was just as cocky; he also had a tattoo of the Virgin.”
“I need to go for a walk,” I tell Slim John, making an effort to regain my composure, wiping away my tears. “To sort things out, to see what I have to do.”
“What do you mean, my Malinche? We’ll both tell the authorities that the boy lunged at me with his knife. Nobody will doubt our story.”
“It’s not so simple,” I reply. “I need to think.”
“What was I supposed to do? He punched me in the face. Do you want me to go to prison for years over a simple mistake? I was high. You know I was high.”
“I’ll be back in an hour, Slim John. Just give me some space. And a little time.”
“Don’t leave me, Malinche! Don’t leave,” Slim John cries out. “You owe me this one.”
“I owe you nothing,” I respond, as I begin to walk away from him.
The original la Malinche had a chance to escape her rapist-lover during la Noche Triste, the Night of Sorrows, when Hernan Cortes’s troops were being decimated by the Aztec warriors. After being attacked for several days by the Aztec army, the Spaniards had decided to escape the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan during a heavy rain and la Malinche faced a life-and-death decision: to stay with the Indians, returning to her people, or to join Cortes and his soldiers as they sought to flee the Aztec capital in the darkness.
The Night of Sorrows was brutal; it was an interminable night. More than six-hundred Spaniards were killed by Aztec arrows as they attempted to make their escape, and a great number drowned. Those conquistadors who were captured by the Indians were promptly sacrificed to the Aztec gods, their heads decapitated, their hearts torn out with obsidian knives. And so in all that tumult, la Malinche could have escaped from her Spanish captors forever, and joined her Indian brothers and sisters, but she chose not to do so.
She accompanied Cortes over a causeway which the conquistador used to exit from the Indians’ capital – a bridge which at times was covered by the bodies of the dead Spaniards and their allies – and she did not leave the side of her rapist-lover, not even for a moment, even when they were forced to survive by eating their own horses.
When Cortes cried at the foot of a tree after his disastrous escape, la Malinche was standing next to him, trying to give him comfort. She had made her choice, and when Cortes returned to Tenochtitlan, triumphant now, vanquishing the emperor Cuauhtemoc and his Indian subjects, la chingada – the raped one – was also with him, ready to be raped once again when Cortes abandoned her. In fact, la Malinche stood at Cortes’ side, close to the gallows, when the Aztec emperor Cuauhtemoc was hanged, forever ending a dynasty that had lasted for centuries, and la Malinche never said a word. La Malinche never said No.
I start to walk along the road that marks the border between the United States and Mexico, this llaga, this open sore, this wound. I really don’t know what to do, and I have such little time to make up my mind. Perhaps the curse of la Malinche is finally having its effect on me, when I must choose between loyalty to a lover and loyalty to my people, indeed, loyalty to humanity. Should I report exactly what happened to the authorities, knowing that it would mean a lengthy prison term for Slim John? Or should I lie – it would be such a simple lie – and say that the boy had attacked Slim John with a chaveta? Just as I had lied for my father, so many years ago, after he had thrown me hard against a wall. After all, I cannot bring the boy back to life. What good could I achieve by turning in Slim John?
On the other hand, I would be the ultimate traitor, the ultimate Malinchista. To let the murder of that Mexican boy on the border go unpunished – how would I be any better than la Malinche witnessing the hanging of Cuauhtemoc and saying nothing because of her loyalty to Cortes? Indeed, wouldn’t I be much worse since I have never been enslaved like la Malinche? True, la Malinche had multiple opportunities to escape her Spanish masters and failed to do so, but she had been raped into submission. She was like a hostage, beaten down again and again, somehow thankful for the generosity of her captor Hernan Cortes. The never-ending rapes had lasted more than fifteen years, and she had eventually succumbed. Her body had always belonged to someone else, and never to herself. Doña Maria had not understood the full story. Like so many others, she had judged la Malinche from the point of view of a man. If la Malinche had returned to the Aztecs, what guarantee did she have that she would not once again be raped, once again be treated as la chingada?
Now it is I who must decide whether or not to leave my rapist-lover or stay at his side and protect him. And yet today, in the crack of an instant, I have suddenly realized that Slim John actually raped me, that he caused the deaths of so many migrants through his cruelty, that he murdered a brown boy over a simple punch, and I suddenly feel rage, an avid rage, an omnivorous rage that has been building up over time and which I have refused to acknowledge. No, I am not la Malinche, I refuse to be Slim John’s puppet, he raped me once, but I do not belong to him. And so, I reach my decision and walk back to the site where I left Slim John with the boy. It is not an easy choice, but I believe it is the only one possible.
“Welcome back, my Malinche!” Slim John says with a smile. “I was getting worried. I think we can call headquarters now and report the accident.”
“Wait, Slim John, wait.” I suddenly feel dizzy and need to sit down, but there is nowhere to sit. “I need a drink of water.”
Slim John hands me his canteen and I let the cool water run down my throat. I am trying to think of the words I must use, but the words do not come easily.
“Everything’s o.k., right, Malinche? We’re both on the same page?”
“No,” I answer. I know how Slim John shall receive that word, like an abuser’s slap in the face.
“You’ve decided not to help me? Is that what you’re saying? That you want me to go to prison for years? You’re not going to tell them the son-of-a-bitch attacked me with his knife?”
“No,” I repeat. “No, Slim John, no, I will not.” I had not imagined how empowering it would feel to finally be able to simply say “No.”
La Malinche could never, in her entire life, say “No” to any of the men who had abused her, to the men who thought they owned her, but I can.
“Well, I’ll tell them that the motherfucker stabbed you with his knife!” Slim John cries. “That I shot him after he attacked you.”
“What are you saying, Slim John? Please don’t do this. Don’t make it harder than it already is.”
But Slim John goes to the corpse of the immigrant boy and takes the chaveta from his left hand. He stands up with both arms at his side, his dark silhouette against the setting orange sun, the blade of the knife shining bright against his leg.
“What are you doing? Drop that knife! Drop it now, Slim John. Have you gone mad?”
“He killed you, my Malinche. And I had to shoot him. The insolent cocksucker stabbed you when you tried to arrest him.”
Slim John starts to walk towards me, and he doesn’t stop, holding the chaveta up in the air.
“No,” I tell him. “No,” again and again. No, I will not let you kill me with that unsheathed knife. You raped me once and I forgave you, but I shall not let you rape me once again.
I shoot him point-blank in the face. I call headquarters and report his death and that of the migrant. I start crying, ceaselessly, as la Malinche would have wept if she had stood over the corpse of Cortes her rapist-lover.
