Malinche Read Online Free PDF

be in the audience at the ceremony of New Fire, which was celebrated in those parts every fifty-two years. It was an important event, but Malinalli’s mother had taken longer than necessary to return. After midnight, laughter and noises were heard coming from Malinalli’s mother and her new lord. They returned cheerful and very lively, for the man, by the heat of the New Fire, had proposed and she, very pleased, had immediately accepted. She invited him in and prepared his hammock. When Malinalli’s mother was about to lie down to sleep, her mother-in-law interrupted her.
    â€œThree years ago today,” she said, “your daughter was born. Today is her birthday. Why weren’t you with her? Why didn’t you care enough to place the red conch over her pubis?”
    â€œBecause then when she is thirteen I would have to perform for her the ceremony of ‘rebirth,’ and I will not be there to do it.”
    â€œHow is it that you will not be by her side?”
    â€œI am going to give her away.”
    â€œYou cannot rip her from me. She belongs to my heart, she belongs to my feelings. In her is the image of my son. Or have you forgotten him?”
    â€œEverything is forgotten in this life,” she answered in a cutting tone. “Everything lapses into memory. Every event ceases to be present, loses its value and meaning, everything is forgotten. Now I have a new lord and I will have new children. Malinalli will be given to a new family who will take care of her, for she is a part of the Old Fire that I want to forget.
    â€œNo,” the grandmother demanded, “I am the one who is here to show her the way, to smooth out her existence, to prove to her that the dream in which we live can be a pleasant one, full of songs and flowers.”
    â€œWe don’t all dream the same thing,” the daughter-in-law replied. “The dream can be cruel and sorrowful as mine has been. She will be given away because everything in this life is forgotten.”
    â€œIt is obvious,” the grandmother said in an authoritative voice, “that you will neither shed a tear nor worry over what happens to your daughter. I see that you have forgotten the advice of your mother and father. Do you think that you came to this earth to act wildly, to go to bed and rise merrily with your new lord? Have you forgotten that it was the God of All Things who gave you that girl so that you may show her the way through life? If that’s the case, then let me care for her. As long as I live, let Malinalli remain by my side.”
    Malinalli’s mother complied with the grandmother’s wishes, and so it was that from that day forward the girl was lovingly educated by her grandmother.
    As a result of the long talks between grandmother and granddaughter, from the age of two the girl’s speech had been precise, abundant, and well structured. By the time Malinalli was four, she could express doubts and complex concepts without difficulty. The credit was her grandmother’s. Very early on, she had taught Malinalli how to sketch out codices in her mind so that she could exercise both language and memory.
    â€œMemory,” she told the girl, “is seeing things from the inside. It gives shape and color to words. Without images, there is no memory.”
    Afterward, she would ask the child to draw on a piece of parchment a codex, a sequence of images that narrate an event. It could be real or made up. The girl spent long hours drawing and at night, the grandmother would ask her to narrate her codex before going to sleep. This is how they played together. The grandmother greatly enjoyed the intelligence and creativity with which her granddaughter elaborated on the images she had made on the parchment.
    Malinalli never imagined that her grandmother was blind. She thought her grandmother behaved normally and spoke beautifully. The tone of her grandmother’s voice caressed her ears and made her