Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories - Italo Calvino [84]
MYSELF: Or not allowing ourselves to be dominated by others, not ending up like yourselves under the Spanish! If you had killed Cortes's men, no, I'll go further, listen carefully to what I'm going to say, Montezuma, if you had cut their throats one by one on the altar as sacrifices, well then I would have understood, because your survival as a people was at stake, your perpetuation through history…
MONTEZUMA: See how you contradict yourself, white man? Kill them… I wanted to do something far more important: conceive them. If I could have conceived the Spanish, brought them into my manner of thinking, been sure of their true nature, whether gods or evil demons it didn't matter which, or beings like ourselves subject to divine or demonic will, in short if I could have made of them - inconceivable as they were -something my mind could dwell on and grasp, then, and only then, would I have been able to have them as my allies or enemies, to recognize them as persecutors or victims.
MYSELF: For Cortes, on the other hand, everything was clear. He didn't worry about this kind of thing. He knew what he wanted, the Spaniard did.
MONTEZUMA: It was the same for him as for me. The real victory he sought to gain over me was the same: that of conceiving me.
MYSELF: And did he succeed?
MONTEZUMA: No. It may seem that he had his way with me: he tricked me many times, he sacked my treasures, he used my authority as a shield, he sent me to die stoned by my own subjects: but he didn't succeed in possessing me. What I was remained forever beyond his imagining, unattainable. His reasoning never managed to trap my reasoning in its net. That is why you come back to meet me amidst the ruins of my empire — of your empires. That is why you come asking me questions. Four and more centuries after my defeat you are no longer sure you conquered me. Real wars and real peace don't take place on earth, but between the gods.
MYSELF: Montezuma, now you've explained why it was impossible for you to win. The war between the gods means that behind Cortes's marauders lay the idea of the West, lay history that never stands still, that presses on, swallowing up those civilizations for whom time has stopped still.
MONTEZUMA: You too superimpose your gods on the facts. What is this thing you call history? Perhaps all you mean is the absence of equilibrium. Whereas when men live together in such a way as to establish a lasting equilibrium you say history has stopped. If you had managed to be less enslaved to this history of yours, you wouldn't be coming to reproach me for not having stopped you in time. What do you want from me? You've realized that you don't know what it is, this history of yours, and you are wondering if it mightn't have had a different course. And to your mind, I should have been the one giving history this different course. But how? By thinking the way you think? You too feel the need to classify everything new with the names of your gods, everything that turns your world upside down, and you are never sure whether those gods are real gods or evil spirits, and you are quick to become their prisoners. The laws of the material world seem clear to you, yet that doesn't mean you stop expecting that from behind those laws the design that shapes the world's destiny will reveal itself. Yes, it's true, at the beginning of your sixteenth century the fate of the world was not yet settled perhaps. Your civilization of perpetual motion still didn't know where it was going — as today it no longer knows where it can go — and we, the civilization of permanence and equilibrium, might still have swallowed it up in our harmony.
MYSELF: It was too late! You Aztecs would have had to land near Seville