Old New World

THE BERNAL DIAZ CHRONICLES (414 pp.)--Translated by Albert Idell--Doubleday ($5).

THE CONQUISTADORS (404 pp.)--Jean Descola--Viking ($5).

The myth of New England is profoundly different from the myth of New Spain, and so are the realities. Both parts of the New World may now be good neighbors, but the heirs of the Pilgrims have a hostile notion of all that the Spanish fathered in Latin America. The austere image of the Puritans of 1620 kneeling on the bare beach at Plymouth has obscured in the U.S. mind the more complicated grandeur of the equally devout men who, 100 years before, had kneeled at Mass on their beachhead near the place they came to call Vera Cruz. The notion persists that the Spanish conquest of the New World was a cruel and disgraceful business. Two new books may do something to destroy what Salvador de Madariaga has called "an article of faith" in the Anglo-Saxon world--"that Spain means cruelty and oppression."

One of the books, The Bernal Diaz Chronicles, is the first new English version in 50 years of Diaz' famed history of Cortes' conquest of Mexico. The new translation is so smooth that the story gains as a narrative but lacks something of the awkward dignity with which the proud old soldier must have recalled his years of service under Cortes. The book inevitably evokes Herodotus--another old soldier who lived to remember and tell--as Diaz begins: "I am an old man of 84 and have lost my sight and hearing. It is my fortune to have no other wealth to leave my sons and descendants except this, my true story, and they will see what a wonderful one it is."

In contrast, The Conquistadors, by French Scholar Jean Descola, lacks the firsthand touch of that truly wonderful story; it is a brilliant work of historical synthesis, written with an eloquence that is Spanish and an aphoristic bite that is French. For part of the way the two books travel together, since both chronicle the Cortes conquest. The 16th century soldier and the 20th century scholar tell much the same story--the fantastic saga of Hernan Cortes, a vagabond student from Salamanca who became one of the most famous conquerors in history.

Dream Landscape. "His mission was religious and military," says Author Descola, and makes clear that at the time no Spaniard saw a contradiction in this. Cortes formed his expeditionary fleet in Santiago de Cuba, and his flag bore the device: "Brothers and comrades, let us follow the Cross, and if we have true faith in this symbol, we will conquer." The facts will always remain astonishing--how Cortes scuttled his ten ships (not "burned behind him," but dismantled and sunk, despite legend and the Encyclopaedia Britannica) and with his Aztec mistress, 400 Spaniards, 15 horses and ten cannons, advanced against the unknown things that lay behind an 18,000-ft. mountain wall. The fantastic outcome--in which Spanish chivalry and Christian faith matched themselves against the Mexican capital, set like a city of legend amid its lagoons in the mountains--takes on the nature of both myth and history. Armored knight met priest-warrior, each masked in the symbols of his faith.

The Indians who were fighting Cortes have been glorified by many historians; nevertheless, these books make clear that the battle was between the armed faith of Christian Europe and a cruel empire whose ceremonies seemed to the Spanish soldiers a bloody, blasphemous parody of the Mass. Inland, the conquistadors first met the strange Mexican-Indian priesthood, men whose hair was caked with human blood and whose temple floors were clogged with it. The Christians had no hesitation in breaking their idols. Even then they had no notion that in the city of Tenochtitlan as many as 20,000 human sacrifices had been made in one ceremony. Victims stood in queues miles long waiting their turns, as relays of beaked and painted priests presided at the altar set up at the top of the pyramid-temples to cut out living hearts with stone knives.

Cross in Blood. Particularly in the Diaz version, the story has the nature of a dream landscape described by someone who had all his senses about him. Its quality is indicated in passages as stern and unsentimental as a death sentence: "We dressed our wounds with grease of a fat Indian we had killed, for we had no oil, and had a good supper on some of the dogs they breed to eat. The houses were deserted and the food had been carried off ... but during the night [the dogs] returned to their houses and we snatched them with relish."

Diaz' Chronicles ends with Cortes; leaving him behind, The Conquistadors moves on to Francisco Pizarro, the conqueror of Peru, whose life matches that of Cortes for sheer drama.

What Author Descola calls "the prodigious curve of this incomparable destiny" begins with a child abandoned on the steps of a church in Spain. It passes through the forming of his expedition in Panama, his defeat of the Incas and his majesty as a marquis, ruler of "the empire of the sun." It moves, finally, to his death, like a Shakespearean tragic hero's on the swords of conspirators. Bloody feuds had broken out, and Pizarro's murderers saw themselves as avengers. Descola describes the scene: "This old man of nearly seventy handled his sword like a youngster. There were twenty against Pizarro and blows rained upon him. His arm weakened. A final thrust, and the Marquis crumpled, his throat cut. He cried out his confession and then, unable to speak more, dipped a hand in his own blood and traced a great cross on the floor ..." A contemporary chronicler wrote: "Afterward he was poorly buried. All his grandeur and all his riches vanished, and the means could not be found to pay for candles at his burial."

The Judge. In his story of Cortes, Pizarro and the other conquistadors--Balboa, Coronado, Ponce de Leon, De Soto--Author Descola gives not only gaudy melodrama but also psychological insights, which make the figures on this great tapestry emerge as living men. In the end it was the Dominican, Las Casas, the "Apostle of the Indies," who judged the conquistador's pride. A conquistador himself before he entered his order, he served as a bishop in Mexico and bitterly fought against Spanish officials for the abolition of slavery; history has vindicated his demand that the conquered has equal spiritual rights with the conquerors.

Concludes Descola: "These were the contradictions of the conquest . . . Humane at one point, at others the conquest was barbaric. [These] reflections never ceased to torment the Spanish kings. They had received from the Pope a mandate to convert the Indians, though they also intended to master the New World and to extract from it the gold for financing their European wars." This unresolved irony is the theme of Descola's haunting history.

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