Carlos Fuentes - Hydra Head

Then the voice of the buried slave spoke with the tongue of the doomed princess and led the Conquistadors to the eternal, high, central seat of authority, of the power of Mexico: the mesa of Anáhuac and the city of Tenochtitlán, the capital of Moctezuma, the Lord of the Great Voice.

Cortés converted Malintzin twice: first, to love; second, to Christianity. She was baptized Marina. The people call her Malinche, name of betrayal, voice that revealed to the Spaniards the hidden weaknesses of the Aztec empire and permitted fifteen hundred gold-hungry adventurers to conquer a nation five times larger than Spain. The small voice of the woman defeated the great voice of the Emperor.

But beneath the land of the Malinche lie riches greater than all of Moctezuma’s gold. Sealed in geological pits more ancient than the most ancient empires, the treasure of Chiapas, Veracruz, and Tabasco is a promise in a sealed bottle: to seek it is to pursue an invisible cat through subterranean labyrinths. The patient drillers penetrate two, three, four thousand meters deep into the sea, into the jungles, into the sierra. The discovery of one fertile well compensates for the failure of a thousand sterile ones.

Like the Hydra, the oil is reborn, multiplied, from a single severed head. Dark semen in a land of hopes and betrayals, oil fecundates the realms of the Malinche beneath the mute voices of the stars and their nocturnal portents.