Let me share with you one of the most beautiful reveiws of Bernal's epic, writen by the great Guatemalan writer and poet Luis Cardoza y Aragón (from his book "Guatemala: The Lines of Her Palm", translated into English by Michelle Suderman): I started leafing through The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico at my student's desk, at night by lamplight. I skimmed summaries, the odd page, then began my reading in an orderly fashion. Tirelessly, I penetrated further and further into the enchanted forest, mesmerized by the story and by this encounter with my warrior culture, with the conquest. I was entering a distant and fascinating world. I witnessed and experienced the legendary campaign. I saw and heard it. I smelled its odor of iron, gunpowder and tired bodies. I was awed by the descriptions of Tenochtitlan, the markets and Moctezuma's court. The blood looked fresh on the steps of the pyramids. As Humboldt points out, the exhilaration of a newly discovered world is better transmitted by chroniclers than by poets. My first contact with this work was positively prodigious. Exhaustion came after reading for many hours without being able to stop. Captivated by descriptions and memories, I kept going, reading a little more, just a little more. I finally left off when the light of the new day began singing in my window. This is the most comprehensive work on the conquest of America, though it speaks only of New Spain. It contains a wealth of information, and details of all orders, that we do not find in posterior writings on related events-not even adding them together. It was written in Antigua Guatemala, where Díaz del Castillo took up residence in 1545 at the age of forty-nine, and where he died in 1584 after having lived there for about thirty-nine years. He was an old man when he wrote his Discovery and Conquest, nearly half a century after the siege of Mexico Tenochtitlan and the conquest of Guatemala. Bernal Díaz del Castillo's chronicle is the most important and engaging of all, the most truthful and comprehensive account of the conquest of America. He wrote it not only in his quest for truth, to refute the chronicles of Cortés's chaplain, Gómara, and his followers, but out of a need to relive the conquest, out of the same hunger that engendered Don Quixote in Cervantes. Old wounds were opened as he wrote: he himself confesses that he slept with his arms loaded, and that in his old age, he slept fully dressed, accustomed to the exhausting days he spent in Mexico. He was twice conqueror, but the true conquest was the one he carried out seated at his desk, still wearing armor, but no longer wielding the saber.
There are very close ties between this work and the author's life. There was nothing else he could have written. His heart was spilling over with it. Chroniclers would write of the Peru campaigns, campaigns against Turkey, Flanders or Italy, of strangers fighting strangers. Díaz del Castillo wrote about his life and about the land where he placed it at risk countless times. That is what makes his work unique, superior to the writings of historians for the perfect spontaneity of his testimony. He is the unknown soldier, the sweating troops bearing their arms and spoils, walking alongside the chief's mount; through him, they were given a voice, immortality. Pen in hand, he became the great adventurer, with the same fury as when he wielded his sword, with the faith that made his companions envision St James slaughtering Indians in the name of the Lord. He left us the conquest, fresh and bloody, gasping for all eternity.
