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  My corner started to fray, coming apart in two layers. I tugged a little.

  “Gently,” said Zé.

  I gave him a look that meant As-if-you-needed-to-tell-me-that. He countered with a Don’t-forget-everything-we-went-through-to-get-this look. But soon he was tugging gently on his corner too.

  “Wait,” I said. “Can we make it warmer in here?”

  “Excellent idea. There’s a surface thermostat under the edge of the slab, right where you’re standing.”

  I found the knob and turned the setting up, as high as it would go. We resumed pulling. Within seconds, the warmer slab surface had loosened the layer we were trying to remove.

  “Hang on,” he said. “My edge was lifting off until it got too warm. Try lowering the temperature just a bit.”

  A few more adjustments and we were able to peel the entire surface from the folio. This separated layer was intact, except the tequila spots, and transparent except where painted. It looked like a cel from an animated film.

  “¡No me lo puedo creer!” I was astounded by the technology, the ingenuity, and the precedent. “We’ve lifted a layer right off a codex!”

  “It was a clothed codex,” Zé said, his eyes glistening, “and we’ve undressed it.”

  And it was true. The background of the image—the name and date glyphs, the objects—had not changed, but the four human figures in the scene were now completely nude.

  “This is unprecedented…” I kept muttering.

  “Maravilha,” I heard Zé say under his breath.

  “Have you photographed...”

  “Of course,” he cut me off. “Every folio has been meticulously digitized.”

  “Where?”

  “In the next room.” He shrugged. “As you have probably noticed, I can afford my own equipment.”

  “Who would have done this?” I took a deep breath, the questions coming to me all at once. “Why are they naked? Naked is usually a very bad state of affairs in these codices. Do you think the other folios have these layers too? What is the layer made of? It must be some kind of wax, no?”

  “Maybe, then as now, censorship was an obstacle that artists had to thwart creatively...” Zé trailed off, glancing toward the entrance to the room. I followed his gaze and saw Jota, dressed only in an apron.

  “Dinner is ready,” Jota said.

  “Thanks, perfect timing. We have just made an extraordinary discovery, but let’s refresh ourselves before continuing to the other pages. Marisol, I should tell you that Jota’s special skills include gourmet cooking.”

  “Great! I’m starved,” I said, which was suddenly quite true. I wondered if Jota had been the one who had digitized the codex folios using the in-house equipment. But mostly I wondered, although I refused to say it out loud, why these men were naked, or nearly so in Jota’s case. Was this really what they meant by complete freedom? Was there some relation to the nude figures in this astounding codex?

  Chapter 5: To Illumination

  We strode further down the hall and around toward the back of the house, Zé pulling his robe on as we walked.

  He shrugged. “I always dress for dinner.”

  He led me onto a veranda as lavish as I had come to expect. There was an elaborately set table for two, with a stunning view of the sunset over the surrounding hills.

  “There to the southwest you can see the lights of Dallas starting to come on.”

  “Why do you live here?”

  “Please, sit down.” He pulled out my chair for me. “Like many drawn to this city, I am here for the oil. My family has energy interests, and I administer this… outpost for them. In truth, I am my family’s ovelha negra.”

  “The black sheep?”

  Zé sat down across from me. “Exactly. This is something like an exile for me.”

  I looked around again. “Heck of a place to live in exile.”

  “Well. Yes. My family has much money. You should see their home in Rio! But, the problem is, I do not care for oil, I do not know about oil, I do not study energy of any kind. I do not have the business sense of my older brother, Pedro, who runs our family company now. What I do have is a refined aesthetic appreciation. I love art and architecture, history, anthropology, philosophy, literature. So, my father, who was very traditional, did what generations of cariocas have done with certain of their sons: he sent me to study in Coimbra, in Portugal. And then when I graduated they set me up with this parcel of land so I could make something of it.”

  “You mean you designed this house?”

  “I did.”

  “It’s beautiful.”

  “Thank you. Yes, my parents and my older brother came to make an inspection, you know, to see if I had proven I was good at anything. They were very impressed. But I think it was too easy, because I had virtually unlimited funding.”

  “Is your family involved in… you know… substances that are available only under special conditions?”

  “Marisol! Por favor. Don’t drag my family’s name down like that.”

  I found it amusing that he felt so insulted. “Do you understand where my question comes from? Do you understand why I feel like I can’t quite trust you?”

  Zé gradually unknit his brow, his fingers drumming along the stem of his wine glass. “Yes, I suppose I can understand why you would ask. My brother… is not the most ethical person I know, but I assure you that my family is not involved in drugs, or prostitution, or illegal commerce of any kind.”

  Jota brought a bottle of a Chilean merlot and served us.

  Zé put on a smile and lifted his glass. “To illumination.”

  I repeated the line as we clinked our glasses, but I gave a quizzical look.

  “It’s a family tradition. My surname, Queluz, can be understood to mean ‘what light!’”

  I smiled. “Very appropriate. The meaning is the same in Spanish, just pronounced differently. But, tell me something… what do you know about me? Do you even know what my surname is?”

  “Of course I know. I read your passport. Marisol Aguilar Xicoténcatl, born in Xalapa, Veracruz, 1986.”

  “Nice. And, uh, how exactly did you get my passport?”

  Jota was fidgeting next to the table.

  “It shall remain a mystery, I guess,” said Zé. “Jota, the sun is setting. Would you mind illuminating some candles for us?”

  Jota lit the candles. I waited for him to leave, then I leaned into the middle of the table and spoke low. “Zé, look, I’m pissed off at you for bringing me here against my will. Jota said I should text my family and Maestra Filo, and I did, but I don’t know what to tell them next. You said I have complete freedom. So, I want answers. Let’s start with this: why do you say Gutiérrez is a fraud?”

  Zé looked to the horizon. “The codex would have been in danger in the hands of that clown. You heard nothing of what I told you in the display room?”

  “I tuned out—sorry. I was focused on Sun Prince.”

  “Let me start at the beginning, then. When my family assessed this house favorably, they encouraged me to continue using my aesthetic talents for the benefit of the company. Specifically, they asked me to begin collecting art as a form of investment. So I did, and I have collected quite a lot over twelve years. What you’ve seen in the hall is only a fragment of the total collection.”

  Jota brought us our salads. He had heard Zé and couldn’t resist commenting, “It’s a lot to dust.”

  Zé coughed and continued, “Yes, well, from the visual arts I became interested in historical documents, and particularly those related to the indigenous cultures of the Americas, such as the codices. That’s what led me to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin. Have you heard of it?”

  “I know all about it. It’s an excellent arts and humanities archive. My goal is to attend UT’s graduate program in history.”

  “Good! I am glad to know this. I think that would be a very good choice for you,” Zé said, fixing a carrot on the tines of
his fork. “If there’s some way I can help you…”

  “Kidnapping me really didn’t help much,” I said, snapping my napkin over my lap with exaggerated force. “Neither did knocking out the department chair, who, as we’ve established, you claim is a fraud.”

  Zé pursed his lips. “You never know. Just consider what I showed you. You could make a name for yourself.”

  “How, if it’s a stolen codex?! This isn’t getting any better. And you still haven’t told me why you knocked out Gutiérrez or why he’s a fraud, and what’s the rush.”

  “Patience,” Zé said, finishing a bite of salad while I rolled my eyes at his unbridled irony.

  “I was at the Ransom perusing their Mexican collection,” he continued, “and one of the archivists mentioned that there was a UT professor who is a specialist in sixteenth-century Mexico.”

  “Gutiérrez?”

  “Sim, but I didn’t know it at the time. The archivist didn’t remember his name. So I searched faculty directories and read about their specialties, and decided it was probably Gutiérrez. I set up an appointment with him to talk about something else, and met him in his extremely disorganized office…”

  I waited for Zé to finish another bite. The salad was delicious, the view was incredible, and I just kept thinking it was a hell of a place for an exile and his kidnap victim to be dining.

  “And so? Go on, tell me… then what happened?”

  “We were talking about areas of mutual interest, like the colonial castas paintings, and then he was called out of the office. So… I snooped around. Marisol, that guy is a cook! I mean, kook - he’s a kook! He had articles about aliens teaching the Maya how to build pyramids, or aliens teaching the Egyptians and then the Egyptians teaching the Maya, you know, all that pseudoscientific bunk that’s incredibly racist. Can you imagine? Why would he have all that stuff?”

  Zé paused to work on his salad, and I did too, thinking back to what I researched on Dr. Gutiérrez when I had first been considering grad school programs. Boorish as he was, the man had a solid research reputation with no trace of extraterrestrial shenanigans.

  “Maybe,” I ventured, “he collects those articles precisely to show his students how ridiculous they are. Maybe he has his students keep a look-out for those kinds of pseudoscience articles and help him collect them.”

  Zé looked abashed. After swallowing a couple bites, he said, “You know, Marisol, maybe you are right. I had not thought of that. But so we finished our conversation eventually, and then some months later when he called to invite me to go with him to Puebla, to see whatever it was that had been found at the Palafox, my reaction was that I should go, with the mission of keeping him from getting his hands on anything that he was going to attribute to visiting Martians.”

  “Very unprofessional,” I had to admit. The whole accusation that Zé was making just didn’t seem to fit, though, with what I knew about Dr. Gutiérrez. Or, with what little I thought I knew.

  Jota retrieved the salad plates and delivered our main course, a colorful combination with a savory aroma.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  Jota looked down at me, uttered “Fusion,” and walked away.

  “Please forgive Jota,” said Zé. “An excellent chef, but testy. People are just supposed to try the food without asking about it. For him, ‘fusion’ means experimenting with different so-called national cuisines.”

  I took a bite—it was some sort of fish. The sauce was smoky and rich, with hints of pineapple, cilantro, chipotle and almond. We enjoyed several bites before I took up the conversation again.

  “You know, regardless of whether Gutiérrez is a kook, I hope he recovers from the wallop you gave him, because as I said, I want to go to UT grad school in his department, and I don’t need to be associated with this bad experience he’s had.”

  “And so this is what I’m telling you,” Zé continued as he finished chewing. “You, with your Nahuatl, you help me interpret the codex and translate the narrative, and we both make our names professionally, you see? And if you still really want to attend the UT program, then the professor—the department chair—he’ll be grateful to us for our scholarly work on Sun Prince.”

  I cleared my throat. “Lovely. You can’t be sure he’ll be so grateful.”

  “Não se preocupe. We will figure it all out.”

  “You know, I could easily choose not to believe you. Not to trust you.”

  Zé wrinkled his forehead. “Your choice.” The bite of fish that had been waiting in midair on his fork finally found its way to his mouth.

  I smiled. “Let’s pretend, then, for right now, that I believe you and trust you. Tell me what you think, because this is all very mysterious. Why was that missing birth registry in the chest with the codex?”

  “That is a fundamental question. Exactly—why? Who knows? Maybe we will know when we figure out what story the codex tells? And that is also what else is very mysterious: how the Luz y razón narrative was made, and how it got separated from the codex. Had the friar said anything to you about that narrative before?”

  “Nada.” I chewed and pondered a moment, thinking about the friar’s final words. “You know what? ‘Busca la luz’ can mean ‘look for the light,’ like a command, but it can also mean, ‘it looks for the light,’ as if the codex were looking for illumination.”

  “Yes, this is a good point, and entirely appropriate, now that we know it is a ‘clothed’ codex. But, so the friar did not read Nahuatl?”

  “I’m fairly sure he did not, no.”

  “So the most he could have read were those beginning sections. But when we found it, it was sealed, remember? Why would he have done that?”

  “Good question.” I thought about it while scraping the last of the rich sauce from my plate. “I really don’t know.”

  “Do you think he knew about the existence of the codex before the plumbers found it?”

  “He must have hoped for its existence, but he had probably long since given up on any unknown codex surviving the bonfires of the Inquisition. I’m sure he knew that since the codices were like picture drawings, the colonial Spaniards often recruited or coerced the help of Nahuas who knew how to ‘read’ the pictures, and then they would translate the readings into cristiano, as they called it, meaning Spanish. This probably would have happened in the sixteenth century.”

  Zé traced his finger through the air, along an imaginary timeline. “And then someone, maybe Palafox himself, decided to hide it in the wall when the library was built.”

  “But remember, the library was built more than a century after Palafox died. Palafox may have put it in the chest, but someone else put the chest in the wall. Another mystery. Why would someone hide it?”

  Zé’s eyes lit up. “I think I know why. The Inquisition would not have tolerated it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They would have considered it to be a blasphemous document. In the opening section, this Sun Prince guy shows up naked and encourages people to live without clothing.”

  “What?!” I dropped my fork. “Sun Prince did what?! You’re kidding me.”

  “No, no. Not kidding. I mean, I could not understand all of it, because Spanish is just not the same as Portuguese of course, but I could understand a lot. I’m fairly sure that’s what it said.”

  “Wait a second. You read it already?”

  Zé coughed. “While you were knocked out on the plane. By the way, I think you should translate it to English, our common language and the biggest readership market.”

  “Hold on, hold on here! I have not even read this yet. You said Sun Prince was naked… so then the nude figures under that transparent layer on the codex surely prove that the narrative goes with it, beyond a doubt… This is crazy!”

  I sat back in my chair, observing Zé while he finished his fish. His robe only partially covered his torso. “So what is it about not wearing clothes? Is this a recent thing for you?”

  “Believe it o
r not, it has been my practice for many years now to be nude whenever possible. Ask Jota if you do not believe me. And Jota goes nude when he can too—he learned that from my example. But, and this is interesting indeed, I believe that the friar’s reason for not wearing anything under his frock was in fact precisely because he had read the opening parts of this narration, Luz y razón. As he said, the book was very important to him and influenced him. Read it! You’ll see.”

  I took a sip of wine. “I’m not convinced. You didn’t know him. He was deeply devout.”

  “What does that have to do with it? Not one thing. We are all naked under our clothes, Marisol. It was highly symbolic, don’t you think? The friar unpeeled himself, as it were, in his last moments, maybe to give you a message that, we now know, corresponds to a codex that also needed to be unpeeled.”

  “Maybe… but as we already said, he probably didn’t know about the codex. And he couldn’t have known about the earthquake…”

  “Maybe he had to be prepared,” Zé said. “Always.”

  I felt a little sting of tears. “He was always very nice to me, and he got me that job at the library. Now what am I going to do?”

  Zé extended his hand across the table toward me. I hesitated, then put my hand in his. He squeezed it. “I’m very sorry for today’s events, Marisol. Although I’m very glad to get to know you, and to have you here with me, I am sorry for the circumstances.”

  We sat in silence a few minutes, staring out at the darkening sky. Then he changed the subject to wines and chocolates, and we enjoyed both of our understandings of the word sobremesa: in Portuguese, it’s dessert, while in Spanish it means an after-dinner conversation at the table.

  At some point, when the moon was already high, Zé spelled out some options for me. “It’s late,” he said. “As I told you, you have complete freedom. You are free to go as you choose. Jota can give you a ride to a hotel—there are several nearby—where you can spend the night at my expense, or wherever you would like to go. If you wish, Jota can drive you to the airport and I will pay your ticket back home. But, please consider staying here. You can sleep in the guest room. You’ll find everything you need in there, and you won’t be bothered. Breakfast whenever you’re ready tomorrow morning, and we can get to work.”