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  Zé held his hand to his chin and began pacing around the kitchen. Dora moved to sit next to Pedrinho to help with his math assignment. Jota was preparing more coffee.

  “This necklace is probably related to the codex,” Zé said. “Why would they have been kept hidden together, if not? Countless statues and figurines—nude or otherwise—were destroyed by the Spaniards. If Palafox kept this one...”

  I interrupted him, in the desire to keep separate what I knew from Filo’s text about a letter from the former viceroy and library founder. I wanted to know if Zé had made some connection I’d missed. “But we don’t know that Palafox has anything to do with it. The library wasn’t built until the eighteenth century, remember?”

  “Sim, Marisol, but we know the codex is from the sixteenth century. My guess is that Palafox spared it, and the necklace, for some reason. Probably for the same reason. Your former teacher Filomena—is she at her university now?”

  “Yes. La Universidad Veracruzana, in Xalapa.”

  “Here’s what we’re going to do: let’s give ourselves today and tomorrow to finish disrobing and digitizing the codex, and as much of the translation as you can finish. Then, we’re bound for Xalapa.”

  “Eu também?” Dora chimed in. “I want to go to Mexico."

  “Não, mãe, you and Pedrinho can leave for Rio the same morning, and we’ll meet you there the next day.”

  I was not used to zipping around on a private jet. I was not used to having my whereabouts dictated to me. But I liked the plan. I would be able to return to Xalapa and see Filo, and re-evaluate if I wanted to just stay in Mexico, stay away from this whole situation… or travel to Brazil.

  After breakfast, Dora was in charge of Pedrinho, and Zé and Jota spent the rest of the morning and most of the afternoon carefully lifting the wax layers off each and every one of the remaining folios of the codex. Sure enough, they discovered—and called me to come see—that in the gardening scene, in the woman upside-down scene, and in all of the folios, all of the human figures were rendered nude when unpeeled. Even the dark-robed priest underneath an eagle was revealed to be naked, and, curiously, there appeared to be a snake hung over his bare shoulders. The snake was only visible on the bottom, or nude, layer. The priest’s name glyph meant Obsidian Heart.

  I texted Filo to let her know we would arrive in a few days, and then I got down to work. I translated into English the section that I had read the night before as well as the second of the two sections that were already rendered in Spanish. I tried to adopt a formal tone in English, maybe somewhat biblical, to match the way it was written in a Spanish tinged with the cadence and lexicon of scripture. Right off the bat in this second section, I suspected why the translator had proceeded no further:

  On the morning of 7-Water, 1-House, 10-Reed [June 10, 1515], a priest, walking home from his temple, passed one of the common gardens. There he saw Pilli hoeing and humming, unclothed and with his penis rigid.

  The priest stopped and called out, “Man, there! What is your name? Why are you out in the open with your sex aroused? Have you no shame?”

  Pilli did not cease plowing but answered, “There is no shame in throbbing. Could it be that you have never done so, nor heard the hummingbird throb? Flying, for the hummingbird, cannot be without throbbing. Does not the hummingbird’s throb incite the wet bloom? Does not the bloom’s sheen incite the flying throbbing?”

  The priest looked around and saw no one nearby. “Where is the bloom, then, that excites you so?”

  And Pilli answered, “But does not the hummingbird throb at times without the bloom? And does not the bloom moisten at times without the humming? It is always the cycle of force in health, this blooming, this throbbing.”

  “But it incites those who witness it,” replied the priest. “It incites them to act excessively and shamefully.”

  “There is no shame in the throb and the bloom,” said Pilli. “We are not called on to hide ourselves or our sexes. Would you hide the spring when you have not thirst, the fruit when you have not hunger? Only is there shame in failing to follow our calling as grown men and women: to honor the throbbing and the blooming and what may come of their meeting; to protect children from acts which they cannot understand; and, when our sons and daughters are beginning

  to mature, to teach them of sowing and reaping in the garden they may one day tend.”

  The priest felt hot in the bright sunlight, and bothered by what he was seeing and hearing. Again he addressed Pilli, saying, “But what about the man who is incited by the throbbing of a man, and the woman who is incited by the blooming of a woman?”

  “Have you not heard me?” Pilli asked. “I said, there is no shame in the bloom and the throb. We are not called upon to hide ourselves nor our sexes. From blooming may many flowers moisten, from throbbing may many hummingbirds flock.”

  The priest stood still longer in his dark robes, sweat streaking the soot on his forehead. “Do you not know of our shortage of enemy captives? Would that the throbbing and blooming of our enemies made for more bountiful gardens in their lands.”

  At this, Pilli threw down his hoe. “You would filch fruits from your neighbor’s garden, only to mulch your own? Truly such great and stupid wickedness I cannot abide. Know you not that sapling-hacked limbs a poor fire make? Better to let grow the tree, to let it bear its fruit, and only much later will the firewood’s resin delight.”

  The priest pointed mockingly at Pilli. “What has happened to your throbbing now?”

  Pilli answered, “Perhaps you feel satisfaction now? You have robbed me of the joyful throbbing I found in work, the vigorous flowing of life through my limbs. Yet you do not even know whereof I speak. Were you to spend less time inside the smokestink of the temple, sulking in your sootsuit, and more time in the embrace of your father, the sky, and your mother, the earth, then even you would easily learn to follow the throbbing of your penis, the beating of your heart, the very melody that needs must spring from your lungs.”

  The priest took offense, and made to attack Pilli. But

  Pilli overturned him, and pinned him to the ground by his cloak, and sitting over him said, “Did you not ask my name, when first you hailed me? I tell you that one way I am known is Tonatiuhpilli, the Sun Prince. Do I not seek, then, Xochiquetzal, Precious Flower, the bloom who throbs in the hum of my sunlight? I have come here to Xalapa to seek her, the precious flower. This woman I speak of is as my sister, yet she is not my sister, because she is my lover. We are as twins of one spirit, she of the water, and I of the sun. We are separate, but we are one, just as the throb of the hummingbird and the bloom of the flower, together, are the very thrumming of breath, of blood, our gift of life.”

  And then Pilli wrestled the priest, and rent his clothing, pulling it from him, in the time they groped on the wet ground.

  When the priest was unclothed, Pilli squeezed his body, and he said to him too, “Look how the throbbing is born again from us both! Be not ashamed, but be alive, be aware! Now go, wash from yourself the blood of those you have sacrificed, and return not to that dark tomb of yours until you have ceased to live. Go, tend your garden!”

  This priest, who was called Ixtilyollotl, Obsidian Heart, took up his torn robes and returned in fear to the temple, where he pierced the skin of his penis with a maguey thorn and spilt his blood, believing this to be an act of penance, and nursed his wounds in soot and smoke.

  This, I saw, was where the translator had stopped. Whoever the translator was, had he felt ashamed by the words he was writing? Had he, or his employer, feared the fire-and-iron tyranny of the Inquisition? Bloodletting from the genitals, the tongue, and other body parts had been common practice for Mesoamerican priests... Though I could not be sure of the emotions of those who had been involved in the translation, my own overriding feeling was awe. Here I was, continuing the translation project almost five hundred years later, adding yet another language, English, to the mix. I had certainly never read anything quite like this�
��so earthy, so sexually forthright… but so ecstatically beautiful and poetic at the same time.

  And, as I had just read, this had taken place in the very city where I was born and raised, and where we would visit Filo in a few days according to Zé’s plan: Xalapa, now the capital of the state of Veracruz. In Pilli’s time it was an Aztec-controlled city toward the eastern edge of their empire.

  Fascinated, I wanted to keep reading and translating, even though I feared what might happen to someone as outspoken as Pilli. Also, I wondered if by reading about Pilli, I might understand more about Zé. It seemed to me that Zé, even before he knew of the existence of the Sun Prince, had been channeling his philosophy.

  Chapter 8: Real Magic

  From Nahuatl to English: I spent the rest of the day working on translating another couple chapters. It was slow-going, but fortunately my years of studying the language were supplemented by a comprehensive Nahuatl dictionary and reference grammar in Zé’s impressive library. Yes, of course he had an impressive library, and elegant, too, stocked with all kinds of materials on art and literature in the Americas.

  On the afternoon of 10-Snake, 1-Vulture, 10-Reed [June 26, 1515], Pilli stopped to rest on the steps of the temple of Tezcatlipoca. The priest Obsidian Heart saw him and knew him, and cried out to him, “You defile the steps of the temple with your bared buttocks!”

  Pilli answered him, “So lowly are my bare buttocks that they are lower than your bare feet? Our bodies are whole and sound and they do not defile. Our bodies are temples far greater than this pile of stones.”

  And Obsidian Heart replied, shouting, “My ears hear your mouth spewing blasphemy, and my eyes see your buttocks where they should not be. My heart knows that you will suffer the torments of Tezcatlipoca when your lungs no longer breathe in this world.”

  To this, Pilli questioned, “Why do you persist in dividing yourself, and in dividing me? One body may have many desires or many woes, but one body must act on them altogether: feet, ears, mouth, eyes, buttocks, heart, lungs, and all else.”

  By this time a crowd had gathered at the base of the temple. When Obsidian Heart went to summon guards, Pilli turned to the people and called, “Each one of you, every body of you: listen and know! We are all bodies, and we are all temples! We are walking temples when we walk, swimming temples when we swim. We are dancing temples when we dance, and loving temples when we love. When we die, we are dying temples.”

  Pilli stamped his feet on the stone steps. “Do we cover these steps with cloth? Each one of you, every body of you: let the dirt cover your temple, let the rain wash it, let the wind sweep it, and let the sun warm it. The temple is you. Your home is you. Would you hide your home from the elements?

  “Perhaps you are concerned that your home is more modest than your neighbor’s home. Perhaps you prefer to hide behind curtains those parts of your temple that you wrongly think to be excessive or lacking in size, or diminished in strength, or beauty, or honor. But I say to you, hide not your breasts, nor your belly, nor your buttocks, large or small, for they are the rounded bounties of all that is nourishment and movement. And hide not your genitals of man nor woman, for they are the noble flint and hearth that bring light and warmth to the dawn. Every last stone of your temple is wondrous; let all your parts dance in light and dust, let all of you dance in wind and rain.”

  The people who had gathered at the temple observed his lack of clothing, and those who had not seen him before asked, “Where do you come from?”

  And Pilli answered, “I come from the place of the flowers, there where the butterflies fan the sun, there where the hummingbirds bathe in the spray of the waterfall.”

  “Is that the place where you were born?”

  “I was born into the waters of the eastern ocean.”

  Some there were in the crowd who began to uncover themselves. A man called out, “And what shall we sacrifice at our temples?”

  And Pilli said, “We sacrifice what we eat, the food that maintains your temple. Consecrate your food. Prepare it well. It is the fuel for the fire of your temple. But you need no more at one time than what fits in both hands; keep your fire from dying, but no more let it blaze beyond control. And just as your temple has many parts, you should eat of many fruits.”

  A woman who had disrobed asked, “What of the fruit of the cacao tree? It is our method of exchange.”

  Pilli replied, “Trade in cacao no more than you would in any other fruit, exchanging fair quantities so all may eat in health and savor. Cultivate crops with care and respect for the origin of the world, for the pods of the cacao tree are the breasts of our mother, the earth, just as the trunk of the cacao tree is the penis of our father, the sky.”

  But finally there were those who returned to the question of Pilli’s origin. “Who is your mother? Who is your father?”

  “The one I call my mother is she, the earth, and the one I call my father is he, the sky. But if, when you ask me this, you mean to ask, who is it who bore me in her womb and suckled me at her breasts, and who is it who seeded me from his penis and carried me on his shoulders, then I say, anybody among you is my mother, my father.”

  “Who are you?” the people began to shout.

  “I am one among you!”

  “What is your name?” they insisted.

  “My name I change as often as you change your clothes. Like your clothes, it is what I can don or doff. For now, I am Pilli. But the essence of me is man.”

  They did not understand him, and asked further, “What do you mean, the essence of you is man?”

  He replied, “Can you not see me, all of me? Look at me, while I turn around. Look at me, while I bend, and jump, and squat, and thrust. This is me, a man, all of me.”

  One there was who pointed at him with malice, calling out, “I heard it said of him, that he throbs for the bloom of his sister!”

  “All of us are brothers and sisters,” spoke Pilli.

  At this, Obsidian Heart made his way back through to the front of the crowd. “And where, gardener, are the fruits of your orchard? No doubt you have left them unattended in every sister’s garden you’ve known.”

  Pilli reached for his cloak and replied, “The seeds of our fruits are in our words and in our acts. My orchards will be legion.”

  Obsidian Heart led the guards to advance against him, saying “Just now he covers himself in shame!”

  But Pilli had taken up his cloak to withdraw, from a hidden pocket, a handful of earthen powder. He threw it upon the stone steps, where it gave rise to a stinging smoke, and in the confusion he quickly disappeared from the crowd unseen.

  I pinched my thigh through my skirt, to stay focused on just how unprecedented and thoroughly unique this all was. I felt overwhelming pleasure and honor in translating such a fascinating text—a story that was uplifting, even in the face of Obsidian Heart’s oppression.

  On a more mundane note, though, I was hungry after completing this section. Walking to the kitchen, I heard sitar music and smelled sandalwood incense coming from a room off the hall. The door was open, so I looked into the candle-lit chamber and saw someone from behind—nude, of course. He was upside-down, feet straight up in the air, his weight resting on his forearms. It was Jota.

  Not wanting to interrupt his practice, I started to move away. But his voice detained me.

  “What did you think about the part in the garden?”

  I looked back at him. He had not moved. “You read it, too?” I asked.

  He did not reply, and I understood the answer to be obvious.

  “The throbbing and the blooming. Yeah,” I said, “I can guess why the translator stopped.”

  Jota still did not reply, and I realized I had not really answered his question. But he had not answered mine, either.

  I moved my foot, about to take a step away, when Jota, maintaining his pose, brought his left foot down along his right knee, and asked, “What happened next?”

  “I just finished translating the next
section. Sun Prince speaks to the people from a temple, and tells them their bodies are temples. He talks about sacrifice, and eating, and how all of us are brothers and sisters. Then he has to escape because the priest brings guards to arrest him.”

  A candle sputtered.

  “I’m not doing it justice,” I went on. “You’ll be able to read my translation soon, and then you can take in all the beautiful images and extended metaphors.”

  Jota reversed the position of his legs. “Have you read anything like this before?”

  “No,” I said simply.

  “Está gostando? Are you enjoying it?”

  “Yes.” I paused. “I am humbled, but also excited, to be working on a story so old, yet so… strangely urgent.”

  “Has your perspective changed at all?”

  I thought for a moment. “Well, yes. In many ways, I’d say.”

  “I try to adopt new perspectives whenever I can manage,” said Jota.

  “I can tell.”

  “There’s shrimp bisque in the fridge. Put it in the microwave for two minutes. You need it. Also there’s a fig and walnut salad.”

  “Thanks.” I started down the hall.

  “Marisol.”

  I looked back, and saw Jota’s legs straight up again.

  “Could you, at least, while translating Sun Prince’s story, take off your shoes? I think he would approve, no? Also, I work hard to keep the floors clean.”

  “Yes… of course,” I said, and I left my sandals right there by the door to his yoga room.

  The soup and salad fortified me. Well fed, and unshod, I went back to translate the next section.

  A woman came to Pilli seeking his aid. She was an alhuiani, a woman of sexual favors. She lifted her huipil to Pilli for him to behold her suffering from a scaly red rash under her arms and breasts and between her thighs.