Mirrors (34 page)

As in America, few natives survived. Those not killed by hunger or bullets were annihilated by unknown plagues against which they had no defense.

BEDEVILED

They will come to teach fear.
They will come to castrate the sun.

Mayan prophets in Yucatan had announced this time of humiliation.

And it was in Yucatan in 1562 that Father Diego de Landa, in a lengthy ceremony, built a bonfire of books.

And the exorcist wrote:

“We found a great number of books written in these letters of theirs and, since they contained nothing but the Devil’s superstition and falsehoods, we burned them all.”

The scent of sulfur could be detected from afar. The Mayans deserved the stake for being curious, for tracking the course of the days through time and the route of the stars across the thirteen heavens.

Among many other devilish things, they invented the most precise of all the calendars that have ever existed, they knew better than anyone how to predict eclipses of the sun and moon, and they discovered the number zero long before the Arabs kindly brought that novelty to Europe.

PALACE ART IN THE MAYAN KINGDOMS

The Spanish Conquest occurred long after the fall of the Mayan kingdoms.

Only ruins remained of their immense plazas and of the palaces and temples where kings, squatting before the high priests and warrior chiefs, decided the fate and misfortune of everyone else.

In those sanctuaries of power, painters and sculptors dedicated themselves to exalting the gods and venerating the exploits of monarchs past and present.

Palace art left no room for the many who worked and remained silent.

Neither did the defeat of any kings figure in the codices or murals or bas-reliefs.

A king of Copán, for example, known as 18 Rabbit, raised Cauac Sky as a son and gave him the throne of the neighboring kingdom of Quiriguá. In the year 737, Cauac Sky returned the favor: he invaded Copán, humiliated its warriors, captured his protector, and cut off his head.

Art never found out. No bark book was written, no stone was chiseled to illustrate the sad end of the decapitated king, who in his days of splendor had been portrayed several times with his courtiers and his robes of feathers, jade, and jaguar skin.

KILLING FORESTS, THEY DIED

Ever more mouths and ever less food. Ever less forest and ever more desert. Too much rain or no rain at all.

Held on by ropes, peasants scratched in vain at the steep flayed slopes. The corn found no water or earth on which to raise its stalk. The soil, without trees to retain it, stained the rivers red and was lost to the wind.

After three thousand years of history, night fell on the Mayan kingdoms.

But the days of the Mayans walked on in the lives of the peasants. Communities moved and survived, practically in secret, without pyramids of stone or pyramids of power: with no king but the sun rising every day.

THE LOST ISLE

Far from the Mayan kingdoms and centuries later, Easter Island was devoured by its children.

The European navigators who arrived there in the eighteenth century found it empty of trees and of everything else.

It was terrifying. Never had they seen a solitude so lonely. No birds in the sky, no grass on the ground, no animals but rats.

Of the verdant past of long ago, no memory remained. The island was a stone inhabited by five hundred stone giants staring at the horizon, nowhere near anything or anyone.

Perhaps those statues were asking the gods to rescue them. But not even the gods could hear their mute voices, as lost in the middle of the ocean as the earth in the infinite sky.

KINGLESS KINGDOMS

According to historians and practically everyone else, Mayan civilization disappeared centuries ago.

Afterward, nothing.

Nothing: community life, born in silence and in silence borne, awakened neither admiration nor curiosity.

It did evoke astonishment, however, at least at the time of the Spanish Conquest. The new lords were worried: these kingless Indians had lost the habit of obeying.

Father Tomás de la Torre recounted in 1545 that the Tzotziles from Zinacantán chose someone to run the war and “when he did not do it well, they got rid of him and chose another.” In war, and also in peace, communities elected their leaders, and they chose the best listeners.

Colonial authorities used lash and noose aplenty to oblige the Maya to pay tribute and perform forced labor. In Chiapas in 1551, Magistrate Tomás López saw that they rejected servitude and he admonished:

“These are people who work enough to get by and no more.”

A century and a half later, in Totonicapán, Governor Fuentes y Guzmán had to admit that the new despotism had not made much headway. The Indians continued living “without any superior leader to obey, and among themselves it is all meetings, conversation, advice, and mystery, and for ourselves nothing.”

DOOMED BY YOUR PAST

Corn, sacred plant of the Maya, was given several names in Europe. The names recast geography: they called it Turkish grain, Arab grain, grain of Egypt, or grain of India. These errors did nothing to rescue corn from mistrust and scorn. When people learned where it came from, they fed it to the pigs. Corn had a higher yield than wheat and it grew faster, resisted drought, and produced good food. But it was not proper for Christian mouths.

The potato was also a forbidden fruit in Europe. Like corn, its American origins condemned it. Worse, the potato was a root grown in the depths of the earth, where hell has its caves. Doctors knew it caused leprosy and syphilis. In Ireland, if a pregnant woman ate a potato at night, in the morning she would give birth to a monster. Until the end of the eighteenth century, the potato was fed only to prisoners, lunatics, and the dying.

Later on, this cursed root rescued Europe from hunger. But not even then did people stop wondering: if not food of the devil, then why are potatoes and corn not mentioned in the Bible?

DOOMED BY YOUR FUTURE

Centuries before the advent of cocaine, coca was “the Devil’s leaf.”

Since the Indians of the Andes chewed it in their pagan ceremonies, the Church included coca among the idolatries to be extirpated. But far from disappearing, coca plantations grew fiftyfold. The Spaniards realized the plant was indispensable to mask hunger and exhaustion among the multitudes digging silver out of the bowels of Cerro Rico in Potosí.

In time, the colonial lords also embraced coca. As a tea, it cured indigestion and colds, relieved pain, renewed vigor, and eased altitude sickness.

Nowadays, coca is still sacred to the indigenous peoples of the Andes and it remains good medicine for anyone. But airplanes destroy the fields to keep coca from becoming cocaine.

Of course, cars kill many more people than cocaine and nobody talks about outlawing the wheel.

ANANAS