The Fan-Maker's Inquisition (17 page)

The Indians described fantastic rituals; these confessions justified more arrests. Idols accumulated—some so ancient and weather-worn as to be barely idols at all, others surprisingly fresh-looking, clumsily carved: hideous things too ugly, even, for doorstops. Some were wonderfully beautiful, carved of jade or serpentine, cinnabar clinging to their etched surfaces like old blood. These things were dumped on the cobbles of the friary, at the feet of an exulting Landa
.

One evening, when the friars had found an ancient stone altar carved in the form of a thickly coiled snake and covered from head to tail in feathers, an old woman—one who had survived the plagues, a woman whose face had been so often branded with fire it looked like a page from a book—rushed at the friars and their constables shouting. In an instant, and before anyone had seen it happen, the soldier’s dogs were upon her and she had vanished beneath their paws and faces in a cloud of dust
.

Night after night, after the cries of the tortured had stilled, Landa examined the things he was so eager to destroy. The most curious were very old sculptures of human monstrosities: hunchbacks forced to their knees by the weight of humps rising like hills from their backs, dwarfs barely able to stand on withered legs, idiots grinning with cleft palates, a howling infant metamorphosing into a jaguar, a truly satanic figure with a snout and hooves. But one of these pieces was of particular interest to Landa; carved of copey wood and fragrant with copal, it showed two men embracing. For many long hours he looked at the thing with fascination, recalling Aristotle:
To understand a thing is to suffer.
Landa suffered because he understood the danger he was in. It took all his strength to keep from caressing the wood with his fingers, from pressing it to his burning cheek. Later, when he would be closely questioned in Spain, he would explain that the idols and other objects he had reduced to rubble had been alive with an irresistible vitality, capable of contaminating the staunchest hearts. To examine them was to come dangerously close to losing the eternal struggle that frets so ceaselessly the human soul
.

As Melchor continued to gaze out his window, the day’s second marvel occurred. As the sky thickened to night, friars, soldiers and constables, and a crowd of people approached the friary with what appeared to be…Yes! A great quantity of books! The blue books of the Maya, books fragrant with incense, books Kukum had guarded with his life; books with pages white with lime; books swarming with glyphs and stars and numbers: the Maya’s sacred library of black mirror days, days of smoke, of vanished moons; days of sun, of ocelots and fish; days of eyes, days of dreams: poetic days, priceless, tragic, baneful days. Red and black, they tumbled and spilled across the cobbles; they glowed like live coals, causing the eyes of those who look upon them to water and burn
.

The next day, and surely to quiet his anger, Landa was given a statue of the Virgin made of a paste of cornstalks and the roots of wild orchids. He complained the thing looked like a satanic pastry, fit for a witches’ sabbath. The Virgin had crossed eyes and a sluttish smile. But the Indian who had made her was known to be devout, and so the Virgin was placed in the chapel—already cluttered with such gifts, including a Christ made of the same dubious materials, a figure Landa feared was meant to convey intense rage against the Church. The Christ’s black lips curled back from teeth shattered by the violence of his agony, and a gnawed and ragged tongue. Worse: The Savior’s back was so violently arched it was clear He wished to tear Himself from the Sacred Cross! What could this mean if not that the Son of God did not wish to submit to God’s Will? But Landa did not chew on this for long; the Tophet was scheduled for the following week, and the friary needed to be made ready. The fountain and corridors were all draped in black cloth; a scaffold had been built—platforms, too; and shirts for the damned cut, dyed, and sewn
.

That week, Melchor was plagued by a recurrent dream: He had been running in terror for a long time and, exhausted, sat down upon the roots of an old tree. He had been running because Mani was on fire, afire so hot that buildings exploded with a sound like thunder and the bodies of people, Spanish and Indian alike, were thrown up into the air. As they were hurled across the sky by the force of the explosion, they grew wings or, like witches, straddled brooms. The fire caused a terrific wind, and all about him the air was filled with domestic animals, crockery, and blankets. Melchor realized with horror that what remained of Mani was now airborne: forks and spoons and pots of beans, boots and stools and frying pans
.

Suddenly he was surrounded by strange figures: dwarfs and sows in dresses, and witches showing their breasts or lifting their skirts to fart black smoke and blue butterflies in his face. And then he saw what all the commotion was about: Kukum’s widow, dressed not in her little white shift embroidered with flowers, but in a gown of scarlet silk and approaching swiftly with a retinue of giant hares
.

Landa’s public burning was preceded by a parade: first, a flock of chanting friars carrying black flags and crosses swathed in black raised above them like standards; then the schoolchildren, their eyes to the ground and singing in voices hesitant and hollow; last of all, a throng of Indians so disfigured by torture their own children could not recognize them. Some wore stiff yellow shirts marked with red crosses; others were dressed in blood-soaked paper. A number had been so badly beaten the tendons and muscles of their backs had ruptured. Shaking, they walked bent in two, their hands, twisted into claws, hanging at their sides
.

Landa, flanked by four judges and his principal lieutenants, stood on a high platform and bowed to the Spanish dignitaries, secular and regular clergy, lesser officials, and individual colonists who had come from as far away as Mérida, Izamal, Valladolid. A crowd of Indians stood apart, held back by soldiers and their dogs, which in their excitement howled and barked ceaselessly, submerging the sobs and cries that filled the air with a palpable throbbing. The faggots were prepared, the prisoners bound, hanged by their hands, and lashed for the last time
.

Landa unfolded a large piece of parchment embellished with the watermark of the Inquisition: the cross, the sword, and the palm branch. In a voice hoarse with ranting, so that he sounded more like a raven than a man, he cried:

“I, Reverend Father Fray Diego de Landa, First Provincial, Apostolic Inquisitor Against Heresy, Humors, and Emptiness of Mind, Charms, False Opinions, Tittle-Tattle, and Evil Effects; Sorcery in All Its Three Thousand Forms, Vexations, Infections, Befoulment, and Unlucky Things; Subtlety of Nature; Satyrs and Fauns; and by Virtue of His Holiness’s Bulls, and Apostasy in His Majesty’s Dominions of the Province of Yucatán, New Spain; having appointed a fit house for the Audience and prisons and torture chambers of the Holy Office, make it known to all assembled here today, July the eleventh, in the year 1562 of the Incarnation of the Redeemer:

• That these Indians—nobles, lords, and peasants—beneath the lashes and iron of the Holy Inquisition, have admitted to Witchcraft, evoking a demon named “Angel of Light”

• Have offered prayers to skulls and idols smeared with the blood of their bodies

• Have taken itinerant sorcerers into their homes and fed them and also kept hidden for them their bundles of necromantic tools

• Have ridden on horseback or on occasion worn forbidden things such as gold, silver, silk, coral, and pearls

• That they have manufactured and sold in the market of Mani obscene snuffboxes, indecent crosses, and the like

• Have painted their bodies with the stripes of tigers and, drawing blood from their ears, cursed God

• Have crucified small children, cut out their hearts, roasted them, and fed them to their idols—crimes so terrible they were acknowledged only after the most rigorous investigation

• Finally: They have hidden their blasphemous books and lied about them and continue to revere them and hold them precious above all things

The prisoners, little more than meat, were bound and heaved into the fire, now raging. So great was the Tophet it eclipsed the sun and for a time became the lamp of the universe. Landa, too, outshone the sun. Beneath him, the last of his enemies, the last Lords of Mani, the last heretics, librarians, and sorcerers, writhed and wormed their way into Hell
.

Gloatingly, Landa recalled the subversive lispings of Copernicus, who in his folly believed in the sun’s preeminence; Landa’s Tophet was proof of the world’s centrality
.

“So much for the ‘allegorical fires’ of the so-called philosophers!” Landa shouted to Melchor above the fire, the dog’s howlings, the screams of the damned. “My Tophet is the mirror of Hell, and it is God in His Infinite Glory who holds up that mirror today!” With a small gesture of his hand, Landa indicated that the sacred books, heaped together, should be fed to the fire. A column of smoke flooded the sky—it was so black, so thick, that Landa was certain God was watching. So great was the stench of burning flesh, of deerskin curling up like fingers, that surely God smelled the Tophet, too. And the cries of the damned. Surely He was listening
. What these people were,
Landa whispered
, I alone will say.

Late that night, the sky tore open from the west to the east with such violence the walls of the friary shuddered and the belfry bell rang out. Prostrate with heat, Landa gazed toward the window in time to see a horizontal bar of lightning ignite the sky. For a moment the sky was sliced into two distinct portions: the top a muddy green, the bottom the color and consistency of curdled cream. It began to rain
. If a flood should scour this land to the bone, that would be an act of Grace,
Landa thought
, and an act of Compassion.

The Inquisitor rolled over. So damp was his bed, in such disarray, and, to tell the truth, so smelly, it seemed like the nest of some lesser mammal. Landa did not approve of baths—a thing the Indians in their vanity and lechery were so addicted to that, despite fines and lashings, they continued to indulge in. As Landa lay in his own familiar stench, the rain fingered his mind. He sank into a dream as into silt. Dreaming, he saw a woman fucked by a goat right in the public square of Mani, and no one seemed to care. The woman and the goat were going at it eagerly; the woman was holding the goat by its horns, straddling him while he sat like a king on a dazzling throne, his balls like great velvet cushions
.

“Does no one care?” Landa shouted to the crowd of Indians and friars who walked hither and thither occupied by banalities. “Am I the only one to see?”

In the most secret of places, a place known only to her, in the deepest of caves far beneath Mani, in a circular room built within a natural declivity of red stones and turtle-egg mortar, Kukum’s widow sits on the floor beside a candle, her husband’s inkpot, and his bundle of uncut pens. Twelve of her people’s most sacred books are here, wrapped in jaguar skin and buried in sand
.

She burns incense to her husband’s special gods: Itzamná—the god of writing—and old, old Pawahtún. And she bums incense to the god of corn. For are not books like bread? Do they not nourish our spirits just as corn feeds our bodies?

It comforts her to know the books are near. She has some berries with her; these she eats slowly, one by one, because they are bitter. Then she lies down to die
.

Today my papers were returned to me, among them Gabrielle’s last letter, which I had sorely missed. Here is a piece of it that I neglected to share with you before, gentle reader; I wish to do so now: