Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories - Italo Calvino [80]
Montezuma
MYSELF: Your Majesty… Your Holiness! … Emperor!… General! … I don't know how to address you, am obliged to resort to terms that only partially convey the prerogatives of your position, forms of address that in my modern language have lost much of their authority, sound like echoes of lost powers … As your throne high on the Mexican plateau is lost, the throne from which you reigned over the Aztecs, most august of their sovereigns, and the last too, Montezuma… Even calling you by your name is a problem for me: Motecuhzoma, it seems that's what your name really sounded like, but in our European books it's distorted to Moteczuma, Moctezuma … A name that some writers say means ‘sad man’. To tell the truth, it's a name you would have well deserved, for you saw the prosperous, well-ordered empire the Aztec world then was, invaded by incomprehensible beings, armed with unheard-of instruments of death. It must have been as if our cities here were suddenly to be invaded by extra-terrestrials. But we have already imagined that moment in every possible way: or at least we think we have. And you? When did you begin to realize that you were witnessing the end of a world?
MONTEZUMA: The end … Day rolls towards sunset … Summer rots in muddy autumn. Thus every day — every summer … You can never be certain they will return. That's why man has to ingratiate himself with the gods. So that the sun and stars may continue to revolve over the fields of maize — one more day — one more year…
MYSELF: You mean to say that the end of the world is always there hanging over us, that amid all the extraordinary events you were witness to in your lifetime, the most extraordinary was that everything went on, not that everything was collapsing?
MONTEZUMA: It's not always the same gods who reign in the sky, not always the same empires collecting their taxes in city and country. Throughout my life I honoured two gods, one present and one absent: the Blue Hummingbird, Huitzilopoch-tli who led us Aztecs in war, and the banished god, the Plumed Serpent, Quetzacoad, an exile beyond the ocean, in the unknown lands of the West. One day the absent god would return to Mexico to wreak his revenge on the other gods and those peoples faithful to them. I feared the threat that hung over my empire, the upheaval that would usher in the era of the Plumed Serpent, but at the same time I looked forward to it, inwardly I was impatient that this prophecy should come to pass, even though I knew it would mean the ruin of our temples, the slaughter of the Aztecs, my own death…
MYSELF: And you really believed that the god Quetzacoad led the Spanish conquistadores off their ships, you recognized the Plumed Serpent in the iron helmet and black beard of Hernan Cortes?
MONTEZUMA {a sorrowful wait)
MYSELF: Forgive me, King Montezuma: that name reopens a wound in your heart…
MONTEZUMA: Oh enough… This story has been told too many times. That this god was traditionally depicted as having a pale bearded face, and that seeing {he groans) the pale and bearded Cortes we supposedly thought him our god… No, it's not that simple. Correspondences between signs are never conclusive. Everything must be interpreted: the scriptures handed down by our priests are not made of letters, like yours, but of images.
MYSELF: You mean that your pictographic scripture and reality were each to be read in the same way: they both had to be deciphered…
MONTEZUMA: In the images of the holy books, the bas-reliefs in the temples, the feather mosaics, every line, every frieze, every coloured stripe can have a meaning… And in the things that come to pass, the events that unfold before our eyes, every tiny detail can have a meaning that points us to the intentions