What If Someone Played It?

How a Maya shell behind glass at LACMA started a novel about a Mexica year

10 September ~ 3 min read

The Image. This book began in front of a display case. In May, at an evening preview of the new David Geffen Galleries at LACMA, I stood in front of a conch-shell trumpet—Maya, carved, more than a thousand years old—longer than I had meant to. I never did reach the rest of the building that night. There were several thousand square feet of it, and I saw one case.

I have taught music history long enough to know what museum objects usually give you, which is information. Date, culture, material, provenance if you’re lucky. A scholar is trained to ask who made this and what it was for. A historian of instruments is trained to ask a third question—what did it sound like—and I asked that one too.

Then I asked the one no training accounts for: what would happen if someone played it?

The carving didn’t help me put the question down. Incised on the shell is an aged god, his hand raised in the Maya gesture of speech, addressing a single day sign. The museum’s notes answer the scholar’s questions: the god is Itzam, the old creator who dwells in the primordial sea and whose labor keeps the years turning; the day sign reads 13 Ajaw, a day in the sacred calendar bound up with the completion of great cycles. Speech, and a date. Standing there, I read the carving as a warning, or as the record of who would be called if the shell ever sounded again. That is not what the scholarship suggests. It is what the object said to me at seven in the evening with my phone in my hand.

I should explain why it said anything to me at all, since the same case had been passed by a few hundred people that night without incident. I came to the object as a player. I am a trumpet player, and I own conch trumpets of my own—from Papua New Guinea and Hawaiʻi—and I have written a concert work, Odusseia, that requires the performer to sound one. For twenty years I have put a conch to my mouth in front of a room of world-music students, and for twenty years the same thing has happened. The room stops. Not politely, the way a room stops for a lecturer. Bodily. A conch doesn’t sound like an instrument; it sounds like a place. The note doesn’t come from the shell so much as arrive from every wall at once, and it is longer than any breath the listeners know, because the player has been taught to make it so.

So I knew, standing at the glass, what the object was for, in the way a cook knows what a knife is for. I also knew that the wear at the mouthpiece—five hundred, a thousand years of lips—was the one thing in the case that had not been made by an artist. It had been made by use. Whoever last played it did not know he was the last.

The question became a man. If someone were going to play it, who would have the case open? Not a curator, not a guard. The person who builds the mount—the brass-and-felt cradle every museum object rests on and nobody sees. He would have handled it for days. He would know its weight and where its balance sits, and if he were also a trumpet player, he would know exactly what his hands were holding. So I gave him the case open at eleven at night, alone, and the thing he cannot afterward locate the decision for.

The novel is 79,000 words of what happens next, and I still can’t tell you the answer in a sentence—only that his life turns golden, and that golden is not the same as safe.

A note for the scrupulous: the shell that started the book is Maya, made far from Tenochtitlan and centuries before the year the novel imagines. I moved it. I’ll write about how in another post. What I did not move is the question, or the photograph I took that night, which is the one thing in the whole book that is exactly true.

~ Liam