What the Friars Wrote Down

Toxcatl in Sahagún and Durán, and the one thing I moved to make the novel possible

16 September ~ 3 min read

The ceremony in The Image is documented. Toxcatl was real. I want to say that plainly at the top, because readers of a novel with a speculative premise are entitled to know which parts the novelist made up, and the answer here is: the people, and almost nothing else.

Each year, according to Book 2 of Sahagún’s Florentine Codex—the great encyclopedia the Franciscan friar assembled from Nahua informants in the decades after the conquest—a young man was chosen for his bearing and his grace to live as the living image of the god Tezcatlipoca. For a year he was trained: in speech, in movement, in music. He walked the city playing flutes and was honored wherever he went. Twenty days before the end, four young women, named for four goddesses, were joined to him, and the last days were feasts. At the end he crossed the lake by canoe with his household. The women turned back at the landing. He went inland to a temple in the place called Tlapitzahuayan—read, in one scholarly tradition, as “the place where wind instruments are played”—and on the steps he broke the flutes he had played all year, one at each step. What waited at the summit is in the sources too, and is the reason the feast existed.

The sources add that at the moment of his death his successor was presented. The year began again.

Durán, the Dominican who wrote his own history a generation later, records the provision the middle of my book turns on: if the image escaped, the guard responsible served in his place. He records the taunts the women used on candidates who didn’t measure up—tall fellow; tree-shaker; star-gatherer—the mockery of the too-tall, the disqualified, the merely human. He records the eight stewards, four of whom had kept a fast for a year, and the house of the shell trumpet. And he glosses the festival’s name, Toxcatl, as meaning something like “dryness”: the ceremony read as a petition for rain at the parched pivot of the year. The reading is contested, as most readings are at five centuries’ distance. The drought that runs through my Los Angeles is at least that old.

Even the stars are in the record. The fire-drill—mamalhuaztli, the hand tool that makes fire and the constellation named for it—is in Sahagún’s book of the heavens, and it is over Citlali’s roof on the night she is asked the hardest question in the book.

A composer works from a score and a novelist from a codex, and in both cases the notes are on the page and the sound is not. That gap is where I worked. Sahagún tells you the image played flutes; he does not tell you what a year of flutes does to a young man’s breath, or what it costs to break one. I have played reproductions of Maya and Aztec flutes for years—among them a flower flute, the flower-belled kind that the archaeology of Mexica music places in Toxcatl itself—so when the sources describe the training, I was not imagining what those instruments ask of the body. Whatever else the book invents, its instruments are played from experience.

Now the confession. The shell that started this book—the one I stood in front of at LACMA—is Maya. It was made far from Tenochtitlan, centuries before the year the novel imagines, and it belongs to a different people, a different language, a different god. I moved it. I can say how. In the days after the preview I was preparing a lecture on Mesoamerica for my world-music students, and at its center was Toxcatl. The shell and the ceremony met in that week and would not afterward be separated.

So the museum in my pages keeps a Mexica trumpet that the real museum does not. Carved shell trumpets are attested among the offerings excavated at the Templo Mayor, so the novel’s shell is invented in its particulars and truthful in its kind. Its markings—eroded, contested, never attributed—I left unresolved on purpose. That uncertainty is not a device I added to the object; it is the ordinary condition of objects this old.

What I invented: Mateo, Citlali, and everyone around them; the museum’s staff and its year; and the premise itself—the claim that the two cities are two descriptions of one reality. That claim belongs to the fiction. The friars can tell you what was done. They cannot tell you which description is true, and neither will I.

~ Liam