Balderston- Cryptogram and Scripture (sobre Escritura del dios,de Borges)

8/3/2019 Balderston- Cryptogram and Scripture (sobre Escritura del dios,de Borges)

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5Crypto,r.. "'" laiptu.. l";"'1 (ount in"lJ tsaituri dtl elios"

This we shall write now under me Law ofGod and Christiani!)'; we shOlll bring i l lOlight because IlOW the: PopoI Vuh, as it was called, cannot be seen any more, in whichwas clearly seen the coming from the ath.tr side or the 51:3 and the narration of OUTobscurity, and our life ~ k a r l y secn. The original hook, wrincn long ago, existed,but irs sight is hidden 10 the 5Carchcr and 10 the thinkcr.-Rccinos, Goetz, andMorley 79-80'Ibc polemic that rages as a series of inrcmational culrural establishmentscelebrate the five hundredth anniversary of the violent encounter of twoworlds lends a note of seriousness and a change of focus to a discussion of"La cscritura del dios," Borges'S only story about the Spanish conquest ofthe so-called New World.2 The narrator of rhe story is a Maya priest,Tzinadn, who has been imprisom .d since the conquest of Guatemala( [524 - 17) by Pedro de Alvarado, and who is trying to figure out the locarion(and then the meaning) of a magical inscription made by his god at thecreation. His prison is half ofa dark cylinderlikc cel l, at the top ofwhich is asmall window opened once a day by a guard who lets down a pitcher ofwater and a planer of meal. Th e other half of the cylinder is occupied by ajaguar, glimpsed for a moment at noon each day when the window isopened. The Story consists of a series. of revelations; that the god 's script iswritten 00 the jaguar, that it is a formula fourteen words long, that onceTzinacln has deciphered it he no longer sees the point of uttering it aloud.The Story ends, men, with a great act of renunciation, since ifTzinadn


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70 Out ofContextwe re to utter the magic fonnula, he would restore the old order and wouldhimself become all-JX)werful.3

In the Story almost none of the cultural or historical context is c : x p l a i n e d ; ~ Tzinacan takes for granted the tradition from which he comes and thenature of his calling_He does not of course identi)' himself as a "Maya,"Ixcausc that designation would not have had a unitary meaning for him inthe fractured world of the warring Quiche and Cakchiqucl srarC1l in highland Guatemala in the early sixteenth century. Tht'Tt' is a brit'f reft'rence nearthe end of he story [ 0 rhe Aztcc emperor MoctezumaII: "Cuarcnta sflabas,catorce palabras, y yo, Tzinadn, regirfa las tierms que rigi6 Moctezuma"(599 ) [Forry syllables, fourteen words, and I, Tzinad.n, would rule the landswhere Moctezuma ruled] . Somt' critics have been misled by this referenceinto thinking that Tzinad.n is an AztecSpriest (and indeed anOlher reasonfor the confusion might be hi s name, wh ich is Nahuatl, not Maya, for"batn).6 However, there is also an unequivocal reference' in the story to thePrtpol VulJ rBook of the Mat or Book ofCouncil], tht' Quitnc scripture thatwas written down after the conquest ofGuatemala in tht' Roman alphabet,vcrsions of which were the common parrimony7 of rhe \ ' a r i o u Mayaspeaking peoples of Guatemala and Mexico:

Vi el universo y vi los intimas designios del universo. Vi los origenesquc narra cl Libro del Comun.8 Vi las m o n t a n a . ~ qut' surgieron delagua, vi los primeros hombres de palo, vi las tinajas que se volvieroncontra los hombres, vi los perros que les destrozaron las ca ras. Vi eIdios sin cara que hay detris de los dioscs. Vi infinitos procesos quefonnaban una sola fcl icidad y, emendicndolo todo, a1cance rambien aentender la eseritura del tigre. (S99)I saw the origins tharthe Book ofCouncil rells of. I saw the mountainsthat rose upout of the water, I saw the fi rst men ofwCXJd, I saw the jarsthat turned against men, I saw the dogs that tore at their faces . I sawthe faceless god who is behind all the gOl.k I saw intinitt' procCSSt."S [hatfanned a single happiness and, understanding it all , I was also able toundersrand the writing on the jaguar.

What I p r o ~ to do here is [ 0 reconstruct what Borges could have knownabout Maya culture in 19+9 when the story was published, [ 0 fill out thecultural references in Tzinacan's narr-uivc, and then to speculatc on Tlinacan's acceptance of alUlihilation.First, it may be helpful [ 0 show where Borges got the cultural rciereneesthat he uses here. Since this is hi s on ly story (or teX[ of ally kind) on a


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Cryptogram and Scriprure 71Mesoamerican thcmc,9 dlere arc fcw clues, and rhe scarch is more challeng-ing than usual. Two friends ofBorges had taken an interest in the PopoJ Yuhand the Mesoamerican past. Alfonso Reyes, whose: "Visi6n de Anahuac"(1917) [Vision of Anahuac) is a lively re-creation of and meditation onMexico-Tenochti tl:in, wrote Letras de la Nueva Espana [Letters of NewSpain] at the reques t of the minister of education, Jaime Torres Bodet, in1946, the imroducrion to which includes a summary and brief i s ~ i o n ofthe PopoI VI/h, characrerized by Reyes as

a labyrinth ofcosmogony, theogony and human genesis; crcation, notex nihilo, but tom , as with rhe G reeks, from some preexisting matter;amhropoccntrism that unites the twelve cardinal points to the heart ofman, according to thra: concentric laycrs ofhea\cn, the earth and theundcrv..'orld; a mixnlrc of religion, in which the pricsr implores favors ,and of magic, in which hc commands and enslaves thc god by hiswo rd; a Kabbalah of sacrcd numbers; a parallel of the contrast be-tween Aegeans and H ellcnes betwecn a belief of the vanquished,popular, chthonic, somewhat persecuted, hidden in caves and full of"nagualislT\o" (a b'Uardian spirit a.nd me tamorphoses into animals ),and the official belief of the victors, constituted into a church andultimately less res istant than the other sys tem ofbclicfto the intrusionofChristianity, as the brave survival of thc Laca.ndon Maya still proves.(12: Ul7) HI

Pedro Henrfq m."Z Urena, who was then residing in Argcntina afte r ancxtended period in Mex ico, also discusses the Popoi Yuh, though muchmore briefly than does Reyes, in his H istoria de La cultura en la Amimahisptinica (19+7) . According to H en rfquez Urena, the Mayas and Quichcs llhad precise notions of as tronomy and mathematics and employed a writingsystem that was evolving from hieroglyphs toward phonetic writing. Mterthe Conqucst, the Dominican scholar reports, some of them, "intent onpreserving their religious and hi5torical traditions in written fo rm " (IS) ,uscd thc Roman alphabet to record a number of works. Those: mentionedby Hcnriquez Urena arc the Popol Yuh, characterized as "the Quiche lxx>kabout the origins of the world and of humanity," the dramatic workR . n b i n a l c h ~ the AnaJes de !us CakrhiIJl/tles , and the "magical lxx>ks" ca ll edChilRm Balam (1.\ ). Significantly, most of these works had rece ndy beenissued in cheap editions that circulated throughout the Spanish world,published by the new Mexican publishing house Fondo de Cultu ra Economica , wi th whosc early history and direcrion lX.lIh Reyes and HcnrfquezUrena were intimately associated.12 T he inaugural volume of the Bibl iotcca


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71 Out ofContextAmericana [American Libra!}'] series directed by Henriquez Urena wasAdrian Recinos's translation of the Popel Vub (1947).B [he eighth volwncwas Alfredo Barrcra Vasquez and Silvia Rend6n's edition of the Dibro de losLibras de Chilam Ba/aln (19+8) [Book ofthc Books ofChi am Balam] , andtht: ekventh was Recinos's edition of thcMemoria1 de S%ld orAna/a de loscakchiqueJes (1 950) [Annals ofdlC Cakchiquels). Sino." his story was pub-lished in Sur in 1949, it would certainly have been possible for Borges toread the fi rst two of these works, and he may ha\'e done so to show interestin Henriquez Urena's project. Certainly these edilions of the three workssupplied what he needed to write "La escritura del dios." What is impres-sh'e abom the story is the synthetic and imaginative usc ofmaterial that tothe nonspecialist is rather opaque. Borges, as it were, passed a short coursein Maya studies and then went on to use what he had learned to saysomedling new (and as usual he got the details righ t). It is interesting tofind rnat he is rather more sympathetic to the highland Guatemalan Mayacultures than Jose Vasconcelos, whose concept of me "cosmic race" docsnot hold him back from snide attacks on the Popol Yuh and the othermonumt:nts of indigenous America. 14

The historical "Tzinacan" was dle ruler of the Cakchiquds at h.imche;his Cakchique! namc was Ahpo7.0tzil (meaning "the Bat King" [Kelly IJ2Jor "'Kccper of the Bat Mat" [Tedlock 1 8 3 1 ) . 1 ~ He is mcmioned in the PopoiVuh, in a discussion of the i f f ~ r e c e s oflanguage and religion between the

and their neighbors and historic enemies, the Cakchiquds. TheRetinos translation reads: "Well, the speech of the Cakchiqud is different,Ixcausc the namc of their god was different when they came from there,from Tulan-Zuyva. Twrziha Chimalcan was the nan"IC of their god, andtoday they speak a different tongue; and also from their god the families ofAhpo7.0tzil and Ahpoxa, as they arc called, took their names" (I90). At thispoint RecinOli a d d ~ a note dla[ is surely Borges's immediate source: "Ah-pomnil and Ahpoxahil were tht: names of dle Icing of the Cakehiqucl ando f h i . ~ principal assistanr and heir. The Spaniards gave the former, who wasgoverning in ISl.4, the name Sinad.n, from dle NallUad Tzinacin, whichalso means 'bat' n (l90n) .

One of"dle Spaniards" in question is Bernal Diaz del CastiUo, ncar theend ofwhose massl\'e Histrwia verdtukra de /a amquista de La Nu eva Espmiawe read:

There they wounded mc with an arrow, bur the wound was notserious, and then we came to Petapa, and the nt:xt day we came ro thisvalley wt: call "of the Twisted One," where this city of Guatemala is


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Cryptogram and Scripture 7Sme tcem ofour mouths; we shall destroy you,' ~ i d the dogs, and then,they destroyed their faces" (91).7. "Vi cI dios sin cara que hay dcu-as de los dio5eS. "" I "The face of thesun had not ye t appeared, nor that or the moon, nor the surs, and ithad not dawned" (94).

The important thing about Tzinad.n's vis ion here is precisely that it is avis ion; the emphasis is not on his reading (or his memory of reading) thesac red book, but on the book coming to life. By obeying the creator god'sinjunction to see, Tzinad.n has broken Out of an intellectualized smpor;though in prison, he is, as the god instructed, contemplating the world.What is of interest is the result of his meditation.

Borges has Tzinadn reply avam fa Itttrt to two important exponents ofWestern philosophy: Rene Descartes and Jose Ortega y Gasset. WhenTzinacan finds himselfdreaming of being buried alive under an eyer growing heap ofsand and a \oice in the dream tells him that ifhe wakes up fromthis dream it will be into yet another dream, he wakes himsclfup through asheer act of intellecrual will, objecting that there arc no dreams insidcdreams.12 This is the idea (which p'sychoanalysis has not, I believc, sustained) used by Descartes as one of thc grounds for certainty for the cogitoin the Mtditatiom on Fint PhilosupJry (102) . For Tzinac;ln, however, the"proof" of individual identity is too paltry for words, nor worth utteringaloud: the cgo, when Sl.:parated (as Tzinadn has been Sl.:cluded in his ce ll)from tht; world and from time, is not worth saving. His argument withCartesian thought (and Descartes had not yet been born) rums on anobjection to the separation ofmind from Ixxiy, ofselrfrom community, ofspace rrom time.

Just after rh c dream sequence, T..:inac;ln says: "Un hombre se confunde,gradualmeme, con la forma dc su destino; un hombre es, a la larga, suscireunstancias" (598) [A man is confused, gradually, with the roml of hisdestiny; a m ~ n is, evcnruall}', his circumstances I. Here Tzinadn is anticipating Ortcga y Gassct's fan lOus fommla in the Meditaciona dtl Quijote: "Yosoy yo y mi circunstancia, y si no Ia salvo a ella no me salvo yo" (122) [I ammyself and circumstance, and if I do not save it I do not save;: myself].Borges uses rhc word "circumstances" in a limited meaning here, in accordwith the L1tin root, to n:fe;:r to till: thill!,'S in Tzina d n's cdl: the jab'Uar, thewi ndow, his body,ll the darkness, the stone. The reduction ofTzinac:in'sphysical universe, and his separation from the great continuum of he;: LongCount, results in a deflation ofOrtega's triumphal fonnula: instead of the


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76 Out of Contextimpli("ir imperial gesture of induding and inwrporating the surroundingworld into the se lf (as in the work of the Spa nish philosopher). the Mayapriest has had hi s "cin::urnstances" taken away from him. yet he blesses whatremains to h m . T7.inadn's meditation, then, is se t against two influential European meditations on identity and existence, but Tzinadn, un like tha t other famousimprisoned philosopher, Boethius, finds no wnsolation in philosophy.In stead, philosophi("aJ doubt bewmes rhe ground for mystical experience:

EI ex tas is no repite SllS sim bolos; hay quien ha vis ta a Dios en unrcsplandor, hay quien 10 ha pen::ibido en una espada 0 en los dn::ulosde una rosa. Yo vi una Rueda altisima, que no cstaba deJallte de misoios, oi detras, ni a los lados, sino en [adas partes, a Wl tiempo. EsaRueda estaba hha de agua, peru rambieo de fuego, y era (aunque sevda eI borde) infio ira . Entn:tejidas, la formaban wdas las msas quesenin, que son y que fueron, )' yo era una de las hebras de esa tramatotal, }' Pedro de Alvarado, que me dio tormento, era ot ra. AM esrabanlas eausas y los efeetos y me bastaba ver esa Rueda para enteoderlotodo, sin fi n. (S98-99)Ecstasy docs not repeat its symbols; there is one who has seen God in ablinding flash, somwne has seen it in a sword or in the circles ofa rose.I saw a very taUWheel, which was not before my c.'yes, or lxhind them,or to the side, but everywhere at once. That 'Wheel was made ofwater,but also of fi re, and it was infi nite (although I could see its edge).Interwoven. it was formed of all tile th ings that will be, that are, andtha t were, and I was one of the th reads of that total web, and Pedro de.:Alvarado, who had nle tortured, was ;morher. There were tile causesand rhe effects an d it sufficed for mC' to see that Wheel to understande\'erything, without limits.

Once again Tzinadn, the Jaguar Priest, is in dialogue with the Old World;his vision is l.:ounterpo.


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Cryprogram and Scripture 77Acwrding to Miguel Leon-Portilla ( in his Time and Rea/ity in the Thoughtof the Maya): "The Colonial Maya (ens which speak of me twenty-yearperiods or wheels of the katuns confirm this peculiar conception of auniverse in which the passage of time wnsists of arrivals, relays, anddepartures of divine forces . This is shown, for instance, in the 'first prophetic wheel of a circle of katum,' published by Barrera Vasquez andreconstructed from various tCXtSof [he ChiJam Ba/am books" (51).27 Heretoo a detail wnfirms the accuracy of the design of the Story. Within theemTIeshcd wheels of the various cycles of time in the Long Count calendar,the days were sacred, being themselves gods. When Tzinadn says that themagic formu la was a sentence of founeen words, he confirms his statuS asJaguar Priest and the wholeness of his understanding of the physical universe, because fourteen was the nwnocr sacred to the jaguar g o againfollowing LeOn-Porrilla (who bases his views, in tum, on Barrera Voisqua.!1931: "14. Ix is a repeated appearance of thc jaguar god in his relationshipwith m l ~ earth and me lower world. Its glyph though highly stylil.edincludes spots ofthc skin of the jaguar" (40).29 Eric Thompson, in rum,confirms the relation between the jaguar god and mc earth: "The jaguarb>od, corresponding to me Mexican TepeyolJod, god of the interior of theearth, is an important Maya deity of me surface of the carth or its interior,for the twO regions overlap" (Rise (md Fall Z31 ). Why, mm, should Tzinacan reject the gin of the jaguar god, the gift ofpower O\'er the surface of theearth {and with it , the possibility of avenging himself and his wmmunityfor the bmtality of the Conquest by offering up the hcart of Pedro dcAlvarado ro the god L599]) ?l(l The answer lies earlier in dlC Story, but first letus examine the Maya conceptionof the relation between space and time, asexpressed in the post-Conquest textSand as reconstructed by archaeologistsand field anthropologisTS.

Thompson has stated the difficulty posed for us by the Maya wa}' ofthinking about time and space:There are other aspects of the Maya philosophy of t ime , such as thestrange failure to distinguish bet\\'cen past and funlre in the propheticchants. \-\'hat had gone before and what lay ahead were blended in away that is baffling to our westem mi nds. Mysticism is not now fashionable, and so writers tend to STress the material side ofMaya civili?;)cion, but surely it is precisely these (to us) strange aberr.lrionsofMayamentality wh ich pose the most imeresting questions. (Rise a'ld FaJ114 )

He adds later in the same book: "Time, in the conception of the Maya,sweeps forward, tOO, but surviving calculations carry us only a paltry four


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18 Out ofContextmillenn ia into the future. Evidently, future rime was of less interest thantime past, probab ly because the Maya were much more interested in thepast than in the future on accounr of their be lief that history repeatswheneve r the divine influences are in the same balance" (14-0) . Because ofthe intricate narure of the Maya calend ar, with its "wheels within wheels," agiven alignment would not be repeated again for a very long time. T imeitse lf was d ivine , and the prcrision with which its passage was calculated(fru it of an advanced knowledge of asTronomy and mathemat ics, is wellknown, though this knowledge was apparently not used for more mundanepurposes ) served the art of divination bur, more importantly, reflected anobses.sion with the thing itself.

This obsession took prcc!.:denee over all else. LeOn-Portilla expla ins:Isolated from time, space becomes inconceivable. In the absence oftime-cycles, there is no life , noth ing happens, not even death. Thecolored regions, divorced from kinlJ, sun-day-time, \\-"Ou ld becomeuner darkness devoid of all meaning. The world of he gods would bea mere absence, and the flight of the luituns would mark the end ofreal ity. There would be a return to primt.'val da rknes.s, without tllecosm ic ceibas, without the sun, the moon, the great star, withouthuman beings, withour an )' meaning whatsoever. (86 )

He adds a bit later: "Space an d time were inseparable. The spa tial uni\'ersewas an immense slage on which the d ivine faces and forces we re oriented,coming and going in an unbroken order.The Maya sages had found the keyto extricate mean ings and ta fo resee the fu nm:" (no). Thus, when Tzinacansays early in the Story, " He pe rdido la cifra de los aiios que )'v..go en latiniebla" (596) [I ha ve lust count of the years I have lain in this darkness] , heexpresses what fo r him must be the greatest of tragcdies , the mOST unerhwniliarion: he has lost track uf the Long Count. 1110ugh his memory ofthe Popol Yuh and of the am of divination has not faded, his ofsynchrony signifies his inadequacy to res tore the un ive rse. He must bean nih ilatt.'d ; the uni\'efSt.' must also be annihilated and then created anew.l1

His tragedy, then, is due in large measure ta the darkness of his soli taryconfinemenTand to its psychic result- that he has an almost European,almost bourgeois sense of his own individuality: "Cuarenta snabas, ea tarcepalabras. y y(), Tziwuall, regiria las rierras que rigif> Moetezuma" (.199,emphasis added) [Forty sy llables, founeen words, and 1, Tziwuall, wouldrule [he lands where Moctczuma rulcd] .31 Power ovt.'r the earth, cventhough assoc iated wi th the cult of the jaguar god, even though it mayprovide me occasion for sweet revenge, is useless wi thout synchrony,


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80 Out of Contextcompletely erased from Tzinadn 's account, although, as the quotation hereproves, the dimensions of the tragedy arc still visible under erasure. "Que Ieimporta la suerte de aquel otro, qui Ie importa /(1 mu:iOn de aqud otnl'-Tzinad.n is the Jaguar Priest who once offic ia tcd the ritcs in his communityand thus bound together rime, space, himself, and the conIDlUnity. Thename of his sacred book implies this also: it is the "Libro del Comlin," theBook of Council. Tedlock explains that the literal meaning is "Book ofthe Mat," and that the mal (also present in Tzinadn's C..akchiqud name,Abpozotr.il, or "Keeper of the Bat Mat") was the symbol of the weavingtogether of the community and the universe, rather like our word text. Insolitary confinement, Tzinadn loses track of time; also, and no doubt aspart of the same experience ofloss, he forgets his community. Even ifhehad no desire for individual power or glory, he might have uttered theformula to restore his communif)-' to its rightful place in the design of theuniverse, but in forgctting himself he has forgotten them. In the words ofthe book ofCh i am Balam ofTizimin:

There were rulers:There we re lords.That's finished

Not now . . .Time has passc:dAnd unraveled.That is the word of the kmunThat is coming.

(Edmonson, Ancient Future 161 j "

Documents

Balderston- Cryptogram and Scripture (sobre Escritura del dios,de Borges)