Under the Jaguar Sun Read Free

the ancient Mexican civilizations, carved on the reliefs, represent a cyclic, tragic concept of time: every fifty-two years the universe ended, the gods died, the temples were destroyed, every celestial and terrestrial thing changed its name. Perhaps the peoples that history defines as the successive occupants of these territories were merely a single people, whose continuity was never broken even through a series of massacres like those the reliefs depict. Here are the conquered villages, their names written in hieroglyphics, and the god of the village, his head hung upside down; here are the chained prisoners of war, the severed heads of the victims.
    The guide to whom the travel agency entrusted us, a burly man named Alonso, with flattened features like an Olmec head (or Mixtec? Zapotec?), points out to us, with exuberant mime, the famous bas-reliefs called “Los Danzantes.” Only some of the carved figures, he says, are portraits of dancers, with their legs in movement (Alonso performs a few steps); others might be astronomers, raising one hand to shield their eyes and study the stars (Alonso strikes an astronomer’s pose). But for the most part, he says, they represent women giving birth (Alonso acts this out). We learn that this temple was meant to ward off difficult childbirths; the reliefs were perhaps votive images. Even the dance, for that matter, served to make births easier, through magic mimesis—especially when the baby came out feet first (Alonso performs the magic mimesis). One relief depicts a cesarean operation, complete with uterus and Fallopian tubes (Alonso, more brutal than ever, mimes the entire female anatomy, to demonstrate that a sole surgical torment linked births and deaths).
    Everything in our guide’s gesticulation takes on a truculent significance, as if the temples of the sacrifices cast their shadow on every act and every thought. When the most propitious date had been set, in accordance with the stars, the sacrifices were accompanied by the revelry of dances, and even births seemed to have no purpose beyond supplying new soldiers for the wars to capture victims. Though some figures are shown running or wrestling or playing football, according to Alonso these are not peaceful athletic competitions but, rather, the games of prisoners forced to compete in order to determine which of them would be the first to ascend the altar.
    â€œAnd the loser in the games was chosen for the sacrifice?” I ask.
    â€œNo! The winner!” Alonso’s face becomes radiant. “To have your chest split open by the obsidian knife was an honor!” And in a crescendo of ancestral patriotism, just as he had boasted of the excellence of the scientific knowledge of the ancient peoples, so now this worthy descendant of the Olmecs feels called upon to exalt the offering of a throbbing human heart to the sun to assure that the dawn would return each morning and illuminate the world.
    That was when Olivia asked, “But what did they do with the victims’ bodies afterward?”
    Alonso stopped.
    â€œThose limbs—I mean, those entrails,” Olivia insisted. “They were offered to the gods, I realize that. But, practically speaking, what happened to them? Were they burned?”
    No, they weren’t burned.
    â€œWell, what then? Surely a gift to the gods couldn’t be buried, left to rot in the ground.”
    â€œLos zopilotes,”
Alonso said. “The vultures. They were the ones who cleared the altars and carried the offerings to Heaven.”
    The vultures. “Always?” Olivia asked further, with an insistence I could not explain to myself.
    Alonso was evasive, tried to change the subject; he was in a hurry to show us the passages that connected the priests’ houses with the temples, where they made their appearance, their faces covered by terrifying masks. Our guide’s pedagogical enthusiasm had something irritating about it, because it gave