AA Gill is away
The traffic of colonisation goes both ways, writes AA Gill.
On 8 November 1519 Hernán Cortés looked down from the circling mountains and saw a city in a lake. It must have been astonishing, the most unexpected, unbelievable thing he’d ever seen. Tenochtitlán, the Aztec capital, was a beautiful metropolis built in the middle of a lake on a grid of canals and floating market gardens, serviced by a flotilla of canoes and barges. At its centre, the stone palaces and huge ziggurat temples. It was grander – far grander – and more elegant than anything the conquistador desperados would have seen in Europe.
Tenochtitlán turned the accepted truth of colonial exploration on its head. It is still taken as a given that European expansion brought civilisation to the uncivilised; the movement of intellectual and practical gifts was all one way. Europe exploited and stole and enslaved and raped and pillaged. But in
Contrary to popular wisdom, the dubious traffic of colonisation goes both ways,
exchange it brought the stuff, the wherewithal, of modernity and sophistication and the future. No one after the Turcoman and the Mongol from the Great Steppe ever invaded Europe for its own good.
But the mighty Aztec empire had constructed a city out of a premonition: where an eagle caught a snake on a cactus they would build. And they waited for hundreds of years until a shepherd saw the eagle with the snake on the cactus on an island in a lake and that’s where they settled, the most desperately malign and cruel political system ever devised, based on relentless blood sacrifices to a waning sun – hearts harvested from their neighbours.
Mexico City’s Museum of Anthropology is one of the most austerely beautiful and imposing warehouses of culture in the world. A great, brutal evocation of the ’60s set in gardens that hold pre-Columbian ruins that are not unlike what you imagine Indiana Jones’s back garden to be. The collection is split between the ages of pre-European Central American civilisations, the prehistoric, the jolly and comic Mayans, the Toltec, and the Aztecs.
The Aztec room grabs you with a ferociously mad intensity. It has a dark, angular, heavy authoritarian vigour. Their culture is mesmerising and cowering. You walk through the exhibits cringing, waiting for a blow. It is properly, emphatically fascist, half a millennium before anyone coined that word – the iconography, the perspective thud and the sense of destiny are the blueprint for Albert Speer’s Nuremberg and Hitler’s fantasy city of Germania.
Fascist style isn’t a caprice or an aesthetic choice; it is the congealed ectoplasm of political and social intolerance. You realise that when Cortés and his missionary, mercenary conquistadors arrived at the gates of Mexico City it was the meeting of the two most unpleasant cultures in the world. Arrogant, frothingly messianic Spain and the Gothically barbarous, blood-soaked heroic pessimism of the Aztec empire.
The conquistadors triumphed with a mixture of surprise, escalating brutality, luck and alliances the subject tribes. But it was a finely balanced thing.
The great centrepiece of the museum is a vast circular stone calendar weighing dozens of tonnes – an intricately carved wheel that no one has been able to definitively translate. It may be a calendar of past times, perhaps an altar for sacrifices, a votive prayer wheel. At its centre is the sun god holding two human hearts, with his ravenous mouth gaping. There the symbols of previous ages, when humanity has been extinguished, once eaten by monsters, once turned into monkeys, once into fish.
The Aztecs believed that they were in the dying embers of the last age.
In 1521 the conquistadors let loose the ultimate weapon to fulfil the promise of the calendar wheel: germ warfare. Central
America was scourged by a pandemic of smallpox. No one knows how many were killed. Possibly more people than survived. That was the final, brutal judgement of Tenochtitlán, the throne of blood that is now Mexico City.
Today it’s a brilliant and vital place – not laid out or easy for the casual tourist but full of strange and cosmopolitan interest. It has twice the population of London and an edge of fissile danger and a great deal of grand and decaying pleasure. The museum aside, there are the murals of Diego Rivera, one of the greatest bodies of work anywhere in the Americas.
His wife Frida Kahlo is on all the T-shirts, pillowcases and handbags, and tourist posters. Her eyebrows are graffitied everywhere, but her small museum is a disappointment. Her life has become a feminist parable. The pictures just aren’t as good as the story and certainly not as good as her husband’s, proving that genius isn’t fair or politically correct and doesn’t go to the deserving or the nice.
I just spent a Sunday walking through the sunny, garrulous and chaotic streets of the comfortably bohemian city centre. They love a heroic statue here – every corner and roundabout has some sternly valiant moustachioed man with a hat and a sword, defending the nation’s honour. Or a seminaked girl holding bronze foliage to adorn the heroic dead.
In one park, watched over by operatic bellicosity, old women paid young men to dance energetically to some Latin syncopated bop, a terpsichorean longing. They took turns to be spun and dipped by these chaps with shiny black hair and lizard smiles.
In another park over the road, mariachi bands in tight braided trousers and little bolero jackets waited to be hired. You have to admire any culture where a brass and guitar band that sings syrupy soap songs with sombreros on is an impulse buy: “I didn’t know what to bring for dinner so here’s
Pedro and the boys with ‘Guantanamera’.”
And then round the corner in another little park there were Mexican wrestlers, oblivious to the Jack Black mockery. They flung themselves at each other with their comic mimed violence. Mexican wrestling is to martial arts what Punch and Judy is to Ibsen. They were watched by hundreds of fat kids in nylon masks who shouted and imitated the moves with a berserk brio, risking third-degree friction burns on their chubby thighs.
Mexico City does much of its living outside, though with surprisingly few cafés. It has a Gadarene, cacophonous atmosphere, but there is still a background hum, a tinnitus of something darker, a sixth sense that this is a place constructed on a great sadness, a terrible anger, that the old ladies are dancing on a crime scene. Everywhere Day of the Dead skeletons grin with a deathless irony.
When the conquistadors came, not only was this the grandest city they’d ever seen, but these were the finest, healthiest people they’d ever met, unblemished by Europe’s endemic diseases. In the New World there were no domesticated ungulates; most Western illnesses came via the husbandry of farm animals and the sickness and immunity they bring. The Amerindians had neither, and died in their countless thousands.
Now they’re as fat and diabetic as their northern neighbours. They did, though, give to the Spanish two remembrances to take home. As the great plague ravaged Mexico, chocolate got to Europe. And syphilis.