Vision de Anahuac by Alfonso Reyes

First published: 1917

Type of work: Essay

Critical Evaluation:

For more than fifty years, in book after book, Alfonso Reyes has demonstrated the excellence and universality of Hispano-American letters. Poet, short story writer, essayist, critic, theoretician, meta-physicist, and a scholar in the best humanist tradition, he has ranged for his themes and materials from Athens in the classic age to the Indian pueblos and the history of his native Mexico. Under these circumstances it may seem somewhat arbitrary to let a single essay, even one commonly found in separate publication, represent a writer of such variety and scope. But VISION DE ANAHUAC, written in Madrid in 1915 and published in San Jose de Costa Rica two years later, is one of those seminal works in which significance or influence bears no relationship to bulk. It is a prose poem, a landscape painting, a patriotic invocation, a study in history, an archaeological reconstruction, a literary critique, an exercise in style. The late Gabriela Mistral, Chilean poet, called it the best single piece of Latin American prose.

Anahuac was the Nahuatl name for the Valley of Mexico, site of the great city of Tenochtitlan and the center of the Aztec civilization which fell to the rapacity of the conquistadores under Hernan Cortes in 1521. In a style that is subtle, evocative, and varied, Alfonso Reyes re-creates the wonder of that place and time when two races, two societies, confronted each other and the feudal barbarism of the Old World performed its act of violence upon the Indian barbarism of the New. Years later Bernal Diaz del Castillo, chronicler of the conquest, voiced his lament for a despoiled culture that was passionate and cruel but also beautiful and splendid: “Now all is lost, razed, so that there is nothing.”

In the epigraph to his essay Reyes welcomes the traveler to the most crystalline region of the air. In this luminous prose and vivid imagery every object stands out, distinct and immaculate in color and form, bathed in the blue and gold intensity of sky and sun. For the sake of analogy Reyes invokes the name of Giovanni Battista Ramusio, who began to publish his collection DELLE NAVIGAZIONI E VIAGGI in Venice in 1550. Among the illustrations in this old work are scenes of the New World as the explorers saw them and wrote about them. These pictures, ingenuous in conception, meticulous in design, present an exotic world of nature in the vegetation of New Spain: the ear of corn, the clustered banana, the strange tropical fruits distilling their own fragrance and honey, and in stiff array the varieties of cacti, emblematic plants of a semi-arid land where the cactus, the eagle, and the serpent are the appropriate heraldic devices for a coat of arms.

To the priests and warriors of the tribe that entered the valley early in the fourteenth century—the last of such migrations into Anahuac—the legendary vision of the eagle and the serpent was the fulfillment of a prophecy. Behind that roving band lay a history of many wanderings and wars in which memory and fact faded into a primitive myth of warriors who came out of the Seven Caves to which the seven tribes traced their dim beginnings. There they built a city, a flower of stone on water, and the city became an empire, cyclopean like those of Egypt and Babylon, over which Moctezuma the magnificent but weak ruled in the ill-omened days that heralded the coming of the white man. The stage had been set for the last act in an ancient drama of conquest and settlement when Cortes and his followers crossed the snow-capped mountains and descended through fields of maize and maguey to the valley floor.

Ahead of them, connected with the mainland by three stone causeways two lances in width, Tenochtitlan rose like a mirage from waters that caught and held the color of the sky. In that clear atmosphere every detail of the city and its environs could be viewed as if through crystal, an intricate pattern of temples, palaces, public squares, streets, canals, and gardens bright with flowers. Over the city loomed the bulk of the great temple, with wide streets radiating from its four corners. Smoke rose from the sanctuaries atop the holy pyramid, and through the still air came the echoing rumble of drums and the thin music of flutes.

To the Spaniards the sight was like some vision of enchantment, for the conquistadores carried in their blood the same strain of wonder that had produced the romantic story of Amadis of Gaul. “As soon as we saw so many cities and towns in the water,” Diaz del Castillo wrote, “we were struck with amazement and said that it seemed like things from the book of Amadis because of the great towers and temples and houses which they had built in the water, and all of them of stone and mortar, and even some of our soldiers spoke of what they saw as if they were in a land of dreams. . . .”

As Alfonso Reyes points out, the life of the city revolved around three central points: the temple, the market place, and Moctezuma’s palace. In all sections of the city, the pattern was repeated in the smaller shrines, the market squares, the palaces of the nobles. The proud, somber Indian of Anahuac was a worshiper of fierce gods, a shrewd trader, a lover of ceremony and display.

Within the serpent-carved wall of the sacred enclosure stood the great temple, a terraced, monolithic pyramid built of basalt and porphyry slabs quarried from the surrounding hills. Inside this precinct the apartments of the priests, the study halls, and rooms for the storage of sacrificial utensils and books of ritual covered an area which could have enclosed a village of five hundred persons. One hundred and fourteen steps led to the highest platform on which were images of the gods, housed in sanctuaries decorated with carvings of men and monsters in wood and stone. The giant idols, made of cereals and blood, were decorated with precious metals and jewels. Sacred fires burned on the altars. Close at hand were trumpets, censers, flutes, conch shells, and the flint knives used for human sacrifice. There also was the ceremonial serpent-skin drum which could be heard two leagues away. Blood spattered the altars and floors. The priests wore black robes and their hair was matted with gore. They were the guardians of savage rituals, the ministers of a faith reaching downward toward that concept of earth and blood which is the dark mystery at the heart of mankind’s remote origins.

From the horrors of the temple the Spaniards turned to the bustle of the market place. It was, said Cortes, twice as large as that of Salamanca and there every day some sixty thousand people engaged in buying and selling under the supervision of inspectors and twelve presiding magistrates. All the produce of the land was offered for sale, each in its separate quarter under deep porticoes: jewelry of precious stones and metals, collars, bracelets, earrings, lip plugs of jade, crystal, emerald, turquoise, gold, silver, and copper; beautiful featherwork, shimmering as a hummingbird poised in sunlight; flowers from Xochimilco; textiles that reminded Cortes of the silk market in Granada; game of all kinds, partridge, quail, wild ducks, rabbits, deer, and small dogs bred for eating; vegetables of every description, onions, leeks, cresses, sorrel, artichokes, beans, and golden thistles; corn, red, black, yellow, and blue, sold green on the ear or dried or ground or baked into loaves and tortillas; fish, fruits, cacao, syrups of corn and maguey; building materials, stone, bricks, timber; firewood and charcoal for cooking and heating; pottery for every use, painted and glazed; eggs, cakes, sweets, hides, tobacco. There was a quarter for apothecaries—Indian herbalists acquainted the Spaniards with more than twelve hundred medicinal plants and roots—and another for barbers. There were houses where food was cooked and served. In another quarter was the slave market where traders cried their human merchandise. The Indian market, according to Diaz del Castillo, surprised even those who had been to Constantinople and Rome.

Those familiar with the Spanish court were equally astonished by the pomp and splendor that surrounded Moctezuma. To their awed gaze he seemed another Midas whose touch turned everything to gold, so that it was necessary for him to uncover himself to show Cortes that he was, like other men, of human flesh. As the poet has said, if there is poetry in America it is Moctezuma on his throne of gold. In his palaces he had reproduced in precious stones, gold, silver, or feathers every natural object in his kingdom. Six hundred lords attended him daily. When he dined, three hundred noble youths were needed to serve him, for he had put before him every variety of meat, fish, vegetables, and fruits in the land. Four times a day he changed his dress, and his garments, like the dishes from which he was served, were never used again. Those who approached his person wore poor clothing and abased themselves in humility. When he took his ease, dancers, buffoons, and acrobats entertained him.

In his great palace the walls were of porphyry, jasper, and marble, roofed with carved beams and richly carpeted with cotton carpets, skins, and featherwork. Fountains played in the courtyards. He had other palaces for his recreation. One contained pools of water, salt and sweet, for every kind of aquatic bird. Another section contained birds prized for the beauty of their plumage. Still another housed birds of prey, for the king was skilled in falconry. There was a palace in which wild animals and reptiles were kept. Another was given over to the raising of flowers—no vegetables or fruit trees ever grew in the Indian garden—fragrant shrubs, and scented herbs.

In a land where nature was so inseparably joined to the daily lives of the people, the flower, not the snakeskin drum or the sacrificial knife, was the symbol of their culture, a symbol of the love of art and beauty that redeemed in part the cruelty of their religion. The Aztec noble carried flowers in his hand when he walked abroad; garlands decked him on ceremonial occasions. Flowers filled the markets, the palaces, the adobe houses of the poor. Floral designs decorated the pottery of Cholula. Floating gardens covered the lakes. In the calendrical codices a shower of flowers is shown descending upon the earth at the end of the fourth sun-cycle. The flower also had its consecration in art. Stylized in picture writing and in sculpture, it appears in place names and as the designation of the exquisite qualities of things. And as the surviving fragments or corrupted translations show, the flower provided the themes and imagery in both the secular and religious poetry of the period before the conquest.

Alfonso Reyes laments the loss of the indigenous poetry of the Indians. Although scholars may unearth portions of their hymns, rituals, or festive songs, and although others still exist in the versions of the Spanish friars, nothing can ever compensate for the loss of that body of literature which reflected the religious and social experience of the people of Anahuac. Findings and reconstructions contain only suggestions of what that poetry must have been, for even altered and indirect in the surviving versions it exhibits a degree of sensibility not characteristic of the translating Spanish missionaries who possessed more pity than imagination. One poem, “Ninoyolonotza,” is quoted as an example of man’s search through the world of the senses for a concept of the ideal. Another, paraphrased in part from the Quetzalcoatl cycle, contains echoes of an ancient fertility myth similar to those of Tammuz and Adonis. The likeness becomes cause for reflection. The promise of rebirth in the Quetzalcoatl legend, if fulfilled, might have destroyed the blood-drinking gods of the Aztecs and so altered the somber history of Anahuac.

Discussion can do no more than suggest the magnificence of the writing in VISION DE ANAHUAC. All of pre-conquest Mexico is seen here, evoked out of a vast and prodigal storehouse of history and legend, every detail viewed through the eyes of a poet conferring impressions of sense and details of fact like a radiant gift. The style is in keeping with the theme, language rising from the page to the slow swing of its rhythms and the sudden thrust of its images, a mingling of grace and violence, of the concrete and the hauntingly allusive. It has been said that VISION DE ANAHUAC set a standard for a new kind of poetry. Certainly its auditory and visual effects have been echoed by a number of modern poets. Among others, Valery Larbaud and Juan Jose Domenchina have called attention to similarities of tone and style between this prose poem by Alfonso Reyes and the ANABASIS of St.-John Perse. It should be pointed out also that VISION DE ANAHUAC is the antecedent work.