The Fan-Maker's Inquisition by Rikki Ducornet Read Free Book Online

strange trees from the ground.
    The map-maker dares not leave his rooms, but no matter: He believes his hand is guided by divine inspiration. Melchor is a madman who imagines that there where he pens in a lake, a lake must be. Or a river. Or a range of mountains. Or, if not, that these things appear once he has designated them, summoned directly from the mind of God. Melchor is a Christian, not a kabbalist, but as he studies the heresies, this Jewish idea of things appearing as God thinks them appeals to him, and he is mad enough to believe that whatever he thinks, God conceives—or, perhaps with less vanity, that whatever God conceives, Melchor then imagines. Thus the bridge between divine conception and Melchor’s pen precipitates reality. Melchor is God’s vessel and God’s quill.
    —The map-maker is mad!
    —The map-maker’s vanity is contained only by his folly.
    He is not alone. All times are foolish, including our own, which breaks sodomites on the wheel. I ask you: Why shouldn’t one mouth be as good as the other? But some times worse than others, and Landa’s was overswarming with murderously foolish men. Men who instead of delighting in new worlds drenched them in blood.
    The year is 1562, and Landa—who has impressed everyone with his uncanny capacity with language, his intelligence and zealousness—has been named First Provincial. He has gone to Mani to inquire into pagan practices the Church has not managed to purge. Already a number of Maya women have had their breasts cut away and fed to dogs in order to frighten their husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons into submission. Infants stuck to pikes line the road to Mani. The book opens with this image: those bodies, that road. Entering Mani, Landa sees a Spanish mastiff gnawing a human hand.
    —All inventions of Sade!
    —Only Melchor is our invention. But to continue: Imagine now, if you will, how such a man as this map-maker, Melchor, responds when a Maya scribe named Kukum is made to bring his books and maps before Landa; imagine Melchor’s humiliation when Landa, to impress Kukum and, perhaps, to frighten him, unrolls Melchor’s map—it is so large that it covers the entire surface of a great library table set out in the center of the Inquisitor’s chamber—and Kukum snorts with disdain.
    Kukum is defiant and he is daring. He knows it is likely that he will die a horrible death. He has seen that, like everything Spanish, Melchor’s map is fantastical and false. He says: “My land is not a land of dreams. It is a real place, a tangible place supporting more temples and pyramids than can be counted, and each is as heavy as a hill. Your map-maker must take a long journey and, with his brushes and quills, put down what is truly there. But, see, he need not bother. The thing has been done. I, myself, have done it.” Then, from the bundle he carries, Kukum takes out one of those beautiful books of the New World, a book made of bark paper pasted to ribs of cedar wood, with covers of cedar carefully carved—a book that opens like a fan! There, to the wonderment of Landa and Melchor, lies the entire Yucatán peninsula, the whole of the north as free of lakes, rivers, and mountains as the summit of Landa’s own head. But there are tall forests clearly drawn and dry scrublands and planted fields. The sacred wells and salt pans are clearly marked, and the marshes filled with birds and fish; the cities of Ake and Chancenote, Campeche and Ichmul, Ecab, Izamal, and Chetumal are all in their places. Also marked are the ancient cities “where no one goes now,” Kukum informs them: Labna, Mayapán, Uxmal, Chicheniza .
    With refinement and spontaneity, Kukum had painted the features of his vanishing world. He had marked the roadways with footprints; the hills were bright with butterflies, the coastal waters filled with fish. Kukum points to these things, speaking their names with reverence: uzcay, or skate; zub, or hare; put, papaya; maxcal, yam; ixim,