On Diaz, i.-- Remembering

1. Sensory perception runs through Diaz’s account, from memories of rainy nights and little food to vivid smells to a vast range of visual media both indigenous and Spanish. The olfactory has a decided presence:  Bodies lie putrid on the battlefield. The charnel-house temples Diaz remembers for us stink so strongly he can barely stand them. At nearly every peaceful meeting between Spanish and indigenous there is incense, the smoke ‘fumigating’ the Spaniards as a sign of honor. Smell pervades Diaz’s memories: smell, burrowed into the brain, hanging over the reconstructed/constructed remembering of an old Spaniard.

2. Sight: The image of the Virgin and Child Cortes presents to the subdued town- Diaz repaints it for us in his text, and clears the pagan underbrush anew, erasing the foul-looking Idols and painting in their place the hallowed Lady and Son. They set them up, so that the indigenous ‘would see how well it would go with them.’ Seeing is becoming; the image is transformation, is the visual inscribing of Spanish dominion, of the dominion of the Cross the Spanish bring. Everywhere they go the Spaniards inscribe the sign of the Cross, setting up crosses in temple-complexes, placing them along roadsides, consciously recasting the landscape while also retaining the landscape with much of its significance (the crosses and images of the Virgin and Child are, significantly, placed in the old temples, scrubbed clean and whitewashed). The Spaniards cut the sign of the cross into the ceiba tree, because even when its bark grows back the sign will remain. The tree remains the tree, but it is not the same. It has been inscribed with a mark that will last forever, that is re-inscribed by Diaz, traced in tree after tree, an image of an image of an image, tree from tree to tree. On and on.

The Mexica paint through Diaz’s pen: script through painting, turned script again: thrice-written, thrice, four times refracted, from text to paint to text to text to text-in-translation. So multiple translations, and only the reimagined lines remain in place. Numerous times Diaz describes, often in admiring detail, the paintings the Mexica and others employed: here, he investigates and recalls for us the image of the Spaniards, having now passed through the channels of Mexica observation and interpretation, then through Diaz, then onto the page and finally to us. More layers… All these texts, these visual signs, inscribed, interpreted, stuck in Diaz’s mind enough to be re-imagined, re-inscribed, and now we receive them, repaint them through his words, our associations. The process of memory goes on…