Aztec - Jennings Gary - Страница 39
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I thought I had done a very good job of picturing the incident, particularly in my meticulous rendering of the innumerable left ears and the expression of astonishment on the face of Coxcox. I waited, almost aglow with self-congratulation, for the Lord Teacher to praise my work.
But he was frowning as he flipped the book's pages apart, and he looked from one side to the other of the pleated strip, and he said at last, "In which direction am I supposed to read this?"
Puzzled, I said, "In Xaltocan, my lord, we unfold the pages leftward. That is, so we may read each panel from left to right."
"Yes, yes!" he snapped. "We all customarily read from left to right. But your book gives no indication that we should do so."
"Indication?" I said.
"Suppose you are bidden to write an inscription that must be read in some other direction—on a temple frieze or column, for instance, where the architecture requires that it be read from right to left, or even from top to bottom."
The possibility had never occurred to me, and I said so.
He said impatiently, "When a scribe pictures two persons or two gods conversing, naturally they must be face to face. But there is one basic rule. The majority of all the characters must face in the direction the writing is to be read."
I think I gulped loudly.
"You never grasped that simplest rule of picture writing?" he asked scathingly. "And you have the effrontery to show me this?" He tossed it back to me without even refolding it. "When you attend your first class in word knowing tomorrow, join that one yonder."
He pointed across the lawn to a class assembling about one of the pavilions, and my face fell and my pride evaporated. Even from a distance, I could make out that all the students were about half my size and age.
It was mortifying to have to sit among infants—to begin at the very beginning in both my history and my word knowing classes—as if I had never been taught anything at all, as if I had never exerted myself to learn anything at all.
So I was cheered to discover that the study of poetry, at least, was not graded into the Beginners, the Learners, the Somewhat Learned, and so on, with me at the very bottom of the class. There was only a single gathering of aspiring poets, and they included students much older as well as much younger than myself. Among them were both the young Prince Willow and his elder half brother Crown Prince Black Flower; there were other nobles ranging even to the very old; there were both girls and women of the nobility; there were more slaves than I had seen in any other class.
It seems that it matters not who makes a poem, and it matters not what kind of poem: a tribute to some god or hero, a lengthy historical account, a love song, a lamentation, or a joking bit of banter. That poem is not judged according to the poet's age, sex, social standing, education, or experience. A poem merely is or is not. It lives or it never existed. It is made and remembered or it is forgotten so quickly that it might never have been made at all. In that class I was content to sit and listen, timorous of attempting any poetic ventures of my own. It was not until many, many years later that I happened to make a poem which I have since heard recited by strangers. So that one has lived, but it is a very small poem, and I would not call myself a poet on that account.
What I recollect most vividly about my poetry class is the first time I attended it. Some distinguished visitor had been invited by the Lord Teacher to read his works, and he was just about to begin when I arrived and sat down on a grassy bank at the rear of the crowd. I could not see him too distinctly at that distance, but I could make out that he was medium tall and well built, that he was about the age of the Lady of Tolan, that he wore a richly embroidered cotton mantle held by a gold clasp, and no other adornments to designate his office or class. So I took him to be a professional poet of sufficient talent to have been rewarded with a pension and a place at court.
He shuffled several sheets of bark paper in his hand and gave one sheet to a slave boy who sat crosslegged at his feet, holding a miniature drum on his lap. Then the visitor announced in a voice which, though soft-spoken, carried well, "With the Lord Teacher's permission, my young lord and lady students, I will not recite today from my own works, but from those of a far greater and wiser poet. My father."
"Ayyo, with my permission and pleasure," said the Lord Teacher, nodding benignly. The class also murmured a collective ayyo of approval, as if everyone there already knew the works of the poet-father he had mentioned.
From what I have already told you of our picture writing, reverend friars, you will have realized that it was inadequate for setting down poetry. Our poems lived by oral repetition, or lived not at all. Anyone who heard and liked a poem would memorize it and retell it to someone else, who might in turn tell it again. To aid the hearers in that memorizing, a poem was usually constructed in such a manner that the syllables of its words had a regular rhythm, and in such a manner that the same word sounds regularly recurred at the ends of its separate lines.
The papers the visitor carried bore only enough word pictures to assure that his memory did not falter and omit a line, to remind him here and there to stress a word or a passage his poet-father had thought worthy of special note. And the papers he handed to his drummer slave were marked only with brush strokes: many small dabs of paint, some larger ones, variously commingled and variously spaced. They told the slave the rhythm to beat out with his hand on the drum as accompaniment to the poet's recital: sometimes murmurous, sometimes sharply emphasizing the words, sometimes a soft throb like a heart beating in the pauses between the lines.
The poems the visitor recited and sang and chanted that day were all felicitously worded and sweetly cadenced, but they all were slightly tinged with melancholy, as when early autumn first steals in upon the summertime. After nearly a sheaf of years, and with no word pictures to aid my recollection, no drum to mark the beats and pauses, I still can repeat one of them:
I made a song in praise of life,
a world as bright as quetzal feather:
to skies of turquoise, sunlight gold,
to streams like jadestone, gardens blooming...
But gold can melt and jadestone shatter,
leaves turn brown and trees fall down,
our flowers fade, their petals scatter.
The sun sets soon, the night comes looming.
See beauty fade, our loves grow cold,
the gods desert, their temples weather...
Why does my song pierce like a knife?
When the recital was concluded, the respectfully attentive crowd of listeners stood up and broke apart. Some went strolling about by themselves, saying one or several of the poems over and over, to fix the words in their memory. I was one of those. Others milled about the visitor, kissed the earth to him, and regaled him with compliments and thanks. I was walking in circles on the grass, head bowed, repeating to myself that poem I have just repeated to you, when I was approached by young Prince Willow.
"I overheard you, Head Nodder," he said. "I too liked that poem best of all. And it made another poem waft into my own head. Would you oblige me by hearing it?"
"I should be honored to be the first," I said, and what he recited was this:
You tell me then that I must perish
like the flowers that I cherish.
Nothing remaining of my name,
nothing remembered of my fame?
But the gardens I planted still are young—
the songs I sang will still be sung!
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