“…it matters not if you elude my arms,

my heart, when my thought alone can imprison you.”

— Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (tr. Edith Grossman)

I. Teotihuacan

An empty grid with stone jaguars. Used to be you wouldn’t get down the street for the crowd. Now you won’t see anyone—maybe a snake. The ground echoes under you, things snap. Pillars of smoke on far-off rooftops. Only squatters. We divided the streets. Mine’s the good growing land. Corn, beans, peppers. I keep turkeys. The house we sleep in was a mansion once. Murals broken. Fangs, teeth, tongues, eyes. You’ll find things, even after the long rot. No fabric, furniture gone, but rainwater drums, weights for flour, luxury items. Green stones, obsidian. I climb high places, waterspouts. I exercise. I sleep at night. A drought might happen, a flood. Crops dry out, birds get sick. Same anywhere. Loud noises don’t bother me, money’s no worry. The gods don’t care, don’t look from their temples. Ghosts keep distant. Troubles are sudden, or a long way off. Land-thieves: it’s happened before. I keep my knives sharp. My sons make rounds in the street. Outsiders don’t take what I have. They leave offerings, write poems. The ruins are enchanted, timeless, that’s what they say—a place the legends happened. I keep out of their way. I annoy them. They try not to see me if they do. I say, What are you looking for? Are you crazy? People live in the south, no differently.

II. Mexican Treasuries

When the square was cleared of corpses, they surveyed what they had, looked around, lifted things. Did they regret anything? Too soon to tell. They rode along distractedly. Something about it gave them the impression of returning to a place they’d known in stories. The beautiful gardens, the mysterious fruit: it was like being drunk, or ill. They were exhausted by the smoke in their throats, the delirious hewing. Their wounds bled out memories. It was so desperate, so easy. Buildings burned quickly, before they were recognized. When they were gone, only strange feelings were left: giddiness, yearning, less articulable things. The old Axayacatl palace had gone up first, then the House of Birds. Cruel to let it burn, but it overwhelmed them, they couldn’t take in its dimensions, the elegance of the huge aviaries, the resplendence of the plumages, the ceaseless squawking and roar of wings. Even the literate men, few in number, couldn’t explain these moods, identify these birds, these plants, the languages. They had been born on a tripartite globe, a flower with three petals, Jerusalem in the center, and even that was different now; nothing from childhood stays long, not even the world. And when others joined them, well-read men who knew how to put things in order, they only collected a mass of unsorted anecdotes, compiled promiscuously in the manner of Pliny. They recorded, for example, that cochineal was a dye mashed from an insect’s wing-case, that the hummingbird was a variety of hornet. They described the exhilarating properties of lime and coca, drew the chocolate seed intact and halved, and rendered, almost accurately, the Lord’s prayer in Mixtec glyphs. “Never will my imagination or my pen be sufficient to describe this fruit, the avocado”—this was a typical observation. Insufficient, useless without a catalog: only with a system could anything be made of this conquest, or anything justified. The Council of the Indies, not insensitive to the difficulty, called upon Doctor Hernandez to organize the data, provide form, arrange the species in his index of Mexican treasures by their names and applications: ecapatli, called small elder, a headache remedy, tzontecpatli, a dressing for injuries.

III. The Manila Galleon

That wall-chart’s not straight, he thought, and probably inaccurate, and I should call the boy in to hang it straight. He stared at the map a long time, satisfying himself that Mexico was a point on a line extending west from Cádiz. As he leaned forward in his chair and opened the ledger, he detected an opportunity to contemplate the price of ink for a while, so he did so, then glanced at an entry in the book, and then at the window again. The light was the problem, the day was so wet—that’s why he couldn’t concentrate. Considering his options, he remembered he hadn’t been to Acapulco in many years, or seen the Pacific in just as long, except in a rather dark and clumsy painting in the lobby, of his ancestor in a creamy ruff, with a prospect of merchant ships (he’d owned several) blowing along on the westerlies. Rather than waste the day, he grabbed his hat and strolled to the Parián to examine the goods that arrived the night before. The streets were crowded—he’d forgot the market day—and he thought of turning back, but he needed some air, and anyway it was an excuse to soak in the aura of foreign merchandise. And then, of course, when he reached the warehouse, the man was asleep, and there was a problem with the lock, and most of the items were packed. Given the disorder, he had to satisfy himself with what was by the door. One or two crates, pried open, released a scent of what he imagined to be the Philippines. There was a decorative screen, mother-of-pearl inlay; he liked it—a street scene, Chinese, bird- or cricket-sellers (he couldn’t be sure in that light)—and thought it would make a good companion for the screen from his ancestor’s time. That was only an imitation, admittedly, but it was a street-scene, the Viceroy arriving from Veracruz, a painting in the Japanese style, with gold clouds floating among the horses and palanquins, novel motifs at the time. It amused him to think how the city had changed, how a man could have an occupation like his, staring at ledgers and maps with eastward-stretching lines. So far, he thought. We can’t help thinking it’s a dream: that in Peking tonight a mandarin, withdrawing from the monotony of court, will toy with some commodity of ours, a good timepiece or a snuffbox, yet in my house I run my hand down the jacket I bought my woman (silk, of course, with a Chinese unicorn on the back, signifying an auspicious rule).

IV. An Incident in Candide

There’s a chapter in the book where our hero and his companion meet Cunégonde’s brother on one of the Jesuit reductions, and for a moment the reader might well think: Here’s someone who knows what he’s doing, someone who learned to live in the New World. He sits down to breakfast under a cool arbor. The colonnade is marble and he’s had netting put up to confine his parrots, his Guinea hens, his several types of hummingbirds. It sways as the parrots cling to it, grooming their feathers. A slave has brought him liquor in a crystal glass. Out in the sun, the Paraguayans satisfy themselves with mate and cornmeal in wooden vessels. Maybe you despise him, but he knows there aren’t clean slates and golden ages. Baron of seventy-two quarterings, he can laugh at the forest monkeys who bite each other’s buttocks and fuss over one quarter of human blood. As for the Paraguayans—human or not, savage or ennobled by nature, prayer, labor, et cetera—none of that interests him. They work for a daily meal. Reader, condemn him all you want, you can’t shame him. Drive him out and he’ll appear elsewhere, or in the same place. Yes, even kill him with your sword—Cacambo will lead you to safety—but don’t imagine you’re done with him: certainly you’ll meet him again. Such men you can run through, you can punish with Bulgarian drills, but they’ll come back, they will return in a later chapter.

V. Aleijadinho, Sculptor and Architect

Because I hoped to write about you, Aleijadinho, I asked you to visit me in my sleep. I asked this because, having read the same things over and over, I wanted something more to report than the inescapable details—the chisel strapped to your fingerless hand, the curtained palanquin in which you traveled to avoid being seen, and the fact (not so remarkable in Minas Gerais) that your mother had been a slave. There were some receipts for materials signed in a confident hand, and a rough portrait said to be yours—rather disappointingly, since it shows you were a man of your time, the time of Napoleon. (I had foolishly pictured a gothic face, given your palanquin and your leprosy.) All this having become familiar to me, I asked you, closing my eyes, to tell me something new in a dream, since I remembered, too, that you only worked at night, while everyone was asleep apart from you and your three slaves, and when your palanquin left at dawn the people in Congonhas do Campo would wake to find your statues completed along the church staircase like residues of their dreams, like accumulations of salt. Of course you did not appear in my dream or say anything to me, either because it was presumptuous of me to ask or because you prefer to express yourself in another medium. All I can do, like anyone else, is admire your sculptures, however few they are, and also recoil at them perhaps, because they are as worrying as your story, they seem to dissolve in fragments, to grow outward like thorns. Nothing about them is what I expect, and I was wrong to ask for more. I don’t know you—forgive me. What you left, for those who are awake, are the statues you made at night—images in fragrant wood, the Brazilian, not the true jacaranda, or else blue soapstone.

VI. Therefore, with all the angels and archangels…

When this moment arrived in the liturgy I was sure that if I kept my eyes on the green cloth of ordinary time hanging from the tabernacle I would see the customary folded wings of the seraphim process in neat rows of gold thread up and down the linen and in that crowd of feathers discern the eyes staring back at me, faintly and drowsily, from a little field of eternity. I was given to visions as a child—in those days the stories I cared about were ones I found slightly too difficult to believe—and so of course the dancing angels did not surprise me, or the astonishing careers of various bandits. All the images of life in that place held the strange weight of fantasies playing out within me—the Organ Mountains gleaming like candles in the purple winter light, the Pueblo clown biting a slab of watermelon on a roadside billboard, the gentle trickle of a tiled fountain with moss growing under its brim and snails gliding along the edge of the pool. I saw them with a child’s eyes, and it is no mystery that what remains of them is a peculiar mood of uncreated splendor, an unspoken word granting supersubstantial life. We left New Mexico when I was quite young, only about ten, and we never returned. I did not realize then how much I loved it, or how deeply it affected me, but when I think about it now it is with an astonishing ardor, a love that almost frightens me in its childish greed. My life settled into a regular order. In the Midwestern light, which traveled unbroken over so many straight roads, I came to accept the solidity of things, the untroubled rule of time and space, the passivity of ordinary time. I was used to it almost at once, never asked anything of it, and it required nothing of me; I neither feared nor delighted in it; when I parted from it, I rarely thought of it again. But still I find myself dreaming about desert fountains and billboards, and needing to consult a book on the art of the colonial period, or the architecture of the Mission San Xavier del Bac, simply to remind myself that there is some material basis to these persistent images. Not everything can be verified, of course, and I worry about my motives. The place cannot only be my memory of the place, and so much of my memory cannot be true. My clear recollection, for instance, of a fragile tower in the canyon of El Morro, where conquistadores added their inscriptions to the petroglyphs of birds and hunters. (There is no tower.) Or a couch in nineteenth-century leather in the ghost room of a Mesilla restaurant, stained with the blood of murdered lovers, members of different castes, whose faces stare defiantly from portraits above. (The room exists, but the portraits are not theirs.) Or the several missions we visited, many of them ruined, a few elaborate and well-preserved, but rarely larger than our own modest church. I never saw any of the great retablos with cascading dust covers and solomonic columns (we were too far north for that), but one stands in my memories, tremendous and dark, with brittle, shrunken Jesuits in the niches, and all along the edges masses of scrolling decoration—curiously organic, almost marine in places, like curtains of red seaweed. I see it so clearly it must be real somewhere—the angels blushing in the ceiling, the little fragments of gold leaf clinging like raindrops to the exposed cedar, the sculptures with human hair, glass eyes, distressingly watchful eyes, drowned faces, martyred faces, faces that have been crying. When I awake, the vision lingers in the room around me, called into the world by words I have not said. It fades, but only gradually, as time and space remember themselves, allowing me for a while to dismiss the idol I have set in my heart.

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Addison Zeller is a contributing editor for The Dodge and lives in Wooster, Ohio. His fiction has appeared in 3:AM, Epiphany, Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere. Twitter: @amhcrane87