A Reader on Reading

There is a scene in our own history that could have found its place in Alice’s books. Exhausted from the continuing battles, convinced that further struggle was now useless, having decided to attempt capitulation rather than lose not only his freedom but his life, in the summer of 1520 the Aztec king Montezuma, prisoner of the Spaniards, agreed to hand over to Hernán Cortés the vast treasure that his father, Axayactl, had laboriously assembled, and to swear allegiance to the king of Spain, that distant and invisible monarch whose power Cortés represented. Commenting on the ceremony, the Spanish chronicler Fernández de Oviedo reported that Montezuma was in tears throughout the procedure, and, pointing out the difference between a bond willingly accepted by a free agent and one performed in sorrow by someone in chains, Oviedo quoted the Roman poet Marcus Varro: “What is given by force is not service but larceny.”

The royal Aztec treasure was, by all accounts, magnificent, and when it was assembled in front of the Spaniards, it towered in three golden heaps made up, for the most part, of exquisite utensils whose secret purpose suggested sophisticated social ceremonies; intricate collars, bracelets, wands, and fans decorated with many-colored feathers, precious stones, and pearls; and carefully wrought birds, insects, and flowers, which, according to Cortés himself, “were, beyond their value, so marvelous, that their very novelty and strangeness rendered them priceless, nor could it be believed that any of the known Princes of this World might possess things like these, and of such quality.”

Montezuma had intended the treasure to be a tribute from his court to the Spanish king. Cortés’s soldiers, however, demanded that the treasure be treated as booty and that they each receive a fair part of the gold. A fifth of the treasure belonged by rights to the king of Spain, and an equal portion to Cortés himself. A large sum was destined to indemnify the governor of Cuba for the cost of the expedition. The garrison at Veracruz and the leading caballeros were expecting their part, as well as the cavalry, the harquebusiers, and the crossbow men, who were entitled to double pay. This left the common soldiers with about one hundred gold pesos each, a sum so insignificant, compared to their expectations, that many eventually refused to accept it.

Bending to his men’s wishes, Cortés sent for the famed goldsmiths of Azcapozalco to turn Montezuma’s precious objects into ingots, which were then stamped with the royal arms. The task took the goldsmiths three full days of work. Today, engraved in stone over the door of the Museum of Gold in Santafé de Bogotá, the visitor can read the following verse, addressed by an Aztec poet to the Spanish conquerors: “I am amazed by your blindness and folly, that you undo such beautifully wrought jewels to make bricks out of them.”

The question of value is an ancient one. For Cortés, the value of a work of art whose “very novelty and strangeness” rendered it “priceless,” was superseded by the value of the raw material from which the work was made and which had been granted a (however fluctuating and symbolic) market price. Since gold itself was the measure of the value of his social transactions, he deemed himself justified in turning the Aztec artworks into ingots. (In our time, the businessman who bought van Gogh’s Sunflowers and locked up the painting in a safe proceeded under exactly the same conviction.)

Of course, other values exist. The German language, for instance, employs several words to denote value and its different meanings, such as Gewalt (the quality of power), Wert (the agreed-upon importance of something), Geltung (the current validity), Gültigkeit (the official worth or usefulness) in the fields of morality, aesthetics, scholarship, and epistemology. But for Cortés, the monetary value superseded them all. Such an overriding notion allowed the baron de Montesquieu, two centuries later, to suggest mockingly that if buying and selling have become our evaluating scales, “a man is worth the price he would be sold for in Algiers.”