![]() ![]() Mixtli, the 63-yearold Indian narrator of the chronicle accompanying the Bishop's reports, is indeed "an Aeolus with an inexhaustible bag of wind" and a "human cataract" who 'cannot be restrained." Mixtli's autobiography goes on for more than 700 word-crammed pages.īut the Bishop is wrong when he calls Mixtli's 16th-century history pernicious maunderings." This, of course, is part of the grim and somewhat heavy-handed joke of the frame of "Aztec" - that the Bishop cannot see beyond his Christian missionary nose when he characterizes Mixtli as a "simple-minded and weak savage." For old Mixtli, or Chicome-Xochitl Tlilecic-Mixtli, to give him one of his more formal appellations, though he has fallen on evil times in the wake of Cortez 16th-century conquest of the Mexican has risen from humble beginnings to become a warrior, a scribe, an interpreter, an explorer, a wealthy merchant and a sometime adviser and confident to no less than Motecuzoma II (or Montezuma, as the conquering Spaniards corrupted his name). The Bishop of the See of Mexico in New Spain writes at least one true thing in the reports he sends to his Emperor Don Carlo. AYYO! - as the characters in Gary Jennings's dazzling and hypnotic historical novel are wont to exclaim. ![]()
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