CORTAZAR’S “THE NIGHT FACE UP” AND THE WAR OF THE FLOWER by DAVID WYKES In its English translation by Paul Blackburn, Julio Cortézar’s “La noche boca arriba” (from Final del juego, 1956) has a footnote appended to Cortdzar’s epigraph for the story. The epigraph either quotes one of the Spanish chroniclers of the Conquest or imitates their style: “And at certain periods they went out to hunt enemies; they called it the war of the blossom” (p. 66).1 The footnote, ascribed to “Ed.,” first expands on the epigraph: “The war of the blossom was the name the Aztecs gave toa ritual war in which they took prisoners for sacrifice.” Then comes a sentence of commentary. “It is metaphysics to say that the gods see men as flowers, to be so uprooted, trampled, cut down.” An epigraph, like the title or a footnote, stands in a somewhat prob- lematical relationship to a story. It is of the story without being in it, and this intimate but exterior position is structurally so similar to the author’s relationship to his text that an epigraph will seem to claim a certain authority. It challenges any simple taboo on intentionality. The author put this here, and only the wariest of readers—perhaps the most sophisticated, perhaps the most inhibited—will not assume that by putting it there the author meant to point to something. The epigraph—generally a quotation, the author’s choice but not usually of his own writing —will seem to be there to guide the reader, and its guidance is most often towards the generaliza- tion or abstraction that we call “theme.” The epigraph to “The Night Face Up” is unusual. It collects and emphasizes at the outset information scattered in the story. It tells us where the Moteca captive is in history and what is going on. It works, in fact, largely like an informative footnote. The only element that might go beyond information towards theme is the name, “the war of the blossom.” The first sentence of the footnote to the English translation operates asa note is expected to do. It can be seen as an aid to the English reader, who might not identify “them” as the Aztecs, and who might not know that the guerra florida (variously translated as “flowery war,” “flower war,” “war of the flower(s),” or—by Blackburn—“war of the blossom”) was a ritual war in which the objective was the taking of prisoners for sacrifice. Such supplemental information can be expected from a translator, but the second sentence seems to go beyond a translator’s brief. Its function is interpretive, aggressively thematic, and yet ambiguous, for the opening 1, The translation isin End of the Game and Other Stories (New York: Pantheon, 1967), pp. 66-76. Parer:thetical citations in the text from the English version refer to this edition. 147148 STUDIES IN SHORT FICTION phrase, “It is metaphysics to say . . .” may or may not be contemptuous. And credit for all goes to “Ed.” I suggest that Cort4zar supplied the translator with the footnote, perhaps by means of a discussion that Blackburn summarized in the second sentence—a sentence that sounds more appropriate to the genre of the epigraph than to that of the footnote, that sounds in fact more authorial than editorial. “The Night Face Up” handles themes of recurrent importance in Cort4zar’s work: the cyclical nature of time, blood sacrifice, doubles, and human powerlessness before death.? The injured biker on his hospital bed “dreams” that he is hunted and captured by Aztecs, only to find, at the superb dénouement, that el sueto es vida—and death. Face up in the night, on his hospital bed or/and in an Aztec dungeon, carried to the operating theatre or/and to the sacrificial stone, the individual awaits the knife. If we assume that “metaphysics” is not contemptuously dismissive, that the second sentence is not therefore a self-destructive artifact, telling us not to believe what it says, then the footnote as a whole underlines a view of life conveyed by the story, and the trampled flowers of the guerra florida fall into conformity with other epigraphs one could choose from the Western literary tradition: “He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down .. .” for instance, from the Book of Job and the Anglican burial service. If this is the thematic intent of the story, it is plain that to use the “war of the blossom” in this way involves Cortazar in a knowing distortion of historical fact, by which is here meant the widely accepted view, based on the chroniclers’ reports, of the nature of the zochiyaoyotl, the Aztec flower war. The epigraph and the footnote give a tactically circumscribed defini- tion that differs strikingly from the historians’ and anthropologists’ reports. “The flower war was not part of the policy or the international rela- tions of any Aztec state; it existed solely to produce sacrificial victims.”* The flesh and blood of captives were food and drink for the sun god, and since nourishment is a recurring necessity, warfare was a constant of Aztec life. Captives for sacrifice, however, were graded for divine consumption 2. Lanin A. Gyurko, “Cyclic Time and Blood Sacrifice in Three Stories by Cortazar” Revista. Hisptnica Moderna, 38 (1969), 341-862, and Ernesto Gonzélez Bermejo, Conversa- ciones con Cortézar (Barcelona: Edhasa, 1978), pp. 32-33. 3. This interpretation is the “obvious” one, the one that reflects the affective experience of most readers encountering the story for the first time. Francisco Antolin, ina sensitive and persuasive essay, argues that the story does not present a reversal of the relationship of life to dream but parallel or overlapping realities: “‘the possibility exists that the hospitalized man can have a nightmare that becomes reality and, vice-versa, that a Moteca can, by means of a dream, escape the agonizing reality of Aztec persecution and captivity.” “La noche boca arriba de Cortazar: Oposicién de paradigmas,” Explicacién de textos literarios, 9, ii (1981), 149. Antolin argues that death, at least for the Moteea, is the only certainty in the story (p. 151). Translation by D. W. 4, Burr Cartwright Brundage, The Fifth Sun: Aztec Gods, Aztec World (Austin: Univer- sity of Texas Press, 1979), p. 206.CORTAZAR'S “THE NIGHT FACE UP” 149 according to nationality and social status. For some purposes, slaves and common soldiers would suffice, yet “many major events specifically re- quired the sacrifice of warriors captured in battle: only their vigor and courage could strengthen the sun.” Aztec imperial expansionism produced “a quandary of ideological logistics; as the pace of conquests slowed and the fields of battle became more distant, it became ever more difficult to obtain the supply of victims needed by the gods.”5 Slave-merchants supplied some part of this need, but the important requirement of warriors taken in battle—Nahuatl-speaking warriqrs, moreover: “The gods preferred Nahua [that is, Aztec] blood’*—was met by the re-institution of the legendary flower war. Two groups of Aztec cities “formed what were in essence two loose amphyctyonic bodies existing solely to fight flower wars with each other.” The combatants were all knights and all volunteers. The larger cities had designated on their borders fields, especially sacred places, where the battles, or more exactly tournaments, occurred. After courteous speeches, in which the participants addressed each other as “brother” and “nephew,” they fought until the accompanying priests decreed that enough captives had been taken, whereupon—though often with difficulty—the fighting was brought to a stop. The surviving warriors returned to their respective cities, where their prisoners were sacrificed.” In Cortazar’s story, as the epigraph indicates, the “war of the blossom” is a hunt, taking place in a swampy forest at night. The Aztecs are pursuing a “Moteca,”® apparently a man from a different cultural and linguistic group (p. 69). Though he knows that the Aztec temple is the teocaili,? the house of the gods (p. 73), and knows the fate of Aztec captives, he seems to share no language with his captors. Though armed with a stone knife with which he stabs one of his attackers, the Moteca does not seem to be a warrior. The Aztecs gloried in war, but for him “the smell of war was unbearable” (p. 72). His possessions and attitudes are simple. He prays “the supplication of the corn” and to'a great goddess, “Her Very Highness” (p. Ti). These were elements that the Aztec religion shared with all other Mesoamerican religions, but Cortazar uses them to differentiate his “dreamer” from the Aztecs. And the sacrifice—it has to be to the sun-god— takes place at night. Cort4zar’s Moteca captive, judged by the criteria of the historical war of the flower, is simply unsuitable. Francisco Antolin perceives that the 5. Geoffrey W. Conrad and Arthur A. Demarest, Religion and Empire: The Dynamics of Aztec - Inca Expansionism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 59. 8. This name is apparently unknown to Mesoamerican history and anthropology. Cor- tazar presumably invented it, perhaps alluding to a dialect term of Hispanic America, mote, for a maize dish. 9. Blackburn translates this as a place name, “Teocalli.”150 STUDIES IN SHORT FICTION war of the flower as named and depicted in the story does not conform to historical accounts, and he explains the divergence as the product of the narrator’s bringing his account into conformity with the Moteca’s; at this point, both consciousnesses share a modern perspective.” No explanation is offered, however, for Cortazar’s decision to invoke the flower war. It would obviously have been easy to leave off that label, to present the Aztecs as hunting Indians for sacrifice, with no violation of historical verisimilitude. Clearly, however, Cortazar wanted to keep that label. The hunt was to be a flower war, yet the emotional atmosphere of the story was to contradict the Aztec ideology of sacrifice. Judged by that ideology, the Motecan captive is most of all undesirable because he is afraid. The Aztec knight captured in a flower war met a highly honorable death. “He longed for itzmiquiztli, death by the knife.” Moreover, “no Aztec city would ever receive one of its own knights who had escaped from captivity. ... Such a person would have been publicly throttled as a cra- ven.” But without the fearfulness of the hunted fugitive and the dawning fear of the increasingly reluctant “dreamer,” Cortézar’s wonderful story would be a nullity. Had he made his story conform to the easily available details of the Aztec flower war, he would have presented a very different pattern of emotions. He chose to invoke the flower war because it was a ritual war of sacrifice and because he could gloss its name to suggest the ephemerality of human life. To the Aztecs, who had “a positive passion for flowers,”! this interpretation of the name of their ritual battle would have been a surprising diminution. As depicted in carvings, prisoners offer flowers to their captors, symbolizing the lives they are about to give up.* Battle was “a rain of blossoms wherein precious warriors, beautiful in their finery and splendid in their contempt for death, fall here and there on the field as if a wind had shaken a flowering tree in the springtime.” Flowers were given to warriors as rewards for bravery. Cortazar chooses a meaning from a different tradition. He was not writing historical fiction, but fiction about the thing called history. 10. Antolin, p. 150. 11. Brundage, p. 202. 2 : 12. Jacques Soustelle, Daily Life of the Aztecs (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1970), p. 128. 13. Lewis Spence, The Myths of Mexico and Peru (London: Harrap, 1900), p. 100. 14. Brundage, p. 199.Copyright © 2002 EBSCO Publishing