For a scholar to devote time and energy to hunting down a valuable but elusive source is hardly unusual. To make a whole book out of the experience is. As indeed is the quarry in Bauer's case, the early colonial manuscript from Mexico known as the Cardona Codex, which in 1982 popped up for auction at Sotheby's, having been totally unknown hitherto. Extending over 427 or so pages of native amate paper, profusely illustrated with 300 figures and two large maps centred on the highland basin of Mexico, the Codex was consigned for auction at US$ 8 million and in the crudest terms can readily be seen as the ‘treasure’ of the title. Following strict instructions, the auctioneers scrupulously hid the identity of the seller (name, gender, nationality, residence), and no details were given of where and how the Codex might have survived the vicissitudes of the many years stretching from the date of its ostensible production in the mid-1500s to the end of the twentieth century. The very shadiness of its provenance has lent the Codex a certain notoriety, ensuring that it has no place and not a single listing in any of the standard encyclopaedias, handbooks or catalogues of Mesoamerican manuscripts, not least those at all linked to the native tradition from before and after the invasion led by Hernán Cortés. No one has been prepared or able to prove it either authentic or a forgery. Stanford and Princeton stand among the rich and famous universities which, having shown an interest in it at some point, then backed away. Christie's in New York again put it up for auction, again inconclusively, in 1998, which is when it was last seen. Eight pages of illustrations in colour, which include the maps, appear in this volume. They are the first evidence of the Codex ever to have been made publicly available, and in themselves constitute a reason for noting Bauer's volume.
An emeritus professor of the University of California at Davis, Bauer fully acknowledges the fascination the Codex began to have for him from the moment he first saw it in 1985 in the Crocker Nuclear Laboratory. His life had shaped him to be the ideal victim of what he came to feel as obsession, for which his charmingly written book serves as a kind of closure. A student of Latin American history and author of two books on his subject, he knew Mexico particularly well and at close hand. The 19 chapters of the tale he tells thoroughly embed the scholarly facts in a living world of librarians, antique book dealers, lawyers, charlatans, auctioneers, archaeologists, painters and artists, architects, gardeners, food sellers and restaurant owners, wine growers (wine is also an expertise of his) and the succulent marketplaces common to California and Mexico.
On the trail of his trove, Bauer clocks up quantities of air miles, moving to and fro between continents – London, Mexico, Seville, New York, Mexico, Ibiza and Madrid – coming ever closer to his quarry but never quite able to seize it. At the high end of finance, sleuths can cause the odd frisson in the street and the seeker needs to know who to trust and what to believe. Over the decades, as the internet begins to intervene as a prime mode of communication, imagination can fill virtual reality. Yet all along the story remains hitched to the propositions of the two opening chapters, ‘The Crocker Lab’ and ‘A World of Painted Books’.
In 1964 experts at Crocker had vouched for the authenticity of the Vinland Map, which Yale bought for a large sum, only to discover it needed to spend almost as much to prove the map was a twentieth-century fake, though astoundingly Crocker's high-tech reputation had been left intact. One of the Crocker dates for the Codex Cardona was post-1945.
As a Mexican ‘painted book’, Cardona is then compared with three post-Cortesian codices on European paper universally accepted as genuine: Telleriano-Remensis and Mendoza, from the same decades, and the somewhat later Florentine Codex.
This procedure has the effect of emphasising two qualities of Cardona: the native paper from which it is made and the script in which it is written. European paper would have been the default choice for the viceregal officialdom to which Cardona is claimed to have belonged, while for the modern forger paper has the disadvantage of being readily datable. Known post-Cortesian texts on native paper consist mainly of the Techialoyan Land Books made to defend local communities from second-wave Spanish depredation, hardly a concern in Cardona.
As for script, the quoted examples, especially Mendoza, can only serve to highlight the beauty and precision of tlacuilolli, the graphia franca of Mesoamerica whose pre-Cortesian master models include the deerskin screenfold books known as Borgia from Cholula, and Fejérváry from Xiuhtecutlán. The title-page map and chaptering in Fejérváry provided the Mendoza scribes with exact parameters for every page of their work. Fusing what for us are the separate ideas of number, image and sound, without being reliant on any one particular speech, tlacuilolli books have a wit and an economy of expression wholly lacking in what has been seen of Cardona. There, the maps and many drawings of undoubted historical interest testify to little or no debt to tlacuilolli precedent and rely on clumsy captions in alphabetic Spanish.
It may well be that one day some single clear answer will be found to the enigma posed by Cardona, laying to rest questions of cultural patrimony and the fleeting lives of manuscripts and even archives. In the meantime Bauer fears it likely that as a coherent codex it is no longer in existence, thieves having gnawed at its unbound pages, and that the only record of its entirety is in his book, clearly another reason for noting it.
