A man who eats gold starves at a full table
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THE DRAWING
Around 1615 an Andean nobleman drew a meeting that never happened and made it carry the truth of the thing that did.
Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala set the Inca Huayna Capac on a low throne and the conquistador Pedro de Candía on his knees before him, and between them a plate of gold granules and the lavish vessels of the house.
The Inca gestures at the plate and asks, in Quechua: Cay coritacho micunqui — do you eat this gold?
The conquistador, his hand already on the treasure, answers in Spanish: Este oro comemos — we eat this gold.
The meeting is invented. Candía never sat with Huayna Capac; the historians agree the scene has no event under it. Guamán Poma built it because a made scene could hold what no recorded one would. He put the whole conquest into four words and a plate, and set the drawing first in his chapter on the conquest, so that everything the chapter would record flows out of this exchange as from its source.
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THE TURNING, GIVEN A FACE
A host holds out food and asks the stranger what he eats. On the plate is sustenance, offered. Beside it is gold, which is not food. The stranger reaches past what is offered, closes his hand on the metal, and names the metal his food. This is the turning drawn as a single gesture: orientation leaving everything present — the plate, the host, the house, the food actually held out — and landing on the one thing on the table that cannot be eaten.
What the creature turns toward, it draws into itself and becomes. The man who turns wholly toward gold becomes the one who eats it, and eating it, is not fed. Gold is the finite center at the register of appetite — the point that does not nourish, cannot be metabolized, returns nothing to the body that takes it in.
So the eating cannot end.
The insatiability the Spaniards were known for, the hunger that no ransom room filled twice over could close, was not an excess of appetite. It was the nature of the object. A thing that fills the mouth and leaves the body starving must be eaten without stopping.
The Gold Eater is not a man who wants too much. He is a man who has turned toward what cannot feed him and can no longer turn back to the plate.
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THE MONSTER RETURNED TO ITS AUTHOR
The fathers of the conquest had already drawn the monster. The Indian was the cannibal, the eater of human flesh, the figure whose monstrosity the conquest was dispatched to civilize — the vacancy of the human declared before the ships arrived, so the arrival could read as rescue.
Guamán Poma takes that projected figure and hands it back. You are the eater. What you eat is gold. And the eating is the monstrous thing, because it consumes the eater from within while he calls it sustenance.
He does not deny the charge and take the civilized seat against it. He does not argue the Andean was not a savage. He turns the projection through the glass and shows the projector wearing it: the appetite the conquest ascribed to the conquered is the conquest's own, and only the direction of the account was ever in question. The one who holds the true account is the one the conquest had already declared to have nothing to say — the wakcha, the orphaned and unprotected, writing from the position the account-keeping had emptied. From that emptied position the sight is clear, because the man consumed by the eating cannot see the eating, and the man it has dispossessed can see nothing else.
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WHERE THE WITNESS STOPPED
Guamán Poma names the appetite and names its end.
With the greed for gold and silver, he writes, they go to hell — con la codicia del oro y plata se van al infierno.
The appetite is codicia, one of the deadly sins, a disordered wanting that damns the soul that harbors it. He read the operation truly and filed it under the morality play. The fault sits in the Spaniard's excess; a rightly ordered soul would want less; the cure is temperance, and the sentence for its absence is hell.
This is the ceiling of his sight, and it is the ceiling of the register he was given. He saw eaters and called them damned. He could not yet see the floor beneath the eating — that the gold on his plate was in the same years becoming the point the ledger posts, the finite center at the register of value, and that the hunger was not a vice distributed across individual souls but a function installed as a civilization's manner of keeping accounts. He stood at the exact seam and marked it without knowing it was a seam. Writing of the stripping of the Coricancha, the sun temple whose walls and floor and windows were sheathed in gold, he says the plunder was so great it could not be counted — no se puede contar. The uncountable was being made to count. He watched the living house rendered into the postable metal and had, in his tradition, only the word sin for what he saw.
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WHERE IT EXTENDS
The appetite is not excess wanting to be moderated.
It is wanting severed from its object and fixed on the point that cannot satisfy — the magnetic field of the will keeping all its power and losing its discrimination, impressed now by whatever presents the shape of a destination. Gold is the purest destination-shape there is, because it has no face to break the fixation. A child's face, looked at long enough, ends the parent's grip; the plate of food, received, ends the hunger. Gold receives the whole force of the turning and gives nothing back, so the turning has nowhere to complete and no reason to stop.
And the conversion the witness could not name is the floor: the gold does not merely draw the appetite, it is made postable. The house is severed into extractable metal — the cut between the thing and its relation, the temple walls melted from a dwelling of the sun into a figure that can be entered on a page. The Gold Eater's hunger and the ledger's account are one operation at two registers, the appetite that cannot be fed and the entry that cannot be closed, each requiring the next mouthful, the next posting, without end. The cure is not wanting less. Temperance rations the eating; it does not turn the eater back to the plate.
The cure is the re-turning — orientation returning from the finite center to what was actually on the table, which was food, and a host, and a house, offered.
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THE LETTER THAT DID NOT ARRIVE
Guamán Poma addressed the whole manuscript to the king of Spain, to make him see, through the glass, what his conquest had become. He was writing to the mouth that ate. The letter was never delivered. The manuscript sat unread for three centuries in a library in the north and surfaced only in the last hundred years, its reader four hundred years late. The one who held the accurate account had it declared, by the account-keeping itself, to be a thing with no standing and nowhere to be received. The Gold Eater never read the drawing of himself eating. He was too busy eating to receive the plate held out to him, which is the drawing, which is the account, which is the food.
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See THE TURNING — the orientation that leaves the present and lands on a finite center
See THE RE-TURNING
See THE FINITE CENTER — the point that draws and does not give
See THE KILLER INSTINCT — the cut that makes the countable
See THE MORALITY PLAY — the register in which the witness read the operation as sin
