The Templo Mayor Museum is open from Tuesday to Sunday, from nine in the morning to five in the afternoon. The cost is fifty-seven pesos, which includes admittance to both the archeological site and museum. The site welcomes visitors for free on Sundays. For children younger than thirteen, for students and teachers, for pensioners, the admission is always free—with valid identification. The museum was inaugurated in 1987, just nine years after electric workers, digging near the plaza, uncovered a smooth stoned monolith of a decapitated woman with bells on her cheeks and bangles on her dismembered arms.
Despite its renowned status as one of Mexico City’s most popular tourist attractions, the complex hides itself well. It is the Cathedral’s fault. It is massive and imposing and difficult to navigate with any coherency, as it breaks and bleeds and bends over the streets and past alleyways—the five naves, fourteen chapels, the towers, speak to its tangled morass. It is baroque. It is everywhere. Fortunately, city officials have placed posters with arrows pointing to the temple, left, then right, and left again. And soon, through a series walled walkways—the city a perpetual site of construction, restoration, and excavation—an unassuming entrance appears, manned by a trio of security guards in blue caps and jackets.
As archeologists still comb through the rubble, unearthing priceless cultural treasures, the security is strict and serious. Metal detectors. No food. No bags. Photography is tolerable, but no flash. A hand-railed pathway leads through the stucco foundations of the great temples, the stones protruding like kernels from a comb of maize. Teams of archeologists work under red and blue beach umbrellas, hidden from the sun. They chip and then dust and clean and polish old rock fragments. Shovels, trowels, spades, buckets, and wheelbarrows congregate in piles amid the torn and blasted ground. It holds only silence, broken only by quick whiffs of working sounds, steel on rock, the clanging of metals, long days of piecing together memory. The sun rises in the mid-morning calm. Few people are about. Outside, horns blare.
A man in khaki shorts and blue runners, sunglasses around his ears, headphones overthem, holds his cellphone to the grey pit and the backgrounded bell towers of the Cathedral, the purple lilac bushes, the chain-link fences, and then he touches the screen. Walking over the ancient pathway, he flips through his guidebook and pauses at one placard just before a serpent’s head. The head, made of basalt, sits at the edge of four rows of stairs; its teeth and fangs carved with immaculate detail, its mouth wide, eyes circular cavities of rage, coloured in ochres, the serpent readies to strike. The man removes the audio guide from his pocket and presses the number matching the one on the sign. “Huitzilopochtli, the solar war god, was the patron deity of the Mexicas,” the tenor voice says. “He was associated with the most important aspects of his people warfare and tribute. He wore a hummingbird beak headdress and carried a blue staff in the shape of a serpent.” The man looks past the snake, up towards the sky where the temple once loomed below the waterfall-like steps, denoting its dominion as an abode of the god. The space is empty now, surrounded by blue and the cracking facades of colonial buildings, the ground rocky hollow, the odd weed peeking through the rubble. “The stage four platform is adorned with three groups of two stone braziers covered with stucco. The braziers located in the middle of the south side of the Great Temple are dedicated to the Huitzilopochtli cult. Next to the serpent head, beneath the slab floor, there was a box made of slab stones, which contained offerings.” Before continuing the tour, before proceeding to the next stop, before learning the next digestible snippet of the Mixteca story, the man leans over the rail and does not see them, not the shells, alligator skins, obsidian knives, feathered necklaces, sacrificial blades, human skulls, does not see the thousands of objects offered to the gods. They rest in the museum behind a glass shield.
By the museum’s entrance, just above the men and women working under bright parasols, stands two giant pieces of granite. On them have been etched the immortal, Spanish words of Bernal Diaz and Hernan Cortes, conquistadores, adventurers, buccaneers, and swashbucklers par excellence. Diaz waxes poetic about the city’s grandeur, the plaza, the bridges, the multitude of peoples buying and selling their wares, a city with few peers. Cortes mixes praise with concern. He lauds the well-worked towers of the temple, higher than those of Sevilla, the stonework, the staircases, the big corridors and bigger rooms, the opulence and luxury, the abundance. But inside the rooms, in the cool chambers, the dark shrines, he warns of idols with crazy images, rows of chopped things and monstrous figures, grounds deep withburials, all dedicated to their idols whom they worship with zeal and to whom they devote everything.