Television
Travelling in the realms of gold
Published 13 November 2006
D B C Pierre's road trip through Mexico could have done with a shot of tequila
The Last Aztec Channel 4
In this road movie of a documentary (9 November, 9pm), there were a number of candidates for the title role. There was, naturally, Montezuma, the Aztec emperor who so woefully mishandled the arrival on his shores of the Spanish adventurer Cortés. An equal claim to being the ultimate Aztec, if he had only actually shown up as prophesied, was Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent god and alleged begetter of all Mesoamericans. Montezuma, who had bought one too many editions of Old Moore's Almanac, was expecting Quetzalcoatl to return any day from the clouds to claim his empire, and when Cortés and his Spanish crew arrived with flowing white beards it was, well, an easy mistake for Montezuma to think he had.
But in any contest, there can only be one winner, and the accolade on this occasion must go to D B C Pierre, who wandered through Mexico for this two-hour film as if he owned the place, implying with every step that his veins flowed with the dark magic of the Aztecs. Granted, he was brought up in Mexico City, but to say he was proprietorial about the culture would be to under-egg it. "People bang on and on about Egypt and bloody Rome and Greece," he began, but the Aztecs should have been "the most studied civilisation in the history of man".
While the old world was dying of the plague and "scrapping around in the gutters", the Aztecs were drinking spring water out of gold goblets. Mexico City was made of gold. They invented the wheel too, but never took it out of its box. True, their society was founded on human sacrifice, but Pierre seemed pretty pro that, too.
Unshaven, studentish at 45, dressed in short-sleeved shirts that he never quite managed to button up, the Booker Prize winner retraced the steps of Cortés, the greedy European who in 1519 came and went and ruined everything. He marched on Mexico City, buying the loyalty of the natives as he passed, while Montezuma sent more and more gold in his direction and in the end, became a prisoner in his own palace.
Pierre began his journey in a "Cortés-mobile", a flashy banger with flames painted down the side, whose bumper fell off as the camera was running. Within a few minutes, Pierre was comparing this mishap to the death of Cortés's horse at a similar point in his adventure. "Despite the mighty power of the Catholic Church, things did not always go to plan," he improvised. But as his trek wore on, he identified less and less with the invaders. He ended up in a restaurant called Bar Cantinas de Montezuma.
The eatery, whose only apparent crime was to share the great Aztec's name, annoyed Pierre. "There's only one way to get over the collapse of an empire - if this is what it's about - and that's to get horribly lashed."
Despite this promise, his film turned out to be a bit lacking in the horribly lashed department, just as it was in picture research and the special effects departments (Mexico City was recreated with models that might have been knocked up on Blue Peter). But Pierre's enthusiasm was infectious even when sober, and by midway, I was buying his argument that Mexico, once you scratched its surface, remained more Aztec than Latin. In a Sierra Madre mountain bar, the bartenders looked genuinely afraid as Pierre threw around the idea of looking for Monte's lost gold.
The film left us wanting more - not more about the Aztecs, but more about Pierre. In that mountain bar, he told us: "The last time I left from here, I had bad luck for many years. I was an arsehole as well, but you see arseholes who have better luck than I had."
I think he was hinting that he had once had a go at digging up Monte's gold himself. But despite the amulets he had bought from witch doctors to protect himself and a ritualistic dumping in a cemetery of his evil baggage, he was too scared to retrace his steps, as opposed to sneering at Cortés's.
If the director, Teresa Griffiths, had held her nerve, she would have plied him with so many tequilas he wouldn't have been able to refuse. A gonzo journalist unwilling to confront his demons for profit is a gonzo journalist unworthy of the title Aztec.
Andrew Billen is a staff writer for the Times
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Two prisoners are up for parole. But how will they cope with life outside?
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