THE FRANCISCAN Diego de Landa y Calderon, bishop of Mérida and Yucatan, destroys all but four hieroglyphic manuscripts of the Mayas, written on fig bark, except those on astronomy and a calendar. From the tower of his cathedral, built a year earlier on top of the ruins of a Maya shrine, he watches the sunset glow of the bonfire of vanities. Language is an imprint on the universe, pervasive, but in da Landa’s view, as easily extinguished as anything of this world.

But the Council of the Indies condemns his action, and Diego de Landa is summoned back to Spain. As a form of atonement, he is forced to remember everything he tried to expunge. The act of writing is not in itself punishment (it can, in fact, be a form of catharsis); punishment is in being forced to come face to face with the inadequacy of memory. For he knows that in his remembering alone will he be redeemed, and in that sense there is no true redemption.

His work of penance is an extensive history of the Yucatan Maya—the words of the one who tried to silence it. But here’s the twist: what he supposed to be the Maya alphabet is disproved four centuries later, when, in the 1970s, epigraphers discover that Maya hieroglyphics are actually a combination of logographs, or words, and syllabic signs, or units of sound.

De Landa’s error had made it impossible, until then, to accurately decode the few Maya scripts that he had chosen to spare. In that sense his efforts to erase Maya culture were successful. Not only did successive generations of Maya lose the ability to read their ancestors’ writing, effectively cutting them off from a sense of history, a sense of having been in the world. Had the error not been discovered, such a history of loss would have escaped our knowledge completely, in a sort of doubled absence. It is only now that de Landa’s auto-da-fé—and his memory—is finally, and justly, recompensed.

—And how is this any different from the actions of the dictator Efrain Ríos Montt, who in the 1980s massacred more than 100,000 Mayans?