“My daughters,” she said, indicating the two girls who stood with their backs against the far wall.
I had been expecting two small and grubby brats, who would eye with awe the stranger their mother had suddenly brought home. But the one was as old as I; she was as tall as her mother, and just as shapely and fair of face. The other was perhaps three years younger, and of equal comeliness. They both stared at me with pensive curiosity. I was surprised, to put it mildly, but I made a bravura gesture of kissing the earth to them—and would have fallen on my face, had not the younger one caught me.
She giggled despite herself, and so did I, but then I stopped in puzzlement. Few Tzapotéca females show their age until they get well along in years. But that girl was only seventeen or so, and already her black hair had one startling strand of white streaking back from her forehead, like lightning through midnight.
Gié Bele explained, “A scorpion stung her there, when she was a baby still crawling. She nearly died of it, but the only lasting effect was that one lock of hair, white ever since.”
“She is—they are both as beautiful as their mother,” I mumbled gallantly. But my face must have expressed my twinge of consternation at having discovered that the woman was old enough to be my own mother, for she gave me a worried, almost frightened look and said:
“No, please do not think of taking one of them instead of me.” She whipped her blouse over her head, and instantly blushed so extensively that the blush suffused her bare breasts. “Please, young lord! I offered only myself. Not yet the girls …” She seemed to mistake my numb silence for indecision; she quickly undid both her skirt and undergarment, and let them drop to the ground, and stood naked before me and her daughters.
I glanced uneasily at them, my eyes no doubt as wide as theirs were, and it must have seemed to Gié Bele that I was comparing the available wares. Still imploring, “Please! Not my girls. Use me!“ she forcibly dragged me down beside her on the pallet. I was too shocked to resist, as she flung my mantle to one side and tugged at my loincloth, saying breathlessly, “The innkeeper would demand five cacao beans for a maátitl, and he would keep two for himself. So I will ask only three. Is not that a fair price?”
I was too dazed to reply. The private parts of us both were exposed to the view of the girls, who stared as if they could not look away, and their mother was next trying to roll me on top of herself. Perhaps the girls were not unacquainted with their mother’s body, and perhaps they had even seen an erect male organ before, but I was sure they had never seen the two together. Drunk though I may have been, I protested, “Woman! The lamplight, the girls! At least send them outdoors while we—”
“Let them see!” she almost screamed. “They will be lying here on other nights!” Her face was wet with tears, and I finally understood that she was not so resigned to whoredom as she had tried to pretend. I grimaced at the girls and made a violent gesture. Looking frightened, they whisked out through the door curtain. But Gié Bele did not notice, and cried again, as if demanding the utmost debasement of herself, “Let them see what they will be doing!”
“You want others to see, woman?” I growled at her. “Let them see the better, then!”
Instead of sprawling atop her, I turned onto my back, lifting her at the same time, and set her kneeling astride me, and I impaled her to the hilt of myself. After that first painful moment, Gié Bele slowly relaxed against me and lay quiescent in my embrace, though I could feel her tears continuing to trickle onto my bare chest. Well, it happened quickly and powerfully for me, and she certainly felt the spurt inside her, but she did not pull away as any other bought woman would then have done.
By then, her own body was wanting satisfaction, and I think she would not have noticed if the girls had been still in the hut, would not have given thought to the detailed demonstration provided by our position, or the damp noise of suction made by her rocking back and forth the length of my tepúli. When Gié Bele came to climax, she reared up and leaned back, her distended nipples pointing high, her long hair brushing my legs, her eyes shut tight, her mouth open in a mewing cry like that of a jaguar kitten. Then she collapsed again onto my chest, her head beside mine, and she lay so limp that I would have thought she had died, except that she breathed in short gasps.
After a little, when I had myself recovered, slightly more sober for the experience, I became aware of another head near me on my other side. I turned to see immense brown eyes, wide behind their luxuriant dark lashes: the winsome face of one of the daughters. At some point she had reentered the hut and knelt beside the pallet and was regarding me intently. I drew the quilt over the nakedness of myself and her still-motionless mother.
“Nu shishá skarú …” the girl began to whisper. Then, seeing that I did not comprehend, she spoke softly in a broken Náhuatl, and giggled when she told me guiltily, “We watched through the cracks in the wall.” I groaned in shame and embarrassment; I still burn when I think of it. But then she said thoughtfully, seriously, “Always I supposed it would be a bad thing. But your faces were good, like happy.”
Though I was in no philosophic mood, I told her quietly, “I do not think it is ever really a bad thing. But it is much better when you do it with someone you love.” I added, “And in private, without mice watching from the walls.”
She started to say something more, but suddenly her stomach grumbled, more loudly than her voice had spoken. She looked pathetically mortified, and tried to pretend it had not happened, and drew a little away from me.
I exclaimed, “Child, you are hungry!”
“Child?” She petulantly tossed her head. “I have near your age, which is old enough for—for that. I am not a child.”
I shook her drowsing mother and said, “Gié Bele, when did your daughters last eat a meal?”
She stirred and said meekly, “I am allowed to feed on the leftovers at the inn, but I cannot bring much home.”
“And you asked for three cacao beans!” I said angrily.
I could have remarked that it might more rightly have been myself asking a fee, for performing to an audience, or instructing the young. But I groped for my castoff loincloth and the purse I kept sewn into it. “Here,” I said to the daughter, and caught her hands and poured into them perhaps twenty or thirty beans. “You and your sister go and buy food. Buy fuel for the fire. Anything you like, and as much as you can carry.”
She looked at me as if I had filled her hands with emeralds. Impulsively, she bent over and kissed my cheek, then bounded up and out of the hut again. Gié Bele raised up on one elbow to look down at my face.
“You are kind to us—and after I behaved so. Please, would you let me be kinder to you now?”
I said, “You gave me what I came to buy. I am not trying now to buy your affection.”
“But I want to give it,” she insisted, and began to give me an attention which may be exclusive to the Cloud People.
It really is much better when it is done lovingly—and in private. And she truly was so attractive that a man could hardly get enough of her. But we were up and dressed again when the girls returned, laden with comestibles: one entire and enormous plucked fowl, a basket of vegetables, many other things. Chattering cheerfully to each other, they set about building up the brazier fire, and the younger daughter courteously asked if her mother and myself would dine with them.
Gié Bele told them that we had both eaten at the inn. Now, she said, she would guide me back there and find some chore to occupy her there during what remained of the night, for if she slept she would surely oversleep the sunrise. So I bade the girls good night and we left them to what may have been, for all I knew, their first decent meal in four years. As the woman and I walked hand in hand through streets and alleys seeming darker even than before, I thought about the famished girls, their widowed and desperate mother, the greedy Zoque creditor … and at last I said abruptly:
“Would you sell me your house, Gié Bele?”
“What?” She started
so that our hands came unlinked. “That dilapidated hut? Whatever for?”
“Oh, to rebuild into something better, of course. If I continue trading, I shall certainly pass this way again, perhaps often, and a place of my own would be preferable to a crowded inn.”
She laughed at the absurdity of my lie, but pretended to take it seriously, asking, “And where in the world would we live?”
“In some place much finer. I would pay a good price, enough to enable you to live comfortably. And,” I said firmly, “with no necessity for the girls or you to go astraddle the road.”
“What—what would you offer to pay?”
“We will settle that right now. Here is the inn. Please to put lights in the room where we dined. And writing materials—paper and chalk will do. Meanwhile, tell me which is the room of that fat eunuch. And stop looking frightened; I am being no more imbecilic than usual.”
She gave me a wavering smile and went to do my bidding, while I took a lamp to find the proprietor’s room, and interrupted his snoring with a hard kick to his massive rear end.
“Get up and come with me,” I said, as he spluttered with outrage and sleepy bewilderment. “We have business to transact.”
“It is the middle of the night. You are drunk. Go away.”
I had almost to lift him to his feet, and it took a while to convince him that I was sober, but I finally hauled him—still struggling to knot his mantle—to the room Gié Bele had lighted for us. When I half-dragged him in, she started to sidle out.
“No, stay,” I said. “This concerns all three of us. Fat man, fetch out all the papers pertinent to the ownership of this hostel and the debt outstanding against it. I am here to redeem the pledge.”
He and she stared at me in equal astonishment, and Wáyay, after spluttering some more, said, “This is why you rout me from my bed? You want to buy this place, you presumptuous pup? We can all go back to bed. I do not intend to sell.”
“It is not yours to sell,” I said. “You are not its owner, but the holder of a lien. When I pay the debt and all its accrual, you are a trespasser. Go, bring the documents.”
I had the advantage of him then, when he was still befogged with sleep. But by the time we settled down to the columns of number dots and flags and little trees, he was again as acute and exacting as he had ever been in his careers of priest and currency changer. I will not regale you, my lords, with all the details of our negotiations. I will only remind you that I did know the craft of working with numbers, and I knew the craftiness possible to that craft.
What the late explorer husband had borrowed, in goods and currency, added up to an appreciable sum. However, the premium he had agreed to pay for the privilege of the loans should not have been excessive, except for the lender’s cunning method of compounding it. I do not remember all the figures there involved, but I can give a simplified illustration. If I lend a man a hundred cacao beans for one month, I am entitled to the repayment of a hundred and ten. For two months, he repays a hundred and twenty beans. For three months, a hundred and thirty, and so on. But what Wáyay had done was to add the ten-bean premium at the end of the first month, and then on that total of a hundred and ten to calculate the next premium, so that at the end of two months he was owed a hundred twenty and one beans. The difference may sound trifling, but it mounts proportionately each month, and on substantial sums it can mount alarmingly.
I demanded a recalculation from the very start of Wáyay’s giving credit to the inn. Ayya, he squawked as he must have done when he awoke from that disastrous mushroom rapture of his priesthood days. But, when I suggested that we refer the matter to Tecuantépec’s bishósu for adjudication, he gritted his teeth and redid the arithmetic, with me closely monitoring. There were many other details to be argued, such as the inn’s expenses and profits over the four years he had been running it. But finally, as dawn was breaking, we agreed on a lump sum due him, and I agreed to pay in currency of gold dust, copper and tin snippets, and cacao beans. Before I did so, I said:
“You have forgotten one small item. I owe you for the lodging of my own train.”
“Ah, yes,” said the fat old fraud. “Honest of you to remind me.” And he added that to the accounting.
As if suddenly remembering, I said, “Oh, one other thing.”
“Yes?” he said expectantly, his chalk poised to add it in.
“Subtract four years’ wages due the woman Gié Bele.”
“What?” He stared at me aghast. She stared too, but in dazzled admiration. “Wages?” he sneered. “The woman was bound over to me as a tlacótli.”
“If your accounting had been honest, she would not have been. Look at your own revised arithmetic. The bishósu might have awarded you a half interest in this property. You have not only swindled Gié Bele, you have also enslaved a free citizen.”
“All right, all right. Let me count. Two cacao beans a day—”
“Those are slave wages. You have had the services of the inn’s former proprietress. Certainly worth a freeman’s wage of twenty beans a day.” He clutched his hair and howled. I added, “You are a barely tolerated alien in Tecuantépec. She is of the Ben Záa, and so is the bishósu. If we go to him …”
He immediately ceased his tantrum and began frantically to scribble, dripping sweat onto the bark paper. Then he did howl.
“More than twenty and nine thousand! There are not that many beans on all the cacao bushes in all the Hot Lands!”
“Translate it to gold-dust quills,” I suggested. “It will not sound so big a sum.”
“Will it not?” he bellowed, when he had done the figuring. “Why, if I accede to the wage demand, I have lost my very loincloth on the entire transaction. To subtract that amount means you pay me less than half the original amount I paid out as a loan!“ His voice had gone up to a squeak and he sweated as if he were melting.
“Yes,” I said. “That agrees with my own figures. How will you have it? All in gold? Or some in tin? In copper?” I had fetched my pack from the room I had not yet occupied.
“This is extortion!” he raged. “This is robbery!”
There was also a small obsidian dagger in the pack. I took it out and held its point against Wàyay’s second or third chin.
“Extortion and robbery it was,” I said in my coldest voice. “You cheated a defenseless woman of her property, then made her drudge for you during four long years, and I know to what desperate straits she had come. I hold you to the arithmetic you yourself have just now done. I will pay you the amount you last arrived at—”
“Ruination!” he bawled. “Devastation!”
“You will write me a receipt, and on it you will write that the payment voids all your claim on this property and this woman, now and forever. You will then, while I watch, tear up that old pledge signed by her husband. You will then take whatever personal possessions you have, and depart these premises.”
He made one last try at defiance: “And if I refuse?”
“I march you to the bishósu at knife point. The punishment for theft is the flower-garland garrotte. I do not know what you would suffer beforehand, as a penalty for enslaving the freeborn, since I do not know the refinements of torture in this nation.”
Slumping in final defeat, he said, “Put away the knife. Count out the currency.” He raised his head to snap at Gié Bele, “Bring me fresh paper—” then winced and made his tone unctuous, “Please, my lady, bring me paper and paints and a writing reed.”
I counted quills of gold dust and stacks of tin and copper onto the cloth between us, and there was little but lint left in the pack when I was done. I said, “Make the receipt to my name. In the language of this place I am called Zaá Nayàzú.”
“Never was an ill-omened man better named,” he muttered, as he began to make the word pictures and columns of number glyphs. And he wept as he worked at it, I swear.
I felt Gié Bele’s hand on my shoulder and I looked up at her. She had labored all the day before and then had
endured a sleepless night, not to mention other things, but she stood straight, and her glorious eyes shone, and her whole face glowed.
I said, “This will not take long. Why do you not go back and fetch the girls? Bring them home.”
When my partners woke and came for breakfast, Cozcatl looked rested and bright again, but Blood Glutton looked somewhat drawn. He ordered a meal consisting mainly of raw eggs, then said to the woman, “Send me the landlord, too. I owe him ten cacao beans.” He added, “Spendthrift lecher that I am, and at my age.”
She smiled and said, “For that entertainment—for you—no charge, my lord,” and went away.
“Huh?” grunted Blood Glutton, staring after her. “No inn gives that commodity free.”
I reminded him, “Cynical old grouch, you said there are no first times. Perhaps there are.”
“You may be crazy, and so may she, but the innkeeper—”
“As of last night, she is the innkeeper.”
“Huh?” he blurted again. He said huh? twice more, once when his breakfast platter was brought by the surpassingly lovely girl of my own age, and again when his big cup of frothy chocolate was brought by the surpassingly lovely younger girl with the streak of pale lightning in her black hair.
“What has happened here?” Blood Glutton asked bewilderedly. “We stop at a rundown hostel, an inferior establishment of one greasy Zoque and one slave woman …”
“And overnight,” said Cozcatl, sounding equally amazed, “Mixtli turns it into a temple full of goddesses.”
Our party stayed a second night at the inn, and when all was quiet, Gié Bele stole into my room, more radiant in her newfound happiness than she had been before, and that time the lovingness of our embrace was not at all dissembled, or forced, or in any other way distinguishable from an act of true and mutual love.
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