Aztec

by Gary Jennings

  “The Chichiméca!” I said to myself, or perhaps I said it aloud. I did say to them, “I just now happened upon this unfortunate woman. I was trying to be of help.”

  Since I blurted that out in a hurry, hoping it would hold back their arrows, I spoke in my native tongue of Náhuatl. But I accompanied the words with gestures intended to be understandable even by savages, and even in that tense moment I was thinking that, if I lived long enough to say anything else, I should have the task of learning yet another foreign language. But, to my surprise, one of the men—the one who had jabbed me with his arrow point, a man about my own age and nearly of my height—said in easily understandable Náhuatl:

  “The woman is my wife.”

  I cleared my throat and said condolingly, as one does when imparting bad news, “I regret to say she was your wife. She appears to have died a short while ago.” The Chichimécatl’s arrow—all nine arrows—stayed aimed at my middle. I hastened to add, “I did not cause her death. I found her thus. And I had no thought of molesting her, even if I had found her alive.”

  The man laughed harshly, without humor.

  “In fact,” I went on, “I was about to do her the favor of burying her, before the scavengers should get at her.” I indicated the place where my maquáhuitl lay.

  The man looked at the furrow I had begun, then up at a vulture already hovering overhead, then at me again, and his stern face softened somewhat. He said, “That was kindly of you, stranger,” and he lowered his arrow and relaxed the bowstring.

  The other eight Chichiméca did likewise, and tucked their arrows into their tangled hair. One of the men went to pick up my maquáhuitl and examine it appraisingly; another began to poke through the contents of my pack. Maybe I was about to be robbed of what little I carried, but at least it seemed that I would not immediately be killed as a trespasser. To maintain the mood of amiability, I said to the just-widowed husband:

  “I sympathize in your bereavement. Your wife was young and comely. Of what did she die?”

  “Of being a bad wife,” he said glumly. Then he said, “She was bitten by a rattle-tailed snake.”

  I could make no connection between his two statements. I could only say, “Strange. She does not at all appear to have been ill.”

  “No, she recovered from the venom,” he growled, “but not before she had made her confession to Filth Eater, and with me at her side. The only bad deed she confessed to Tlazoltéotl was her having lain with a man of another tribe. Then she had the misfortune not to die of the snakebite.”

  He shook his head somberly. So did I. He continued:

  “We waited for her to recover her health, for it would be unseemly to execute an ailing woman. When she was well and strong again, we brought her here. This morning. To die.”

  I gazed at the remains, wondering what mode of execution could have left the victim without any mark but staring eyes and silently screaming mouth.

  “Now we come to remove her,” the widower concluded. “A good place of execution is not easy to find in the desert, so we do not desecrate this one by leaving our carrion to attract the vultures and coyotes. It was thoughtful of you, stranger, to have appreciated that fact.” He laid a hand companionably on my shoulder. “But we will attend to the disposal, and then perhaps you will share our night’s meal at our camp.”

  “Gladly,” I said, and my empty stomach rumbled. But what happened next nearly spoiled my appetite.

  The man went to where his wife sat, and he moved her in a way that had not occurred to me. I had tried laying her down. He gripped her under her armpits and lifted. Even so, she still moved reluctantly, and he visibly had to exert some strength. There was a horrid sucking and tearing sound, rather as if the dead woman’s bottom had put down roots in the earth. Then she came up off the stake on which she had been impaled.

  I knew then why the man had said that a good place of execution was not easy to find. It had to provide a tree of just the right size, one growing straight from the ground without obstructive roots. That stake had been a mizquitl sapling as big around as my forearm, severed at knee height, then sharpened to a point at the top, but the coarse bark left on the rest of it. I wondered whether the betrayed husband had sat his wife delicately on the stake point and only slowly let her down its cruelly barked length, or whether he had given her a slightly more merciful quick downward shove. I wondered, but I did not inquire.

  When the nine men led me to their camp, they made me welcome there, and they treated me courteously as long as I stayed with them. They had thoroughly inspected the belongings I carried, but they stole nothing, not even my small store of copper trade currency. However, I think I might have been treated otherwise if I had been carrying anything of value or leading a train of laden porters. Those men were, after all, the Chichiméca.

  The name was always spoken among us Mexíca with contempt or derision or loathing, as you Spaniards speak of “barbarians” and “savages.” We derived the name from chichíne, one of our words meaning dog. When we said Chichiméca, we generally referred to those dog people among whom I had then arrived: the homeless, unwashed, forever wandering tribes of the desert not far north of the Otomí lands. (Which is why, some ten years earlier, I had been so indignant when the Fast of Feet Rarámuri mistook me for a Chichimécatl.) Those of the near north were sufficiently despised by us Mexíca, but it was widely believed that there were others of even lower degree. Farther north of the dog people supposedly lived still fiercer desert tribes, which we designated the TéoChichiméca—as one might say, “the even more awful dog people.” And in the desert’s farthest northernmost regions supposedly lived even more fearsome tribes, which we called the Záca-Chichiméca, much as to say, “the most depraved of all the dog people.”

  But I must report, after having traveled through almost the whole extent of those desert lands, that I found none of those tribes inferior or superior to another. They were all ignorant, insensitive, and often inhumanly cruel, but it was that cruel desert which had made them so. They all lived in a squalor that would disgust a civilized man or a Christian, and they lived on foods that would nauseate a city man’s stomach. They had no houses or trades or arts, because they had to keep ceaselessly roaming to forage for the scant sustenance they could wring from the desert. Though the Chichiméca tribes among which I sojourned all spoke a coherent Náhuatl, or some dialect of it, they had no word knowing or other education, and some of their habits and customs were veritably repulsive. But, while they would have horrified any civilized community that they might ever try to visit, I have to say that the Chichiméca had admirably adapted themselves to life in the pitiless desert, and I know few civilized men who could have done the same.

  That first camp I visited, the only home its people knew, was just one more piece of the desert, on which they had elected to squat because they knew there was a seepage of underground water accessible by digging some way down in that particular patch of sand. The camp’s only homelike aspect was the cooking fires of the tribe’s sixteen or eighteen families. Except for the rudimentary cooking pots and utensils, there was no furniture. Near each fire was stacked each family’s armory of hunting weapons and tools: a bow and some arrows, a javelin and its atlatl, a skinning knife, a meat-cutting ax, and the like. Only a few of those things were tipped or bladed with obsidian, that rock being a rare commodity in those regions. The majority of weapons were made of the copper-hard quauxelolóni wood, cunningly shaped and sharpened by fire.

  Of course there were no solid-built houses, and only two temporary ones: crude little huts constructed by leaning deadwood sticks haphazardly together. In each hut, I was told, lay a pregnant woman awaiting childbirth, for which reason that camp was more permanent than most, meaning it might exist for several days instead of being merely the usual overnight stop for sleep. The rest of the tRibé scorned any shelter. Men, women, and the smallest infant children slept on the ground, as I had lately been doing, but instead of a ground-softening blanket, lik
e mine of felted rabbit hair, they used only old and dirty and tattered deerskins. Equally bedraggled animal skins also composed what sketchy clothing they wore: loincloths for the men; sleeveless, shapeless, knee-length blouses for the women; nothing at all for the children, even those almost full grown.

  But the vilest thing about the camp was its odor, which even the surrounding vastness of open air failed to dispel, and the odor was that of the dog people, every one of them far dirtier than any dog. It might be doubted that a person could get soiled in the desert, for sand is as clean as snow. But those people were mainly befouled with their own dirt, their own secretions, their own negligence. They let their sweat cake on their bodies, so it encrusted the other oils and scurfs that the body normally sheds in unnoticeable flakes. Every wrinkle and fold of their bodies was a tracery of dark grime: knuckles, wrists, throats, inner elbows, backs of knees. Their hair flapped in mats, not strands, and lice and fleas crawled among that greasy matting. Their skin garments, as well as their own skins, were permeated with the additional odors of wood smoke, dried blood, and rancid animal fats. The total stench was staggering, and, although I eventually ceased to notice it, I long thought the Chichiméca the filthiest people I had ever encountered, and the people most uncaring about their filthiness.

  They all had extremely simple names—such as Zoquitl and Nacatl and Chachápa, which mean Mud and Meat and Cloudburst—names rather pitiably unsuited to their blighted and starved habitat; but then, maybe they chose such names in a spirit of wishfulness. Meat was the name of the newly made widower who had invited me to visit the camp. He and I sat down at the cooking fire built by a number of other unattached males, apart from the fires of the family groups. Meat and his fellows already knew that I was a Mexícatl, but I was uncomfortably uncertain how to refer to their nationality. So, while one of the men used a yuca-leaf ladle to serve each of us some unidentifiable stew on a curved segment of maguey leaf, I said:

  “As you probably know, Meat, we Mexíca are accustomed to speak of all desert inhabitants as the Chichiméca. But no doubt you have another name for yourselves.”

  He indicated the scattering of campfires and said, “We here are the Tecuéxe tribe. There are many others in the desert—Pame, Janámbre, Hualahuíse, many others—but yes, we are all Chichiméca, since we are all red-skinned people.” I privately thought that he and his tribesmen were more the gray color of grime. Meat swallowed a mouthful of stew and added, “You too are a Chichimécatl. No different from us.”

  I had resented the Rarámuri’s calling me that. It was even more outrageous that a desert savage himself should claim kinship with a civilized Mexícatl. But he said it so casually that I realized he meant no presumption. It was true that, underneath their dirt, Meat and the other Tecuéxe were of a coppery complexion similar to my own and that of every other person I knew. Tribes and individuals of our race might vary, from palest red-gold to the ruddy brown of cacao, but, generally speaking, red-skinned was the most inclusive description. And so I understood: those scruffy, half-naked, ignorant nomads obviously believed that the name Chichiméca derived not from the chichíne, dog, but from the word chichíltic, meaning red. To anyone who chose to believe that, Chichiméca was no contemptuous name; it described every human being in every desert, every jungle, every civilized city of The One World.

  I went on feeding my grateful belly—the stew was gritty with sand, but tasty nonetheless—and I meditated on the ties between diverse peoples. Clearly the Chichiméca must once have had some improving contact with civilization. Meat had mentioned his wife’s imprudent sickbed confession to Tlazoltéotl, so I already knew of the Chichiméca’s acquaintance with that goddess. I later learned that they worshiped most of our other gods as well. But, in their isolation and ignorance, they had invented a new one just for themselves. They held the laughable belief that the stars are butterflies made of obsidian, and that the stars’ twinkling light is only a reflection of moonlight from those fluttering wings of shiny stone. So they had conceived a goddess—Itzpapálotl, Obsidian Butterfly—whom they regarded as the highest of all gods. Well, in the desert night, the stars are spectacularly bright, and they do seem to hover, like butterflies, just beyond one’s reach.

  But even if the Chichiméca have some things in common with more civilized peoples, and even if they interpret the very name Chichiméca to imply that all red-skinned peoples are somehow distantly related, they have no compunction about living at the expense of those relatives, distant or near. On that first night I dined with the Tecuéxe tribe, the mealtime stew contained bits of tender white meat flaking off delicate bones which I could not recognize as being the bones of lizards or rabbits or any other creatures I had seen in the desert. So I inquired:

  “Meat, what is this meat we are eating?”

  He grunted, “Baby.”

  “Baby what?”

  He said again, “Baby,” and shrugged. “Food for the hard times.” He saw that I still did not comprehend, so he explained, “We sometimes leave the desert to pillage an Otomí village and we take, among other things, their infant children. Or we may fight with another Chichiméca tribe in the open desert. When the defeated tribe withdraws, it must leave those of its children too small to run. Since such tiny captives would be of no other use to their captors, they are gutted and cured in the sun, or smoked over a mizquitl fire, so they last a long time without spoiling. They weigh little, so each of our women can easily carry three or four of them dangling from a cord around her waist. They are carried to be cooked and eaten when—as happened today—Obsidian Butterfly neglects to send game for our arrows.”

  I can see from your faces, reverend scribes, that you deem that practice reprehensible. But I must confess that I learned to eat almost anything edible, with as much satisfaction and as little repugnance as any Chichimécatl, for during that desert journey I knew no laws more peremptory than those of hunger and thirst. Nevertheless, I did not totally discard the manners and discriminations of civilization. There were other dietary eccentricities of the Chichiméca in which not even the direst deprivations could make me participate.

  I accompanied Meat and his fellows as long as their wanderings tended more or less northward, in the way I was going. Then, when the Tecuéxe decided to veer off to the east, Meat kindly escorted me to the camp of another tribe, the Tzacatéca, and introduced me to a friend there with whom he had often done battle, a man named Greenery. So I went along with the Tzacatéca as long as they drifted northward, and, when our paths diverged, Greenery in turn introduced me to another friend, by the name of Banquet, of the Hua tribe. Thus I was handed on from one band of Chichiméca to another—to the Tobóso, the Iritíla, the Mapimí—and thus it was that I lived in the desert through all the seasons of an entire year, and thus it was that I observed some really disgusting customs of the Chichiméca.

  In the late summer and early autumn of the year, the various desert cactuses put out their fruit. I have mentioned the towering quinámetl cactus, which resembles an immense green man with many uplifted arms. It bears the fruit called the pitaáya, which is admittedly tasty and nourishing, but I think it is most prized because it is so difficult of acquisition. Since no man can climb a spine-clothed quinámetl, the fruit can be coaxed loose only with the aid of long poles or thrown rocks. Anyway, the pitaáya is a favorite delicacy of the desert dwellers—such a luxury that they eat each fruit twice.

  A Chichimécatl man or woman will gobble one of the purplish globes entire, pulp and juice and black seeds together, and then wait for what those people call the ynic ome pixquitl, or “second harvest.” That means only that the eaters digest the fruit and excrete the residue, among which are the undigested pitaáya seeds. As soon as a person has voided his bowels, he examines his excrement, he fingers through it and picks out those nutlike seeds and then eats them again, voluptuously crunching and chewing them to extract their full flavor and measure of nourishment. If a man or woman finds a trace of other excrement anywhere in the des
ert in that season—whether it be the droppings of an animal or vulture or another human—he or she will leap to examine it and paw through it, in hope of finding overlooked pitaáya seeds to appropriate and eat.

  There is another practice of those people which I found even more repellent, but to describe it I must explain something. When I had been traveling in the desert for almost a year, and the springtime came—I was at that time in the company of the Iritíla tribe—I saw that Tlaloc does condescend to spill some of his rain upon the desert. For about a month of twenty days, he rains. On some of those days he storms so liberally that the desert’s long-dry gullies become raging, frothing torrents. But Tlaloc’s dispensation continues for no longer than that one month, and the water soon is sucked into the sands. So it is only during those twenty or so days of rain that the desert becomes briefly colorful, with flowers on the cactuses and the otherwise sere scrub bushes. At that time, too, in places where the ground stays soggy long enough, the desert sprouts a growth I had not seen before: a mushroom called the chichinanácatl. It consists of a skinny stem topped by a blood-red cap which is disfigured by white warts.

  The Iritíla women eagerly gathered those mushrooms, but they never served any of them in the meals they prepared, and I thought that odd. During that same short, moist springtime, the chief of the Iritíla ceased to urinate on the ground like other men. During that time, one of his wives carried always and everywhere a special clay bowl. Whenever the chief felt the urge to relieve himself, she held the bowl and he urinated into it. And there was one other odd circumstance during that season: each day, various of the Iritíla males would be too drunk to go out hunting or foraging, and I could not imagine how they could have found or concocted a drunk-making drink. It was a while before I discerned the connection among those various odd things and events.