Aztec Rage

by Gary Jennings

  The dandies shut up and moved away when I spurred Tempest toward them. They knew if they did not leave they would face me on the field of honor—and I was not one of them, a soft, silken caballero. I earned my big spurs not simply through an accident of birth but in the saddle, outriding, outshooting, and outroping the best vaqueros on my hacienda. On horseback, I chased a bull out on the range until I came up behind it and sent it to the ground by grabbing its tail. These paseo peacocks knew my abilities. They disliked me for them but dared not call me out.

  Raquel scandalizing herself was so serious, however, I again brought the matter up with the compañeros I drink and whore with. They concurred that she needed a strong hand to know that I was her lord and master, even before marriage.

  Thinking about their advice, I decided to seduce Raquel, to learn whether her education had damaged her beyond the point of being able to perform her most important matrimonial duties. The plan, however, was not without risk. If I impregnated her, there would be scandal, and we would both lose face. But a smart caballero knew the art of coitus interruptus, the sin for which God condemned Onan. If I left my seed in a whore or a servant girl, pregnancy was of no consequence. The law ignored offspring from such casual liaisons, affording them no privileges or rights. To deflower a woman of quality, however, would bring down the wrath of God to say nothing of her male relatives: pistols at dawn and financial retribution.

  While Raquel was a mestiza, her father was a gachupine, a man of wealth and substance. To such a family, virtue and virginity not only were synonymous, they also were prized because the loss could bar a woman from a financially advantageous marriage.

  That a man was free to conjugate beyond the marriage bed was understood. God in his indubitable wisdom had designed, ordained, and predetermined man’s peripatetic lust, thus making it divinely destined, the way of the world.

  ¡Ay! It was extremely imprudent to debauch one’s intended esposa, but my mind and body have not always obeyed society’s dictates.

  One evening after dinner I persuaded her to stroll with me in her family garden. I was in a jovial mood, my stomach full with rare beef and rarer wine. The evening was mild, even a little warm, and the air was fragrant with roses. The only damper on my plan was the elderly aunt who accompanied us on our walk. A young lady required a chaperone even in her own garden. She followed behind us, a little unsteady. At last, she sat wearily on a rock bench and closed her eyes.

  “Poor dear, she’s old and tired,” Raquel said in a loving tone.

  The old woman’s chest rose and fell in a steady rhythm.

  “She drank too much wine.”

  I pulled her roughly to me and put my arms around her, ready to kiss her.

  “Someone might see us.”

  “No one is around but your aunt, and, look, the old woman is fast asleep,” I whispered. “Come with me. I want to show you something,” I told her, my voice thick with desire. Grabbing her hand, I pulled her behind a row of bushes.

  “Juan, what has gotten into you? The wine has made you crazy.”

  We tumbled to the ground together, myself on top. “I saw the way you looked at me this evening,” I said.

  “You are a striking figure of a man.”

  She didn’t stop me when I kissed her on the mouth. In fact, she returned my kiss with surprising ardor, and the wine spurred me on.

  “I see longing in your eyes,” I told her.

  “I want my husband to be pleased.”

  I looked at her, bewildered.

  “But—” she said, almost with a pained looked on her face.

  “What is wrong?”

  “I have so much to learn,” she said hesitantly, lowering her eyes, “about pleasing . . . you . . .”

  I couldn’t help but laugh. “Ay, I will teach you. Give me your hand.”

  I already felt the heat rising in my body as I guided her hand to my loins. “Now touch it.”

  She looked around and hesitated for a moment.

  “It’s getting hard . . . and big . . . and growing bigger!” she said, confused.

  My pride swelled as did my garrancha from the pressure of her grip.

  I spun for her the fables men have spun for women since the beginning of time: promises of love eternal, faith and fealty, inviolable discretion . . . now . . . forever . . . I promised to cherish her until the sun died blind, blackened to the heart; until man, Earth, the stars themselves were blotted out. I swore the deity Himself would bless our consummation . . . and that after all I was her husband in all things but the ring. We were to be married, were we not?

  Desire rode me like a ram in rut. I pulled her cotton blouse down and sucked her breast. Discarding my boots and pants, I frantically fumbled through her mounds and mountains of petticoats. Removing her undergarments, I gingerly spread her legs apart. As I pushed my throbbing organ against her pristine loins, into her immaculate yet magically sensuous opening, she let out a soft strangled cry—half pain, half pleasure—and a sigh, another sigh, the word yes, faintly audible above her sighs, and again yes. At the same time she enveloped my hips with her legs, squeezing me, holding me, then hanging on for dear life. She had to, for I was bucking now—as if I were an outlaw llano stallion and El Diablo himself was mounting my back and roweling my ribs, as if I were possessed by wind and rain and fire, by a sword of fire. Deeper, harder, I bucked, riding us both into a whirlwind of rain and fire, but the latter, a hurricane of fire, a chaos of fire, a fire of fires, straight on through to the hell-hot core of the sun.

  When I was spent and gazed down at her, not without tenderness, her eyes were closed though I felt her body shudder whenever I touched her. Her face was expressionless save for a trickle of tears. From pain or joy I did not know.

  Eh, I had made a terrible mistake, one that started as a mud slide but was soon an avalanche. After I had taken her, a change took place. She began to look at me with doe eyes. ¡Ay! She had fallen in love with me. She was sixteen years old and had had her first intimate experience with a man. All sixteen-year-old girls are idealistic about love, but I had not realized that the poetry and plays she read had so usurped her mind and commandeered her heart. To be frank with you, I prefer my women hardened to my lust . . . like a brothel puta. Her affection embarrassed me, even though we were betrothed.

  And then her world exploded: A rumor spread that her father was from a converso family. Converso was an ugly word, over three centuries old, dating from the time of Ferdinand and Isabella. It denoted the worse kind of blood taint.

  After the Moors were conquered and separate Christian kingdoms united to form a country, the Spanish church and crown decreed that Jews and Moors had to convert to Christianity or face seizure of their property and expulsion from the country. Those who converted were known as conversos. Many conversos and their descendants were prosecuted by the Inquisition, accused of pretending to convert in order to stay in the country and save their possessions, though it was sometimes whispered that accusations of fraudulent conversions were made so the Inquisition could enrich itself by seizing the fortunes of people who opposed their black deeds.

  Eh, all the fuss over so many things I cared nothing about. Perfumed petticoats, gambling and pistols, horses and whores—the things I cared about—were my religion at the time, and they required mucho dinero, which was my sole interest in Raquel.

  When “witnesses” swore her grandfather in Spain was a converso, the accusations burned through Guanajuato society like a firestorm. Soon the crown barred her father from the New Spain quicksilver trade. The business that earned him his fortune, the importation of fine Toledo and Damascus blades, suffered as well when his customers deserted him. Forged in infidel flames, Damascus blades drew special scorn. In the wake of the accusations and Raquel’s loss of a dowry, our betrothal unraveled. Fortunately, her father was a man of honor, and the engagement was canceled because he could no longer afford the dowry.

  That fickle Slut of Chance continued to spin her shadowy wheel,
carrying misfortune into her father’s life. When an ill-set charge collapsed a shaft and blew out a stope, his silver mine was racked to ruin by fire and flood.

  Soon after, Raquel’s father came, uninvited, to our house. Trembling with rage, tears on his cheeks, he accused my uncle of spreading the converso slander. “You think me not so white as yourselves?” he shouted.

  The dispute raged, but I said nothing. Criollos and gachupines raised the issue of “whiteness” continually, but the question was always rhetorical. People posed it only when others treated them with contempt, as if others treated them like peons. The “white” the old man referred to, of course, was the “color” of blood not skin.

  Voicing other accusations, he charged my uncle with sabotaging the mine and starting the fire—a suspicion I harbored myself. As he shouted, something broke in him. Perhaps his heart burst or a brain fever consumed him. He suddenly keeled over, hitting the floor like a toppled oak. He lay there portentously inert. Taking a door off its hinges, we carefully placed him on it and had servants carry him down the street to his own house. He died a few days later without regaining consciousness.

  The world changed for Raquel after her father’s loss of fortune and death. No longer able to maintain a great house, she and her grieving mother moved into a smaller house, keeping but a single servant. Poor Raquel. As if blood taint and financial ruin weren’t enough, leaving her without even a dowry, she was also deflowered.

  When I saw those sad doe eyes staring at me, asking in quizzical silence where those vows of love had gone, I cursed that I had ever met her and wondered why her fall from grace so racked my calloused soul. Was it my fault that her world collapsed? When I took her, did I know she would lose not only her virginity but father and dowry? Should not the girl have fought me off, knowing how important her virgo intacta was?

  But it was all for the best, at least for me. Isabella, my angel, soon arrived. From the moment I saw her, I knew she would be mine.

  Still Raquel’s sad eyes plagued me. ¡Dios es Dios! As sure as God lives. I must have rutted a thousand lecherous wenches and legions of brothel bawds, but none with her wounded eyes.

  They will haunt me to the grave.

  FIVE

  I RODE TEMPEST through the narrow, crowded streets of the city, making my way toward the paseo, a pathway in a park beyond the city streets. As their peers did in the two famed parks in Méjico City, the Alameda and Paseo de Bucareli, wealthy señoritas in their carriages and caballeros on their fine blooded horses paraded the paseo in Guanajuato. I went in the afternoons to show off myself and my great stallion before the flirtatious women who stayed in their carriages and laughed behind Chinese silk fans at the displays of machismo by the caballeros.

  Despite the size of the city, Guanajuato’s central zone could not accommodate a spacious park. Unlike the capital, it was not situated on flat terrain but was a mountain mining town. Sprawling over steep hillsides at the junction of three ravines, its elevation was almost seven thousand feet.

  Plagued by rainstorms and floods, the indios called the city the “place of the frogs,” implying it was only fit for frogs. Its windswept cobbled streets rose narrowly into little alleys, or callejones, consisting of a few stone steps. Flattening out, the callejones yielded to more stone steps, twisting uphill, past colorful buildings of cantera stone.

  Guanajuato was famed throughout New Spain for its magnificently ornate La Valenciana Church, with its elaborately hand-carved altar and pulpit. Its most prized possession, however, was in fact singularly secular: the celebrated Veta Madre, the mother lode of silver, acclaimed as the richest silver find in all New Spain, perhaps in all the world.

  Second in population only to the capital, the city boasted over seventy thousand people, including its environs and surrounding mines. In wealth and importance, Guanajuato was the third city of the Americas, surpassed only by Méjico City and Havana. Not even that place called New York—in that country to the northeast that had declared its independence from Britain when I was a child—compared to the three great cities of the Spanish colonial empire in size and importance.

  Guanajuato was the leading city in the Bajío. A rich region of cattle, farming, and mining northwest of the capital, it boasted many fine haciendas, picturesque villages, and elegant baroque churches. The Bajío was not in the Valley of Méjico but was still in the heart of the colony, that central expanse called the Plateau of Méjico. New Spain was a vast territory, extending from the Isthmus of Panama to regions far north of the arid deserts of New Méjico and California. The colony’s population was said to be about 6 million, with the greatest portion thereof concentrated in the central plateau. I am told that the entire population of that entity known as the United States, the only independent nation in the Americas, would be almost equal to New Spain’s if that northern nation had not kidnapped a million slaves from Africa.

  What kind of people lived in this place called New Spain? About half—nearly 3 million—were pure-blood indios, the remnants of ten times that many who had occupied the land before Cortés landed nearly three hundred years ago.

  That infelicitous mix of indio and Spanish bloods called mestizos amounted to fewer than half that many. And there was also a small number of mulattos, people of indio and africano blood, and an even smaller number of chinos, people with yellow skin from that mysterious land across the Pacific Ocean called Cathay. Another 1 million of the people in the colony were criollos, colony-born Spaniards who owned most of the haciendas, mines, and businesses.

  The gachupines were the smallest yet mightiest social class of New Spain, that privileged population into which God and our fickle goddess of fate, Señora Fortuna, had so fortuitously inserted me. Though we numbered perhaps only ten thousand—a minute portion of the 6 million surrounding us—we were imperially favored by God and the crown. We controlled the government, courts, police, military, church, and commerce.

  Rapacious wearers of our razor-sharp spurs, we drove our rowels into the flanks of not just the Aztecs, mestizos, and others that made up the peon class but also the proud and disdainful criollos, who dreamed of the day when their Spanish blood would make them our equals.

  More than money, horsemanship, skill with weapons, or the sensuous subjugation of señoritas, the “color” of a man’s blood was the sine qua non of status and honor. By any application of the limpieza de sangre—the test of blood—mine was pureza de sangre, pure Spanish blood. Without the purity of my blood, little separated me from the peons.

  Blood was the God-given difference between all people, even those with the same skin color and speech. A vaquero on a hacienda may be a fine horseman in the saddle of a horse or with a woman, he might work cattle and shoot game with deadly aplomb, but he was a peon and could never be a caballero. Caballeros, the knights of New Spain and the Mother Country, had pureza de sangre, pure Spanish blood.

  Purity of blood transcended wealth, nobility, and artistry, for blood alone conferred honor. The tradition arose from the centuries of wars that made the Iberian Peninsula a battleground between Christians and the infidel followers of Allah we call Moors. Like the mestizos of the colony, those with a mixture that included Moorish blood were ostracized.

  Not even skin color was more important than pureza de sangre. Many Spaniards did not have pale white skin. The Iberian Peninsula, where so many cultures have existed and clashed for thousands of years, produced many hues of skin and hair.

  While birth, not lineage, conferred honor, and mixing blood was the ultimate degradation, colonial birth by itself was enough to sully a bloodline.

  The climate in New Spain ranges from deserts in the north to jungles in the south. It is unhealthy for birthing, rendering criollos unfit for high office, whether it be in the government, church, or military.

  Eh, there is grumbling from some criollos that the real reason power was kept only in the tight fist of gachupines was to keep control of the colony in the hands of the Spain-born because they had stron
g ties to the king. Most of the gachupines who administered the colony came over for only a few years, made their fortune, and returned to the homeland. The church also kept real power out of the grasp of colony-born priests.

  To understand why my birthplace made me what is vulgarly called a gachupine, you must know a little more about New Spain. It was nearly three centuries ago when Cortés and his band of five or six hundred adventurers conquered the mighty empire of Montezuma, emperor of the Aztecs, and found themselves masters of indio empires that stretched a thousand leagues and were populated by over 25 million people.

  Though we refer to all indios as “Aztecs,” twenty or more indigenous cultures resided in the central region when Cortés landed. Many more indio cultures dotted the lands farther south, among them the mysterious Mayas and the gold-rich Inca empire of Peru. Seizing the wealth of the indio royalty and nobility, conquistadors and their Spanish rulers soon rounded up another type of “treasure,” the indios themselves, conscripting them as laborers and exacting an annual tribute for their new Spanish masters.

  The Spanish carved the indios’ empires into vast grants, but smallpox and other plagues—carried to the New World by Europeans—killed ninety percent of the indigenous people in a few short decades. Fortunately, for Spain, a new treasure was discovered: silver. Silver made the colony Spain’s prize possession.

  The Spanish Empire was the largest on earth, a domain so vast, the sun never set upon it. Neither Britain’s colonies in Africa and Asia, nor the Czar’s illimitable Russian domain, spreading across so much of the northern portion of the globe, compared in size to the far-flung empire of Spain.

  History, of course, was the interest of priests and scholars. What was important about it to me was that New Spain’s mountains of silver dwarfed the wealth of all other Spanish colonies, and my quicksilver business, which controlled the magic element that alchemized silver out of mining rock, would buy me the noble title necessary to win the hand of my true love.