Aztec Rage

by Gary Jennings

  Tethering our horses to a hitch rack, we followed Hidalgo. The young woman looked over my horse before we followed behind Lizardi and Hidalgo.

  “Do you know horses?” I asked her, to make conversation, knowing, of course, that horses were beyond the comprehension of women. I never believed for a second that she would see through Tempest’s “disguise.”

  “A bit, yes. My husband and I owned a caballo rancho. After he was killed, I raised the horses myself, from birthing the mares to saddle-breaking the colts, from working the pony herds to breeding the studs.”

  “Muy bueno,” I said. But it was not good. What a terrible hand Señora Fortuna had dealt me again—a woman with knowledge of horses when I was trying to hide Tempest’s pedigree.

  Marina tenderly stroked the side of Tempest’s face. He let out a snort that indicated he liked it when she caressed him.

  “I see your stallion has fine lines, champion lines. Other than the . . . unusual markings, he is a finer caballo than any in Dolores.”

  I could have told Marina that no horse outside of a few in Méjico City could match Tempest. I quickly changed the subject.

  “What happened to your husband? An accident training horses?”

  “An accident with his pants. He let them drop once too often, and a jealous husband shot him.”

  I mumbled my regrets and dutifully crossed myself.

  “It’s all right,” Marina said, “the wronged husband saved me from the gallows. I would have killed him myself. I’m sure you know, Brother Juan, a man can kill a woman he finds in flagrante delicto, but a woman who slays her husband for the same reason will share the scaffold with killers and thieves.”

  Marina gave me a look when she spoke of killers and thieves. Did I have bandido written on my face? I found it strange that a woman would use a Latin expression. I knew the Latin phrase for a bedroom indiscretion, having been accused of committing it more than once myself.

  “But, of course, Brother Juan, that is just one of the unjust laws we must change.”

  I was shocked to hear her speak this way. Raquel had spoken of ideas and philosophy, but at least she was part Spanish. Now I was hearing an india speak of politics and justice . . . and horses. Perhaps my recent ordeal had befuddled my brain more than I realized.

  “I have disturbed you with my blunt remarks,” Marina said.

  “No, my child. You are just mourning the loss of your husband.”

  Throwing her head back, she laughed with derision. “I mourn the loss of my horses. A good horse is hard to find, but men . . . they are easily replaced.”

  I looked Marina up and down. Although she lacked Isabella’s striking beauty, her voluptuous body was more shapely and sensuous than Isabella’s. Moreover, I was genuinely interested in what she said. This was disconcerting. In truth, I had never viewed indias as anything more than serving wenches or repositories for my lascivious lust. Now I found myself conversing with one.

  My male physical needs were undeniably urgent, and I suspected she knew it. In fact, when she looked me in the eye, her smile seemed to search the darkest dankest depths of my sin-stained soul, as if she discerned every dirty deed I had ever done.

  It had been a long time since I lay my head upon a woman’s bare breasts, kissed her soft lips, and caressed the hidden treasure between her legs. I wanted this Aztec woman of wit and bearing more than I had ever wanted any woman in my life.

  “Why did you give up your horses?” I asked.

  “Men refused to buy horses raised and trained by a woman. More than one suggested the only business fit for a woman was to raise babies, make tortillas, and break her back in bed. I soon tired of their ignorance and came to work for the padre. He is the most enlightened man in the colony.”

  “Brother Alano and I will sup at the padre’s table tonight. Perhaps, señorita, afterward we could take a walk together? I have some questions about the area that you may be able to answer.”

  “I will also be at the dinner. We can discuss the matters then.”

  I wanted to tell her that it would be difficult for me to have a discussion with a servant when she was attending to the dinner guests, but I held my tongue. After dinner and her cleaning chores were done, I might be able to arrange an assignation.

  As I followed “Brother Alano” and Padre Hidalgo around, I learned more about Dolores. Not only was the padre growing grapes and making wine, he also had started a number of industries, all employing indios.

  The priest bubbled with enthusiasm, telling us about his work with the Aztecs. I listened but could not stop staring at the padre. He reminded me of someone I could not place.

  “When we came to the New World,” Hidalgo said, “we Spaniards did not conquer savages but great and proud empires. These indios we call Aztecs—the Mexica, Mayas, Toltecs, Zapotecs, and others were on a cultural level that was in some ways superior to our European civilizations. They had books, great works of art, engineering skills that allowed them to move blocks of stones larger than houses over mountains, a more accurate astronomy, and more mathematically precise calendar. Their roads were safer and more durable than the foul ruts running through many of our locales, and their buildings more solid. In other words, we annihilated civilizations of cultured intelligent peoples.”

  I stared at the padre as if he were mad. Every Spaniard knew that Cortés had conquered naked ignorant savages who sacrificed virgins and practiced cannibalism. Yet I could see that Lizardi was not as shocked as I by the priest’s ignorance. Marina gave me an amused look as I tried to keep my face blank while the padre made the outrageous comments about indios. If she had been my servant, for such impertinence I would have given her a beating . . . after I made love to her.

  The padre showed us to an area where clay pottery—bowls, cups, pots, and jars—were baked in an oven. “None finer are made in the colony,” he said. He pointed at my leather boots, the ones I was gifted by the lady-in-black, who I was certain was my own sweet Isabella. “The indio workmanship on those boots is finer than anything produced in Spain or the rest of Europe. The hands that crafted those boots and the pottery are as skilled with leather and pottery as any in the world. Why, we’ve even imported mulberry trees from China. Silkworms will feed off the white fruit, and we’ll in turn use the worms to weave silk.”

  He enthusiastically explained the process of making silk from worms: “The silkworms are nurtured from egg to maturity by feeding on the mulberry trees. They build their cocoons by producing and surrounding themselves with a long, continuous fiber. Incredibly, each little cocoon produces a very fine fiber about a thousand paces long. Several fibers are twisted together to make yarn that’s woven into cloth.”

  The padre beamed at us. “Is it not wonderful? Aztecs producing wine as fine as the vineyards in Jerez, silks as delicate as those made in Cathay.”

  “And pottery exquisite as the Greeks,” Marina said.

  “Bueno, bueno,” Lizardi said.

  I kept my face expressionless. I would not be surprised if he now told us that his indios were building a stairway to heaven.

  He was different from any priest I’d ever met. Other priests knew and spoke of little except the narrow precepts of their church. When they dealt with matters outside those confines, they were often wrong and inevitably tedious. But the curate of Dolores’s church was intelligent, enthusiastic, and energetic. When he spoke of the vineyard, silk making, and other crafts, he had the fervor of a merchant and the intellect of a scholar.

  And, of course, he was also quite mad. Who but a madman would teach peons crafts that competed with the work of their betters?

  When we were out of the padre’s hearing, Lizardi whispered, “Do you realize everything you see is illegal?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Were you educated by moonbeams, señor? Growing grapes for wine, silk works, pottery—he even has an orchard of olive trees. I’ve told you, the colony is barred from the production of all these things because they compe
te with imports from Spain.”

  “Spain sells us wine that tastes like mule piss for extortionate prices. The priest probably has a special dispensation from the viceroy.”

  “No, I’ve heard talk about him in the capital. He’s known as a notorious advocate for indios, but he walks the razor’s edge. He won’t get away with these illegal industries forever.”

  I scoffed. “These projects don’t threaten the empire.”

  “It’s their nature, not the size, that threatens the gachupines. The padre wants to prove that peons are as capable as Spaniards, that they lack only training and opportunities. How would the gachupines you know react to Aztecs and mestizos being their equal?”

  The question didn’t require an answer. We both knew that the viceroy had men strangled in his dungeon for lesser sins.

  “ ‘Brother’ Juan, one day the viceroy’s men or the Inquisition will stop the padre from his folly. He’ll die on the scaffold or at the stake. Only the remoteness of this town and his priest’s robes have protected him from harm’s way thus far.”

  Lizardi rejoined the priest as Marina approached. She glanced down at my caballero boots. It was a deliberate look. I pursed my lips and locked my eyes on hers.

  “You have an amazing facility with language, señor.”

  I didn’t know what she meant, but I took the bait. “I speak French, Latin, and an indio tongue. But how would you know that?”

  “I wasn’t referring to those but to your command of our colonial dialect and idioms and, as you say, of one of our indio tongues as well . . . all in such a short time.”

  She gave me a knowing smile that meant many things, none of them good for me. If nothing else, she implied that she had seen through my monk’s masquerade.

  Averting my eyes, I turned to join Lizardi and the padre when it struck me with hammer force: I had met the padre before.

  He was the priest with Raquel who had stopped me from beating the lépero-beggar.

  TWENTY-THREE

  WE HAD DINNER at the padre’s, and Marina was there—as a guest. Should I have been surprised that she was not a servant? The entire dinner party was a strange concoction. The padre even had his mistress—an actress he had produced a play for—present.

  A priest producing a play?

  The other guests were a young Aztec novice for the priesthood from León, a criollo hacendado, owner of the largest hacienda in the area, and two criollo priests from Valladolid who had come to speak to the padre about his indio industries.

  The novice, Diego Rayu, was a young man with searching eyes and a bright smile. I learned he had studied for the priesthood and now waited to see if the church would accept him. Indio priests were a rarity in the colony.

  Don Roberto Ayala, the hacienda owner, gave Marina and the young novice looks that left no doubt that the only way they would have gotten near his own dinner table was with a serving tray.

  One of the visiting priests said the padre’s home should be called Francia Chiquita, or Little France. France was the world’s guiding light in arts and sciences.

  The conversation turned to literature and philosophy, and I felt that I was surrounded by a table full of Raquels—except for Don Roberto, who was as happily ignorant about such things as I was.

  After dinner, the padre had his actress-mistress, Marina, and the novice read and act out scenes from El sí de las niñas (When a Girl Says Yes) by Leandro Fernández de Moratín. The play dealt with the conflicts between an older, more rigid generation and a younger, rebellious one.

  In the play a wealthy fifty-nine-year-old man wants to take a pretty young sixteen-year-old as his bride. Things get complicated because she is in love with a younger man, not knowing that he’s the older man’s nephew. Nor do the uncle or nephew know each is vying for the girl’s hand. The muddle has a happy ending when the rich older man allows his nephew to marry the girl.

  The notion of a wealthy man marrying a beautiful girl even though he is four times older than she rang true for me. But that he would hand the hot young señorita over to his nephew rang as false as those chivalric romances that so vexed poor Don Quixote. In the real world, the old man would keep his money, bed the girl, and send the nephew off to be killed in a war.

  The padre’s guests droned on and on about literature after which Padre Hidalgo read from Molière, a long dead French writer of even deader French comedies. L’École des femmes (The School for Wives) the padre said was based on a Spanish story, featuring one Arnolphe, a scholar who never takes his head out of books. When he must marry, he is so frightened of women he chooses a bride who is totally naïve to the ways of the world.

  As the padre read the inane utterances of Arnolphe and the young woman, my eyelids drooped, and I reached for the brandy bottle. Arnolphe falls hopelessly in love with the idiotic girl and spends the rest of the play attempting to romance her into bed, making an ass out of himself the entire time.

  It took all my willpower to keep from imbibing my brandy straight out of the bottle’s neck. I could have told Arnolphe how to handle the woman: I would have ridden up to her on Tempest, carried her off to some quiet place, told her whatever lies she needed to hear, then had my way with her. That was the sort of romancing women respected, not whining sniveling talk.

  From small talk between Marina and the actress, I learned that Padre Hidalgo had a child with the actress and had fathered two daughters in another town. Having a mistress and children was not unusual for a parish priest; they were not monks, cloistered in a monastery. But it made the priest even more unfathomable to me.

  Dolores was the strangest place I had ever seen. Running Aztec industries in defiance of the king’s decrees? Treating peons as social and intellectual equals? Treating women as equals? The priest’s mistress reading French plays at the dinner table . . . Was he going to produce it as a play for her?

  Meanwhile Padre Hidalgo never intimated that I was the caballero he had encountered in Guanajuato. More than anything else that went on in Dolores, that puzzled me. Why didn’t he expose and denounce me as a vicious brute and a fraud? That he recognized me I had no doubt. Why he kept his own counsel I did not know. Even more disturbing he seemed to like me.

  While all this was going on, Marina offered her opinion on the Viceroy’s recent decree increasing the tax on corn to aid the war effort of our Spanish king. I took it in stride; an Aztec with a mind of her own no longer shocked me. I simply helped myself to more of the padre’s admirable brandy. The hacienda owner, however, grew increasingly out of sorts with Marina expressing opinions.

  She intrigued me. Despite Marina’s literary education, her skill with horses, her considerable beauty, her obvious forthrightness interested yet confused me.

  Watching her quick-but-subtle movements, she reminded me of a wild forest creature, not a delicate doe but a menacing feline with the indolent grace of a sated jaguar at rest. A raw power radiated through her. Her interest in the arts and politics matched Raquel’s, even though Raquel’s reasoning had more depth. Marina compensated in her arguments with primal passion.

  She brought out passion in all the guests that night, as they debated the events in the capital and the wars in Europe. After Britain’s terrible defeat of the combined Spanish-French fleets at Trafalgar several years ago, the king was again bearding the British lion. This time Spain had invaded Portugal at the behest of the French, who wanted to isolate Britain from its last ally on the continent.

  “Tragic,” Padre Hidalgo said, “just tragic, so many lives lost, so much of our nation’s wealth going into wars. First we ally ourselves with the British and fight the French, now we align with Napoleon against the British, only to court more disaster.”

  “From what we have heard, we have lost so many ships-of-the-line, we may never be a great naval power again,” Lizardi said.

  “I blame Godoy,” Marina said. “They say he’s the queen’s lover, no less. First he led us into a disastrous war with France, then another against the British.
”

  Marina’s remark provoked an outburst from Señor Ayala, the hacendado. The same age as the padre, the hacendado’s rapacious greed and Rabelaisian appetites had endowed him with ridiculous riches, a glutton’s girth, and a tyrant’s intolerance for political dissent. He had not visited the padre’s table to have literate women lecture him on world affairs. The padre’s industrious indios he declared beneath contempt. Their lack of basic rights he deemed a cause for jubilation.

  I knew him well. He was every aged caballero I grew up around and the sort of gachupine on whom I modeled my own ignoble views.

  “Women should breed babies, satisfy their husband’s needs in all ways, and refrain from speaking of matters that concern the church and the crown,” he fumed at Marina.

  “Señor, all men, women, and races are free to express themselves at my table,” Hidalgo spoke softly but forcefully.

  Most parish priests would pander to a rich hacienda owner and later seek recompense in the name of the church. To side with an india over a grandee was financial folly. The padre, on the other hand, truckled to no man, voicing his beliefs without fear or favor.

  Lizardi prudently changed the subject to Diego Rayu, the table’s candidate for the priesthood, asking him:

  “Do you plan to parish in León?”

  Silent for most of the evening, the young novice responded to Lizardi’s question. “I am not welcome in León.”

  While small in stature, Diego had the muscular frame of an indio laborer. As with most Aztecs, he looked to be in better physical condition than Spaniards. With his black hair cropped and large brown eyes, he had a deliberative demeanor and intense gaze.

  “Why have you and León become estranged?” Lizardi asked.

  “I made trouble for the parish priest who sponsored me for the priesthood. He asked me to speak to the father of a fourteen-year-old servant in a gachupine’s house. The grandee had whipped then raped her. When the girl’s father confronted the Spaniard, the caballero horsewhipped the father half to death. When the curé told me the Spaniard would compensate the girl and her father in exchange for the church’s blessing and absolution, I told the curé bribes would not buy off God or the need for justice. When he disagreed, I complained to the alcalde.”