Other dangers abounded as well. En route to distant settlements like Taos and San Antonio, a lone rider had to fear not only bandidos but also wild indios, some of them still practicing the cannibalism favored by their ancestors. I had hunted with care when I went into those areas, more wary of two-legged beasts than the four-footed kind.
I also knew the unsettled areas of the south and east well, probably better than the constables searching for me. I had hunted the territory that stood at the edge of the great region of mountains and high flatlands we call the Valley of Méjico. I also knew what lay east beyond the mountains: the torrid disease-ridden wet-hot coasts, where, when it rained, the ocean itself seemed to fall from the sky, hot enough to melt a man to the bone. But down that coast also lay the colony’s main port, Veracruz.
Hernán Cortés founded a town called La Villa Rica de la Vera Cruz (The Rich Town of the True Cross) when he first landed on the east coast of the colony back in 1519. Eh, he didn’t name the town for its “untold riches” since all he had found was swamp and sand. He named it instead after his conquistador dreams, the lust for worldly riches.
Once I was in Veracruz, I would find a way to get on a ship taking me perhaps to Havana, queen of the Carribean.
I had to get out of the colony. I doubted now that if I was captured, I would be sent to the Far East on that infamous Manila galleon. The constables would hang me from the nearest tree. Escape through Veracruz was the only way out.
To get there I would have to cross mountains, descend into the hot zone to the coast, and follow the coast south to the port. Besides the hazards of constables and bandidos, I would have to traverse the coastal areas where mosquitoes and crocodiles abounded, and countless victims died from the dreaded vomito negro lurking in the stinking swamps.
Contemplating that trip, I recalled Bruto’s claim that the black vomit transformed me into a gachupine in the first place. If his tale of deceit was true, what would the real Juan de Zavala have become had he lived? More important, what would I have been if he had lived?
Was my mother truly an Aztec puta—a whore? Just because she sold her baby did not necessarily make her a whore or even a bad person. The world was hard on poor women with children. Even harder for a woman with a child outside the marriage bed. She might have sold her baby to give the child a better life.
That lying bastardo Bruto said my mother was a whore, but was he telling the truth? He deliberately set out to disgrace and destroy me after I threatened to take control of my estate. I was certain he lied to bring me down after his plan to poison me and steal my estate went astray.
By the time I had ridden another hour, I was sure he had lied. I had adapted so well as a gachupine my mother had to have been one, or at least a highly placed criolla. No doubt she had become pregnant with me as a result of a love affair with a titled gachupine, a count or marqués, and had permitted Bruto to switch me for the dead baby so I would have a good future.
The main road from the capital to Veracruz ran from Puebla to Jalapa and then down to the coast. Along the coast, the road ran through the sands, wetlands, and swamps that made the torrid region infamously unhealthy. Not always a carriage route, the road in the mountains was at times little more than a mule trail. Yet it was also the most widely traveled road in the colony since most of the colony’s imports and exports traversed it.
I was reluctant to take the road since it was also frequented by the viceroy’s constables. An alternative was to negotiate precipitous mountain passes, then journey to the coast north of the Jalapa path. I had hunted in those rugged mountains and once went all the way down to the coast. That coastline featured no ports and no ships. The few plantations there grewjungle produce: bananas, coconuts, sugar, tobacco.
Negotiating the steep, narrow mountain passes, the tropical rainstorms, and the disease-ridden swamps along the sweltering coast would be difficult and dangerous. Still I would encounter very few people en route, mostly indios with donkeys and an occasional string of pack mules transporting plantation produce up the mountains and trade goods, such as clothes, utensils, and pulque, back down.
Recalling my previous trip down the coast, I came across the ancient indio ruins of Tajín. I remembered the name from the many boring hours I’d spent listening to Raquel as she lectured me on the glories of the indio civilizations that existed before Cortés landed. The city was now overgrown, but I could make out stone structures. Raquel said that the ancient indios had played a dangerous game in courts like this, a sport played with a hard rubber ball in which the losing team was often sacrificed to the gods.
And I remembered something else about the Tajín area: Along the coast, I had encountered a military post with only about a dozen men, but the crown was bent on fortifying the coast. Other posts may well be deployed with few travelers besides myself to pique their curiosity.
The coast was no good for me. I had no good options. But the thought occurred to me that the least likely place they would look for me was in plain sight, along the crowded roads that led to the capital and Veracruz.
I devised a plan that would have evoked the admiration and envy of Napoleon himself. Disguising myself as a lowly tradesman, I would vanish into the ranks of itinerant tradesmen traversing the roads: indios weighted down with burden baskets, their backs bent, tumplines taut against their foreheads; mestizos hazing donkeys or mules, their backs likewise piled high; and criollo merchants on blooded horses or in sturdy carriages. Mule trains carrying silver or maize often had a thousand or more pack animals. They banned together for protection, and I could easily “lose myself” among them.
But I couldn’t hide Tempest. The constables would be looking for me mounted on a fine bluish-black stallion. As Marina pointed out, I hadn’t fooled her when I rode into Dolores on the great stallion. To escape detection, I would have to wear the clothes of peons and ride a donkey or mule, the mounts most suited to that class.
Clothing was no problem. Under my monk’s robe I wore clothes Marina gave me that had belonged to her deceased husband. I could change my appearance by merely casting the monk’s robe off. I rubbed my face. I would be glad to get rid of my beard.
But Tempest was not just my horse; he was the winged Pegasus that carried me away from danger. More than that, he symbolized the life I’d lost but swore I would retrieve. I breathed only because of Tempest’s speed and courage.
After I had put two days between myself and the Dolores hacienda, sticking mostly to wilderness, I knew I couldn’t keep riding the stallion. I lassoed a mule in a pen on a rancho that raised the animals for work at the mines. I also bought a suitable saddle for a mule from another rancher along the way. After I had the mule saddled and determined that he was not going to be ornery and refuse to let me ride him, I took Tempest aside.
“I’m sorry,” I told him sadly. “You have been my amigo and savior, but now we must part. Someday we will be partners again.” I turned him loose into a pasture with other mares and left.
Astride a mule and dressed as a peon, I was no longer Juan de Zavala, caballero.
The next day, I bought a load of clothing—mostly serapes that were little more than pieces of cheap blankets—from a mestizo, taking his already packed mule in exchange for mine and the price of the merchandize. It meant I had to walk, but almost all peon merchants except muleteers of long trains walked in order to use every animal they had to carry merchandise.
The one thing I refused to give up were my caballero boots. They were a gift from my beloved Isabella, and I would have sliced off pieces of my flesh before I would part with them. In my heart, I knew that someday I would return, with a fortune and perhaps even that coveted noble title Isabella so fancied. And the first thing I would do is show her that I still wore the boots she had given me. I made one concession however and did not clean them, hiding their quality under layers of dirt.
With my mule, merchandise, and humble attitude, I headed south, toward a place Raquel had described to me. Not that she an
d her scholarly friends knew much about it. No one did. A place of the dead, where ghosts, gods, and ancient mysteries resided.
THIRTY-FOUR
Teotihuacán
FROM MOUNTAINOUS TRAILS that few people traveled and across wild terrain where I saw no other humans traversing, I finally came to the Valley of Méjico and one of the strangest cities on Earth. The city of the gods.
Teotihuacán (an indio word pronounced tay-oh-tee-wah-KAHN) both fascinated and frightened the Aztecs.
I confess, not much scares me. I have ridden alone on hunting trips into the mountains and forests of our great plateau, down to the jungles on the east side of the mountains, and even beyond Zacatecas, north to the dangerous arid regions that are infested with savage indios. With bow and arrow, I’ve hunted jaguars, creatures so fast they can deflect arrows with their paws in midflight, so lethal they eviscerate with a single blow. I have fought and killed bad men. While I have met braver hombres, I have faced more dangers than most men my age, and no man has ever accused me of cowardice. But I don’t pretend to be brave when it comes to ghosts.
I had arrived at Teotihuacán after coming out of the mountains and descending to the tablelands. Located in a valley that also bears its name, Teotihuacán is part of the larger Valley of Méjico. It’s about a dozen leagues from the capital. The Spanish name for the place is San Juan de Teotihuacán, but its spirit is in no way saintly.
Walking down the Avenue of the Dead—the broad, empty street that was the central artery of this ghost-city—I sensed the spirits of the longdead. And shivered despite the warm sunlight.
I leaned against an ancient avenue wall and smoked a cigarro while I watched a crafty lépero eyeing a group of Spanish scholars who had come to study the city of gods and ghosts. Léperos commonly possessed a certain sly and innate cunning when it came to getting money for pulque.
This particular lépero had ingratiated himself with one of the scholars, a pale, sensitive-looking young Spaniard I’d heard other members of the expedition call Carlos Galí. This Carlos the Scholar appeared to be but a few years older than me.
Observing and listening to conversations, I learned that some of the expedition scholars were priest-scholars, others were secular professors at a university in Barcelona. They were in the colony to examine sites of the ancient indio civilizations that flourished before the Conquest.
The name Barcelona had a magic ring in my ear. One of the great cities of Spain, this remarkable city on the Mediterranean in Catalonia was situated not far from the French border. A prized city even in Roman times, it was briefly occupied by the Moors before it became a bastion of Christian power on the peninsula during the centuries-long struggle to drive the infidels back to North Africa. I heard many stories about its greatness from Bruto as I grew up. It was the city of my birth. Or so I was told until a dying madman slandered my origins.
I even spoke a bit of Catalán, a language similar to but distinct from Spanish. Like Spanish, its roots were Latin. I had picked up enough of the language during my childhood to hold a conversation, because Bruto and Zavala family members who visited spoke Catalán around the dinner table.
The expedition employed porters who handled the baggage of individual scholars and the food and supplies of the group as a whole. It had used peons from Veracruz on the trek up the mountains to Jalapa. At Jalapa the Veracruz peons returned home, and new porters took their place. Now the Jalapa porters were being replaced by men who would accompany the expedition on the next leg, south to Cuicuilco, a town just beyond the capital.
If I could join the group as a porter, I would disappear into thin air, at least for the constables looking for me. From sizing up the members, the young scholar whom the lépero finessed seemed the most promising to me. Naïve, he had no idea how the lépero would react to his touching simplicity. He was, in truth, wet-nursing a rattlesnake.
I had noticed the lépero earlier with two other vermin, drinking and laughing, leering at the young scholar with their shifty eyes. I didn’t need a cartographer to chart their course for me. They would rob him, and if given the chance, cut his throat for the boots on his feet, even for just his socks.
Looking at the dedicated, sincere youth, I felt I was honor bound to save him from this pack of murderous thieves. But I had to tread carefully. The constable from a nearby village had come to meet with the head of the expedition. From the conversations I eavesdropped on, the constable—a fat fool who probably could not read his own name—was describing to the expedition members how the site had once been a great Aztec city. I knew that to be false.
Eh, you wonder how Juan de Zavala, a man who had “read” more horse hooves, and brothel putas than books, would know about an ancient city of indios? Was I not once betrothed to a woman who suckled me at the teat of knowledge? Had I not suffered through Raquel’s interminable harangues about the grandeur of indio culture and the destruction visited on it by Cortés’s conquest?
Now I was fortunate that she had lectured me on this city of ghosts and on Tenochtitlán, the Aztec capital now occupied by Méjico City.
I approached the young scholar who had moved away from the group, which still listened to the constable explicate the markings the ancient race of indios put on walls. I considered speaking to him in Catalán and telling him I was born in Barcelona and had fallen upon hard times, but I was still pretending to be a peon selling clothes. Anything I told him was likely to be repeated to the others and reach the ear of the constable.
I strode up beside him, removed my hat and addressed him respectfully, putting a guttural edge on my Spanish.
“Señor, I must say something to you but, por favor, keep it in confidence or I will get into trouble. I do not believe the constable is giving your compañeros the correct information about the history of this ancient city.”
The young scholar smiled at me. “And what do you know about the history?”
“I know that it was never an Aztec city. For certain, the Aztec emperors visited here each year to pay homage to their pagan gods, but the city was built many centuries before the Aztecs came to the Valley of Méjico. And a long time before the Aztecs rose to power, the city was abandoned. It was that way even when the Aztecs were a mighty empire. They visited the city to worship, but they did not live here because they were fearful of it.”
He looked me over. “How did you gain your knowledge of the city?”
“I worked in the home of a scholar in Guadalajara, señor. He had no fame,” I said, to ensure he shouldn’t expect to know of him, “but he was a learned man. He spoke to me sometimes of what he read.”
“Is your master here?”
“No, senór, he died a few months ago. His passing left me homeless and without a master. I have heard you are hiring porters for the trip south. I am a good worker and obey without too many beatings. I would serve you well if you would so permit.”
“I’m sorry, but I’ve already hired a bearer, Pepe, a local man who not only knows the territory but has many children to feed.”
“Perhaps I can serve you in other ways, señor. While I have been nothing more than a lowly household servant, my master did teach me to shoot and to use a blade. There are many bandidos on the road . . .”
He shook his head. “We have men from the army protecting us.”
He pointed to where six soldiers were standing around talking, smoking, and drinking wine. If it were not for their dirty, sloppy uniforms, I would have taken the group to be compañeros of the léperos drinking pulque across the way. They would not be mistaken for bandidos only because they were too fat and lazy.
“Are you traveling far beyond Cuicuilco?” I asked.
“We are going all the way to the land of the Mayas.”
“That far? To the southern jungles? I am told there are many hazards en route, that the south is even more dangerous than the north, the indios are wild and bloodthirsty.”
“The porter I’m hiring,” he nodded in the direction of Pepe the lép
ero, “assures me he knows of safe routes through the jungles.”
“Well, señor, as one familiar with the colony, I can say with assurance that you will arrive safely in Cuicuilco.”
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Juan Madero,” I said.
“Come along with me if you want a day’s work. You can assist me by clearing some of the brush from ruins that I want to examine. I’m interested in what other things your former employer told you about the city.”
“He told me this main boulevard is called the Avenue of the Dead because many kings and notables—dead since before the time of our Savior Jesus Christ—are said to be buried in the tombs that line it.”
“I’ve heard that story, too, but some question whether those buildings are tombs or temples and palaces. Regardless, it is a ghost city for sure.”
“Dead, but not quiet, eh?” I said. “What you couldn’t hear with your ears, you feel with your skin as you walk down the roadway between the two great pyramids. You sense them, too, señor?”
He laughed. “If you fear the spirits of the city, you are in good company. Perhaps it runs in your indio blood. As you said, the Aztecs also feared the city. In their pagan tongue, the name Teotihuacán meant something like ‘city of the gods.’ They believed that it was the dwelling place of powerfully dangerous deities. That’s why they pilgrimaged here each year, to pay homage to the gods.”
“Señor, why would the Aztecs—who I have been told were bad hombres, who warred and killed at every opportunity—fear a deserted city?”
“They feared what they could see as well as what they didn’t see. Look at the incredible ruins. Giant pyramids and brilliantly carved stone temples and palaces. Can you imagine what the city must have looked like in ancient times, when its buildings were brightly painted? I have never heard of a place on earth—except the monuments of the mighty pharaohs in Egypt, and the wall that runs forever through the land of the chinos—that compares to the accomplishments of the ancient race that built this magnificent city.
Aztec Rage Page 17
