“He’s in league with the devil,” I told Ramírez. “Either that or he has the lives of a cat.”
Baltar howled that I should be taken immediately to the hangman, that he would arrange for my summary execution.
“I will deal with him like the knave he is,” the colonel assured the priest. As soon as I was in a coach alone with Ramírez, he grinned at me. “Your services to Spain are the toast of Cádiz.” The colonel waved his hand. “Don’t be concerned about that idiot priest. I had to pretend to arrest you or he would have denounced me to the cardinal. However, the fact that you have tried to kill a son of the church—and more particularly, a son of the Inquisition—does make things difficult for you here in Cádiz. I fear I must ship you back to New Spain. A proclamation decreeing you a hero of the War of Independence and a full pardon for your lifetime of crimes is already on its way to the colony. No doubt, you will find a hero’s welcome when you step on the dock at Veracruz.” The colonel eyed me narrowly. “Of course, I understand that your own preference would be to stay here and continue your fight against the invaders.”
I put my hand over my heart. “But of course.”
SEVENTY
Veracruz
IN A SMALL, fast packet, we raced across the great sea in less than a month. On the voyage, I enjoyed the company of a woman who was on her way to join her husband, a grain merchant in Puebla. I was sure a month in my bed had ruined her for all other men.
When the ship from Cádiz dropped anchor in Veracruz, for once I knew I could disembark at a port without fear of arrest and execution. Life was good. I was happy, rich, and a hero. The colonel had sent a copy of my pardon ahead on a dispatch boat to the viceroy in Méjico City. He included with the pardon an official proclamation enumerating my death-defying deeds in the war against Napoleon
We dropped anchor in the bay, within sight of the massive fort that had protected the city for three centuries, el Castillo de San Juan de Ulúa. Before we were allowed to leave the ship, a familiar from the Holy Office of the Inquisition and a customs official were rowed out on a ship’s tender. As soon as they finished going through the passenger list, luggage, and goods, they asked to speak to me.
“Juan Zavala, you are to report immediately to the governor,” the customs official said.
I climbed down the rope ladder to the ship’s tender, whose crew was instructed by the customs official to take me to the dock. I grinned like a monkey as we headed toward land, where I saw a reception committee gathering on the dock for me. What did the governor have in mind for me? A parade through the streets for the hero of the Spanish War of Independence? Perhaps he would fête me at a grand ball, where caballeros would envy my courage and women my garrancha. Or would the viceroy himself be here to honor me for my services to the crown? Would Isabella be at the dock to hurl herself into my arms?
As soon as I climbed up the ladder and onto the dock, an official stepped forward.
“Juan Zavala, you are under arrest!”
I spent the night in the governor’s jail, a stinking cell that made the Guanajuato confines palatial by comparison. I was taken before his excellency the governor the next morning.
My warders had confiscated my fine sword and dagger. I had slept in silk clothes fit for a prince, and now they were smelly, foul, and soiled. Much of my wealth had been converted into a letter of credit for a Méjico City bank, and luckily I had sneaked the paper somewhere they would never search.
“Is this the way a hero of Spain is treated?” I demanded of the governor the moment I was led into his office, having decided to go on the offensive immediately. “Did you not receive word of my feats and pardon from Cádiz?”
The governor scowled at me and pushed aside what I recognized as my pardon certificate on his desk as if it were a horse apple.
“You may have fooled the authorities in Cádiz, but in the colony we know you as a brutal bandido and cold-blooded killer.”
“I have a pardon for crimes, even the false ones that you just mentioned.”
“Don’t use that tone of voice with me,” he said, “I’m in charge here in Veracruz, and only the viceroy has greater authority than me. You would have been better off staying in Spain, where your crimes weren’t known. Now that you’ve returned in silk to a place where you’re not wanted, you’ll find that you aren’t any more welcome than when Bruto de Zavala exposed you for the lépero scum you are. Take this as a warning: we’re going to be watching you, as will the archbishop. The church knows of your heresies. Revert to your old ways, and our constables will convey you to the gallows or our Inquisitors to the stake.”
I was seething. “My possessions—”
“Return his possessions and escort him out of my compound,” he told the sergeant who had brought me in. “And send in a servant to air out this room.”
My luggage from the ship was in the jail entry area. I refused to take possession of the bags until I checked and made sure everything was there. The only items missing were the fine sword and dagger I was wearing when I came ashore. I asked the sergeant for them.
“You are not permitted by law to carry weapons,” he said.
As he escorted me to the gate to the compound, I glanced over at him. He was a mestizo.
“They’re doing this, because they believe I’m a peon?”
He looked at me out of the corner of his eye but said nothing. I knew that I had hit upon the truth. Had I been a pure-blood Spaniard, I would have received the grand reception I had expected. But I was back now in a world where Spanish blood counted for more than purity of soul . . . or anything else. The entire political and economic system was based upon the myth of bloodlines.
A peon who had been accepted as a gachupine caballero had offended and frightened the landed gentry of the colony. Now I had returned showered with honors from the mother country herself. I laughed aloud as I stepped out the gate.
“When the viceroy and the governor found out the colony’s biggest hero was a peon,” I said to the sergeant, “they must have shit giant green avocados.”
He avoided my eye, but I could see he had to struggle to keep his features rigid.
“Listen, amigo,” I said. “I want my sword and dagger back. They’re wetted with French blood in the war I fought to keep the gachupines in power. How do I get them?”
“If I can locate them, it will cost you a hundred reales for their return.”
“Bring them to the best inn in town tonight, the one with the loveliest señoritas.”
There’s no justice, eh? The people who dispense it profit from their abuses by keeping the poor down and themselves up. Had the governor and notables of Veracruz been mestizos or Aztecs, they would have paraded me through the city, amid glittering showers of flowers and gold. Instead, they treated me like a leper, except they don’t salivate to hang lepers.
I went to the inn, drank too much, took two putas to my room, and made love till they were panting with exhaustion.
When the passive-faced sergeant knocked on my door after midnight, I was still awake, lying on my bed smoking a cigar and drinking brandy from the neck of the bottle.
“Your sword and dagger, señor.”
He laid them at the foot of the bed. I threw him a pouch containing a hundred reales. He carefully counted the money, then dropped ten reales on the bed.
“What’s that for?” I asked.
“My commission from the officer who took your weapons. He said I could keep one part in ten for my services.”
“You earned it.”
“No, señor, you earned it. I couldn’t show my pride in your actions when we were at the governor’s. Rest assured, however, while the gachupines may fear you for your accomplishments, to people of your own kind, you are a hero.”
“Wonderful. I am a hero to peons. Do you know what that does for me?”
“I am a mejicano, like you, not a peon. You are a hero to mejicanos,” he said. “And you should be proud of that.”
He left me
puzzling over his remark.
Mejicano? What was that? I’d heard the word used before but never by someone with such pride. Most often it was used in the colony to describe people living in the capital itself and the surrounding Valley of Méjico.
I had heard people, including Father Hidalgo, a criollo, and Marina, an india, call themselves americanos because they were born on the American continent and didn’t like the official designations of race. The word americano in fact was very popular among educated people. But it was geographically ambiguous; a person in the United States, in Spanish possessions in the Caribbean, Peru, Argentina, and the rest of the Río de la Plata region and in Portuguese Brazil were also americanos.
The word Méjica had been used by the Aztecs to describe themselves. That was why the capital was called Méjico City after the Conquest, because it had been a city of “Méjicans.” The sergeant, however, had not used the word to indicate he had Aztec ancestry but to express his pride that, regardless of his bloodline, he was proud of his colonial birth. No doubt, if I spoke to Marina or Father Hidalgo, they would understand immediately that the sergeant used the word mejicano to convey equality: Mejicanos were all equal and inferior to no one.
Glossing the sergeant’s statement was probably the most complex sociopolitical exercise I had ever managed. It gave me a headache. Hands trembling, I once more upended the brandy bottle. Fortified by the return of my weapons and the fresh infusion of spirits, I opened my door and shouted down the stairs for more whores.
SEVENTY-ONE
I BOUGHT THE best horse in Veracruz. He was not of Tempest’s quality, but I was not going to ride into the capital as a peon. I knew I’d be watched. I had already learned from the innkeeper, who appeared to know all the business of everyone in the colony, that Isabella had married a margués and now lived in Méjico City. My heart bled at the news, and I was certain that she had only married—and not buried herself in a convent with a broken heart over me—because of some terrible need of money.
My anger rode with me as I left Veracruz. Bandidos sometimes assaulted travelers on the road, and since I journeyed alone, I rode with my pistols loaded and a sheathed sword lashed to my pommel. I hoped some fool would challenge me, but the only bandidos I saw were two crucified along the roadside as I neared Jalapa.
I was shocked by the brutality. I was told that the crucifixion was the work of a hermandad, a brotherhood of citizens who formed civilian posses with the unofficial approval of the authorities. These posses sometimes decapitated bandidos, nailing their heads to the tree nearest the crime scene. I saw nothing wrong with hanging brigands. I even understood savages ripping out a man’s heart and eating it. But to nail a criminal to a cross as our Lord and Savior had been crucified seemed almost to honor them.
I needed a shave, and in Jalapa I searched for a barbershop and its traditional storefront display: the burnished brass basin representing Mambrino’s helmet. Cervantes made famous this emblem of the barber’s profession. His knight-errant, Don Quijote, saw a man riding an ass and wearing what appeared to be the magical gold helmet of the Saracen king Mambrino. Naturally, the rider was no Saracen king. A simple barber, he sported not headgear but the brass pan he used for bloodletting.
As the barber shaved me, he talked about the highwaymen who’d been crucified. “The bandidos were heroes of the common people,” he said, “taking from the rich and giving to the poor.”
I had heard such tales of the charity of highwaymen many times before, and they always seemed to apply to dead bandidos rather than to the ones who were currently robbing and killing. I am sure the Bethlehemite monks that Lizardi and I found tied to trees with their throats cut didn’t think bandidos were heroes.
But I was still angry at the crucifixions I saw. They again exemplified the gachupines’ excessive and unnecessary cruelty against races they deemed inferior. The gachupines would have hanged murderers and rapists of Spanish blood, not nailed them on a tree to die. They saved such brutality for peons. It was as if they’d heard tales about the bandidos’ popularity among the people and crucified them as a brutal warning.
The talkative barber also told me a tale about the face of a man he had been shaving.
“You see how the soap stays wet on your face?” he asked. “When I put it on the man’s face last week, it dried quickly. I told him that he would be dead within two days. It happens every time I shave a man and the soap dries so quickly. They are soon dead from the black vomito. The man was dead the next day.”
If the barber thought he could prophesize death, I didn’t want to disabuse him. However, as one who has had considerable experience as a healer and physician, I knew the shaving soap dried quickly because the man was hot from fever.
To get to Jalapa, I had had to pass through the corridor of death: the sand and swamps of the coastal plains, the dreaded region where breathing miasma from the swamps infects one with the black vomit. Naturally, thoughts about my parents, whoever they were, collided with speculations on the life I might have led had the real Juan Zavala not perished from yellow fever.
It was true, I no longer considered myself a gachupine. But the purity or even the impurity of my blood no longer mattered to me. I was Juan de Zavala, and I would kill any man who sullied my honor.
Soon I was approaching the capital itself.
Méjico City was in the great Valley of Méjico, on the plateau region the Aztecs had called Anáhuac, a word I was told meant “Land by the Water” because it had five interlocking lakes. In the midst of that water had stood the Aztec capital Tenochtitlán, a large city served by three causeways. It was on the broken bones and ashes of Tenochtitlán that the conquistadors had built Méjico City.
The mining treasures of Guanajuato, the arid far reaches of New Méjico and Texas, the nearly uninhabited region of New California, the hot-wet jungle regions of the Mayan south—none of these were the prize of New Spain. Méjico City was not just the gem of the colony, not just the greatest city of the Americas, it rivaled the great cities of the world. One could damn the Spaniards for many things—and they committed wrongs in the colony in ways too numerous to enumerate—but they truly excelled at city building.
Raquel had called the capital a metropolis, a word that she said was from the Greeks and meant “mother city.” The word applied to Méjico City because while 150,000 souls lived inside its limits, ten times that many dwelt in the surrounding area, all of whom were dependent on it.
I stayed at a small inn an hour from the city because I didn’t want to arrive anonymously, like a thief in the night. I wanted to ride tall into the city, proud and defiant in case a reception committee pounced on me as the one in Veracruz had.
My return to the colony was to terminate in the capital. I had no desire to revisit the maddening memories of Guanajuato. Isabella was the object of all my desires, and now she lived in the capital. I intended to make my mark in the city before long and reclaim my woman.
I still wore the boots she had given me when I was a prisoner in Guanajuato. They had taken me through jails, jungles, deserts, and wars, and I’d had them repaired innumerable times. Even now, however, they were serviceable. When she saw them, she would know my love was true. Naturally from time to time in the presence of a pretty señorita the beast in my pants had soiled her sainted memory, but my love for her was pure.
In the early morning, the route to the city was already a fervent hive of frantic activity a league back from the causeway. The energy of the awakening city was like no other I had experienced. Long mule trains and armies of indio carriers transported food and supplies to the city’s merchants, who flung open their shop doors to hawk these myriad wares. The streets swarmed with beggars and merchants fighting for space on the sidewalks and streets. It was everything I remembered about the brief but memorable visits I had made to the city with Bruto many years before: noisy, smelly, violent, crazy, and chaotic but also vivid, thrilling, and alive.
A newspaper I picked up in Veracruz post
ed the population of the capital according to a census made five years earlier as 3,000 gachupines, 65,000 criollos, 33,000 indios, 27,000 mestizos, and about 10,000 africanos and mulattos, giving a total of 138,000 back then. The figures were not representative of all of New Spain, of course. Because it was the center of wealth and power, there was a higher concentration of Spanish in the city than in the colony as a whole. And a higher concentration of africanos used as servants by the wealthy.
As I approached the causeway, the landscape flattened and turned arid, despite the gloomy, melancholy marshlands where sparkling lakes had stood before the Conquest. Nearly three centuries of “civilization” had almost drained the lakes and filled in many of the lakebeds.
I entered the city with the incredible migration that crossed the calzadas each morning—indios piled high with goods like beasts of burden, two-wheeled carts and four-wheeled wagons, long trains of mules commanded by arrieros—all competing with droves of cattle, flocks of sheep, herds of pigs, and packs of dogs for shoulder room.
The congestion didn’t end once I was off the causeway and on city streets, even though the capital was well laid out with many straight streets running east-west and north-south. When the city was awake, the peddlers and porters began their day’s work. Peddlers walked down the streets loaded with merchandise that they hawked to people on the business and residential streets. Sellers of fruits—mangos, lemons, oranges, and pomegranates—cheese and hot pastry, salted beef and tortillas, rivaled the retailers of tubs of butter, cans of milk, and baskets of fish.
The streets were so hemmed in by peddlers and makeshift wooden stalls that porters were more adroit at carrying merchandise across and down streets than four-legged beasts of burden pulling carts. The porters carried mountainous stacks of goods in burden baskets strapped to their backs and held in place by tump lines stretched tight across their foreheads. Porters, acting as human aquadors, transported large clay jugs of water from the two great aqueducts connecting the city with the mountain springs to the west to dwellings that lacked access to the city’s public fountains.
Aztec Rage Page 35
