"How could anyone else possibly know?" I asked.
"Recently, in Cuba, an apparently white man and wife bore a—what we call a turna atrás—an unmistakably black baby. The woman of course pled innocence and immaculate Castilian lineage and unblemished wifely fidelity. And later the local gossips said that if records had been properly kept since the first Spaniards settled in Cuba, the white husband could very well have proved to be the guilty possessor of the black blood. But the Church had, of course, by that time sent the woman and her child to the burning stake. Hence our now-punctilious attention to records. Because the merest trace of non-white blood, evident or not, taints the bearer of it as inferior."
"Inferior," I said. "Yes, of course."
"We Spaniards even observe some distinctions among ourselves. The indisputably white Spanish children you see in your Colegio classrooms we call criollos, meaning that they were born on this side of the Ocean Sea. The older children and their parents, who, like myself, were born in Mother Spain are called gachupines—which is to say, the 'spur-wearers'—the most Spanish Spanish of all. In time, I daresay, the gachupines will look down on the criollos, as if being born under different skies made some difference in their social status. All it means to me is that I am bidden to list them that way in my census and cadastral records."
I nodded, to show that I was following him, though I had no least idea what words like "spur" and "census" meant.
"However," he continued, "of the others, the mongrels, I have mentioned only a very few of the fractional classifications. If, for instance, a cuarterón mates with a white, their child is an octavo. The divisions of classification extend to decimosexto, which would be a child probably indistinguishable from white, though New Spain is too young a colony yet to have spawned any. And there are other names for those of every possible combination of white, indio and Moro blood. Coyotes, barcinos, bajunos, the unfortunate mottled-skin pintojos, and many more. Keeping records of those can be vexatiously complicated, but maintain the records we must, and we do, to distinguish every person of every quality, from noblest to basest."
"Of course," I said again.
It would eventually be evident on any city street, and not at all ambiguously, that many of my own people came to accept, even to agree with, that Spanish-imposed notion of their being less-than-human beings. Their acceptance of that evaluation, that they were inherently inferior, they expressed with—of all things—hair.
The Spaniards have long known that the majority of our peoples of The One World are markedly less hairy than they. We "indios" have abundant hair on our heads, but except for the people of one or two anomalous tribes, we have no more than a trace of hair on our faces or bodies. Our male children, from their birth throughout their infancy, have their faces repeatedly bathed by their mothers with scalding lime water. So, at adolescence, they do not sprout even a fuzz of beard. Female children, of course, do not have to endure that preventative treatment. But, male or female, we grow no hair on the chest or in armpits, and only a few of us have even the merest wisp of ymáxtli in the genital region.
Very well. White Spaniards are hairy, and white Spaniards, by their own definition, are immeasurably superior to indios. And I gather that the blood of a white forebear, however much diluted down the generations, confers on every descendant a tendency to hairiness. So, in time, our men ceased to be proud of having a smooth and clean visage. Mothers no longer scalded the faces of their male infants. Those adolescent boys who found the least tufts of down on their cheeks let it grow and did whatever they could to encourage it to full beardedness. Any who sprouted hair on their chests or under their arms refrained from plucking or shaving it.
Worse yet, young women—even women who were otherwise comely—if they found themselves growing hair on their legs or under their arms, they were not ashamed of it. Indeed, they began to wear their skirts short, to display those hairy legs, and they cut the sleeves from their blouses, to show the little bushes in their armpits.
To this day, any of our men and women who grow hirsute of face or body—whether just a few sparse hairs or near to furriness—he or she flaunts that. Of course, it marks them as having the taint of bastardy somewhere in their lineage, but they do not mind that, because it proclaims to the rest of us:
"You smooth-skinned persons may be of the same complexion as myself, but you and I are no longer of the same lowly and despised race. I have an excess of hair, meaning that I have Spanish blood in me. You can tell just by looking at me that I am superior to you."
But I am getting ahead of my chronicle. At the time I settled in the City of Mexíco, there were not so many mestizos and mulatos and other mongrels to be seen. I had passed my nineteenth birthday some while back—though exactly when, by the Christian calendar, I could not say, since I was not then very familiar with that calendar. Anyway, the white and black conquerors had not yet been among us for long enough to have produced more than those very young offspring, such as I saw in my Colegio classes.
What I did see on the streets, though, from my first arrival and ever afterward, was a much greater number of drunken people than I had ever seen even at the most licentious religious festivals in Aztlan. Many men, and more than a few women, could be seen at all hours, day or night, staggering about or even collapsed unconscious where sober passersby had to step over them. Our people, even our priests, had never been totally abstemious, but neither had they often overindulged—except at festivals—in the intoxicating beverages like Aztlan's fermented coconut milk or the tesgúino that the Rarámuri make from maize or the chápari that the Purémpecha make from bees' honey or the everywhere-common octli, which the Spaniards call pulque, made from the metl plant, which the Spaniards call maguey.
I could only suppose that the Mexíca citizens had taken to drinking to excess in order to forget for a while their utter defeat and despair, but Cuatl Alonso disagreed with that notion.
"It has been amply evidenced," he said, "that the entire race of indio peoples is susceptible to the gross effects of drink, and fond of those effects, and desirous of attaining those effects at every least opportunity."
I said, "I cannot speak for the inhabitants of this city, but I have never known the indios elsewhere to be so."
"Well, we Spaniards have subdued many other peoples," he said. "Berbers, Mohammedans, Jews, Turks, Frenchmen. Not even the Frenchmen took to mass drunkenness as a result of their defeat. No, Juan Británico, from our years-ago landing in Cuba to the farthest extent that we have secured this New Spain, we have found the natives to be natural-born sots. De León reported the same of the red men in Florida. It appears to be an inherent physical failing in your people, much the same as their so easily dying from such trivial diseases as measles and the small pocks."
"I cannot deny that they sicken and die," I said.
"The authorities, especially Mother Church," he said, "have compassionately tried to lessen the temptation that drink holds for the weakling indios. We have tried to convert them to Spanish brandies and wines, in the hope that those more highly intoxicating beverages would lead people to drink less of them. But of course only the rich nobles could afford them. So the gobernador set up a brewery in San Antonio de Padua—what used to be Texcóco—hoping to wean the indios onto the cheaper and weaker intoxicant called beer, but to no avail. Pulque remains the easiest available liquor, almost dirt-cheap, since anyone can make it even at home, hence it remains the most-favored way for an indio to get drunk. The authorities' only recourse has been to make a law against any natives drinking to excess, and jailing those that do. But even the law is impracticable. We should have to lock up almost the entire indio population."
Or kill them, I thought. I had recently watched as a middle-aged and very drunk woman, reeling and shouting incoherently, was seized by three soldiers of the force that regularly patrolled the city. They had not bothered to jail the woman. They had set upon her with the stocks of their thunder-stick weapons, and with seeming glee, until she
was beaten unconscious. Then they used their swords, not to stab and kill but only to slash her repeatedly, crisscross-wise, all over her body, so that when the woman awoke from the beating—if she ever did—she would be conscious just long enough to realize that she was irremediably bleeding to death.
"Speaking of pulque," I said, to change the subject, "it is made from the metl, or maguey. And while we have been translating this newest text, Cuatl Alonso, I heard you speak of the maguey as a cacto. It is not. The maguey has spines, yes, but every cactus also has an internal woody skeleton, and the maguey does not. It is a planta, the same as any bush or grass."
"Thank you, Cuatl Juan. I am making a note. So—let us get on with our work, then."
I continued to sleep every night and to take my morning and evening meals at the Mesón de San José, while I passed my free Sundays in the several city markets, asking stallkeepers and passersby if they knew any persons named Netzlin and Citláli, formerly of the town of Tépiz. For a long while, my search was unsuccessful. But I was not wasting what time I spent, either at that endeavor or at the mesón.
Mingling with the city folk in the markets helped me refine my old-fashioned way of speaking Náhuatl and acquire the more modern vocabulary of the Mexíca. Also I associated as much as possible with those prosperous, far-traveled pochtéca who had brought goods from the south to sell in the city—and with the burly tamémime who had actually carried those goods—and thereby learned a useful number of words and phrases of the southern tongues: the Mixtéca language of the people who call themselves Men of the Earth, and the Tzapotéca of those who call themselves the Cloud People, even many words of the tongues spoken in the Chiapa and Quautemálan lands.
At the mesón, every night I was in the company of foreigners from the north, as I have said. Of those, as I have also said, the Chichiméca lodgers spoke a Náhuatl about as archaic as my own, but understandable. So I consorted mainly with foreigners of the Otomí and Purémpecha and the so-called Runner People, thereby learning useful fragments of the Otomíte and Poré and Rarámuri languages. I had never before had any occasion, back home in my own land, to discover my considerable facility for learning other tongues, but now it was evident to me. And I supposed that I must have inherited the ability from my late father, because he must have acquired it during his extensive travels throughout The One World. I will say this, however: the languages of our peoples, though they might be very different from Náhuatl, and sometimes difficult for me to enunciate, none was so very different and difficult as the Spanish, or took me as long to gain fluency in.
At the mesón, also, on any night I could engage in conversation that long-time city dweller, the former jewelsmith Pochotl, who obviously had determined to spend the rest of his life battening on the hospitality of the San José friars. Some of our talks consisted of my merely listening, and trying not to yawn, as he recited his innumerable grudges and grievances against the Spanish, against the tonáli that from his birth had predestined his present misery, and against the gods who had laid that tonáli on him. But more often I listened more attentively, for he had really informative things to tell. For example, Pochotl provided my first knowledge of the orders and ranks and authorities by which New Spain was ruled and governed.
"The very topmost personage," he said, "is a certain man named Carlos, who resides back in what the Spaniards call the Old World. He is sometimes referred to as 'king,' sometimes as 'emperor,' sometimes as 'the crown' or 'the court.' But clearly he is the equivalent of a Revered Speaker, such as we Mexíca once had. A good many years ago, that king sent ships full of warriors to conquer and colonize a place called Cuba, which is a very large island in the Eastern Sea, somewhere beyond the horizon."
"I have heard of it," I said. "It is now populated by varicolored mongrel bastards."
He blinked and said, "What?"
"No matter. Go on, please, Cuatl Pochotl."
"From that Cuba, about twelve or thirteen years ago, came hither that Carlos's captain-general Hernán Cortés, to lead the conquest of our One World. Cortés naturally expected that the king would make him lord and master of all he conquered. However, it is now common knowledge that there were many dignitaries in Spain, and many of his own officers, who were jealous of Cortés's presumption. They persuaded the king to clamp a firm restraining hand on him. So now Cortés holds only the grand but empty title of Marqués del Valle—of this Valley of Mexíco—and the real rulers are the members of what they call the Audiencia, or what in the old days would have been a Revered Speaker's Speaking Council. Cortés has retired in disgust to his estate south of here, in Quaunáhuac—"
I interrupted. "I understand that place is no longer called Quaunáhuac."
"Well, yes and no. Our name for it, Surrounded by Forest, is pronounced by the Spaniards Cuernavaca, which is ridiculous. It means 'Cow's Horn' in their tongue. Anyway, Cortés now sits sulking on his fine estate there. I do not know why he should sulk. His herds of sheep and his plantations of the sugar-yielding cane and the tribute he still receives from numerous tribes and nations—all of that has made him the wealthiest man in New Spain. Perhaps in all the dominions of Spain."
"I am not much interested," I said, "in the intrigues and exploitations that the white men concoct and inflict among themselves. Nor in the riches they have laid up for themselves. Tell me the details of the hold they have on us."
"There are many who do not find that grip too onerous," said Pochotl. "I mean those who have always been the lower classes. Peasants and laborers and such. They so seldom raise their eyes from their toil that they may not yet have noticed that their masters have changed color."
He went on to elaborate. New Spain was governed by the councilmen of the Audiencia, but, every so often, their King Carlos would send across the sea a royal inspector called a visitador, to make sure the Audiencia was properly attending to its business. The visitadores reported back to a council in Old Spain, the Consejo de los Indios. That council was purportedly responsible for protecting the rights of all in New Spain, natives and Spaniards alike, so it could change or amend or overrule any laws made by the Audiencia.
"I personally believe, though," said Pochotl, "that the Consejo exists mainly to make sure that the quinto gets paid."
"The quinto?"
"The King's Fifth. Every time a quill measure of gold dust or a handful of sugar is extracted from our land—or cacao beans or cotton or anything else—one fifth of it is set aside for the king, before any others get their share of it."
The Audiencia's laws and regulations made in the City of Mexíco, Pochotl continued to explain, were passed along for enforcement by Spanish officials called corregidores, posted in the major communities throughout New Spain. And those officials, in turn, enjoined the encomenderos residing in their districts to abide by those laws and see that they were obeyed by the native population.
"The encomenderos, of course, are usually Spanish," he said, "but not all of them. Some are the survivors or descendants of our own onetime overlords. The son and two daughters of Motecuzóma, for instance, as soon as they converted to Christianity and took Spanish names—Pedro, Isabel and Leónor—they were given encomiendas. So was Prince Black Flower, the son of Nezahualpíli, the late, great and sincerely lamented Revered Speaker of Texcóco. That son fought on the side of the white men during their conquest, so he is now Hernando Black Flower, and a wealthy encomendero."
I said, "Encomendero. Encomienda. What are those?"
"An encomendero is one who has been granted an encomienda. And that is a territory of varying size, within which the encomendero is master. The cities or towns or villages within that area pay him tribute in money or goods, all who grow or produce anything give him a share of it, all are subject to his command, whether to build him a mansion, to till his fields for him, to tend his livestock, to hunt or fish for him, even to lend him their wives or daughters, if he demands. Or their sons, I suppose, if it is a female encomendera of lascivious tastes. An encomienda
does not include the land, only everything and everybody on it."
"Of course," I said. "How could anyone own land? Own a piece of the world? The notion is beyond belief."
"Not to the Spaniards," said Pochotl, raising a cautionary hand. "Some of them were granted what is called an estancia, and that does include the land. It can even be bequeathed from one generation to the next. The Marqués Cortés, for example, owns not just the people and produce of Quaunáhuac, but also the very ground under the whole of it. And his former concubine Malinche, that traitress to her own people, is now respectfully entitled the Widow Jaramillo and owns an entire, immense river island as her estancia."
"It is against all reason," I growled. "Against all nature. No person can claim to possess the smallest fragment of the world. It was put here by the gods, it is managed by the gods. In times past, it has been purged of people by the gods. It belongs only to the gods."
"Would that the gods would purge it again, then," said Pochotl with a sigh. "Of white people, I mean."
"Now, the encomienda I can understand," I went on. "It is no more than our own rulers did. Collect tribute, conscript workers. I do not know of any who demanded partners for their beds, but I suppose they could have done, if they had wanted to. And I can understand why you say that many persons nowadays do not perceive any difference in the change of masters from—"
"I said the lower classes," Pochotl reminded me. "What the Spaniards call indios rústicos—clods, bumpkins, priests of our old religion, other persons easily dispensable. But I am of the class called indios pallos—persons of quality. And, by Huitztli, I perceive the difference. So does every other artist and artisan and scribe and—"
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