Aztec a-1

by Gary Jennings

  Would that I had disregarded them both, and done something! I think, from what came later, that the cruelty inflicted by our mother on that occasion, intended to discourage Tzitzi's awakening sexual urges, had exactly the contrary effect. I think, from that time on, my sister's tipíli parts burned like a chili-blistered throat, hot and thirsty, clamoring to be slaked. I think it would not have been many years before dear Tzitzitlini would have gone "astraddle the road," as we say of a depraved and promiscuous woman. That was the most sordid and squalid depth to which a decent Mexícatl maiden could sink—or so I thought, until I learned of the even worse fate that eventually did befall my sister.

  How she later behaved, what she became, and what she came to be called, I will tell in its place. But I want to say here only one thing. I want to say that to me she was and always will be Tzitzitlini: the sound of small bells ringing.

  I H S

  S.C.C.M.

  Sanctified, Caesarean, Catholic Majesty, the Emperor Don Carlos, Our Lord King:

  May the serene and beneficent light of Our Lord Jesus Christ shine everlastingly upon Your Majesty Don Carlos, divinely appointed Emperor, etc., etc.

  Most August Majesty: from this City of Mexíco, capital of New Spain, this eve of the Feast of St. Michael and All Angels, in the Year of Our Lord one thousand five hundred twenty and nine, greeting.

  Your Majesty commands that we continue to send additional portions of the so-called Aztec History "as quickly as the pages are compiled." This grievously astounds and offends your well-intentioned chaplain, Sire. We would not, for all the realms in Your Majesty's domain, dream of disputing our sovereign's desires and decisions. But we thought we had made plain in our earlier letter our objections to this chronicle—which grows daily more detestable—and we hoped that the recommendation of Your Majesty's own delegated Bishop would not be so casually disdained.

  We are cognizant of Your Gracious Majesty's concern for the most minute information regarding even the most remote of your subjects, that you may the more wisely and beneficently govern them. Indeed, we have respected that praiseworthy concern ever since the very first task to which Your Majesty personally set us: the extermination of the witches of Navarre. That once dissident province has been, since that sublime and prodigious purging by fire, among the most obedient and subservient of all under Your Majesty's sovereignty. Your humble servant intends equal assiduity in rooting out the age-old evils of these newer provinces—putting the curb rein to vice and the spurs to virtue—thus bringing them likewise to submission to Your Majesty and the Holy Cross.

  Surely nothing can be undertaken in Your Majesty's service which will not be blessed by God. And, of a certainty, Your Most Puissant Lordship should know of matters regarding this land, for it is so limitless and marvelous that Your Majesty may well call yourself Emperor of it with no less pride than you do of Germany, which by the grace of God is now also Your Majesty's possession.

  Nevertheless, in supervising the transcription of this history of what is now New Spain, only God knows how racked and outraged and nauseated we have been by the narrator's unquenchable effluxion. The Aztec is an Aeolus with an inexhaustible bag of winds. We could not complain of that if he confined himself to what we have asked: that is, an account in the manner of St. Gregory of Tours and other classical historians—names of distinguished personages, brief summaries of their careers, prominent dates, battles, etc.

  But this human cataract cannot be restrained from his divagations into the most sordid and repellent aspects of his people's history and his own. Granted, this Indian was a heathen until his baptism no more than a few years ago. The infernal atrocities he committed and witnessed in his earlier life we must charitably concede were done or condoned in ignorance of Christian morality. Still, he is now at least nominally a Christian. One would expect him, if he must dwell on the more bestial episodes of his life and times, to manifest a decent and humble contrition befitting the horrors he describes in such lascivious detail.

  He does not. He recognizes no horror in those enormities.

  He does not so much as blush at the many offenses to our Lord and to common decency which he is dinning into the ears of our reverend friar-scribes: idolatry, pretense of magic, superstitions, bloodthirst and bloodletting, obscene and unnatural acts, other sins so vile that we here forbear even to name them. Except for Your Majesty's command that all "be set forth in much detail," we would not allow our scribes to commit portions of the Aztec's narrative to the permanence of parchment.

  However, Your Majesty's servant has never yet disobeyed a royal order. We will try to regard the Indian's pernicious maunderings merely as evidence that during his lifetime the Adversary arranged many sorts of temptations and trials for him, God permitting it for the stoutening of the Aztec's soul. This, we remind ourself, is no small evidence of the greatness of God, for He chooses not the wise and strong but the simple-minded and weak to be equally instruments and beneficiaries of His mercy. The law of God, we remind ourself, obliges us to extend an extra meed of tolerance to those upon whose lips the milk of the Faith is not yet dry, rather than to those who have already absorbed it and are accustomed to it.

  So we will try to contain our disgust. We will keep the Indian with us and let him continue to spew his sewage, at least until we hear of Your Majesty's response to these further pages of his story. Fortunately, we have no other urgent need for his five attendants at this time. And the creature's only recompense is that we allow him a share of our simple fare, and a straw sleeping mat in an unused store closet off the cloister for his use on those nights when he does not take our table scraps to his apparently ailing wife, and spend the night ministering to her.

  But we are confident that we shall soon be rid of the Aztec and the foul miasma which we feel surrounding him. We know that when you read the following pages. Sire—indescribably more horripilating than the previous portion—you will share our revulsion and will cry, "No more of this filth!" much as David cried, "Publish it not, lest the unbelievers rejoice!" We will eagerly—nay, anxiously—await Your Esteemed Majesty's command, by the next courier ship, that all pages compiled in the meantime be destroyed and that we oust this reprehensible barbarian from our precincts.

  May God Our Lord watch over and preserve Your Most Excellent Majesty for many years in His holy service. Of Your S.C.C.M., the loyal and prayerful chaplain,

  (ecce signum) Zumárraga

  ALTER PARS

  His Excellency does not attend today, my lord scribes? Am I to continue, then? Ah, I see. He will read your pages of my words at his leisure.

  Very well. Then let me leave, for now, my overly personal chronicle of my family and myself. Lest you get the impression that I and the few other persons I have mentioned lived in some kind of isolation, apart from the rest of humanity, let me give you a broader view. In my mind, in my recollection, I shall step back and away, so to speak, that I may better make you see our relation to our world as a whole. The world we called Cem-Anáhuac, meaning The One World.

  Your explorers early discovered that it is situated between two boundless oceans east and west. The humid Hot Lands at the oceans' edges extend not far inland before they slant upward to become towering mountain ranges, and with a high plateau between those eastern and western ranges. This plateau is so near the sky that the air is thin and clean and sparkling clear. Our days here are almost always springtime mild, even during the midsummer rainy season—until the dry winter comes, when Tititl, god of the year's shortest days, chooses to make some of those days chilly or even achingly cold.

  The most populous part of all The One World is this great bowl or depression in the plateau, which you now call the Valley of Mexíco. Here are puddled the lakes that made this area so attractive to human habitation. In actuality, there is only one tremendous lake, pinched in two places by encroaching highlands, so that there are three large bodies of water connected by slightly narrower straits. The smallest and southernmost of these lakes is of fr
esh water, fed by clear streams melting from the snows of the mountains there. The northernmost lake, where I spent my earliest years, is of reddish and briny water, because it is surrounded by mineral lands which leach their salts into the water. The central lake, Texcóco, bigger than the other two together and composed of their mingled salty and fresh waters, is thus of a slightly brackish quality.

  Despite there being only one lake—or three, if you like—we have always divided them by five names. The dun-colored Lake Texcóco aione bears a single name. The southern and most crystalline lake is called Xochimilco in its upper part: The Flower Garden, because that neighborhood is the nursery of precious plants for all the lands about. In its lower part, the lake is called Chalco, after the Chalca nation which borders it. The northernmost lake, though also a single body of water, is likewise divided. The people who live on Tzumpanco, The Skull-Shaped Island, call its upper half Lake Tzumpanco. The people of my native Xaltócan, Island of Field Mice, call their portion Lake Xaltócan.

  In a sense, I might liken these lakes to our gods—our former gods. I have heard you Christians complain of our "multitudes" of gods and goddesses, who held dominion over every facet of nature and of human behavior. I have heard you complain that you never can sort out and understand the workings of our crowded pantheon. However, I have counted and compared. I do not believe that we relied on so many major and minor deities as you do—the Lord God, the Son Jesus, the Holy Ghost, the Virgin Mary—plus all those other Higher Beings you call Angels and Apostles and Saints, each of them the governing patron of some single facet of your world, your lives, your tonaltin, even every single day in the calendar. In truth, I believe we recognized fewer deities, but we charged each of ours with more diverse functions.

  To a geographer, there is but one lake here in the valley. To a boatman laboriously paddling his acáli, there are three broad bodies of water, interconnected. To the people who live on or around the lakes, there are five, distinguished by separate names. Just so, no one of our gods and goddesses had but one face, one responsibility, one name. Like our lake of three lakes, a single god might embody a trinity of aspects....

  That makes you scowl, reverend friars? Very well, a god might have two aspects, or five. Or twenty.

  Depending on the time of year: wet season or dry, long days or short, planting time or harvest time—and depending on circumstances: wartime or peacetime, feast or famine, kind rulers or cruel—a single god's duties would vary, and so would his attitude toward us, and so would our mode of worshiping or celebrating or placating him. To look at it another way, our lives and harvests and battle triumphs or failures might depend on the temperament and transient moods of the god. He could be, like the three lakes, bitter or sweet or blankly indifferent, as he chose.

  Meanwhile, both the god's prevailing mood and the current happenings in our world could be differently viewed by different followers of that god. A victory for one army is a defeat for another, is that not so? Thus the god or goddess might be simultaneously regarded as rewarding and punishing, demanding and giving, doing good and evil. If you grasp all the infinite possible combinations of circumstances, you should be able to comprehend the variety of attributes we saw in every god, the variety of aspects each assumed, and the even greater variety of names we gave each of them—worshipful, respectful, grateful, fearful.

  But I will not belabor this. Let me come back from the mystic to the physical. I will speak of things demonstrable to the five senses that even brute animals possess.

  The island of Xaltócan is really a gigantic, almost solid rock, set well out from the mainland in the salty red lake. If it were not for three natural springs of fresh water bubbling up from the rock, the island would never have been populated, but in my time it supported perhaps two thousand people distributed among twenty villages. And the rock was our support in more than one sense, for it was tenextetl limestone, a valuable commodity. In its natural state, this form of limestone is quite soft and easily quarried, even with our crude tools of wood, stone, blunt copper, and brittle obsidian, so inferior to yours of iron and steel. My father was a master quarrier, one of several who directed the less expert workers. I remember one of the occasions when he took me to his quarry for instruction in his trade.

  "You cannot see them," he told me, "but here—and here—run the natural fissures and striations of this particular stratum of the stone. Though they are invisible to the untrained eye, you will learn to divine them."

  I never would; but he never ceased hoping. I watched while he marked the face of the stone with dabs of black oxitl. Other workers came—they were pale with sweat-caked dust—to hammer wooden wedges into the minute cracks he had marked. Then they sloshed water over the wedges. We went home and some days passed, during which the workers kept those wedges well sodden, so they would swell and exert increasing pressure inside the stone. Then my father and I went again to the quarry. We stood on the brink of it and looked down. My father said, "Watch now."

  The stone might have been awaiting his presence and permission, for all of a sudden and all of its own accord, the quarry face gave a rending noise and split apart. Some of it came tumbling ponderously down in immense cubic chunks, other parts peeled off in flat square sheets, and they all fell intact into rope nets spread to receive them before they smashed on the quarry floor. We went down and my father inspected them with satisfaction.

  "Only a little dressing with adzes," he said, "a little polishing with a slurry of powdered obsidian and water, and these"—he pointed to the limestone cubes—"will be perfect building blocks, while these"—the sheets as big as our house floor and as thick as my arm—"will be panels of facing."

  I rubbed the surface of one of the blocks, waist high to myself. It felt both waxy and powdery.

  "Oh, they are too soft for any use when they first come loose from the mother stone," said my father. He ran his thumbnail across the block and it scored a deep scratch. "After some while of exposure to the open air, they solidify, they become as strong and imperishable as granite. But our stone, while it is still malmy and workable, can be carved with any harder stone, or cut with an obsidian-grit sawing string."

  Most of our island's limestone was freighted to the mainland or to the capital for use as buildings' walls and floors and ceilings. But, because of the fresh stone's easy workability, there were also sculptors busy at the quarries. Those artists chose the finest quality blocks and, while those were still soft, sculptured them into statues of our gods, rulers, and other heroes. The most perfect limestone sheets they carved into low-relief lintels and friezes with which to decorate temples and palaces. Also, using leftover chunks of stone, the artists carved the little household gods treasured by families everywhere. In our house we had small figures of Tonatíu and Tlaloc, of course, and of the maize goddess Chicomecoatl, and the hearth goddess Chintico. My sister Tzitzi even had her own private figurine of Xochiquetzal, goddess of love and flowers, to whom all young girls prayed for a suitable and loving husband.

  The stone chips and other detritus from the quarries were burned in the kilns I have mentioned, from which emerged powder of lime, another valuable commodity. This is essential for the mortar used to cement a building's blocks together. It also makes a gesso for plastering and disguising buildings made of cheaper materials. Mixed with water, the lime is used for hulling the kernels of maize that our women grind into meal for tlaxcaltin tortillas and other foods. The lime was even used by a certain class of women as a cosmetic; with it they bleached their black or brown hair to an unnatural yellow hue, like that of some of your own women.

  Of course the gods give nothing absolutely free of payment, and from time to time they exacted tribute from us for the wealth of limestone we dug out of Xaltócan. I happened to be at my father's quarry on a day when the gods decided to take a token sacrifice.

  A number of porters were hauling a tremendous block of new-cut stone up the long incline, like a curving shelf, that spiraled from the bottom of the q
uarry to the top. They did it by sheer muscle power, with a tumpline around each man's forehead attached to the rope net that dragged the block. Somewhere high up on that ramp, the block slid too close to the edge, or was tilted by some irregularity in the path. Whatever happened, it slowly and implacably fell sideways. There was much shouting and, if the porters had not instantly ripped the tumplines from their heads, they would have gone over the brink with the block. But one man, far below in the noise of the quarry, did not hear the shouts. The block came down upon him, and one of its edges, like a stone adze, chopped him precisely in half at his waist.

  The limestone block had gouged such a deep notch in the quarry floor that it stayed there, balanced on its angular edge. So my father and the other men who rushed to the spot were able without much difficulty to topple it to one side. They found, to their astonishment, that the victim of the gods was still alive and even conscious.

  Unnoticed in the excitement, I came close and saw the man, who was now in two pieces. From the waist up, his naked and sweaty body was intact and unmarked. But his waist was pinched wide and flat, so his torso itself rather resembled an adze or a chisel. The stone had simultaneously severed him—skin, flesh, guts, spine—and neatly closed the wound so that there was not even a drop of blood spilt. He might have been a cotton doll that had been sliced across the middle, then sewn at the cut. His bottom half, still wearing its loincloth, lay separated from him, neatly pinched shut and bloodless—though the legs were twitching slightly, and that half of the body was copiously urinating and defecating.

  The massive injury must have so deadened all the cut nerves that the man even felt no pain. He raised his head and looked in mild wonder at himself in two halves. To spare him the sight, the other men quickly and tenderly carried him—the upper half of him—some distance away, and leaned him against the quarry wall. He flexed his arms, opened and closed his hands, experimentally turned his head about, and said in a voice of awe: