by Simon Levack
I stood by the wicker screen. I watched as the foggy cloud my breath made dispersed in the cold, still night air, and then took a slow, deep, deliberate sniff.
I fought back the gorge rising in my throat as each of the smells pressed its claim to recognition. They were all foul: piss and ordure and, underlying the others but unmistakable, an odour no priest or former priest could ever forget – the reek of fresh human blood.
I looked down. There was no doubt that this was where the short trail I had followed led. The smell came from behind the screen, and there was nothing I could do now but go and look for its source.
I knew something of what I would find. There would be pots into which passers-by could relieve themselves, and which would be taken away by boat for sale in the markets as dyestuff or manure. Sure enough, I found several large, squat, plain clay vessels, their outsides streaked, spattered and darkly stained by years of careless use. I peered at the unsavoury things as closely as I could in the darkness, but could see nothing out of the ordinary. Then I took a step forward, and felt my stomach lurch.
My bare feet stuck to the ground.
I did not need to look down. The smell rising from all around me was enough to tell me what I was standing in. The space around the pots was awash with it. Enough blood had been spilt here to satisfy even Cihuacoatl, our most ravenous goddess, if it had been offered as a sacrifice.
My head spun. I was tempted to lean against the screen for support but stopped myself just in time, as the flimsy structure would surely have collapsed. I looked around wildly, probing each dark corner for some sign of a body, desperate to assure myself that the dead man had not ended up where I could see he almost certainly had.
Groaning, I accepted the evidence of my eyes and ventured towards the nearest pot. I pushed it nervously with the heel of my hand. It was too heavy to fall over, and merely rocked back on to its base. I tried to upset it again, failed again and finally, howling with frustration and disgust, got both my hands on its slippery rim and shoved.
I jumped back as a stream of vile sludge slopped across the ground at my feet. Mercifully, there was not enough light to see what colour it was, but there was no mistaking either its smell or the pale thing that flowed out on the dark, stinking stream. It was part of a human arm. The hand was turned up towards me, as if in supplication, although its fingers were closed around something, a small, hard, gleaming object, with an irregular shape, like a carving in jade or obsidian.
I bent towards the hand for a closer look, but at that point nausea finally got the better of me. I ran to the edge of the canal and vomited, voiding my almost empty stomach and heaving drily and painfully until I scarcely had the strength to draw breath. For a long time after that I just knelt by the water’s edge, watching the gathering pre-dawn light catch the ripples on its surface until the moisture in my own eyes turned them first into vague ghostly shapes and then into a feeble, pale flickering, like a blanket being shaken out on a dull day.
A long time passed after I had fled from the horror I found behind the screen, during which I did nothing but crouch wretchedly beside the canal. When my stomach had stopped heaving I wept, and when my tears had dried up I merely stared at the water.
I ought to have gone back, to tip up all the other pots and confront their secrets. I shifted my weight from my heels to the balls of my feet twice, meaning to get up and look behind the screen again, but both times I stayed where I was. I thought I could guess what had happened, and I could not bear to have it confirmed.
My son had gone to Kindly’s house, looking for his knife. I wondered whether he had surprised another thief, whoever had stolen Kindly’s costume, or whether, as Kindly himself believed, the two of them had been in it together and had fallen out. One of them had stabbed the other, and the victim had ended up here. I looked back along the bridge and tried, in spite of myself, to visualize what had happened: the killer carrying the body as far as the middle of the bridge, perhaps, and then dropping it and dragging it the rest of the way before cutting it up and concealing it hastily in a public privy.
Could Nimble have done such a thing? I closed my eyes and tried to imagine the boy I had known all too briefly killing a man for the sake of a bronze knife and a feathered costume. It was difficult. Nimble had been the lover of a vicious, cold-blooded and sadistic murderer, but he was no killer himself. Yet the alternative explanation was worse: that it was my son’s body that lay in pieces, just a few paces away
I had to know.
Swallowing once, I forced myself to my feet, and then realized that the matter was out of my hands and my chance had been lost.
It was almost dawn and the city was coming to life. Canoes began gliding by, and one or two of their boatmen glanced curiously at the miserable creature standing by the canal, his face pale from retching, his eyes raw and his clothes reduced to rags. I knew that I had better move on quickly before somebody else discovered what I had seen and connected it with me.
With one last brief glance at the screen, I went on my way.
THREE RABBIT
1
I had no difficulty in memorizing the directions Kindly had given me. Still I managed to get lost four times. The horrifying discovery I had just made kept forcing itself into my thoughts, making it hard to concentrate. It was not until late in the morning that I found myself where I wanted to be, and even then I was not certain I had got it right.
The route Kindly had given me took me among the sturdy, respectable houses of the featherworkers, and past them. It led me down narrow, overgrown, silted-up canals whose stagnant waters reeked even on a cool winter’s morning, among wretched hovels, some of them little more than one-room huts, some of them obviously long abandoned and others with their roofs coated with moss and their sides piled high with stinking garbage, and into what I was convinced must be another parish altogether.
Eventually I asked a water seller to confirm that I was where I thought I was. He was standing up in a canoe, using his paddle to hack his way through the reeds in his path while lumps of green scum swirled and coagulated in his wake. The canoe was laden with pots that I presumed were full of fresh water from the spring at Chapultepec, on the mainland. Every morning the water sellers drew it from the aqueduct that had been built over the lake in Emperor Ahuitzotl’s time, and filled their pots with it for sale to countless thirsty households in the city Of course, Mexico was riddled with canals, but nobody in his right mind would ever drink out of them.
My question made him laugh. ‘Amantlan? You must be joking!’ His voice had a nasal tone, the result of trying to avoid breathing through his nose. ‘Amantlan’s back there.’ He jerked his head to indicate the way I had come. ‘This is Atecocolecan.’
I stared about me, bewildered. I had not realized I had walked so far, but as I took in my surroundings it began to make sense. Atecocolecan: the Place of the Angry Water. I had walked all the way to the edge of Mexico’s island, close to where the northern causeway linked the city to Tepeyac on the mainland. ‘It’s a dump! Look – there isn’t even a path over there. It’s just a marsh – you can’t tell where the canal ends and the ground starts. These houses must be waterlogged all the time.’ The name of this place was no accident. After a serious flood many of the hovels around me would be driftwood.
He dipped his paddle in the water. ‘Afraid so,’ he acknowledged.
‘Do you know where Skinny lives?’ I called after him, as his canoe at last got under way through the gap he had hacked through the foliage. ‘Only I was looking for him, but I got lost.’
‘Skinny?’ He laughed shortly without looking around. ‘You’re not lost. He lives right here!’ He waved his paddle at a house just a few paces away. ‘Doesn’t owe you any money, does he?’
‘No.’
‘Good for you! If you catch him, mention me, eh? Tell him I’ll settle for a nice plump turkey hen, as long as she’s a good layer. Otherwise he can drink his own piss!’
The paddle hit the
water with an emphatic splash, throwing up a jet of green and brown muck. It did not propel the canoe forward with any great speed, but it probably felt good.
Skinny’s house was not one of the meanest in this part of the city. It was in better condition than the dwellings on either side. On the other hand, they were both ruins, evidently deserted, unless you counted the rats. The featherworker’s property looked sturdy enough, but its walls were in desperate need of rendering and all that remained of the garden on its roof was a few bedraggled brown leaves trailing over its edge.
A gang of men driving wooden piles into the bed of the swamp at the back of the house, shaking the ground with their hammering and tormenting the air with their tuneless singing, did nothing for the neighbourhood. The water seller’s s parting remark came back to me. Here was the home of a family down on its luck.
I wondered how a featherworker could possibly have ended up here, especially one as eminent as Skinny Amantlan was like many parishes in Mexico, in that its people were a close-knit community, bound together by ties of kinship, whose sons and daughters rarely married outside and were expected to carry on a family business that they had in common with all their friends and relations. Put two Aztecs together and there would be rivalry, and the Amanteca were no exception to this, but something extraordinary must have happened to allow a great craftsman to fall so far, without his peers doing anything to stop it.
Considering the state of his home, I began to wonder whether it would, after all, be so surprising if Skinny had sold the god’s costume to Kindly. He might well have been desperate enough.
A low square doorway, leading straight into a room, broke the clean white expanse of the wall in front of me. There was no screen but the interior was too dark to give anything away. The glare of a sunlit courtyard, visible through another doorway directly opposite the street entrance, made it look darker. By squinting I was just able to make out a few features in the courtyard: the domed shape of a sweat bath against the rear wall, another doorway off to one side.
There was no one in the first room and I went straight through into the courtyard. That was deserted too. This puzzled me, because most dwellings in Mexico were home to more than one household and were consequently crowded, even during the day with the men away in the fields.
I stopped wondering about that when I saw the idols.
Every house in Mexico had them. In most a ledge near the hearth served as a shrine, a home for the household’s patron deities, who might be feared or adored but were always cherished and often treated as if they were members of the family.
Here, it seemed, things were done differently. Two of the courtyard’s four walls, the ones that were not lined with rooms, were richly decorated with statuettes of the gods. Some were new, some old. The biggest was half my height and I could have closed my fist around the smallest. They were made of everything from brilliantly polished greenstone to crudely carved wood, ash or fir or something similarly cheap and plentiful. I saw Tezcatlipoca, Xipe Totec with his mask of human skin, Tlaloc with his protruding, goggle eyes and his consort Chalcihuitlicue, She of the Jade Skirt, Ohmacatl, the vain and importunate lord of the feast, several other gods I knew and a few I did not know. I supposed the particular gods of the featherworkers – Coyotl Inahual and the women Xilo and Xiuhtlati – must be here, and I recognized Yacatecuhtli, the merchants’ god, whom the featherworkers honoured as well.
There was something odd about these figures, apart from their number and variety. All of them, despite having been placed so carefully in niches that had been lovingly prepared for them, were coated in a fine layer of dust, and some were stained, smeared, defaced with dried muck. One of the idols had even been broken. It was impossible to tell which god it represented, because all that was left was a jagged greenstone stump.
Clay flower pots stood on the floor of the courtyard. One of them had fallen over and cracked, leaving the floor around it strewn with soil. That made me frown, for sweeping was a sacred duty and for a pious Aztec to neglect it altogether was all but unthinkable.
When I looked up again I saw I was no longer alone.
Although the wall to my right stretched the whole length of the courtyard, there was only one opening in it, the one I had caught sight of from the front of the house. A short, grubby cloth screen had been hung across it. This still shivered, as it would if it had been tugged aside and jerked back into place. A man stood in front of it.
‘Who are you? What are you doing here? This is a private house. Whatever you’re selling, we don’t want any. Get out!’
I took a step back, astonished. It was not the sort of greeting I would have expected to get anywhere in Mexico, where visitors could normally expect to be received with almost ceremonial courtesy I stared at the stranger, taking in as much of his appearance as I could while I tried to think of a suitable reply.
He was about my height and, like me, perhaps forty years old. He was thin and gaunt, with his ribs showing plainly where his cloak parted. Dark hollows around his eyes added to my impression that he was in need of a square meal. Their lids were heavy as well, and he kept blinking as he stared at me, in the slow, stupid manner of someone who has just been roused from a deep sleep.
A long scratch ran down one of his cheeks. It was a recent wound, and I doubted that it was deep enough to leave a scar, but it might easily have been much worse, since it began a hair’s breadth from the corner of his left eye.
I cleared my throat uncertainly. ‘You must be Skinny. Is that any way for a great craftsman to greet a customer?’
The eyebrows shot up to the top of his forehead and fluttered down again. ‘A customer?’ He gaped at me.
The screen behind him rustled and was pulled aside. He jerked his head around quickly, and I saw one of his hands clench and loosen nervously as I peered over his shoulder to see who was following him into the courtyard.
A woman’s voice cooed: ‘Skinny? Who’s this?’
Aztec children learned at an early age that it was rude to stare openly at someone. If my father could have seen me at that moment he would probably have had me hanging upside down over burning chillies, grown man or not, until he judged that seared lungs and streaming eyes had reminded me firmly enough of my manners.
She slipped from the room as silently and gracefully as an ocelot stalking a sparrow along the branch of a tree, and stood next to the man, so close that her bare arm brushed against his, all the time keeping her eyes fixed on me with a stare as frank as mine. Perfect ellipses, those eyes were, wide and glistening, their irises pure black, matching the hair that fell loose about her face and cascaded like molten tar over her shoulders. No doubt its dark sheen owed something to indigo dye, but a man would have to have been made of marble to care about that. I was not, which was why I could not help noticing, beneath her plain skirt and shift, the curve of the woman’s thigh and the swell of breasts tipped by nipples as small and sharp as arrowheads.
‘Says he’s a customer.’
Skinny’s voice snatched me out of my reverie. Hastily I forced my eyes back to the woman’s face. It was a perfect oval of clear, unblemished skin, with an interesting pallor that might have been natural but was more likely the result of staining with yellow ochre. I wondered how old she was, thinking she must be much younger than the man, perhaps not yet twenty.
‘Madam, I am sorry to have troubled you,’ I mumbled, ‘but I was looking for Skinny the craftsman …’
She yawned. A hand flew upward to cover her mouth, and dropped again to reveal a weary smile.
‘I beg your pardon. You must think we’re very rude, but neither of us slept very well. You must have come far, you’ll be tired. Have a rest and something to eat.’ It was merely the conventional way to greet visitors but she managed to make it sound as if she was truly concerned. Detaching herself from the man, she began walking towards a doorway in the wall behind me.
I forced myself to take my eyes off her and turn back towards the man. ‘You are S
kinny, the featherworker? I have got the right house?’
He looked hastily from me to the girl and back again. ‘Yes,’ he admitted gruffly. ‘And this is Papalotl, my wife.’ Her name suited her. It meant ‘Butterfly’. ‘We weren’t expecting visitors. Who did you say you were?’
‘I’m Moquequeloa,’ I said, on the spur of the moment, and instantly regretted it. It was one of the names we used for Tezcatlipoca, and meant ‘Joker’. ‘I was looking to buy a piece of featherwork for my master.’ I could not resist a quick look over my shoulder, but all I could see of the girl was the sheen of her long hair in the dark room beyond the doorway she had gone through.
‘You want to buy a piece of featherwork?’ The man’s hollow eyes widened and then narrowed suspiciously. ‘What kind of piece, exactly? What made you come here?’
That seemed like an odd question, coming from a renowned master of his craft, but I was spared the need to answer it straight away by his wife’s reappearance.
‘I can’t offer you very much, I’m afraid,’ she said. She had a drinking-gourd in her hand which she proffered, this time with modestly downcast eyes. ‘Here is some water. All we have to eat are some cakes of stone dung.’
‘Thank you.’ I took the stopper off the gourd and raised it. I took a cautious sniff before pressing it to my lips, and decided I was not thirsty after all. It must have been a long while since Skinny’s credit with the water seller had run out. I passed the gourd to Skinny, who took it and drank without hesitation, as if he no longer noticed what the contents tasted like.
‘It’s very kind of you,’ I added politely, ‘but I ate and drank before I came here.’ Stone dung was what we called scum skimmed off the surface of the lake, which was dried and sold in the markets as crumbly cakes. It was nourishing enough, provided nobody had been emptying pots of whitewash into the water while it was being harvested, but scarcely appetizing. During one of the lowest periods in my life I had made a living collecting the stuff, and so I was even less fond of it than most Aztecs.
