Aztec Autumn

by Gary Jennings

  Meanwhile, the less favored lodgers in this charitable mesón were, if not homeless local townsfolk, all from the stillunconquered northern lands of The One World. They had come either as scouts, like Uncle Mixtzin, to take the measure of the white men and determine what their own peoples’ future might be—or they had come, like those other scouts, Netzlin and Citláli, to seek a living among the luxuries of the white men’s city. Or perhaps some, I thought, might have come here to do both, like me and like the worm in the coyacapúli fruit—hoping to delve and burrow and hollow out this New Spain from within. If there were others of similarly subversive intent, I must find them and join them.

  The friars woke us’ at sunrise and directed us downstairs again. My uncle and I were pleased to see that my mother had passed the night unharmed, and all three of us were pleased to find that the friars now ladled out bowls of atóli mush with which to break our fast, and even a cup of frothy chocólatl for each person. Evidently my mother, like Mixtzin, had spent much of the night awake and in converse with other lodgers, for she reported, with more vivacity than she had shown all during our journey:

  “There are women here who have served some of the best Spanish families, in some of the best homes, and they have marvelous things to tell. Especially of some new fabrics that have never before been known in The One World. There is a stuff called wool, which is shorn from curly-furred creatures called ovejas, which are being raised in great herds all over New Spain. The fur is not felted, but made into yarn—much as is done with cotton—and that is woven into cloth. Wool can be as warm as fur, they say, and colored as vividly as if it were of quetzal feathers.”

  I was happy to see that my Tene had encountered novelties enough to erase—or at least to dim—her memory of what we had seen the day before, but my uncle only grunted as she prattled on.

  I looked about the dining chamber, trying not to be too obvious about it, wondering which of these people—if any—might be future allies in my campaign of prying and plotting. Well, yonder squatted the scrawny man, Pochotl, swilling his bowl of atóli. He could be useful in that he was a native of this city and knew it intimately, though I could not envision him acting the warrior, if my campaign ever came to that And of the others around the room, which? There were children, adults and oldsters, male and female. I might recruit one or more of the latter, because there are places a female can go, without arousing suspicion, where a male cannot.

  “And there is an even more wonderful fabric of which they tell,” my mother was saying. “It is called silk, and they say it is as light as a cobweb, but lustrous to the eye, voluptuous to the touch and as long-wearing as leather. It is not made here; it comes from Old Spain. And what is truly incredible, they say its thread is spun by worms. They must mean spiders of some sort.”

  “Trust women to be beguiled by trifles and trinkets,” muttered Mixtzin. “If this One World were all of women, the white men could have had it for an armload of baubles, and never a weapon raised against them.”

  “Now, brother, that is not so,” she said virtuously. “I detest the white men as much as you do, and I have even more reason, having been widowed by them. But, as long as they did bring such curiosities … and as long as we are here where they can be seen …”

  Mixtzin expectably erupted, “In the name of Míctlan’s uttermost darkness, Cuilcani, would you engage in trade with these loathsome trespassers?”

  “Of course not.” And she added, with womanly practicality, “We have no coins to trade with. I do not wish to acquire any of those fabrics, only to see and touch them. I know you are in a hurry to be gone from this alien city. But it will not be much out of our way to go past the marketplace and let me browse a bit among the stalls.”

  My uncle mumbled and balked and grumbled, but of course he would not deny her that one small pleasure, which would never be within her reach again. “Then, if you must dawdle, let us be on our way this instant. Fare you well, Tenamáxtli.” He clapped a hand on my shoulder. “I wish you success with your foolhardy notion. But I wish even more that you come home safely, and not too long from now.”

  Tene’s leavetaking was rather lengthier and more emotional, with embraces and kisses and tears and admonitions to stay healthy and eat nourishing foods and tread cautiously among the unpredictable white men and, above all, have nothing whatever to do with any white women. They went off toward the northern end of the city, where was situated the largest and busiest market square. And I went off toward a different square, the one in which yesterday my father had been burned alive. I went alone but not empty-handed; as I was leaving the Mesón de San José, I saw outside its door a large, empty clay jar that no one was using or guarding. So I lifted it up onto my shoulder, as if I were carrying water or atóli for the laborers in a construction party somewhere. I pretended it was heavy, and I walked slowly, in part because that was the way I imagined an ill-paid laborer would walk, but mainly because I wanted to examine thoroughly every person, place and thing I passed.

  The day before, I had been inclined to gape at whole, wide aspects of the city, taking each scene at one eye-gulp, so to speak—the broad, long avenues lined with immense buildings of alien architecture, their stone or gesso-plastered fronts adorned with sculptured friezes, convoluted and complicated but meaningless, like the embroidery with which certain of our peoples hem their mantles; and the much narrower side streets, where the buildings were smaller, crammed side by side, and not so fancily decorated.

  This day, I concentrated on details. Thus I could now discern that the grand edifices fronting on the avenues and open squares were mostly workplaces for the functionaries of the government of New Spain, and their numerous subordinates and councillors and clerks and scribes and such. I also now noticed that among the many men wearing Spanish attire who went in and out of those buildings—bearing books or papers or messenger pouches or just facial expressions of haughty self-importance—a number were of the same dark complexion and beardlessness as myself. Other grand buildings were clearly inhabited by the dignitaries of the white men’s religion, and their numerous subordinates and minions. And among those, too, wearing clerical garb and blandly complacent expressions, were more than a few men with coppery and beardless faces. Only at the buildings housing military men—the headquarters of high officers, the barracks of the lower ranks—did I see none of my own people in formal parade dress or in everyday working uniform or in armor or bearing arms of any sort. A few of the really large and ornate structures, of course, were palaces in which resided the uppermost quality folk of the government, the Church and the military, and at every door of them stood armed and alert-looking soldier sentries, usually holding on a leash one of their fierce staghound war dogs.

  I saw other dogs, too, of various shapes and sizes and unfierce mien, though one could hardly believe that they are related to the pudgy little techíchi dogs that we of The One World had for ages been breeding for no other use than as emergency rations. Indeed, there were no more techíchime to be found in the City of Mexíco, because all of the native citizens had become so fond of puerco meat and there was such an abundance of it here, and the Spaniards never would eat techíchi meat. There were other animals here that were totally new to me, though I assume they must be Old Spain’s peculiar variety of our jaguar, cuguar and océlotl. They are ever so much smaller than those cats, however, and tame and gentle and soft of voice. And as only the cuguar, of all our cats, can do, these miniature versions even purr.

  The elbow-to-elbow buildings on the narrower side streets were both working and living quarters for their occupants, all of them white. At ground level might be a shop selling some kind of merchandise, a smithy, a stable for horses or an eating establishment open to the public—the white public. The one or two or three floors above would be where the proprietors and their families lived.

  Except for those I have mentioned, the dark-skinned persons I saw on those streets and avenues were mostly swift-messengers going somewhere at a trot or t
amémime trudging along under yokes or tumplines bearing bales and bundles. Those men were dressed as I was, in tilmatl mantle, máxtlatl loincloth and cactli sandals. But there were some others who had to be servants of white families, because they were dressed like Spaniards, in tunics and tight-fitting breeches and boots and hats of one shape or another. Some of the older of those men had curious scars on their cheeks. The first such man that I saw I assumed had come by his scar in some war or duel, because its shape—like this: G—conveyed nothing to me. But then I saw several more men whose cheeks were marked with that same figure. And I saw others, younger men, similarly scarred but with different symbols. It was clear that all of them had deliberately been so marked. Whether any of the city’s women had been treated the same, I could not determine, because I saw on those streets no women at all, neither white nor dark.

  I learned later that this portion of the city through which I was plodding was called the Tram, a vast rectangle comprising many streets and avenues in extent, the entire center of the City of Mexíco. The Traza was reserved for the residences, churches, commercial establishments and official buildings of the white men and their families. There were exceptions. The copper-skinned men in clerical garb lived in the church residences along with their white fellow churchmen. And a few of the white families’ native servants ate and slept in the houses where they worked. But all other native citizens—even those who worked for the governing functionaries—had to go home at night to the colaciones, the several parts of the city that extended out from the Traza to the edges of the island. And those sections ranged in quality and appearance and cleanliness from respectable to tolerable to vile.

  Just looking at the fine, large buildings that composed the Traza, I wondered if the Spaniards were ignorant of the natural disasters that this city was prone to, and which were well known to everybody else in The One World. Tenochtítlan had frequently been inundated by floods of the surrounding lake waters, and two or three times had been all but washed away. I supposed that there was no longer much danger of floods, with Lake Texcóco’s being now so diminished.

  However, the entire island, because it was simply an up-cropping of the lake’s unstable bed, had often also been racked by what we called the tlalolíni—the terremoto in Spanish. On some of those occasions, just one or a few of Tenochtítlan’s structures had shifted position slightly or had leaned sideways or had sunk below ground level to some degree. On other occasions, the whole island had violently shaken and heaved, making buildings fall down as suddenly as did the people on the streets. That was why, by the time my Uncle Mixtzin first saw Tenochtítlan, its major buildings were all firmly broad-based, and the lesser ones were built on pilings that would merely sway or give a little, to compensate for the island’s settling or quaking.

  Another thing that I learned later was that the Spaniards were beginning to realize this propensity of the island, and from experience. The looming Cathedral Church of San Francisco, the biggest, therefore the heaviest, structure yet attempted by the white builders—and not even completed yet—was already perceptibly and lopsidedly sinking. Its stone walls were cracking in places, its marble floors buckling.

  “It is the spiteful doing of the pagan demons,” declared the priests who inhabited the place. “We should never have built this house of God on the site of the red heathens’ monstrous temple, and even used that temple’s stones in the process. We must start again, and rebuild elsewhere.”

  So the Cathedral’s architects were frantically putting wedges under the building, and buttresses about it, trying every means to keep it upright and intact at least until it was finished. At the same time, they were drawing plans for a whole new Cathedral to be erected some distance away, with an extensive underground foundation that they hoped would hold it up.

  I knew none of that on the day, still carrying the empty jar on my shoulder, I crossed the immense open square beside which the Cathedral stood. I set the jar down beside the big main door, so that I might look less like an itinerant laborer and more like an estimable caller. I waited while several clerically gowned white men went in or came out, addressing each of them and asking if I might enter their temple. (I also knew nothing then of the rules regarding respectful entrance; for instance, whether I should kiss the ground before or after going through the door.) What soon became evident was that not a one of these white priests, friars, whatever they were—and some had been resident in New Spain for as long as ten years—could speak or comprehend a word of Náhuatl. And none of our people-turned-Crixtanóyotl came by. So I tried repeating over and over, as best I could pronounce the words, “notarius” and “Alonso” and “Molina.”

  Finally one of the men snapped his fingers in recognition of what I was asking, and led me through the portal—no kissing the ground at all, by either of us, though he did give a sort of reverential little dip at one point—through the cavernous interior and along aisles and corridors and up stairways. Inside the church, I noticed, all the churchmen removed their hats—they wore quite an assortment, from small and round to large and puffy—and every one of them had a circle of his hair shaved bald at the crown of his head.

  My guide stopped at an open door and motioned for me to enter, and in that small room sat the notarius Alonso at a table. He was smoking picíetl, but not in the way we do, with the dried, shredded herb rolled in a tube of reed or paper. He held between his lips a long, stiff, thin thing of white clay, the far end of which was bent upward and packed with the slow-burning picíetl, and he inhaled the smoke from the other, narrower end.

  The notarius had one of our native pleated bark-paper books before him, and was copying from its many colored word-pictures. I should say translating from it, because the copy he was writing on another paper was not in word-pictures. He was doing it with a sharpened duck quill that he dipped in a small jar of black liquid, and then scribbled on his paper only wiggly lines of that one color—what I know now, of course, is the Spanish style of writing. He finished a line and looked up, and looked pleased, but had to fumble for my name:

  “Ayyo, it is good to see you again … er… Cuatl…”

  “Tenamáxtli, Cuatl Alonso.”

  “Cuatl Tenamáxtli, to be sure.”

  “You told me I might come and talk to you again.”

  “By all means, though I did not expect you so soon. What can I do for you, brother?”

  “Teach me to speak and understand Spanish, if you would, brother notarius.”

  He gave me a long look before he asked, “Why?”

  “You are the only Spaniard I have met who speaks my language. And you said it makes you useful as a communicator between your people and mine. Perhaps I could be equally useful. If none other of your countrymen can manage to learn our Náhuatl—”

  “Oh, I am not the only one who speaks it,” he said. “But the others, as they become fluent, get variously assigned to other parts of the city or out in the farther reaches of New Spain.”

  “Then will you teach me?” I persisted. “Or if you cannot, maybe one of those others …”

  “I can and I will,” he said. “I cannot make time to give you private lessons, but I do teach a class every day at the Colegio de San José. That is a school established solely for the education of you indios—of you people. Every priest-teacher at the Colegio speaks at least a passable Náhuatl.”

  “Then I am in luck,” I said, pleased. “As it happens, I am lodging in the friars’ mesón next door.”

  “Even better luck, Tenamáxtli, there is a beginners’ class just starting. That will make the learning easier for you. If you will be at the front gate of the Colegio tomorrow at the hour of Prime—”

  “Prime?” I said blankly.

  “I was forgetting. Well, never mind. As soon as you have broken your night’s fast—that would be the hour of Lauds—simply step over to the Colegio gate and wait for me. I will see that you are properly admitted and enrolled and told when and where your classes will be.”

 
; “I cannot thank you enough, Cuatl Alonso.”

  He picked up his quill again, expecting me to depart. When I hesitated there before his table, he asked, “Was there something else?”

  “I saw something today, brother. Can you tell me what it means?”

  “What sort of something?”

  “May I borrow your quill for a moment?” He gave it to me, and I wrote with that black liquid on the back of my hand (not to spoil any of his paper) the figure G. “What is that, brother?”

  He looked at it and said, “Hay.”

  “Hay?”

  “That is the name of the character. Hay. It is a letra initial—well, there is no word in Náhuatl for it. You will learn these things in your Colegio class. Hay is a particle of the Spanish language, as is ahchay, ee, hota… and so on. Where did you see this?”

  “It was scarred into a man’s face. Cut or burned, I could not tell.”

  “Ah, yes … the brand.” He frowned and looked away. It seemed that I had a faculty for making Cuatl Alonso uncomfortable. “In that case, the letra inicial stands for guerra. War. It means the man was a prisoner of war, therefore now a slave.”

  “I saw several wearing that mark. I saw others—like these.” Again I wrote on the back of my hand, the figures HC and JZ and perhaps others that I do not now remember.

  “More letras iniciales,” he said. “Ahchay thay, that would be the Marqués Hernan Cortes. And hota thaydah, that would be His Excellency, the Bishop Juan de Zumarraga.”