Aztec Autumn

by Gary Jennings

  I said, and meant it, that there would not be any more such times. Then Alonso led me along the hall to the room where my next class was assembling. This was where I would be subjected to my first instruction in Christianity, and I was pleased to see that here I was not the oldest pupil. My classmates ranged in age from adolescents to mature adults. There were no children, and only a few females, and among these students there was none of that disturbing diversity of skin color displayed by the youngsters in the other room. However, this was not a class where beginners were being taught the very simplest rudiments of their subject. It had clearly been going on for some time, maybe months, before I joined it. Therefore I was plunged into what, for me, were depths that defied my comprehension.

  On that, my first day, the teacher-priest was expounding on the Christian concept of trinity. Padre Diego was bald of hair, not shaven just on the crown of his head, and was pleased when addressed as Tete, our people’s fond diminutive of “father.” He was very nearly as fluent in Náhuatl as was the notarius Alonso, so I understood everything he said, but not what the, words and phrases meant. For example, the word trinity in our tongue is yeyíntetl, and it denotes a group of three, or three things in company, or three entities acting together, or a set of three somethings—such as the three points of a triangle or the three-lobed leaf of certain plants. But Tete Diego kept urging us listeners to adore what is plainly a group of four.

  To this day, I have never met a Christian Spaniard who does not wholeheartedly worship a trinity comprising one God, who has no name, and the God’s son, who is named Jesucristo, and that son’s mother, named Maria Virgen, and an Espfritu Santo, who, though he has no name, is apparently one of those godling Santos, like San José and San Francisco. However, that makes four to be adored, and how four could constitute a trinity I never could understand.

  VII

  THAT DAY, AND each day thereafter—except for the days called Sunday—when I had finished with my two classes at the Colegio, I would report to Alonso de Molina at the Cathedral. We would sit among his heaps of barkpaper books, metl-fiber books, fawnskin books, and discuss the interpretation of this or that page or passage or sometimes just a single pictured symbol.

  Of course, the notarius was already well acquainted with such basic matters as the Aztéca’s and Mexíca’s method of counting numbers, and the differing methods used by other peoples—in the Tzapotéca and Mixtéca languages, for example—and those used by older nations that no longer existed, but had left records of their times—the ancient Maya and Olméca, for example. He also knew that in any book drawn by any scribe of any nation a person depicted with a Náhuatl—that is, a tongue—near its head meant the person was speaking. And if the pictured tongue was curly, it meant the person was singing or speaking poetry. And if the pictured tongue was pierced by a thorn, it meant the person was lying. Alonso could recognize the symbols that all our peoples employed to indicate mountains and rivers and the like. He knew many such features of our picture writing. But I was able to correct him, now and then, in some misapprehension.

  “No,” I might say, “the southernmost inhabitants of The One World—the peoples of Quautemálan—do not call the god Quetzalcóatl by that name. I have never visited those lands but, according to my calmécac teachers, in those southern languages the god has always been known as Gukumatz.”

  Or I might say, “No, Cuatl Alonso, you are misnaming these several gods shown here. These are the itzceliúqui, the blind gods. That is why you will find them always pictured, as here, with all-black faces.”

  That particular remark of mine, I remember, led to my asking Alonso why some of the younger pupils at the Colegio had skin so dark that they were almost black. The notarius enlightened me. There existed certain men and women, he said, called in Spanish Moros or Negros, a pitiably inferior race inhabiting some place called Africa. They were brutish and savage, and could be civilized and domesticated only with great difficulty. But those who could be tamed, the Spanish made into slaves—and a favored few of the Moro men had even been allowed to enlist as Spanish soldiers. Several of those had been among the original troops who had ccmquered The One World—and those were, like their white comrades, rewarded with grants of tribute here in New Spain, and with slaves of their own, “indio” prisoners of war, the men I had seen with the figure G branded into their faces.

  “I have seen two or three of the black men, too, on the streets,” I said. “They seem to be fond of rich apparel. They dress even more gaudily than the upper-class white men. Perhaps it is because they are so ugly in the face. Those broad, splayed noses and immense, everted lips and the tight-kinked hair. I have seen no black women, though.”

  “Just as ugly, believe me,” said Alonso. “Most of the Moro conquistadores who were given grants settled on the east coast, around the Villa Rica de Vera Cruz. And some of those have imported black wives for themselves. But they generally prefer the lighter—and much more handsome—native women.”

  All warriors, of course, are inclined and expected to rape the womenfolk of their defeated foes, and the white Spanish conquerors naturally had done much of that. But, according to Alonso, the Moro soldiers were even more lustfully inclined to seize and rape anything female that could not outrun them. Whether this had resulted in the birth of such brute creatures as tapir-children or alligator-children, Alonso could not say for sure. But, in New Spain and in older Spanish colonies, too, he said, both Spanish and Moro patrones were still making use, at whim, of their female slaves. Also, though it was not much talked about, there was ample evidence that some Spanish women had done the same; not just the sluts imported from Spain to be whores for hire, but some of the wives and daughters of the highest-born Spaniards. Out of perversity or prurience or simple curiosity, they occasionally copulated with men of any color or class, even their own male slaves. What with this abundance of licentious miscegenation, said Alonso, there resulted an abundance of children with skins ranging from near-black to almost-white.

  “Ever since Velazquez took Cuba,” he said, “we have found it convenient to apply names of classification to the variously colored offspring. The product of a coupling between a male or female indio and a male or female white person we call a mestizo. The product of a coupling between Moro and white we call a mulato, meaning ‘mulish.’ The product of a coupling between indio and Moro we call a pardo, a ‘drab.’ Should a mulato or a pardo and a white person mate, their child is a cuarterón, and a child with that mere one-quarter of indio or Moro blood can sometimes appear to be pure white.”

  I asked, “Then why bother with such minute specifics of degree?”

  “Oh, come now, Juan Británico! Because it can happen that the father or mother of a bastard of mixed blood may come to feel some responsibility for it, or actually become fond of it. As you have noticed, they sometimes enroll such mongrels for an education. Sometimes, too, the parent may bequeath to the child a family title or property. There is nothing to forbid the doing of that But the authorities—especially Holy Church—must keep precise records, to prevent the adulteration of the pure Spanish blood. Just suppose a cuarterón should pass himself or herself off as white, and thereby trick some unsuspecting real Spaniard into marriage … well… that has happened.”

  “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.”r />
  “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 amcmg 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 Rarémuri make from maize or the chépari that the Purémpecha make from bees’ honey or the everywherecommon 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 native’s 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 aplanta, 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 stall-keepers 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 Quautemalan 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 Otomite and Poré and Rarómuri 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.