He said nothing, only glared darkly at me.
“The Christians are looking for an artist to sculpture for their Cathedral numerous items of gold and silver and gems.” Pochotl’s eyes went from dark to brightly glowing. “Dishes and cups and other vessels, also articles that I cannot describe to you, all to be most ornately worked. Splendiferous things. The man who makes those will leave a heritage to posterity. An outlandish posterity, of course, but—”
“But artistry is artistry!” Pochotl exclaimed. “Even in the service of an alien people and an alien religion!”
“Indubitably,” I said, complacent “And, as you yourself have remariced, I am something of a darling of the Christian clergy. Were I to put in a word on behalf of a certain incomparable artificer…”
“Would you? Yyo ayyo, Cuatl Tenamáxtli, would you?”
“Should I do so, I believe that artist would be assured of the commission to do the work. And all I would ask in return would be that he waste his free time in the construction of my arcabuz.”
Pochotl snatched up the paper of my drawings. “Let me take and study this.” He started away, muttering, “… Have to contrive some way to procure the metals …” But then he turned back, frowning, and said, “When you explained the workings of the arcabuz, Tenamáxtli, you made it plain that the secret powder called pólvora is the one vital component. What is the use of my building this weapon if you have no pólvora?”
“I have a pinch of it,” I said, “and I think I may be able to divine the separate constituents. By the time you have made the weapon, Pochotl, I hope to have the pólvora in abundance. That young soldier was indiscreet enough to give me a hint that may help.”
“The hint,” I said to Netzlin and Citláli, “was that women make some contribution to this powdery mixture. An intimate contribution, he called it.”
Citláli widened her eyes at that, as she and her husband and I, squatting on the earthen floor of their little house, regarded the pinch of pólvora I had carefully put onto a piece of bark paper.
“As you can see,” I went on, “the powder appears gray in color. But, working very meticulously with the tip of a tiny feather, I have succeeded in separating the almost impalpable grains of it. As best I can determine, there are only three different sorts mixed together. One kind is black, one is yellow and one is white.”
Netzlin grunted skeptically. “So much painstaking and ticklish labor, and what do you learn from that? The specks could be pollens from any number of different flowers.”
“But they are not,” I said. “I have already identified two of them, simply by touching a few grains of each to my tongue. The black specks are nothing but common charcoal. The yellow ones are the dust of that crusty excretion found around the vents of any volcano. The Spaniards use that for several other purposes as well—for preserving fruits, for making dyes, for caulking their wine casks—and they call it azufre.”
“So those two would be easy for you to procure,” said Netzlin. “But the white grains defy your so-clever investigation?”
“Yes. All I can tell about those is that they taste something like salt, only more sharp and bitter. That is why I brought the pólvora here”—I turned to Citláli—“because that soldier spoke of women.”
She smiled with good humor but shrugged helplessly. “I can discern the white grains in that little pile, but I certainly do not recognize them. Why should a woman’s eyes see more to them than yours do, Tenamáxtli?”
“Perhaps not the eyes,” I said. “A woman’s other senses and intuitions are known to be much more acute than a man’s. Here, I will separate out a number of those specks.” I had brought the little feather, and delicately employed it, so that I teased a minute quantity of the white grains apart from the rest. “Now, taste them, Citláli.”
“Must I?” she asked, eyeing them askance. Then she leaned forward—with considerable effort, because her protuberant belly was in the way—lowered her head to the paper and sniffed. “Must I really taste them?” she asked again, sitting back on her heels. “They smell exactly like xitli.”
“Xitli?” said both Netzlin and myself, blinking at her, because that word means “urine.”
Citláli blushed with embarrassment and said, “Well, like my xitli, anyway. You see, Tenamáxtli, we have only a single public retiring-closet here on this street, and only immodest women go there to urinate. Most of us use axixcéltin pots and, when they are full, go and empty them in that closet’s pit.”
“But nobody—not even a Spanish woman, I am sure—urinates powder,” I said. “Unless, Citláli, you are one uncommon human being.”
“I am no such thing, you simpleton!” she said, in mock anger, but blushing again. “However, I have noticed that while the xitli sits undisturbed between emptyings, at the bottom of the axixcáli there come into being some little whitish crystals.”
I stared at her, cogitating.
“The way a moss or a scale sometimes develops at the bottom of a water jar,” she elaborated, as if she thought me so dense that I needed a simple illustration.
I continued staring at her, making her blush redder yet.
“Those crystals I speak of,” she said, “if they were ground very fine on a metlatl stone, they would be a powder just like those white grains you have there.”
Almost breathlessly, I said, “You may have hit on it, Citláli.”
“What?!” her husband exclaimed. “You think that is why the soldier mentioned women in connection with the secret powder?”
“In an intimate connection,” I reminded him.
“But would a female’s xitli be any different from a male’s?”
“In one respect, I know it is, and so do you. You must have seen that when a man urinates outdoors, on the grass, the grass is not at all affected. But wherever a woman urinates, the grass goes brown and dead.”
“You are right,” he and his wife said together, and Netzlin added, “It is such a commonplace occurrence that no one ever even speaks of it.”
“And charcoal is also a commonplace thing.” I said. “And so is the volcanic yellow azufre. It stands to reason that something as common as a female’s xitli could provide the third ingredient of the pólvora. Citláli, forgive my audacious rudeness, but may I borrow your axixcáli pot for a while, and do some experimenting with its contents?”
She went still redder in the face, maybe by now all the way down to her taut belly, but her laugh was unabashed. “Do with it what you like, you preposterous man. Only do bring back the pot, please. I have ever more frequent need of it now that the child is due to be born at any moment.”
It took both hands to carry the clay container, covered but audibly sloshing, back to the mesón—and I got some queer looks from passersby along the way, because everyone knows an axixcáli by sight.
Yes, I had been living all this while at the mesón—or at least sleeping and taking meals there—and so had Pochotl, while many other lodgers had come and gone in the meantime. So, feeling guilty about my leechlike dependence on the friars of San José, I had often joined Pochotl in helping them clean the place, fetch wood to stoke the fires, stir and serve the soup, things like that. I might have thought that the friars were lenient about my staying on and on because they knew of my attending classes next door. But they were equally lenient about the perpetual residence of Pochotl, so obviously they were not showing me any partiality. In my opinion, they were kindheartedly carrying charity to an extreme of benevolence. Even though I was one of its chief beneficiaries, that day I returned from visiting Netzlin and Citláli, I made bold to ask one of the soup-ladling friars about that.
To my bewilderment, the friar actually sneered at me. “You think we do this for love of you shiftless layabouts?” he snarled. “We do this in God’s name, for our own souls’ sake. Our order bids us to debase ourselves, to work among the lowest of the lowly, the filthiest of the filthy. I am here at this mesón only because so many other brothers of the order had already volun
teered for the leprosery that there was no room there for me. I had to settle for serving you indio sluggards. And that I do, and in doing that I lay up for myself credits in heaven. But one thing I do not have to do is associate with you. So get back to your lazy fellow redskins.”
Well, I thought, charity comes in some strange guises. I wondered if the nuns of Santa Brígida felt similar contempt for the multicolored orphans in their charge—caring for them ostensibly in the name of their God, but really in the expectation of reward in the afterlife. I wondered also if Alonso de Molina had been kind and helpful to me only for that same reason. Such thoughts naturally strengthened my resolve not to adopt such a crass religion. Bad enough that my tonáli had decreed that I be born into The One World precisely when I would have to share my lifetime with these Christians; I certainly did not intend to spend my afterlife among them.
No longer feeling guilty, but feeling ashamed of myself for having partaken of the friars’ grudging charity, I decided to move away from their mesón. The Cathedral elders had been paying me only a pittance for my work with notarius Alonso—barring whatever extra they had paid for my three articles of Spanish attire: shirt, trousers and boots. Still, of my wages I had spent only the occasional bit for a midday meal, so my savings should enable me to take lodging at one of the cheap native hostelries situated in the colación neighborhoods. I went to my pallet determined that this was the last night I would sleep there, that in the morning I would pack up my few belongings—which now included Citláli’s axixcáli—and be gone. However, no sooner had I made that decision than it turned out that the decision had already been made for me, doubtless by those same mischievous, interfering gods who had for so long been persistently at my heels.
In the middle of the night I was awakened—as was everyone else in the men’s chamber—by the shouting of the aged warder whom the friars left to watch over the premises after they had departed:
“¡Señor Tennamotch! ¡Hay aquí un señor bajo el nombre de Tennamotch?”
I knew he meant me. My name, like so many other Náhuatl words, was always a tongue-twister for the Spaniards, particularly because they are unable to pronounce the soft “sh” sound represented by the letter x with which they write my name. I scrambled up from my pallet, threw on my mantle, and went down the stairs to where the old man stood.
“¡Señor Tennamotch?” he barked, angry at having been disturbed himself. “Hay aquí una mujer insistente e importuna. La vejezuela demanda a hablar contigo.”
A woman? Insistently demanding to speak to me? The only female I could think of, who might come seeking me at midnight, was the mulata child Rebeca, and that was highly unlikely. Anyway, the warder had called her an “old hag.” Mystified, I followed him out the front door, and there stood a woman, old indeed, and no one I had ever seen before. Tears were flowing down along the many wrinkles of her face as she said in Náhuatl:
“I am midwife to the young woman friend of yours, Citláli. The baby is born, but the father has died.”
I was shocked, but not too shocked to correct her. “You mean the mother, surely.” Even I knew that even the healthiest-appearing woman could the in giving birth, but it gave me a heart pang that dear Citláli should have done so.
“No, no! The father. Netzlin.”
“What? How could that be?” Then I remembered his extreme eagerness to see a son born to him. “Did he the of the excitement? Of a stroke of the hands of a god?”
“No, no. He waited in the front room, pacing. The instant the baby gave its first cry in the other room, Netzlin roared triumphantly and went crashing out the door into the street, bellowing, ‘I have a son!’ though he had not yet even seen the child.”
“Well? Did he come back and find it was a daughter? And Skilled him?”
“No, no. He gathered all the men of the barrio, and bought much octli for them, and they all got drunk, but he much more drunk than the others.”
“And that killed him?” I demanded in frustration. “Old mother, you will never make a storyteller. Best stick to midwifing.”
“Well… yes. But, after tonight, I think I may even give up that humble profession and—”
“Will you get on?” I shouted, almost dancing in impatience.
“Yes, yes. You could say the drinking did kill poor fuddled Netzlin. He was caught by the soldiers on night patrol. They beat and cut him to death.”
I was too stunned to say anything. The old midwife went on:
“The neighbors came to tell us. Citláli was already near to frenzy, and the news of Netzlin’s death on top of everything else drove her near to madness. But she was able to tell me where to find you and—”
“What do you mean—on top of everything else? Did the birthing cause injury to her? Is she in pain? In clanger?”
“Just come, Tenamáxtli. She needs comforting. She needs you.”
Rather than go on asking frantic questions and getting dotard answers that were nearly sending me into a frenzy, I said, “Very well, old mother. Let us hurry.”
As we approached the unlighted house, we heard no screams or moans or other sounds of distress coming from within. But I let the old woman precede me, and waited in the front room while she tiptoed into the other. She returned with a finger held to her lips, whispering: “She sleeps at last.”
“She is not dead?” I asked, in a sort of a shout of a whisper.
“No, no. Only sleeping, and that is good. But come now—quietly—and see the infant. It sleeps also.”
With a tongs, she plucked an ember from the cooking hearth and used it to light a coconut-oil lamp, and with that led me into the room where Citláli slept. In a straw-padded box beside her pallet lay the child, neatly swathed, and the midwife held the lamp so I could look down at it. To me it looked like any other newborn: red and raw and as wrinkled as the midwife, but apparently entire, with ail the requisite appendages, the proper number of ears and fingers and toes and such. It lacked hair, true, but there was nothing unusual about that.
“Why did you want me to see it, old mother?” I whispered. “I have seen babies before, and this one appears no different.”
“Ayya, friend Tenamáxtli, it has no eyes.”
“The child is blind? How could you tell?”
“Not just blind. It has no eyes. Look more closely.”
Since the child was asleep, I had taken for granted that its eyelids were closed. But now I could see that there was no line of closed lashes. Where there should have been lids, each eye socket was closed over—from the faint little eyebrows down to the cheekbones—with the same delicate skin that covered the rest of the face, only slightly indented where the eyeballs should have been.
“By all the darkness of Míctlan,” I muttered, horrified. “You are right, old mother. It is a monster.”
“That is why Citláli was so distraught, even before she heard the news about Netzlin. At least he was spared knowing of this.” She hesitated, then asked, “Shall I throw it into a canal?”
That would have been the kindest thing, for both Citláli and the infant. It would indeed have been the obligatory thing, according to the customs of The One World. Children born defective in either body or intellect were disposed of, immediately as the defect was discovered. It was the natural and expected thing to do, in order that such creatures not grow up to be a burden to themselves and to the community, or, worse, perhaps to bear similarly blighted children themselves. No one wept or regretted or disputed the quick disposal of such unfortunates. It was too plainly necessary, to maintain undiluted the best physical and mental qualities of the race. One nation, the Cloud People of Uaxyácac, renowned for their beauty, even disposed of infants who were merely ugly.
But, I reminded myself, this was no longer The One World, free to follow its age-old, wise traditions. I knew that the Christians let their own varicolored and despised mongrel offspring live and grow up—even those wretched ones of splotched brown-and-white complexion that they called pintojos, from whom
everyone of every other color turned his gaze away in revulsion. So there was probably a Christian law requiring that any child—though misbegotten and, for whatever reasons of practicality, unwanted—must be kept and reared, at whatever cost in misery to itself, its parents and all the rest of society. I was not sure that such a law existed; I would have to remember to ask Alonso if the Christians truly were that insensitive and pitiless and unmerciful. Anyway, this one poor creature’s fate need not be decided this very night, so I told the midwife:
“It is not for me to say. Netzlin would assuredly have told you to get rid of it But he is gone, and Citláli is its only parent. We will wait for her to wake.”
X
“I WISH TO keep the child,” said Citláli when she had awakened and I had spoken some consoling and encouraging words, and she was able to regard the two sudden disasters in her life with more composure than she had the night before.
I asked her, “Have you considered what you will have to bear? Besides staying in constant and vigilant attendance on the child—perhaps even until it is full grown, or even until one of you dies—you will suffer the scorn and derision of all our people, especially our priests. And to what sort of tonáli has your baby been destined? A life of abject dependence on its mother. A life of inability to deal with the commonest happenings of every day, let alone any real difficulty that may come along. Practically no hope of its ever doing anything in life to earn a place in the happy afterworld of Tonatíucan. Why, no tonalpóqui will even deign to consult his book of omens to give the child an auspicious name.”
“Then its birthday name will have to serve as its only name,” she murmured, undeterred. “Yesterday was the day Two-Wind, was it not? So—Ome-Ehécatl its name will be, and that is fitting. The wind has no eyes, either.”
“There,” I said, “you have spoken it. Ome-Ehécatl will never even see you, Citláli; never know what its own mother looks like; never marry and give you grandchildren; never support you in your old age. You yourself are still young and comely and talented in your craft, and sweet of nature, but you will not likely attract another husband, not with such a gross impediment hung upon you. Meanwhile—”
Aztec Autumn Page 14
