Aztec Blood

by Gary Jennings

  Sweet Carmelita will smuggle my pages out via a kindly guard to a man who claims her as his friend. In this way, from words written with mother's milk in a dungeon, the world may one day learn of my story.

  Eh, amigos, will I not be as famous as Miguel Cervantes, he who wrote of that awkward knight errant who tilted with windmills?

  What compels me to leave this history of my days before I face the fires of the infernal? Ay! My life is not just sorrow and regret. My travels from the harsh streets of Veracruz, to the palaces of the great City of Mexico and the towering wonders of Seville, the Queen of Cities, those memories are more golden than the treasures of El Dorado.

  This is the true story of those times, of my days as a liar and thief, a street leper and a rich hidalgo, a bandit and a gentleman caballero. I have seen wonders and my feet have been scorched by the fires of hell.

  As you will soon see, it is a wondrous tale.

  THREE

  Men call me Cristo the Bastardo. In truth I was not christened "Bastardo." I received on baptism the name Cristóbal in honor of God's only Son. Bastardo is an accusation that the bearer was conceived outside of holy matrimony, not a name.

  Bastardo is merely one of my names. Even less flattering words have been used to describe my person. For some time I was known as Cristo the Lépero for my association in the dirt with those mixed-blood outcasts you of fairer society and purer blood call social lepers. The rape and union of Aztec women by Spanish men has created a great many half-castes—outcasts—who fall to begging or thievery because they are rejected by both the people of their mother and their father. I am one of these, but I admit to my arrogant pride in having the blood of two noble races in my veins.

  Of my name, true and otherwise, and other treasures, I will say more later. Like the Persian princess who wove tales through the night to keep her head on her shoulders, I will not cast all of my pearls with a single toss....

  "Cristóbal, speak to us of jewels, silver and gold."

  The words of the capitán of the guard come to mind like hot embers from the torturer's pyre for the not-yet-dead. Of those treasures I will speak, but first there is the matter of my birth. My youth. Dangers surmounted and a love that conquers all. These things must not be hurried but savored. Patience is a virtue I learned as a guest in the viceroy's dungeon.

  One does not hurry a torturer.

  You must excuse the awkwardness of the way in which I scratch words upon this fine paper. I am usually able to form letters on paper as well as any priest. Fray Osorio's ministrations, however, have impaired my script. After crushing my fingernails with thumbnails, I was forced to grip the quill between my palms.

  Amigos, need I tell you what pleasure it would be to meet the good fray along the road on his way back to Veracruz? I would teach him some tricks that would no doubt be of use to the Holy Office of the Inquisition in its search for good and evil with pain. Those vermin devils that the dungeon master has swept off the floor and placed on my skin to create the almost unbearable ticklish agony, I would make good use of. I would slice open the fray's belly and slip a handful of the crawling vermin inside....

  Despite the corporeal damage, my soul is stalwart. It will still bethink truth, which is all that remains to me. All else has been taken from me—love, honor, clothes—so I sit naked before God and the rats that share my cell.

  Truth still resides in my heart, in that sanctum sanctorum that no man can touch. The truth cannot be stolen from a man, even on the rack, because it is in the custody of God.

  Like Don Quixote, an hidalgo whose dreams and ambitions were as strange as mine, I was destined from birth to play a role that made me different from other men. Secrets have always been shadows in my life. I was to find that even my birth was veiled by dark thoughts and foul deeds.

  You say the great knight errant was nothing more than the ravings of Cervantes after he returned maimed from Moorish war and durance vile? Would you speak of my madness if I told you that in my adventures I fought for treasure beside the real Don Quixote?

  Tell the fray to put away his hot pinchers and await this tale of treasure for I am not yet prepared to tell it. His embrace has left my thoughts in many pieces, and I need to mend them to remember this jewel of life and those worldly treasures the viceroy desires word of. I must go back, back to the days when I was suckled by a she-wolf and drank the wine of my youth.

  I shall start at the beginning, my amigos, and shall share with you the gold of my life.

  PART TWO

  You have no mother.

  —Fray Antonio

  FOUR

  Call me Cristo.

  I was born in the village of Aguetza in the vast Valley of Mexico. My Aztec ancestors built temples in the valley to please the sun, moon, and rain gods, but after the indio gods were vanquished by Cortes and his conquistadors, the land and the indios upon it were divided into large haciendas, feudal domains owned by Spanish grandees. Composed of a few hundred jacals—huts of sun-baked, mud-and-straw bricks—the village of Aguetza and all of its people belonged to the hacienda of Don Francisco Perez Montero de Ibarra.

  The small stone church was near the riverbank on the village side. On the other side of the river were the shops, corrals, and the great house of the hacienda. The great house was built like a fortress with a high, thick wall, gun ports, and a huge door with iron braces. A coat of arms blazoned the wall beside the door.

  In our time it is said that the sun never sets upon the Spanish Empire, for it dominates, not just Europe, but stretches around the world, encompassing most of the New World, then across to the Philippines and footholds in the land of the Hindu and Africa. New Spain, with its vast riches in silver and land, is one of the prizes of the empire.

  The Spanish generally referred to all of the indios of New Spain as "Aztecs," even though there were many indio tribes—the Tarasco, Otomi, Totonac, Zapotec, Maya, and others, often with their own language.

  I grew up speaking both Náhuatl, the Aztec tongue, and Spanish.

  As I mentioned before, in my own veins was the blood of Spain and the Aztecs. Because of that mixture, I was called a mestizo, a name that meant I was neither español nor indio. Fray Antonio, the village priest who had much to do with my upbringing and education, said that a mestizo was born into a border place between heaven and hell where dwell those whose souls are deprived of the joy of heaven. While the fray was rarely wrong, in this case he had misjudged the damnation of mestizos. Rather than limbo, it was a state of living hell.

  The fray's church was built on the spot where there had once been a small temple devoted to Huitzilopochtli, the mighty Aztec tribal war god. After the conquest the temple had been torn down and its stones used to build a Christian temple on the same spot. From then on the indios gave praise to the Christian Savior rather than the Aztec gods.

  The hacienda was a small kingdom in and of itself. The indios who worked the land grew maize, beans, squash, and other food stuffs, horses, cattle, sheep, and swine. Workshops created almost everything that was used on the hacienda, from the shoes for horses and plows for tilling the soil, to the rough carts with wooden wheels used to haul the harvest. Only the fine furnishings, china and linens of the great house used by the hacendado, Don Francisco, came from outside the hacienda.

  I shared the hut of my mother, Miaha. Her Christian name was Maria, for the blessed Mother of Christ. Her Aztec name, Miahauxiuitl, meant Turquoise Maize Flower in our Náhuatl tongue. Except in the presence of the village priest, she was called by her Náhuatl name.

  She was the first mother I knew. I called her Miaha, which was what she preferred.

  It was common knowledge that Don Francisco lay with Miaha, and everyone believed that I was his son. The bastardos dropped by indias after intercourse with Spaniards were not favored by either race. To the Spaniard I was just an increase in his stock of dray animals. When Don Francisco looked at me, he saw not a child but a piece of property. The don proffered no more affection to
ward me than he did to the cattle grazing in his fields.

  Accepted by neither Spanish nor indios, even children spurned me as a playmate, I learned early that my hands and feet existed solely to defend my mixed blood.

  Nor was there sanctuary for me in the hacienda's main house. The don's son, José, was a year older than myself; his twin daughters, Maribel and Isabella, two years older. None of them were permitted to play with me, although they were allowed to beat me at will.

  Doña Amelia was unrelentingly venomous. For her I was sin incarnate—living proof that her husband, the don, had stuck his garrancha between the legs of an india.

  This was the world I grew up in, Spanish and indio by blood, but accepted by neither—and cursed by a secret that would one day shake the foundations of a great house of New Spain.

  "What is this secret, Cristóbal? Tell it to us!"

  Ayyo, the dungeon master's words appear on my paper like black ghosts.

  Patience, Señor Capitán, patience. Soon you will know the secret of my birth and of other treasures. I will reveal the secrets in words the blind can see and the deaf can hear, but at present my mind is too weak from hunger and deprivation to do so. It will have to wait until I have regained my strength from decent food and sweet water....

  The day came when I saw with my own eyes how a person like me, who carried the blood taint, was treated when they rebelled. I was more than halfway through my eleventh year when I came out of the hut I shared with my mother carrying my fishing spear when I heard horses and shouting.

  "¡Andale! ¡Andale! ¡Apurate!" Hurry! Hurry!

  Two men on horseback were driving a man before them with whips. Running and staggering, the horses breathing down his neck, their powerful hoofs hammering at his heels, the man came toward me down the village path.

  The horsemen were Don Francisco's soldados, Spaniards who protected the hacienda from bandits with their muskets and used their whips to keep the indios working the fields.

  "Andale, mestizo!"

  He was a half-breed like me. Dressed as a peasant, he was lighter of skin and taller than an indio, reflecting the infusion of español and indio blood. I was the only mestizo on the hacienda and the man was a stranger to me. I knew there were other mestizos in the valley. Occasionally one passed through the hacienda with the burro trains that bring supplies and haul away hides and the crops of maize and beans.

  A horseman rode up beside the mestizo and quirted him savagely. The man staggered and fell, belly down. His shirt was torn and bloody, his back a mass of bleeding whip marks.

  The other soldado charged with a lance and shoved the pole in the man's backside. The man struggled to his feet and staggered down the village lane toward us. He lost his footing again, and the horsemen wheeled, resuming their attack with whip and lance.

  "Who is he?" I asked my mother as she came up beside me.

  "A mine slave," she said. "A mestizo who has escaped from one of the northern silver mines. He came to some of the workers in the field asking for food, and they called the soldados. Mines pay a reward for runaways."

  "Why are they beating him?"

  It was a stupid question that required no answer from my mother. I might as well have asked why an oxen is whipped to pull a plow. Mestizos and indios were dray animals. Forbidden to leave the haciendas, they were the property of their Spanish masters. When they strayed, they were whipped like any other animal that disobeyed its master. The king's laws actually protected indios from being put to death, but there was no protection for half-bloods.

  As the man got closer, I saw that his face was marred by more than blood.

  "His face is branded," I said.

  "Mine owners brand their slaves," Miaha said. "When they're traded or sold to other mines, more brands are burned on. This man was branded by many masters."

  I had heard of this practice from the fray. He explained that when the Crown gave the conquistadors their original land grants, they also granted them tribute-paying indios. Many of these early settlers branded their indios. Some even burned their initials into the foreheads of the indios to ensure that they could not stray. The king finally forbade the branding of encomienda indios and it came to be used only for the forced laborers and criminals who work in the dreaded silver mines.

  From the indios who had come out of their huts, I heard the word casta hissed as an insult. The insult was intended as much for me as the mine slave. When I looked toward the group, one of the men caught my eye and spat upon the ground.

  "¡Imbesil!" my mother said angrily.

  The man melted into the group to avoid my mother's ire. While the villagers may have viewed my tainted blood with repugnance, my mother was india pura. Of more importance, they did not want to antagonize her because it was known that Don Francisco slept with her from time to time. My own position as the supposed bastard of the grandee won me nothing—there was no blood-tie to Don Francisco that was recognized by him or anyone else.

  The indios also believed in the myth of sangre puro, the purity of their own blood. But I represented more than tainted blood to them. A mestizo was a living reminder of the rape of their women and the ravaging of their land.

  I was just a boy and it cracked my heart to grow up surrounded by contempt.

  As the man was herded toward us, I got a closer look at the agony twisting his features. I had once watched men in the village beat a crippled deer to death with clubs. I saw in the man's eyes the same feral anguish.

  I don't know why his tormented eyes locked on mine. Perhaps he could see his own corrupted blood in my lighter skin and features. Or perhaps I was the only one whose face was expressing shock and horror.

  "¡Ni Thaca!" he shouted at me. We are also human!

  He grabbed my fishing spear. I thought he was going to turn and fight the two soldados with it. Instead he shoved the spear against his stomach and fell on it. Air and blood bubbled from his mouth and the wound as he writhed in the dirt.

  My mother pulled me aside as the soldados dismounted. One of them flogged the man, cursing him to hell for cheating them out of a reward.

  The other drew his sword and stood over the man.

  "His head, we can still get something for his head and branded face. The mine owner will post it on a stake as a warning to other runaways."

  He chopped at the dying man's neck.

  FIVE

  Thus i grew from baby crawling in the dirt to a young boy running in the dirt, neither brown nor white, neither español nor indio, welcomed nowhere save the hut of my mother and the little stone church of Fray Antonio.

  My mother's hut also welcomed Don Francisco. He came each Saturday afternoon, while his wife and daughters visited the doña of a nearby hacienda.

  At those times I was sent away from the hut. No village children played with me, so I explored the riverbanks, fishing and inventing playmates in my mind. Once I returned to the hut to retrieve my forgotten fishing spear and heard strange noises coming from the draped-off corner where my mother's pétat, her sleeping pallet, lay. I peeked through the reed curtain and saw my mother lying naked on her back. The don knelt over her, making wet, sucking noises with his mouth on one of her breasts. His hairy hind end glared at me, his garrancha and cojones swinging back and forth like those of a bull about to mount a cow. Frightened, I fled the hut and ran to the river.

  I spent most of my days with Fray Antonio. In truth, I found more love and affection from the fray than I did Miaha. While Miaha usually treated me with kindness, I never felt the warm, passionate bond between us that I saw with other children and mothers. Deep down I always felt that my mixed blood made her ashamed of me before her own people. I once expressed this feeling to the fray, and he told me it was not my blood.

  "Miaha is proud to be thought of as having the don's child. It is the woman's vanity that keeps her from showing her love. She looked into the river once, and saw her own reflection and fell in love with it."

  We both laughed over comparing her
to the vain Narcissus. Some say he fell into the pool and drowned.

  The fray taught me to read almost as soon as I was able to walk. Because most of the great classics were written in Latin and ancient Greek, he taught me my letters in both languages. The lessons always came with repeated warnings: I was never to let anyone, español or indio, know that I had such learning. The lessons were always conducted in the privacy of his room. Fray Antonio was a saint about everything but my education. He was determined to shape me into a scholar despite my mestizo blood—and when my mind did not grasp quick enough, he threatened to quicken my learning with a whipping stick but in truth, he never had the heart to strike me.

  Such learning was not only forbidden to a mestizo; Spaniards were seldom lettered unless they were destined for the priesthood. The fray said that Doña Amelia could barely write her name.

  Eh, the fray, at his personal peril, had educated me "beyond my means," as he put it. Through the fray and his books, I knew other worlds. While other boys followed their fathers to tend the fields as soon as they could walk, I sat in the fray's small chamber at the back of the little church and read Homer's Odyssey and Virgil's Aeneid.

  But all must labor on a hacienda. Had I been indio, I would have joined the others in the field. But the fray chose me as his helper. My earliest memories were of sweeping the church with a bound-twig broom, a full head taller than I, and dusting the fray's small collection of leather-bound books and codices of Scripture, classics, ancient annals, and medicine.

  Besides ministering to the souls of all on the haciendas in the valley, the fray was the chief source of medical advice. Spaniards from many miles and days of travel came seeking his medical attention, "as poor and ignorant as it is," he said, rather truthfully. Indios, of course, had their own shamans and witches to combat sickness. In our small village we had a witch-sorceress who could be called upon to put a curse on an enemy or drive off disease-inducing demons.