Aztec

by Gary Jennings

  As I have said, those warriors wore the new headdress ordained by Cortés: it looked like a clump of high, pliant grass growing from the tops of their heads. But the Spanish soldiers too, since I had seen them last, had added to their military headgear a distinctive adornment. Each of them wore a curious, pale-leather band encircling the crown of his steel helmet, just above its flanged brim. It was not particularly decorative, and served no apparent purpose, so eventually I inquired about it and one of the Spaniards, laughing, told me what it was.

  During the affray at Cholólan, while the Texcaltéca were indiscriminately butchering the mass of the city’s inhabitants, the Spaniards had gone looking specifically for the females with whom they had disported themselves during their fourteen days of revel, and they found most of those women and girls still in their quarters, trembling with fear. Convinced that the females had coupled with them only to sap their strength, the Spaniards exacted a unique revenge. They seized the women and girls, stripped them naked, and used some of them a last time or two. Then, though the females screamed and pleaded, the soldiers held them down and, with their sharp steel knives, they cut away from each female’s crotch a hand-sized flap of skin containing the oval opening of her tipíli. They left the mutilated and sexless women to bleed to death, and went away. They took the warm, purselike pouches of skin and stretched the lips of them around the pommels of their horses’ saddles. When the flesh had dried but was still pliable, they slipped the resultant circlets over their helmets, each with its little xacapíli pearl facing front—that is, the shriveled, beanlike gristle that had been a tender xacapíli. I do not know whether the soldiers wore those trophies as a grisly joke or as a warning to other scheming females.

  All the Spaniards remarked approvingly on the size and population and splendor and cleanliness of Tenochtítlan, and compared it to other cities they had visited. The names of those other cities mean nothing to me, but you reverend friars may know them. The guests said our city was bigger in extent than Valladolid, that it was more populous than Seville, that its buildings were almost as magnificent as those of Holy Rome, that its canals made it resemble Amsterdam or Venice, that its streets and airs and waters were cleaner than in any of those places. We guides refrained from remarking that the effluvium of the Spaniards was noticeably diminishing that cleanliness. Yes, the newcomers were much impressed by our city’s architecture and ornamentation and orderliness, but do you know what most impressed them? What moved them to their loudest exclamations of wonder and amazement?

  Our sanitary closets.

  It was clear that many of those men had traveled widely in your Old World, but it was equally clear that nowhere had they encountered an indoor facility for performing one’s necessary functions. They were amazed enough to find such closets in the palace they occupied; they were astonished beyond words when we took them to visit the market square of Tlaltelólco and they found public conveniences provided for even the common folk: the vendors and the marketers there. When the Spaniards first noticed the things, every single man of them, Cortés included, just had to go inside and void himself. So did Malíntzin, since such conveniences were as unknown in her native backcountry of the uncivilized Coatlícamac as they evidently are in Spain’s Holy Rome. As long as Cortés and his company stayed on the island, and as long as the marketplace existed, those public closets were the most popular and most often visited attractions of all that Tenochtítlan had to offer.

  While the Spaniards were enchanted by the closets of continually flushing water, our Mexíca physicians were cursing those same conveniences, for they avidly wished to get a sample of Cortés’s bodily wastes. And if the Spaniards were behaving like children with a new toy, those doctors were behaving like quimíchime mice, forever following Cortés about or popping their heads suddenly from around corners. Cortés could not help noticing those various elderly strangers peeking and peering at him everywhere he went in public. He finally asked about them, and Motecuzóma, secretly amused by their antics, replied only that they were doctors watching over the health of their most honored guest. Cortés shrugged and said no more, though I suspect he formed the opinion that all our physicians were more pathetically ill than any patients they might attend. Of course, what the doctors were doing, and not doing very subtly, was trying to verify their earlier conclusion that the white man Cortés was indeed afflicted with the nanáua disease. They were trying to measure with their eyes the significant curvature of his thighbones, trying to get close enough to hear if he breathed with the characteristic snuffling noise, or to see if his incisor teeth had the telltale notches.

  Even I began to find them an embarrassment and an annoyance, always lurking in the way of our walks about the city and abruptly pouncing from unexpected places. When one day I literally tripped over an old doctor who was crouching for a leg-level view of Cortés, I angrily took him aside and demanded, “If you dare not ask for permission to examine the exalted white man, surely you can invent some excuse for examining his woman, who is merely one of us.”

  “It would not serve, Mixtzin,” said the physician unhappily. “She will not have been infected by their connection. The nanáua can be transmitted to a sexual partner only in its early and flagrantly evident stages. If, as we suspect, the man was born of a diseased mother, then he is long past being a hazard to any other woman, though he could give her a diseased child. We are all naturally eager to know if we rightly divined his condition, but we cannot be sure. If only he were not so fascinated by the sanitary facilities, if we could examine his urine for traces of chiatóztli …”

  I said in exasperation, “I keep finding you everywhere except squatting under him in the closets. I suggest, Lord Physician, that you go and instruct their palace steward to have slaves dismantle the man’s closet there, and explain that it is clogged, and provide a pot for him to use in the meantime, and instruct his chambermaid to bring the pot—”

  “Ayyo, a brilliant idea,” said the physician, and he went hurrying off. We were molested no more during our excursions, but I never did hear whether the doctors found any definite evidence of Cortés’s being a sufferer of the shameful disease.

  I must report that those first Spaniards did not admire everything in Tenochtítlan. Some of the sights we showed them they disliked and even deplored. For example, they recoiled violently at sight of the skull rack in The Heart of the One World. They seemed to find it disgusting that we should wish to keep those relics of so many persons of renown who had gone to their Flowery Deaths in that plaza. But I have heard your Spanish storytellers tell of your own long-ago hero, El Cid, whose death was kept secret from his enemies, while his stiff body was bent to a shape that could be mounted on a horse, and thus he led his army to win its last battle. Since you Spaniards so treasure that tale, I do not know why Cortés and his company thought our display of notable persons’ skulls any more gruesome than El Cid’s preservation after death.

  But the things that most repelled the white men were our temples, with their evidence of many sacrifices, both recent and long past. To give his visitors the best possible view of his city, Motecuzóma took them to the summit of the Great Pyramid, which, except during sacrificial ceremonies, was always kept scrubbed and gleaming on its outside. The guests climbed the banner-bordered stairs, admiring the grace and immensity of the edifice, the vividness of its painted and beaten-gold decoration, and they looked all about them at the vista of city and lake which broadened as they climbed. The two temples atop the pyramid were also bright on the outside, but the interiors were never cleaned. Since an accumulation of blood signified an accumulation of veneration, the temples’ statues and walls and ceilings and floors were thick with coagulated blood.

  The Spaniards entered the temple of Tlaloc, and instantly lunged out again, with retching exclamations and faces expressive of nausea. It was the first and only time I ever knew the white men to back away from a smell, or even acknowledge one, but in truth the stench of that place was worse than their
own. When they could control their heaving stomachs, Cortés and Alvarado and the priest Bartolomé went inside again, and went into spasms of rage when they discovered Tlaloc’s hollow statue to be filled, right up to the level of his gaping square mouth, with the decaying human hearts on which he had been fed. Cortés was so infuriated that he whipped out his sword and gave the statue a mighty blow. It only chipped away a fragment of dried blood from Tlaloc’s stone face, but it was an insult that made Motecuzóma and his priests gasp with consternation. However, Tlaloc did not respond with any devastating blast of lightning, and Cortés caught hold of his temper. He said to Motecuzóma:

  “This idol of yours is no god. It is an evil thing which we call a devil. It must be cast down and out and into eternal darkness. Let me set here in its place the cross of Our Lord and an image of Our Lady. You will see that this demon dares not object, and from that you will realize that it is inferior, that it fears the True Faith, and that you will be well advised to abjure such wicked beings and embrace our kindly ones.”

  Motecuzóma said stiffly that the idea was unthinkable, but the Spaniards went into convulsions again when they entered the adjacent temple of Huitzilopóchtli, and yet again when they beheld the similar temples atop the lesser pyramid at Tlaltelólco, and each time Cortés expressed his repugnance more strongly and in more intemperate words.

  “The Totonáca,” he said, “have swept their country clean of these foul idols, and have given their allegiance to Our Lord and His Virgin Mother. The monstrous mountain temple at Cholólan has been leveled. At this moment, some of my friars are instructing King Xicoténca and his court in the blessings of Christianity. I tell you, in none of those places have the old devil-deities so much as whimpered. And I swear on my oath, neither will they when you cast them out!”

  Motecuzóma replied, and I translated, doing my best to convey the iciness of his words, “Captain-General, you are here as my guest, and a mannerly guest does not deride his host’s beliefs any more than he would mock his host’s taste in dress or wives. Also, although you are my guest, a majority of my people resent that they too must be hospitable to you. If you try to tamper with their gods, the priests will raise an outcry against you, and in matters of religion the priests can overrule my mandates. The people will heed the priests, not me, and you will be fortunate if you and your men are only evicted alive from Tenochtítlan.”

  Even the brash Cortés understood that he was being sharply reminded of his tenuous position, and he withdrew from pressing the topic further, and he muttered words of apology. At which Motecuzóma likewise thawed a little, and said:

  “However, I try to be a fair man and a generous host. I realize that you Christians have no place here in which to worship your own gods, and I have no objection to your doing that. I will order that the small Eagle Temple in the grand plaza be cleared of its statues and altar stones and anything else offensive to your faith. Your priests may put in whatever furnishings they require, and the temple is your temple for as long as you want it.”

  Our own priests naturally were not pleased at even that minor concession to the aliens, but they did no more than grumble when the white priests took over the little temple. Thereafter, in fact, the place was more frequented than it had ever been. The Christian priests seemed to hold their Masses and other services continuously from morning to night, whether the white soldiers attended or not—because numbers of our own people, drawn by simple curiosity, began to drift in to those services. I say our own people; in actuality, they were mainly the white men’s female consorts and allied warriors from other nations. But the priests employed Malíntzin to translate their sermons, and were delighted when many of those heathen participants submitted—still no more than curious about the novelty of it—to take the salt and sprinkling and new-naming of baptism. Anyway, Motecuzóma’s granting of that temple temporarily diverted Cortés from laying violent hands on our ancient gods, as he had done in other places.

  The Spaniards had been in Tenochtítlan for little more than a month when something happened that could have expunged them forever from Tenochtítlan, probably from the entire One World. A swift-messenger came from Lord Patzínca of the Totonáca and, if he had reported to Motecuzóma, as formerly he would have done, the white men’s sojourn might have ended then and there. However, the messenger made his report to the Totonáca army camped on the mainland, and he was brought by one of that company into the city to repeat it privily to Cortés. His news was that a serious commotion had occurred on the coast.

  What had happened was this. A Mexícatl tribute collector named Cuaupopóca, making his accustomed annual round of various tributary nations, accompanied by a troop of Mexíca warriors, had collected the year’s levy from the Huaxtéca, who also live on the seacoast, but to the north of the Totonáca. Then, leading a train of Huaxtéca porters, conscripted to carry their own tribute goods to Tenochtítlan, Cuaupopóca had moved on south into the Totonáca country, as he had been doing every year for years. But on reaching the capital city of Tzempoálan, he was shocked and indignant to find that the Totonáca were unprepared for his arrival. There was no stock of goods ready to go; there were no local men waiting to serve as porters; the ruling Lord Patzínca had not even the usual list compiled for Cuaupopóca to know what the tribute was supposed to consist of.

  Having come from the northern hinterlands, Cuaupopóca had heard nothing of the misadventure that had befallen the Mexíca registrars who always went ahead of him, and he knew nothing of all the occurrences since then. Motecuzóma could easily have sent word to him, but had not. And I will never know whether the Revered Speaker simply forgot, in the press of so many other events, or whether he deliberately chose to let the tribute collection proceed as usual, just to see what would happen. Well, Cuaupopóca tried to do his duty. He demanded the tribute from Patzínca, who did his customary cringing but refused to comply, on the ground that he was no longer subordinate to The Triple Alliance. He had new masters, white ones, who lived in a fortified village farther down the beach. Patzínca whiningly suggested that Cuaupopóca apply to the white officer in charge there, a certain Juan de Escalante.

  Angry and mystified, but determined, Cuaupopóca led his men to the Villa Rica de la Vera Cruz, to be received only with jeers in a language that was incomprehensible but recognizably insulting. So he, a mere tribute collector, did what the mighty Motecuzóma never had done yet; he objected to being thus disdainfully treated, and he objected strenuously, violently, decisively. In so doing, Cuaupopóca may have made a mistake, but he made it in the grand manner, in the lordly manner to be expected of the Mexíca. Patzínca and Escalante made a worse mistake in provoking him to it, for they should have been aware of their vulnerability. Practically the entire Totonáca army had marched away with Cortés, along with practically all of his own. Tzempoálan had few men left to defend it, and Vera Cruz was not much better manned, since most of its garrison consisted of the boatmen left there simply because they had no ships to require their employment.

  Cuaupopóca, I repeat, was only a minor Mexícatl official. I may be the only person who even remembers his name, though many still remember the fate to which his tonáli brought him. The man was diligent in his duty of collecting levies, and that was the first time in his career that he had ever met defiance from a tributary nation, and he must have been as fiery-tempered as his name implied—it meant Smoldering Eagle—and he would not be balked in accomplishing his mission. He snapped an order to his force of Mexíca warriors and they leapt eagerly into action, because they were fighting men, bored by an undemanding journey of escort duty. They happily seized the opportunity for combat, and they were not long deterred by the few harquebuses and crossbows discharged at them from the stockade walls of the white men’s village.

  They killed Escalante and what few professional soldiers Cortés had detached to his command. The remaining population of unwarlike boatmen immediately surrendered. Cuaupopóca set guards there and around the Tzempoálan palace
, then ordered the rest of his men to strip clean the entire surrounding country. This year, he proclaimed to the terrorized Totonáca, their levy would comprise no fraction of their goods and produce, but all of it. So it had been something of a feat for Patzínca’s messenger to escape from the cordoned palace, and to slip past the scourging warriors of Cuaupopóca, and to bring Cortés the bad news.

  Surely Cortés perceived how much more perilous his own position had suddenly become, and how uncertain his future, but he wasted no time in brooding. He went immediately to Motecuzóma’s palace, and in no subdued or fearful mood. He took with him the red giant Alvarado and Malíntzin and a number of heavily armed men, and all of them stormed past the palace stewards and, without ceremony, directly into Motecuzóma’s throne room. Cortés raged, or pretended to rage, as he regaled the Revered Speaker with an amended version of the report he had received. As he told it, a roving band of Mexíca bandits had without provocation attacked his few men peaceably living on the beach, and had slaughtered them. It was a grave breach of the truce and friendship Motecuzóma had promised, and what did Motecuzóma intend to do about it?

  The Revered Speaker knew of the tribute train’s presence in that general area, so, from hearing Cortés’s account, he would have supposed that it had got involved in a skirmish there and had done some damage among the white men. But he need not have hastened to conciliate Cortés; he could have temporized long enough to find out the true state of affairs. And the truth was this: the white men’s one and only established settlement in these lands had surrendered itself to Cuaupopóca’s Mexíca troops; the white men’s one most biddable ally, Lord Patzínca, was cowering inside his palace, a prisoner of the Mexíca. Meanwhile, Motecuzóma had almost all the rest of the white men contained on his island, easy prey for elimination; and Cortés’s other white and native troops could easily have been held off the island while the mainland armies of The Triple Alliance gathered to pulverize them. Thanks to Cuaupopóca, Motecuzóma held the Spaniards and all their supporters helpless in his hand. He had only to close that hand into a fist and squeeze until the blood ran out between his fingers.