Aztec Rage

by Gary Jennings

  I spoke quietly, little more than a whisper, as if the walls had ears. “You’re right. No one could be as dull-witted as that notary was. The confession he wrote out was concocted in advance. He will lie, say that they were my words he transcribed and that I confessed to the crimes they accuse me of. You are right, amigo. They’ll kill me.”

  “And bury the truth.”

  We were silent for a moment, and then I said, “I was wrong about you, Señor Lizardi. You know little about horses and women, guns and blades, but I now see that men kill as thoroughly with paper and quill as with pistol and sword.”

  I listened quietly for a reply until I realized he was softly snoring.

  Ay, some of the insanity made sense. My life was no longer spinning down a maelstrom of madness. No, Lizardi had spoken the truth. The notary was not a fool but had told the story on orders. No doubt his masters would send others like him to inns, social gatherings, and card games to spread the lie. They’ll start by assassinating my character. When they’ve succeeded, they’ll take my life.

  How could I defend against them? No doubt they thought of me as soft, that I would break in this hellhole of a jail, but unlike most caballeros, I rode and worked alongside the vaqueros at my hacienda. I enjoyed a life in the saddle: breaking mounts, herding cattle, gelding bulls, branding steers, fording rivers. I spent many months each year on the open range and in mountains, hunting and fishing, living off the land. I was not the dandy that they imagined.

  But the most pressing question now was how to free myself from this prison-house, find pistol and blade so I could make them pay for their crimes.

  FIFTEEN

  TWO DAYS LATER another disaster struck.

  “I gave my remaining funds to the trustee last night,” Lizardi said. “We’ll be evicted from our comfortable quarters and have to join—” he sniffed in the rabble’s direction, “them.”

  I had devoured my own basket of food, and no more had come. Lizardi, who had been in jail before, explained that the person sending the food had to know who, as well as how much, to bribe or else the package would end up in the wrong hands. I suspected that Isabella still sent food baskets but did not know the proper way to get them in my hands.

  “What about your family?” I asked.

  “They’re in the capital. I’ve sent a message. My father detests my politics and has disowned me.”

  “How many times have you been arrested?”

  “Twice. You see, amigo, we’re both in the same quandary. They’ll bury me alive in their dungeons or slit my gullet. They may try me first, but my fate is assured. Your case, on the other hand, will never see daylight.”

  As if he had heard our whispers, the trustee suddenly materialized.

  “Out of here, you peso-less léperos. The best room at this fine inn has been reserved by another guest.”

  The new prisoner was a big burly mestizo shopkeeper who was in trouble for cheating on his taxes. He didn’t appear to be someone I could bully as easily as Lizardi, so I joined Lizardi in our new home, a space big enough for our rear ends on the floor with the wall against our backs.

  Lizardi moaned and buried his head in his arms. “The pity of it, I—a university-educated pure-blood Spaniard—forced to live in filthy conditions among you lowly léperos.”

  I batted him across the side of the head. “Insult me again, and I’ll stick your head in a shit bucket.”

  But I felt no malice toward the man. I had discovered that he had great courage when it came to speaking ideas, though he was more cowardly than the commonest cur when it came to physical duress. I found his verbal valor and physical timidity a curious combination. I, on the other hand, was brave as a bull but devoid of ideas, philosophies, and burning beliefs. I functioned solely in the here and now, living day by day, taking what I wanted, discarding what I tired of. I had no interest in religion or politics, about colonial governance, divine rights of kings, or whether the pope was the Chosen Hand of God, though I was forced to listen to Lizardi expound for hours on end on these matters. But the pamphleteer had not instilled his ideals in me; I still believed in nothing. And at least now I knew it.

  Lizardi was dozing when the trustee came in and ordered all of us to line up. “Road work,” he said.

  “What’s that?” Lizardi asked me, after the trustee left.

  “Labor for work animals. The warden rents prisoners out to businesses. We’re to work for the contractor who repairs the roads.”

  “How often do we do this?”

  I shrugged. “This is the first time I’ve been selected.”

  “I’m a criollo. This is an outrage. I will speak to the jail warden.”

  “Do that. The more they think about you, the quicker they’ll hang you. You’ll get a clean rope, of course, because your blood’s so white.”

  A guard shackled my right and left ankles together with a two-foot chain, then fitted Lizardi with leg irons as well. Only Lizardi and I were so restrained. The constabulary had hauled the rest of the prisoners out of the gutter after a night of drinking. They wouldn’t run farther than the nearest pulquería.

  We were marched single file out of the jail. We stepped into blinding sunlight, and I took in a deep lungful of the fresh air, the first breath I’d tasted in ages that the prison’s effluvium hadn’t befouled.

  I stared at my hands and bare feet: My skin was filthy. ¡Ay de mí! What I must have smelled like. The streets seemed strange to me, though I’d been down them hundreds of times. Now I saw them differently, picking up details I’d never noticed before: the colors brighter, sharper, gaudier than before; the smells more pronounced, more pungent, more distinctive; the people more vivid, more animated, more vibrant.

  In the past, I had always been so focused on myself and on my position in life, almost always riding above the crowd on a fine horse, that I hadn’t studied the world around—and beneath—me. Now I stared at the people on the street as they moved out of our path and away from our smell. I wondered if they had heard about me, if they had been told the big lie about Juan de Zavala.

  I had little respect for the common people, even the respectable ones who were shopkeepers and clerks. Now they would repay me at my execution. Hangings were public spectacles, and they would battle the rabble to watch the trap drop and my neck snap . . . close up.

  We were marched to the road that led up to the paseo. A rainstorm had flooded it out, and we were to pave it with cobblestones. Eh, how many times I had come down this road, riding tall on Tempest, saluting the señoritas along the way.

  Now I came filthy, barefoot, and in leg irons, my feet raw and sore by the time we reached the street. I tried to ignore the pain and remember those days when I rode as a caballero with a powerful ebony mount beneath me, when I terrified servants, and titillated señoritas who giggled and hid behind Chinese silk fans when I promised to slay Englishmen and dragons for them.

  My reverie was interrupted by a shout from the contractor’s foreman. He stood before a line of carts loaded with stones. “I’m paying these devils to work, and work they shall. The first time any of them loaf or malinger, they will taste my boots. If I catch them again, they will taste my whip.”

  Loading the cart’s cobblestones into sacks, we lugged them to the worksite at the end of the barricaded street. There, prisoners dug narrow holes and inserted the cobblestones lengthwise into the predug slots. Soon my feet were raw. Lizardi’s feet were protected by boots, but his hands, like my feet, were blistered and bloody.

  “The hands that held the pen of truth are red with the blood of bondage,” he said, wincing.

  “Save it for your pamphlets,” I muttered.

  As I worked, young caballeros on horseback and wealthy señoritas in carriages passed by. I recognized many of them; none, God be praised, recognized the filthy, stinking creature with blistered hands and bleeding feet, staggering under loads of rock, though for a time I stood rooted in shame and shock.

  Gawking at my former acquaintance
s in their fine clothes, riding their handsome horses, I wished I ate as well as their horses . . . until, that is, the foreman kicked me in the shin hard enough to break the skin and bruise the bone. “Get to work, swine!”

  Returning to work, my leg bled from where the foreman kicked me. A couple of weeks ago if a man had kicked me, I would have . . . Ay, that had been a different life, a different world.

  One night, eons ago, sleeping under the stars with my hacienda’s vaqueros, one of them described the Aztec hell, an underworld where people suffered one ordeal after another: swimming raging rivers, crawling among deadly snakes, fighting wars, jungle jaguars, and other brutal tests. He called that hell Mictlán, and I wondered if by some twist of heaven or hell the Aztec gods had plunged me into it.

  Mictlán’s nine regions of horror and torment must be overcome, the vaquero had said, before a person cast there can find peace. Only after years of transcending torments and enduring ordeals would the person reach the place of oblivion, where a dark god of a nether region would destroy his soul, not so the soul might ascend to heaven but so that it might suffer no more.

  Perhaps my fate was to have Mictlán test my resolve with one hideous torment after another, only to find in the end not paradise but eternal night.

  SIXTEEN

  AS I LUGGED another rock load toward the worksite, a paseo carriage caught my eye, stopping me in my tracks. One of the most expensive open carriages in the city, it conveyed the most beautiful woman on whom I have ever gazed upon.

  “Isabella!”

  I ran . . . No, I hobbled in leg irons toward the oncoming carriage, shouting her name again and again.

  Isabella half-stood in the coach, gaping as I ran toward her. She screamed and fell back down as her driver whipped the horse. The carriage surged forward, toward me, bouncing up the rough unpaved road, throwing Isabella and a señorita sitting across from her about the carriage.

  Dodging the horses and carriage, I grabbed hold of the side of the carriage door, stumbling alongside it as it took off. “It’s me, Isabella!”

  She screamed in horror and hit me with her parasol. A caballero, coming behind the carriage, charged me on horseback. I saw the horse and man coming and let go of the coach. Dodging the horse, my hobbled legs did not move me fast enough to avoid a blow. The rider hit me across the top of my head with the shot-loaded buttstock of his whip as he swept by. I stumbled and fell, almost passing out, hitting the ground hard and rolling, bleeding from the head.

  Before I could get up a guard was on me, hitting me with the butt of his musket. I took the beating, in stoic silence, knowing resistance would only exacerbate my punishment. Only when the foreman grabbed the man’s musket did the guard desist.

  “I’m paying for that man’s work. If you cripple him, you must pay me for his lost labor.”

  With that, I was able to get dizzily to my feet and stagger along with work. And work I did, keeping my head low, ashamed of what I had become, ashamed of what I had done to poor Isabella. No wonder she panicked, fool that I was for charging her carriage like a wild animal. She hadn’t recognized me, of that I was certain, for had she known it was me, she would have ordered the driver to stop. After all, had she not sent me rations and a mattress?

  Lizardi nudged me. “You’re woolgathering. Keep working or you will get another beating.”

  I knelt on painful bleeding knees and placed rocks in position. As we worked, he spoke to me.

  “The señorita, she’s your love?”

  “Yes, she has captured my heart.”

  “Captured it and chopped it into little pieces, from what I can see. Along with most of your brains.”

  I glared at him. “Watch your tongue, señor, or it’ll get cut out.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “I only wonder if your heart’s desire is as desirous of you as you are of her. You called out her name, she must have recognized your voice . . . but didn’t seem pleased to see you.”

  “She didn’t recognize me.” I punched my chest over my heart. “I know this woman; our hearts beat as one. If I asked her, she would fling herself into a den of lions.” I sneered at him. “You don’t understand, you worthless worm of a scholar. No woman would want you because your cojones are the size of peas.”

  We trudged back toward the jail, wearily dragging our feet, one step and then the next. Lizardi clutched the back of my pants to keep up. His sedentary scholar’s life had not prepared him for hard labor, and while my life had been active, I had been active on a horse. I was not used to hauling and lifting on shank’s mare. I left bloody footsteps in my wake.

  Lizardi muttered behind me, sometimes praying, sometimes lamenting how la Fortuna, the puta of chance, had weighted the dice against him.

  If I had had the energy, I would have mocked his mournful utterances. Eh, if Señora Fortuna had rigged the game of life against anyone, it was Juan de Zavala, no?

  Later that afternoon we stopped for a rest, sitting in the gutter, while the guards smoked, drank from wine bodas, and talked to a pair of putas, probably discussing price. I had had one of them a few months ago.

  One of the guards broke off negotiations. Unrolling a piece of paper, he read off a dozen names. When he called a prisoner’s name, the inmate wandered off down the street. Over half the work crew was released.

  “Drunks,” I told Lizardi, “serve only three days and are released.”

  An indio in white cotton pants, a white collarless shirt, and the leather sandals of his class approached me.

  “For you, señor.”

  He dropped a pair of boots in front of me.

  “What—?” I stared at the boots in surprise.

  “From the señorita,” he said, pointing up the street, where a woman wearing a black dress, her head covered by the traditional long scarf, disappeared around a corner.

  I asked her name, but the Aztec walked away without answering. I quickly shoved my feet into the boots. The boots were worn but sturdy and finely crafted. Indio tradesmen had hand-worked the deep cinnamon-color leather until it was as soft as a glove, the boots of a caballero, similar to the ones stolen from me at the jail.

  The dozing Lizardi woke as I pulled on my boots.

  “Where did you get those?”

  “You cucaracha of a man, you woman in pants,” I said, jovially, no insult intended, for I was in high spirits, “did I not tell you that my Isabella wouldn’t forsake me?”

  “She brought you boots?”

  “A messenger, but I am sure they came from her.” I nudged him with my elbow. “My luck is changing; Señora Fortuna has thrown the dice again, and this time I am the winner. Soon I will be out of this jail, a full caballero, all rights restored.”

  “You are deranged.”

  I ignored his cynicism. The boots had redeemed my faith in Isabella. In all honesty, the worm of doubt had gnawed at my brain when she failed to recognize me—ay, she hit me with her parasol and screamed—but no, she was my true love, faithful and resolute, ready to throw herself to the lions for me. Although I hadn’t seen enough of the woman in black to identify her, no one else in the city would have helped me except my sainted Isabella.

  The world suddenly was bright again. I felt stronger and more capable of facing my next hellish ordeal. But I had not considered that the viceroy also spoke in New Spain, in words that the deaf could hear and the blind could see.

  SEVENTEEN

  YOU’RE BEING SENT to Manila,” the notary told me.

  It was the next day, and I once again had an audience with him. I stared at him, wondering what he was talking about.

  “Manila?”

  “Certainly you’ve had enough education to know where Manila is. It’s the capital of our colony called the Philippines.”

  “I am well aware of where Manila is,” I snapped. Actually, all I knew was that the Philippines were somewhere across the vast Pacific Ocean, near Cathay, the land of the chinos. I recalled hearing other things about that colony—all of them bad—bu
t at the moment, my mind had gone blank. The call to appear before the notary had caught me by surprise. To be told I was going to be shipped to another city in a distant land rather than being hanged had stunned me. Perhaps they had discerned my innocence.

  “They found out I’m not lying, haven’t they?”

  He put his nosegay to his face distastefully. “You have caused your betters trouble and consternation. Some wish to try you in court, then hang you. Others wish to turn you over to the Inquisition to be tortured hard and burned at the stake.”

  “The Inquisition? What have I done against God and the church?”

  “You exist.” He struggled to maintain his composure. “You may thank God that the viceroy is not hanging you and the Inquisitors are not burning you alive . . . after breaking you on the rack.”

  “I have done nothing wrong,” I said stubbornly.

  “Get out of here, you swine, before I order you racked, flogged, castrated, and quartered myself.”

  Lizardi was waiting in line to see the notary.

  I whispered to him as I came by, “They’re sending me to Manila.”

  His jaw dropped, and he made the sign of the cross on his chest.

  What’s wrong with him? I wondered. I got good news, and he acted like I had been sentenced to the holy fires of an Inquisitional auto-da-fé.

  I went back to the cell and lay on my straw mattress. Lizardi and I were both back in the small, private cell. Someone—my Isabella, for certain—was again paying for me to have decent food and treatment. I was just as certain that she had arranged my voyage to Manila and that she would meet me there.

  When Lizardi came back, he was ghostly white, his face haggard and drawn.