The pasquín, or “libel,” as they called it, was posted on the cathedral door on Saturday the eighteenth. The criminal court judges considered it disrespectful and greatly offensive to His Majesty King Felipe and His Royal Justice.
The three men named above were imprisoned. One of them, González de Eslava, wrote a letter to the archbishop. One of the copies (of which he made several) fell into my hands and said something along these lines:
“On December 20,2 I was peacefully and quietly living my life when Doctor Horozco, court judge for the Council of Castile, came to my house with constables and other people. He barged into my bedroom and opened a chest from which he took my writings and other papers. On the same day, Your Illustrious Lordship’s public prosecutor also came to my home with two court bailiffs, a minister of justice, blacks, and others. They took me into custody with a great deal of noise and fuss and put me in the archiepiscopal jail. The following day, Antequera, the deputy of the criminal court and other men came and walked me along the street and across the plaza that separate the archiepiscopal jail from the Royal Palace. As it was the feast day of Saint Thomas the Apostle, there were many people on the street and in the plaza who were startled and scandalized at the sight. Most of those who witnessed this knew me, had conversed with me over the past sixteen years that I have lived here, and were moved to the greatest compassion for me because they were certain of my innocence. That is how I was escorted to the room where they torture those who commit horrible and atrocious crimes. That is where the wooden burro they use to torture wrongdoers is kept and by which only God knows the anguish and tribulation I suffered. The above-named gentlemen asked me if I had written or ordered the libel against Don Martín Enríquez, Your Majesty’s Viceroy in New Spain. I replied that it was not my habit to commit wickedness of such enormity or any kind of abominable and horrible actions. I, Sir, was imprisoned for seventeen days.”3
As for me, I do not want to miss seeing the sun for a single day. Even without any intention to offend, the raw unvarnished truth (which is what I want to write here) would pierce the chests of some arrogant people like an arrow. I will not have to use a sword to nail the truth to the Cathedral door; it would not be necessary to wield a weapon or draw a bow in order for the truth to pierce their chests. Death will come for me soon enough and though I might still want to live even if I had my face to a wall and could no longer see the sky, it would not be long before Mother Nature would satisfy me and fulfill my foolish appetite. When death arrives I will no longer see anything illuminated by the light of the sun. I do not want to quicken this difficult, but unavoidable, ending. I am alive and my eyes are open. I want the sun to at least touch the nape of my old neck before we say goodbye to each other forever. I write this as I revisit my memories, seated in the courtyard of the Colegio de Santa Cruz, next to the convent of San Francisco in the village of Tlatelolco, the neighboring city of Tenochtitlan-Mexico, which some say is part of the original city because there is no separation between their houses and the low wall that divided them in earlier times is almost gone.
It has been a year since my legs gave up. They no longer perform their duty as legs. They no longer carry me. Now I carry them. They hang inconveniently from my body and occasionally bother me with pains that are their way of reminding me that they used to serve me, that they used to carry me from here to there. Their remorse at not complying, even poorly as they have done in recent years—slow, heavy, and unsure; stumbling through their basic, though indispensable, work as legs—manifests in the stabbing pains they torment me with. Ah legs! You should have played dead in silence! I am so ashamed when the boys carry me here every morning from my cell and back to my cell every evening; sometimes I have even wet myself like a stupid dog. I am a legless dog lying in the sun remembering; my feet lie beside me. From time to time they remember me and get up to kick me, angry because they have been cut off. But this old dog did not chop off his own legs. As a dog I do not know how to use an ax. A cruel being cut them off, slowly and calmly severing each band of ligaments while observing me mockingly with his ax brandished, considering what he will cut off next.
That cruel being is Time. The years of my life, the ax. The dog’s legs are my legs, they hang inertly next to me. I am the dog. I bask in the sun and am grateful to feel it on my skin. That bright star almost overcomes (but cannot completely dispel) the cold because nothing can warm the blood of the dog that walks so slowly that the poor body freezes in its tracks.
My blood no longer rushes in my veins. It knows that everything must end in death.
I sit here, tethered to the chair by the rope of old age. The chair was carved ex profeso4 for me by former students of Fray Pedro de Gante in the school of San José, situated next to the chapel of the same name, adjacent to Mexico City’s church and monastery of San Francisco. Now no one has the skill to embroider the inexpensive, but neat and colorful, ecclesiastical adornments. The exquisite manner in which these adornments were embroidered made the students famous. It was a skill they learned from the maestro, Fray Daniel, an innocent cherub who was Italian by birth but who took the habit in the province of Santiago and wore an iron chainmail against his skin for more than fifty years. Ah Fray Daniel! When he walked, he embroidered the floor with a zigzag pattern. Now nobody knows how to embroider in the same way (I do not mean on the floor, that step is easy to learn). The grandchildren of the students of Gante’s school, who learned how to embroider fabric from the students of the refined and sensitive Fray Daniel, do not have the mastery of their masters. Evil has infiltrated and destroyed all the very best this land has to offer. The last time I heard the choir of the Church of San Francisco, their horrific mistakes hurt my eardrums. It would seem that they can no longer read music, nor have they learned the rules by ear. In my time, the same choir was the wonder of the Tyrians and Trojans. That choir perfectly emulated the fluttering wings of the angels and the brilliance of the staircase to the heavens. All of this—their cultured voices warmed by the light of the soul and the stars; the adornments with which they dressed the altars, embroidered in the gold of wisdom with a needle and thread; and not to mention the lessons in Latin, the trivium and the quadrivium that they no longer teach—all of this, like my legs, has died. Some things remain unchanged—they still practice these arts, but now they are more like magpies or crows than artists.
I would be lying if I were to say that the very air has been contaminated with the weight of evil and hatred. I would be lying, though I almost dared to do so. I feel that the air is sick, tainted by so many mistakes. It is dirty with the wet sand of vileness and folly. But I do not notice it when the air touches my face and the wind carries the song of the cicada and the laughter of the children to me seemingly unaffected by the evil of envy.
Here I am, tethered to the chair made by Gante’s students, writing on the pages bound by the students of this school. Beneath the seat of my chair—the throne of the legless one—the students made a hidden compartment for me to keep the book in which I write every day. When I die, if anyone wants to see it, he will have to wait until time destroys the hard wood the chair is made from, which was extracted from the closed forests that cover the steep hills, where some of the Indians hid in order to escape the violence of the Spaniards, where it is not possible to live in order and harmony, where there is no human law, and where many wild beasts live in the dense vegetation.
How long would someone who wants to look at my writing have to wait? One hundred years? Two hundred? Three hundred? According to those who work with them, the trees of those forests never die and their hard wood is as indestructible as they are. Hidden, the pages will await the passage of time. No light from the sun, no air, no water will penetrate this wooden fortress. Nobody will be able to read these pages until a more noble time arrives and somebody might be disposed to read my story.
I will begin with the beginning of my own story, I will not return to the age of Anáhuac. As I have already said, I will recount only that wh
ich I saw with my own eyes and I could not have witnessed those times. I will not go back to when5
—
If the son of a nobleman was a gambler and sold his father’s things, or sold some land, he would be secretly drowned.
If someone stole a canoe, he would have to pay its worth in mantles; if he did not have the mantles, he was enslaved.
It was law that a person who practiced witchcraft, and brought evil upon a city, would be sacrificed by having his chest split open.
Anyone who killed with potions, drugged a household in order to more easily steal from them, or was a highwayman, would be hung.
Any man who enslaved an underage girl who subsequently died, was either himself enslaved, or made to pay the priest in goods or property.
Anyone who stole in the street market was stoned to death.
If a father sinned with his daughter, they were both drowned with ropes around their necks.
In some places, a man who lay with his wife after he had betrayed her was punished.
Male prostitutes, sodomists, and young men who put on or wore women’s clothing, were hung.
Women who committed adultery were stoned to death along with the men with whom they had sinned.
Taking a ration of food from another during wartime was punishable by death.
Traitors who talked to or notified enemies of plans during war had their property taken away and torn asunder and all of their relatives were enslaved.
A thief, who had not used what he had stolen, was enslaved; if what he had stolen was of value and he had used it, he was put to death.
There was a rigorously enforced law that a person who sold a lost child as a slave was himself enslaved and his hacienda was divided into two parts, one of which was given to the child and the other was given to the person who was going to buy the child. If there was more than one seller, they were all enslaved.
Judges who unjustly sentenced someone and people who made false testimony to the chief judge in a legal dispute were subject to the pain of death.
Fathers scalped, beat, and pierced the ears, thighs, and arms of their young sons and daughters when they were wicked, disobedient, or naughty. Sons of lords or rich men entered the temples in the service of the idols at seven years of age where they swept, made the fire, and lit incense. If they were negligent, naughty, or disobedient, their hands and feet were tied and their thighs, arms, and chests were pierced with pointed sticks and they were pushed down the steps of the small temples.6
—
The reason I was listing some of the laws of the ancient Nahuas in Spanish is only to make it clear that I do not want to be clear—because someone was spying over my shoulder. Fortunately, my hearing is good and I could hear the footsteps of a student approaching. Apparently, his curiosity was piqued when he noticed me writing here—in the middle of the courtyard of the Colegio Imperial de la Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco, on this poor plank of wood that the boys placed between the arms of the chair for me to use as a writing surface—in the blank book they bound for me in the workshop, using the remnants of paper left over from our printing press. The student patiently began reading, following with his eyes what I was writing in a clear hand (though perhaps no longer as beautifully as I once did) in the Italian cancelleresca script as dictated by Vicentino in the volume entitled Il modo et regola de scrivere littera corsiva over Cancellarescha (a text that disappeared from our library without even bidding us goodbye, like so many other volumes, including those that Miguel made us learn when we were young students in this school).
The boy who was spying over my shoulder will believe that I have gone mad and will make fun of me, thinking that if Sahagún, surrounded by scribes and informants his entire life, could never train his Calepino, I, a legless old invalid (in every way except my mind) had to be sick in the head to spend my time writing down idiotic ancient practices while sitting in the sun in order to conserve the little bit of warmth left in my body.
Now that the busybody has left, bored with reading all the laws I managed to write down while he was spying, I will get back to work. The laws were those I remembered hearing the elders talk about, the ones Sahagún and Olmos brought in as informants. These laws never applied to me because I was not of their time, nor was my mother an adulterer, nor my father a traitor, thief, or false judge. I know more laws than these—as well as the wisdom and stories of the ancients—that I could use as a shield should the need arise, but I do not believe it will be necessary because my graceless body does not call attention to itself. This old man does not have any grace, he is only repugnant; even worse, the poor old paralytic is doubly poor because he lives like a member of the mendicant order. This has been my humble destiny.
I pick up my pen again, but not for the purpose of fooling innocent students. I want to tell the story from beginning to end and in order to do that I have to say where, when, and how I was born, adding a little bit about my early years to explain how I became part of the history I want to recount. I will begin with my birth, move forward as quickly as possible, and will not stop until I reach the end. It is true that from time to time my vision clouds and I see only black, as if I were already a guest of the De Profundis. But even if my vision gets cloudy, my imagination and my brain do not. For example, when I refer to the De Profundis, there are several things I am sure of and others I can imagine. One is that the De Profundis will not be my final resting place because interred there, in an old room of the convent of San Francisco, are only friars and benefactors such as Doña Beatriz de Andrada, in a marked tomb, and her husband Francisco de Velasco (she, because she paid for the construction of the De Profundis with her own money and he in order to keep her company). It is understood that Hernando will definitely not sleep there among such famous people because he is just an Indian. At the end of times I will not be in the De Profundis when I see an angel coming down from heaven holding the key of the bottomless pit and a great chain in his hand, and lay hold of the dragon, that old serpent that is sin, to bind him for a thousand years. When the heavens rip open and the time of judgment arrives, will I wake up? Will it have been in vain that I was not born a warrior who, after dying in a glorious battle, transforms into a fluttering hummingbird? Will I just be bone and dust forever? Will I be made to pay for my faults by torture? When the hour of vengeance arrives (“For these are the days of vengeance, that all things may be fulfilled, that are written,” wrote Saint Luke), when the seas cover the earth and the earth covers the sea, and the dead, just and unjust, awake, will I be made to sit, reliving my life in my sad chair? Supposing this will be the case, it would be best not to go where conjectures and fears gnaw at the brain, leaving the mind wasted, as happened after Francisco Vazquez de Coronado’s long, fruitless, and failed expedition to Cíbola in search of gold in 1540. If this is where the inevitable end were to lead me, I will return to where they will bury me without any fanfare.
However, before going back there, and since I have just said what I know, I will now say in a trice what I imagine. Since the aforementioned De Profundis will not be home to the bones and dust into which death will convert me, every time my vision clouds I make a game of walking through its darkness, rehearsing an end that will not be mine. Because even if my vision is dark right now, my plebeian bones will be buried in the graveyard of the pueblo where a streak of light will sneak through. The brutal sun beats mercilessly on the barren hillsides where I will end up without any fanfare to accompany me to my final resting place. The light of the sun does not respect the bones of the commoners, known as macehuales, and I imagine light leaping among them, scoffing like a little Lucifer at their forced repose, celebrating the false triumph of darkness.
But my days on this earth did not begin like that. I was born a male child, seventy-one years ago, on 14 October of the year 1526 in Texcoco. There was a great celebration with glorious music and a lavish array of delicious foods. Many respectable people were invited from Mexico City, five leagues away, for the celebration. As
presents, they brought many jewels and a lot of wine—the jewel that made everyone most joyful. There was no incense or myrrh (I must stick to the facts of the story), but gold, precious gems, clothing, home furnishings, and even two horses were brought as gifts.
After the mass everyone went to the palace of the noble lord, where, following dinner, as was customary at that time, there was a grand party attended by a thousand or two thousand Indians. On the day of my birth, 14 October of the year 1526, they all danced until vespers. Indians, whites, and a few blacks—all a little inebriated, bellies full of delicacies—celebrated on the blessed day that my mother gave birth to the poor, legless dog I am today.
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