Aztec

by neetha Napew

  * * *

  I bid you welcome once again, Your Excellency, after such long absence. Do you come to hear the conclusion of my narrative? Well, I have told it all, except for a little bit.

  Cortés returned with his train about a year after I had left him, and his first concern was to put about the false story of the planned insurrection of the three Revered Speakers, and to show my drawing as "proof" of their collusion, and to proclaim the justness of his having executed them for that treason. It came as a shock to all the people of what had been The Triple Alliance, for I had not broached the news to any but Béu. All the people mourned, of course, and held belated funeral services of remembrance. They also, of course, muttered darkly among themselves, but they had no choice except to feign belief in the version of the incident told by Cortés. He did not, I might remark, bring back the perfidious Florencia to support his story. He would not have risked her trying to achieve another fleeting moment of recognition by publicly giving the lie to her own lies. Where and how he disposed of the creature, no one ever heard, or cared enough to inquire.

  Surely Cortés had been angered by my desertion of his expedition, but that anger must have ebbed during the ensuing year, for he never ordered a hunt for me, or not that I know of. None of his men ever came seeking my whereabouts; none of his dogs were sent to sniff me out. Béu and I were left to live as best we could.

  By that time, the marketplace of. Tlaltelólco had been restored, though much reduced in size. I went there to see what was being bought and sold, and by whom, and for what prices. The market was as crowded as in the old days, though at least half the crowd consisted of white men and women. I noticed that most of the goods exchanged between my own people went by barter—"I will give you this gallipavo fowl for that pottery bowl"—but the Spanish buyers were paying in trade currency: ducados and reales and maravedies. And, while they bought foodstuffs and other commodities, they also bought a great many things of only trifling use or decorative worth. Listening to them talk, I gathered that they were buying "quaint native handcrafts" to keep for their "curiosity value" or to send to their kinfolk back home as "mementos of New Spain."

  As you know, Your Excellency, many different flags have flown over this city during the years since its reconstruction as the City of Mexíco. There has been Cortés's personal standard, blue and white with a red cross; and the blood-and-gold flag of Spain; and the one bearing the picture of the Virgin Mary in what I suppose are realistic colors; and the one with the two-headed eagle signifying empire; and others of significance unknown to me. In the market that day, I saw many artisans obsequiously offering for sale miniature copies of those various flags, well or badly done, but even the best did not seem to arouse any fervor among the browsing Spaniards. And I saw that not any of the tradesmen were offering similar replicas of our own proud symbol of the Mexíca nation. Perhaps they feared they could be charged with harboring sympathies contrary to peace and good order.

  Well, I had no such fears. Or rather, I was already punishable for worse offenses, so I felt not much concern for trivial ones. I went home to our wretched little hut, and I made a drawing, and I knelt beside Béu's pallet to hold it close to her eyes.

  "Waiting Moon," I said, "can you see this clearly enough to copy it?" She peered intently as I pointed to the various elements. "See, it is an eagle, with his wings poised for flight, and he perches on a nopali cactus, and in his beak he holds the war symbol of intertwined ribbons—"

  "Yes," she said. "Yes. I can better make out the details, now that you have explained them. But copy it, Záa? What do you mean?"

  "If I buy the materials, could you make a copy of this by embroidering with colored threads upon a small square of cloth? It need not be as exquisite as the pictures you used to make. Just brown for the eagle, green for the nopali, perhaps red and yellow for the ribbons."

  "I believe I could. But why?"

  "If you can make enough such copies, I can sell them in the market. To the white men and women. They seem to fancy such curiosities, and they pay in coin for them."

  She said, "I will make one, while you watch me, so you can correct me where I go wrong. When I have one done right, and can feel it with my fingertips, I can use it for a pattern to do any number of others."

  And she did, and very nicely too, and I applied for a place in the market, and was allotted a small space, and there I spread a groundcloth, and on it I arrayed the replicas of the old emblem of the Mexíca. No one in authority came to molest me, or to make me take the things away; instead, many people came and bought. Most were Spaniards, but even some of my own race offered me this or that in barter, because they had thought they would never again see that reminder of who and what we had been.

  From the start, many Spaniards complained of the design: "That is not a very lifelike snake the eagle is eating." I tried to tell them that it was not intended to be a snake, nor was the eagle eating it. But they seemed unable to comprehend that it was a word picture, the intertwined ribbons that signified fire and smoke, hence also signified war. And warfare, I explained, had constituted a great part of Mexíca history, whereas no reptile ever had. They said only, "It would look better with a snake."

  If that was what they wanted, that was what they would have. I made a revised drawing, and helped Waiting Moon make from it a new piece of embroidery, which she used thereafter as her pattern. When inevitably other tradesmen at the market copied the emblem, they copied it complete with the snake. None of the imitations were as well made as Béu's, so my business did not suffer much. Rather, I was amused by the slavishness of the copies, amused that I had instigated a whole new industry, amused that that should be my concluding contribution to The One World. I had been many things in my life, even for a time the Lord Mixtli, a man of stature and wealth and respectability. I would have laughed if anyone had told me, "You will end your roads and your days as a common tradesman peddling to haughty outlanders little cloth copies of the Mexíca emblem—and a debased travesty of the emblem, at that." I would have laughed, so I did laugh, as I sat there day after day in the marketplace, and those who stopped to buy from me thought me a jolly old man.

  As things turned out, I did not quite end there, because the time came when Béu's eyesight failed completely, and her fingers also went, and she could no longer do the embroidery, so I had to close my little venture into trade. We have lived since then on the savings of coins we put by, though Waiting Moon has often and fretfully expressed the wish that death might release her from her black prison of boredom and immobility and misery. After a while of inactivity, of doing no more than existing, I might have wished that release for myself as well. But it was then that Your Excellency's friars found me and brought me here, and you asked me to talk of times past, and that has been diversion enough to sustain my interest in living. While my employment here has meant an even more dreary and solitary imprisonment for Béu, she has endured it just so I would have someone to go home to, on the nights I have gone home to that shack. When finally I go there to stay, perhaps I shall arrange that it be no overlong stay for her and me. We have no more work to do, or any other excuse for remaining in the world of the living. And I might mention that the last contribution we did make to The One World does not now amuse me. Go to the Tlaltelólco market this day and you will see the Mexíca emblem still for sale, still complete with serpent. What is worse—why I am not amused—you will also hear there the professional storytellers, now coiling that invented and excrescent snake into our most venerable legends:

  "Hear me and know. When our people first came here to this lake region, when we were still the Aztéca, our great god Huitzilopóchtli bade our priests look for a place where there stood a nopali, and upon it an eagle perched, eating a snake...."

  Well, Your Excellency, so much for history. I cannot change the pitiful little falsities of it, any more than I can change the far more deplorable realities of it. But the history I have told is the history through which I lived, and in which
I had some part, and I have told it truthfully. I kiss the earth to that, which is to say: I swear to it.

  * * *

  Now, it may be that I have here and there in my narrative left a gap that Your Excellency would like bridged, or there may be questions Your Excellency would wish to put to me, or further details Your Excellency would desire on one subject or another. But I beg that they be postponed for a time, and that I be allowed a respite from this employment. I ask Your Excellency's permission now to take my leave of you and the reverend scribes and this room in what was once The House of Song. It is not because I am weary of speaking, or because I have said all that might be told, or because I suspect you may be weary of hearing me speak. I ask to take my leave because last night, when I went home to my hut and sat down beside my wife's pallet, something astounding occurred. Waiting Moon told me that she loved me! She said that she loved me and that she always had and that she still does. Since Béu never in her life said any such thing before, I think she may be approaching the end of her long dying, and that I ought to be with her when it comes. Forlorn things though we are, she and I, we are all we have—Last night, Béu said she had loved me ever since our first meeting, long ago, in Tecuantépec, in the days of our greenest youth. But she lost me the first time and she lost me forever, she said, when I decided to go seeking the purple dye, when she and her sister Zyanya did the choosing of the twigs to see which of the girls would accompany me. She had lost me then, she said, but she had never ceased to love me, and never encountered another man she could love. When she made that astonishing revelation last night, an unworthy thought went through my mind. I thought: if it had been you, Béu, who went with me, who married me soon after, then it would be Zyanya whom now I would still have with me. But that thought was chased away by another: would I have wanted Zyanya to suffer as you have suffered, Béu? And I pitied the poor wreckage lying there, saying she loved me. She sounded so sad that I endeavored to make light of it. I remarked that she had chosen some odd ways in which to manifest her love, and I told how I had seen her dabbling in the magic art, making a mud image of me, as witch women do when they would work harm upon a man. Béu said, and she sounded sadder yet, that she had made it to do me no hurt; that she had waited long and in vain for us to share a bed; that she had made the image that she might sleep with it and possibly enchant me into her embrace and into love of her. I sat silent beside her pallet, then, and I thought over many things past, and I realized how undiscerning and impervious I have been during all the years Béu and I have known each other; how I have been more unseeing and crippled than Béu is at this moment in her utter blindness. It is not a woman's place to announce that she loves a man, and Béu had respected that traditional inhibition; she had never said it, she had disguised her feelings with a flippancy that I had obstinately and always taken for scorn or mockery. She had let slip her ladylike restraint only a few times—I remembered her once saying wistfully, "I used to wonder why I was named Waiting Moon"—and I had refused ever to recognize those moments, when all I need have done was hold out my arms—True, I loved Zyanya, I have gone on loving her, and I always will. But that would not have been diminished by my later loving Béu too. Ayya, the years I have thrown away! And it was I who deprived myself; I can blame no one else. What is more hurtful to my heart is the ungracious way in which I deprived Waiting Moon, who waited so long, until now it is too late to salvage even a last moment of all those misused years. I would make them up to her if I could, but I cannot. I would have taken her to me last night, and lain with her in the act of love, and perhaps I could have done it, but what remains of Béu could not. So I did the only thing possible, which was to speak, and I spoke it honestly, saying, "Béu, my dear wife, I love you too." She could not reply, for the tears came and choked what little voice she has left, but she put out her hand to mine. I squeezed it tenderly, and I sat there holding it, and I would have entwined our fingers, but I could not even do that, since she has no fingers.

  As you have probably already divined, my lords, the cause of her long dying has been The Being Eaten by the Gods, and I have described what that is like, so I would prefer not to tell you what the gods have left uneaten of the woman who was once as beautiful as Zyanya. I merely sat beside her, and we were both silent. I do not know what she was thinking, but I was remembering the years we have lived together, yet never together, and what a waste they have been—of each other, and of love, which is the most unpardonable waste there is. Love and time, those are the only two things in all the world and all of life that cannot be bought, but only spent. Last night, Béu and I at last declared our love... but so late, too late. It is spent, and cannot be bought back. So I sat and recalled those lost years... and beyond them, to other years. I remembered that night my father carried me on his shoulders across the island of Xaltócan, under the "oldest of old" cypress trees, and how I passed from moonlight to moon shadow and to moonlight again. I could not have known it then, but I was sampling what my life was to be—alternate light and shadow, dappled days and nights, good times and bad. Since that night, I have endured my share of hardships and griefs, perhaps more than my share. But my unforgivable neglect of Béu Ribé is proof enough that I have caused hardship and grief to others as well. Still, it is futile to regret or complain of one's tonáli. And I think, on balance, my life has been more often good than bad. The gods favored me with many fortunes and with some occasions to do worthwhile deeds. If I were to lament any one aspect of my life, it is only that the gods refused me the one last best fortune: that my roads and my days had come to their end when my few worthy deeds were done. That would have been long ago, but still I live. Of course, I can believe, if I choose, that the gods have their reason for that too. Unless I choose to remember that distant night as a drunken dream, I can believe that two of the gods even told me their reason. They told me that my tonáli was not that I be happy or sad, rich or poor, productive or idle, even-tempered or ill-tempered, intelligent or stupid, joyful or desolated—though I have been all of those things at one time or another. According to the gods, my tonáli dictated simply that I dare to accept every challenge and seize every opportunity to live my life as fully as a man can. In so doing, I have participated in many events, great and small, historic and otherwise. But the gods said—if they were gods, and if they spoke truly—that my real function in those events was only to remember them, and tell of them to those who would come after me, so that those happenings should not be forgotten. Well, I have now done that. Except for any small details Your Excellency might wish me to add, I can think of nothing more to relate. As I cautioned at the beginning, I could tell of nothing but my own life, and that is all past. If there is a future, I cannot foresee it, and I think I would not wish to.

  I recall the words I heard so many times during my journey in search of Aztlan, the words Motecuzóma repeated that night we sat atop the Teotihuacan pyramid in the moonlight, repeating them as if he spoke an epitaph: "The Aztéca were here, but they brought nothing with them, and they left nothing when they went." The Aztéca, the Mexíca—whatever name you prefer—we are going now, we are being dispersed and absorbed, and soon we will all be gone, and there will be little left to remember us by. All the other nations too, overrun by your soldiers enforcing new laws, by your lords properietors demanding slave labor, by your missionary friars bringing new gods, those nations also will vanish or change beyond recognition or decay into decrepitude. Cortés is at this moment planting his colonies in the lands along the southern ocean. Alvarado is fighting to conquer the jungle tribes of Quautemálan. Montejo is fighting to subdue the more civilized Maya of Uluumil Kutz. Guzmán is fighting to vanquish the defiant Purémpecha of Michihuácan. At least those peoples, like us Mexíca, will be able to console themselves that they fought to the last. I pity more those nations—even our ancient enemy Texcala—which now so bitterly regret what they did to help you white men hasten your taking of The One World. I said, a moment ago, that I could not foresee the future, b
ut in a sense I already have seen it. I have seen Malintzin's son Martin, and the ever increasing number of other little boys and girls, the color of cheap, watered-down chocolate. That may be the future: not that all our peoples of The One World will be exterminated, but that they will be diluted to an insipid weakness and sameness and worthlessness. I may be wrong; I doubt it; but I can hope that I am. There may be people somewhere in these lands, so remote or so invincible that they will be left in peace, and they will multiply, and then... aquin ixnentla? Ayyo, I should almost like to live to see what could happen then! My own ancestors were not ashamed to call themselves The Weed People, for weeds may be unsightly and unwanted, but they are fiercely strong and almost impossible to eradicate. It was not until after The Weed People's civilization had flourished and flowered that it was cut down. Flowers are beautiful and fragrant and desirable, but they are perishable. Perhaps somewhere in The One World there exists, or will exist, another Weed People, and perhaps it will be their tonáli next to flourish, and perhaps you white men will not be able to mow them down, and perhaps they will succeed to what was once our eminence. It could even happen that, when they march, some of my own descendants will march among them. I take no account of whatever seeds I may have scattered in the far southern lands; the people there have been so long degenerate that they will never be anything else, not even with my possible infusion of Mexícatl blood among them. But in the north—well, among the many places I have dallied, there is still Aztlan.

  And I long ago realized the meaning of the invitation extended to me by that Lesser Speaker who was also named Tlilectic-Mixtli. He said, "You must come again to Aztlan, Brother, for a small surprise," but it was not until afterward that I remembered I had lain many nights with his sister, and I knew what the waiting surprise must be. I have often wondered: a boy or a girl? But this I know: he or she will not torpidly or fearfully stay behind in Aztlan, should another migration move out from there. And I wish that young weed all success.... But I maunder again, Your Excellency fidgets. If I have your leave, then, Lord Bishop, I will now make my departure. I will go and sit with Béu, and I will keep telling her that I love her, for I want those to be the last words she hears each night before she sleeps, and before she begins the last sleep of all. And when she sleeps, I will get up and go out into the night and I will walk the empty streets.