Aztec Autumn

by neetha Napew

  "All we seek is a place to sleep," growled Uncle Mixtzin.

  "The thing is," explained the steward, "the original House of Pochtéca was almost of the size and grandeur of a palace, but it suffered the same demolition as the rest of the city. This replacement is but small and poor by comparison. There simply is no room for anyone not a member."

  "Then where, in this warmly hospitable city, do visitors find lodging?"

  "There is an establishment the white men call a mesón. It is provided by the Christian Church, to house and feed itinerant or indigent persons. The Mesón de San José." And he told us how to find it.

  My uncle said, through his teeth, "By Huitzli, another of their trifling santos!" but we went there.

  The mesón was a large adobe structure that was an annex to an even larger and much more substantial building called the Colegio de San José. I learned later that the word colegio means much the same as our calmécac—a school for advanced students, taught by priests, though in this case Christian priests, of course.

  The mesón, like the colegio, was in the charge of what we took to be priests, until some others converging on the building told us that these were only friars, a lowly grade of the Christian clergy. We arrived about sundown, just as some of those friars were spooning food from huge cooking vats into bowls held by the many people who got in line for it. Most of those people were not travel-stained like ourselves, but only ragged and defeated-looking inhabitants of the city itself. Evidently they were so impoverished that they depended on the friars for their sustenance as well as shelter, because none made any offer of any kind of payment when his bowl was filled, and the friars gave no sign of expecting payment.

  Under the circumstances, I would have expected the charity fare to be some cheap and filling gruel like atóli. But what was poured into our bowls was, surprisingly, duck soup, thick with meat, hot and tasty. Each of us also was handed a warm, globular, brown, crusty thing. We watched what others did with theirs, and saw that they were eating them in bites and using them to sop up their soup, just as we always had done with our round, thin, flat tláxcaltin.

  "Our maize-flour tláxcaltin the Spaniards call tortillas," said a scrawny man who had been in the line with us. "And this bread of theirs they call a bolillo. It is made of flour from a kind of grass they call wheat, which they deem superior to our maize, and which can be grown in places where maize cannot."

  "Whatever it is," my mother said timidly, "it is good."

  She had been right to speak with timidity, for Uncle Mixtzin instantly and sharply told her, "Sister Cuicáni, I wish to hear no approving words about anything to do with these white people!"

  The scrawny man told us his name, Pochotl, and sat with us while we all dined, and continued helpfully to inform us:

  "It must be that the Spaniards have only few and puny ducks in their own country, for here they devour ducks in preference to all other meats. Of course, our lakes support such multitudes of these birds, and the Spaniards have such a strange but effective means of slaughtering them—" He paused and held up a hand. "There. Did you hear that? Twilight is when the flocks come homing to the water, and the Spanish fowlers kill them by the hundreds every evening."

  We had heard several claps of what might have been distant thunder, off to the eastward, and it went on rumbling for a time.

  "That is why," Pochotl went on, "duck meat is so abundant that it can even be fed free to us paupers. Myself, I would prefer pitzóme meat, if I could afford to buy it."

  Uncle Mixtzin said, with a snarl, "We three are not paupers!"

  "You are newcomers, I assume. Just stay awhile, then."

  "What is a pitzóme?" I asked. "I never heard the word before."

  "An animal. Brought by the Spaniards, and bred by them in great numbers. It is very like our familiar wild boar, only tame and much fatter. Its meat, called by them puerco, is as tender and savory as a well-cooked human haunch." My mother and I both winced at that, but Pochotl took no notice. "Indeed, so close is the similarity of pitzóme and human meat that many of us believe the Spaniards and those animals must be blood relations, that the white men and their pitzóme both propagate their kind by mutual copulation."

  Now the friars were waving all of us out of the big bare room where we had been eating, up the stairs to the sleeping quarters. It was the first time in my recollection that I had ever gone to bed without steaming or bathing myself, or at least taking a swim in the nearest available water. Upstairs were two separate big rooms, one each for men and women, so my uncle and I went one way and my mother the other, looking unhappy at being parted from us.

  "I hope we see her safe and sound in the morning," muttered Mixtzin. "Yya, I hope we see her at all. These white priests may well have a rule that giving a woman a meal entitles them to the use of the woman."

  To soothe him, I said, "There were women being fed down there who are rather younger and more tempting than Tene."

  "Who knows what tastes these aliens may have, if, as that man said, they are thought to couple even with sows? I would put nothing past them."

  That man, Pochotl—so scrawny as to belie his name, which means a certain tree, a very bulky one—was again joining us, taking the straw pallet next to mine, whence he continued to regale us with information about the City of Mexíco and its Spanish masters.

  "This," he said, "was once an island entirely surrounded by the waters of Lake Texcóco. But now that lake has dwindled so much that its nearer shore is fully one-long-run eastward from the city—except for the canals that must repeatedly be dredged to provide access for the freight acáltin. The causeways that link the city to the mainland used to cross expanses of clear lake water, but now, as you must have seen yourselves, those expanses are more weed than water. The other lakes, too, back then were interconnected with Lake Texcóco and with each other. In effect, one single great lake. A man could row an acáli from the island of Tzumpánco in the north to the flower gardens of Xochimílco in the south, some twenty one-long-runs—or twenty leagues, as the Spanish would say. Now that man would have to plod through the wide bogs that have put those shrunken lakes far apart from each other. Some people say the trees were responsible."

  "The trees?!" exclaimed my uncle.

  "This valley is ringed by mountains, all around the horizon. And all those mountains bore thick forests—were almost furred with forests—before the white men came."

  Mixtzin said slowly, remembering, "Ye-es, you are right. It did strike me, on this visit, that the mountains look more brown than green."

  "Because they are barren of trees," said Pochotl. "The Spaniards chopped them down—all of them—for timbers and lumber and firewood. Truly, that could well have angered Chicomecóatl, the goddess of green growing things. She may have taken revenge by persuading the god Tlaloc to send his rain only meagerly and sporadically, as he has been doing, and by persuading Tonatíu to blaze more hotly, as he has been doing. Whatever the reason, our weather gods have behaved most peculiarly ever since the coming of the Crixtanóyotl deities."

  "Excuse me, friend Pochotl," I said, changing the subject. "I hope to find employment here. Not to make any fortune, but work that will pay me enough to live on. Can I expect to do that?"

  The scrawny man looked me up and down. "Have you any skills, young man? Can you write the white men's language? Are you talented at any craft? Do you possess any artistic ability?"

  "None of those. No."

  "Good," he said bleakly. "Then you will not balk at hard labor. Hefting stone blocks and baskets of mortar for the new buildings. Or drudging as a tamémi porter. Or mucking out silt and excrement and trash from the canals. Whether such work will enable you to live depends, of course, on how skimpily you can live."

  "Well," I said, gulping, "I had hoped for something rather more..."

  Uncle Mixtzin interrupted, "Friend Pochotl, you are a well-spoken man. I take you to have some intelligence, even education. And clearly you do not love the white men. Why, then
, do you subsist on their charity?"

  "Because I do have skills," said Pochotl with a sigh. "I was a master worker in gold and silver. Delicate jewelry—necklaces, bracelets, labrets, diadems, anklets—things for which the Spaniards have no use. They want their gold and silver melted down into featureless ingots, for sending home to their king, or for stamping into crude coins. Barbarians! Their other metals, what they call iron and steel, copper and bronze, they entrust to brawny smiths, to forge into horseshoes, armor plates, swords and the like."

  Mixtzin asked, "You could not do that?"

  "Any muscular lout could do that. I think such strong-arm work beneath me. Also. I do not care to callus and gnarl my artist's fingers. Someday, somehow, there may again be decent work for them to do."

  I was only half listening to them. I sat cross-legged on my rancid pallet—it smelled of numberless earlier unwashed occupants—and contemplated the extremely unappealing careers the scrawny man had suggested for me. I had sworn to myself that I would do anything the gods might require in the furtherance of my vengeance against the white men, and I would keep that oath. The prospect of hard and ill-paid labor did not affright me. But the whole object of my staying in this city was to search out some hitherto unnoticed weakness in the Spaniards' grip on The One World, some flaw in their system of governing and controlling New Spain, some blind spot in their allegedly all-seeing preparedness against any kind of overthrow. It seemed unlikely that I could do much successful spying while spending most of my time among other laborers at the bottom of a canal ditch, or bent under the tumpline of a tamémi porter. Well, maybe the notarius Alonso de Molina could provide for me some better line of work, where I would have more opportunity for employing my eyes and ears and instincts.

  Now Pochotl was telling my uncle, "The white men have brought us several new and very flavorsome foods. Their chicken, for instance, yields a much more tender and juicy meat than does our bigger huaxolómi fowl that they call the gallipavo. And they grow a cane from which they extract a powder called sugar, much sweeter than honey or coconut syrup. And they brought a new kind of bean called an haba, and other vegetables called cabbage, artichoke, lettuce and radish. Good eating, for those who can afford to buy them, or still have a plot of ground in which to grow them. But I think the Spaniards found here many more things new to them. They are ecstatic over our xitómatl and chili and chocólatl and ahuácatl, which they say do not exist in their Old Spain. Oh, and also they are learning how to take pleasure in smoking our picíetl."

  Gradually I became aware of other voices around me in the dark room, other people staying awake to converse as Mixtzin and the scrawny man were doing. Most of those voices were speaking Náhuatl, and not saying anything much worth my listening to. But other conversations were in languages incomprehensible; they could have been conveying the wisdom of the world, or the deepest secrets of the gods, for all I could make out. At that time, I was unable to sort out the nationalities of those various speakers. But after a few more nights in the guest house, I would learn something interesting—that almost every man of them, except those native to this City of Mexíco itself, had come to this San José mesón from somewhere north of the city, often far north.

  It stood to reason. As I have said, all the nations and peoples south of the City of Mexíco—also to the east—had early succumbed to the Spanish conquest, and by now had well adapted to the presence and puissance of the Spaniards, in all their social and commercial dealings with them. So any visitors from the south or east would be envoys or swift-messengers or pochtéca bringing goods to the city to sell or barter, or coming here to buy merchandise imported from Old Spain. Those visitors, then, would be lodging at the House of Pochtéca, where we three had been turned away—or, not impossibly, they would even be guests in some high-ranking Spaniard's mansion or palace.

  Meanwhile, the less favored lodgers in this charitable mesón were, if not homeless local townsfolk, all from the still-unconquered northern lands of The One World. They had come either as scouts, like Uncle Mixtzin, to take the measure of the white men and determine what their own peoples' future might be—or they had come, like those other scouts, Netzlin and Citláli, to seek a living among the luxuries of the white men's city. Or perhaps some, I thought, might have come here to do both, like me and like the worm in the coyacapúli fruit—hoping to delve and burrow and hollow out this New Spain from within. If there were others of similarly subversive intent, I must find them and join them.

  The friars woke us at sunrise and directed us downstairs again. My uncle and I were pleased to see that my mother had passed the night unharmed, and all three of us were pleased to find that the friars now ladled out bowls of atóli mush with which to break our fast, and even a cup of frothy chocólatl for each person. Evidently my mother, like Mixtzin, had spent much of the night awake and in converse with other lodgers, for she reported, with more vivacity than she had shown all during our journey:

  "There are women here who have served some of the best Spanish families, in some of the best homes, and they have marvelous things to tell. Especially of some new fabrics that have never before been known in The One World. There is a stuff called wool, which is shorn from curly-furred creatures called ovejas, which are being raised in great herds all over New Spain. The fur is not felted, but made into yarn—much as is done with cotton—and that is woven into cloth. Wool can be as warm as fur, they say. and colored as vividly as if it were of quetzal feathers."

  I was happy to see that my Tene had encountered novelties enough to erase—or at least to dim—her memory of what we had seen the day before, but my uncle only grunted as she prattled on.

  I looked about the dining chamber, trying not to be too obvious about it. wondering which of these people—if any—might be future allies in my campaign of prying and plotting. Well, yonder squatted the scrawny man, Pochotl, swilling his bowl of atóli. He could be useful in that he was a native of this city and knew it intimately, though I could not envision him acting the warrior, if my campaign ever came to that. And of the others around the room, which? There were children, adults and oldsters, male and female. I might recruit one or more of the latter, because there are places a female can go, without arousing suspicion, where a male cannot.

  "And there is an even more wonderful fabric of which they tell," my mother was saying. "It is called silk, and they say it is as light as a cobweb, but lustrous to the eye, voluptuous to the touch and as long-wearing as leather. It is not made here; it comes from Old Spain. And what is truly incredible, they say its thread is spun by worms. They must mean spiders of some sort."

  "Trust women to be beguiled by trifles and trinkets," muttered Mixtzin. "If this One World were all of women, the white men could have had it for an armload of baubles, and never a weapon raised against them."

  "Now, brother, that is not so," she said virtuously. "I detest the white men as much as you do, and I have even more reason, having been widowed by them. But, as long as they did bring such curiosities... and as long as we are here where they can be seen..."

  Mixtzin expectably erupted, "In the name of Míctlan's uttermost darkness, Cuilcáni, would you engage in trade with these loathsome trespassers?"

  "Of course not." And she added, with womanly practicality, "We have no coins to trade with. I do not wish to acquire any of those fabrics, only to see and touch them. I know you are in a hurry to be gone from this alien city. But it will not be much out of our way to go past the marketplace and let me browse a bit among the stalls."

  My uncle mumbled and balked and grumbled, but of course he would not deny her that one small pleasure, which would never be within her reach again. "Then, if you must dawdle, let us be on our way this instant. Fare you well, Tenamáxtli." He clapped a hand on my shoulder. "I wish you success with your foolhardy notion. But I wish even more that you come home safely, and not too long from now."

  Tene's leavetaking was rather lengthier and more emotional, with embraces and kisses and tears an
d admonitions to stay healthy and eat nourishing foods and tread cautiously among the unpredictable white men and, above all, have nothing whatever to do with any white women. They went off toward the northern end of the city, where was situated the largest and busiest market square. And I went off toward a different square, the one in which yesterday my father had been burned alive. I went alone but not empty-handed; as I was leaving the Mesón de San José, I saw outside its door a large, empty clay jar that no one was using or guarding. So I lifted it up onto my shoulder, as if I were carrying water or atóli for the laborers in a construction party somewhere. I pretended it was heavy, and I walked slowly, in part because that was the way I imagined an ill-paid laborer would walk, but mainly because I wanted to examine thoroughly every person, place and thing I passed.

  The day before, I had been inclined to gape at whole, wide aspects of the city, taking each scene at one eye-gulp, so to speak—the broad, long avenues lined with immense buildings of alien architecture, their stone or gesso-plastered fronts adorned with sculptured friezes, convoluted and complicated but meaningless, like the embroidery with which certain of our peoples hem their mantles; and the much narrower side streets, where the buildings were smaller, crammed side by side, and not so fancily decorated.

  This day, I concentrated on details. Thus I could now discern that the grand edifices fronting on the avenues and open squares were mostly workplaces for the functionaries of the government of New Spain, and their numerous subordinates and councillors and clerks and scribes and such. I also now noticed that among the many men wearing Spanish attire who went in and out of those buildings—bearing books or papers or messenger pouches or just facial expressions of haughty self-importance—a number were of the same dark complexion and beardlessness as myself. Other grand buildings were clearly inhabited by the dignitaries of the white men's religion, and their numerous subordinates and minions. And among those, too, wearing clerical garb and blandly complacent expressions, were more than a few men with coppery and beardless faces. Only at the buildings housing military men—the headquarters of high officers, the barracks of the lower ranks—did I see none of my own people in formal parade dress or in everyday working uniform or in armor or bearing arms of any sort. A few of the really large and ornate structures, of course, were palaces in which resided the uppermost quality folk of the government, the Church and the military, and at every door of them stood armed and alert-looking soldier sentries, usually holding on a leash one of their fierce staghound war dogs.