Aztec a-1

by Gary Jennings

  Chimali and I spent a day at that sport, and we had a respectable heap of ducks stacked onshore by the time we got tired and decided to quit. But then we discovered that all the swimming about had dissolved Chimali's hair plaster, and his tuft was sticking up behind like the back feather worn by certain of our warriors. We were at the end of the island farthest from our village, meaning Chimali would have to cross the whole of Xaltócan looking like that.

  "Ayya, pochdoa!" he muttered. The expression refers only to the malodorous passing of gut wind, but it was a vehement enough expletive, from a boy of eight or nine years, that it would have earned him a thrashing with thorns if an adult had been there to overhear it.

  "We can get back into the water," I suggested, "and swim around the island, if we stay far enough offshore."

  "Maybe you could," said Chimali. "I am so winded and waterlogged that I would sink on the instant. Suppose we wait until dark to walk back home."

  I said, "In the daylight you risk running into some priest who may notice your standing tuft of hair. In the dark you risk meeting some monster even more terrible, like Night Wind. But you decide, and I am with you."

  We sat and thought for a while, idly nipping at honey ants. Those were everywhere on the ground at that season, their abdomens bulging with nectar. We picked up the insects and bit their hinder ends for a sip of the sweet honey. But each droplet was minuscule and, no matter how many ants we nipped, we were getting hungry.

  "I know!" Chimali said at last. "I will wear my pumpkin all the way home."

  And that is what he did. Of course he could not see too well through its eyehole, so I had to lead him, and we were both considerably encumbered by our burdens of dead, wet, heavy ducks. This meant that Chimali quite often stumbled and fell, or walked into tree trunks, or toppled into roadside ditches. By good fortune, his pumpkin never broke to pieces. But I laughed at him all the way and dogs barked at him and, since the twilight came before we reached home, Chimali himself may have astonished and terrified any passersby who saw him in the dusk.

  But it might otherwise have been no laughing matter. There was good reason for Chimali's being always aware and careful of his unruly hair. Any boy with such a tuft, you see, was especially preferred by the priests when they required a male youngster for sacrifice. Do not ask me why. No priest has ever told me why. But then, what priest has ever had to give us a credible reason for the unreasonable rules he makes us live by, or for the fear and guilt and shame we must endure when we sometimes circumvent them?

  I do not mean to give the impression that any of us, young or old, lived lives of constant apprehension. Except for a few arbitrary vagaries like the priests' predilection for boys with disordered hair, our religion and the priests who interpreted it did not make too many or too onerous demands of us. Nor did any other authorities. We owed obedience to our rulers and governors, of course, and we had certain obligations to the pípiltin nobles, and we heeded the advice of our tlamatintin wise men. But I was born into the middle class of our society, the macehualtin, "the fortunate," so called because we were equally free of the upper classes' heavy responsibilities and of the lower classes' liability to being basely used.

  In our time there were few laws—deliberately few, so that every man might hold them all in his head and in his heart, and have not the excuse of ignorance for flouting them. The laws were not written down, like yours, nor pasted up in public places, like yours, so that a man must forever be consulting the long lists of edicts, rules, and regulations, to measure his every last action against "you shall" and "you shall not." By your standards, our few laws may seem to have been lax or whimsical, and the penalties for their infraction unduly harsh. But our laws worked for the good of all—and all, knowing the dire consequences, obeyed them. Those who did not—they disappeared.

  An example. According to the laws you brought from Spain, a thief is punished with death. So he was in our time. But, by your laws, a hungry man who steals a thing to eat is a thief. Not so in our time. One of our laws said that, in any maize field planted alongside a public road, the four rows of stalks adjacent to that road were accessible to the passerby. Any hungry warfarer could pluck as many ears of maize as his empty belly required. But a man who greedily sought to enrich himself, and plundered that maize field to collect a sackful for hoarding or trading, if he was caught, he died. Thus that one law ensured two good things: that the thieving man was permanently cured of thievery, and that the hungering man did not die of hunger.

  Our lives were regulated less by laws than by long-standing customs and traditions. Most of those governed the behavior of adults or of clans or of entire communities. But, even as a child not yet grown beyond the name of Seven Flower, I was made aware of the traditional insistence on a male's being brave, strong, gallant, hard-working, and honest; of a female's being modest, chaste, gentle, hard-working, and self-effacing.

  What time I did not spend at play with my toys—most of them miniature war weapons and replicas of the tools of my father's trade—and what time I did not spend at play with Chimali and Tlatli and other boys about my own age, I spent in the company of my father, when he was not at work in the quarry. Though of course I called him Tete, as all children childishly called their fathers, his name was Tepetzalan, meaning Valley, after the low place among the mainland mountains where he had been born. Since he towered well above the average height of our men, that name, given him at the age of seven, was rather ridiculous in his adulthood. All our neighbors and his fellow quarriers called him by tall nicknames: Handful of Stars and Head Nodder and the like. Indeed, he had to nod his head far down to my level, to speak the traditional father-to-son homilies. If perhaps he caught me impudently imitating the shuffle gait of our village's hunchbacked old garbage collector, my father would tell me sternly:

  "Take care that you do not mock the old, the ill, the maimed, or anyone who has fallen into some folly or transgression. Do not insult or despise them, but abase yourself before the gods, and tremble lest they bring the same misery upon you."

  Or if I showed little interest in what he tried to teach me of his trade—and any macehuali boy who did not aspire to soldiering was expected to follow in his father's footsteps—he would lean down and say earnestly:

  "Flee not any labor to which the gods assign you, my son, but be content. I pray that they may grant you merits and good fortune, but whatever they give you, take it gratefully. If it be only a small gift, do not scorn it, for the gods can take even that little away. If it be a large bestowal, perhaps some great talent, do not be proud or vainglorious, but remember that the gods must have denied that tonáli to someone else that you might have it."

  Sometimes, at no discernible instigation, and with his big face reddening slightly, my father would deliver a small sermon that made no sense to me at all. Something on this order:

  "Live cleanly and be not dissolute, or you will anger the gods and they will cover you with infamy. Restrain yourself, my son, until you meet the girl whom the gods destine for your wife, because the gods know how to arrange all things properly. Above all, never disport yourself with another man's wife."

  It seemed an unnecessary injunction, for I did live cleanly. Like every other Mexícatl—except the priests—I bathed twice a day in hot soapy water, and swam often in the lake, and periodically sweated out my remaining bad vapors in our oven-like little steam house. I cleaned my teeth, night and morning, with a mixture of bee's honey and white ashes. As for disporting myself, I knew of no man on the island who had a wife my age, and none of us boys included girls in our games anyway.

  All those father-to-son preachments were so many rote recitations, handed down through the generations word for word, like the midwife's discourse at my birth. Only on those occasions did my father Tepetzalan talk at great length; he was otherwise a taciturn man. In the noise of the quarry there was little use for talk, and at home my mother's incessant fretful chatter gave him little chance to put in a word. Tete did not mind.
He always preferred action to speech, and he taught me far more by example than with the parroted harangues. If my father was at all defective in the qualities expected of our men-strength, bravery, and all that—it consisted only in his letting himself be bullied and brow-beaten by my Tene.

  My mother was the most untypical female among all those of our class on Xaltócan: the least modest, least docile, least self-effacing. She was a shrill termagant, the tyrant of our little family and the bane of all our neighbors. But she preened herself on being the model of womanly perfection, so it followed that she lived in a state of perpetual and angry dissatisfaction with everything around her. If I learned anything at all useful from my Tene, it was to be sometimes dissatisfied with myself.

  I remember being corporally punished by my father on only one occasion, when I richly deserved it. We boys were allowed, even encouraged, to kill birds like crows and grackles which pecked at our garden crops, and that we did with reed blowpipes which propelled shaped clay pellets. But one day, out of some impish perversity, I blew a pellet at the little tame quail we kept in our house. (Most houses had one of those pets, to keep down scorpions and other insect vermin.) Then, to compound my crime, I tried to blame the bird's killing on my friend Tlatli.

  It took my father not long to find out the truth. While my murder of the unoffending quail might have been only moderately penalized, the strictly prohibited sin of lying could not. My Tete had to inflict on me the prescribed punishment for "speaking spittle and phlegm," as we called a lie. He winced himself as he did it: piercing my lower lip with a maguey thorn and leaving it there until bedtime. Ayya ouíya, the pain, the mortification, the pain, the tears of remorse, the pain!

  The punishment left such a lasting impression on me that I have in turn left its impress upon the archives of our land. If you have seen our picture writing, then you have seen figures of persons or other creatures with a small, curly, scroll-like symbol emanating from them. That symbol represents a nahuatl, which is to say a tongue, or language, or speech, or sound. It indicates that the figure is talking or making a noise of some sort. If the nahuatl is more than ordinarily curly, and elaborated by the symbol for a butterfly or flower, then the figure is speaking poetry or singing music. When I myself became a scribe, I added another elaboration to our picture writing: the nahuatl pierced by a maguey thorn, and all our other scribes soon adopted it. When you see that symbol before a figure, you know you see a picture of someone telling a lie.

  The punishments more frequently dealt out by my mother were inflicted with no hesitation, no compunction, no compassion; I suspect even with some pleasure at giving pain besides correction. They may have left no legacy to this land's pictured history, like the tongue-and-thorn symbol, but they certainly affected the life history of myself and my sister. I remember one right watching my mother ferociously beat my sister's buttocks bright red with a bundle of nettles, because the girl had been guilty of immodesty. And I should explain that immodesty did not necessarily mean to us what it evidently means to you white men: an indecent exposure of one's unclothed body.

  In the matter of clothing, we children of both sexes went totally naked, weather permitting, until we were four or five years old. Then we covered our nudity with a long rectangle of rough cloth which tied at one shoulder and draped around us to mid-thigh. At the attainment of adulthood—that is, at the age of thirteen—we boys began wearing a maxtlatl loincloth under our outer mantle, which was now of finer cloth. At about the same age, depending upon when they had their first bleeding, girls donned the womanly skirt and blouse, plus an undergarment rather like what you call a diaper.

  Pardon my recital of minor details, but I am trying to fix the time of that beating of my sister. Nine Reed had become Tzitzitlini some while before—the name means "the sound of small bells ringing"—so she was past the age of seven. However, I saw her nether parts beaten nearly raw, meaning that she was wearing no undergarment, so she was not yet thirteen. All things considered, I reckon her age to have been ten or eleven. And what she had done to deserve that beating, the only thing of which she was guilty, was that she had murmured dreamily, "I hear drums and music playing. I wonder where they are dancing tonight." To our mother, that was immodesty. Tzitzi was yearning for frivolity when she should have been applying herself to a loom or something else as tedious.

  You know the chili? That vegetable pod which is used in our cookery? Though the degree of piquancy varies, all the different types of chili are so hot to the tongue, so pungent, so biting, that it is no accident that their name comes from our word for "sharp" or "pointed." Like every cook, my mother used the chilis in the usual ways, but she had another use for them which I almost hesitate to mention, since your Inquisitors already have instruments enough.

  One day, when I was four or five years old, I sat with Tlatli and Chimali in our dooryard, playing the patoli bean game. This was not the grown men's gambling game, also called patoli, which on occasion has cost a family its fortune or caused a mortal family feud. No, we three boys had merely drawn a circle in the dust, and had each put a jumping bean in its center, the object being to see whose bean, warmed to activity by the sun, would be the first to hop outside the circle. My own bean tended to sluggishness, and I muttered some imprecation at it. Maybe I said "pocheoa!" or something of the sort.

  Suddenly I was upside down and off the ground. My Tene had snatched me up by the ankles. I saw the inverted faces of Chimali and Tlatli, their mouths and eyes wide with surprise, before I was whisked into the house and to the cooking hearth. My mother shifted her grip so that one of her hands was free, and with it she flung into the fire a number of dried red chilis. When they were crackling and sending up a dense yellow smoke, my Tene took me again by the ankles and suspended me head down in those acrid fumes. I leave the next little while to your imagination, but I think I nearly perished. I know that for half a month afterward my eyes watered continuously so that I could scarcely see, and I could not draw a breath without feeling as if I were inhaling flames and flints.

  Yet I must count myself fortunate, for our customs did not dictate that a boy spend much time in his mother's company, and I now had every excuse not to. Thereafter, I avoided her, as my tuft-haired friend Chimali avoided the island priests. Even when she came looking for me, to command some chore or errand, I could always retire to the safety of the hill of the lime-burning kilns. The quarriers believed that no woman should ever be allowed near the kilns, or the quality of the lime would be spoiled, and not even my mother dared to trespass on that hill.

  But poor Tzitzitlini knew no such refuge. In accordance with custom and her tonáli, a girl had to learn womanly and wifely labors—cooking, spinning, weaving, sewing, embroidering—so my sister had to spend most of every day under our mother's sharp eye and limber tongue. Her tongue neglected no opportunity to deliver one of the traditional mother-to-daughter orations. Some of those, which Tzitzi repeated to me, we agreed had been fashioned (by whatever long-ago ancestor) more for the benefit of the mother than the daughter.

  "Attend always, girl, to the service of the gods and the giving of comfort to your parents. If your mother calls, do not loiter to be called twice, but come instantly. When commanded to a task, speak no insolent answer and show no reluctance to comply. Indeed, if your Tene calls another, and that other does not come quickly, come yourself to see what is wanted, and do it yourself, and do it well."

  Other preachments were the expectable admonitions to modesty, virtue, and chastity, and even not Tzitzi or I could find fault with them. We knew that after she turned thirteen, until she was perhaps twenty and two and properly married, no man could so much as speak to her in public, nor she to him.

  "If, in a public place, you meet with a likely youth, take no notice, give no sign, lest that inflame his passions. Guard against improper familiarities with men, yield not to the baser impulses of your heart, or lust will befoul your character as mud does water."

  Tzitzitlini would probably never
have disobeyed that one sensible prohibition. But by the time she was twelve years old, surely she felt some sexual sensations stirring in her, and some curiosity about sex. It may have been to conceal what she considered unmaidenly and inexpressible feelings that she tried to vent them privately and alone and in secret. All I know is that one day our mother came home unexpectedly from a trip to the market and caught my sister lying on her pallet, nude from the waist down, doing an act of which I did not understand the significance for some time. She was caught playing with her tipíli parts, and using a small wooden spindle for the purpose.

  You mutter under your breath, Your Excellency, and you gather the skirts of your cassock almost protectively about you. Have I somehow offended by telling frankly what occurred? I have been careful not to use the coarser words for the telling. And I must assume, since the coarser words abound in both our languages, that the acts they describe are not uncommon among either of our peoples.

  To punish Tzitzitlini's offense against her own body, our Tene seized her and seized the container of chili powder, and viciously rubbed the burning chili into those exposed, tender tipíli parts. Though she muffled her daughter's screams with the bed covers, I heard and came running, and I gasped, "Should I go to fetch the physician?"

  "No! No doctor!" our mother snapped at me. "What your sister has done is too shameful to be known outside these walls!"

  Tzitzi stifled her sobs and added her plea, "I am not much hurt, little brother. Summon no doctor. Mention this to no one, not even Tete. Try to pretend that even you know nothing of it. I beg you."

  I might have ignored my tyrant mother, but not my beloved sister. Though I did not then know the reason for her refusal of assistance, I respected it, and I went away from there, to worry and wonder by myself.