Aztec a-1

by Gary Jennings

  The man went to where his wife sat, and he moved her in a way that had not occurred to me. I had tried laying her down. He gripped her under her armpits and lifted. Even so, she still moved reluctantly, and he visibly had to exert some strength. There was a horrid sucking and tearing sound, rather as if the dead woman's bottom had put down roots in the earth. Then she came up off the stake on which she had been impaled.

  I knew then why the man had said that a good place of execution was not easy to find. It had to provide a tree of just the right size, one growing straight from the ground without obstructive roots. That stake had been a mizquitl sapling as big around as my forearm, severed at knee height, then sharped to a point at the top, but the coarse bark left on the rest of it. I wondered whether the betrayed husband had sat his wife delicately on the stake point and only slowly let her down its cruelly barked length, or whether he had given her a slightly more merciful quick downward shove. I wondered, but I did not inquire.

  When the nine men led me to their camp, they made me welcome there, and they treated me courteously as long as I stayed with them. They had thoroughly inspected the belongings I carried, but they stole nothing, not even my small store of copper trade currency. However I think I might have been treated otherwise if I had been carrying anything of value or leading a train of laden porters. Those men were, after all, the Chichimeca.

  The name was always spoken among us Mexíca with contempt or derision or loathing, as you Spaniards speak of "barbarians" and "savages." We derived the name from chichine, one of our words meaning dog. When we said Chichimeca, we generally referred to those dog people among whom I had then arrived; the homeless, unwashed, forever wandering tribes of the desert not far north of the Otomí lands. (Which is why, some ten years earlier, I had been so indignant when the Fast of Feet Rarámuri mistook me for a Chichimecatl.) Those of the near north were sufficiently despied by us Mexíca, but it was widely believed that there were others of even lower degree. Farther north of the dog people supposedly lived still fiercer desert tribes, which we designated the Teochichimeca—as one might say, "the even more awful dog people." And in the desert's farthest northernmost regions supposedly lived even more fearsome tribes, which we called the Zacachichimeca, much as to say, "the most depraved of all the dog people."

  But I must report, after having traveled through almost the whole extent of those desert lands, that I found none of those tribes inferior or superior to another. They were all ignorant, insensitive, and often inhumanly cruel, but it was that cruel desert which had made them so. They all lived in a squalor that would disgust a civilized man or a Christian, and they lived on foods that would nauseate a city man's stomach. They had no houses or trades or arts, because they had to keep ceaselessly roaming to forage for the scant sustenance they could wring from the desert. Though the Chichimeca tribes among which I sojourned all spoke a coherent Náhuatl, or some dialect of it, they had no word knowing or other education, and some of their habits and customs were veritably repulsive. But, while they would have horrified any civilized community that they might ever try to visit, I have to say that the Chichimeca had admirably adapted themselves to life in the pitiless desert, and I know few civilized men who could have done the same.

  That first camp I visited, the only home its people knew, was just one more piece of the desert, on which they had elected to squat because they knew there was a seepage of underground water accessible by digging some way down in that particular patch of sand. The camp's only homelike aspect was the cooking fires of the tribe's sixteen or eighteen families. Except for the rudimentary cooking pots and utensils, there was no furniture. Near each fire was stacked each family's armory of hunting weapons and tools: a bow and some arrows, a javelin and its atlatl, a skinning knife, a meat-cutting ax, and the like. Only a few of those things were tipped or bladed with obsidian, that rock being a rare commodity in those regions. The majority of weapons were made of the copper-hard quauxeloloni wood, cunningly shaped and sharpened by fire.

  Of course there were no solid-built houses, and only two temporary ones: crude little huts constructed by leaning dead-wood sticks haphazardly together. In each hut, I was told, lay a pregnant woman awaiting childbirth, for which reason that camp was more permanent than most, meaning it might exist for several days instead of being merely the usual overnight stop for sleep. The rest of the tribe scorned any shelter. Men, women, and the smallest infant children slept on the ground, as I had lately been doing, but instead of a ground-softening blanket, like mine of felted rabbit hair, they used only old and dirty and tattered deerskins. Equally bedraggled animal skins also composed what sketchy clothing they wore: loinclothes for the men; sleeveless, shapeless, knee-length blouses for the women; nothing at all for the children, even those almost full grown.

  But the vilest thing about the camp was its odor, which even the surrounding vastness of open air failed to dispel, and the odor was that of the dog people, every one of them far dirtier than any dog. It might be doubted that a person could get soiled in the desert, for sand is as clean as snow. But those people were mainly befouled with their own dirt, their own secretions, their own negligence. They let their sweat cake on their bodies, so it encrusted the other oils and scurfs that the body normally sheds in unnoticeable flakes. Every wrinkle and fold of their bodies was a tracery of dark grime: knuckles, wrists, throats, inner elbows, backs of knees. Their hair flapped in mats, not strands, and lice and fleas crawled among that greasy matting. Their skin garments, as well as their own skins, were permeated with the additional odors of wood smoke, dried blood, and rancid animal fats. The total stench was staggering, and, although I eventually ceased to notice it, I long thought the Chichimeca the filthiest people I had ever encountered, and the people most uncaring about their filthiness.

  They all had extremely simple names—such as Zoquitl and Nacatl and Chachapa, which mean Mud and Meat and Cloudburst—names rather pitiably unsuited to their blighted and starved habitat; but then, maybe they chose such names in a spirit of wishfulness. Meat was the name of the newly made widower who had invited me to visit the camp. He and I sat down at the cooking fire built by a number of other unattached males, apart from the fires of the family groups. Meat and his fellows already knew that I was a Mexícatl, but I was uncomfortably uncertain how to refer to their nationality. So, while one of the men used a yuca-leaf ladle to serve each of us some unidentifiable stew on a curved segment of maguey leaf, I said:

  "As you probably know, Meat, we Mexíca are accustomed to speak of all desert inhabitants as the Chichimeca. But no doubt you have another name for yourselves."

  He indicated the scattering of campfires and said, "We here are the Tecuexe tribe. There are many others in the desert—Fame, Janambre, Hualahuise, many others—but yes, we are all Chichimeca, since we are all red-skinned people." I privately thought that he and his tribesmen were more the gray color of grime. Meat swallowed a mouthful of stew and added, "You too are a Chichimecatl. No different from us."

  I had resented the Rarámuri's calling me that. It was even more outrageous that a desert savage himself should claim kinship with a civilized Mexícatl. But he said it so casually that I realized he meant no presumption. It was true that, underneath their dirt, Meat and the other Tecuexe were of a coppery complexion similar to my own and that of every other person I knew. Tribes and individuals of our race might vary, from palest red-gold to the ruddy brown of cacao, but, generally speaking, red-skinned was the most inclusive description. And so I understood: those scruffy, half-naked, ignorant nomads obviously believed that the name Chichimeca derived not from the chichine, dog, but from the word chichiltic, meaning red. To anyone who chose to believe that, Chichimeca was no contemptuous name; it described every human being in every desert, every jungle, every civilized city of The One World.

  I went on feeding my grateful belly—the stew was gritty with sand, but tasty nonetheless—and I meditated on the ties between diverse peoples. Clearly the Chichimeca must o
nce have had some improving contact with civilization. Meat had mentioned his wife's imprudent sickbed confession to Tlazolteotl, so I already knew of the Chicimeca's acquaintance with that goddess. I later learned that they worshiped most of our other gods as well. But, in their isolation and ignorance, they had invented a new one just for themselves. They held the laughable belief that the stars are butterflies made of obsidian, and that the stars' twinkling light is only a reflection of moonlight from those fluttering wings of shiny stone. So they had conceived a goddess—Itzpapalotl, Obsidian Butterfly—whom they regarded as the highest of all gods. Well, in the desert night, the stars are spectacularly bright, and they do seem to hover, like butterflies, just beyond one's reach.

  But even if the Chichimeca have some things in common with more civilized peoples, and even if they interpret the very name Chichimeca to imply that all red-skinned peoples are somehow distantly related, they have no compunction about living at the expense of those relatives, distant or near. On that first night I dined with the Tecuexe tribe, the mealtime stew contained bits of tender white meat flaking off delicate bones which I could not recognize as being the bones of lizards or rabbits or any other creatures I had seen in the desert. So I inquired:

  "Meat, what is this meat we are eating?"

  He grunted, "Baby."

  "Baby what?"

  He said again, "Baby," and shrugged. "Food for the hard times." He saw that I still did not comprehend, so he explained, "We sometimes leave the desert to pillage an Otomí village and we take, among other things, their infant children. Or we might fight with another Chichimeca tribe in the open desert. When the defeated tribe withdraws, it must leave those of its children too small to run. Since such tiny captives would be of no other use to their captors, they are gutted and cured in the sun, or smoked over a mizquitl fire, so they last a long time without spoiling. They weigh little, so each of our women can easily carry three or four of them dangling from a cord around her waist. They are carried to be cooked and eaten when—as happened today—Obsidian Butterfly neglects to send game for our arrows."

  I can see from your faces, reverend scribes, that you deem that practice reprehensible. But I must confess that I learned to eat almost anything edible, with as much satisfaction and as little repugnance as any Chichimecatl, for during that desert journey I knew no laws more peremptory than those of hunger and thirst. Nevertheless, I did not totally discard the manners and discriminations of civilization. There were other dietary eccentricities of the Chichimeca in which not even the direst deprivations could make me participate.

  I accompanied Meat and his fellows as long as their wanderings tended more or less northward, in the way I was going. Then, when the Tecuexe decided to veer off to the east, Meat kindly escorted me to the camp of another tribe, the Tzacateca, and introduced me to a friend there with whom he had often done battle, a man named Greenery. So I went along with the Tzacateca as long as they drifted northward, and, when our paths diverged, Greenery in turn introduced me to another friend, by the name of Banquet, of the Hua tribe. Thus I was handed on from one band of Chichimeca to another—to the Toboso, the Iritila, the Mapimi—and thus it was that I lived in the desert through all the seasons of an entire year, and thus it was that I observed some really disgusting customs of the Chichimeca.

  In the late summer and early autumn of the year, the various desert cactuses put out their fruit. I have mentioned the towering quinametl cactus, which resembles an immense green man with many uplifted arms. It bears the fruit called the pitaaya, which is admittedly tasty and nourishing, but I think it is most prized because it is so difficult of acquisition. Since no man can climb a spine-clothed quinametl, the fruit can be coaxed loose only with the aid of long poles or thrown rocks. Anyway, the pitaaya is a favorite delicacy of the desert dwellers—such a luxury that they eat each fruit twice.

  A Chichimecatl man or woman will gobble one of the purplish globes entire, pulp and juice and black seeds together, and then wait for what those people call the ynic ome pixquitl, or "second harvest." That means only that the eaters digest the fruit and excrete the residue, among which are the undigested pitaaya seeds. As soon as a person has voided his bowels, he examines his excrement, he fingers through it and picks out those nutlike seeds and then eats them again, voluptuously crunching and chewing them to extract their full flavor and measure of nourishment. If a man or woman finds a trace of other excrement anywhere in the desert in that season—whether it be the droppings of an animal or vulture or another human—he or she will leap to examine it and paw through it, in hope of finding overlooked pitaaya seeds to appropriate and eat.

  There is another practice of those people which I found even more repellent, but to describe it I must explain something. When I had been traveling in the desert for almost a year, and the springtime came—I was at that time in the company of the Iritila tribe—I saw that Tlaloc does condescend to spill some of his rain upon the desert. For about a month of twenty days, he rains. On some of those days he storms so liberally that the desert's long-dry gullies become raging, frothing torrents. But Tlaloc's dispensation continues for no longer than that one month, and the water soon is sucked into the sands. So it is only during those twenty or so days of rain that the desert becomes briefly colorful, with flowers on the cactuses and the otherwise sere scrub bushes. At that time, too, in places where the ground stays soggy long enough, the desert sprouts a growth I had not seen before: a mushroom called the chichinanacatl. It consists of a skinny stem topped by a blood-red cap which is disfigured by white warts.

  The Iritila women eagerly gathered those mushrooms, but they never served any of them in the meals they prepared, and I thought that odd. During that same short, moist springtime, the chief of the Iritila ceased to urinate on the ground like other men. During that time, one of his wives carried always and everywhere a special clay bowl. Whenever the chief felt the urge to relieve himself, she held the bowl and he urinated into it. And there was one other odd circumstance during that season: each day, various of the Iritila males would be too drunk to go out hunting or foraging, and I could not imagine how they could have found or concocted a drunk-making drink. It was a while before I discerned the connection among those various odd things and events.

  There was really no great mystery. The mushrooms were reserved to be eaten only by the chief of the tribe. The eating of them gives the eater a sort of combined drunkenness and delicious hallucination, rather like the effect of chewing peyotl. And the inebriating effect of the chichinanacatl is only a little diminished by its being eaten and digested; whatever magical substance it contains goes right through the human body and out by way of the bladder. While the chief was in a constant state of happy stupefaction, he was also frequently urinating into his bowl, and his urine was almost as potent an intoxicant as the original mushrooms.

  The first full bowl was passed among his wise men and sorcerers. Each of them swigged greedily from it, and soon was staggering about or lying sodden in bliss. The next full bowl went to the chief's closest friends, the next to the tribe's more stalwart warriors, and so on. Before many days had passed, the bowl was circulating among the tribe's lesser men and oldsters, and finally even among the females. Eventually all the Iritila enjoyed at least one brief respite from the lackluster existence they endured during the rest of the year. The bowl was even hospitably proffered to the stranger among them, but I respectfully declined the treat, and no one seemed insulted or sorry that I did not take a portion of the precious urine.

  Despite the Chichimeca's numerous and flagrant depravities, I ought in fairness to say that those desert people are not entirely degraded and detestable. For one thing, I gradually realized that they are not unclean of body and verminous and smelly because they want to be. During seventeen months of the year, every drop of water that can be wrung from the desert—if it is not immediately and avidly lapped up by a thirsty tongue—must be hoarded against the day when there is not even a meagerly moist cactus withi
n reach, and there are many such days. During seventeen months of the year, water is for the inside of the body, not the outside. The short and fleeting season of early spring is the only time when the desert provides water to spare for the luxury of bathing. Like me, every member of the Iritila tribe took advantage of that opportunity to bathe as thoroughly and as often as possible. And, disencumbered of filth, a Chichimecatl looks as human as any civilized person.

  I remember one lovely sight I saw. It was late one afternoon, and I had wandered idly some distance from the place where the Iritila had just made camp for the night, and I came upon a young woman taking what was obviously her first bath of the year. She stood in the middle of a small and shallow rain pool caught in a rock basin, and she was alone, no doubt wanting to enjoy the pure water before others also found it and came jostling to share and dirty it. I did not make my presence known, but watched through my seeing crystal, while she lathered herself with the soaplike root of an amoli plant and then rinsed repeatedly—but slowly, leisurely, savoring the unaccustomed pleasure of the occasion.

  Tlaloc was preparing a storm in the east, behind her, erecting a wall of clouds as dark as a wall of slate. At first, the girl was almost indistinguishable against it, she was so discolored by her year's accumulation of dirt. But as she lathered and rinsed away layer after layer, her normal skin color came clearer and clearer. Tonatíu was setting in the west, and his beams accentuated the copper-gold of her. In that vast landscape, stretching flat and empty all the way to the dark cloud wall at the horizon, the young woman was the only bright thing. The curves of her naked body were outlined by their gleam of wetness, her clean hair glistened, the water she splashed upon herself broke into drops that glittered like jewels. Against the menacing storm sky behind her, she shone in the last sunlight as prettily as a small piece of glowing amber laid on a great dull slab of slate.