Here was an aspect of Spanish custom that I had not encountered before. Among us indios, there were of course children who suffered the loss of father or mother or both—to disease or war or some other disaster. But we had no word for orphan in any of the native languages that I knew. And that was simply because no child was ever abandoned or cast away or foisted upon the community. Every child was dear to us, and any one of them left alone in the world was instantly, eagerly adopted by some man and wife, whether they were forlornly childless or had a home teeming with other children.
“At least I was given a decent first name,” Rebeca went on. “But that ‘drab’ yonder”—she discreetly indicated him—“the pardo boy, the ugly one, being also an orphan living at the Refiigio, was named by the nuns Niebla Zonzón.”
“Ayya!” I exclaimed, half laughing, half pitying. “Both his names mean ‘dim, foggy, stupid’!”
“And ay de mi, so he is,” said Rebeca with a pearly grin. “Well, you have heard him stutter and stammer and flounder when he speaks here in class.”
“At any rate, the nuns provide you orphans with an education,” I said. “If religious instruction can be called education.”
“For me it is,” she said. “I am studying to become a Christian nun myself. To wear the veil.”
“I thought it was shoes,” I said confusedly.
“What?”
“No matter. What does it mean—wearing the veil?”
“I become the bride of Christ.”
“I thought he was dead.”
“You really do not listen very closely to our Tete, do you, Juan Británico?” she said, sounding as severe as Alonso. “I will become Jesucristo’s bride in name. All nuns are called so.”
“Well, it is better than the name Canalluza,” I said. “Will the ugly pardo Niebla Zonzón get to change his name, too?
“¡Vaya al cielo—no!” she said, laughing. “He has not the brains to become a religious of any order. From this class here, poor witless Zonzón goes to a cellar room where he is training to be an apprentice tanner. That is why he smells so bad all the time.”
“Tell me, then,” I said, “what does it entail—becoming a dead godling’s bride?”
“It means that, like any bride, I devote myself only to him for the rest of my life. I renounce every mortal man, every pleasure, every frivolity. As soon as I am confirmed and make my first Communion, I become a novice in the convent. From that time on, I am dedicated to duty, to obedience, to service.” She dropped her eyes from mine. “And to chastity.”
“But that time is not yet,” I said gently.
“Soon, though,” she said, her eyes still downcast.
“Rebeca, I am nearly ten years older than you are.”
“You are handsome,” she said, still without raising her eyes. “I will have you—-to remember—during all the years of having no one else but Jesucristo.”
In that wistful moment, the little girl was very nearly lovable, certainly pitiable. I could not have refused such a shy and tender plea, even had I wanted to. So we arranged to meet in a private place, after dark, and there I gave her what she wanted to remember.
Even with her eager collaboration, however, our coupling did not come easily. First, as I should have expected, I found that Spanish-style clothes—both mine and hers—were difficult to doff with any grace. It required awkward contortions that considerably lessened the gratification of two persons getting themselves naked. Next, the size of her body and mine proved to be a disadvantage. I am rather taller than almost every other Aztécatl and Mexícatl man—according to my mother, I inherited my height from my father Mixtli—and, as I have said, for all her womanly proportions, Rebeca was a very small child. This was her first attempt at the act, and it might as well have been the first for me, so bumblingly did we go about it that night. She simply could not spread her legs far enough apart for me to get properly between them, so my tepúli could put no more than its tip end into her tipíli. After much mutual frustration, we finally settled for doing it rabbit-fashion, she on elbows and knees, I covering her from above and behind—though even then, her extraordinary buttocks were something of a hindrance.
I did learn two things from that experience. Rebeca was even blacker of skin at her private parts than elsewhere, but when the black lips down there opened, she was as flowerpink inside as any other female I ever knew so intimately. Also, because Rebeca was a virgin when we began there was a little smear of blood when we were done, and I discovered that her blood was as red as that of anyone else. I have, ever since then, been inclined to believe that all persons, whatever their outer color, are made of the very same meat within.
And Rebeca so delighted in her first ahuilnéma that we did it thereafter at every opportunity. I was able to show her some of the more comfortable and pleasurable expedients that I had learned from that auyaními in Aztlan and then had perfected in practice with my cousin Améyatl. So Rebeca and I enjoyed one another often, and right up until the night before the day that Bishop Zumárraga anointed her and several of her sister orphans in the rite of Confirmatión.
I did not attend that ceremony, but I did get a glimpse of Rebeca in her ceremonial gown. I have to say that she looked rather comical—the brown-black head and hands in stark contrast to the gown as white as the only white feature of Rebeca, her teeth, gleaming in a smile of commingled excitement and nervousness. And, from that day on, I never again touched her or even saw her, for she never again emerged from the Refugio de Santa Brígida.
IX
“¿A CUÁNTOS PATOS ha matado hoy?” I asked, with some diffidence.
“¡Caray, cientos! ¡Y a tenazón!” he said, grinning proudly. “Unos gansos yscisnes ademas.”
Well, he had understood my asking how many ducks he had slain that day, and I had understood his reply: “Hah, hundreds! And without even aiming. Also some geese and swans.”
It was the first time I had tested my command of Spanish on anyone but my teacher and classmates. This young man was a soldier doing fowler duty at the lakeside, and he seemed amiable, perhaps because I was in Spanish garb and he took me to be a domesticated and Christianized manservant of some sort. He went on:
“Por supuesto, no comemos los cisnes. Demasiado duro a mancar.” And he took pains to make that clear to me, waggling his jaw in an exaggerated manner. “Of course, we do not eat the swans. Too tough to chew.”
I had come here to the lakeside on other occasions, to watch what Pochotl had called the “strange but effective means” employed by the Spaniards to harvest the waterfowl that descended onto the lake at every dusk. It was indeed a strange method, and it was done with the thunder-stick (properly called an arcabuz) and it was indeed effective.
A considerable number of the arcabuces were tied firmly to posts sunk in the lake’s bank, the weapons pointing straight out across the water. Another battery of arcabuces was similarly tied to stakes, but pointing upward at various angles and in various directions. All those weapons could be tended and set off by a single soldier. First, he pulled a string and the leveled arcabuces boomed their flashes and smokes directly across the. lake surface, killing many of the birds floating there and frightening the rest into sudden flight At which, the fowler pulled another string, and those severally aimed, uptilted arcabuces fired all together, knocking whole swarms of the birds out of the air. Then the soldier would go about to all the weapons, doing something at the front of their tubes and something else at the rear of them. By the time he had completed that task, the birds would have calmed and resettled on the water, and the twofold slaughter would commence again. Finally, before full darkness came, the fowler would send out boatmen in acáltin canoes to collect the drifts of dead birds.
Though I had witnessed that procedure several times, this was the first time I had nerved myself to ask questions about it
“We indios never used anything but nets,” I told the young soldier, “into which we drove the birds. Your method is much more rewarding
. How does it work?”
“Very simple,” he said. “A string is tied to the gatillo of each of the leveled arcabuces.” (I was already puzzled, for gatillo means a “little cat” or a “kitten.”) “All those strings are tied to a single string for me to pull and fire those weapons all at once. Likewise, strings are tied to the gatillos of all the upward-aimed—”
“I could see that,” I said. “But how does the arcabuz itself work?”
“Ah,” he said, and pridefully led me to one of the staked weapons, knelt beside it and began to point. “This little thing here is the gatillo.” It was a bit of metal protruding from under the rearward part of the arcabuz, crescent-shaped to be pulled by a finger or, in this case, a string, and the kitten was inside a metal guard, evidently to prevent its being pulled accidentally. “And this thing here is the wheel, which is spun by a spring that you cannot see, inside the lock there.” The wheel was just that—a wheel—but small, about the size of an ardite coin, made of metal and grooved with tiny teeth all around.
“What is a spring?” I asked.
“A narrow leaf of thin metal, wound into a tight coil by this key.” He showed me the key, then used it to sketch a small, tight spiral in the earth at our feet. “That is what the spring looks like, and every arcabucero carries a key.” He inserted his into a hole in what he had called “the lock,” turned the key a time or two, and I heard a faint grating noise. “There, the wheel is ready to spin. Now, this thing here we call a cat’s-paw.” It was another small metal piece, not like a cat’s paw at all, but shaped more like a bird’s head, gripping in its beak a bit of gravel. “That stone,” the soldier explained, “is a pinto.” And I recognized it as a tiny fragment of what we call the “false-gold.”
“Now, we cock the cat’s-paw back, ready to strike,” he went on, thumbing it backward with a click, “and another spring holds it there. Then—observe—I squeeze the kitten, the wheel spins and at the same instant the cat’s-paw slaps its pirita against the wheel and you will see a spray of sparks.”
Which is exactly what occurred, and the soldier looked more proud than ever.
“But,” I said, “there was no flash or noise or smoke from the tube.”
He laughed indulgently. “That is because I had not yet loaded the arcabuz or primed its cazoleta.”
He produced two large leather pouches and, from one of them, dribbled a small pile of dark powder into my palm. “That is the pólvora. See, now I pour a measured amount of it down the mouth of the canon here, and shove in behind it a small piece of cloth. Then, from this other pouch, I take a cartucho.” He showed me a small, transparent sac—like a bit of tied-off animal intestine—packed with little metal pellets. “For shooting enemies or large animals, of course, we use a heavy round balcu But for birds we use a cartucho of perdigones.” Then, with a long metal rod, he tamped all the contents tightly down in there. “Last of all, I put a mere touch of the pólvora here on the cazoleta.” That was a little pan sticking out shelflike from the lock, where the sparks from the wheel and the false-gold would strike it. “You will notice,” he concluded, “that there is a narrow hole going from the cazoleta into the canon where the charge of pólvora is packed. Now, here, I wind the spring and you squeeze the gatillo.”
I knelt down to the charged weapon with commingled curiosity, timidity and dread. But the curiosity was foremost, because I had come here and accosted the young soldier with precisely this end in mind. I put my finger through the guard beneath the arcabuz’s lock, hooked it around the kitten and squeezed.
The wheel spun, the cat’s-paw snapped down, the sparks sprayed, there was a noise like an angry little snarl and a puff of smoke from the powdered pan… and then the arcabuz rocked backward, and I flinched wildly away, as its mouth roared and spewed a flame and a bloom of blue smoke and, I had no doubt, all those death-dealing metal pellets. When I had recovered from the shock and the ringing in my ears, the young soldier was laughing heartily.
“¡Cáspita!” he exclaimed. “I will wager that you are the first and only indio ever to fire such a weapon. Do not let anyone know that I let you do it. Come, you can watch me load all the arcabuces for the next fusillade.”
As I followed him, I said, “Then the pólvora is the absolute essential component of the arcabuz. The lock and wheel and cats and such are simply to make the pólvora work as you wish it to.”
“Indeed, yes,” he said. “Without the pólvora there would be no firearms at all in the world. No arcabuces, granadas, culebrinas, petardos. Ni siquiera triquitraques. Nada.”
“But what is the pólvora?” I asked. “What is it made of?”
“Ah, now that I will not tell you. It was rash enough of me to let you play with the arcabuz. The orders are that no indio be allowed to handle any weapon of the white men, and my punishment for that would be dire. I certainly cannot reveal the composition of the pólvora.”
I must have looked downcast, because he laughed once more and said, “I will tell you this much. The pólvora is obviously very much a man’s property, for manly uses. But, oddly enough, one of its ingredients is a very intimate contribution from the ladies.”
He went on laughing as he went on working, and as I drifted away. He took no notice of my departure, nor had he noticed that the small amount of the pólvora he had poured into my hand had gone into my own belt pouch, nor that I had picked up one of the wheel-winding keys I found lying beside one of the other arcabuces.
Bearing those items, I made my way to the Cathedral-hurrying thence, before I might forget any detail of the contrivances I had been shown. It was past the hour of Compline when I got to Alonso’s workroom, so the notarius was not there, probably busy at his devotions. I found a blank piece of bark paper and, with a stick of charcoal, began to draw: the kitten and its guard, the cat’s-paw, the wheel, the spiral of spring…
“Are you returned to work late this evening, Juan Británico?” said Alonso, coming through the door.
I managed not to jump or act startled. “Only practicing some word-pictures of my own,” I said offhandedly, crumpling the paper but holding on to it “You and I do so much translating of other scribes’ work that I feared I might be forgetting the craft. So, having nothing better to do, I came back here to practice.”
“I am glad you did. I would like to ask you something.”
“A su servicio, Cuatl Alonso,” I said, hoping I did not look wary.
“I have just come from a meeting of Bishop Zumárraga, Archdeacon Suárez-Begega, the Ostiarius Sénchez-Santovefia and various other custodians. They are all agreed that it is time the Cathedral was provided with more dignified and resplendent furnishings and vessels. We have been using makeshift paraphernalia only because a whole new Cathedral must be built before long. However, since such articles as chalice and monstrance, pyx and stoup—even larger things, like a rood screen and a font—can be easily moved to the new building, it has been agreed that we procure all those things, and of a quality befitting a Cathedral.”
“Surely,” I said, “you are not seeking my agreement?”
He smiled. “Hardly. But you may be of assistance, since I know you wander widely about the city. These fixtures and appurtenances must be of gold and silver and precious gems. Your people used to be sublimely accomplished at such works. Before we send a crier through the streets, calling for a master jewelsmith to come forward, I thought you might be able to suggest someone.”
“Cuatl Alonso,” I said, gleefully clapping my hands together, “I know the very man.”
Back at the mesón, I said to Pochotl, “You are acquainted with the Spanish weapon we call the thunder-stick?”
“The arcabuz, yes,” he said. “At any rate, I have seen what it can do. One of them put a hole—as if it had thrown an invisible javelin—clear through my elder brother.”
“Do you know how the arcabuz works?”
“How it works? No. How should I?”
“You are an artist of great ingenuity. Could you mak
e one?”
“Make a device that is both outlandish and prodigious? A thing I have seen only from a distance? Without even knowing how it works? Are you tlahuéle, friend, or merely xoiopítli?”
There are two Náhuatl words meaning “deranged.” Tlahuéle refers to a person who is violently and dangerously insane. Xolopitli refers to one who is witless in only a moony and harmless degree.
I said, “But could you build one if I show you pictures of the parts that make it work?”
“How can you possibly do that? None of us is allowed anywhere near the white men’s arms or armor.”
“I have done that Here, look.” I showed him the paper of drawings I had made, and, right there, with a bit of charcoal, I completed a couple of the pictures that had been left unfinished when Alonso interrupted me. I told Pochotl what the drawings represented and how the various pieces performed to make an arcabuz do its death-dealing.
Pochotl mumbled, “Well, it would not be impossible to forge and shape the pieces, and to fit them together as you have described. But this is work for a common smith, not for an artificer of delicate jewelry. All of it, anyway, except for these strange things you call springs.”
“Except the springs, exactly,” I said. “That is why I come to you.”
“Even assuming I can lay hands on the iron and steel required, why should I waste my time fooling with such a complicated contraption?”
“Waste what time?” I asked sardonically. “What are you spending your time on, beyond eating and sleeping?”
“Be that as it may, I told you I want nothing to do with your ludicrous idea of revolution! Making an unlawful weapon for you would involve me in your tlahuéle delirium, and I would stand yoked beside you at the burning stake!”
“I shall absolve you and go to the stake alone,” I said. “Meanwhile, suppose I offer you a reward irresistible in payment for the arcabuz?”
Aztec Autumn Page 13