Aztec - Jennings Gary - Страница 8

Most August Majesty: from this City of Mexico, capital of New Spain, this eve of the Feast of St. Michael and All Angels, in the Year of Our Lord one thousand five hundred twenty and nine, greeting.

Your Majesty commands that we continue to send additional portions of the so-called Aztec History "as quickly as the pages are compiled." This grievously astounds and offends your well-intentioned chaplain, Sire. We would not, for all the realms in Your Majesty's domain, dream of disputing our sovereign's desires and decisions. But we thought we had made plain in our earlier letter our objections to this chronicle—which grows daily more detestable—and we hoped that the recommendation of Your Majesty's own delegated Bishop would not be so casually disdained.

We are cognizant of Your Gracious Majesty's concern for the most minute information regarding even the most remote of your subjects, that you may the more wisely and beneficently govern them. Indeed, we have respected that praiseworthy concern ever since the very first task to which Your Majesty personally set us: the extermination of the witches of Navarre. That once dissident province has been, since that sublime and prodigious purging by fire, among the most obedient and subservient of all under Your Majesty's sovereignty. Your humble servant intends equal assiduity in rooting out the age-old evils of these newer provinces—putting the curb rein to vice and the spurs to virtue—thus bringing them likewise to submission to Your Majesty and the Holy Cross.

Surely nothing can be undertaken in Your Majesty's service which will not be blessed by God. And, of a certainty, Your Most Puissant Lordship should know of matters regarding this land, for it is so limitless and marvelous that Your Majesty may well call yourself Emperor of it with no less pride than you do of Germany, which by the grace of God is now also Your Majesty's possession.

Nevertheless, in supervising the transcription of this history of what is now New Spain, only God knows how racked and outraged and nauseated we have been by the narrator's unquenchable effluxion. The Aztec is an Aeolus with an inexhaustible bag of winds. We could not complain of that if he confined himself to what we have asked: that is, an account in the manner of St. Gregory of Tours and other classical historians—names of distinguished personages, brief summaries of their careers, prominent dates, battles, etc.

But this human cataract cannot be restrained from his divagations into the most sordid and repellent aspects of his people's history and his own. Granted, this Indian was a heathen until his baptism no more than a few years ago. The infernal atrocities he committed and witnessed in his earlier life we must charitably concede were done or condoned in ignorance of Christian morality. Still, he is now at least nominally a Christian. One would expect him, if he must dwell on the more bestial episodes of his life and times, to manifest a decent and humble contrition befitting the horrors he describes in such lascivious detail.

He does not. He recognizes no horror in those enormities.

He does not so much as blush at the many offenses to our Lord and to common decency which he is dinning into the ears of our reverend friar-scribes: idolatry, pretense of magic, superstitions, bloodthirst and bloodletting, obscene and unnatural acts, other sins so vile that we here forbear even to name them. Except for Your Majesty's command that all "be set forth in much detail," we would not allow our scribes to commit portions of the Aztec's narrative to the permanence of parchment.

However, Your Majesty's servant has never yet disobeyed a royal order. We will try to regard the Indian's pernicious maunderings merely as evidence that during his lifetime the Adversary arranged many sorts of temptations and trials for him, God permitting it for the stoutening of the Aztec's soul. This, we remind ourself, is no small evidence of the greatness of God, for He chooses not the wise and strong but the simple-minded and weak to be equally instruments and beneficiaries of His mercy. The law of God, we remind ourself, obliges us to extend an extra meed of tolerance to those upon whose lips the milk of the Faith is not yet dry, rather than to those who have already absorbed it and are accustomed to it.

So we will try to contain our disgust. We will keep the Indian with us and let him continue to spew his sewage, at least until we hear of Your Majesty's response to these further pages of his story. Fortunately, we have no other urgent need for his five attendants at this time. And the creature's only recompense is that we allow him a share of our simple fare, and a straw sleeping mat in an unused store closet off the cloister for his use on those nights when he does not take our table scraps to his apparently ailing wife, and spend the night ministering to her.

But we are confident that we shall soon be rid of the Aztec and the foul miasma which we feel surrounding him. We know that when you read the following pages. Sire—indescribably more horripilating than the previous portion—you will share our revulsion and will cry, "No more of this filth!" much as David cried, "Publish it not, lest the unbelievers rejoice!" We will eagerly—nay, anxiously—await Your Esteemed Majesty's command, by the next courier ship, that all pages compiled in the meantime be destroyed and that we oust this reprehensible barbarian from our precincts.

May God Our Lord watch over and preserve Your Most Excellent Majesty for many years in His holy service. Of Your S.C.C.M., the loyal and prayerful chaplain,

(ecce signum) Zumarraga

ALTER PARS

His Excellency does not attend today, my lord scribes? Am I to continue, then? Ah, I see. He will read your pages of my words at his leisure.

Very well. Then let me leave, for now, my overly personal chronicle of my family and myself. Lest you get the impression that I and the few other persons I have mentioned lived in some kind of isolation, apart from the rest of humanity, let me give you a broader view. In my mind, in my recollection, I shall step back and away, so to speak, that I may better make you see our relation to our world as a whole. The world we called Cem-Anahuac, meaning The One World.

Your explorers early discovered that it is situated between two boundless oceans east and west. The humid Hot Lands at the oceans' edges extend not far inland before they slant upward to become towering mountain ranges, and with a high plateau between those eastern and western ranges. This plateau is so near the sky that the air is thin and clean and sparkling clear. Our days here are almost always springtime mild, even during the midsummer rainy season—until the dry winter comes, when Tititl, god of the year's shortest days, chooses to make some of those days chilly or even achingly cold.

The most populous part of all The One World is this great bowl or depression in the plateau, which you now call the Valley of Mexico. Here are puddled the lakes that made this area so attractive to human habitation. In actuality, there is only one tremendous lake, pinched in two places by encroaching highlands, so that there are three large bodies of water connected by slightly narrower straits. The smallest and southernmost of these lakes is of fresh water, fed by clear streams melting from the snows of the mountains there. The northernmost lake, where I spent my earliest years, is of reddish and briny water, because it is surrounded by mineral lands which leach their salts into the water. The central lake, Texcoco, bigger than the other two together and composed of their mingled salty and fresh waters, is thus of a slightly brackish quality.

Despite there being only one lake—or three, if you like—we have always divided them by five names. The dun-colored Lake Texcoco aione bears a single name. The southern and most crystalline lake is called Xochimilco in its upper part: The Flower Garden, because that neighborhood is the nursery of precious plants for all the lands about. In its lower part, the lake is called Chalco, after the Chalca nation which borders it. The northernmost lake, though also a single body of water, is likewise divided. The people who live on Tzumpanco, The Skull-Shaped Island, call its upper half Lake Tzumpanco. The people of my native Xaltocan, Island of Field Mice, call their portion Lake Xaltocan.