Aztec Autumn - Jennings Gary - Страница 15

"Please do not mock me, uncle. I quote to you a bit of one of your own poems. 'Never forgive... at last you lunge and reach for the throat.' The Spaniards surely have a pregnability somewhere. It has only to be found."

"By you, nephew? In these last ten years, no other man of any of the defeated nations has found a penetrable crack in the Spanish armor. How will you?"

"I have at least made a friend among the enemies. That one called a notarius, who speaks our tongue. He invited me to come and talk to him at any time. Perhaps I can pry from him some useful hint of—"

"Go then. Talk. We will wait here."

"No, no," I said. "It is bound to take me a long time to gain his full confidence—to hope for any helpful disclosures. I ask your permission, as my uncle and my Uey-Tecutli, to remain here in this city for as long as that may require."

My mother murmured dolefully, "Ayya ouiya..." and Mixtzin pensively rubbed his chin.

At last he asked, "Where will you live? How will you live? The cacao beans in our purses are negotiable only in the native markets. For any other purchase or payment, I have already been told that things called coins are necessary. Gold and silver and copper pieces. You have none and I have none to leave with you."

"I shall seek some kind of work to do, and be paid for it. Perhaps that notarius can assist me. Also—remember—the tlatocapili Tototl said that two of his scouts from Tepiz are still here somewhere. They must have a roof over them by now, and may be willing to share it with a onetime neighbor."

"Yes." Mixtzin nodded. "I remember. Tototl told me their names. Netzlin and his wife Citlali. Yes, if you can find them..."

"Then I may stay?"

"But, Tenamaxtli," my mother whimpered. "Suppose you should come to accept and adopt the white men's ways..."

I snorted and said, "Not likely, Tene. Here I shall be as the worm in a coyacapuli fruit. Making it nourish me only until it is dead itself."

We inquired of passersby whether there was any place we might spend the night, and one of them directed us to the House of Pochteca, a meeting hall and warehouse for the traveling merchants who brought their wares to the city. But there was a steward at the door, and he apologetically but firmly declined to let us enter.

"The building is reserved to the use of pochteca only," he said, "which you obviously are not, since you bear no bundles and lead no train of tamemime porters."

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

"The thing is," explained the steward, "the original House of Pochteca 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 meson. It is provided by the Christian Church, to house and feed itinerant or indigent persons. The Meson de San Jose." 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 meson was a large adobe structure that was an annex to an even larger and much more substantial building called the Colegio de San Jose. I learned later that the word colegio means much the same as our calmecac—a school for advanced students, taught by priests, though in this case Christian priests, of course.

The meson, 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 atoli. 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 tlaxcaltin.

"Our maize-flour tlaxcaltin 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 Cuicani, 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 pitzome 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 pitzome?" 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 pitzome and human meat that many of us believe the Spaniards and those animals must be blood relations, that the white men and their pitzome 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."