Aztec Autumn - Jennings Gary - Страница 18

I learned later that this portion of the city through which I was plodding was called the Traza, a vast rectangle comprising many streets and avenues in extent, the entire center of the City of Mexico. The Traza was reserved for the residences, churches, commercial establishments and official buildings of the white men and their families. There were exceptions. The copper-skinned men in clerical garb lived in the church residences along with their white fellow churchmen. And a few of the white families' native servants ate and slept in the houses where they worked. But all other native citizens—even those who worked for the governing functionaries—had to go home at night to the colaciones, the several parts of the city that extended out from the Traza to the edges of the island. And those sections ranged in quality and appearance and cleanliness from respectable to tolerable to vile.

Just looking at the fine, large buildings that composed the Traza, I wondered if the Spaniards were ignorant of the natural disasters that this city was prone to, and which were well known to everybody else in The One World. Tenochtitlan had frequently been inundated by floods of the surrounding lake waters, and two or three times had been all but washed away. I supposed that there was no longer much danger of floods, with Lake Texcoco's being now so diminished.

However, the entire island, because it was simply an upcropping of the lake's unstable bed, had often also been racked by what we called the tlalolini—the terremoto in Spanish. On some of those occasions, just one or a few of Tenochtitlan's structures had shifted position slightly or had leaned sideways or had sunk below ground level to some degree. On other occasions, the whole island had violently shaken and heaved, making buildings fall down as suddenly as did the people on the streets. That was why, by the time my Uncle Mixtzin first saw Tenochtitlan, its major buildings were all firmly broad-based, and the lesser ones were built on pilings that would merely sway or give a little, to compensate for the island's settling or quaking.

Another thing that I learned later was that the Spaniards were beginning to realize this propensity of the island, and from experience. The looming Cathedral Church of San Francisco, the biggest, therefore the heaviest, structure yet attempted by the white builders—and not even completed yet—was already perceptibly and lopsidedly sinking. Its stone walls were cracking in places, its marble floors buckling.

"It is the spiteful doing of the pagan demons," declared the priests who inhabited the place. "We should never have built this house of God on the site of the red heathens' monstrous temple, and even used that temple's stones in the process. We must start again, and rebuild elsewhere."

So the Cathedral's architects were frantically putting wedges under the building, and buttresses about it, trying every means to keep it upright and intact at least until it was finished. At the same time, they were drawing plans for a whole new Cathedral to be erected some distance away, with an extensive underground foundation that they hoped would hold it up.

I knew none of that on the day, still carrying the empty jar on my shoulder, I crossed the immense open square beside which the Cathedral stood. I set the jar down beside the big main door, so that I might look less like an itinerant laborer and more like an estimable caller. I waited while several clerically gowned white men went in or came out, addressing each of them and asking if I might enter their temple. (I also knew nothing then of the rules regarding respectful entrance; for instance, whether I should kiss the ground before or after going through the door.) What soon became evident was that not a one of these white priests, friars, whatever they were—and some had been resident in New Spain for as long as ten years—could speak or comprehend a word of Nahuatl. And none of our people-turned-Crixtanoyotl came by. So I tried repeating over and over, as best I could pronounce the words, "notarius" and "Alonso" and "Molina."

Finally one of the men snapped his fingers in recognition of what I was asking, and led me through the portal—no kissing the ground at all, by either of us, though he did give a sort of reverential little dip at one point—through the cavernous interior and along aisles and corridors and up stairways. Inside the church, I noticed, all the churchmen removed their hats—they wore quite an assortment, from small and round to large and puffy—and every one of them had a circle of his hair shaved bald at the crown of his head.

My guide stopped at an open door and motioned for me to enter, and in that small room sat the notarius Alonso at a table. He was smoking picietl, but not in the way we do, with the dried, shredded herb rolled in a tube of reed or paper. He held between his lips a long, stiff, thin thing of white clay, the far end of which was bent upward and packed with the slow-burning picietl, and he inhaled the smoke from the other, narrower end.

The notarius had one of our native pleated bark-paper books before him, and was copying from its many colored word-pictures. I should say translating from it, because the copy he was writing on another paper was not in word-pictures. He was doing it with a sharpened duck quill that he dipped in a small jar of black liquid, and then scribbled on his paper only wiggly lines of that one color—what I know now, of course, is the Spanish style of writing. He finished a line and looked up, and looked pleased, but had to fumble for my name:

"Ayyo, it is good to see you again... er... Cuatl..."

"Tenamaxtli, Cuatl Alonso."

"Cuatl Tenamaxtli, to be sure."

"You told me I might come and talk to you again."

"By all means, though I did not expect you so soon. What can I do for you, brother?"

"Teach me to speak and understand Spanish, if you would, brother notarius."

He gave me a long look before he asked, "Why?"

"You are the only Spaniard I have met who speaks my language. And you said it makes you useful as a communicator between your people and mine. Perhaps I could be equally useful. If none other of your countrymen can manage to learn our Nahuatl—"

"Oh, I am not the only one who speaks it," he said. "But the others, as they become fluent, get variously assigned to other parts of the city or out in the farther reaches of New Spain."

"Then will you teach me?" I persisted. "Or if you cannot, maybe one of those others..."

"I can and I will," he said. "I cannot make time to give you private lessons, but I do teach a class every day at the Colegio de San Jose. That is a school established solely for the education of you indios—of you people. Every priest-teacher at the Colegio speaks at least a passable Nahuatl."

"Then I am in luck," I said, pleased. "As it happens, I am lodging in the friars' meson next door."

"Even better luck, Tenamaxtli, there is a beginners' class just starting. That will make the learning easier for you. If you will be at the front gate of the Colegio tomorrow at the hour of Prime—"

"Prime?" I said blankly.

"I was forgetting. Well, never mind. As soon as you have broken your night's fast—that would be the hour of Lauds—simply step over to the Colegio gate and wait for me. I will see that you are properly admitted and enrolled and told when and where your classes will be."

"I cannot thank you enough, Cuatl Alonso."

He picked up his quill again, expecting me to depart. When I hesitated there before his table, he asked, "Was there something else?"