Aztec Autumn - Jennings Gary - Страница 23

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Worse yet, young women—even women who were otherwise comely—if they found themselves growing hair on their legs or under their arms, they were not ashamed of it. Indeed, they began to wear their skirts short, to display those hairy legs, and they cut the sleeves from their blouses, to show the little bushes in their armpits.

To this day, any of our men and women who grow hirsute of face or body—whether just a few sparse hairs or near to furriness—he or she flaunts that. Of course, it marks them as having the taint of bastardy somewhere in their lineage, but they do not mind that, because it proclaims to the rest of us:

"You smooth-skinned persons may be of the same complexion as myself, but you and I are no longer of the same lowly and despised race. I have an excess of hair, meaning that I have Spanish blood in me. You can tell just by looking at me that I am superior to you."

But I am getting ahead of my chronicle. At the time I settled in the City of Mexico, there were not so many mestizos and mulatos and other mongrels to be seen. I had passed my nineteenth birthday some while back—though exactly when, by the Christian calendar, I could not say, since I was not then very familiar with that calendar. Anyway, the white and black conquerors had not yet been among us for long enough to have produced more than those very young offspring, such as I saw in my Colegio classes.

What I did see on the streets, though, from my first arrival and ever afterward, was a much greater number of drunken people than I had ever seen even at the most licentious religious festivals in Aztlan. Many men, and more than a few women, could be seen at all hours, day or night, staggering about or even collapsed unconscious where sober passersby had to step over them. Our people, even our priests, had never been totally abstemious, but neither had they often overindulged—except at festivals—in the intoxicating beverages like Aztlan's fermented coconut milk or the tesguino that the Raramuri make from maize or the chapari that the Purempecha make from bees' honey or the everywhere-common octli, which the Spaniards call pulque, made from the metl plant, which the Spaniards call maguey.

I could only suppose that the Mexica citizens had taken to drinking to excess in order to forget for a while their utter defeat and despair, but Cuatl Alonso disagreed with that notion.

"It has been amply evidenced," he said, "that the entire race of indio peoples is susceptible to the gross effects of drink, and fond of those effects, and desirous of attaining those effects at every least opportunity."

I said, "I cannot speak for the inhabitants of this city, but I have never known the indios elsewhere to be so."

"Well, we Spaniards have subdued many other peoples," he said. "Berbers, Mohammedans, Jews, Turks, Frenchmen. Not even the Frenchmen took to mass drunkenness as a result of their defeat. No, Juan Britanico, from our years-ago landing in Cuba to the farthest extent that we have secured this New Spain, we have found the natives to be natural-born sots. De Leon reported the same of the red men in Florida. It appears to be an inherent physical failing in your people, much the same as their so easily dying from such trivial diseases as measles and the small pocks."

"I cannot deny that they sicken and die," I said.

"The authorities, especially Mother Church," he said, "have compassionately tried to lessen the temptation that drink holds for the weakling indios. We have tried to convert them to Spanish brandies and wines, in the hope that those more highly intoxicating beverages would lead people to drink less of them. But of course only the rich nobles could afford them. So the gobernador set up a brewery in San Antonio de Padua—what used to be Texcoco—hoping to wean the indios onto the cheaper and weaker intoxicant called beer, but to no avail. Pulque remains the easiest available liquor, almost dirt-cheap, since anyone can make it even at home, hence it remains the most-favored way for an indio to get drunk. The authorities' only recourse has been to make a law against any natives drinking to excess, and jailing those that do. But even the law is impracticable. We should have to lock up almost the entire indio population."

Or kill them, I thought. I had recently watched as a middle-aged and very drunk woman, reeling and shouting incoherently, was seized by three soldiers of the force that regularly patrolled the city. They had not bothered to jail the woman. They had set upon her with the stocks of their thunder-stick weapons, and with seeming glee, until she was beaten unconscious. Then they used their swords, not to stab and kill but only to slash her repeatedly, crisscross-wise, all over her body, so that when the woman awoke from the beating—if she ever did—she would be conscious just long enough to realize that she was irremediably bleeding to death.

"Speaking of pulque," I said, to change the subject, "it is made from the metl, or maguey. And while we have been translating this newest text, Cuatl Alonso, I heard you speak of the maguey as a cacto. It is not. The maguey has spines, yes, but every cactus also has an internal woody skeleton, and the maguey does not. It is a planta, the same as any bush or grass."

"Thank you, Cuatl Juan. I am making a note. So—let us get on with our work, then."

I continued to sleep every night and to take my morning and evening meals at the Meson de San Jose, while I passed my free Sundays in the several city markets, asking stallkeepers and passersby if they knew any persons named Netzlin and Citlali, formerly of the town of Tepiz. For a long while, my search was unsuccessful. But I was not wasting what time I spent, either at that endeavor or at the meson.

Mingling with the city folk in the markets helped me refine my old-fashioned way of speaking Nahuatl and acquire the more modern vocabulary of the Mexica. Also I associated as much as possible with those prosperous, far-traveled pochteca who had brought goods from the south to sell in the city—and with the burly tamemime who had actually carried those goods—and thereby learned a useful number of words and phrases of the southern tongues: the Mixteca language of the people who call themselves Men of the Earth, and the Tzapoteca of those who call themselves the Cloud People, even many words of the tongues spoken in the Chiapa and Quautemalan lands.

At the meson, every night I was in the company of foreigners from the north, as I have said. Of those, as I have also said, the Chichimeca lodgers spoke a Nahuatl about as archaic as my own, but understandable. So I consorted mainly with foreigners of the Otomi and Purempecha and the so-called Runner People, thereby learning useful fragments of the Otomite and Pore and Raramuri languages. I had never before had any occasion, back home in my own land, to discover my considerable facility for learning other tongues, but now it was evident to me. And I supposed that I must have inherited the ability from my late father, because he must have acquired it during his extensive travels throughout The One World. I will say this, however: the languages of our peoples, though they might be very different from Nahuatl, and sometimes difficult for me to enunciate, none was so very different and difficult as the Spanish, or took me as long to gain fluency in.

At the meson, also, on any night I could engage in conversation that long-time city dweller, the former jewelsmith Pochotl, who obviously had determined to spend the rest of his life battening on the hospitality of the San Jose friars. Some of our talks consisted of my merely listening, and trying not to yawn, as he recited his innumerable grudges and grievances against the Spanish, against the tonali that from his birth had predestined his present misery, and against the gods who had laid that tonali on him. But more often I listened more attentively, for he had really informative things to tell. For example, Pochotl provided my first knowledge of the orders and ranks and authorities by which New Spain was ruled and governed.

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