Aztec Blood

FIFTEEN

At the House of the Poor I crept across the main room without lighting a candle. Rather than sleep in the big room, I went into the fray's enclosed corner and lay down on his bed. I lay there for over an hour, unable to sleep, when I heard men entering the house. No voices. They were trying to be quiet, but the straw gave them away.

Neither Fray Antonio nor our rope-sandaled street people had come in, men wearing boots had entered. I heard the jingle of spurs. A third man had entered, a wearer of spurs. That did not inevitably mean the man was a gachupin. Indio, mestizo, and africano vaqueros wore spurs as well, but they favored working rowels of honed iron. These were the silver spurs of a caballero.

The old woman had sent a gachupin and two helpers for me.

¡Así es! So be it.

The fray's rabbit hole was almost filled with blankets. I quickly removed enough to make room for me and slipped in, pulling the trapdoor and its rug over my head. The trapdoor would not completely close, but unless one was looking for it, it was unlikely they would spot it.

Through a crack in the opening, I saw someone enter with a lit torch. A Spaniard, about forty years old. From his clothes, it was obvious that he was a caballero, a gentleman and swordsman.

"No one here," he said. His voice was aristocratic, with that tone of cold command. Here was a man used to issuing orders.

"No sign of the boy or the priest in the main room, Don Ramon."

The second voice was that of an indio or mestizo vaquero, a horseman who drove cattle and sheep, perhaps even an overseer who commanded the hacienda's workers.

"They must all be at the festival, Don Ramon," he said.

"No way they can be found in that crowd," the don answered, "and anyway I have to get back to the reception. We will return in the morning."

A guest at the alcalde's reception itself. Truly a very big wearer of spurs.

I waited in the rabbit's hole until long after the crunch of boots had faded from the house. Climbing out of the hole, I crawled over to the blanket curtain and peeked into the darkness of the main room. Nothing moved. Still the fear that someone had stayed behind to watch kept me from going through the door. Instead I opened the wicker shutter that covered the window opening behind the fray's bed and climbed out into the alley. From the position of the moon, I estimated I had been in the rabbit hole for a good two hours and had been home from the festival for more than three.

I crept down the alley until I was two blocks from the House of the Poor, then positioned myself where I could watch the street leading to its front door. I was certain the fray would make his way home along this street.

I sat down with my back to a wall staring up the alley. Soon people came streaming back from the festival, many of them raucously inebriated.

Near dawn Fray Antonio and a rowdy group of neighbors staggered down the street. I rushed out and took the fray aside.

"Cristo, Cristo, what's the matter? Have you seen a ghost? You look like Montezuma upon learning that the Plumed Serpent, Quetzalcóatl, had claimed his throne."

"Fray, there is great trouble." I told him about the woman in black and the man named Don Ramon, who had searched the House of the Poor.

The fray crossed himself. "We are lost."

His panic fueled mine. "What are you talking about, Fray. Why do these people wish me harm?"

"Ramon is the devil himself." He grabbed my shoulders, and his voice shook. "You must flee the city."

"I—I can't leave. This is the only place I know."

"You must leave now, this moment."

Fray Antonio pulled me into the darkness of the narrow alley. "I knew they would come someday. I knew that the secret could not stay buried forever, but I did not think you would be found this quickly."

I was young and scared and ready to cry. "What have I done?"

"That does not matter. All that counts now is flight. You must leave the city by the Jalapa road. A steady stream of pack trains is hauling goods from the treasure fleet to the fair. There will be horsemen as well. You will not be noticed among the other travelers."

I was horrified. Go to Jalapa by myself? It was several days' journey. "What will I do in Jalapa?"

"Wait for me. I will come. Many people from the city go there for the fair. I will take Fray Juan with me. You stay near the fair until I arrive."

"But, Fray, I don't—"

"Listen to me!" He grabbed my shoulders again, his fingernails dug into them. "There is no other path. If they find you, they will kill you."

"Why—"

"I can't give you answers. If anything is to save you, it might be your very ignorance. From this moment on, do not speak Spanish. Speak only Náhuatl. They are looking for a mestizo. Never admit that you are one. You are indio. Give yourself an indio name, not a Spanish one."

"Fray—"

"Go—now! Vayas con Dios. And let God be your protector because no man will lift a hand to help a mestizo."

SIXTEEN

I left the city before dawn, walking quickly, sticking to the shadows. There were already a few travelers on the road, mule and donkey trains loaded with goods from the ships. I had not been far down the Jalapa road in years and what lay ahead for me was the unknown. While I was capable of taking care of myself on the streets of Veracruz, that was the only life I now knew. My confusion and dismay was aggravated by fear of the unknown and unfamiliar.

The Jalapa road trailed southwest out of the city, then cut across the sand dunes, swamps, and inlets before it slowly rose up the side of the great mountain range. Once the hot sands and swamps were passed, the trail ascended into the mountains. The heat of the tierra caliente slowly cooled.

Jalapa was a village high enough for travelers to escape the miasma that rose up from the swamps and annually killed one-fifth of Veracruz. Still the village's chief function was as a resting place on the road from Veracruz to the City of Mexico—except, of course, when the treasure fleet's fair was held.

I did not find carriages and wagons traveling all the way to Jalapa, though some would journey part of the way. The mountain roads would not accommodate them. People traveled by horse, mule, or Shank's mare. Or, in the case of the very wealthy, by litter-covered chairs suspended on two long poles. In the city a litter was commonly carried by servants, but over the mountains the poles were harnessed to mules.

At the time of the fair, long columns of the pack animals, piled high with goods, made the journey. Leaving Veracruz, I took a position behind a mule train in the hopes of being thought of as one of the mule tenders. The arriero, the Spanish muleteer in charge of the pack train, rode a mule at the head of a train of twenty mules. Four indios were spread out along the line of the animals. The indio at the rear glared at me. Indios did not like mestizos. We were a living reminder of the Spaniards, who routinely defiled their women. Their hatred of these gachupin rapists they masked with feigned stupidity and heavy-lidded, empty-eyed stares.

I followed the pack train out of Veracruz, and all through the morning, the air heated up. By noon the dunes were a scorching inferno. In fact, a stone cliff, cutting through the sands, bore a hand-carved inscription, EL DIABLO TE ESPEREA, the devil awaits you. I didn't know whether the message was meant for all travelers or if it was a special warning to me.

I left the House of the Poor without my straw hat, and now I walked with my head hanging down, the sun burning a hole in my brain, sick with dread. I had crossed the dunes before with Fray Antonio when we'd visited a village church on a nearby hacienda. As we crossed the burning dunes and walked through the foul stench of the swamps, having no finely scented nosegays, we tied rags across our faces to keep out the vómito fever. Fray Antonio told me tales of the "people of the rubber," who were even more ancient and more powerful than my Aztec ancestors.

"There is a legend," he said, "that the people of the rubber were giants who were created by the mating of a woman and a jaguar. You can tell from the statues they left behind, heads taller than a grown man, that they were a mighty race. They built a mysterious civilization called Tamoanchán, the Land of the Mist. Precious Feather Flower, Xochiquetzal, an Aztec goddess of love, resided there."

Fray Antonio did not believe in giants created by the union of a woman and a jungle cat, but he told the story with flair, waving his hands in dramatic emphasis.

"They are called 'people of the rubber,' because they constructed hard rubber balls from the sap of trees in that area. They organized teams and played each other in walled arenas the size of jousting fields. The object was for each team to knock the ball into the area behind the other team without using their hands. They could only propel it with hips, knees, and feet. The ball was so hard that it could kill if it struck a person on the head."

"Was anyone killed playing the game?" I asked.

"Every time. The losing team members were sacrificed to the gods at the end of the game."

He told me no one knew where the rubber people had gone. "My bishop said that they were vanquished by God because they were heathen sinners. But when I asked why God did not destroy all other heathen sinners worldwide, he became angry at me."

Yes, my trip to the hacienda with the fray had been a happy one. On this journey fear and melancholy were my staunchest companions.

SEVENTEEN

At midday the mule train stopped near a pulqueria to rest the animals and cook a noon meal. Other mules trains and travelers were already there.

I still had the two reales that the rogue poet had given me and some cocoa beans. The beans were a traditional form of money among the indios and were still used by them as currency. In fact, they had disdained the first Spanish coins, finding it difficult to place a value on something they couldn't eat or plant. Even though copper and silver coins were now in common use, the cocoa bean was still prized by the indios. Chocolate, a drink made from the beans, was the drink of kings.

Fermented pulque, the drink of the gods, was also highly valued. Cheaper and more plentiful than chocolate, Fray Antonio believed it was the indio's salvation, because it dulled their senses and made their lives more bearable.

The pulqueria consisted of two thatched, mud-walled huts with two indio women cooking over an open fire. They served pulque from large, earthen jars. I had ten cocoa beans, enough to put a Veracruz whore on her back for as many minutes, and after much haggling I purchased a huge tortilla packed with pork stew and peppers for six beans. I told the woman she harvested the violento peppers in a volcano's molten heart.

I could have gotten a cup of pulque for the other four beans but also knew I could later have all I wanted for free.

I lay in the shade of a tree and ate the tortilla. I'd been up all night, but still I could not rest. Fray Antonio's frightened face haunted me. I was quickly on my feet and back on the Jalapa road.

In another hour the road wound around a sugar plantation. The endless expanses of sugarcane were not indigenous to New Spain but had been planted along the coasts by the Spanish. The cutting and refining of the cane was impossibly brutal, indisputably dangerous—all of it performed under temazcalli sweat hut conditions. Fantastic fortunes were born out of that cane, true, but no one worked those fields voluntarily. In the end the sugar trade came down to one irreducible determinant, slavery. The indios failed miserably as slaves, their death rate in the plantations and the mines so catastrophic that Crown and Church both feared their extinction. Only the africano bore up against such lethal servitude.

Two africanos accompanied the Cortes expedition of 1519—Juan Cortes and Juan Garrido—but turning jungles into sugar and mountains into silver required armies of slaves. Those glittering jewels, gilt carriages, fine silks, and splendid palaces that the gachupins so greedily lusted after, to say nothing of the Crown's foreign wars, were paid for in slave blood.

When the Spanish king inherited the Portugese throne in 1580, chained africanos, whipped and starved by Portugese slavers, arrived in New Spain by the thousands. They were brought to work the sugarcane haciendas after the Spanish discovered they could "grow" gold in the form of sweet sugar.

Yes, the sweet tooth of Europe made slavery inescapable.

As I walked past the cane, I saw men, women, and children, all africanos, working the fields. Up the road I neared el real de negros, the fenced-off slave quarters, a cluster of round huts with conical roofs made of straw.

I knew from Beatriz that slaves, even in their quarters, had almost no privacy. They lived communally, sharing the huts regardless of sex or marital status, surrounded by pigs and chickens. The owners wanted them to breed but discouraged family dwellings, fearing that privacy encouraged talk of rebellion, especially when slaves were sold to other hacendados. Consequently, few married even though the owners sought additional stock. Healthy slaves brought a price at auction.

On the sugar plantations slaves worked interminable hours with almost no free time. During busy periods the mills ran twenty-four hours a day and slaves worked until they dropped, often napping near their job so that the overseer could kick them to their feet and back to their jobs.

The plantation owners considered black slaves incomparable beasts of burden. Africanos were not only bigger and stronger than indios, but they survived the suffocating heat, back-breaking labor and deadly fevers that annihilated indios by the millions.

"But our blacks are likewise victims of that myth that each of them can do the work of four Indians," Fray Antonio told me when we had walked along the docks a few days ago and watched slaves piling sugar bags. Like the mestizo mine slave, each of the sugar plantation slaves had been branded like cattle with a hot iron with the initials of their owner. Most of the brands were on the shoulder. When I saw a brand on the face, I knew the slave had tried to escape once and was being marked as someone to watch. "As a result overseers drive them four times as hard as indios," the fray continued. "They often drive these wretches mad. Many take their own lives. Others forswear children, abort those they do conceive, or resort to infanticide, sparing their children lives of living hell. Some rebel, which only leads to brutal reprisals by their owners.

"Many turn deeply melancholic, refusing water or sustenance, until they die. Others cut their throats. Those who endure keep the institution running."

Still Spaniards feared africano rebellion like the wrath of God.

I understood their fear. While indio docility had increased after the Mixton War, africano rebellion had never subsided.

Diego Columbus, the son of "the Great Discoverer," had endured the very first slave uprising when africanos on one of his Caribbean plantations rose up and slaughtered Spaniards. Each subsequent decade saw an africano uprising followed by savage reprisals from the wearers of spurs. And as the africano population grew disproportionate to that of the pure-blood españols, that fear spread.

Slaves were forbidden to assemble in numbers larger than three—public or private, day or night. The penalty was two hundred lashes each.

Fear kept me watching my back trail. The road was no longer able to handle a carriage but ay! who knows? Perhaps that predatory dowager would overtake me with eagle wings and raptor claws.

The ancient Greeks believed three goddesses determined our destiny. Not just the length of our days and years, but the breadth and depth of our misery. Those three shadowy women, whose hands and wheels spun the skein of fate, had allotted me more than an ordinary share of struggle, strife, and, yes, pleasure.

Again I posed as one of the drivers, attached myself to the rear of a mule train, and tried to avoid the dung. The sun slipped behind the mountains, casting shadows on the trail. Soon I would have to find a safe place to sleep. While the Spanish kept the towns and villages on a tight rein, on the roads and trails, banditry reigned. The worst of these bandits were my fellow mestizos.

Bad blood, you say? That was the general view, that mixed blood produced weak character, and it was easy to see why they thought that. We mestizos swarmed city streets like lice and robbed the gachupin blind on the rural roads.

The fray dismissed skin color as the key to character, believing that opportunity was the determining factor. However, he was a pure-blood Spaniard, while I was of mixed provenance and could not blithely dismiss a fact I'd heard since boyhood. The question of my corrupt blood had haunted me my whole life long.

Pack trains and travelers would soon be gathering by the roadside to cook their meals. Darkness was falling, and afterward wild animals—and wilder men—would have their way. The fact that I was a fellow mestizo would win me nothing from men who robbed, raped, and killed without scruple. Furthermore, mestizos were not the only highwaymen. Runaway africano slave bands, called maroons, terrorized travelers. The maroons were feared even more than mestizo road agents because they were not only bigger and stronger but had suffered more abuse than half-castes. They also had less to lose.

A dozen or so travelers had stopped near a maguey field to prepare their dinner fires and lay their bedding out. I stopped too. I had nothing to eat, nothing to unpack, and no tools for fire making. There was a good stream, however, so I would at least have water. After a long, thirsty drink, I lay down to rest under a dense conifer that might offer protection against a night rain, which seemed likely.

A pleasant river flowed lazily through a maguey field. It was no doubt part of some great hacienda, perhaps even one of the great holdings in which everything from sugar to cattle was raised.

As I walked along the river, I picked up a stick and swung it like a cane as boys do. I was about to turn back when I heard the giggle of girls. I froze and listened. It came again, laughing and splashing. Creeping half bent over, I made my way to the source of the sound. Through bushes at the edge of the river, I saw two young women splashing and swimming. They tossed a coconut between them as if it was a ball. One girl had the tawny color of a mulatta, the other the glistening ebony of a pure africana. They were in water about to their breast line and as they leaped, their entire upper bodies came out of the water, filling my young eyes.

They babbled back and forth in a language I did not understand but took to be one of the many africano tongues heard on the streets. After a moment the mulatta swam away, disappearing from my sight. I kept my eyes on the ebony girl. She had her back to me and seemed to be dealing with her hair, turning in the water so I would catch sight of her bare breasts and then turning back again.

A twig snapped behind me, and I turned as the mulatta rushed me and gave me a shove. Stumbling backward, I fell into the river. I sloshed in the water until I got my feet and came up spitting out river to the laughter of the two girls. The mulatta dove in and swam to where her friend was. They kept themselves up to their necks in the water.

I grinned at them. "Buenos dias."

"Buenos dias," the mulatta said.

"I am on my way to Jalapa. I am a merchant," I lied.

The mulatta returned my grin. "You look more like a boy than a merchant."

The girls were probably both about my own age, but they seemed older. The mulatta said words to the pure africana girl, and I took it that she was interpreting what we had said. If she was a field worker, she may know little or no Spanish.

"My father is a rich merchant. I work with his goods."

The mulatta laughed and shook her head. "You are dressed as a peón."

"I am in disguise so banditos do not try to rob me."

I found both women sensually appealing. The mulatta girl was not the stuff of grande mistresses—she was not the Thoroughbred race horse demanded by rich caballeros, but was young and spirited. The darker-skinned girl was more attractive. She glistened like a precious black stone, statuesque and perfectly proportioned, her breasts young melons that were just becoming ripe.

Even though I had touched—and been touched—by Snake Flower and the alcalde's wife, I had never lain with a woman. Looking at the two girls, I wondered what it would be like to make love with them.

They must have read my thoughts. They looked at each other and broke out laughing.

My grin got wider and I felt my cheeks warm with embarrassment.

After more chatter in the strange tongue, the mulatta asked me, "Have you made love to many women?"

I shrugged and tried to look modest. "Many women seek my favors."

After more translation and laughter from the girls, the mulatta asked, "Have you made love to women whose roots go back to Africa?"

"No," I admitted, "but I would like to."

"Before you make love to an africana, you should know what gives us pleasure."

The ebony girl pulled herself onto a large rock and sat facing me. She kept an arm across her breasts and a hand covering the hair at the crevice between her legs.

"Love is upendo in our language," the mulatta said. "But fulfillment comes not just from the mind, but from mwili, the body." She waved her hand up and down at the other girl's nakedness. "The body is bustani, a garden; a garden of pleasure and delight. Each person, man and woman, have tools to work the garden." She pointed at the girl's lips. "They have mdomos, lips, and ulimi, the tongue. These permit one to taste the fruit of the garden."

The mulatta girl leaned over and brushed the lips of the other girl.

I had never seen two girls so physically intimate before. It stunned me.

"There are melons, tikiti, in the garden." She pushed aside the arm hiding the young melon breasts. "You can taste the whole melon," she kissed a breast, running her lips around its full curvature, "or you can taste just the namna ya tunda, the strawberries." She gently ran her tongue around the girl's nipples.

My virile part swelled and began throbbing. I stood perfectly still in the water, entranced by the performance the girl was putting on.

She caressed the girl's stomach with her hand, running her hand slowly down from the breast to where her legs split.

"This bush covers the marufuku bustani, the forbidden garden." She took the girl's dark hand away and placed her own hand on the pubis. "There is an ekundu eupe kipepeo in the garden." The ebony girl slowly spread her legs, exposing her vulva. "A pink butterfly."

The mulatta touched the pink area with her finger. "There is a secret mushroom, a kiyoga, that grows in the garden. When it is pressed, it helps to water the garden."

I could not see what her finger was doing, but the ebony girl reacted by writhing with pleasure. Surely it must be the same as the little pene I'd discovered on the alcalde's wife.

"There is a flower, ua, in the garden. It has an opening in the stem so that the honey, asali, can be obtained by the bee. The bee, nyuki, is the man. He is attracted to the nectar of the flower and desires to taste the honey."

She stopped and gave me a seductive smile. "Are you attracted to the flower?"

I felt a terrible urgency in my virile parts. My mouth was dry. I muttered yes as if I had a mouthful of cotton.

The mulatta girl looked sad for a moment. "But you see, a girl cannot let the bee taste the honey anytime he likes because the bee has a sting. Do you know what happens when the bee stings a woman?"

I shook my head numbly.

"She gets pregnant!"

The two girls splashed out of the water. I started for them but slipped on the muddy bottom and came up with another mouthful of water. By the time I got onto dry land, they had disappeared into the bushes.

Wet and chagrined, I made my way back to where the travelers camped. Women were a great mystery to me. While I could easily read men, I realized that I had not even begun the first chapter on the Book of Women.

EIGHTEEN

As dusk fell I could not resist exploring. I disappeared into the maguey field out of sight of the travelers and any indio defending the field against thieves.

Maguey were enormous plants with leaves wider than my legs and taller than a grown man. To my boyish imagination, the plants were the gigantic crowns of Aztec gods. Some plants, like the maize that gave us life, had power stored within them. The maguey was a warrior of the plant world, not only because its tall, slender leaves rose like a bunch of spears, but because of the power of its nectar and the uses of its flesh.

Like a woman who could cook, sew, raise children, yet still pleasure a man, maguey provided the indio with cloth for rough clothes, blankets, sandals, and bags; needles from its spines; fuel and thatch from its dried leaves. But, ah, like that woman who provided the necessities of life, the maguey was also full of an intoxicating spirit.

At the fleshy heart of the plant, protected by the great spears, was agua miel, honey water. But this "honey" was craved not for its sweetness; to the contrary, the whitish, cloudy liquid was sour. In its natural state from the plant, unfermented, it tasted like swamp water to me. After fermentation, it acquired the taste of sour goat's milk. But ¡cho! This milk captured your mind faster than Spanish vino, sending you reeling amid gods with a smile on your face.

The honey water we call pulque was well known to my Aztec ancestors. They called it octli, the drink of the gods.

The maguey grows slowly and flowers once after as long as ten years. When it flowers, a tall stem shoots up like a sword from the center. The indios who cultivate the plants know when the flower will appear. When the time is ripe, a man climbs into the plant among the thorny leaves to open the heart, creating a bowl to catch the raw juice.

Each plant can produce a dozen or more tall servings of pulque a day and can be nursed for several months. The tlachiqueros collect the raw juice several times a day, drawing it off with a long gourd, then putting it into pigskin bladders. Sometimes the juice is sucked into the mouth with a straw and then spit into the skins, which are emptied into hides or wood tubs to ferment several days.

Pure fermented pulque is called pulque bianco. My Aztec ancestors increased its bite with tree bark called cuapatle. Pulque amarillo is yellow pulque, created by adding brown sugar. Because this gave much power to the drink, our good King Filipe forbade putting cuapatle and sugar into pulque but the indios continue to do it.

My indio ancestors worshipped pulque because Quetzalcóatl, the Plumed Serpent, drank it. As with the tales of the Greeks and their tragedies, pulque was also born out of love lost. The Plumed Serpent fell in love with Mayahuel, a beautiful maid who was the granddaughter of one of the Tzitzimime, the star demons, and convinced her to run away with him. When they got to earth, Quetzalcóatl and Mayahuel entwined, transforming themselves into a single tree.

The Tzitzimime followed them. These demonicos were the most fearsome of all the beings who haunt the night, malevolent female spirits transformed into stars who kept baleful watch on the human world below them. Because they bore a grudge against the living, they brought down calamidads and miserías—sickness, droughts, and famines. They tried to steal the sun during solar eclipses, causing the Aztecs to sacrifice many fairskinned people to fortify the sun with fresh blood.

The Tzitzimime grandmother of Mayahuel recognized her as part of the tree. She ripped Mayahuel from the tree and fed her to the other demons. Quetzalcóatl, in sorrow, buried what was left of his beautiful Mayahuel and from her sprang the maguey plant that produces the intoxicating pulque. This gift brings joy to humans as Quetzalcóatl's and Mayahuel's love brought joy to each other.

If the Aztec gods drank pulque, in my mind it was the reason for their defeat by the Spanish God. The fray drank it when there was no vino to quench his thirst; he claims that unfermented it had the taste of rancid meat, but I still say it is as foul as the vomitó swamps.

The indios thrived upon it and even fed it to their children. The Aztecs were not tolerant of drunkenness but some indulgence was shown toward old people on the grounds that their blood was running cold. Besides the old, women in the days following childbirth and the sick were given the tonic to strengthen them. But adults found publicly drunk would have their hair cut off as punishment the first time, their houses demolished the second, and be put to death on the third. Dios mio! If the alcalde did this in Veracruz, there would be no indios or half-castes left in a week.

The fray found much sadness in the state of indio drunkenness. "They drink to forget their miseries," he often said. "And they drink differently from whites. My español hermanos think about the amount they consume. More the pity, indios drink for the occasion without considering the amount. They drink on Sundays, festival days, weddings, and other special occasions. And when they drink, they pour it down their throats until their minds have been captured by the heavenly waters and their bodies are pickled. It is said one indio could drink for a dozen Spaniards." He shook his finger at me. "This is no exaggeration, Bastardo. My brothers of the cloth say that drink is the wellspring of all indio vices. But why was this vice not widespread until we washed upon their shores?"

The fray threw his hands up in aggravation as he often did when religious doctrine conflicted with what he saw with his own eyes. "Sunday has become a day of public drunkenness for the indios. Why? Because it is their way of protesting the religion we have forced upon them. Did you know that a holy cross near the marketplace had to be removed because dogs and drunken indios urinated upon it?"

If drinking is so much a problem with the indios, one wonders why the Spanish masters did so much to profit upon it. The great maguey fields are owned by the hacendados. And it is said that Spanish wines cause the indios to lose their heads faster than pulque. These potent wines were brought to the villages by traveling Spanish traders, who find not only that the sale of the wine lines their pockets, but that indios can be persuaded to give up their land and gold when there is enough wine between their ears.

To the indio, pulque takes one to the threshold of the sacred; and along with corn, maguey is their staff of life. Perhaps there is something mystically akin to the Aztecs about the plant; it dies after flowering, which is what happened to the short-lived Aztec Empire.

My stomach growled irritably. It had been hours since I had eaten the tortilla with the volcanic peppers. The only nourishment available, without spending my treasure of two reales and a few cocoa beans, was pulque. My hunger would drive me to consume it raw... if I could not steal a fermented brew.

I knew from my trip with the fray to a village church on a maguey hacienda that indios who tended the fields often had a cache of the juice fermenting out of sight of the hacendado's overseers. I looked over the field and asked myself where I would have hid the contraband myself. Not in the large, bare, dirt areas between the plants, certainly. It would be hidden in the bushes, far enough in to be out of sight, but not so far that the bushes overgrew it.

Ay, with the eye of a well-practiced thief, I surveyed the lay of the land and began walking along what I considered to be the best candidates for a cache. It took me longer than I thought, a half an hour to find a clay pot of fermented pulque, but I attributed the excessive time not to any error in my plan of search but the ignorance of the indio who did not hide it as cleverly as I would have.

Soon after the pulque went down my throat, a warmth kindled in my belly that spread throughout my body. It was going to be cool tonight sleeping on the ground with only my manta for a blanket, so I drank a little more of the drink of the gods to help keep me warm.

Returning to camp, I went back to my spot under the conifer and sat with my back to the trunk. My head was spinning a bit, but my spirits were lifted. I thanked the Plumed Serpent for lightening my burdens.

A sugarcane hacendado had camped nearby with three of his vaqueros and an africano slave. A large fire shared with some other español travelers had been built. From the light of it I could see that the slave, a young, husky male, had been badly beaten. One side of his face was swollen, his right eye shut, and his ragged clothes were bloody and slashed by a whip. I had seen many africanos, indios, and half-castes beaten by their masters in a like manner. Violence and terror were how the few always subjugate the many.

I half-closed my eyes and listened as the slave owner, whose sugarcane hacienda lay east of Veracruz, talked to another spur wearer about the slave.

"An escapado," he said. "It took us three days to run him down. Now I'm going to take him back and flog him again in front of my other slaves. When I'm finished with him, no one will ever run away again."

"The countryside's full of runaways, maroons, who rob, rape, and murder every Spaniard they can get their hands on," the other man said.

As they talked, I realized I had seen the plantation owner before. He came to church occasionally in Veracruz. I knew him to be a brutal, stupid person, thick-chested, thick-necked, a hairy, hombre malo who liked to castrate male slaves, rape slave women, and flog everybody in sight. His reputation, even among his own people, was that of evil incarnate. I had had occasion to go to church—which I did whenever the fray berated me enough—when once this slave owner had appeared with a male slave, a boy about my own age, whom he had beaten savagely for some infraction. Qué diablo! He'd brought the boy to church naked, the boy's mouth gaping open, his pene bouncing, dragging him from a rope fastened to a dog collar.

When I told the fray, he said that the man would burn in hell. "Hate boils inside some people and comes to the surface by cruelty to others. This man hates people with black skin. He owns slaves to abuse them. He organized a Santa Hermandad, a militia of local swords to support the king's law, but in truth they are nothing more than men who hunt runaway slaves like others hunt deer."

I thought about the fray's words as I listened to the man loudly boast about all of the runaways he had tracked down and the africano women he'd sexually assaulted. What would it feel like to be a madman's slave, a man who could beat you at will and rape your wife on a whim? Who could kill you when he got the urge?

"This one claims to be a prince in his own country," the slave owner laughed. He picked up a rock and threw it, hitting the tied-up slave with it. "Eat that for dinner, Prince Yanga." He roared again with laughter.

"He's a tough one," the other Spaniard said.

"Not after I geld him."

No por Dios! Castración!

I glanced at the slave, and he stared blankly at me. He already knew his fate. But as I continued to look at him and his brown eyes met mine, I saw both intelligence and pain. Not just the pain of his bruises, but a much deeper hurt. His eyes told me that he was no animal but a man. That he, too, was human!

Not able to stand the sadness in his eyes, I looked away. Slaves were castrated on the theory that it made them more malleable—just as bulls are gelded to soften their meat and make them more docile.

Another merchant, overhearing the conversation, recognized my look of revulsion.

"Slaves are property," the merchant said, glaring at me. "They are to be used in the fields or in bed, whatever suits the owners. They are like the indios, gente sin razon." Without reason. Childlike. "But at least the africanos and indios have pure-blood. Mestizos, such as yourself, are the lowest."

I got up and found another tree to rest under, certain I would open my mouth and receive a beating if I stayed.

"His spurs are stuck up his own ass," Fray Antonio sometimes said privately of certain "wearers of the spurs." The fray's criollo resentment of those born on the Iberian Peninsula came out frequently. But as a mestizo, I knew that criollos were as harsh on slaves and half-castes as the other Spaniards. Because criollos were kept out of high office in the Church and government by the spur wearers, they tended, like the fray, to characterize anyone who wielded power ruthlessly or arbitrarily as spur wearers, forgetting about their own sharp spurs.

NINETEEN

I fell into a deep sleep and awoke in the dark of the night. A ghostly moon navigated a sea of dark clouds, emerging for only a moment at a time. When she was obscured, the heavens were black as pitch. The night was filled with nocturnal birdcalls, the rustle of bushes as something bigger moved in the forest, and the noises made by the travelers—someone snoring, a mule snorting about something in its sleep.

A thought came to me, one born of madness. Perhaps it was the pulque, the drink that even intoxicated gods, warping my mind until I did things that any lépero would find insane.

When I was certain that no one was stirring in the area, I slipped my knife from its holder and arose from the ground. Crouching low, I went into the maguey field, away from the area where people were camped. If anyone saw me, they would think I was relieving myself or was stealing pulque.

Circling around, I came to the area where the slave Yanga was tied with his back to a tree. Down on my hands and knees, I crawled as quietly as a snake slithering up to the tree. Yanga twisted his head to watch my approach. I paused and put a hand to my mouth to signal silence.

Coughing erupted from the slave master, and I froze. I could not discern him in the darkness, but I believed he rolled over. A moment later he snored, and I moved forward.

The cough had put my heart in my throat. The pulque was wearing off, and I was starting to realize I was in danger. If caught, I would face the same flogging post and gelding knife.

My fear was overwhelming, and I longed to crawl back. But in my mind's eye I still saw Yanga's eyes, intelligent eyes, not those of a dumb animal but of a man who knew love and pain and knowledge and desire. Amigas, amigos, I wish I had had the courage of a lion, the strength of a tiger. But I was a boy of little consequence. It was time to return to my bed. Tomorrow, I would take to the road with the hounds of hell at my back. There was neither glory nor profit in helping a slave escape. Not even the fray would expect me to risk my own manhood to save the cojones of another.

Ah, the spur wearers are right. Mestizos are without reason, and without guidance, I succumbed to my baser instincts. I crawled to the tree and cut Yanga's ropes.

He didn't speak, but his eyes signaled his thanks.

Just as I reached my sleeping spot, I heard running and Yanga rushed by me into the bushes.

A moment later the slave master, stirred by the noise, shouted the alarm and ran into the same bushes. The man's sword was raised high and glinted when the moon peeked out of the clouds. Loud confusion erupted around me as other men shouted and drew their swords, not knowing what had caused the disturbance, assuming a bandit attack.

I did not know if I should run or remain at the tree where I had been sleeping. If I ran, the men in the camp surely would know that I had cut the slave's bonds. My panic demanded that I flee, but my survival instincts told me to remain still. When the slave master looked at the ropes, he would see that Yanga had not broken them, that someone had cut them for him.

From the bushes where the slave and his master had disappeared came the sounds of a struggle and cries of pain. No! What had I done? Cut Yanga free so the scoundrel could chop off his head? More cries, a whimpering sob, came from the bushes. It was too dark to see anything but the movement around me of dark figures until torches were lit. Brands blazing, the men went into the brush, following the sounds.

I followed close behind, determined to appear as part of the curious crowd rather than the culprit. As I got closer I could see men examining someone prone on the ground who was in severe pain.

Someone said, "Holy Jesu, he's been castrated!"

My heart sank. I had cut Yanga loose just to have his manhood cut off. I pushed my way into the crowd of men and stared down at the person on the ground.

It was the slave master, not Yanga. He was sobbing.

The crotch of his pants was bloody.

TWENTY

I hid in the bushes and waited for the travelers to go on their way. When the last mule headed toward Jalapa, I walked over to a nearby indio hut and purchased a tortilla as my breakfast. The india woman—no doubt the wife of the maguey worker whose pulque I'd purloined—was young, little older than myself. Her harsh life, however—working the fields, preparing food, and dropping babies every year or two—had aged her prematurely. By age twenty-five she would be wizened beyond her years. That she had seen so little of youth weighed on me as she cooked the tortilla. She offered it to me with sad, dark eyes and lonely smile, refusing the cocoa bean I offered in trade.

The tortilla—without even beans or peppers or a little hint of carne—was my entire desayuno. From a nearby stream I washed it down, forgoing another trip to the pulque cache.

I then considered my plight. The fray would come for me; of that I was certain. I would wait at this spot, halfway to Jalapa, for the fray to catch up. It was a natural place for travelers to stop. I could also stay hidden and watch for the man named Ramon if he came looking for me. There was pulque to steal, and if I could no longer go without solid food, I could use one of my reales to buy enough tortillas and carne to last several days.

Although I was certain that the fray would try to come... I also feared that he might be in trouble because of me and that I might now be on my own. How would I eat? Where would I sleep? These thoughts dogged me as I lay in the bushes and watched the trail from Veracruz.

My own plight was not that different from Vida del Picaro Guzman de Alfarache, the life and adventures of the picaro, Guzman de Alfarache. The book—also known as as The Spanish Rogue—was one of the titles the fray tried, and failed, to hide from me, a work whose popularity surpassed even that of Don Quixote whose misadventures delighted readers throughout Spain and New Spain alike.

If Cervantes sounded the death knell for the romantic knight, Guzman de Alfarache replaced that sentimentalized hero with a figure more in keeping with our cynical times: the picaro. As all know, the picaro is an amoral rascal who would rather live by his wits and his sword than the sweat of his brow.

Like the poet-swordsman-philandering rogue Mateo, Guzman's picaro was a casteless wanderer. An adventurer of neither peasant stock nor of aristocratic blood, he roamed the world at will, mingling with people of all classes and professions, barely escaping punishment for his lying, conniving, stealing, and womanizing.

Guzman's saga began in Seville, the crowning glory of Spain's greatest cities. All of the New World's treasure is shipped to Seville; and from that city, everything sent to the New World flows. A few years ago a sailor from the treasure fleet confided in me that the streets of Seville were paved in gold and only the most beautiful women in the world were allowed to enter its city walls.

At fourteen years of age our picaro's father, a profligate scoundrel, squanders the family fortune and dies bankrupt. Our destitute hero must then set out to seek his own livelihood—following his father's ignoble example, it seems. Bad blood begets black blood, as the priests like to say.

Cheated by reprobate innkeepers, waylaid by highwaymen, he learns life's lessons while still a youth. But despite his inexperience, he is a born picaro, a rogue at heart. He is at home everywhere, at every level of society, whether begging a copper off of a hog farmer or supping with a count in a castle.

As he ambles from Spain to Italy, he loses his good clothes and money, joins a band of beggars, becomes a ne'er-do-well and gambler. He attempts honest labor as a kitchen scullion, but his baser instincts prevail even at that lowly station. When a silver goblet turns up missing—which our light-fingered friend has of course appropriated—the cook's wife is out of her head with fear, knowing that their master will beat her and her husband severely or even send them to jail. But the resourceful Guzman comes to her rescue. Cleaning and burnishing the goblet till it looks like new, he sells it back to her as a new one. Of course, these profits are not long for his purse. He quickly wastes his ill-gotten gain on bad women and worse cards.

On and on it goes. There is no end to this rogue's depravities. Gambling, begging, thieving his way to Italy. As adept at losing money as he is at stealing it, fortune and misfortune are his inevitable lot.

After many hair's-breadth escapes, he ends up in Rome, capital of the Catholic world. He joins a band of beggars who have turned begging into high art, even to the point of organizing a beggars' guild, complete with written laws and bylaws.

Would it not shock the alcalde of Veracruz if were I to present him with written rules for a lépero code of conduct? Of course he would declare me mad. Among other things, Veracruz street denizens would not be able to read the rules.

Guzman soon learns that while he has seen himself as a master of beggars, the Romans, who had once conquered the world, have much to teach him, including the different techniques for approaching men and women.

"Men," he is instructed by a mentor beggar, "are not in the least affected by the laments of most beggars. They will be much more likely to put their hands in their pockets when you implore their assistance boldly, for God's sake. As for women," he continued, "as some pay their devotions to Our Lady of the Rosary, it is by one of these exhortations that we wheedle them. It is frequently a good effect also to pray that they may be preserved from all mortal sin, from false witnesses, the power of traitors, and from slanderous tongues; such wishes as these, pronounced in energetic terms and in an impressive tone of voice, will almost always make their purses fly open to assist you."

He is taught to display ravenous hunger when eating before his patrons, which houses to approach for alms, and how to cadge convincingly. He is instructed never to wear anything new in public; to wrap a dishcloth over his head in winter instead of wearing a hat; to walk with crutches or one leg tied behind; to accept alms only in a cap, never in a purse or pocket; to hire and display small children in rags; a man is to carry one child in his arm and another by hand; a woman is to always have a child at her breast. He is taught to fake leprosy, even to the extent of erupting phony skin ulcers, causing his legs to appear swollen, to dislocate his arms, to render his face pale as death. He is taught these trade secrets and written rules only after swearing an oath of silence.

Guzman, however, tires of the mendicant life and once again joins the aristocracy. Through trickery, of course. Passing himself off as a young nobleman, he seduces their most desirable women, in the end fleeing with jealous lovers dogging his trail.

He applies to the priesthood when pious guilt overwhelms him. At the moment of his investiture, however, he runs off with a scarlet woman, who inevitably elopes with another, absconding with every peso of Guzman's ill-gotten savings.

Reconnecting with his mother, rather than dissuading him from his evil path, she joins forces with him. Captured and sentenced to the galleys, he escapes the oar locks when he informs on his fellow slaves, exposing their planned mutiny. He is rewarded with his freedom.

At the end of his memoir, he thus regales us: "Friendly reader, I have given you an account of the principal adventures of my life. What followed after the king was graciously pleased to grant me my liberty, you may expect to hear, should I live long enough to tell you."

Ah, Guzman, would I, too, live long enough to tell all of my adventures.

I am grateful for all he has taught me, permitting me to become the best beggar on the streets of Veracruz. And I can only hope that my problems in life will be solved by the way he overcame adversity with guile and guts.

Guzman was, in truth, a mentor, but in the end he taught me more than begging tricks; he showed me a way of life. As I lay in the shade—reflecting on Guzman, waiting for the fray, and wondering what I would do if he failed to show—I found the answer to my own life's journey in the picaresque saga. Like Guzman—expelled from a comfortable life—I would do what I had to do to survive. If it meant lying, stealing, conniving, womanizing... so be it.

Looking back on my lépero life, I was ashamed. I now believed my destiny demanded greater things that cadging alms. Among other things, I read Latin, Greek, and was conversant in waterfront tongues.

I realized at that moment that by exposing me to Guzman, God Himself had pointed out the path of my life.

TWENTY-ONE

Near midday I spotted the fray on the road. With him was Fray Juan, the two sharing a mule. I ran out from my place of hiding and shouted my joy but quickly restraining myself when Fray Antonio gave me a warning look. Obviously he had not revealed my troubles to his friend, and I can imagine why. Fray Antonio, while not a man of sword or fire, had the heart of a lion, a sometimes frightened lion, but one driven by his passion to confront injustice. Fray Juan was more ethereal, a sweet and gentle soul whose heart was faint and tender.

"Cristo, I told Fray Juan that you were so eager to accompany your friends to their village near the road to Jalapa that you asked to meet us along the way. Did your friends reach home all right?"

The fray was asking me if I had had any problems. "Yes, but we were unable to connect with the one named Ramon. He didn't show up."

The fray looked relieved.

I followed behind the mule of the two Spaniards, in accordance with my station.

Jalapa is north of Veracruz and inland. It was on the way to the City of Mexico, and several days' hard walk from Veracruz. I had covered less than half the distance when I met up with the two frays. It would take longer to cover the second part of the journey. After crossing the sands of the tierra caliente and starting up the mountain range, the path became steep and narrow. During the rainy season new streams sprang up along the trail, and the rivers jumped their banks.

There was little talk along the route. I had many questions for the fray, but they went unspoken. From the dark tightness of his features, I knew that all had not gone well in Veracruz. Even though Fray Juan had not been told of my troubles, he was quickly aware that something was wrong.

"Antonio says he has trouble with his stomach," Fray Juan said. "What do you think, Cristóbal, could it be that he is having a problem with a woman instead?"

He was only joking, but the fray's problem was a woman, though not in the way Fray Juan suggested.

Every hour up the foothills and mountains brought cooler air. The trip was almost pleasant until we reached a pulqueria. Like the one I had stopped at, it was conducted from an indio hut. A large clay pot of pulque and a stone oven cooking tortillas sat in the shade, flanked by logs, under shade trees. It might have been a pleasant respite if the frays, seated on a log, had not struck up a conversation with priest inquisitors.

There were three of them, Dominicans, two simple frays dressed in black and a prior wearing the green cross of the Holy Office of the Inquisition. I was immediately taken for an indio or mestizo servant to the frays and as such was of no more interest to them than our mule. Their own six servants sat a distance.

The Dominicans greeted Fray Juan with friendly words but pointedly ignored Fray Antonio. I had seen this attitude toward him exhibited by other priests. Fray Antonio had fallen from grace with the Church. The fact that he shined in the eyes of God and the poor meant nothing to clerics who wore expensive hose, leather shoes, and silk shirts under their robes.

The inquisitors immediately began to torment Fray Antonio and Fray Juan, one for breaking the rules of the Church, the other for associating with the rule breaker.

"Fray Juan, tell us what news there is from Veracruz. We heard along the road that the archbishop has arrived."

"That is true," Juan said. "I'm sure the festival, celebrating his safe journey, still goes on."

"And what of sinners? Our good amigo of the Holy Office, Fray Osorio, is said to have his eye on a blasphemer in Veracruz who will test his faith in the fire of the stake."

Fray Juan noticeably flinched at the mention of the dreaded Veracruz Inquisitor. Fray Antonio kept his eyes averted from the Inquisitors, but his face reddened from anger at the mention of Osorio.

"What business brings you on the road?" Fray Juan asked, changing the subject. "Are you going to greet the archbishop and escort him to the City of Mexico?"

"No, God's call for us to hunt down blasphemers has prevented us from celebrating the archbishop's arrival," the prior said. His voice dropped down to a confidential level. "We are on our way to Tuxtla to investigate an accusation that some converted Portuguese Jews, marranos, are secretly practicing the black art of their devilish religion."

"Is the evidence forthcoming?" Fray Juan asked.

"The most serious since the Carvajales were sent howling into hell." The inquisitor's eyes narrowed when he spoke of unmasking Jews and dispatching them to el diablo. A marrano was a Jew who claimed to have converted to Christianity but continued to practice the forbidden religion in secret.

"New Spain seethes with Jews," the prior said, his voice strong with emotion. "They are the scourge of the land, false converts who pose as God-fearing Christians but who betray us. They conceal their foul deeds and hatred of us, but once the mask is torn off, their vile acts we invariably expose."

"They worship the devil and money," one fray muttered.

"They kidnap and commit fiendish acts on Christian children," the fellow fray remarked.

I felt an instant animosity toward the three brothers who took oaths of love and poverty but conducted themselves as murderous tyrants. I had heard of the Holy Office of the Inquisition and knew Fray Antonio's fear of the bestial inquisitor. Often I had heard the fray utter blasphemies about their overzealous work. Once, while in his cups, he told me that inquisitors were the hounds of the Church and that some of them were rabid.

I could see that both Fray Juan and Fray Antonio were intimidated by the inquisitors. At that time I didn't know how these Church dogs operated, whether they would attempt to strike down the fray or were merely bullies. I remained crouched nearby with my hand on the knife I carried under my shirt.

The prior gestured for Fray Juan to lean closer to hear a confidence but spoke loud enough for me to hear.

"Fray Osorio sent us a communication that while examining a woman under torture, he uncovered a sign of the devil that is of great interest to the Holy Office."

"What is it?" Fray Juan asked.

"A witch's teat!"

The young fray gasped, and Fray Antonio looked to see if I was listening. Seeing that I was, Fray Antonio promptly announced that we must continue our journey.

TWENTY-TWO

As soon as we were out of sight of the pulqueria, I stepped up beside the mule carrying the two frays. I wanted to learn more of what I'd heard, so I boldly asked my question.

I knew what a woman's teat was. Many india and africana women worked naked to the waist in the fields or suckled their babies with their bare breasts on the street. But I had never seen a witch and didn't know what their teats looked like.

"What does a witch's teat look like?" I asked.

The young fray, Juan, made the sign of the cross and mumbled a prayer as Fray Antonio scowled at me. "Your curiosity will someday bring you trouble," he predicted.

"I fear it's already here," I mumbled, but quickly shut my mouth when the fray glared at me.

"There is much that you should know," Fray Antonio said, "to protect yourself from those who threaten you along life's path. There is evil in this world, and good men must fight it. Sadly, the institution the Church created to fight evil commits unspeakable atrocities in the name of our Lord."

"Antonio, you must not—" Fray Juan started.

"Quiet. I do not bow to ignorance as you do. The matter was mentioned before the boy, and he should know the workings of the Inquisition if he is going to survive in this world." His tone implied that my survival was not preordained.

He rode for a moment, gathering his thoughts. "You will discover, my young friend, that women's private parts are constructed differently from ours."

I almost laughed. Little india girls routinely ran naked on the streets. I would have to be blind not to have noticed that they lacked a pene. What would the fray say if I told him of my introduction to the alcalde's wife?

Once again the fray hesitated, weighing his words.

"When the Holy Office takes a person to their dungeons, they are stripped naked, and their bodies are minutely examined by inquisitors for signs of the devil."

"What are the signs of the devil?" I asked.

"The devil knows his own," Fray Juan says, "and places his mark on them. It may be in the form of a mold, a scar, the way wrinkles are formed on the skin—"

Fray Antonio scoffed and the younger fray gave him a pained look.

"You must not jeer at the Inquisition," Juan said. "Your blasphemous attitude is well known and someday they will remind you of that."

"I answer each day to God," Fray Antonio said. "Where Satan's signs reside, I know not. As for this beast, Osorio," the fray's voice faltered with emotion as he spoke the name, "in examining naked women, he delights in peering between their legs and tormenting an appendage that is, in loving hands, their source of joy."

"Uno poco pene?" I timorously asked.

"No, not like that possessed of men. Something different. This inquisitor, in his ignorance, for he had never looked closely between a woman's legs before nor bedded with one, had heard of such a mushroom from other ignorant frays. These fools believed that what was found between the woman's legs was a teat, conceived, then suckled by Satan."

I gasped, remembering the little mushroom between the legs of the alcalde's wife that I had pressed with my tongue. "What—what if a man touches this teat? Will he die?"

"He becomes possessed by the devil!" Fray Juan exclaimed.

¡Ay de mí!

"Absurdo!" Fray Antonio cursed. "That is nonsense. All women have the pleasure bump between their legs."

"No!" Juan said.

"Even our Virgin Mother had it."

Fray Juan quickly muttered a prayer and crossed himself.

"What I'm saying, Chico Bastardo, is that what Osorio found and reported as Satan's sign, a witch's teat, is God-given, something every woman possesses."

"It must have been terrible for the poor woman," I said.

"It was worse than terrible," Fray Antonio said. "When she did not confess, Osorio tortured her to death."

"Por Dios!" I said. "What was his punishment?"

"Punishment? There is none. God knows His own, they say. The woman is officially absolved, and she goes to heaven."

We walked in silence.

"Antonio," Fray Juan finally said, shaking his head, "your heretical opinions will one day bring the Inquisition down on the boy as well as yourself."

Fray Antonio shrugged. "All right, explain it to him in your own way."

Fray Juan said, "When our glorious monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, assumed the United Crown of Spain and captured the last Moorish strongholds on the peninsula, the land was heavily populated by Jews and Infidels. They threatened the foundation of our society. Our Most Catholic Monarchs created the Holy Office of the Inquisition to counter their demonic influence. Ultimately, it was decreed that Jews had to convert to the Christian faith or leave the country. At almost the same time that Cristóbal Colon—the great discoverer of the New World—was sailing from Spain to discover the New World, tens of thousands of Jews were forced out of the country and into the Islamic lands of North Africa."

"Torquemada, our Inquisitor General, introduced torture and confiscation of the victim's wealth as the means of conversion," Fray Antonio pointed out. "In other words, tens of thousands of Jews lost everything to Church and Crown, whether they converted or not."

Fray Juan shot Antonio a dark look and continued. "Muhammad's followers were also forced to convert or leave Spain."

"Violating the terms of their surrender," Fray Antonio said. "In any event, their property was likewise confiscated."

"From this time on," Juan persisted, "a new threat arose, the problem of false conversos—Jews who falsely subscribed to Christian beliefs, the ones we call marranos, and Moors who swear false allegiance to Christ, people we call moriscos."

I recognized the word as meaning "little Moors."

"To stop these false conversos from spreading their evil ideas and Satanic rites, the the Church ordered the Holy Office to find the wrongdoers—"

"—through torture—"

"—and punish them."

"Burning them at the stake in front of the entire city," Fray Antonio said.

"Cristo, my son," Fray Juan said with weary patience, "auto-da-fé means 'act of faith,' and that is what it is. For those who repent and confess their guilt, the punishment is almost painless."

Fray Antonio snorted. "The victims are tied to the stake and wood piled around them. If they repent, they are garroted before they are burned."

I, too, had never understood the auto-da-fé. I had read the Gospels many times in the hospice and never saw suggestions that we burn people alive.

"The Inquisition, which is run entirely by men who have never slept with a woman, or who at least are forbidden to, is conducting a holy war against women," Fray Antonio said. He waved away the objections of Juan. "They accomplish this through what they call controlling devil worship among witches. Dominican monks have made passionate sermons in villages and towns, describing the demonic practices of witches, sowing a belief in the black arts. Because of these sermons, ignorant people see Satan's hand in everything. They report their neighbors, sometimes their own family members, to the Inquisition for the most trivial reasons.

"Once a woman is arrested, the inquisitors take as their Bible a book called The Hammer of Witches, which professes to teach one to recognize witches. They take the women to their dungeons, strip and search them for Satanic signs, even to the point of cutting off their hair.

"The inquisitors begin with simple questions from The Hammer of Witches. However, there are no correct answers, so the prisoners can never talk their way out of an accusation, even with the truth. A woman might be asked, "Do you believe in witches?" If she says yes, she has knowledge of witchcraft and is thus a witch herself. And if she says no, she is lying for the devil and is also tortured.

"A young girl's virginity they attack mercilessly. If she's chaste, they claim Satan protected his slut. If she isn't intact... she's been bedding Beelzebub.

"Young or old, they are tortured hard, even if they admit fornicating with Satan. Then they must describe how the fiend enters them, where he touches them, and where they touch their Dark Master, how it feels."

When the Inquisition runs out of Jews, Moors, and witches, the fray told me, it censors books and tyrannizes people sexually—accusing people of polygamy, casting spells, blasphemy, sodomy.

"One woman, who smiled at the mere mention of the Holy Virgin, was denounced," Fray Antonio complained.

"They do God's work," Fray Juan said—but without much conviction.

"They are devils," Fray Antonio said to me. "Their obsession with Jews is unrelenting. Torquemada himself was from a family of conversos, and when King Felipe II made war on the pope, the pope reminded him that Spanish kings were also descendants of conversos."

Poor Fray Juan—he made the sign of the cross and prayed loudly to God for forgiveness.

The three of us traveled in silence, each closeted with our own thoughts. I contemplated what it would be like being burned alive or for a woman to be sexually assaulted by demented monks. Both horrors were unimaginable.

Fray Antonio started another story of the Inquisition.

"There was a young priest who, despite the fact that he was criollo born, was headed for a brilliant career in the Church. Having an inquisitive mind, however, he asked too many controversial questions and read too many controversial authors—particularly the great Carranza, the Archbishop of Toledo, who believed that the common people should be given Spanish Bibles so that they might read and understand the word of God themselves rather than having a priest recite verses in Latin, a language they did not understand.

"The priest fought for Carranza's position even after the archbishop had been arrested by the Holy Office. Like Carranza, the young priest found the Inquisition at his door. Locked in a cell, he was left for days without food or water. Then the questioning and accusations began. Then the torture."

His face racked by emotion, he said, "The young priest was lucky. He came out of it with a few pains, some warnings, and banishment to a village church on a remote hacienda. But he never forgot. And he never forgave.'"

As I listened to the story, I realized that the young priest was Fray Antonio. At that time, still in the innocent blush of youth, I was surprised that the fray had felt the hand of the Inquisition. But as I sit in a dank dungeon, a man who has had his flesh shredded by the blazing pinchers and maggots thrust in the wounds, I know that any person of conviction and compassion is their likely prey.

TWENTY-THREE

When we arrived at the Jalapa fair, the sun was at its zenith. Sprawled over a wide area, the merchandise of two worlds was vertiginously stacked under open sky or sailcloth canopies. Magicians, acrobats, and charlatans vied for loose change alongside book stalls touting religious tomes and honor plays; tool sellers bragged about the strength of their hammers and saws; merchants peddling seed and farm tools debated prices with the majordomos of haciendas; clothiers purveying rare raiments of exquisite silk and fine lace, claimed that kings and queens throughout Europe accoutred themselves in identical finery. Religious vendors everywhere flogged crosses, paintings, statues, effigies, and icons of every description.

Stalls filled with honey and sugar treats competed with charms guaranteed to capture a person's love and "crucifixes blessed by Santa Lucy, on my word, a holy shield against infections of the eyes..." "Blessed by San Anthony of Padua, will vanquish diabolic possession and brain fevers..."

I felt like I had stumbled into the world of Scheherazade and the Arabian Nights.

Of course, the Inquisition was there in force. The familiars, its lay police, roamed the shops, perusing their list of libros proibidos and checking the authenticity of religious items. There were also the king's black-clad publicans, computing and collecting taxes for the Crown. Nor could I fail to note how much money changed hands beneath the table between booksellers and the familiars, the tax collectors and merchants; the inevitable una mordida that so ubiquitously underpinned New Spain's economy was universally condoned as an indispensable cost of doing business. With some truth. The tax collector purchased his office from the king. He was compensated not by merit, bonus, fee, or salary, but by legally sanctioned extortion. The same was true for most public offices. The jailer, who purchased his job, rented prisoners to the deadly sugar mills, the obrajas sweat shops, and the northern mines... dividing the dinero with the constable who arrested the prisoner and the judge who pronounced their guilt. Mordida, "the bite," a payment to a public official for him to do his duty—or ignore it—was the way of the world in New Spain.

"Face it," the fray told me while in his cups, "our public offices are sold at extortionate prices to raise money for our wars in Europe."

But for the moment I was entranced. I even forgot the old matron and the wicked Ramon. I roamed the fair, my eyes wide open, my mouth agape. I'd seen Veracruz packed with people celebrating festivals and the arrival of the treasure fleet. I'd witnessed the fervid excitement of the archbishop's arrival, but the fair's affluence and ostentation was nonpareil. Even I, a veteran of everything Veracruz had to offer, who had seen so many bales and bundles trundled to and from the treasure fleet, was awed. It was different to see these uncrated items spread out individually—everything from gaudy silken garments to glittering swords, their jeweled handles and hafts sparkling in the sun—not hauled en masse out of a ship's bleak hold but invitingly displayed, waiting to be fondled, examined, closely inspected. Everything was so much more intimate here than on the waterfront docks: Spanish merchants haggling toe-to-toe and nose-to-nose with their customers; strolling pitchmen prating about their delicacies; acrobats doing back flips for tips; singers serenading passersby with impassioned ballads; indios scrutinizing the exotic goods and personages with the same wide-eyed wonder their ancestors had no doubt felt when they mistook Cortez and his horse-borne conquistadors, riding into Tenochtitlan, for gargantuan gods.

Fray Antonio intercepted me to offer a word of caution. "I don't believe there is any threat here. Veracruz is consumed with the new archbishop's arrival, and Don Ramon and the widow should be busy for some time to come. Still we must be careful."

"I don't understand—"

"Good. Knowledge at this point can only get you killed. Ignorance is your sole ally." Then he left me stammering in confusion.

Heading for the book stalls, he began examining some newly arrived works of Plato and Virgil, while Father Juan was leafing through the romantic adventures of knights-errant and delectable damsels in search of God and Grail, some of these works banned, some not banned; but even those free of the censors, he dared not purchase and carry back.

Ordinarily, I, too, would have been at the booksellers' stalls, rifling through their tomes, but for the moment, at fifteen years of age, I was diverted by a strange gathering of magicians and sorcerers, proclaiming they could raise the dead, predict the future, and read the stars. Nearby a troupe of illusionists swallowed swords and devoured torches.

I was determined not to let fear ruin my fair. With the fray's coppers, I bought a flat, hard tortilla smeared with honey. Chewing on it, I strolled by the colorful booths and tables. Everything seemed to be for sale—from luscious putas to pulque fresh from the maguey's fleshy heart to rare wines that had survived both storm-tossed ocean voyage and jarring trek by pack train.

People flowed through the aisles like river currents. Merchants and mendicants, soldiers and sailors, whores and ladies, indios and mestizos, richly dressed españols, village headmen, caciques in colorful indio mantas, flamboyant africanas and mulattas.

Two española women stopped at a busy corner, shaking tambourines, flat musical instruments resembling drumheads but with jingling disks fitted around the rim. I recognized them as the picara dancers who had performed when that rogue, Mateo, had recited "El Cid." Their two male troupers dropped a barrel nearby and lifted the dwarf on top.

"Amigos, heed my call. Gather around and you will see and hear regal wonderments, oft performed for the crowned heads of Europe, the Infidel sultans of Arabia and Persia, and the heathen emperors of Asia.

"Remember a day in time when our proud land was overrun by the ravaging Moors. There were naught but a few small kingdoms where our lords held sway, and even these paid tribute to the Moors. That bitter tariff was not remitted in the gold dug from the earth but in the guise of gold-haired maidens, the fairest virgins in the land, whom each year the depraved Moorish king and his notables ruthlessly ravished."

With histrionic hands and wonder-wide eyes, the dwarf began his lurid tale.

"There was no Cid, no hero in our land, but, ah, there was a maiden who forswore the lewd lust of Moorish fiends. In alabaster garb, golden tresses trailing down her back, she burst into the council room where the Spanish king held court with his knights. Confronting them with their cowardly acts, she called them false men who sat on their swords while the flower of Spain's honor was desecrated and defiled."

The diminutive thespian eyed the intense men and outraged women now assembled.

"Do you know what this fair maid told them? She said to them that if they lacked the manhood to face the Moor, let women brandish Spanish steel and fight the Infidel in their stead."

Every man in the crowd—as well as youths such as I—raged at the shame of those knights. Spain's greatest treasure was the honor of her men—and the sanctity of her women. To give our women to our enemies as tribute? Ay! Better to rip out my tongue, gouge my eyes, cut off my cojones.

"Now, gather around all, as the dancers of La Nómadas sing for you 'The Maiden's Tribute.' "

While the crowd of men were primarily interested in the dancing women, and especially the flashes of thigh the women showed when they lifted their skirts, I saw that the dwarf kept a close eye out for the Inquisitors and other priests wandering around the fair, even as the two men circulated with a hat to collect money. Meanwhile the women dancers sang:

If the Moors must have tribute, make men your tribute money;

Send idle drones to tease them within their hives of honey;

For when 'tis paid with maidens, from every maid there springs

Some five or six strong soldiers to serve the Moorish king.

It is but little wisdom to keep our men at home;—

While the words of the song were innocent enough, the body language of the women, who occasionally paused in a whispered aside to describe what a Moor would do to a Spanish virgin, was enough to get them arrested.

They serve but to get señoritas, who when their time is come,

Must go, like all the others, the moor's bed to sleep in;—

In all the rest they're useless, and nowise worth the keeping.

'Tis we have manly courage within the breasts of women,

But you caballeros are all hare-hearted,

Thus spoke that fearless señorita—

The women dancing in front of me flung their skirts above their waists. They wore nothing beneath those swirling garments, and I gaped to glimpse that secret garden between their legs, which I'd so recently come to know. Of course, the men in the audience went wild and hurled their money into the hats.

What was it about Spanish women that drove Spanish men wild? Spanish men can see a naked india or africana woman and look through them as if they were never there or see them merely as receptacles for their lust. But one brief glance at a Spanish woman's ankle or a furtive glimpse of her delectable throatline, and these same men are beside themselves with rapture. And, of course, these two actresses displayed more than a little ankle.

"Pssss!" the dwarf hissed. "Cho!"

The dancers even drew the attention of the two priests. Pushing into the crowd, the women dropped their skirts and sang "The Song of the Galley," a tune about a woman waiting for her lover, a prisoner of the Moors, to return.

You mariners of Spain,

Bend strongly on your oars,

And bring my love again,

For he lies among the Moors!

You galleys fairly built

Like castles on the sea,

Oh, great will be your guilt,

If you bring him not to me.

The wind is blowing strong,

The breeze will aid your oars;

Oh, swiftly fly along—

For he lies among the Moors.

The sweet breeze of the sea

Cools every cheek but mine;

Hot is its breath to me,

As I graze upon the brine,

Lift up, lift up your sail,

And bend upon your oars;

Oh, lose not the fair gale,

For he lies among the Moors!

It is a narrow strait,

I see the blue hills over;

Your coming I'll await,

And thank you for my lover.

To San Maria I will pray,

While ye bend upon your oars;

'Twill be a sacred day,

If you bring him from the Moors.

No one reproached them for their lusty voices or whirling skirts, not even the two frays. Nor were these actors the same drab drudges in servant's livery disembarking from the treasure fleet. The traveling troupe had transformed itself. Gaudily attired, I realized now that their serving garb had been a disguise. The dockside inspectors diverted passengers of low character to Manila, almost certainly a death sentence, and actors were regarded as people of low, corrupting character. From time to time troupes had passed through Veracruz, and the fray had observed, "Not only does the king deny them entry here, in Spain when they die, the Church denies them entry into consecrated ground."

"They fear actors will corrupt the dead?" I asked, innocently.

"Actors, to the Church, are picaros by another name."

After my clandestine reading of Guzman de Alfarache, I knew what he meant. I also understood why I was drawn to these rogues. True, their lives were disreputable, but so was mine; but unlike me, they had fun, flair, and flamboyance. They never worked and weren't afraid. People applauded them enthusiastically and put money in their hats. I received for my bone-cracking contortions little more than kicks and derision. They looked forward to travel, adventure, and lascivious ladies. I would die in a gutter or a slave labor mine. They would die in featherbeds between the legs of a sensuous señorita with a jealous rival banging on the door. The most I could hope for when my end came was a belly full of pulque, a comfortable bridge to sleep under, and a clap-stinking puta to ease my pain.

But the picaros lived lives of high excitement, free as birds. Unlike the lépero, doomed to degradation by tainted blood, a picaro might pass as a duke—might become a duke! Picaros were not predetermined by blood. They were not simply born to their allotted fate; picaros were made. They did not gravitate to a structured life of perennial servitude. They did not die in the dark and the dust of silver mine cave-ins, lost, afraid, abandoned, alone. They relished their free will. They walked, talked, and addressed others, even their betters, with familiarity, a hopeful heart, irreverence, and most of all no fear. The picaro faced life with a free soul and a light step—even when he was stealing your purse or cutting your throat.

And picaras! Oh! I had never seen such women before! Their eyes were bold; their blood was hot. While there were women of every color and blood in New Spain, mestizas, indias, mulattas, africanas, and españolas who were as lovely to behold, none of these women showed any freedom in their actions, not even the flamboyant mulattas who were permitted to wrap themselves in garish garb of rainbow hues but would never think of changing their station and state, of challenging their class, their caste, the shackles of their sex.

All of these women may dress and adorn themselves up like scintillating flowers to please a man, but behind their manner and laugh, they know the man they flirt with is superior. But these picara women, who lifted their skirts, exposed their sex, and sang of women who mocked men and slaughtered Moors while their men cowered at home, these women were afraid of nothing. Not a man in that audience, unless his mind was reeling with vino, would have dared grab one of them. Nor would they have permitted it. They knew they were equal to these men—and more.

When women became more important to me than magicians and sword swallowers, the kind of woman who knew her own strength would be the one to draw me. Including the silken muchacha in Veracruz for whom I swirled my manta as a cape. Although she was still young, her eyes had bespoken the same fiery freedom as the dancers.

Often such women connoted danger, and—fool that I was—I knew even then I was drawn to them as to the edge of a smoking volcano, which could flare infernally at any time.

Ay! That was then and this is now. If the innocent fifteen year old knew then what this grown man with the quill in his hands knows today in prison, Dios mio, I could have lined my pockets with gold and my bed with women.

TWENTY-FOUR

When the women finished their respectful song and dance under the watchful eyes of the priests, the dwarf addressed the crowd again.

"For the special enjoyment of all, in the hour before darkness a special performance of a comedia will be performed."

A stir went through the crowd. A comedia was a play—a comedy, tragedy, or adventure story. I had never seen a play, and my heart jumped into my throat. I wondered if it was the same play they had announced in Veracruz.

"If you want to see a pirate punished, a good man's honor restored, come to the comedia." He waved his hand grandly in the direction of the man named Mateo, who had slipped through the crowd to stand beside the dwarf's barrel. "This comedia comes from the hand of that great master of the stage whose works have been performed in Madrid, Seville, and before royalty, Mateo Rosas de Oquendo."

Mateo took off his hat and made one of his grand sweeping bows.

"The admission to this masterpiece," the dwarf said, "a mere reale."

Ha! I had two reales in my pocket, obtained from the autor of the comedia itself. I could feast like a king and see the play. God was good. All is well in my life, I thought, momentarily forgetting that there was a snake in every paradise.

My wandering took me into the section where indio sorcerers and magicians were selling their magic, reveling in the excitement as I rubbed shoulders with priests and nuns, whores and dons, vaqueros and indios, spurred ones and lowly half-castes, rugged soldados and perfumed dandies.

I paused and watched a soothsayer predicting the future for people—an evil-looking, long-haired indio in a sinfully scarlet manta. Ugly slashes scarred both cheeks, and his face was streaked with jagged lightning flashes of flame yellow and blood crimson. He sat crosslegged on a blanket, shaking a dozen small bone fragments in a human skull, then throwing them across an indio blanket as if he were casting lots. From their pattern, he divined the course of a life or the answer to a prayer. I had seen tomorrow-tellers read their bones before on the streets of Veracruz. An indio now asked the magician to foretell his father's fate after a serious accident.

"On the way here, my father slipped off the mountain path and fell. He cannot walk and refuses to eat. He simply lies on his back in great pain."

The soothsayer betrayed no concern or care, questioning him dispassionately only about his father's Aztec birth name and sign.

The man handed him a coin. The fortune teller rattled the bones in the skull and threw them on a dirty blanket. The pieces formed an obliquely oblong pattern.

"The shape of a grave," he told the indio. "Your father will soon pass beyond this life's travail."

I could not help but snort my skepticism. The old faker turned and gave me a menacing stare. Had I been an indio boy, I would have withered under his evil eye; but I was a lépero with a classical education—no, a picaro, which was how I now thought of myself. This new vision of myself as a gentleman-rogue gave my curiosity a freer rein. I should have walked away without tempting fate—and the grave's dark powers, which he clearly understood—but now I wanted to know more. So like Odysseus confronting the Cyclops, I taunted him.

"The course of a man's life is not determined by the throwing of old bones," I said haughtily. "That is magic for old women and fools."

Ay! The follies of youth. Fate's thread is woven for us all. That day so long ago at the fair, bones were cast for me and, unbeknownst to any but the gods, the paths of my life, my Aztec tonal, were laid out in the Tonalamatl, The Book of Fate. The friends and enemies I made that day I would meet throughout my life.

The old man's face twisted into a feral scowl, then erupted in the savage snarl of a jungle cat. He shook a handful of bones at my face and muttered some incantation in an indio dialect I did not know.

I quietly departed.

Why tempt fate?

"Mestizo. Your heart will be ripped out on the sacrificial block when the jaguars rise."

The words, barely whispered at my back, were spoken in Náhuatl. I swung around to see who made this threat. An indio was moving through the crowd, and I was certain he was the culprit.

I hurried away, not happy about my rash remarks and the omen they had provoked. It was not just the comment. It was the hateful tone in which it had been invoked. At the time I saw no connection between jaguars and sacrificial blocks, although I knew that the great jungle cats were sacred to the indios.

At any other time I would have laughed off the indio's comment as just another insult leveled at my mixed blood, but this was the second threat to my life in a short space. I was not frightened by the indio's threat but angered.

I wandered into the crowd, aggravated at both the insult and my hasty retreat in the face of what the fray would have derided as "superstitious foolishness." A picaro would have had a ready retort for a shaman's magical threats. Except the final threat had not come from the shaman but from a disembodied voice I still could not identify.

I headed for the bookstalls, searching for Fray Antonio and Fray Juan. Fray Antonio would be there, browsing the books but not buying any. Any dinero that came his way he used to purchase food for the poor. I could, of course, filch a fine libro for him, but he, of course, would not approve.

I spotted Fray Juan first, talking to a man near one of the bookstalls. As I approached, the man glanced around furtively, then led the fray to the area in back of the stalls.

I immediately broke into a run when I recognized the man—the picaro, Mateo. There was no telling what kind of trouble he had in mind for the fray. Look at the trouble he'd gotten me into already, my run-in with the alcalde's wife and her witch's teat. The dwarf who hawked comedias and ballads for him might boast that Mateo had written and performed before the crowned heads of Europe, but I was immune to such braggadocio. I knew silken devils when I met them. Naive Fray Juan, however, believed the best about everyone and would find himself Mateo's unlawful prey.

Behind the stalls Mateo was slipping him a book from beneath his cloak. When I approached them, Mateo reached for his dagger.

"The boy is a brother's servant," Fray Juan explained to Mateo.

Fray Antonio had described me the same way to the inquisitors to deflect their curiosity.

Mateo did not seem to recognize me, which was understandable. Léperos were objects, not people, and by definition unmemorable.

I hung back, subservient, but kept within earshot.

"This book," Mateo said, continuing his pitch, "is one of the classics of chivalric romance, a sweeping epic, towering above Amadis of Gaul and Palmerin de Oliva. See for yourself—the lavish cover of Moroccan leather, the elegant Gothic script, the exquisite vellum, all for a pittance: a minuscule... ten pesos."

Ten pesos! A pope's ransom. A month's wages for most men and for what? A chivalric romance? A stupid tale of knights and ladies, of dragons slain, kingdoms conquered, and damsals won. The very works that drove Quixote to joust with windmills.

Fray Juan examined it fondly. "It doesn't look like vellum—"

"You have my personal assurance as a lord of the realm that this paper was milled right on the Nile's venerable banks and shipped across the Mediterranean for the personal perusal of our saintly monarch in Madrid. Only by the most fortunate and auspicious of circumstances was this work of art diverted into my capable hands."

"The people of the Nile make papyrus not vellum," I said.

The picaro threw me a nasty look, but quickly returned to Fray Juan. The holy brother was now reading aloud the tome's flowery title.

"Chronicle of the very remarkable Three Knights Tablante of Barcelona who defeated Ten Thousand Howling Moors and Five Frightful Monsters and set the rightful King upon the Throne of Constantinople and claimed a Treasure larger than that held by any King of Christendom."

I roared with derision. "The title is a jest and so is the book. Cervantes's Don Quixote exposed these chivalry romances for what they are. Who would read such gibberish? Only an imbecile. Who would write idiosy? Only a lunatic."

The fray, embarrassed, returned the book to Mateo and hurried away.

I had started after the fray when I heard Mateo quietly say, "Boy."

As I turned, his hand caught my throat with the speed of a striking snake. He jerked me toward him, his dagger already beneath my manta, probing my cojones.

"I should geld you like a steer, you dirty, half-caste beggar."

The point of the dagger cut into the soft flesh of my crotch, and a trickle of blood ran down my leg. He had the eyes of a pain-crazed animal insane with feral suffering. I was too scared to even beg.

He shoved me to the ground. "I will not rip your throat out because I don't want your whore's blood splattering my hands." His sword was out, and he stood over me, its blade flashing over my throat. I expected my head to drop and roll, but the sword tip froze stock-still against my Adam's apple.

"You spoke of that hijodeputa who wrote the saga of Quixote. If you mention his name one more time—the swine who plundered the stories, ideas, the truth, the very life of another, my life—I will not simply separate your head from your shoulders, I will strip your sorry hide an inch at a time and dress your carcass down with jalapeno and salt." The madman vanished, and I stared wall-eyed at the sky.

Ay! What had I done? True, I had spoiled his sale, but it was Cervantes's name that had driven Mateo muy loco ciego, almost costing me my cojones and my head. It suddenly occurred to me that perhaps the madman might be the author of the ridiculous novel.

Dios mio! Perhaps the fray can tell me about this church in India where one is punished for a past life's sins. I must have flung a thousand souls into hell's eternal furnace to have deserved this woe.

The fray, of course, claims I bring this hell of woe on myself by continually speaking out. He blames himself for my loose tongue, and there is some truth in that. He introduced me to the works of that indefatigable skeptic, Socrates. He challenged everything and passed this loathsome habit onto me like a disease.

Fortunately this lamp of truth seldom illuminates my own unrighteous life. One cannot tread the lépero path with truth as a guiding light; some truths no one can bear.

I dusted myself off and went back to the fair with less enthusiasm than I had had before.

TWENTY-FIVE

Then I met the Healer.

The first time I saw him he stood on the remains of an ancient Aztec monument, one of many scattered around the area. The stone slab elevated him several feet above the assembled onlookers, allowing him to perform his magic and work the crowds.

He was not old. He transcended such mundane concepts. He was ancient of days, a being of eons and millennia, not weeks or years.

I did not know what time or place or people spawned him, but to me he was everything Aztec or, more properly, Mexica, since the word Aztec was more Spanish than indio. One could not tell by his speech. Like a jungle parrot, he addressed questioners in their own tongue. I soon suspected he could speak the speech of birds and snakes, of rocks and trees, of mountains and stars.

The soothsayer I had encountered, the peruser of bones, was, in contrast, a charlatan. The Healer abjured conjury. Written in the wrinkles of that old man's face and in the shadows of his veiled eyes were the secrets of the grave.

To me he was a god, not Greek or Roman replete with schemes and intrigues, but a darker deity, gentle in his wisdom but murderous in his scorn.

His cloak—reaching from his shoulders to his ankles—was fashioned of flamboyant feathers, all the colors of a glittering rainbow. His snakeskin belt was festooned with turquoise. The rope laces of his leather sandals coiled up his calves to his knees. He looked as I imagined Montezuma had, only more ageless and wise and weary and venerable.

He was "treating" a woman who was suffering from headaches. A mangy yellow dog, looking more coyote than hound, sprawled nearby on a frayed red blanket. The dog's head rested on crossed paws, his skeptical eyes taking in every movement, large or small, as if checking for enemies. I would soon learn much more about that strange animal and his even stranger companion.

The woman told the Healer that evil spirits had penetrated her brain and were screaming for her soul. In earlier times indio priests would have treated her with healing herbs, and even Fray Antonio acknowledged the power of some of these sacred remedies. The botanical garden of the Emperor Montezuma, he told me, had over two thousand different medicinal herbs. Much of this knowledge was lost to the world because the priests following the conquest incinerated its library of picture-writing scrolls collected by the Aztec doctors.

"They feared what they did not understand and burned what they feared," the fray once lamented.

Of course, failing herbal remedies, the ancient priests would have drilled into her skull and summoned the demon to leave.

The Healer was, of course, a tititl, a native doctor skilled in the use of herbs and chants; but unlike the Spanish herbalists called curanderos, a tititl used herbs, potions, and chants and magic ceremonies to heal. But that was the smallest part of the Healer's medical art. He had his own methods. At the moment he was whispering secret incantations into the woman's ears, designed to draw out her evil spirits.

While I know that the course of an illness, anymore than a life, is not determined by dice throws, we are from time to time engaged by demons. I have never confessed this to the fray, but I have seen people discourse with the devil; and it is an article of indio truth that fiends can spirit themselves into the brain through ears, nose, eyes, and mouth.

As I watched the old medicine man mouthing his sacred incantations, his lips brushed her ears. Suddenly, his eyes bulging, hand at his mouth, he jerked back. A writhing snake, which he'd sucked from her ear, thrashed in his teeth. The woman screamed, convulsing in his arms.

"Ahhhh!!!" rose from the crowd.

I dismissed it as legerdemain. The Healer had slipped a snake up his sleeve, then secreted it in his mouth. How could I think otherwise? I was by training and predilection a truth-teller. I'd studied Socrates; his disciple, Plato; and in my heart of hearts, I detested the mendacity surrounding me at every turn. I worshipped at Truth's Altar. Part of me wanted to roar with skepticism and expose him as a fraud. He was an indio puro, without power or protection. Yet I remained silent. Why, I do not know.

Then, as if reading my mind, his eyes picked me out amid all those faces in the crowd.

"Come here, boy."

Everyone stared at me—even the yellow dog.

The next thing I knew, I was standing on the rock slab beside him.

"You do not believe I drew the snake from her head?"

I could have said nothing. Given the plethora of enemies I was rapidly accumulating, I didn't need anymore. Dissimulation was undoubtedly the better part of valor. Somehow I couldn't lie.

"You hid the snake in your mouth or hand," I said evenly. "It was a trick."

The Healer's hold over the crowd snapped, and they began to hiss.

Still he was not chagrined. "I see indio blood in your veins," the old sage said, shaking his head sadly, "but you favor your Spanish ancestry."

"I favor knowledge over ignorance," I said.

"The question is," the old man said smiling, "how much knowledge can a boy bear?"

Chanting quietly in Náhuatl, his hands passed over my eyes. Swaying, my face flushed fevishly, and my eyes teared. Breath whooshed out of me, and all my skepticism died.

I was especially taken by his eyes. Black, bottomless wells filled with world weariness and tacit understanding, they gripped me like a vise. Helpless in their gaze, they wrung everything from me, knew everything about me, my people, my past, my blood—before the conquistadors, before the Aztecs, before the Mayans, time immemorial, time out of mind.

Reaching for my crotch—as if he was about to grab my garrancha—he drew a long, black snake out of my pants, writhing and hissing and spitting. The crowd erupted into laughter.

TWENTY-SIX

After the crowd dispersed, I sat with him. Still dizzy from his magic spell, I now felt humbled. Handing me a piece of locust cake, a bit of maize, and a gourd of mango juice, he said gently, "Never forswear your indio blood," he told me. "The Spanish think they subjugate our flesh with whips and swords, with guns and priests, but there is another, separate world beneath our feet, above our heads, and dwelling in our souls. In this blessed realm, the sword slays not, and the spirit holds sway. Before the Spaniards, before the indio trod the earth, before the earth itself was blasted and forged out of the void, these sacred shades wrapped us round, nourished our souls, and gave us form. Forever they cry to us, 'Respect! Respect!' Forsake your blood, grovel before the Spaniard's inane gods, spurn the specters of our hallowed pale, you do so at your peril. Their memories are long."

He gave me a black stone—two fingers wide, one long and iron hard. One side glistened, a gleaming ebony mirror. Its interior glinted eerily, and I could feel myself falling into its lightless depths, as if its center were not mere rock but the pit itself—an infinite abyss, eternal as time, its heart the heart of an ancient star.

"Our indio ancestors traversed the stars," he said, "were the stars and carried in their hearts star-stones that foreordained our fate—all fate. Look into the smoking mirror, boy."

I was no longer of this earth but staring into a world before light and time. My hand trembled at its touch.

"It is yours," he said.

He had given me a piece of a star.

I dropped to my knees... overwhelmed.

"It is your tonal, your destiny, to have it."

"I am not worthy."

"Really? You have not asked what you must give in exchange."

"All I have are two reales."

His palm passed over mine without touching it, and the money vanished as if it had never been.

"The gift is immaterial. In the heart the blessing dwells, and your heart harbors the gods."

TWENTY-SEVEN

I found Fray Antonio under the tree where we had set up camp. I told him of my experience with the Healer, including the snake concealed in my loins. He was singularly unimpressed.

"Describe to me what happened—every detail."

I told him of the Healer's incantation, his hand sweeping by my face, my feeling of being both elated and dizzy—

"Ha! Your head went around in circles, you almost lost your balance, your eyes watered, your nose itched, you felt wonderful."

"Sí! From his incantation!"

"It was yoyotli, a powder that Aztec priests used to subdue sacrificial victims. Cortes first learned of it during the battle for Tenochtitlan, when he saw his indio allies, who had been captured by the Aztecs, singing and dancing on their way up temple steps where priests would rip out their hearts. Earlier the prisoners had been given a drink called obsidian knife water, a concoction made from cocoa, the blood of sacrifice victims, and a debilitating drug. Before they mounted the steps to the top, yoyotli dust was thrown in their face. Yoyotli makes one have visions. It is said that the warriors to be sacrificed not only went willingly but thought they were in the arms of the gods."

He explained that it was a trick known by enchanters. "Your 'Healer' had a little of it in his pocket. When he chants his incantations, he sweeps his hand in front of you so the dust flies in your face."

"No, I saw nothing."

"Of course. Only a tiny bit of dust is necessary. You were not going to be sacrificed. He just needed to stun you a little, weaken your mind, so you believed everything he told you."

"But he gave me the heart of a star!"

"Chico, Chico," the fray tapped his temple, "what have I taught you? Do you really think he steals stars from the sky? Or that he flew down to earth with Andromeda in his hand?"

I examined the black stone with the polished side.

"It is a shadow mirror," the fray said, "obsidian from a volcano, burnished until it blazes with a deep gloss. The indio magicians tell fools it foretells their tonal, their fate. If one breaks, they peddle the pieces to other idiots, saying they sell them the hearts of stars. You could buy mountains of them for a reale—or gather them by the wagonful on volcanic slopes. What did you offer the fraud for it?"

"Nothing," I lied.

The Healer was not at the stone slab, nor the spot where he robbed me of my dinero. I went looking where indios camped, ready to threaten him if he didn't return my money. I had never been so angry. Or embarrassed. Did this indio faker think he was a picaro? That was supposed to be my job.

Ay! I could not find the scoundrel. He was gone. With my two reales. My wounded pride would mend, but the money, the money was more sacred to me than the papal throne.

TWENTY-EIGHT

An hour before sunset, I went to watch the play.

The play was put on in a tree-enclosed clearing with blankets hung to conceal the players from illicit onlookers. The sloped terrain allowed the players to occupy the high ground.

I didn't have a silver reale, the price of admission, but I found an affordable vantage point. Climbing a nearby tree, high above the blankets, I had my own private balcony, gratis. The dwarf taking admission at the entrance naturally shot me irate glances, but I was picaro-born and ignored him. After all several priests took up positions outside the blanket wall, folded the blanket drapes over their ropes and robbed the troupe of the admission fee as ruthlessly as I. And naturally no one challenged them.

Before the play began, the two attractive picaras hustled the mostly male audience, purveying sweetmeats. Flirtation went with the vending. Spanish men outnumbered Spanish females twenty to one in New Spain; and these Spanish women, though picaras, spellbound these hombres. I sometimes wondered if these Spaniards were as entranced with their women at home.

The dwarf ascended the grassy "stage."

"Poland, an ancient kingdom by the sea, lies northeast of our sunny Spain. The Alamanians, Danes, and Ruskies abut this arctic realm.

"Before our story begins, a prince is born to the king of Poland. His beloved queen dies in childbirth. Soothsayers at the court foretell of hellish wars enshrouding the king's enthronement; bloodtime, swordtime, destruction engulfing all until the king himself lies prostrate at the prince's feet.

"What was the king to do?" the dwarf asked the audience, his voice a stage whisper. "Should he have the babe killed? His blood-son of his beloved bride?"

The dwarf paused to quaff a goblet of wine. I already knew from Mateo's recital of "El Cid" that acting was a thirsty business.

"The king, knowing the prince would reduce his kingdom to ruin, erected a soaring, impregnable, windowless tower."

The dwarf's voice became darkly sinister. "In the bowels of this bleak and lightless bastion, the boy was raised in chains, swathed in animal skins. Only one mortal attended the boy, an aged sage who schooled him in arts and letters and in the ways of beasts and birds, but instructing him naught in the wiles and guiles of men."

"Some education," an audience wit groaned.

"Some play," another grumbled.

"Where's the marauding pirate?" another critic complained. "Where's the dauntless hero?"

"Mateo Rosas, whose name most of you know from the great theaters of Seville and Madrid, has personally selected Pedro Calderón de la Barca's masterwork for your delectation. As we all know, Calderón is second only to Lope de Vega as a master of the stage."

From the audience's grumbling I had the distinct impression that Mateo's august name meant nothing to them. Nor did I understand their antipathy to the drama. A prince imprisoned in a dark tower stirred my fertile, if fevered, imagination. I wanted to know how he would feel when he got out—and confronted both his father and life. I was on tenterhooks.

The dwarf continued, undismayed.

"As our story opens, the king of Poland is near the end. But who will succeed him? His legitimate heir has languished in chains his whole life long. If he dies, the next in line is the king's nephew, the duke of a land called Moscovy, a bitter, ruthless place at the edge of the world to the east of Poland.

"The king, the duke, and all the great men of the kingdom meet at the palace to debate the problem: Shall the prince be permitted to rule or be put to death because of the prophecy? The king decides to test the prince, who is now a grown man, to see if he is ruled by reason or by savage rage. To ensure he is kept under control—remember, not only have terrible things been prophesied, but he has been rigidly sequestered—the king sedates the prince and orders his tutors to tell him that his memories are but dreams.

"Also, Rosaura arrives, but she comes to avenge her honor's loss at the duke of Moscovy's hands. Disguised as a man, she plans to run the miscreant through herself.

"Now, amigos, we begin at the tower prison on a craggy mountain where Prince Segismundo languishes."

The dwarf waved his hand to where Mateo and the other actors were waiting "off stage." The actors, except Mateo, wore false beards, and the two actresses wore wigs.

"Mateo Rosas will play the prince and several other key roles. Now for your pleasure, La Nómada players present Pedro Calderón's comedia, Life Is a Dream."

With a sweep of his hat, Mateo addressed the audience as Segismundo, prince of Poland.

"I try, oh heavens, to understand what crime I committed... but since I was born, I understand my crime... for man's greatest crime is to have been born at all.

"I have less liberty than birds and beasts and fish. As I reach this pitch of anger, like a volcano, an Aetna, I could tear pieces of my heart from my own breast. What law, justice, or reason can deny to man so sweet a privilege, a freedom God has given a brook, a fish, a beast, and a bird?"

Other actors tell us that the king orders the prince released from the tower and brought to the palace to see if he is fit to rule or is a mad beast. If he fails the test, he will be put to death, and the duke of Moscovy will marry the beautiful Princess Estrella and assume the throne. But the king pleas with those around him to give the prince a chance. The king was being played by the dwarf with the powerful voice.

In the palace, for the first time unchained and interacting with people, the Prince considers vengeance on a servant who was cruel to him while he was held captive in chains. Another man tells him it's not the servant's fault, that he obeyed the king's orders.

But Segismundo thunders, "Insofar as the law was not just, he was not bound to obey the king."

A murmur went through the audience and I heard the word "treason" muttered. Even at my young age, disobedience to any king, even a bad one, was unthinkable.

But the evil servant challenges the prince, baiting him to fight him.

The prince struggles with the wrongdoer and throws him off of the balcony.

The prince is drugged and returned to the prison tower, where he is told by his tutor that all that occurred was nothing more than a dream, that he had never left the tower.

I could see the audience was constantly stirring and restless. "Where's the pirate?" a man yelled.

"Where are the gorgeous women?" another thundered.

I was enjoying the play and eager to find out about the woman who dresses like a man and whose sword thirsts for bloody revenge, but the audience of merchants and hacienda majordomos was little interested in a prince's struggle with the demons in us all.

Mateo ignored the grumbling. As Segismundo, he said, "To live is to dream... a king dreams he is king and in this deception spends his days, commanding, governing, disposing. But the renown he receives is only written on the wind.... The rich man dreams of his riches, which only brings him greater concern and worry. The poor man dreams that he suffers misery and want. All men dream the Me they live. All life is a dream and dreams themselves are—"

"The hell with dreams! Where's the pirate?" someone shouted.

Mateo angrily drew his sword. "The next man who interrupts me will have this pirate spilling his blood."

This was no audience of city folk but rough colonists. A dozen men rose to the challenge, and Mateo was about to take them on when the dwarf and the other actors intervened, pleading with Mateo and forcing him off the stage.

Fray Antonio told me that when plays are presented in Spain, the common people stand closest to the stage and are called mosqueteros, musket bearers, because of the clamor they make and provoke. These vulgares, low vulgar people, pelt the actors with fruit and anything at hand if they do not like the play.

"Country boors!" Mateo yelled as he left.

There was something else he yelled back, a remark on their manhood and their mothers that I dare not repeat even in these secret words. The insult caused several men to draw their swords, which, however, they instantly sheathed when the two actresses placated them with honeyed words and seductive smiles, which implied everything but which would, I'm sure, deliver nothing.

In the meantime the troupe changed plays.

The dwarf explained that a simple Spanish soldier, rather than a Polish king, now trod their earthen stage.

"I am a simple soldier of the king," he said, "whose honor has been offended by the acts of an English pirate."

The actor-pirate bragged offstage, "I have enjoyed legions of Spanish women, by force at first but never with real resistance. They are all natural-born putas, endowed by their mothers in the harlot's art at birth."

The audience roared. Swords rattled, challenges were issued, and the audience was a howling mob. Shouts of ¡chinga su madre!—an aspersion proclaiming carnal knowledge of the man's mother—rocked the assemblage.

"This simple soldier," the dwarf said, waving his hands for silence, "returns from the Italian war to find his wife has been ravaged by an English brigand."

Gasps resounded. Several men shouted, "If he does not wreak vengeance on the Inglés son of a puta, he is no español."

"He is a mujer!" yelled a woman.

The Spanish soldier had no doubt raped and looted his way through Italy, just as the Spaniards to this very day raped and looted their way through New Spain, my very existence mortal proof of that sad fact; but given the temper of the audience, I kept that observation to myself.

The dwarf drew his sword. It was little more than a good-size dagger, but it looked like a broadsword in his diminutive hand. All the while his booming voice reverberated through us. "I have slit the throats of English, French, and Dutch swine, and my sword will drink their blood again."

Had there been a roof on the "theater," the audience's shouts would have blown it off. Men shook their swords and pleaded for the foul marauder to show his face. But discretion was the better part of showmanship. Either the actor was very good or he was very scared. He cowered offstage. I doubted that even the infamous mosqueteros of Seville were as menacing as our sword-swinging, dagger-slinging colonials.

The actresses, who'd sung, danced, seduced, and solicited hat money outright, now came on stage. This time they harmonized, not unmelodically, a ballad venerating the pristine honor and inviolable maidenhoods of Spanish women here, there, and everywhere. But even as they sang, they could not resist kicking up their heels, revealing a great deal of leg, including that now infamous garden of delights palpitating between their thighs. The two nearby priests pretended with elaborate insincerity to avert their voracious gazes.

The brutish English brigand revealed himself. Leaping to the stage, brandishing his sword, he accosted one of the dancers, roaring, "I've had you by force, and now I will have you again."

She was, of course, the wife of the simple soldier. Men in the audience implored her to take her own life rather than disgrace her husband's honor. It was not to be. As if confirming the corsair's earlier remarks, she yielded immediately, offering laughably little resistance. Murderous rage swept through the audience.

The Spanish soldier, played by the dwarf, continued his speech. Gesturing with much sweeping of his cape and doffing of his broad-brimmed caballero's hat, he spoke of the dauntless courage of Spanish men everywhere—of the righteousness of Spain's soldiers, merchants, and humble farmers. Like Mateo, the dwarf was more suited to play the peacock than the goose.

"Honor is not just the right and possession of the nobility," the dwarf orated, "it belongs to all of us who act as men should act. We Spanish are the greatest nation in the world. Our armies are the most powerful, our king the most generous, our culture the most glorious, our men the bravest, our women the fairest and the most virtuous."

Cheers erupted in the audience.

After each speech a singing guitarist serenaded us with ballads extolling the courage of Spanish men, particularly their love of women, honor, and war.

My ornaments are arms,

My pastime is in war,

My bed is cold upon the hill,

My lamp yon star;

My journeyings are long,

My slumbers short and broken;

From hill to hill I wander still,

Kissing thy token.

I ride from land to land,

I sail from sea to sea,—

Some day more kind my fate may find,

Some night kiss you!

Now the play moved quickly. The English freebooter returned again to ravish the soldier's clearly compliant wife, but this time found the soldier waiting for him.

After the dwarf took several bows and made another long speech, a sword fight flared between himself and the buccaneer. After dispatching the blackguard Britainer, he turned to the audience, saying it was now time to settle with his wife.

On this point the men in the audience were unrelenting. Male honor rose and fell on their women's fidelity. No matter how much he loved his wife or loathed her despoiler, her chastity's loss—or the rumor thereof—meant blood revenge. On this count his reputation brooked no slight or doubt or even hesitation.

The audience was blind hot. One man screamed for her head, complaining that she had not forced the brigand to kill her. Another shouted back at him that it wasn't her fault. The marauder's refusal to run her through revealed dishonor on his part, not hers. The two men started pummeling each other, which quickly led to drawn swords. Again the two actresses intervened. Separating the men, they lured each of them to the farthest corners of that blanketed alleyway with sugary words, sensuous smiles, and outrageously preposterous promises.

The actors had no more than got back into position when the dwarf suddenly stopped the action. "Amigos, my apologies. But I have been reminded that since we mount a second production, our troupe is due second recompense."

The picara women, who had extricated themselves from the swordsman with startling aplomb, again sashayed through the crowd, passing their hats. Despite jeering complaints, the money poured in torrents.

I stared at the women, dumbfounded. The performing of comedias seemed little more than rape, pillage, and highway robbery set in a theater—at least the way it was practiced in New Spain. As for the actresses, they only confirmed for me the incomprehensible power of women over men. Madre de Dios, the things these voluptuous vixens make us do worldwide, time out of mind. We are indeed helpless in their hands. At the drop of a garter, a quick come-hither smirk, or the flimsiest hint of chastity debauched, we are irretrievably lost.

True, most of the women I had known were Veracruz prostitutes, but I had seen great ladies from a distance. What little of them I had observed confirmed everything I glimpsed at the Jalapa fair. Women inevitably reduced the brave and the brilliant to drooling imbecility, all the while still believing that as machos hombres we were the ones in charge.

After the two actresses ransacked the crowd, our hero-soldier-dwarf returned to the stage. Not that he was any happier for it. The predacious pirate was now servicing the Spaniard's wife with such stupefying regularity that not even her oaf of a husband accepted her claims to "fanatical resistance" and "fighting the brute off."

"Ever hear of suicide?" the frustrated soldier-dwarf finally asked her, at his wit's end.

"I lacked the means, blessed husband," she responded, with an eager-to-please grin.

"You lying strumpet!" the actor-dwarf-soldier thundered. "All decent women hide poison in their bosoms for exactly these occasions, so when kidnapped by pirates, they can quickly dispatch themselves and not disgrace their cherished husbands, beloved brothers, and doting fathers."

Murmurs of approval rose from the men in the audience.

At last, under questioning, the truth came out. She was not his wife after all but a Moorish whore who, while he was away in Italy, had murdered his faithful bride and taken her place.

The good soldier promptly decapitated her, hurling her heretic soul howling into hell, her infernal descent daringly dramatized by a hideous hell-bent fiend, dragging her offstage, presumably to the bottomless pit. All this was enthusiastically enacted to the wild cheers of the audience.

I thought—and hoped and prayed—that the play was over, but then another character was summarily introduced, the daughter of the soldier. The daughter, a little girl, was portrayed by the shorter of the two dancing women.

The dwarf-soldier discovered that his little girl was dying from the plague. He went to her side and prayed for her. In answer to his prayers, an angel pulled her from her bed and up to heaven—with a rope hung over the branch of a tree.

"God recognizes His own," the hero told the audience, some of whom now had tears rolling down their cheeks.

The play was similar in theme to Peribanez and the Comendador of Ocana, one of Lope de Vega's masterpieces. Fray Juan had let me read the play because Vega was the great master of the Spanish theater, which of course was the greatest producer of comedias in the world. The point of Vega's play was that "honor" was not the exclusive possession of the noble class but could be found in a simple peasant. Peribanez, a peasant, was not noble by birth; but was noble in heart and soul. When his honor and human dignity were violated by the comendador who lusted for his wife, Peribanez avenged himself upon the powerful aristocrat.

The comendador made Peribanez a captain in order to send him away from Ocana and leave the coast clear for his seduction of Casilda, Peribanez's wife. But the crafty nobleman had not counted on the courageous loyalty of Casilda, who stood ready to fight and die for her honor. Peribanez uncovers the nobleman's wicked plot, witnesses his wife's willingness to sacrifice herself, and slays the comendador in mortal combat.

The play put on at the fair was a pale imitation of de Vega's tale, but it had the same result of theatrical fare everywhere: to separate the audience from their hard-earned lucre.

Apparently, this was the way it was done: Challenge a man's honor, then watch the feathers fly. Nothing inflamed the audience's emotions like chastity besmirched and vengeance exacted. I personally preferred the complex emotional struggle of a prince drugged, lied to, and raised as an animal. But emotional complexity failed to fire our hot macho blood. Clearly, a play had to dramatize manliness, courage, and pureza de sangre, purity of blood. Honor was derived from who one was and from what one was—all of which was contingent on bloodlines. Not even riches, titles, and family names could compare with purity of blood, particularly when it was backed up by the willingness to die for it, which was universally heralded as hombría, the quintessence of Spanish manhood.

While I had no honor myself, due to my impure blood, I understood the code of hombría. Wealth, learning, even great skill, such as that of a fine writer or an esteemed scientist, were dismissed by the gachupins as the paltry achievements of Jews and Moors. Fortitude was the true measure of a man, along with the lust to dominate—men by the warrior's sword, women by his passion.

I had started to descend from the tree when the dwarf announced an added attraction if further money could be raised.

"These beautiful señoritas will dance a zarabanda for you!" he enthused.

A zarabanda was a deshonesto dance—wicked, shameless, lecherous, and sly—in which women luridly flung their skirts and lasciviously pumped their hips. Of course, by now these women could show the men little they had not already seen. Still, everyone was game. The men cheered, stomped, and poured more money into the hats; and the deshonesto began.

The zarabanda blazed hotter and hotter, and the skirts flew higher and higher, driving the audience into an hysterical frenzy. Even the two priests could not look away. They feigned disapproval, rising as if to leave, but somehow never made it back beyond the blankets. Nor did they order the dance stopped, which was no doubt the better part of ecclesiastical zeal. The audience might well have ripped off their heads. In truth, they, too, were men and did not want the performance to stop.

Now the two male actors and the dwarf went into the audience with their collection hats. The more frequently the dinero flowed, the louder they shouted commands to the women, and the higher the skirts flew.

Only when the women were so exhausted that their legs no longer kicked and their skirts no longer soared and their secret gardens no longer filled the eyes did the priests rush up to the dirt stage and insist the show desist.

Even so, they met with opposition. A drunk knocked one of the priests out cold, while the other endured a withering barrage of obscene insults, culminating in his "manifest lack of hombria."

The altercation was ugly enough without physical and verbal assaults on the priests. It was time to part. Violence was common fare on the Veracruz streets and held no charm for me. The actors apparently concurred. On my way down the tree, I noticed them sneaking away.

In truth, I had enjoyed myself. I did wonder how the soldier could have mistaken the actress for his own wife. Maybe I had missed an important plot point. Or maybe she was simply more attractive. Who knows?

I burned with curiosity as to the prince of Poland. How would he turn out?

Nor were these idle questions. Though I did not know it at the time, from those two plays I had learned lessons that would prove invaluable.

TWENTY-NINE

Night was falling as I left the comedia. Before returning to the encampment of the frays, I again sought the Healer, in search of my money. Hundreds of campfires surrounded the fair, but at last I recognized the Healer's donkey, dog, and the distinctive indio blanket that I'd seen the dog lying on, dyed imperial red from cochineal bugs. A full moon rode the brilliantly starry sky, affording me sufficient light to locate his campsite.

The Healer was nowhere around. I would have purloined his blanket and anything else I found to repay me for his fraud, but the little yellow dog gave me a vicious look. Yellow dogs were associated with very bad spirits. They accompanied the dead on the trip to the underworld, the Dark Place where one goes after death. This one stared as if he wanted to accompany me to the Dark Place.

I widened my search for the Healer and spotted him some distance behind his encampment. He stood with his back to me on the ruin of a forgotten Aztec monument, staring up at the gathering gloom of the dying day. I could only see the dark outline of his figure. As I walked toward him he raised his hands to the stars and uttered words in a language that was strange to my ear. It was not Náhuatl nor any indio dialect I had heard.

A wind gust, cold and unexpected, blew out of the north, a chill wind freezing my tierra caliente-brewed blood. As the wind buffeted me, I looked to the Healer. In the sky overhead a star streaked to earth, its fall a furious flash. I had seen shooting stars before, but never one that plummeted on mortal command.

My feet turned, and I hurried to the camp of the frays.

Fray Antonio would say it was, no doubt, a coincidence that the star fell just as the Healer appeared to command it. But what if the fray was wrong? The fray knew only an earthly realm, where Crown and Church held sway. What if there was another world, one that had been hidden in our jungles time immemorial, even before the Greek gods mocked us from Mount Olympus and a fruit-bearing snake ensnared Eve's fall.

I was not one to tempt fate. I already had enough enemies without angering the Aztec gods.

I had not gone far when I spotted the picaro, Mateo, sitting under a tree. He had a campfire before him and a dying torch hanging from a branch of the tree. The flickering light revealed fury on his face. Paper and a quill lay near him. I wondered if he had been writing a book, another romance of knights and adventure. "Romance" in books and ballads was not between a man and a woman, though such events were commonplace within their pages. The romance referred to was adventure, fighting evil, conquering a kingdom, and winning the hand of a beautiful princess.

I was intrigued by the idea that the man actually wrote a book. I knew, of course, that books were not hatched like eggs but crafted by men. Still the process was a mystery to me. Other than the frays, I had known few people, beside myself, who could write their name!

He lifted a wineskin and took a long drink.

Hesitating, pondering my move, I came close enough to him to risk a dagger's toss. He looked up at as I came into killing range; his expression darkened when he recognized me.

"I saw the play," I said quickly, "and Life Is a Dream was much better than that silly farce the dwarf put on. How could the soldier not recognize that another woman had taken the place of his wife? And his daughter—the autor did nothing to forewarn us that there was a daughter and that she was ill."

"What could a lépero cur like you know about a comedia?" He slurred his words drunkenly. Another sack of wine, this one flat and empty, lay beside him.

"I am not educated in comedias," I said haughtily, "but I have read the classics in Latin and Castile and even ancient Greek. And I've read two plays, one by Lope de Vega and the other by Mig—" My tongue tripped over the name because the only other play I had ever read was by Miguel Cervantes. The man had threatened my cojones once if I mentioned Cervantes's name again.

"What Spanish books have you read?"

"Guzman de Alfarache." The other book, Don Quixote, of course, I could not mention.

"What friend did Achilles permit to fight on his behalf in the Iliad?" Mateo asked.

"Patroclus. He was killed wearing Achilles's armor."

"Who killed him?"

"He told Hector that it was the gods and 'deadly Destiny.' "

"Who built the Trojan horse?"

"Epeius. He was a master carpenter and pugilist."

"Who was the Queen of Carthage in the Aeneid?"

"Dido. She killed herself after Jupiter ordered Aeneas to leave her."

"Ubi tete occultabas!"

He had switched to Latin and was asking me where I had been hiding. At first the question jarred me because I was, in fact, in hiding; but I realized that he was not referring to hiding my body. In his drunken state he was referring to the fact that I was dressed like a lépero but was educated like a priest.

"Veracruz," I answered. And then, with uncharacteristic honesty for me, I added, "It would not do for the gachupins to know that a mestizo speaks several languages and has read the classics."

He looked at me with new, if drunken, interest—then gave up the effort. The struggle was too much. Instead of further discourse, he raised the wineskin to his lips.

Who was this man? He was probably born in Spain, which presumably made him a gachupin, but I did not think of him as a wearer of spurs. He was first and foremost a rogue and actor. At the moment, a very drunk one.

"I respect you for your refusal to pander to that crowd of merchants and boors who did not understand how great the Calderón play truly was," I said. "Calderón is a true artist. But the other play," I asked, "what kind of person would write such twaddle?"

"I wrote it."

I froze in place, certain that my life had come to an end.

"But—but—"

"And I respect the fact you recognized it as preposterous."

"It was similar to Peribanez and the Comendador of Ocana, the play by Lope de Vega, but Vega's play was..."

"Better. I know. I took the skeleton of Vega's play and added different flesh to it. Why, you ask? Because audiences want simple plays about honor, and he has written so many, hundreds of them, that it is easier to put different clothes on them than to bother writing new ones." He belched. Impressively. "You see, my little street cur, this is what an audience wants, foolishness that fires their hearts but leaves their minds untouched. I give them what they want. If I didn't, the actors would go unpaid, and the theater would die. If a wealthy duke does not underwrite your art, you pander to the rabble or you starve."

"If you believed in your art, you would starve first!" I said.

"You are a fool, a liar, or both."

That was no doubt true. His comments, on the other hand, were made with pained sincerity. I now realized that he was drinking to deaden the pain of theatrical deceit.

"One thing bothers me though," I said. "You knew how the audience would react when you put on the dream play. Did you do it deliberately?"

He laughed. "Guzman taught you well. What is you name, muchacho?"

"They call me Cristo the Bastardo. My friend, the fray, a former fray, calls me Bastardo Chico."

"Then I shall call you Bastardo. It's an honorable name, at least among thieves and whores. I drink to you, Bastardo, and to your friend Guzman. And Odysseus. May you, like Odysseus, not die on the Siren's rocks."

He emptied the wineskin dry and threw it aside.

"I know audiences hate the dream play. I use it to heat up the blood. With all that anger blazing in their blood, they'll pay double to see the pirate get his just desserts."

"What happened to Prince Segismundo?" I said.

"Sit down, Chico, sit down and you shall be enlightened." He stared at me, glassy-eyed. "Do you have a name?"

"Uh, it's still Cristo the Bastardo."

"Ah, a good name. Christ's bastard is how I shall think of you." He fixed me with narrowed eyes. "Now for the prince of Poland, he killed a man, was drugged, and then told everything in his previous life had all been a dream."

He pulled out another wineskin. Acting was clearly a thirsty business.

"His father, the king, made a mistake. He thought that to put the prince in chains was to circumvent destiny, but none of us can cheat the Fatal Sisters who weave our woeful ends. Hearing that the king was to put the duke of Moscovy on the throne, Polish patriots rushed the prison tower and freed the prince. An army of outlaws and commoners stormed the prison tower, proclaiming to Segismunda, 'Liberty awaits you! Hearken to its voice!'

"Believing his life a dream, the prince says to himself, Why not do the right thing? Declaring that all power is borrowed and must return to its owner, the prince leads his ragtag army against the army of his father, the king. At his side is the beautiful woman, who seeks revenge against the duke. She has cast off her male clothes and goes into battle garbed as a woman but brandishing a man's sword.

"The king realizes that he is powerless against a populace aroused. 'Who can check a wild stallion's fury?' he asks. 'Who can hold back the current of a river, as it races proud and headlong to the sea? Who can stop a boulder as it falls, torn from a mountaintop?' All are easier to tame, he tells us, than the angry passion of a mob."

Mateo stopped, studying me, his eyes heavy with drink. "The king says, 'The royal throne has been reduced to horror, a bloody stage where the Fickle Sisters mock our every move.' "

He upended the wineskin and threw back his head. Squeezing its sides, he aimed the arcing geyser at his gaping mouth. Not all of it made its mark; wine dribbled down his beard. Tossing the sack aside, he lay back, his eyelids half open.

A chill was in the air, and I leaned closer to the fire to warm my hands as I waited for him to finish the tale. I was in suspense to find out what happened. Did the prince win? Did he kill his father? The woman warrior—did she avenge her honor with the duke?

I heard snoring and wondered what character performed this unusual act in the play. After a moment I realized that Mateo was not acting. He had passed out.

With a groan of disappointment, I rose to leave the picaro's encampment, no closer to finding out the fate of Prince Segismundo than when I had arrived.

As I turned I saw a man coming down the opening between campsites. He paused at every camp, peering at the occupants. I did not recognize the man, but the fact that he was searching for someone was enough to ignite fear in me. A tent was set up no more than a dozen feet from where Mateo had passed out, and I quickly surmised that it was his.

The entry flap was on the side where the man was approaching. Getting down on my hands and knees, I crawled to the rear of the tent, lifted up the bottom, and crawled into the darkness.

I realized immediately that someone was in the tent.

THIRTY

The tent had warmth inside, the subtle heat of a body. And fragrance. The smell of rose water. The scent of a woman.

I froze in utter terror. Bueno Dios! The whole camp will be aroused by the woman's screams.

Warm hands reached out and grabbed me.

"Hurry, my darling, before my husband returns."

She pulled me to her, throwing off her blanket, her naked flesh glowing in the dark. I recognized her voice! She was the taller of the two actresses.

Hot, wet lips found mine. Her lips were sweet, a hint of cherry. They swallowed my mouth, and her tongue pushed past my lips and tantalized my own. I pulled away, gasping for a breath. The tigress grabbed me and pulled me to her again, smothering my face in warm, soft, succulent breasts.

Reason flew from my head as my virile instincts erupted. I kissed the soft, warm mounds. As the mulatta girl had instructed at the river, my tongue found the strawberries at the tip of her breasts. To my delight they were firm and erect and delightful to kiss.

The woman pulled up my shirt and ran her hands up my chest. She leaned up and kissed my breasts, caressing one of my excited nipples with her tongue. I smothered a cry of pleasure and joy. Eh, no wonder the priests storm so much about carnal knowledge. The touch of a woman was heaven on earth! I thought a man was in command of lovemaking. Now I understood why men fight and die for a woman's smile.

Her hand slid into my pants and she grabbed my manhood. "Mateo, my darling, hurry, give me your garrancha before the beast comes."

Mateo's woman! ¡Ay de mí! A voice of reason would have told me that my choices in life had been narrowed down to being killed by a jealous husband—or a jealous lover—whoever caught me first tasting forbidden fruit. But my mind had stopping commanding my actions—as my excitement and eagerness became acute, my garrancha started dictating my actions.

She pulled me atop her. Remembering the button on a woman that makes the fountain of lust flow, I reached down to the secret garden. Her little button was firm and erect, like the strawberries of her breasts. Touching it caused her body to convulse. A wave of heat swept through her that I felt against my own skin, and a moan of pleasure escaped her lips. She kissed me wildly, her mouth and tongue caressing, teasing, probing.

Her legs spread wide and she took hold of my garrancha, pulling me down between her legs. I was mindless with lust and desire. The head of my male organ touched her secret garden and—

Ay! A fire started in my virile parts and spread through my body. My veins became liquid fire, my brains melted. My manhood pulsated on its own, squirting out virile juice.

I hovered over her, breathless, mindless, melting in her arms. I had been to Nirvana, to the Garden of Allah.

She groaned and pushed me off of her. "Estúpido! Why did you do that? You saved nothing for me!"

"I—I'm sorry!"

She gasped at the sound of my voice. "Who are you?"

The tent flap was jerked and both of us froze. Drunken curses accompanied more effort to open the flap.

I did not need to be told by a panicked gasp that her husband had arrived, the one she called a beast. The sound of his voice struck me as being that of the actor who played the English pirate. He wore a very big sword.

I edged away as the flap came open, pulling up my pants. Her husband flopped inside, falling to his knees. I could not make out his features in the darkness. Only her white flesh was visible in the tent. He unbuckled his sword and threw it aside.

"Been waiting for me, eh?"

If he only knew.

I froze in place, the demon called terror gripping me; holding my breath, I prayed that the ground would open up and swallow me before he discovered my presence.

He crawled onto her naked body, pulling down his pants. He climbed atop her without a word of affection, a caressing touch. The beast probably did not even know about the lust button.

A moment later he moaned and jerked as his virile juice exploded. Then he belched.

"Drunken animal!"

She hit him. I saw the flash of her white arm as she threw the punch. It caught him on the side of the head and he rolled off of her.

I slipped under the tent as she flew atop of him, screaming and clawing like a wildcat.

On shaky knees, I made my way back to the camp of the frays. I did not see the man who I thought might be searching the camps.

As I lay in my blanket and stared up at the night sky, I realized I had learned another lesson about women. If a man takes pleasure from them, he had better be prepared to give back. They have the claws and temperament of a jungle cat.

THIRTY-ONE

The next morning, bundling their possessions, the frays prepared to leave the fair. Taking me aside, Fray Antonio said, "You cannot return to Veracruz, not until Ramon and the doña leave. On the way back to Veracruz, we'll take a detour, and I'll arrange for you to stay with an old friend who is the priest for several indio villages on a large hacienda. You will stay there until we decide what mere is to be done with you."

"I can seek my fortune as a picaro," I said, with a wry smile.

But he saw no humor in my jibe. He shook his head sadly. "I have failed you. You should have been trained for household service or as a vaquero on a hacienda. I taught you Plato and Homer rather than how to shovel the manure from a stable."

"You haven't failed me. I do not want to shovel mierda."

"Still you must be careful. Someone at the fair may be searching for you. If they see me, they will look for you; so we must not be seen together. Juan has a list of religious items to buy for his church, so we cannot leave for a few more hours. Meet us at noon two leagues along the Veracruz road where it forks."

I drank water from the river and stole a mango for my breakfast. I ate the mango as I wandered into the fair. The fair was not over, but merchants who had sold out their stock were packing up to leave. They were quickly replaced by other merchants in from Veracruz.

I would not leave without confronting the Healer. While I was not completely skeptical about his powers, there was still the matter of my money. He had sold me that lump of common rock under false pretenses. Furthermore, it was now morning, and I was no longer frightened by the night. The light of day had steeled my courage. I set out for the area at the far end of the fair where the magicians and other fakers offered their services.

As I crossed the fairground, I saw the fray talking to a man on horseback. I only had caught a passing glimpse of Ramon when he searched our hospice, but I recognized him instantly. From his clothes—leather boots, pants, and shirt of rich but rugged cloth, a wide-brimmed hat without fancy trim—I inferred he was a majordomo, a hacienda boss. He was certainly no gachupin, the kind who sported fancy clothes and exotic mulatta mistresses. He had not grown soft living off the king's largesse and the fat of the land. I also knew he was looking for me.

Another horseman was with him, a Spaniard, who was dressed as an overseer, the kind who supervised the ranch hands who worked the livestock and crops.

There were so many people I could have easily blended into the crowd. Had I returned to the magician's area, I still might have accosted the Healer and reclaimed my lost reales. But the sight of Ramon froze me to my bones, and I headed back toward our camp. I intended to disappear into the surrounding river country.

Then I made a major mistake: I looked back. Glancing over my shoulder, I caught Ramon's eye. And made another mistake: I ran.

I was wearing a hat and was a couple of hundred steps away; so he could not have gotten a good look at my face. My actions, however, instantly caught his attention.

He spurred his horse in my direction. Fray Antonio grabbed the reins of Ramon's horse, but Ramon hammered him with the weighted buttstock of his riding quirt. His horse surged toward me, and the fray dropped to the ground like a rock, as if he'd been shot, not struck.

The hounds of hell were at my heels. I ran into the dense bushes, thick with thorny mesquite, and clambered up the steep hillside on hands and knees, badly torn. I heard the crash of bushes behind me and once more glanced frantically over my shoulder. Ramon's horse, lunging and bucking, had refused to enter the bushes, and Ramon was sawing at the reins. The other horseman, the overseer, passed him, charging up the rocky hill only to have his horse founder on shale.

Reaching the top of the hill, I discovered to my horror that I could not go any farther. A river gorge blocked my escape. Too steep to climb down, too high to jump into, I raced despairingly along the rimrock. Below, Ramon had reined in his mount. Pointing me out, vividly silhouetted against the ridgeline, he shouted something to his overseer. I could not see the overseer, but I heard him on foot in the bushes below me. Ahead of me the hill jutted a good fifty feet above the river. If I made it up the slope, I might have a shot at the river.

Running along the ledge I tripped and stumbled and flew headlong down the hill and back into the bushes. I hit the ground hard, but panic kept me from feeling pain. I crawled back up near the top edge of the brush, where I still had some concealment. I didn't return to the ridge top because I was too conspicuous up there.

The crash of the overseer through the bushes drove me on. I had a small knife, the size permitted a mestizo, but I had no illusion that I could fight the man. The Spanish overseer was not only bigger and stronger than a skinny, fifteen-year-old mestizo boy, but he would be armed with a sword.

Ramon's voice, commanding his overseer to find me, likewise inspired me. I ran with frenzied passion through the bushes, stumbling over rocks.

The slope became almost vertical, and I lost my footing. Tumbling head over heels, I went over a ledge at the bottom and fell half-a-dozen feet. Landing on my back, I lay there inert, the wind knocked out of me. The sound of a man crashing through the brush got me dizzily to my feet, but I was too late.

The overseer, a tall, bony man with a ruddy face and short, red hair and beard, burst into the small clearing. His face and doublet were drenched in sweat, and his breath was labored. He had a wolfish grin, starkly white against his crimson beard, and a drawn sword. "I am going to cut out your heart, chico," he said.

As he stepped toward me, I backed up. I could hear Ramon, following him through the bushes. The overseer turned to greet him, but it wasn't Ramon. The picaro, Mateo, faced the overseer with sword in hand.

"What do you want?" The overseer crouched low, his sword at the ready.

Mateo's sword flashed. The movement was faster than my eyes could follow. The overseer didn't even lift his sword to parry. He just stood there, still as a statue. Then his head dropped from his body, hit the ground, and bounced once. His body collapsed in a heap beside it.

I gaped at the overseer's startled eyes, still blinking in stupefied surprise.

Mateo gestured at a cutbank behind me, leading to the river. "The river! Vamos!"

Without a word I turned and ran through the cutbank. The river was a good fifty feet below, but I never hesitated. I hit the water like an Aztec altar stone—except this altar stone bobbed to the surface, the white, frothing current carrying me downstream. Above the river's roar, I still could hear Ramon shouting for his overseer.

THIRTY-TWO

With no place else to go, I followed the fray's instructions and waited for him by the fork in the road. At last he came along on mule back. Fray Juan was not with him, nor had my friend loaded his panniers. His face was frightened.

"You killed a man, cut off his head."

"I didn't kill him." I told the fray all that had happened.

"It doesn't matter. They blame you. Get on." He helped me climb on behind him and whipped the mule.

"Where are we going?" I asked, bouncing on the mule's back.

"Back to Veracruz."

"You said—"

"A Spaniard is dead, and you are blamed. I have no friend who will offer shelter to a mestizo wanted for such a killing. They will hunt you down and kill you when they find you. There will be no trial for a mestizo."

"What am I to do?"

"We have to go back to the city. Our only hope is for me to find the doña before she leaves the city and try to convince her that you will cause no harm. You must hide with your lépero friends while I try. If all else fails, I will put you on one of the boats that carries goods down the coast to the Yucatan, the land of the Mayas. It is the wildest part of New Spain. You could disappear into the jungles there, and an army would not find you. I will give you what money I can. My son, you will never be able to come back to Veracruz. There is no forgiveness for a casta who kills a Spaniard."

The fray was in hysterical panic. I didn't speak the language of the Mayas, and I knew nothing about jungles. I would end up being eaten by savages if I stepped foot into a Yucatan jungle. In a city I could at least steal food. In the jungle, I would be food. I told him so.

"Then go into the indio areas where you understand the Náhuatl tongue or similar dialects. There are hundreds of indio villages."

I wasn't indio; villages would reject me. Because of his fears, I was hesitant to express my own fright. Leaning forward against his back, as the mule went down a hill, I felt a shudder go through the fray's body.

"I should never have raised you. I should not have tried to help your mother. It has cost me my priesthood and now, perhaps, my life."

How had helping my mother cost him his priesthood? And why were Ramon and the doña after me?

I asked him, these questions but he only said, "Ignorance is your only hope. Mine, too. You must be able to honestly say you know nothing."

But I was not convinced that my ignorance would shield me. Had it not been for Mateo, I would have died where I stood in ignorance and blood.

He prayed a great deal on the long road back. He spoke hardly a word, even when we camped. Hiding in the bushes, we camped far, far from the trail.

An hour's walk from Veracruz, we stopped.

"Travel only at night," the fray said, "and enter Veracruz under cover of darkness. Stay off of the road and hide when it is light. Do not come to the House of the Poor until I send for you."

"How will you find me?"

"Stay in contact with Beatriz. I will pass a message through her when it is safe."

As I turned to leave him, the fray slipped off the tired mule and hugged me. "You have done nothing to deserve any of this—unless you can be blamed for being born. ¡Vaya con Dios!"

Y el diablo, I thought grimly.

As I headed into chaparral, words trailed after me that were to haunt me for the rest of my life. "Remember, Cristo, if they find you, nothing will save you!"