Aztec Autumn

'This,' he said, 'was once an island entirely surrounded by the waters of Lake Texcoco. But now that lake has dwindled so much that its nearer shore is fully one-long-run eastward from the city—except for the canals that must repeatedly be dredged to provide access for the freight acaltin. The causeways that link the city to the mainland used to cross expanses of clear lake water, but now, as you must have seen yourselves, those expanses are more weed than water. The other lakes, too, back then were interconnected with Lake Texcoco and with each other. In effect, one single great lake. A man could row an acali from the island of Tzumpanco in the north to the flower gardens of Xochimilco in the south, some twenty one-long-runs—or twenty leagues, as the Spanish would say. Now that man would have to plod through the wide bogs that have put those shrunken lakes far apart from each other. Some people say the trees were responsible.'

'The trees?!' exclaimed my uncle.

'This valley is ringed by mountains, all around the horizon. And all those mountains bore thick forests—were almost furred with forests—before the white men came.'

Mixtzin said slowly, remembering, 'Ye-es, you are right. It did strike me, on this visit, that the mountains look more brown than green.'

'Because they are barren of trees,' said Pochotl. 'The Spaniards chopped them down—all of them—for timbers and lumber and firewood. Truly, that could well have angered Chicomecoatl, the goddess of green growing things. She may have taken revenge by persuading the god Tlaloc to send his rain only meagerly and sporadically, as he has been doing, and by persuading Tonatiu to blaze more hotly, as he has been doing. Whatever the reason, our weather gods have behaved most peculiarly ever since the coming of the Crixtanoyotl deities.'

'Excuse me, friend Pochotl,' I said, changing the subject. 'I hope to find employment here. Not to make any fortune, but work that will pay me enough to live on. Can I expect to do that?'

The scrawny man looked me up and down. 'Have you any skills, young man? Can you write the white men's language? Are you talented at any craft? Do you possess any artistic ability?'

'None of those. No.'

'Good,' he said bleakly. 'Then you will not balk at hard labor. Hefting stone blocks and baskets of mortar for the new buildings. Or drudging as a tamemi porter. Or mucking out silt and excrement and trash from the canals. Whether such work will enable you to live depends, of course, on how skimpily you can live.'

'Well,' I said, gulping, 'I had hoped for something rather more...'

Uncle Mixtzin interrupted, 'Friend Pochotl, you are a well-spoken man. I take you to have some intelligence, even education. And clearly you do not love the white men. Why, then, do you subsist on their charity?'

'Because I do have skills,' said Pochotl with a sigh. 'I was a master worker in gold and silver. Delicate jewelry—necklaces, bracelets, labrets, diadems, anklets—things for which the Spaniards have no use. They want their gold and silver melted down into featureless ingots, for sending home to their king, or for stamping into crude coins. Barbarians! Their other metals, what they call iron and steel, copper and bronze, they entrust to brawny smiths, to forge into horseshoes, armor plates, swords and the like.'

Mixtzin asked, 'You could not do that?'

'Any muscular lout could do that. I think such strong-arm work beneath me. Also. I do not care to callus and gnarl my artist's fingers. Someday, somehow, there may again be decent work for them to do.'

I was only half listening to them. I sat cross-legged on my rancid pallet—it smelled of numberless earlier unwashed occupants—and contemplated the extremely unappealing careers the scrawny man had suggested for me. I had sworn to myself that I would do anything the gods might require in the furtherance of my vengeance against the white men, and I would keep that oath. The prospect of hard and ill-paid labor did not affright me. But the whole object of my staying in this city was to search out some hitherto unnoticed weakness in the Spaniards' grip on The One World, some flaw in their system of governing and controlling New Spain, some blind spot in their allegedly all-seeing preparedness against any kind of overthrow. It seemed unlikely that I could do much successful spying while spending most of my time among other laborers at the bottom of a canal ditch, or bent under the tumpline of a tamemi porter. Well, maybe the notarius Alonso de Molina could provide for me some better line of work, where I would have more opportunity for employing my eyes and ears and instincts.

Now Pochotl was telling my uncle, 'The white men have brought us several new and very flavorsome foods. Their chicken, for instance, yields a much more tender and juicy meat than does our bigger huaxolomi fowl that they call the gallipavo. And they grow a cane from which they extract a powder called sugar, much sweeter than honey or coconut syrup. And they brought a new kind of bean called an haba, and other vegetables called cabbage, artichoke, lettuce and radish. Good eating, for those who can afford to buy them, or still have a plot of ground in which to grow them. But I think the Spaniards found here many more things new to them. They are ecstatic over our xitomatl and chili and chocolatl and ahuacatl, which they say do not exist in their Old Spain. Oh, and also they are learning how to take pleasure in smoking our picietl.'

Gradually I became aware of other voices around me in the dark room, other people staying awake to converse as Mixtzin and the scrawny man were doing. Most of those voices were speaking Nahuatl, and not saying anything much worth my listening to. But other conversations were in languages incomprehensible; they could have been conveying the wisdom of the world, or the deepest secrets of the gods, for all I could make out. At that time, I was unable to sort out the nationalities of those various speakers. But after a few more nights in the guest house, I would learn something interesting—that almost every man of them, except those native to this City of Mexico itself, had come to this San Jose meson from somewhere north of the city, often far north.

It stood to reason. As I have said, all the nations and peoples south of the City of Mexico—also to the east— had early succumbed to the Spanish conquest, and by now had well adapted to the presence and puissance of the Spaniards, in all their social and commercial dealings with them. So any visitors from the south or east would be envoys or swift-messengers or pochteca bringing goods to the city to sell or barter, or coming here to buy merchandise imported from Old Spain. Those visitors, then, would be lodging at the House of Pochteca, where we three had been turned away—or, not impossibly, they would even be guests in some high-ranking Spaniard's mansion or palace.

Meanwhile, the less favored lodgers in this charitable meson were, if not homeless local townsfolk, all from the still-unconquered northern lands of The One World. They had come either as scouts, like Uncle Mixtzin, to take the measure of the white men and determine what their own peoples' future might be—or they had come, like those other scouts, Netzlin and Citlali, to seek a living among the luxuries of the white men's city. Or perhaps some, I thought, might have come here to do both, like me and like the worm in the coyacapuli fruit—hoping to delve and burrow and hollow out this New Spain from within. If there were others of similarly subversive intent, I must find them and join them.

The friars woke us at sunrise and directed us downstairs again. My uncle and I were pleased to see that my mother had passed the night unharmed, and all three of us were pleased to find that the friars now ladled out bowls of atoli mush with which to break our fast, and even a cup of frothy chocolatl for each person. Evidently my mother, like Mixtzin, had spent much of the night awake and in converse with other lodgers, for she reported, with more vivacity than she had shown all during our journey:

'There are women here who have served some of the best Spanish families, in some of the best homes, and they have marvelous things to tell. Especially of some new fabrics that have never before been known in The One World. There is a stuff called wool, which is shorn from curly-furred creatures called ovejas, which are being raised in great herds all over New Spain. The fur is not felted, but made into yarn—much as is done with cotton—and that is woven into cloth. Wool can be as warm as fur, they say. and colored as vividly as if it were of quetzal feathers.'

I was happy to see that my Tene had encountered novelties enough to erase—or at least to dim—her memory of what we had seen the day before, but my uncle only grunted as she prattled on.

I looked about the dining chamber, trying not to be too obvious about it. wondering which of these people—if any—might be future allies in my campaign of prying and plotting. Well, yonder squatted the scrawny man, Pochotl, swilling his bowl of atoli. He could be useful in that he was a native of this city and knew it intimately, though I could not envision him acting the warrior, if my campaign ever came to that. And of the others around the room, which? There were children, adults and oldsters, male and female. I might recruit one or more of the latter, because there are places a female can go, without arousing suspicion, where a male cannot.