Aztec Autumn

was the notarius Alonso, so I understood everything he said, but not what the words and phrases meant. For example, the word trinity in our tongue is yeyintetl, and it denotes a group of three, or three things in company, or three entities acting together, or a set of three somethings—such as the three points of a triangle or the three-lobed leaf of certain plants. But Tete Diego kept urging us listeners to adore what is plainly a group of four.

To this day, I have never met a Christian Spaniard who does not wholeheartedly worship a trinity comprising one God, who has no name, and the God's son, who is named Jesucristo, and that son's mother, named Maria Virgen, and an Espiritu Santo, who, though he has no name, is apparently one of those godling Santos, like San Jose and San Francisco. However, that makes four to be adored, and how four could constitute a trinity I never could understand.

  VII

That day, and each day thereafter—except for the days called Sunday—when I had finished with my two classes at the Colegio, I would report to Alonso de Molina at the Cathedral. We would sit among his heaps of bark- paper books, metl-fiber books, fawnskin books, and discuss the interpretation of this or that page or passage or sometimes just a single pictured symbol.

Of course, the notarius was already well acquainted with such basic matters as the Azteca's and Mexica's method of counting numbers, and the differing methods used by other peoples—in the Tzapoteca and Mixteca languages, for example—and those used by older nations that no longer existed, but had left records of their times—the ancient Maya and Olmeca, for example. He also knew that in any book drawn by any scribe of any nation a person depicted with a nahuatl—that is, a tongue—near its head meant the person was speaking. And if the pictured tongue was curly, it meant the person was singing or speaking poetry. And if the pictured tongue was pierced by a thorn, it meant the person was lying. Alonso could recognize the symbols that all our peoples employed to indicate mountains and rivers and the like. He knew many such features of our picture writing. But I was able to correct him, now and then, in some misapprehension.

'No,' I might say, 'the southernmost inhabitants of The One World—the peoples of Quautemalan—do not call the god Quetzalcoatl by that name. I have never visited those lands but, according to my calmecac teachers, in those southern languages the god has always been known as Gukumatz.'

Or I might say, 'No, Cuatl Alonso, you are misnaming these several gods shown here. These are the itzceliuqui, the blind gods. That is why you will find them always pictured, as here, with all-black faces.'

That particular remark of mine, I remember, led to my asking Alonso why some of the younger pupils at the Colegio had skin so dark that they were almost black. The notarius enlightened me. There existed certain men and women, he said, called in Spanish Moros or Negros, a pitiably inferior race inhabiting some place called Africa. They were brutish and savage, and could be civilized and domesticated only with great difficulty. But those who could be tamed, the Spanish made into slaves—and a favored few of the Moro men had even been allowed to enlist as Spanish soldiers. Several of those had been among the original troops who had conquered The One World—and those were, like their white comrades, rewarded with grants of tribute here in New Spain, and with slaves of their own, 'indio' prisoners of war, the men I had seen with the figure G branded into their faces.

'I have seen two or three of the black men, too, on the streets,' I said. 'They seem to be fond of rich apparel. They dress even more gaudily than the upper-class white men. Perhaps it is because they are so ugly in the face. Those broad, splayed noses and immense, everted lips and the tight-kinked hair. I have seen no black women, though.'

'Just as ugly, believe me,' said Alonso. 'Most of the Moro conquistadores who were given grants settled on the east coast, around the Villa Rica de Vera Cruz. And some of those have imported black wives for themselves. But they generally prefer the lighter—and much more handsome—native women.'

All warriors, of course, are inclined and expected to rape the womenfolk of their defeated foes, and the white Spanish conquerors naturally had done much of that. But, according to Alonso, the Moro soldiers were even more lustfully inclined to seize and rape anything female that could not outrun them. Whether this had resulted in the birth of such brute creatures as tapir-children or alligator-children, Alonso could not say for sure. But, in New Spain and in older Spanish colonies, too, he said, both Spanish and Moro patrones were still making use, at whim, of their female slaves. Also, though it was not much talked about, there was ample evidence that some Spanish women had done the same; not just the sluts imported from Spain to be whores for hire, but some of the wives and daughters of the highest-born Spaniards. Out of perversity or prurience or simple curiosity, they occasionally copulated with men of any color or class, even their own male slaves. What with this abundance of licentious miscegenation, said Alonso, there resulted an abundance of children with skins ranging from near-black to almost-white.

'Ever since Velazquez took Cuba,' he said, 'we have found it convenient to apply names of classification to the variously colored offspring. The product of a coupling between a male or female indio and a male or female white person we call a mestizo. The product of a coupling between Moro and white we call a mulato, meaning 'mulish.' The product of a coupling between indio and Moro we call a pardo, a 'drab.' Should a mulato or a pardo and a white person mate, their child is a cuarteron, and a child with that mere one-quarter of indio or Moro blood can sometimes appear to be pure white.'

I asked, 'Then why bother with such minute specifics of degree?'

'Oh, come now, Juan Britanico! Because it can happen that the father or mother of a bastard of mixed blood may come to feel some responsibility for it, or actually become fond of it. As you have noticed, they sometimes enroll such mongrels for an education. Sometimes, too, the parent may bequeath to the child a family title or property. There is nothing to forbid the doing of that. But the authorities—especially Holy Church—must keep precise records, to prevent the adulteration of the pure Spanish blood. Just suppose a cuarteron should pass himself or herself off as white, and thereby trick some unsuspecting real Spaniard into marriage... well... that has happened.'

'How could anyone else possibly know?' I asked.

'Recently, in Cuba, an apparently white man and wife bore a—what we call a turna atras—an unmistakably black baby. The woman of course pled innocence and immaculate Castilian lineage and unblemished wifely fidelity. And later the local gossips said that if records had been properly kept since the first Spaniards settled in Cuba, the white husband could very well have proved to be the guilty possessor of the black blood. But the Church had, of course, by that time sent the woman and her child to the burning stake. Hence our now-punctilious attention to records. Because the merest trace of non-white blood, evident or not, taints the bearer of it as inferior.'

'Inferior,' I said. 'Yes, of course.'

'We Spaniards even observe some distinctions among ourselves. The indisputably white Spanish children you see in your Colegio classrooms we call criollos, meaning that they were born on this side of the Ocean Sea. The older children and their parents, who, like myself, were born in Mother Spain are called gachupines—which is to say, the 'spur-wearers'—the most Spanish Spanish of all. In time, I daresay, the gachupines will look down on the criollos, as if being born under different skies made some difference in their social status. All it means to me is that I am bidden to list them that way in my census and cadastral records.'

I nodded, to show that I was following him, though I had no least idea what words like 'spur' and 'census' meant.

'However,' he continued, 'of the others, the mongrels, I have mentioned only a very few of the fractional classifications. If, for instance, a cuarteron mates with a white, their child is an octavo. The divisions of classification extend to decimosexto, which would be a child probably indistinguishable from white, though New Spain is too young a colony yet to have spawned any. And there are other names for those of every possible combination of white, indio and Moro blood. Coyotes, barcinos, bajunos, the unfortunate mottled-skin pintojos, and many more. Keeping records of those can be vexatiously complicated, but maintain the records we must, and we do, to distinguish every