Aztec Autumn

One World.

'By Iztociuatl!' he exclaimed, invoking the goddess of salt, as he pointed at my pathetic pile of white grains on the shopboard. 'Are you intending to trounce me at my own trade?'

'No, Cuatl Peloloa,' I said, smiling ruefully. 'This is not a salt that anyone would wish to buy.'

'You are right,' he said, touching a few grains to his tongue, before I could stop him and tell him it was purely essence of urine. Then he surprised me, saying, 'It is only the bitter first-harvest. What the Spaniards call salitre. It sells so cheaply that it would hardly pay you a living.'

'Ayyo,' I breathed. 'You recognize this substance?'

'But of course. Who from the Xoconochco would not?'

'Do you boil women's urine in the Xoconochco, then?'

He looked blank and said, 'What?'

'Nothing. No matter. You called the powder 'first-harvest.' What does that mean?'

'What it says. Some people think we simply dip a scoop into the sea and strain the salt directly from it. Not so. The making of salt is a more complicated process. We dike off the shallows of our lagoons and let them dry, yes, but then those chunks and lumps and flakes of dry matter must be rid of their many impurities. First, in fresh water, they are sieved clean of sand and shells and weeds. Then, again in fresh water, the substance is boiled. From that initial boiling come crystals that are also sieved out. Those are the first-harvest crystals—salitre—exactly what you have there, Tenamaxtli, only yours has been pulverized. To get to the goddess's invaluable real salt takes several more stages of refinement.'

'You said this salitre sells, but cheaply.'

'The Xoconochco farmers buy it merely to spread it on their cotton fields. They claim it enhances the ground's fertility. The Spanish employ salitre in some manner in their tanneries. I know not what use you might be thinking of making of it—'

'Tanning!' I lied. 'Yes, that is it. I contemplate adding fine leather goods to my stock here. I was only puzzled as to where to get the salitre.'

'I shall be glad to bring you a whole tamemi load, on my next trip north,' said Peloloa. 'Cheap it is, but I shall charge you nothing at all. You are a friend.'

I raced home to announce the good news. But in my excitement, I did it awkwardly. I dashed through the doorway curtain, shouting:

'You can cease urinating now, Citlali!'

My inelegant entrance threw her into such a paroxysm of laughter that it was a while before she could gasp out, 'I once—called you—preposterous. I was wrong. You are—totally xolopitli!' And it was a while longer before I could gather my wits and rephrase my announcement, and tell her what great good fortune had befallen me.

Citlali said shyly, and she was seldom shy, 'Perhaps we should make a small celebration. To show gratitude to the salt goddess Iztociuatl.'

'A celebration? Of what sort?'

Still shyly, and blushing now, she said, 'I have been taking the powdered root tlatlaohuehuetl throughout the past month. I believe we need worry about no mishap if we were to give its vaunted impregnability a trial.'

I looked at her—'with new eyes,' I was about to say, but that would not be true. During all this time that we had been sleeping apart, on pallets in the separate rooms, I had been desiring her, but virtuously had given no sign of it. Also, it had been so very long since I had lain with a female—the tiny brown Rebeca—that I might soon have resorted to the services of a maatitl. Citlali must have taken my brief hesitation as reluctance, for now she said boldly, with laughter, and made me laugh, too:

'Niez tlalqua ayquic axitlinema.' Which means, 'I promise not to urinate.'

And so we embraced laughing, which, I now learned for the first time, is the very best way to begin.

All this while, Ome-Ehecatl had been growing, from a babe in arms, to an infant that crawled, to a weanling learning wobblily to walk. I kept expecting Ehecatl to die any day, and no doubt Citlali did, too, because a child afflicted with a physical deformity so evident at birth usually has other defects that are not visible, and dies very young. During Ehecatl's infancy, the only other deficiency that became apparent was the child's never learning to speak, and possibly that indicated deafness as well. That may have troubled Citlali more than it did me; I was frankly pleased that the child never cried, either.

Anyway, its brain appeared to function well enough. While learning to walk, Ehecatl also learned to make its way most adroitly around the house and learned early on to veer clear of the cooking hearth. Whenever Citlali decided to give the child some outdoor exercise, she would stand it in the street and point it and give it a gentle shove. Ehecatl would dauntlessly toddle straight along the middle of that street, confident that its mother had made sure nothing was in the way. Of course, Citlali was always gentle and kindly toward everyone, but I believe she also had maternal feelings, even for such an offspring as Ehecatl. She kept the child clean, and tidy of dress—and well fed, though at first it had difficulty in finding her teat and, later, in wielding a spoon. The other neighborhood children rather surprised me with their attitude. They seemed to regard Ehecatl as a kind of plaything—not human like themselves, certainly, but not as inert as a straw or clay doll—and played almost affectionately with the child, without ever being abusive or derisive. All in all, while getting to live for more years than such monstrosities usually do, Ehecatl passed those years as pleasantly as an incurable cripple could ever have hoped to do.

I knew that Citlali's chief worry about the child was the question of its afterlife, whether Ehecatl went there young or old. Citlali probably had some concern for her own afterlife, as well. No person of The One World is necessarily damned to the nothingness of Mictlan after death—as Christians are to hell—simply because he or she has been born, has lived and has died. Still, to assure that one does not get plunged to Mictlan, one should have done something in one's lifetime to merit residing afterward in the sun god's Tonatiucan or one of the other beneficent gods' similarly appetizing afterworlds.

A child's only hope of doing that is to sacrifice itself—that is, have its parents sacrifice it—to appease the hunger and the vanity of one god or another. But no priest would have accepted a useless object like Ehecatl as an offering to even the least of gods. A grown man can best attain his desired afterworld by dying in battle or on the altar of a god, or doing some deed noteworthy enough to please the gods. A grown woman can also die in sacrifice to a god, and some have done deeds as praiseworthy as any man's, but most have deserved their places in Tonatiucan or Tlalocan, or wherever, simply by being the mothers of children whose tonali has destined them to be warriors or sacrifices or mothers. Ome-Ehecatl could never be any of those things, which is why I say Citlali must have had some anxiety about her own prospects after death.

XI

Some months after our earlier encounter in the market, the pochtecatl Pololoa came again from the Xoconochco, and brought along one tamemi laden with nothing but a big sack of the 'first-harvest' salitre, and grandly presented that to me, and even bade the porter continue carrying it as far as my house. And there I began devoting every free moment to trying the black, white and yellow powders in mixtures of varying proportions, and noting down every experiment I made. I now had a good deal more free time than before, because both Pochotl and I had been dismissed from our duties at the Cathedral.

'It is because the Church has a new pope at Rome,' the notarius Alonso explained in a tone of apology. 'The old Papa Clemente Septimo has died and been succeeded by the Papa Paulo Tercero. We have just been informed of his accession and his first directives to all the world's Catholic Christian clergy.'

I said, 'You do not sound pleased by the news, Cuatl Alonso.'

He grimaced sourly. 'The Church commands that every priest be celibate and chaste and honorable—or at least that he pretend to be. That certainly should apply to the pope, the highest priest of all. But it is well known that while he was still just the Padre Farnese, he began his climb through the Church hierarchy by what the coarser folk call 'lamiendo el culo del patron.' That is to say, he put his own sister, Giulia the Beautiful, to bed with the earlier Papa Alessandro Sexto, thereby winning for himself substantial preferments. And this Papa Paulo himself has by no means been celibate during his life. He has numerous children and grandchildren. And one of those, a grandson, Paulo has already—immediately on attaining the papacy—made a cardinal at Rome. And that grandson is only fourteen years old.'

'Interesting,' I said, though I did not find it very much so. 'But what has this to do with us here?'

'Among his other directives, Papa Paulo has decreed that every diocese commence to conserve on its expenditures. That means we can no longer finance even such a small luxury as your work with me on the codices.