Aztec Autumn

and all the other Purempe men and boys throughout New Galicia who might someday decide to turn warriors, and he shipped them off as slaves, over the Eastern Sea, to the island of Cuba and another island somewhere out there called Isla Espanola. Thus Guzman could be sure that those men and boys, unable to speak the tongues of the islands' native slaves and the imported Moro slaves, would be helpless to foment any further defiance against their Spanish masters.

So it was that, by the time I arrived in Michihuacan, the population consisted entirely of females young and old, aged males and barely adolescent boys. I being the first adult-but-not-elderly man seen thereabouts in recent memory, I was regarded as a curiosity, and a welcome one. During my travel westward across what had been the Mexica lands, I had had to request food and shelter in the villages and farmsteads I had come upon. The menfolk of those places always agreeably accorded me that hospitality, but I had had to ask. Here in Michihuacan, I was positively besieged with offers of food, drink, a place to sleep and 'stay as long as you like, stranger.' When I passed homesteads along the road, their womenfolk—because there were no menfolk—would actually run out from their doorways to tug at my mantle and invite me inside.

If I was a novelty to them, so were the Purempecha a novelty to me—even though I had expected them to be the kind of people they were. That was because I had met a number of their elderly (hence surviving) men in the City of Mexico—pochteca merchants or messengers or mere vagabonds—at the Meson de San Jose or in the marketplaces. The heads of those men were as bald as huaxolomi eggs, and, they told me, so was the head of every man, woman and child in Michihuacan, because the Purempecha regarded sleek, shiny baldness as the crowning touch of human beauty. Still, my having seen those men with their heads shaved clean of everything but eyelashes had not made much impression on me; after all, they were old enough to be bald in any case. It was quite different when I got to Michihuacan, to see every single soul—from infants to children to grown women and grandmothers—as hairless as the old men among them.

Most of The One World's people, including myself, took pride in our hair and wore it long. We men let it grow to shoulder length, with a heavy fringe across our foreheads; women's hair might reach to their waists or below. But the Spaniards, deeming their beards and mustaches the only true symbols of virility, thought our men looked effeminate and our women slatternly. They even coined a word, balcarrota (roughly 'a haystack'), with which to speak of our hairstyle, and spoke it disparagingly. They also—since they were continually accusing us of petty pilferage from their belongings—assumed that we hid such stolen items under all that hair. So Guzman and the other Spanish lords of New Galicia doubtless highly approved of the Purempe custom of total baldness.

However, there were in Michihuacan other customs of which I am certain the Spaniards, being Christians, could not have approved. That is because Christians are disquieted even by any mention of sexual acts, and are veritably horrified by any out-of-the-ordinary sexual behavior—far more so than they are repelled by, say, human sacrifices to 'pagan gods.' Those Purempe men in the city, when I was learning what I could of their Pore language, had taught me many Pore words and phrases relating to sexual matters. Those men, I repeat, were old, long past any capacity for coupling or the least cravings of that sort. Nevertheless, they lustfully smacked their gums as they recounted the various and remarkable, even unseemly and scandalous ways in which they had slaked the sexual appetites of their youth—and had been allowed by local custom to do so.

I say 'unseemly and scandalous' not because I myself have ever been any paragon of chastity or modesty. But my Azteca people, and the Mexica, and most others, always had been almost as prudish as Christians in regard to sex. We had no written laws and regulations and shall-nots, as the Christians do, but tradition taught us that certain things simply were not to be done. Adultery, incest, promiscuous fornication (except during certain fertility ceremonies), the conceiving of bastards, rape (except by warriors in enemy territories), the seduction of the underaged, the act of cuilonyotl between males and patlachuia between females, all those were forbidden. While we, unlike the Christians, acknowledged that any person might be of a deviant or even depraved nature, and that any normal person might misbehave when overwhelmed by lust, we did not sanction such doings. If anything of that sort was discovered, the perpetrator (or participants) would at the very least be shunned by all decent people forever after, or be banished into exile, or be severely punished, or even be put to death with the 'flower garland' noose.

But, as those aged Purempe men in the city had so gleefully and bawdily forewarned me, the customs of Michihuacan could not have been more different. Or more lenient. Among the Purempecha, not any imaginable kind of sexual congress was prohibited, so long as both (or all) the participants concurred in the act—or at least did not vociferously complain of the act, as in the case of animals employed by men and women who had a taste for that sort of coupling. In former days, said the old men, only the native doe and buck deer had satisfactorily met those people's two requirements: namely, that the creature be catchable and that it have a usable feminine orifice or masculine protuberance. Indeed, they said, copulation with a buck or a doe was regarded by everyone, especially the priests, as a praiseworthy act of religious devotion, because the Purempecha believe that deer are earthly manifestations of the sun god. Since the coming of the Spaniards, however, said the old men, more than a few Purempe females and the surviving adolescent males had found reason to be glad for the white men's introduction of embraceable jack and jenny asses, rams and ewes, billy and nanny goats.

Well, I had no predilections of that sort, and, if any of the many females I encountered in Michihuacan had previously been entertaining themselves with bestial surrogates for their vanished menfolk, they were happy enough to discard the animals when I came along. There being such an abundance of women and girls eager for my attentions, everywhere I wandered in that land, I could take my pick of the comeliest, and I did. At first, I admit, it was a trifle hard for me to get accustomed to bald women. It was even hard sometimes to tell the younger among them from the younger males, because both sexes of the Purempecha dress almost exactly alike. But I gradually developed an almost Purempe admiration for their baldness, as, over time, I learned to perceive that the facial beauty of some women is actually enhanced by being otherwise unadorned. And in their having shed their tresses, they had by no means diminished any of their feminine fervors and amative abilities.

Only once did I make a misjudgment in that respect, and I blame that occurrence on chapari, the beverage that the Purempecha make from the honey of their land's wild black bees, a drink incalculably more inebriating than even Spanish wines. I had stopped for a night at a travelers' inn, where the only other guests were an elderly pochtecatl and a messenger almost as old. The inn's owner was a bald woman, and her three bald helpers were apparently her daughters. Over the course of the evening I partook indiscreetly of the inn's delicious chapari. I got sufficiently sodden that I had to be helped to my cubicle and undressed and deposited on my pallet by the smallest and most beautiful of the servants, who then, unbidden, lavished on my tepuli that wonderfully ardent ingurgitation I had first experienced with my birthday auyanimi in Aztlan and later, many times, with my cousin Ameyatl and other women. No man is ever too drunk to enjoy that experience to the utmost.

So, afterward, I bade the servant undress and let me gratefully reciprocate with the same attention to her xacapili. Muddled as I was, I had it well within my mouth before I realized it was rather too prominent to be a xacapili. It got spit out of my mouth, not in revulsion, but because I gave such a sudden laugh at my own befuddled mistake. The beautiful boy looked hurt, and backed away, and his tepuli instantly wilted very nearly to xacapili stubbiness—which sight inspired in me some drunken ideas of experimentation, so I beckoned him to me again. When he finally departed, I gave him a drunkenly extravagant maravedi coin by way of thanks, then fell drunkenly asleep, to wake the next day with an earthquake of a headache and only the dimmest recollection of what experiments the boy and I had engaged in.

Considering Michihuacan's abundance of available womanhood and girlhood—not to mention boys and domestic animals, should I ever get so very drunk as to essay further experimentation—and the land's bounty of other good things, I could have supposed myself prematurely transported to Tonatiucan or one of the other afterworlds of eternal joyfulness. Besides its limitless sexual license and opportunity, Michihuacan offered also a voluptuous variety of food and drink: the delicate lake and river fish that can be found nowhere else, eggs and stews of the turtles that abound on its seacoast, clay-baked quail and toasted hummingbirds, vanilla-flavored chocolatl and of course the incomparable chapari. In that land, one could even feast with only one's eyes: on the profusely flowered rolling meadows, the sparkling streams and limpid lakes, the richly fruiting orchards and farm fields, all bordered by the blue-green mountains. Yes, a man young, healthy and vigorous might well be tempted to stay in Michihuacan forever. And so I might have done, had I not dedicated myself to a mission.