Aztec Blood

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 hombria, the quintessence of Spanish manhood.

While I had no honor myself, due to my impure blood, I understood the code of hombria. 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 senoritas 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 Nahuatl 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.'