has created a shadow image of the husband, and it is this shadow that comes at night.' He held up his hand to shut off the woman's excited response that the ghost was solid. 'The shadow is a reflection of your husband. He looks and feels like him, but he is a mirror image created with Tlazolteotl's personal smoking mirror.'

The Healer slipped out his own smoking mirror, and the woman and men drew back from it in fear and awe.

'We must burn her hut,' the cacique said, 'to rid her of this fiend. He must hide in a dark corner and come out at night to have his pleasure with her.'

The Healer clicked his tongue. 'No, it would do no good to burn the hut—not unless the woman was in it. The shadow fiend is inside of her!'

More gasps. The Healer was a true showman. He used his hands, eyes, and facial expressions to get across every point. I could imagine him on a comedia stage with the picaros at the fair, the audience alternately in awe and shock from his pronouncements, as he explained how life was but a dream....

'Tlazolteotl has hidden the shadow in you,' he told the woman. 'We need to draw it out and destroy it so it cannot come back and violate you.'

He instructed the cacique to get a fire going; then he led the woman into the hut. I followed inside, but he barred everyone else but the cacique.

'Lie down on the bed,' he told the woman.

When she was on her back on the bed, he knelt down beside her and began to hum near her ear. His humming got louder and developed into a soft chant.

His mouth got closer and closer to her ear and finally his lips were brushing the woman's ear. She was wide- eyed and frozen in fear as if she expected him to mount her as her husband's ghost had done.

He slowly moved away from her ear, just inches, but enough so that the cacique and I could see that he was drawing a snake from her ear and into his mouth.

He suddenly stood up and spit the snake into his hand. Rushing by the cacique, he ran outside. I followed him outside with the cacique and the woman on my heels.

The Healer paused before the fire and held the wriggling snake in the air, hoarsely whispering an incantation of words that were completely unfamiliar to me. I knew it was not Nahuatl; no doubt they were magic words learned from secret sources and known only to those in the inner circle of magic.

He threw the snake into the fire. When the snake hit the flames, a whiff of green flame flashed. As he stood by the fire and made more proclamations in the strange tongue, I wondered if I had seen a little dust come out of his pocket and hit the flames just before the fire flashed green.

Sweating and trembling from ecstatic excitement, he turned to the woman. 'The demon who has violated you each night, I have burned in this fire. It is gone and cannot return. Tlazolteotl no longer has any control over your life. You will sleep well tonight and will never again be visited by the shadow creature.'

After receiving his pay, a handful of cacao beans, the Healer led us back to the cacique's house, where pipes were once more lit and a jug of pulque passed around.

The old men were still discussing the oversexed ghost a little later when horsemen came into the village. I had heard the horses approaching and started up to flee but sat down at a look from the Healer. He was right. I could not outrun a horse.

Three men rode into the village: A Spaniard was on a horse. His clothes were similar to the man who had chased me at the fair, and I took him to be a hacienda overseer. The other two men were on mules, an indio and an africano. Both of these mule riders were dressed better than common indios and slaves. From their appearance I concluded that they were not simply vaqueros but a step above, men who held some authority over common workers.

I knew the moment I saw them that these men were hunters looking for me. Rather than simply passing through the village, they looked about with the wariness and intensity of men on a mission.

They paused their mounts by us. The cacique rose and greeted them, the mounted indio returning his greeting before he addressed all of us in Nahuatl.

'Have any of you seen a mestizo boy, about fourteen or fifteen years old? He would have passed through in the last couple of days.'

I had to lift my head a little to look up to the indio on the mule. My hat was pulled down because of the sun, and I shaded my eyes with my hand in the hopes of concealing part of my face, hoping that the searchers would only see my big nose.

I waited gripped by fear as a general discussion ensued among the old men about who had passed through the village in the last two days. Finally the cacique said, 'No mestizo has passed this way.'

The elders murmured their assent.

'There is a reward,' the hacienda indio said. 'Ten pesos if you catch him.'

Ayyo! The reward was a hundred pesos. These searchers were thieves who would cheat poor indios out of most of the reward.

FORTY-ONE

That evening as we lay in our blankets, I said to the Healer, 'The way you disguised my face fooled not only the Spaniard and the vaqueros, but even the cacique and the old men who were around me for hours.'

'You did not fool the cacique or the elders; they know you are a mestizo.'

I was shocked. 'Why didn't they tell the Spaniard?'

'Their enemy is your enemy,' the Healer said. 'The cacique's son was forced to labor in a hole the Spanish have dug in the ground to steal silver. These holes are to the north, in the land of the Mictlan, the dark place where the dead go. The silver is put into the mountains by Coyolxauhqui, the Moon goddess. It is her excrement and she puts it in the mountains as a gift to her fellow god, Mictlantecuhtli, the god of the underworld. Digging the holes to steal the wealth of Mictlantecuhtli angers him, and he causes the tunnels to cave in. Many indios die there, some from the cave-ins and others from starvation and beatings. The cacique's son passed from sorrow to the Dark Place while working in one of the holes.

'The Spanish have recently come again to this small village and taken men. All are the sons, grandchildren, or nephews of the elders. The young men are being forced to dig a hole through a mountain to drain the lake surrounding Tenochtitlan, the city the Spanish called Mexico. Mictlantecuhtli is again angered by this violation, and many indios have died digging through this mountain.'

'But there is a reward offered,' I said. 'Ten pesos is mucho dinero, probably more than the cacique or anyone else in the village see at any one time.'

'The Spaniard's gold is stolen from Huitzilopochtli, the sun god, who excretes it for Mictlantecuhtli. The villagers do not want the gold. These are vengeful gods, who take many indio lives. The cacique and the other elders want their sons to live and the Spanish to stop forcing them to anger the gods.'

Any Veracruz indio or mestizo, household servant, or street trash would have slit my throat and turned my dead body in for a reward of ten pesos. They would have revealed me to the Spaniard just in the hopes of a small reward. I learned something about the indios of New Spain: The domesticated indios, raised like work animals on haciendas and in cities, were different than the ones who were not corrupted by the conquerors. There were still indios who followed the old ways and to whom honor was more important than gold.

I asked the most important question. 'How did the cacique know I'm not indio? The color of my skin? Hair? My facial features? Did I expose any pale skin? What was it?'

'Your smell.'

I sat up. 'My smell?' I was indignant. That morning I had washed with water from a creek. Late that afternoon both the Healer and I had used the cacique's temazcalli, his steam hut. While the Spanish did not bath as much as an indio, I bathed more than a Spaniard.

'How could he tell from my smell? Don't people all smell the same?'

The only response from the Healer was birdlike twittering.

'I must know,' I insisted. 'What do I have to do to make sure I smell like an indio? I don't have access to a temazcalli every day. Is there a special soap I can use?'

He tapped his heart. 'Sweat and soap cannot take away what is in the heart. When you walk the Way of your indio ancestors, you will be an indio.'

Before we left the village the Healer treated several others for ailments. Like Fray Antonio, who 'doctored'

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