open her blouse. She bent down and guided a breast to my mouth. As she did, her legs spread farther apart and my pene suddenly slipped into her love opening.
All the lust of my pubescent youth was boiling up in me. My hips bucked up and down like a horse that had never felt a saddle.
She rode me, tightening her muscles around my member, gyrating on it erotically, with each twist and turn lengthening the stroke. Up and down, up and down, on my achingly long garrancha. She increased pressure, tempo, and heat with each rise and fall.
I began to lose control. And then my pene exploded inside her. It triggered something in her that at the time I did not understand, and her movements and moans became more frantic. She leaned forward, arching her back like a bent bow, but pumping with everything she had. Lights blazed in my eyes, thunder detonated in my ears, and the earth shook volcanically. My body erupted in turn, not an orgasm of the groin but of the entire corpus—of the entire planet. My entire being was breaking loose, coming apart, taking me on a Homeric odyssey I had never known I would make.
I might have other women subsequently—assuming I lived long enough—but this was my first. Come what may, she owned me body and soul. My soul had broken free, cut loose, its moorings forever slipped.
At which point she grabbed me by my backside and flipped me over on top of her. She pulled my hips forward, tilting them so that the top of my pelvis was rubbing what I would later learn to be what the poet Ovid called 'the Venus Butterfly.'
Her ministrations caused my garrancha to erupt into a long blade again. It went back inside of her, with me atop her. I pumped like el diablo was burning my buttocks, and she began exploding again.
Now she was delirious, her head rolling back and forth, her tongue lolling out of her head. Her hips were grinding desperately, her breath catching in her throat, and she was groaning. Raising her knees, clamping her legs over my shoulders, lifting her buttocks off of the ground, she pumped powerfully. Her nipples hard and swollen bit into my chest, and when I started to yelp, she grabbed me around the back of the neck and muted my groans with all-consuming kisses.
Only God knew what the next day would bring.
But in a sense I didn't care. I was just a boy and had had my first glimpse of bliss.
I had seen the elephant, soared with eagles, heard the owl—and touched the face of God.
If anyone had asked me, I was already dead.
FIFTY-ONE
After midnight I joined the Healer at the campsite. I carefully gave no more hint of my activities with the woman on the grass than I would have to the pope. The Healer was otherworldly; matters of the temporal flesh were not in his realm.
Before hitting the ground with my blanket, I went into the bushes to relieve myself. We had camped on a knoll, and it gave me a view of the town below. The full moon gave good light to the night, casting the town in a ghostly glow. Candles moved around the graveyard like fireflies, and the sound of music floated up.
I sat for a while looking at the town, and it made me lonely. I had grown to love the Healer as a father, just as I had loved Fray Antonio, but neither was a real father. And I never had a real home. I wondered what it would be like to have a mother and father, brothers and sisters, to sleep each night on a bed and eat at a table with a plate in front of me and a fork and knife in hand.
Getting up to leave, I noticed the light of a fire on the knoll across the way and could see moon-shadowy figures moving. I knew that a small Aztec temple was on the hill, one of the hundreds of forgotten and abandoned religious relics left by the defeated empire.
I was curious about who would be at a pagan temple in the middle of the night. No doubt the village priest would like to know—and even pay a reward. Not that I would turn in someone for a reward... but maybe I could get the senorita who'd celebrated the Day of the Dead with me to get the reward and share it with me. That would satisfy my black heart and keep from having the Healer ask me too many questions.
I made my way down the knoll and moved up the other one, taking care not to make enough noise to wake the dead... or disturb whoever was at the temple.
As I neared the top I stopped and listened. I could hear a man speaking Aztec words, not words I understood but a magic incantation in a tone I have heard the Healer use many times. I crept closer and got a view of the temple, a small, stone pyramid with broad steps almost as wide as the pyramid itself.
Men had gathered at the top of the temple and back down the steps. I made out seven or eight men. A small fire had been lit atop the temple. I could see a bit of its flickering light, but my view was blocked by the men standing before it.
I quietly climbed up a tree to get a better view. A man still blocked much of my view, and I strained to see what blasphemy was going on. He moved out of my line of sight and I saw that rather than one large fire, there were several torches burning close together. The torches were kept low, no doubt to keep them from being seen from a distance. The flames illuminated a large, stone block. I heard hysterical laughter, the voice of a man drunk on pulque. He laughed again and I decided that whatever he had been given was not pulque, but a drug concocted by a flower weaver.
Four men suddenly grasped the laughing man, two taking his feet and two taking his arms. They held him outstretched over the block. As they lay him atop the block, I realized that the top of the block was slightly rounded so that the man's back was arched, and his torso extended up when he lay across it.
A dark figure stepped up to the block. He faced me but it was too far and too dark for me to see the person's features. But the figure was familiar. So was the long hair that came almost down to his waist. I was certain if it was daylight I could have seen just how dirty and greasy the hair was.
Fear and trepidation gripped me. I had already guessed what was about to happen at the strange, midnight ceremony. My mind told me that it was a mock ceremony, like the battle between the Aztec knights, but a tight, cold fist gripped my heart.
The magician lifted his hands over his head. The dark glint of an obsidian blade held by both hands reflected in the torch light. He plunged the long blade down at the prone man's chest. The man gasped. His body wriggled and thrashed like a snake whose head had been cut off.
His executioner cut open the chest and reached in. He jerked back and held up to the light a flapping heart. The men gathered on the temple let out a uniform sigh of awe.
My arms and legs turned to rubber, and I tumbled out of the tree. I crashed to the ground with a jolt and a cry of pain.
I ran, through the bushes, in the direction of our camp. I ran as I had when the overseer was chasing me with a sword. I ran as if all the hounds of hell were snapping at my heels.
As I ran I heard something behind me. Not something human, but something that was not stomping on two feet as I was.
It was coming up fast. I turned and swung my knife as something swirled at me in a blur. I was knocked backward, breathless, and felt sharp claws on my chest. I put my arm across my throat to protect it.
Then the Healer was there, shouting something. The creature atop me was gone as quickly as it had come.
The Healer helped me off the ground and took me, sobbing, back to our camp. My explanation of what had happened spouted in a torrent along the way.
'I was attacked by a jaguar,' I said, after telling him about the human sacrifice I had witnessed.
He had come looking for me when I failed to return.
We got together our possessions and the donkey and went down to the town, where many visitors were camped outside homes of friends. Had it been daylight, I would have kept going to the next town and beyond.
When we were settled near others camping in town, I quietly explained everything that had happened, this time going over it slowly and answering his questions.
'I'm sure it was that caster of bones I saw at the fair,' I said. 'I saw him again at the mock battle between the knights today.'
He was strangely quiet. I would have expected him to expound upon the events, explaining them with his
