Aztec Blood

into their ears and spit them out their mouths had made many charges against him, few of which he bothered to defend, many for which he had no defense. I felt his sadness. His greatest sin was caring too much.

Although the Church rescinded his priestly authority to take confession and grant absolution, they couldn't stop him from ministering to the needs of the people. He finally found his calling in Veracruz.

Veracruz! City of the True Cross.

La Ciudad de los Muertos, the City of the Dead, is what the Spanish soon came to call Veracruz as the dreaded vomito negro, the black vomit, came like a poisonous wind from Mictlan, the underworld of the Aztec gods, and killed a fifth part of the population each year.

The vomito seeped out of the swamps during the hot, summer months, its foul miasma rising from the poisonous waters and floating over the city, along with hordes of mosquitoes that attacked like the frog plague of Egypt. The rotted air was the bane of travelers who came off the treasure ships and hurried to the mountains, clutching nosegays to their faces. Those whom this dark sickness struck suffered fever and terrible pains in the head and back. Soon their skin turned yellow, and they vomited black, coagulating blood. They found comfort only in the grave.

Believe me, amigos, when I tell you Veracruz is a hot ember that has been kicked out of hell, a place where the fiery tropical sun and fierce el norte winds turned earth to sand that flayed the flesh from bones. The festering fumes of the swamps, stagnating amid the dunes, combined with the stink of dead slaves—thrown into the river to avoid the cost of burial—to create a stench of death worse than the river Styx.

What would we do in this hell on earth? Have the fray marry some lonely widow, not a grass widow who changed her soft bed for one of straw after the death of her husband, but one who had a golden widowhood and would permit us to live as grandees in her fine home? No, never. My compadre the fray sucked in the troubles of others like the leeches barbers use to suck bad blood from people. It was not to a fine house that we went, but to a hovel with dirt floors.

To the fray it was Casa de los Pobres, the House of the Poor. To him it was as much a house of God as the finest cathedrals in Christendom. It was a long, narrow, wood shack. The planks that made up its walls and roof were thin and rotted from the brutal rains, winds, and heat. Sand and dust blew in, and the whole place shook during a norte. I slept on dirty straw next to whores and drunks and squatted near the fire twice a day to get a tortilla filled with frijoles. This simple meal was a fine feast for those who only knew the streets.

Turned out onto the streets of the meanest city in New Spain, over the next couple of years blows and curses would recast me from being a hacienda boy to a street leper, a lepero. Lying, thieving, conniving, and begging were only a few of the talents I acquired.

I confess that I was not a saintly boy. I sang not hymns but a cry of the streets—a cry for alms! 'Charity for a poor orphan of God!' was my song. Often I covered myself with dirt, rolled back my eyes, and twisted my arms in obscene contortions, all but wrenching them out of their sockets, in order to extricate alms from fools. I was a mudlark with the voice of a mendicant, the soul of a thief, and the heart of a waterfront whore. Half espanol, half indio, I was proud to bear the noble titles of both mestizo and lepero. I spent my days barefoot and dirty, keening my alms cry, cadging filthy lucre from silken grandees, who, when they looked down at me at all, grimaced with contempt.

Do not cast stones at me like that bishop did to the poor fray when he took the holy cloth from him. The streets of Veracruz were a battlefield in which you could find riches... or death.

After a couple of years, the dark cloud that had come over us suddenly at the hacienda disappeared. I was past my fourteenth birthday when the shadow of death fell across our path again.

It was a day in which there was both death and riches on the streets.

I had writhed, contorted, and begged near the fountain in the center of the city's main plaza; and though my alms cup remained empty, I was not particularly chagrined. Early that morning I had struggled through Dante Alighieri's La divina commedia. Eh, do not think I read this tome for pleasure. The fray insisted I keep up my education. Because our library was so limited, I had to read the same books over and over. Dante's dark journey, guided by Virgil through the descending circles of hell, the inferno, to Lucifer at the bottom of the pit, were not unlike the baptism I received when I was first cast out onto the streets of Veracruz. Whether I would someday be purged of my sins and enter paradise were still unanswered questions.

The fray had been loaned the epic poem by Fray Juan, a young priest who had become his secret friend despite the fray's fall from grace with the Church. Fray Juan had been made party to my secret education. That morning, after I recited the poem in my bumbling Italian, Fray Antonio had beamed and boasted of my prowess with knowledge, and Fray Juan had agreed. 'He drinks up knowledge like you do that fine Jerez wine I bring from the cathedral,' Fray Juan had said.

Of course, my scholarship was a secret known only the between the friars and me. The punishment for lettering a lepero was prison and the rack. Had our secret leaked out, we could have been the entertainment of the day.

For entertainment it was. This day, half the city had gathered in their Sabbath finery—accompanied by small children, fine wines, and costly comestibles—to watch a flogging. Excited by the prospect of blood, they had a glow in their cheeks and malice in their eyes.

An overseer in a tan, buckskin jerkin, leather breeches, and black, knee-high boots was lining thirty bound and ragged prisoners up by sixes and loading them into caged, mule-drawn prison wagons. He had a dark beard, a dirty, low-slung felt hat, and mean eyes. He made promiscuous use of the cuarate-quirt, punctuating its cracks with bloodcurdling oaths:

'Get in there, you miserable sons of dray beasts and putas. In there or you'll curse the mothers you never knew for giving you birth—you murdering, thieving, pimping hijodeputa.'

They lumbered painfully under his whip, with teeth gritted, into their portable prisons.

His charges were on their way to the silver mines of the north, but for the most part they weren't 'murdering, thieving, pimping hideputas.' Most were mere debtors, sold into peonage by their creditors. In the mines they were to work off their obligation. At least that was the illusion. In plain fact, when food, clothing, housing, and transport compounded their debt, the bill burgeoned irretrievably.

For most the mines were a death sentence.

Most of the prisoners were mixed bloods. The city alcalde—the viceroy's commander of the city—periodically swept the streets, throwing out of work leperos into jail. From there they were transported to the northern mines.

That could be me, I thought, with grim foreboding.

The alcalde peddled these unfortunates to the northern mines, lined his coffers, and, according to gachupins, reduced the city's infamous stink.

I stared at the mestizo prisoners, ill at ease. Indios had once comprised the entire mine force, until slavery and disease had killed them off in shocking numbers. The fray believed that ninety-five out of every hundred had been annihilated, and the king himself had at last forbade forcing them into bondage. Not that his decree had had much effect. Tens of thousands still died in tunnels, smelters, and pits, to say nothing of the cane fields and sugar mills. Others succumbed in the obrajes, small factories often occupied with the spinning or dying of wool and cotton, where they were chained to their workplaces.

The king could decree all he might, but in the jungles and mountains, where there were no laws, the hacendados held brutal sway.

The crowd cheered, and three guards dragged a runaway slave to the flogging post for his mandatory one hundred lashes. Once he was gagged and strung up, the sergeant-of-the-guard paced off the requisite distance, and the black-snake cracked. Blood bloomed, and his back was laid bare, his ribs and backbone shockingly white under the flayed flesh. Wine cups were raised, and the crowd thundered its approbation. Despite the gag, his screams soared above the crowd's roar.

The whip rose and fell, rose and fell, and I averted my eyes.

At last the hundredth lash was done.

'Lice,' a man near me said. The voice belonged to a merchant, whose protruding belly and exquisite raiment bespoke great wealth, rich food, and rare wine. His delicate wife, garbed in silk and shaded by a parasol held by an africano slave, was at his side.

'These street leperos breed like bed bugs,' she agreed, nodding her disdain. 'If the alcalde didn't sweep them from the gutters, we would trip over them every third step.'