There were a hundred thousand houses like this one in the city of Mexico. All there was to see from outside was an adobe wall, its whitewashed surface pale in the weak light of early morning and featureless except for a single dark opening. There was no screen or cloth over the doorway. It was hard to see inside, but I knew what was there: a sparsely-furnished room opening out, at its far end, onto a square courtyard of hard earth, bounded on two sides by high walls and on the others by the few rooms in which Handy’s family lived. There would be a few idols on low stone plinths and, against one wall, a small dome-shaped structure in dried mud: the sweat bath.
When I first saw the house I quickened my pace, afraid that I might miss my friend before he set out for his day’s work. As I neared it, however, I slowed down and paused. Something was wrong.
I could hear nothing. Handy had nine children, I recalled, and the last time I had seen him there had been a tenth on the way; and he had nieces and nephews besides. Whenever I had been to this house, the place had been in a state approaching uproar. Piercingly high voices had sung, shouted or grizzled, while deeper ones had bellowed or sworn in frustration. And then I realised it was not even the lack of these sounds of a typically large Aztec family that had shocked me into stillness, but the absence of something even more basic.
There was no smoke billowing from the hole in the roof, no slap of dough on a griddle, no smell of baking bread. Nobody was making tortillas, and in a household in Mexico at daybreak, that was unthinkable.
I crept towards the doorway, fearful of what I might find. It suddenly occurred to me that the otomi captain might have been smarter than I had given him credit for, and there might be a sinister explanation for the silence and the atmosphere of tension about the place.
‘Er… Hullo? Handy?’ I put a hand on the doorpost, peering past it while I nerved myself to leap backwards, whirl around and sprint away from the house if I had to.
For a moment there was no response. Then a pair of eyes gleamed, deep within the room’s darkness. Someone shuffled towards me. A female voice snapped: ‘What do you want?’
‘My name’s, er, Yaotl.’ I hoped that was not the signal for my enemy to spring out of the shadows. I shot a nervous glance towards the flat roof, realising too late that anything could be lying in ambush just above my head.
‘I know,’ the woman told me. She came into the light. ‘I asked you what you wanted.’
I stared at her.
I had seen her before. She was Atototl, or ‘Goose’: a pretty, lively, gossipy woman, the sister of Handy’s wife. She was very close to her sister and much like her in temperament. At least that was how I remembered her, but to look at her now, with her eyes heavy-lidded and deep in shadow, her dark hair lank and tangled and her blouse and skirt looking as though she had not changed them in a month, I had to think again before I was sure she was the same person. It was plain that whatever was afflicting her, it had nothing to do with me. It was more like some great grief or fear.
‘What’s the matter, Goose? I just wanted to speak to Handy, to ask him a question, but…’ And then I realised what must have happened, and I closed my eyes and groaned, a sound of pain, despair and remorse. ‘So I’m too late. He’s been here already. It wasn’t yesterday, was it?’ Had the captain struck while Lily and her father and I dawdled for a whole day in Tetzcoco?
She stared at me, her heavy eyelids blinking slowly as though she were getting used to the light. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘The otomi. Did he come here yesterday?’
‘What’s an otomi got to do with my sister?’
It was my turn to stare now. ‘Your sister? Citlalli?’ Star, her name meant: the mother of Handy’s children. ‘You mean it’s Star, not Handy, who’s…’ Finally I understood. When I groaned for a second time, it was out of grief, for someone I had only met twice, but had liked, and whose sharp tongue, easy humour and stout courage I suddenly feared might be gone forever.
Handy, I recalled again, had a tenth child on the way.
‘It’s the baby, isn’t it? Something’s happened to her and the baby.’
A kind of pall always hung over Mexico at this time of year, during the Month of the Ceasing of Water. Long poles had been set up everywhere, with sharp points at their tips and strips of paper dashed and spotted with liquid rubber dangling from them. They stood in most houses, in the forecourts of temples, in the Houses of Youth and the Houses of Tears, as stark as trees in a burned forest. They were a reminder to the rain god of what was required, their points seemingly pricking the sky to draw moisture from it. The forlorn creaking sounds they made and the rustling of those paper streamers were a reminder to us, too, of those who had to die to ensure the god took notice: the young children whose bodies were left on the mountains where the clouds gathered.
However, as I looked around Handy’s courtyard, I saw no sign that any attention was being paid to the ritual. The pain that showed on the faces of those around me was not for the rain god’s anonymous victims, but for somebody close. All eyes were on the small, dome-shaped sweat bath.
Handy squatted just opposite the entrance hole. He was a stolid, broad shouldered man, still strong but with the
