Aztec Revenge Page 3

  Not even riches or great abilities in the arts made a person of mixed blood an equal to the lowest pure-blooded Spanish street sweeper. To the Spaniard, pure blood gave people moral strength in life; it even gave men courage in battle and domination over weaker people.

  The Spanish brought their concept of purity of blood to New Spain, with pure-blooded Spaniards at the top of the social heap.

  That left half-caste léperos at the bottom of the social heap, damned by the fact we carry what the Spanish called a blood taint.

  Ayyo! Accepted by neither the masters nor their peons, not educated or trained in a trade, we with the blood taint became street people, beggars and thieves, jail bait, and born to be hanged. Life on the streets among my lépero “brothers” was not comforted by brotherly love—all léperos were thieving bastardos who would cut my throat for a tortilla.

  I had no knowledge of the man who fathered me. A whore who knew my mother told me that my mother had not been a whore but a girl driven out from her family and village when they found out she carried a child out of wedlock, but the whore did not know who my father was.

  Not that it mattered—bastardos had no rights in the colony even if their father was known, unless the father legally recognized the child as his.

  Ayyo! If Spaniards had to be responsible for all the children they sired with indio girls through rape and coercion, they would leave the colony and return with their booty to their homeland.

  After my mother died when I was an infant, I was raised with the pack of other children born in the whorehouse; most of us doubly orphaned because our fathers were unknown and many others because their mothers were wiped away in childbirth or by the periodic maladies that struck down many.

  I was on the street by the age of eight, forced out of the whorehouse, though the prostitutes sometimes took pity on me and gave me food, but this was one of the many nights when even they went hungry because of fighting in the area.

  An indio rebellion in the region resulted in the town being taking over by Spanish soldiers, who confiscated all the available food.

  Which left me with nothing but dirt to eat.

  Dirt was also part of my life. I slept on the ground covered by a dirty blanket and wore clothes swaddled in dirt. My clothes were rags that only got washed when it rained on them.

  My body was as dark and grimy as my clothing, and if the people of quality that I ranted at for coins were being truthful, I smelled worse than a pile of manure.

  The fact that I had even survived this long was itself truly a miracle. Only the biggest, the cleverest, and for sure the luckiest lépero survived for long on the streets.

  Today I was doubly lucky because the carriage ran over my leg instead of my head.

  Doubly lucky today, but tomorrow I might get my head bashed in by a rock wielded by another lépero as we wrestle in the dirt for a small coin thrown like a bare bone to a pack of hungry dogs.

  Eh, that is the life of one with the blood curse. We are the “leftover” people, the ones who have no place in society because all the other positions are filled by Spaniards who believe the purity of their blood makes them superior and by indios who sulk and wait for the day when they can spill some of that “pure blood.”

  Unwelcome, uninvited, spit upon—that left us léperos not in purgatory but in the hell of the streets.

  One would think that because of the way the Spanish treated them, the indios would have more sympathy, more empathy for outcasts, but they resented the half-castes even more than they did the Spanish.

  I don’t know why I empathized with the indios rather than my Spanish side. The indios treated léperos with the same contempt that Spaniards did even though in many ways they were themselves mistreated. But at least they did not kick us.

  There was a pecking order, and although the indio appeared near the bottom, there was always the mixed bloods one step down from them.

  Ayyo! It was painful being the smallest bug.

  SONG OF THE LÉPERO

  Whilst I am writing, a horrible lépero, with great leering eyes, is looking at me through the windows, and performing the most extraordinary series of groans, displaying at the same time a hand with two long fingers, probably the other three tied behind.

  “Señorita! Señorita! For the love of the most Holy Virgin! For the sake of the most pure blood of Christ! By the miraculous Conception!—”

  The wretch. I dare not look up, but I feel that his eyes are fixed upon a gold watch and seals lying on the table …

  There come more of them! A paralytic woman mounted on the back of a man with a long beard. A sturdy-looking individual … holding up a deformed foot which I verily believe is merely fastened back in some extraordinary way!

  What groans! What rags! What a chorus of whining!

  —Fanny Calderón de la Barca, Life in Mexico

  SEVEN

  AT THE FAR end of the alley I stopped to rest my painful legs behind the town stable.

  The stable was where visitors and the postal stage quartered their horses in Oaxaca. It also had become my source of food.

  All of the windows of the stable were glassless and at night were shuttered to keep out intruders, but the center of the building was an open-air courtyard surrounded by horse stalls. Reaching the roof with the help of the grapevines permitted me to drop down into the courtyard.

  I grabbed a handful of the vines, then lifted my legs, gasping from pain as I bent my knees to get footing.

  I was only a few feet off the ground when I heard the crunch of feet behind me. A pair of hands grabbed me and pulled me off the vines.

  I fell backward, hitting the hard ground, crying out as pain exploded in my injured leg.

  “I know your secret now, bastardo!”

  Mongrel.

  He swung at my face with a rock.

  I brought up my shoulder and the rock hit bone, sending another shot of pain through me as the rock made contact and flew out of his hand.

  He was the biggest lépero in town and the meanest. I knew I could not beat him in a test of strength. He stamped on my leg and I cried out again.

  He began kicking me and I rolled, but he kicked me in the back.

  “I have a copper,” I said. “Take it! Take it!” I pleaded.

  I patted my left pocket to draw him to it as I stuck my right hand under my shirt and got hold of the piece of arrow.

  “Give it to me,” Mongrel said. He knelt down, setting his knee into my stomach.

  The wind exploded out of me when his knee sank in, and the arrow slipped out of my feeble hand.

  He reached down, tearing at the ragged pocket to get it open.

  I knew he would not be satisfied with the coin even if I really had had one. He was going to kill me. That was the way of the street. You didn’t hurt someone and leave them alive to stab you in the back later, because it was inevitable that the enemy would be at your back again one day—and no one on the street watched your back except your enemies.

  I put out my hand to try and force myself up. My right hand hit the rock. I got a grip on it and swung up.

  He turned to face my upcoming hand as he saw the movement, and the rock impacted, catching him on the nose.

  He went back with a spray of blood, falling on his rump.

  As he started to get up, I reached over, stretching as far as I could, and hit him over the forehead with the rock.

  I saw more léperos coming, and I hobbled away and hid.

  They saw Mongrel sitting up, holding his bleeding head.

  I turned away, shutting my eyes as they fell upon him.

  It was his turn to be the wounded prey.

  EIGHT

  I WAITED, MY eyes turned away, my heart empty, as the pack beat Mongrel to death.

  While his body was still twitching and his lips foaming with blood, they stripped off this clothes and kicked him until his spirit had left for hell.

  They found his clothes too foul and ragged even for léperos and threw them on
the ground as they walked away, squabbling over a tortilla found in his pocket.

  I knew they would return to the main square and hang around the inn and the pulquerias in the hopes of picking a copper or getting a bone thrown to them, leaving behind without thought someone who for years had begged, stolen, squabbled, and whined with them.

  When it was safe, I approached the naked body slowly, worried that el diablo was still taking his soul and might reach out and grab me if I got too close.

  I gathered up what I could of his torn shirt and pants and laid them on Mongrel’s body, giving him more dignity than he would have given me if he had managed to kick me to death.

  I don’t know why I bothered. I felt nothing for the vicious animal. He was ugly-mean and had often hurt others because he took pleasure from their pain. Being cold and hungry and abandoned had not made any of us street people saints, but few struck out at anyone smaller or weaker, as Mongrel did for no other reason than he was bigger and stronger.

  He would be forgotten quickly even by those he had stolen from and abused. Though I and the rest of Oaxaca’s street trash had been aware of Mongrel’s presence on the earth, and not a few of us had been kicked and punched as he stole a juicy morsel, none of us cared that he had come and gone, not even God, who had long ago abandoned him to el diablo.

  I heard growling and saw shining eyes and dark forms coming at me from both directions in the alley.

  They came out of the darkness—a pack of hungry dogs. They had smelled the blood and there was nothing I could do. I had blood on me, too, on my legs and my pants.

  Like me they were gaunt and hungry, but their teeth were sharper. I stood no chance against the pack.

  I turned away to climb back up the wall, shutting my mind from the snarling, snapping, and ripping I heard as the dogs pulled flesh off the body and fought over the pieces.

  My foot kicked a rock and I got a grip on it as one of the dogs that got shoved out of the feast turned and came at me.

  I swung around, bringing the rock with me, hitting the animal across the side of the head as he flew at me with jagged jaws. I connected good and the blow sent him stumbling sideways and down to his knees, a bloody gash open between his eye and ear.

  I backed away as other dogs coming down the alley went for the dog with the open wound.

  NINE

  GRABBING A HANDFUL of vines, then another, I pulled myself up slowly, getting a handhold, then a foothold, stretching to reach upward, my arms doing most of the work of bringing up my wounded leg, which trailed almost useless behind me.

  Vines ripped, and I slipped and started to fall as more vines broke loose. I clawed at the vines, breaking my fall, hanging frozen on the wall as I tried to get my breath and slow my pounding heart.

  The sounds of the dogs growling and snarling as they ripped off pieces of flesh gave me the desperation I needed to move again, testing the strength of the vines before I put more weight on them.

  I had lived like a wild animal for so long, rarely treated better than one because domestic animals gave value while léperos were thought of as festering maggots who spoiled the soup for all, that I understood why God gave the dogs sharp teeth and a hunger for red meat, regardless of where they found it.

  I had an urge to slip back down to the ground and rip pieces off the bloody stump to satisfy my hunger.

  Ayyo! Did my sudden lust for human flesh come from being so weak and hungry that I was mindless … or some primeval instinct for the taste of human flesh I had inherited from my indio ancestors?

  The barbaric hunger of my indio ancestors was rarely far from the thoughts of people because it was a favorite subject for Spanish priests to harp upon as they reminded us at church services that indios were little more than half-naked savages with strange appetites before the conquistadors arrived to “civilize” them.

  The priests always neglected to add that the Spanish system of “civilizing” the indio was similar to the way they broke farm animals to the harness and plow.

  Weak and dizzy and only halfway up the wall, I stopped, forcing my knees to lock to keep from sliding back down as I hung on, my arms feeling as if they were being pulled from my shoulder sockets.

  Rubbing against the thick, rough vines had spread open my wounds, and I left a trail of blood as I fought my way up.

  I began to feel light-headed, almost dreamy—

  “Stop it!” I gasped aloud.

  The pain was almost insurmountable, but I knew there was food if I made it up the wall, and pain is suffered easier without the added ache and weakness caused by hunger.

  A man who once watched me climb a tree to fetch a toy his son had tossed into the branches had called me a squirrel, but tonight I was a wounded one and the hardest part was yet to come.

  When I reached the top, I would have to drag myself over the edge to lay on the roof, with my breath coming fast and my legs screaming from pain.

  Why would I suffer the pain and nearly kill myself to climb up a stable wall at night?

  What was the gourmet meal that I would sup on once I had conquered the “mountain” and reaped my reward?

  Horse feed, of course.

  Horses are the pride and joy of caballeros. More than that, horses are their treasures. A man’s horse often costs more than his house. Spanish gentlemen boast more about the accomplishments of their horses than those of their children.

  Men call themselves caballeros, and the title is proudly used by even the plumpest merchant who would have to be lifted onto the back of a very big horse in order to justify the title.

  Any horse in the colony ate better and slept warmer than a lépero.

  Ayyo! Even a mule was treated better than a lépero.

  Mules and carriage horses were fed hay, but the fine riding horses of the rich caballeros also got oats and corn—even apples!

  The only apples I had ever bitten into were overripe ones with large brown spots tossed from a farm wagon that I ran after while loudly begging.

  I understood the Spaniard’s love of horses, though I had never ridden one. The great beasts created a sense of awe and wonderment in me as I watched them carry a grown man or pull a full wagon, their beautiful coats shiny, powerful muscles rippling, hooves pounding.

  Watching the caballeros on their horses, I had many times tried to imagine what it would be like to ride on one. I would be high above people who were walking, the power of the great beast warm between my legs, the wind in my face pushing harder and harder against me as the horse galloped under me, carrying me with no more effort than I could carry a puppy.

  The indio has been in awe of and even in fear of horses since these animals first arrived in what Europeans mistakenly call the New World. Those mounts left the first horseshoe prints on the mainland on the beaches near what is now Vera Cruz when they were unloaded from the ships that carried Hernán Cortés and the other conquistadors to this land.

  Although many thousands of horses have since arrived from the mother country and even more of them have been bred in the colony, the most prized and expensive mounts in New Spain were in the bloodline of those fourteen original warhorses that Cortés brought with him.

  Ayyo! Any horse was valuable, and the ones whose bloodlines could be traced to a champion because of its appearance, speed, or stamina went for more gold than ordinary horses.

  However, a mount whose bloodline could be traced back to the fourteen warhorses that carried Cortés and his highest-ranking officers to victory was prized among none other, perhaps even more than any other class of horses in the entire world. The king in Spain, who sits at the right hand of God and is the mightiest monarch on earth, with an empire so vast and far-flung that the sun never set upon all of it at once, had horses of the conquest bloodline in his stable.

  Sí, I was nothing but a thieving, begging, lying lépero, but like the Spanish, I loved horses. And my indio blood also sensed a spirituality with the animals, just as it did with jaguars, the mighty beasts of the jungle
who could kill a man with a single blow.

  In truth, I have an affinity with horses, a special connection that I never understood and only discovered accidentally when I approached horses that their masters had left with their reins secured in the iron rings in front of the inn.

  When I petted the smooth, shiny coats, I hummed a tune that slipped out through my teeth. A prostitute who helped raise me said it was a melody that my mother always used to sing to calm me when she held me in her arms.

  Like my mother, the prostitute was long dead, swept away by one of the deadly maladies that occasionally seemed to blow across the land like a storm wind, carrying lives away with it.

  One time when I was begging at the house of prostitution I had asked other girls about the song, but none of them had known my mother nor had they ever heard it sung.

  I don’t know why the tune calmed horses. It was as if I spoke a language that they understood.

  I knew of no one else who hummed the same sound, and the léperos who saw me do it simply laughed and said I was dumber than the horses to which I sang.

  Ayyo! If just one of them were as smart as a horse.

  With my last bit of strength, I dragged myself onto the roof of the stable.

  TEN

  MY BODY WAS shaking from pain and exhaustion as I sprawled out on the flat roof and gasped for a breath, empty of strength and will, faint and dizzy. I needed food and rest.

  The cursing shouts of a man bellowed from the street below, followed by the painful yelp of a dog—the town’s night watchman had discovered Mongrel’s body and was driving off the dogs.

  Once the watchman found out it was a lépero, he’d load up the body onto his horse cart and take it to where paupers were buried. He’d have little curiosity or concern about how Mongrel met his maker. That the deceased person was a lépero was reason enough for him to be dead.

  I lay quiet, trying to silence my breathing, because if the watchman spotted me I’d get a severe beating from the club he carried.