"An animal. Brought by the Spaniards, and bred by them in great numbers. It is very like our familiar wild boar, only tame and much fatter. Its meat, called by them puerco,is as tender and savory as a well-cooked human haunch." My mother and I both winced at that, but Pochotl took no notice. "Indeed, so close is the similarity of pitzóme and human meat that many of us believe the Spaniards and those animals must be blood relations, that the white men and their pitzóme both propagate their kind by mutual copulation."
Now the friars were waving all of us out of the big bare room where we had been eating, up the stairs to the sleeping quarters. It was the first time in my recollection that I had ever gone to bed without steaming or bathing myself, or at least taking a swim in the nearest available water. Upstairs were two separate big rooms, one each for men and women, so my uncle and I went one way and my mother the other, looking unhappy at being parted from us.
"I hope we see her safe and sound in the morning," muttered Mixtzin. "Yya, I hope we see her at all. These white priests may well have a rule that giving a woman a meal entitles them to the use of the woman."
To soothe him, I said, "There were women being fed down there who are rather younger and more tempting than Tene."
"Who knows what tastes these aliens may have, if, as that man said, they are thought to couple even with sows? I would put nothing past them."
That man, Pochotl—so scrawny as to belie his name, which means a certain tree, a very bulky one—was again joining us, taking the straw pallet next to mine, whence he continued to regale us with information about the City of Mexíco and its Spanish masters.
"This," he said, "was once an island entirely surrounded by the waters of Lake Texcóco. But now that lake has dwindled so much that its nearer shore is fully one-long-run eastward from the city—except for the canals that must repeatedly be dredged to provide access for the freight acáltin. The causeways that link the city to the mainland used to cross expanses of clear lake water, but now, as you must have seen yourselves, those expanses are more weed than water. The other lakes, too, back then were interconnected with Lake Texcóco and with each other. In effect, one single great lake. A man could row an acáli from the island of Tzumpánco in the north to the flower gardens of Xochimílco in the south, some twenty one-long-runs—or twenty leagues, as the Spanish would say. Now that man would have to plod through the wide bogs that have put those shrunken lakes far apart from each other. Some people say the trees were responsible."
"The trees?!"exclaimed my uncle.
"This valley is ringed by mountains, all around the horizon. And all those mountains bore thick forests—were almost furredwith forests—before the white men came."
Mixtzin said slowly, remembering, "Ye-es, you are right. It did strike me, on this visit, that the mountains look more brown than green."
"Because they are barren of trees," said Pochotl. "The Spaniards chopped them down—all of them—for timbers and lumber and firewood. Truly, that could well have angered Chicomecóatl, the goddess of green growing things. She may have taken revenge by persuading the god Tlaloc to send his rain only meagerly and sporadically, as he has been doing, and by persuading Tonatíu to blaze more hotly, as he has been doing. Whatever the reason, our weather gods have behaved most peculiarly ever since the coming of the Crixtanóyotl deities."
"Excuse me, friend Pochotl," I said, changing the subject. "I hope to find employment here. Not to make any fortune, but work that will pay me enough to live on. Can I expect to do that?"
The scrawny man looked me up and down. "Have you any skills, young man? Can you write the white men's language? Are you talented at any craft? Do you possess any artistic ability?"
"None of those. No."
"Good," he said bleakly. "Then you will not balk at hard labor. Hefting stone blocks and baskets of mortar for the new buildings. Or drudging as a tamémi porter. Or mucking out silt and excrement and trash from the canals. Whether such work will enable you to live depends, of course, on how skimpily you canlive."
"Well," I said, gulping, "I had hoped for something rather more..."
Uncle Mixtzin interrupted, "Friend Pochotl, you are a well-spoken man. I take you to have some intelligence, even education. And clearly you do not love the white men. Why, then, do you subsist on their charity?"
"Because I do have skills," said Pochotl with a sigh. "I was a master worker in gold and silver. Delicate jewelry—necklaces, bracelets, labrets, diadems, anklets—things for which the Spaniards have no use. They want their gold and silver melted down into featureless ingots, for sending home to their king, or for stamping into crude coins. Barbarians! Their other metals, what they call iron and steel, copper and bronze, they entrust to brawny smiths, to forge into horseshoes, armor plates, swords and the like."
Mixtzin asked, "You could not do that?"
"Any muscular lout could do that. I think such strong-arm work beneath me. Also. I do not care to callus and gnarl my artist's fingers. Someday, somehow, there may again be decent work for them to do."
I was only half listening to them. I sat cross-legged on my rancid pallet—it smelled of numberless earlier unwashed occupants—and contemplated the extremely unappealing careers the scrawny man had suggested for me. I had sworn to myself that I would do anything the gods might require in the furtherance of my vengeance against the white men, and I would keep that oath. The prospect of hard and ill-paid labor did not affright me. But the whole object of my staying in this city was to search out some hitherto unnoticed weakness in the Spaniards' grip on The One World, some flaw in their system of governing and controlling New Spain, some blind spot in their allegedly all-seeing preparedness against any kind of overthrow. It seemed unlikely that I could do much successful spying while spending most of my time among other laborers at the bottom of a canal ditch, or bent under the tumpline of a tamémi porter. Well, maybe the notarius Alonso de Molina could provide for me some better line of work, where I would have more opportunity for employing my eyes and ears and instincts.
Now Pochotl was telling my uncle, "The white men have brought us several new and very flavorsome foods. Their chicken, for instance, yields a much more tender and juicy meat than does our bigger huaxolómi fowl that they call the gallipavo.And they grow a cane from which they extract a powder called sugar, much sweeter than honey or coconut syrup. And they brought a new kind of bean called an haba,and other vegetables called cabbage, artichoke, lettuce and radish. Good eating, for those who can afford to buy them, or still have a plot of ground in which to grow them. But I think the Spaniards found here many more things new to them. They are ecstatic over our xitómatl and chili and chocólatl and ahuácatl, which they say do not exist in their Old Spain. Oh, and also they are learning how to take pleasure in smoking our picíetl."
Gradually I became aware of other voices around me in the dark room, other people staying awake to converse as Mixtzin and the scrawny man were doing. Most of those voices were speaking Náhuatl, and not saying anything much worth my listening to. But other conversations were in languages incomprehensible; they could have been conveying the wisdom of the world, or the deepest secrets of the gods, for all I could make out. At that time, I was unable to sort out the nationalities of those various speakers. But after a few more nights in the guest house, I would learn something interesting—that almost every man of them, except those native to this City of Mexíco itself, had come to this San José mesón from somewhere northof the city, often farnorth.