"So those two would be easy for you to procure," said Netzlin. "But the white grains defy your so-clever investigation?"
"Yes. All I can tell about those is that they taste something like salt, only more sharp and bitter. That is why I brought the pólvora here"—I turned to Citláli—"because that soldier spoke of women."
She smiled with good humor but shrugged helplessly. "I can discern the white grains in that little pile, but I certainly do not recognize them. Why should a woman's eyes see more to them than yours do, Tenamáxtli?"
"Perhaps not the eyes," I said. "A woman's other senses and intuitions are known to be much more acute than a man's. Here, I will separate out a number of those specks." I had brought the little feather, and delicately employed it, so that I teased a minute quantity of the white grains apart from the rest. "Now, taste them, Citláli."
"Must I?" she asked, eyeing them askance. Then she leaned forward—with considerable effort, because her protuberant belly was in the way—lowered her head to the paper and sniffed. "Must I really taste them?" she asked again, sitting back on her heels. "They smell exactly like xitli."
"Xitli?"said both Netzlin and myself, blinking at her, because that word means "urine."
Citláli blushed with embarrassment and said, "Well, like myxitli, anyway. You see, Tenamáxtli, we have only a single public retiring-closet here on this street, and only immodest women go there to urinate. Most of us use axixcáltin pots and, when they are full, go and empty them in that closet's pit."
"But nobody—not even a Spanish woman, I am sure—urinates powder,"I said. "Unless, Citláli, you are one uncommon human being."
"I am no such thing, you simpleton!" she said, in mock anger, but blushing again. "However, I have noticed that while the xitli sits undisturbed between emptyings, at the bottom of the axixcáli there come into being some little whitish crystals."
I stared at her, cogitating.
"The way a moss or a scale sometimes develops at the bottom of a water jar," she elaborated, as if she thought me so dense that I needed a simple illustration.
I continued staring at her, making her blush redder yet.
"Those crystals I speak of," she said, "if they were ground very fine on a metlatl stone, they would be a powder just like those white grains you have there."
Almost breathlessly, I said, "You may have hit on it, Citláli."
"What?!" her husband exclaimed. "You think that is why the soldier mentioned women in connection with the secret powder?"
"In an intimateconnection," I reminded him.
"But would a female's xitli be any different from a male's?"
"In one respect, I knowit is, and so do you. You must have seen that when a man urinates outdoors, on the grass, the grass is not at all affected. But wherever a woman urinates, the grass goes brown and dead."
"You are right," he and his wife said together, and Netzlin added, "It is such a commonplace occurrence that no one ever even speaks of it."
"And charcoal is also a commonplace thing," I said. "And so is the volcanic yellow azufre. It stands to reason that something as common as a female's xitli could provide the third ingredient of the pólvora. Citláli, forgive my audacious rudeness, but may I borrow your axixcáli pot for a while, and do some experimenting with its contents?"
She went still redder in the face, maybe by now all the way down to her taut belly, but her laugh was unabashed. "Do with it what you like, you preposterous man. Only do bring back the pot, please. I have ever more frequent need of it now that the child is due to be born at any moment."
It took both hands to carry the clay container, covered but audibly sloshing, back to the mesón—and I got some queer looks from passersby along the way, because everyone knows an axixcáli by sight.
Yes, I had been living all this while at the mesón—or at least sleeping and taking meals there—and so had Pochotl, while many other lodgers had come and gone in the meantime. So, feeling guilty about my leech-like dependence on the friars of San José, I had often joined Pochotl in helping them clean the place, fetch wood to stoke the fires, stir and serve the soup, things like that. I might have thought that the friars were lenient about my staving on and on because they knew of my attending classes next door. But they were equally lenient about the perpetual residence of Pochotl, so obviously they were not showing me any partiality. In my opinion, they were kindheartedly carrying charity to an extreme of benevolence. Even though I was one of its chief beneficiaries, that day I returned from visiting Netzlin and Citláli, I made bold to ask one of the soup-ladling friars about that.
To my bewilderment, the friar actually sneered at me. "You think we do this for love of you shiftless layabouts?" he snarled. "We do this in God's name, for our own souls' sake. Our order bids us to debase ourselves, to work among the lowest of the lowly, the filthiest of the filthy. I am here at this mesón only because so many other brothers of the order had already volunteered for the leprosery that there was no room there for me. I had to settle for serving you indio sluggards. And that I do, and in doing that I lay up for myself credits in heaven. But one thing I do not have to do is associatewith you. So get back to your lazy fellow redskins."
Well, I thought charity comes in some strange guises. I wondered if the nuns of Santa Brígida felt similar contempt for the multicolored orphans in their charge—caring for them ostensibly in the name of their God, but really in the expectation of reward in the afterlife. I wondered also if Alonso de Molina had been kind and helpful to me only for that same reason. Such thoughts naturally strengthened my resolve not to adopt such a crass religion. Bad enough that my tonáli had decreed that I be born into The One World precisely when I would have to share my lifetime with these Christians; I certainly did not intend to spend my afterlife among them.
No longer feeling guilty, but feeling ashamedof myself for having partaken of the friars' grudging charity, I decided to move away from their mesón. The Cathedral elders had been paying me only a pittance for my work with notarius Alonso—barring whatever extra they had paid for my three articles of Spanish attire: shirt, trousers and boots. Still, of my wages I had spent only the occasional bit for a midday meal, so my savings should enable me to take lodging at one of the cheap native hostelries situated in the colación neighborhoods. I went to my pallet determined that this was the last night I would sleep there, that in the morning I would pack up my few belongings—which now included Citláli's axixcáli—and be gone. However, no sooner had I made that decision than it turned out that the decision had already been made for me, doubtless by those same mischievous, interfering gods who had for so long been persistently at my heels.
In the middle of the night I was awakened—as was everyone else in the men's chamber—by the shouting of the aged warder whom the friars left to watch over the premises after they had departed:
"¡Señor Tennamotch! ¿Hay aquí un señor bajo el nombre de Tennamotch?"
I knew he meant me. My name, like so many other Náhuatl words, was always a tongue-twister for the Spaniards, particularly because they are unable to pronounce the soft "sh" sound represented by the letter xwith which they write my name. I scrambled up from my pallet, threw on my mantle, and went down the stairs to where the old man stood.
"¿Señor Tennamotch?"he barked, angry at having been disturbed himself. "Hay aquí una mujer insistente e importuna. La vejezuela demanda a hablar contigo."