"You said this salitre sells, but cheaply."
"The Xoconóchco farmers buy it merely to spread it on their cotton fields. They claim it enhances the ground's fertility. The Spanish employ salitre in some manner in their tanneries. I know not what use you might be thinking of making of it—"
"Tanning!" I lied. "Yes, that is it. I contemplate adding fine leather goods to my stock here. I was only puzzled as to where to get the salitre."
"I shall be glad to bring you a whole tamémi load, on my next trip north," said Peloloá. "Cheap it is, but I shall charge you nothing at all. You are a friend."
I raced home to announce the good news. But in my excitement, I did it awkwardly. I dashed through the doorway curtain, shouting:
"You can cease urinating now, Citláli!"
My inelegant entrance threw her into such a paroxysm of laughter that it was a while before she could gasp out, "I once—called you—preposterous. I was wrong. You are—totally xolopítli!" And it was a while longer before I could gather my wits and rephrase my announcement, and tell her what great good fortune had befallen me.
Citláli said shyly, and she was seldom shy, "Perhaps we should make a small celebration. To show gratitude to the salt goddess Iztocíuatl."
"A celebration? Of what sort?"
Still shyly, and blushing now, she said, "I have been taking the powdered root tlatlaohuéhuetl throughout the past month. I believe we need worry about no mishap if we were to give its vaunted impregnability a trial."
I looked at her—"with new eyes," I was about to say, but that would not be true. During all this time that we had been sleeping apart, on pallets in the separate rooms, I had been desiring her, but virtuously had given no sign of it. Also, it had been so very long since I had lain with a female—the tiny brown Rebeca—that I might soon have resorted to the services of a maátitl. Citláli must have taken my brief hesitation as reluctance, for now she said boldly, with laughter, and made me laugh, too:
"Niez tlalqua ayquic axitlinéma." Which means, "I promise not to urinate."
And so we embraced laughing, which, I now learned for the first time, is the very best way to begin.
All this while, Ome-Ehécatl had been growing, from a babe in arms, to an infant that crawled, to a weanling learning wobblily to walk. I kept expecting Ehécatl to die any day, and no doubt Citláli did, too, because a child afflicted with a physical deformity so evident at birth usually has other defects that are not visible, and dies very young. During Ehécatl's infancy, the only other deficiency that became apparent was the child's never learning to speak, and possibly that indicated deafness as well. That may have troubled Citláli more than it did me; I was frankly pleased that the child never cried, either.
Anyway, its brain appeared to function well enough. While learning to walk, Ehécatl also learned to make its way most adroitly around the house and learned early on to veer clear of the cooking hearth. Whenever Citláli decided to give the child some outdoor exercise, she would stand it in the street and point it and give it a gentle shove. Ehécatl would dauntlessly toddle straight along the middle of that street, confident that its mother had made sure nothing was in the way. Of course, Citláli was always gentle and kindly toward everyone, but I believe she also had maternal feelings, even for such an offspring as Ehécatl. She kept the child clean, and tidy of dress—and well fed, though at first it had difficulty in finding her teat and, later, in wielding a spoon. The other neighborhood children rather surprised me with their attitude. They seemed to regard Ehécatl as a kind of plaything—not human like themselves, certainly, but not as inert as a straw or clay doll—and played almost affectionately with the child, without ever being abusive or derisive. All in all, while getting to live for more years than such monstrosities usually do, Ehécatl passed those years as pleasantly as an incurable cripple could ever have hoped to do.
I knew that Citláli's chief worry about the child was the question of its afterlife, whether Ehécatl went there young or old. Citláli probably had some concern for her own afterlife, as well. No person of The One World is necessarily damned to the nothingness of Míctlan after death—as Christians are to hell—simply because he or she has been born, has lived and has died. Still, to assurethat one does not get plunged to Míctlan, one should have done somethingin one's lifetime to merit residing afterward in the sun god's Tonatíucan or one of the other beneficent gods' similarly appetizing afterworlds.
A child's only hope of doing that is to sacrifice itself—that is, have its parents sacrifice it—to appease the hunger and the vanity of one god or another. But no priest would have accepted a useless object like Ehécatl as an offering to even the least of gods. A grown man can best attain his desired afterworld by dying in battle or on the altar of a god, or doing some deed noteworthy enough to please the gods. A grown woman can also die in sacrifice to a god, and some have done deeds as praiseworthy as any man's, but most have deserved their places in Tonatíucan or Tlálocan, or wherever, simply by being the mothers of children whose tonáli has destined themto be warriors or sacrifices or mothers. Ome-Ehécatl could never be any of those things, which is why I say Citláli must have had some anxiety about her own prospects after death.
XI
Some months after our earlier encounter in the market, the pochtécatl Pololoá came again from the Xoconóchco, and brought along one tamémi laden with nothing but a big sack of the "first-harvest" salitre, and grandly presented that to me, and even bade the porter continue carrying it as far as my house. And there I began devoting every free moment to trying the black, white and yellow powders in mixtures of varying proportions, and noting down every experiment I made. I now had a good deal more free time than before, because both Pochotl and I had been dismissed from our duties at the Cathedral.
"It is because the Church has a new pope at Rome," the notarius Alonso explained in a tone of apology. "The old Papa Clemente Séptimo has died and been succeeded by the Papa Paulo Tercero. We have just been informed of his accession and his first directives to all the world's Catholic Christian clergy."
I said, "You do not sound pleased by the news, Cuatl Alonso."
He grimaced sourly. "The Church commands that every priest be celibate and chaste and honorable—or at least that he pretend to be. That certainly should apply to the pope, the highest priest of all. But it is well known that while he was still just the Padre Farnese, he began his climb through the Church hierarchy by what the coarser folk call 'lamiendo el culo del patron.'That is to say, he put his own sister, Giulia the Beautiful, to bed with the earlier Papa Alessandro Sexto, thereby winning for himself substantial preferments. And this Papa Paulo himself has by no means been celibate during his life. He has numerous children and grandchildren. And one of those, a grandson, Paulo has already—immediately on attaining the papacy—made a cardinalat Rome. And that grandson is only fourteen years old."
"Interesting," I said, though I did not find it very much so. "But what has this to do with us here?"
"Among his other directives, Papa Paulo has decreed that every diocese commence to conserve on its expenditures. That means we can no longer finance even such a small luxury as your work with me on the codices. Also, the pope has addressed Bishop Zumárraga specificallyin the matter of what he calls 'squandering' gold and silver on 'fripperies.' All the precious metals the Church has acquired here in New Spain he decrees must be shared among less fortunately endowed bishoprics. Or so he says."