"In times long past," he said, "before the Great Deluge that covered the earth, the jaguar was the earth god. He dwelled in the stomach of the world. When he came out, he swallowed the sun and brought night upon the earth. After the Great Deluge, he was no longer in the bowels of the earth, but lived upon the land after the sun escaped. He stayed in caves and high in trees while his enemy the sun was in the sky, but the night belonged to him."
Mateo lay nearby with the sack of wine that seemed so often to be his bedmate, smoke curling up from tobacco he smoked without the use of a pipe. The tobacco had been twisted and rolled until it resembled a human turd. I had tasted one of the rolls, and it tasted much worse than I imagined mierda to taste. While he pretended to be half-asleep, gazing up at the night sky, I knew he was listening to the Healer.
"The power of the jaguar comes from the Heart of the World, a flawless green jade the size of a man's head. Inside the gem is a green flame, a fire so bright that to look at it would burn the eyes from a man. It is the power of this gem, this heart-of-hearts, that gives the jaguar magic."
I glanced over at Mateo. He continued to look up at the night sky, blowing rings of smoke. During the trip to Monte Alban he had told me a story about a priest into whose hands soon after the conquest came an incredibly bright jade that glowed green. The priest had been given the gem by indios. The superstitious priest, believing that the green fire was the power of Satan himself, smashed the stone despite an offer of thousands of ducats for the gem from another Spaniard. The point of the story to Mateo was that the priest's stupidity had destroyed a valuable gem.
"The Heart of the Land came from the stars," the Healer said. "The Heart was cast and brought to earth by the Tzitzimine, demons thrown out of heaven because of the evil they spoke and caused. The Tzitzimine lost the Heart to the Nine Lords of the Night; but because it had been made by the Tzitzimine, the Heart not only had magic powers, but was imbued with dark wizardry."
The Healer paused and looked at me in the waning light of the fire.
"It is from this source, the gem that is the Heart of the Land, glowing with the dark powers of the Tzitzimine, that the naualli get their power. A naualli is a nanahualtin, one-who-knows how to use the power of the Heart."
"How does he know?" I asked.
"He has a book. It is like the Book of Fate, the Tonalamatl, but written in its pages are not the fates of men, but the incantations used by the Nine Lords of the Night to wield the power of the Heart of the Land."
I tried to imagine such a book. Aztec books, using picture writing, were often long scrolls, a single rolled page perhaps only two hands high, but very long; unrolled, they could be the length of several men lying head to foot.
"The naualli draws his power from the Book of the Nine Lords of the Night. To gather his magic, he takes the book in darkness to a place where he will not be disturbed. The second, fifth, and seventh hours of night are considered the most auspicious for calling upon the Lords. When he has used the book to draw power from the Heart, he is able to perform his magic. One-who-knows can turn a stick into a snake, a flower into a scorpion, or even call ice stones from the sky to destroy crops. He can turn himself into a jaguar and rip the throat from any that oppose him."
"What was the difference between the Jaguar Knights and the Eagle Knights?" I asked.
"The Jaguar warriors and priests were identified with the night, with darkness. The jaguar ruled the night. The eagle hunted in the daytime. The Eagle Knights, like the Jaguar Knights, were fierce fighters, but the Eagle priests lacked the power of the elixir that made warriors feel no pain and the ability of the priests to shape-change."
I enjoyed listening to the Healer explain indio history. I compared it to what I had learned from Fray Antonio and others. To the Spaniards, history was a series of events. Kings and queens, wars, conquest and defeat, doctors writing down their cures, sailors drawing their charts and espousing their adventures, all recorded in books. To the Healer, history was magic and soul. Magic came from spirits and gods, and even a rock could harbor a spirit. Soul was how people were affected by the acts of the gods.
I knew that Spaniards had the force of reason on their side. But even when the Healer talked of magic books that turned men into jaguars and elixirs made a man invincible, I was inclined to see his tales as espousing another form of wisdom rather than being without reason.
Nor was I inclined to accept the Spanish version of the history of the indios over the Healer's knowledge. Fanatical priests had burned most of the Aztec books, so both the Spaniards and the Healer drew information from the stories passed down from generation to generation. The Spanish had an advantage in that they recorded the stories in books that were passed to generations of scholars, but the Healer had an even greater advantage: From one end of the old indio empires to the other were thousands of inscriptions on walls, temples, and other monuments. Some were disappearing every day, destroyed by ignorance or, even more common, broken up to use as building stone for new construction. But the Healer had spent a long lifetime walking from one end of the land to the other, reading the inscriptions. He had knowledge that was not known to the Spanish, and which never would be discovered because the inscriptions were crumbling to dust or smashed into pieces.
The Spanish had recorded vast amounts of facts into books. The Healer had lived history, not just that of his own days, but that of time immemorial. He slept, ate, spoke, and thought with little difference from what his ancestors had done for thousands of years. He was a walking, breathing temple of knowledge.
SIXTY-TWO
Puebla de los Angeles, the Town of the Angels, was the largest city I had ever been in. To Mateo it was a small place compared to the City of Mexico.
"Mexico is a true city, not an overgrown provincial village like Puebla, Veracruz, and Oaxaca. It is a grand place. Someday, Bastardo, I will take you there. We will sup on the finest food and the most beautiful women. One whorehouse in that city has not only brown and white girls, but a yellow one."
I was awed that a whorehouse could actually have a chino. I had seen a woman with yellow skin at the fair for the Manila galleon, and I'd wondered what she was like without her clothes.
"Are they—the chino women—are they built like other women?"
He looked at me out of the corner of his eye. "No, of course not. Everything is reversed."
What does that mean? I wondered. Was everything that was usually on the front of a person, on the backside of a chino? I did not ask the question because I did not want to expose my ignorance further.
We camped outside Puebla in the same area where traders and indio magicians had converged. We did not see the naualli among them.
I accompanied the Healer and the others to the square at the city center where a harvest festival was to be held. Even though Mateo did not consider Puebla a grande city, it was enormous to me. As I had been told about the City of Mexico, Puebla was also high above the coastline, in a broad plain shouldered by distant mountains. Mateo said that the architecture was similar to that of the great city of Toledo in Spain.
"One of the finest voices of poetry died on the streets of Puebla," Mateo had told me earlier, when the city was in sight. "Gutierre de Cetina was a poet and a swordsman who fought in Italy and the German lands for the king. He came to Mexico after the conquest at the behest of his brother. Unfortunately, his poetry was better than his sword play. He was killed in a duel by a rival for the same woman. They say he was struck down after standing outside the woman's window praising her eyes with his poem, 'Ojos claros serenos.'