Oh, I know there was no significance or profit in my noticing such things. They were but trivial details on which to exercise my new penchant for looking close and examining with care. But that necessity-made-virtue, combined with my aptitude for copying exactly the things I could see, finally led me to take an interest in our people's picture writing. There was no school on Xaltócan that taught such an abstruse subject, but I sought out every scrap of writing I could find, and studied it intently and struggled to read its meaning.
The numerical writing, I think, anyone could easily make out. The shell symbol for zero, the dots or fingers for ones, the flags for twenties, the little trees for hundreds. But I remember the thrill when one day I first puzzled out a pictured word.
My father took me along on some business visit to the governor and, to keep me occupied while they talked in some private chamber, the governor let me sit in his entry hall and look at the register of all his subjects. I turned first to my own page. Seven dots, flower symbol, gray cloud. Then I ever so carefully moved to other pages. Some of the names were as easy to comprehend as my own, simply because I was familiar with them. Not far before my page was that of Chimali, and of course I recognized his: three fingers, the duck-billed head symbolizing the wind, the two intertwined tendrils representing smoke, rising from a feather-fringed disk—Yei-Ehecatl Pocuia-Chimali: Three Wind Smoking Shield.
The more frequently repeated drawings were easy to espy. After all, we had only twenty day-names. But I was suddenly struck by the not so immediately evident repetition of elements from Chimali's name and my own. One page near the back, hence recently drawn, showed six dots, then a shape like a tadpole standing on its head, then that duck-billed symbol, then the three-petaled thing. I could read it! I knew whose it was!
Six Rain Wind Flower, the baby sister of Tlatli, who had only last week celebrated her naming birthday.
Somewhat less gingerly now, I turned the stiff folded pages back and forth, looking at the pages on both sides of the pleats, searching for other repetitions and recognizable symbols I could piece together. The governor and my father returned just after I had laboriously worked out another name, or believed I had. With a mixture of timidity and pride I said:
"Excuse me, Lord Red Heron. Would you have the goodness to tell me, am I right, does this page record the name of some person called Two Reed Yellow Eyetooth?"
He looked and said no, it did not. He must have seen my face fall, for he patiently explained:
"It says Two Reed Yellow Light, the name of a laundress here in the palace. The Two Reed is obvious. And yellow, coztic, is easy to indicate simply by using that color, as you have divined. But tlanixtelotl, 'light'—or more precisely 'the eye's element'—how does one make a picture of something so insubstantial? Instead, I put a drawing of a tooth, tlanti, to represent not the meaning but the sound of the tlan at the beginning of the word, and then a picture of an eye, ixtelolotl, which serves to make clear the meaning of the whole. You grasp it now? Tlanixtelotl. Light."
I nodded, feeling rather deflated and foolish. There was more to picture writing than just recognizing the drawing of a tooth. In case I had not realized it, the governor made it plain:
"Writing and reading are for those trained in such arts, son of Tepetzalan." And he gave me a man-to-man clap on the shoulder. "They take much learning and much practice, and only the nobility have the leisure for so much study. But I admire your initiative. Whatever occupation you do undertake, young man, you ought to do it well."
I daresay the son of Tepetzalan should have complied with the Lord Red Heron's broad hint, and stuck to the trade of Tepetzalan. Weak-eyed and ill equipped as I was for any more ambitious or venturesome occupations, I could have drudged away an uneventful but never empty-bellied life as a real mole of a quarrier. A life less satisfying, perhaps, than the one I stubbornly persisted in pursuing, but it would have brought me far smoother roads and more tranquil days than I was to know when I went my own way. Right at this moment, my lords, I could be employed in helping to build your City of Mexíco. And, if Red Heron was right in his estimation of my abilities, possibly making of it a better city than your own imported architects and stonemasons are doing.
But let it pass, let it all pass, as I myself let it all pass—heedless of the Lord Red Heron's implied command, heedless of my father's genuine pride in his trade and his attempts to teach it to me, heedless of my mother's carping complaints that I was reaching above my ordained station in life.
For the governor had given me another hint, and one that I could not ignore. He had revealed that the picture writing did not always mean what it looked like, but what it sounded like. No more than that. But that was enlightening enough and tantalizing enough to keep me searching out bits of writing—on temple walls, on the island's tribute roll in the palace, on any paper carried by any passing tradesman—and doing my untaught, earnest best to make sense of them.
I even went to the ancient tonalpoqui who had so glibly given me my name, four years before, and asked if I might pore over his venerable naming book when it was not in use. He could not have recoiled more violently if I had asked to use one of his granddaughters as a concubine when she was not otherwise busy. He repulsed me with the information that the art of knowing the tonalmatl was reserved for the descendants of tonalpoque, not for unknown and presumptuous brats. It may have been so. But I will wager that either he remembered my declaring that I could have named myself as well as he had done, or—more likely—he was a frightened old fraud who could no more read the tonalmatl than I could at that time.
Then, one evening, I met a stranger. Chimali and Tlatli and I and some other boys had been playing together all afternoon, so Tzitzitlini was not along. On a shore far distant from our village we found a holed and rotting old hulk of an acáli, and got so absorbed in playing boatmen that we were taken by surprise when Tonatíu gave his red-sky warning that he was preparing for bed. We had a long way to walk home, and Tonatíu hurried to bed faster than we could walk, so the other boys broke into a trot. In daylight I could have kept up with them, but the dusk and my blighted vision forced me to move more slowly and pick my way with care. Probably the others never missed me; anyway, they soon outdistanced me.
I came to a crossroads, and there was a stone bench there, I had not passed that way in some time, but now I remembered that the bench bore several incised symbols, and I forgot everything else. I forgot that it was now almost too dark for me even to see the carvings, let alone decipher them. I forgot why the bench was there. I forgot all the lurking things that might descend on me as the night descended. I even heard an owl hoot somewhere nearby, and paid that omen of danger no attention. There was something there to read, or try to read, and I could not pass by without trying.
The bench was long enough for a man to lie upon, if he could have lain comfortably on the ridges of stone carving. I bent over the marks, and stared at them, and traced them with my fingers as well as my eyes, and moved from one to the next and the next—and nearly sprawled across the lap of a man sitting there. I sprang away as if he had been red-hot to the touch, and stammered an apology:
"M-mixpantzinco. In your august presence..."
Politely enough, but wearily, he made the customary reply, "Ximopanolti. At your convenience..."
Then we stared at each other for a space. I assume he saw only a slightly grubby, squinting boy of about twelve years old. I could not see him in detail, partly because the night was well upon us now, partly because I had leapt so far away from him. But I could make out that he was a stranger to the island, or at least to me, that his mantle was of good material though travel-stained, that his sandals were worn from long walking, and that his coppery skin was dusty from the road.