"What is your name, boy?" he asked at last.
"Well, they call me Mole—" I began.
"I can believe that, but it is not your name." Before I could put in a word, he asked another question, "What were you doing just now?"
"I was reading, Yanquicatzin." I really do not know what there was about him, but it made me address him as Lord Stranger. "I was reading the writing on the bench."
"Indeed?" he said, in what sounded like tired disbelief. "I would never have taken you for an educated young noble. What does the writing say, then?"
"It says: From the people of Xaltócan, a resting place for the Lord Night Wind."
"Someone told you that."
"No, Lord Stranger. Excuse me, but—see?" I moved close enough to point. "This duck-billed thing here stands for wind."
"It is not a duck bill," the man snapped. "That is the trumpet through which the god blows the winds."
"Oh? Thank you for telling me, my lord. Anyway, it stands for ehecatl. And this marking here—all these closed eyelids—that means yoali. Yoali Ehecatl, the Night Wind."
"You really can read?"
"A very little, my lord. Not much."
"Who taught you?"
"No one, Lord Stranger. There is no one on Xaltócan to teach the art. It is a pity, for I should like to learn more."
"Then you must go elsewhere."
"I suppose so, my lord."
"I suggest you do it now. I tire of being read to. Go elsewhere, boy called Mole."
"Oh. Yes. Of course, Lord Stranger. Mixpantzinco."
"Ximopanolti."
I turned back once for a last look at him. But he was beyond the range of my short sight, or he was swallowed up in the dark, or he had simply got up and gone.
I was met at home by a chorus of my father, mother, and sister expressing a mixture of worry, relief, consternation, and anger at my having stayed out so long alone in the perilous dark. But even my mother quieted when I told how I had been delayed by the inquisitive stranger. She quieted, and she and my sister looked with wide eyes at my father. He looked with wide eyes at me.
"You met him," my father said huskily. "You met the god and he let you go. The god Night Wind."
All through a sleepless night I tried, without much success, to see the dusty, weary, surly wayfarer as a god. But if he had been Night Wind, then by tradition I was due to get my heart's desire. There was only one problem. Unless wanting to learn to read and write might qualify, I did not know what was my heart's desire. Or I did not know until I got it, if that is what I got.
* * *
It happened on a day when I was working at the first apprentice job I was given at my father's quarry. It was no onerous work; I had been appointed watchman of the big pit during the time when all the workmen downed tools and went home for their midday meal. Not that there was much risk of human thievery, but if the tools were left unguarded, small wild animals would come to gnaw the tool hafts and handles for the salt the wood had absorbed from the workers' sweat. A single prickly little boar could chew up a whole, hard ebony pry-bar during the men's absence. Fortunately, my mere presence there was sufficient to keep the salt-seeking creatures at bay, for whole swarms of them could have invaded unseen by my mole eyes.
That day, as always, Tzitzitlini ran out from home to bring me my own midday meal. She kicked off her sandals and sat with me on the sunlit grassy rim of the quarry, chattering gaily while I ate my fare of tiny boned lake whitefish, each rolled and broiled in a tortilla. They had come wrapped in a cloth and were still hot from the fire. My sister looked warm too, I noticed, though the day was cool. Her face was flushed and she kept fanning the square-cut top of her blouse away from her breasts.
The fish rolls had a slight but unusually tart taste. I wondered if Tzitzi instead of our mother had prepared them, and whether she was chattering so volubly just to keep me from teasing her about her apparent lack of cooking skill. But the taste was not disagreeable, and I was hungry, and I felt quite replete when I had finished. Tzitzi suggested that I lie down and digest my meal in comfort; she would keep watch for any intruding prickly little boars.
I stretched out on my back and looked up at the clouds which once I could see so clear-cut against the sky; now they were but formless white swatches among formless blue swatches. I had got accustomed to that by now. But all at once something more disturbing began to happen to my vision. The white and blue commenced swirling, slowly at first, then more rapidly, as if some god up there had begun to stir the sky with a chocolate beater. Surprised, I started to sit up, but I was suddenly so dizzy that I fell back upon the grass.
I felt uncommonly odd, and I must have made some odd noise, for Tzitzi leaned over me and looked into my face. Addled though I was, I got the impression that she had been waiting for something to happen to me. The tip of her tongue was caught between her brilliant white teeth, and her narrowed eyes gave me a look of seeking some sign. Then her lips smiled mischievously, her tongue's tip licked them, and her eyes widened with a light almost of triumph. She remarked on my own eyes, and her voice seemed strangely to come like an echo from far away.
"Your pupils have got so large, my brother." But she still smiled, so I felt no cause for alarm. "Your irises are scarcely brown at all, but almost entirely black. What do you see with those eyes?"
"I see you, my sister," I said, and my voice was thick. "But somehow you look different. You look..."
"Yes?" she prompted.
"You look so beautiful," I said. I could not help saying it.
Like every boy my age, I was expected to disdain and disprize girls—if I even deigned to notice them—and of course one's own sister was more to be disparaged than any other girl. But I would have known Tzitzitlini to be beautiful even if the fact had not been remarked so often in my hearing by all the adults, women and men alike, who caught their breath at first catching sight of her. No sculptor could have captured the lissome grace of her young body, for stone or clay cannot move, and she gave the illusion of being always in flowing motion even when she was most still. No painter could have mixed the exact golden-fawn color of her skin, or the color of her eyes: doe-brown flecked with gold...
But that day something magical had been added, and that was why I could not have refused to acknowledge her beauty, even if I had been so inclined. The magic was visible all about her, an aura like that of the mist of water jewels in the sky when the sun comes out immediately after a rain.
"There are colors," I said, in my curiously thickened voice. "Bands of color, like the mist of water jewels. All around your face, my sister. A glow of red... and outside that a glow of purple... and... and..."
"Looking at me gives you pleasure?" she asked.
"It does. You do. Yes. Pleasure."
"Then hush, my brother, and let yourself be given pleasure."
I gasped. Her hand was underneath my mantle. And remember, I was nearly a year short of that age to wear a loincloth. I should have found my sister's bold gesture an outrageous violation of my privacy, except that somehow it did not now seem so, and in any case I felt too numb to raise my arms and ward her off. I could feel almost nothing except that I seemed to be growing in a part of my body where I had never noticeably grown before. So was Tzitzi's body changing. Her young breasts ordinarily showed only as modest mounds beneath her blouse, but now, as she knelt over me, her nipples were swollen; they poked like little fingertips against the thin cloth covering them.