The most populous part of all The One World is this great bowl or depression in the plateau, which you now call the Valley of Mexíco. Here are puddled the lakes that made this area so attractive to human habitation. In actuality, there is only one tremendous lake, pinched in two places by encroaching highlands, so that there are three large bodies of water connected by slightly narrower straits. The smallest and southernmost of these lakes is of fresh water, fed by clear streams melting from the snows of the mountains there. The northernmost lake, where I spent my earliest years, is of reddish and briny water, because it is surrounded by mineral lands which leach their salts into the water. The central lake, Texcóco, bigger than the other two together and composed of their mingled salty and fresh waters, is thus of a slightly brackish quality.
Despite there being only one lake—or three, if you like—we have always divided them by five names. The dun-colored Lake Texcóco aione bears a single name. The southern and most crystalline lake is called Xochimilco in its upper part: The Flower Garden, because that neighborhood is the nursery of precious plants for all the lands about. In its lower part, the lake is called Chalco, after the Chalca nation which borders it. The northernmost lake, though also a single body of water, is likewise divided. The people who live on Tzumpanco, The Skull-Shaped Island, call its upper half Lake Tzumpanco. The people of my native Xaltócan, Island of Field Mice, call their portion Lake Xaltócan.
In a sense, I might liken these lakes to our gods—our former gods. I have heard you Christians complain of our "multitudes" of gods and goddesses, who held dominion over every facet of nature and of human behavior. I have heard you complain that you never can sort out and understand the workings of our crowded pantheon. However, I have counted and compared. I do not believe that we relied on so many major and minor deities as you do—the Lord God, the Son Jesus, the Holy Ghost, the Virgin Mary—plus all those other Higher Beings you call Angels and Apostles and Saints, each of them the governing patron of some single facet of your world, your lives, your tonaltin, even every single day in the calendar. In truth, I believe we recognized fewer deities, but we charged each of ours with more diverse functions.
To a geographer, there is but one lake here in the valley. To a boatman laboriously paddling his acáli, there are three broad bodies of water, interconnected. To the people who live on or around the lakes, there are five, distinguished by separate names. Just so, no one of our gods and goddesses had but one face, one responsibility, one name. Like our lake of three lakes, a single god might embody a trinity of aspects....
That makes you scowl, reverend friars? Very well, a god might have two aspects, or five. Or twenty.
Depending on the time of year: wet season or dry, long days or short, planting time or harvest time—and depending on circumstances: wartime or peacetime, feast or famine, kind rulers or cruel—a single god's duties would vary, and so would his attitude toward us, and so would our mode of worshiping or celebrating or placating him. To look at it another way, our lives and harvests and battle triumphs or failures might depend on the temperament and transient moods of the god. He could be, like the three lakes, bitter or sweet or blankly indifferent, as he chose.
Meanwhile, both the god's prevailing mood and the current happenings in our world could be differently viewed by different followers of that god. A victory for one army is a defeat for another, is that not so? Thus the god or goddess might be simultaneously regarded as rewarding and punishing, demanding and giving, doing good and evil. If you grasp all the infinite possible combinations of circumstances, you should be able to comprehend the variety of attributes we saw in every god, the variety of aspects each assumed, and the even greater variety of names we gave each of them—worshipful, respectful, grateful, fearful.
But I will not belabor this. Let me come back from the mystic to the physical. I will speak of things demonstrable to the five senses that even brute animals possess.
The island of Xaltócan is really a gigantic, almost solid rock, set well out from the mainland in the salty red lake. If it were not for three natural springs of fresh water bubbling up from the rock, the island would never have been populated, but in my time it supported perhaps two thousand people distributed among twenty villages. And the rock was our support in more than one sense, for it was tenextetl limestone, a valuable commodity. In its natural state, this form of limestone is quite soft and easily quarried, even with our crude tools of wood, stone, blunt copper, and brittle obsidian, so inferior to yours of iron and steel. My father was a master quarrier, one of several who directed the less expert workers. I remember one of the occasions when he took me to his quarry for instruction in his trade.
"You cannot see them," he told me, "but here—and here—run the natural fissures and striations of this particular stratum of the stone. Though they are invisible to the untrained eye, you will learn to divine them."
I never would; but he never ceased hoping. I watched while he marked the face of the stone with dabs of black oxitl. Other workers came—they were pale with sweat-caked dust—to hammer wooden wedges into the minute cracks he had marked. Then they sloshed water over the wedges. We went home and some days passed, during which the workers kept those wedges well sodden, so they would swell and exert increasing pressure inside the stone. Then my father and I went again to the quarry. We stood on the brink of it and looked down. My father said, "Watch now."
The stone might have been awaiting his presence and permission, for all of a sudden and all of its own accord, the quarry face gave a rending noise and split apart. Some of it came tumbling ponderously down in immense cubic chunks, other parts peeled off in flat square sheets, and they all fell intact into rope nets spread to receive them before they smashed on the quarry floor. We went down and my father inspected them with satisfaction.
"Only a little dressing with adzes," he said, "a little polishing with a slurry of powdered obsidian and water, and these"—he pointed to the limestone cubes—"will be perfect building blocks, while these"—the sheets as big as our house floor and as thick as my arm—"will be panels of facing."
I rubbed the surface of one of the blocks, waist high to myself. It felt both waxy and powdery.
"Oh, they are too soft for any use when they first come loose from the mother stone," said my father. He ran his thumbnail across the block and it scored a deep scratch. "After some while of exposure to the open air, they solidify, they become as strong and imperishable as granite. But our stone, while it is still malmy and workable, can be carved with any harder stone, or cut with an obsidian-grit sawing string."
Most of our island's limestone was freighted to the mainland or to the capital for use as buildings' walls and floors and ceilings. But, because of the fresh stone's easy workability, there were also sculptors busy at the quarries. Those artists chose the finest quality blocks and, while those were still soft, sculptured them into statues of our gods, rulers, and other heroes. The most perfect limestone sheets they carved into low-relief lintels and friezes with which to decorate temples and palaces. Also, using leftover chunks of stone, the artists carved the little household gods treasured by families everywhere. In our house we had small figures of Tonatíu and Tlaloc, of course, and of the maize goddess Chicomecoatl, and the hearth goddess Chintico. My sister Tzitzi even had her own private figurine of Xochiquetzal, goddess of love and flowers, to whom all young girls prayed for a suitable and loving husband.
The stone chips and other detritus from the quarries were burned in the kilns I have mentioned, from which emerged powder of lime, another valuable commodity. This is essential for the mortar used to cement a building's blocks together. It also makes a gesso for plastering and disguising buildings made of cheaper materials. Mixed with water, the lime is used for hulling the kernels of maize that our women grind into meal for tlaxcaltin tortillas and other foods. The lime was even used by a certain class of women as a cosmetic; with it they bleached their black or brown hair to an unnatural yellow hue, like that of some of your own women.