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.
Of course the gods give nothing absolutely free of payment, and from time to time they exacted tribute from us for the wealth of limestone we dug out of Xaltócan. I happened to be at my father's quarry on a day when the gods decided to take a token sacrifice.
A number of porters were hauling a tremendous block of new-cut stone up the long incline, like a curving shelf, that spiraled from the bottom of the quarry to the top. They did it by sheer muscle power, with a tumpline around each man's forehead attached to the rope net that dragged the block. Somewhere high up on that ramp, the block slid too close to the edge, or was tilted by some irregularity in the path. Whatever happened, it slowly and implacably fell sideways. There was much shouting and, if the porters had not instantly ripped the tumplines from their heads, they would have gone over the brink with the block. But one man, far below in the noise of the quarry, did not hear the shouts. The block came down upon him, and one of its edges, like a stone adze, chopped him precisely in half at his waist.
The limestone block had gouged such a deep notch in the quarry floor that it stayed there, balanced on its angular edge. So my father and the other men who rushed to the spot were able without much difficulty to topple it to one side. They found, to their astonishment, that the victim of the gods was still alive and even conscious.
Unnoticed in the excitement, I came close and saw the man, who was now in two pieces. From the waist up, his naked and sweaty body was intact and unmarked. But his waist was pinched wide and flat, so his torso itself rather resembled an adze or a chisel. The stone had simultaneously severed him—skin, flesh, guts, spine—and neatly closed the wound so that there was not even a drop of blood spilt. He might have been a cotton doll that had been sliced across the middle, then sewn at the cut. His bottom half, still wearing its loincloth, lay separated from him, neatly pinched shut and bloodless—though the legs were twitching slightly, and that half of the body was copiously urinating and defecating.
The massive injury must have so deadened all the cut nerves that the man even felt no pain. He raised his head and looked in mild wonder at himself in two halves. To spare him the sight, the other men quickly and tenderly carried him—the upper half of him—some distance away, and leaned him against the quarry wall. He flexed his arms, opened and closed his hands, experimentally turned his head about, and said in a voice of awe:
"I still can move and talk. I see you all, my comrades. I can reach out and touch and feel you. I hear the hewing of tools. I smell the bitter dust of lime. I still live. This is a most marvelous thing."
"It is," my father said gruffly. "But it cannot be for long, Xicama. There is no use even sending for a physician. You will want a priest. Of which god, Xicama?"
The man thought for a moment. "I can soon greet all the gods, when I can no longer do anything else. But while I still can speak, I had better talk to Filth Eater."
So the call was relayed to the top of the quarry, and from there a runner sped to fetch a priest of the goddess Tlazolteotl, or Filth Eater. Her unlovely name notwithstanding, she was a most compassionate goddess. It was to her that dying men confessed all their sins and misdeeds—quite often living men, too, when they felt particularly distressed or depressed by something they had done—so that Tlazolteotl might swallow their sins, and those sins would disappear as if they had never been committed. Thus they did not go with a man, to count against him or to haunt his memory, in whatever afterworld he was headed for.
While we waited for the priest, Xicama kept his eyes averted from himself, where his body appeared to be squeezed into a cleft of the rock floor, and spoke calmly, almost cheerfully, to my father. He gave him messages to impart to his parents, to his widow and orphaned children, and made suggestions as to their disposition of what little property he owned, and wondered aloud what his family would do when its provider was gone.
"Do not trouble your mind," said my father. "It is your tonáli that the gods take you in exchange for the prosperity of us who remain. In thanks for your sacrifice of yourself, we and the Lord Governor will make suitable compensation to your widow."
"Then she will have a respectable inheritance," said Xicama, relieved. "And she is still a young and handsome woman. Please, Head Nodder, prevail on her to marry again."
"I will do that. Is there anything else?"
"No," said Xicama. He looked about him and smiled. "I never thought I would regret seeing the last of this dreary quarry. Do you know, Head Nodder, even this stone pit looks beautiful and inviting now? The white clouds up there, then the blue sky, then the white stone here... like clouds above and below the blue. I wish, though, I could see the green trees beyond the rim—"
"You will," my father promised, "but after you have finished with the priest. We had better not chance moving you until then."
The priest came, in all his black of flaffing black robes and blood-crusted black hair and never-washed sooty face. He was the only darkness and gloom that marred the clean blue and white of which Xicama was sorry to take leave. All the other men moved away to give them privacy. (And my father espied me among them, and angrily bade me begone; that was no sight for a young boy.) While Xicama was occupied with the priest, four men picked up his stinking and still-quivering lower half, to carry it up to the top of the quarry. One of them vomited along the way.
Xicama evidently had led no very villainous life; it did not take him long to confess to Filth Eater whatever he regretted having done or left undone. When the priest had absolved him on behalf of the goddess, and had said all the ritual words and made all the ritual gestures, he stood away. Four more men carefully picked up the still-living part of Xicama and carried him, as rapidly as they could without jostling, up the incline toward the quarry rim.