I bent towards the hand for a closer look, but at that point nausea finally got the better of me. I ran to the edge of the canal and vomited, voiding my almost empty stomach and heaving drily and painfully until I scarcely had the strength to draw breath. For a long time after that I just knelt by the water’s edge, watching the gathering pre-dawn light catch the ripples on its surface until the moisture in my own eyes turned them first into vague ghostly shapes and then into a feeble, pale flickering, like a blanket being shaken out on a dull day.
A long time passed after I had fled from the horror I found behind the screen, during which I did nothing but crouch wretchedly beside the canal. When my stomach had stopped heaving I wept, and when my tears had dried up I merely stared at the water.
I ought to have gone back, to tip up all the other pots and confront their secrets. I shifted my weight from my heels to the balls of my feet twice, meaning to get up and look behind the screen again, but both times I stayed where I was. I thought I could guess what had happened, and I could not bear to have it confirmed.
My son had gone to Kindly’s house, looking for his knife. Iwondered whether he had surprised another thief, whoever had stolen Kindly’s costume, or whether, as Kindly himself believed, the two of them had been in it together and had fallen out. One of them had stabbed the other, and the victim had ended up here. I looked back along the bridge and tried, in spite of myself, to visualize what had happened: the killer carrying the body as far as the middle of the bridge, perhaps, and then dropping it and dragging it the rest of the way before cutting it up and concealing it hastily in a public privy.
Could Nimble have done such a thing? I closed my eyes and tried to imagine the boy I had known all too briefly killing a man for the sake of a bronze knife and a feathered costume. It was difficult. Nimble had been the lover of a vicious, cold-blooded and sadistic murderer, but he was no killer himself. Yet the alternative explanation was worse: that it was my son’s body that lay in pieces, just a few paces away
I had to know.
Swallowing once, I forced myself to my feet, and then realized that the matter was out of my hands and my chance had been lost.
It was almost dawn and the city was coming to life. Canoes began gliding by, and one or two of their boatmen glanced curiously at the miserable creature standing by the canal, his face pale from retching, his eyes raw and his clothes reduced to rags. I knew that I had better move on quickly before somebody else discovered what I had seen and connected it with me.
With one last brief glance at the screen, I went on my way.
THREE RABBIT
1
I had no difficulty in memorizing the directions Kindly had given me. Still I managed to get lost four times. The horrifying discovery I had just made kept forcing itself into my thoughts, making it hard to concentrate. It was not until late in the morning that I found myself where I wanted to be, and even then I was not certain I had got it right.
The route Kindly had given me took me among the sturdy, respectable houses of the featherworkers, and past them. It led me down narrow, overgrown, silted-up canals whose stagnant waters reeked even on a cool winter’s morning, among wretched hovels, some of them little more than one-room huts, some of them obviously long abandoned and others with their roofs coated with moss and their sides piled high with stinking garbage, and into what I was convinced must be another parish altogether.
Eventually I asked a water seller to confirm that I was where I thought I was. He was standing up in a canoe, using his paddle to hack his way through the reeds in his path while lumps of green scum swirled and coagulated in his wake. The canoe was laden with pots that I presumed were full of fresh water from the spring at Chapultepec, on the mainland. Every morning the water sellers drew it from the aqueduct that had been built over the lake in Emperor Ahuitzotl’s time, and filled their pots with it for sale to countless thirsty households in thecity Of course, Mexico was riddled with canals, but nobody in his right mind would ever drink out of them.
My question made him laugh. ‘Amantlan? You must be joking!’ His voice had a nasal tone, the result of trying to avoid breathing through his nose. ‘Amantlan’s back there.’ He jerked his head to indicate the way I had come. ‘This is Atecocolecan.’
I stared about me, bewildered. I had not realized I had walked so far, but as I took in my surroundings it began to make sense. Atecocolecan: the Place of the Angry Water. I had walked all the way to the edge of Mexico’s island, close to where the northern causeway linked the city to Tepeyac on the mainland. ‘It’s a dump! Look — there isn’t even a path over there. It’s just a marsh — you can’t tell where the canal ends and the ground starts. These houses must be waterlogged all the time.’ The name of this place was no accident. After a serious flood many of the hovels around me would be driftwood.
He dipped his paddle in the water. ‘Afraid so,’ he acknowledged.
‘Do you know where Skinny lives?’ I called after him, as his canoe at last got under way through the gap he had hacked through the foliage. ‘Only I was looking for him, but I got lost.’
‘Skinny?’ He laughed shortly without looking around. ‘You’re not lost. He lives right here!’ He waved his paddle at a house just a few paces away. ‘Doesn’t owe you any money, does he?’
‘No.’
‘Good for you! If you catch him, mention me, eh? Tell him I’ll settle for a nice plump turkey hen, as long as she’s a good layer. Otherwise he can drink his own piss!’
The paddle hit the water with an emphatic splash, throwingup a jet of green and brown muck. It did not propel the canoe forward with any great speed, but it probably felt good.
Skinny’s house was not one of the meanest in this part of the city. It was in better condition than the dwellings on either side. On the other hand, they were both ruins, evidently deserted, unless you counted the rats. The featherworker’s property looked sturdy enough, but its walls were in desperate need of rendering and all that remained of the garden on its roof was a few bedraggled brown leaves trailing over its edge.
A gang of men driving wooden piles into the bed of the swamp at the back of the house, shaking the ground with their hammering and tormenting the air with their tuneless singing, did nothing for the neighbourhood. The water seller’s s parting remark came back to me. Here was the home of a family down on its luck.
I wondered how a featherworker could possibly have ended up here, especially one as eminent as Skinny Amantlan was like many parishes in Mexico, in that its people were a close-knit community, bound together by ties of kinship, whose sons and daughters rarely married outside and were expected to carry on a family business that they had in common with all their friends and relations. Put two Aztecs together and there would be rivalry, and the Amanteca were no exception to this, but something extraordinary must have happened to allow a great craftsman to fall so far, without his peers doing anything to stop it.
Considering the state of his home, I began to wonder whether it would, after all, be so surprising if Skinny had sold the god’s costume to Kindly. He might well have been desperate enough.
A low square doorway, leading straight into a room, broke the clean white expanse of the wall in front of me. There wasno screen but the interior was too dark to give anything away. The glare of a sunlit courtyard, visible through another doorway directly opposite the street entrance, made it look darker. By squinting I was just able to make out a few features in the courtyard: the domed shape of a sweat bath against the rear wall, another doorway off to one side.