There was no one in the first room and I went straight through into the courtyard. That was deserted too. This puzzled me, because most dwellings in Mexico were home to more than one household and were consequently crowded, even during the day with the men away in the fields.
I stopped wondering about that when I saw the idols.
Every house in Mexico had them. In most a ledge near the hearth served as a shrine, a home for the household’s patron deities, who might be feared or adored but were always cherished and often treated as if they were members of the family.
Here, it seemed, things were done differently. Two of the courtyard’s four walls, the ones that were not lined with rooms, were richly decorated with statuettes of the gods. Some were new, some old. The biggest was half my height and I could have closed my fist around the smallest. They were made of everything from brilliantly polished greenstone to crudely carved wood, ash or fir or something similarly cheap and plentiful. I saw Tezcatlipoca, Xipe Totec with his mask of human skin, Tlaloc with his protruding, goggle eyes and his consort Chalcihuitlicue, She of the Jade Skirt, Ohmacatl, the vain and importunate lord of the feast, several other gods I knew and a few I did not know. I supposed the particular gods of the featherworkers — Coyotl Inahual and the women Xilo and Xiuhtlati — must be here, and I recognized Yacatecuhtli, the merchants’ god, whom the featherworkers honoured as well.
There was something odd about these figures, apart from their number and variety. All of them, despite having beenplaced so carefully in niches that had been lovingly prepared for them, were coated in a fine layer of dust, and some were stained, smeared, defaced with dried muck. One of the idols had even been broken. It was impossible to tell which god it represented, because all that was left was a jagged greenstone stump.
Clay flower pots stood on the floor of the courtyard. One of them had fallen over and cracked, leaving the floor around it strewn with soil. That made me frown, for sweeping was a sacred duty and for a pious Aztec to neglect it altogether was all but unthinkable.
When I looked up again I saw I was no longer alone.
Although the wall to my right stretched the whole length of the courtyard, there was only one opening in it, the one I had caught sight of from the front of the house. A short, grubby cloth screen had been hung across it. This still shivered, as it would if it had been tugged aside and jerked back into place. A man stood in front of it.
‘Who are you? What are you doing here? This is a private house. Whatever you’re selling, we don’t want any. Get out!’
I took a step back, astonished. It was not the sort of greeting I would have expected to get anywhere in Mexico, where visitors could normally expect to be received with almost ceremonial courtesy I stared at the stranger, taking in as much of his appearance as I could while I tried to think of a suitable reply.
He was about my height and, like me, perhaps forty years old. He was thin and gaunt, with his ribs showing plainly where his cloak parted. Dark hollows around his eyes added to my impression that he was in need of a square meal. Their lids were heavy as well, and he kept blinking as he stared at me, in the slow, stupid manner of someone who has just been roused from a deep sleep.
A long scratch ran down one of his cheeks. It was a recent wound, and I doubted that it was deep enough to leave a scar, but it might easily have been much worse, since it began a hair’s breadth from the corner of his left eye.
I cleared my throat uncertainly. ‘You must be Skinny. Is that any way for a great craftsman to greet a customer?’
The eyebrows shot up to the top of his forehead and fluttered down again. ‘A customer?’ He gaped at me.
The screen behind him rustled and was pulled aside. He jerked his head around quickly, and I saw one of his hands clench and loosen nervously as I peered over his shoulder to see who was following him into the courtyard.
A woman’s voice cooed: ‘Skinny? Who’s this?’
Aztec children learned at an early age that it was rude to stare openly at someone. If my father could have seen me at that moment he would probably have had me hanging upside down over burning chillies, grown man or not, until he judged that seared lungs and streaming eyes had reminded me firmly enough of my manners.
She slipped from the room as silently and gracefully as an ocelot stalking a sparrow along the branch of a tree, and stood next to the man, so close that her bare arm brushed against his, all the time keeping her eyes fixed on me with a stare as frank as mine. Perfect ellipses, those eyes were, wide and glistening, their irises pure black, matching the hair that fell loose about her face and cascaded like molten tar over her shoulders. No doubt its dark sheen owed something to indigo dye, but a man would have to have been made of marble to care about that. I was not, which was why I could not help noticing, beneath her plain skirt and shift, the curve of the woman’s thigh and the swell of breasts tipped by nipples as small and sharp as arrowheads.
‘Says he’s a customer.’
Skinny’s voice snatched me out of my reverie. Hastily I forced my eyes back to the woman’s face. It was a perfect oval of clear, unblemished skin, with an interesting pallor that might have been natural but was more likely the result of staining with yellow ochre. I wondered how old she was, thinking she must be much younger than the man, perhaps not yet twenty.
‘Madam, I am sorry to have troubled you,’ I mumbled, ‘but I was looking for Skinny the craftsman …’
She yawned. A hand flew upward to cover her mouth, and dropped again to reveal a weary smile.
‘I beg your pardon. You must think we’re very rude, but neither of us slept very well. You must have come far, you’ll be tired. Have a rest and something to eat.’ It was merely the conventional way to greet visitors but she managed to make it sound as if she was truly concerned. Detaching herself from the man, she began walking towards a doorway in the wall behind me.
I forced myself to take my eyes off her and turn back towards the man. ‘You are Skinny, the featherworker? I have got the right house?’
He looked hastily from me to the girl and back again. ‘Yes,’ he admitted gruffly. ‘And this is Papalotl, my wife.’ Her name suited her. It meant ‘Butterfly’. ‘We weren’t expecting visitors. Who did you say you were?’
‘I’m Moquequeloa,’ I said, on the spur of the moment, and instantly regretted it. It was one of the names we used for Tezcatlipoca, and meant ‘Joker’. ‘I was looking to buy a piece of featherwork for my master.’ I could not resist a quick look over my shoulder, but all I could see of the girl was the sheen of her long hair in the dark room beyond the doorway she had gone through.
‘You want to buy a piece of featherwork?’ The man’s holloweyes widened and then narrowed suspiciously. ‘What kind of piece, exactly? What made you come here?’
That seemed like an odd question, coming from a renowned master of his craft, but I was spared the need to answer it straight away by his wife’s reappearance.
‘I can’t offer you very much, I’m afraid,’ she said. She had a drinking-gourd in her hand which she proffered, this time with modestly downcast eyes. ‘Here is some water. All we have to eat are some cakes of stone dung.’
‘Thank you.’ I took the stopper off the gourd and raised it. I took a cautious sniff before pressing it to my lips, and decided I was not thirsty after all. It must have been a long while since Skinny’s credit with the water seller had run out. I passed the gourd to Skinny, who took it and drank without hesitation, as if he no longer noticed what the contents tasted like.
‘It’s very kind of you,’ I added politely, ‘but I ate and drank before I came here.’ Stone dung was what we called scum skimmed off the surface of the lake, which was dried and sold in the markets as crumbly cakes. It was nourishing enough, provided nobody had been emptying pots of whitewash into the water while it was being harvested, but scarcely appetizing. During one of the lowest periods in my life I had made a living collecting the stuff, and so I was even less fond of it than most Aztecs.