Aztec - Jennings Gary - Страница 59
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Alone in the house, alone with my thoughts, I translated my mother's story into what I was sure had happened in fact. Tzitzi had not escaped from her guardian women. They had duly delivered her to Pactli at the palace. He, in a fury—and in what manner I tried not to imagine—had put my sister to death. His father might have been fully in accord with the execution, but he was a notably fair-minded man, and he could not have condoned a killing in cold blood, done without due process of trial and condemnation. The Lord Red Heron would have had the choice, then, of bringing his own son to trial or of covering up the whole affair. So he and Pactli—and, I suspected, Pactli's long-time conspirator, my mother—had concocted the story of Tzitzi's escape and flight in a stolen canoe. And, to smooth things over even more neatly, to discourage questions or a renewed search for the girl, the governor had thrown a sop to my father.
After stowing Tzitzi's belongings, I packed those of my own which I had brought with me from Texcoco. The last thing I tucked into my portable wicker basket was the figurine of Xochiquetzal. Then I shouldered the basket and left the house, never to come back again. When I walked down toward the lakeshore, a butterfly accompanied me for a while, and several times fluttered in circles around my head.
I was fortunate enough to find a fisherman who was irreverently determined to go on working during the Ochpanitztli festival, and who was even then preparing to paddle out to await the twilight rising of the lake's whitefish. He agreed to row me all the way to Texcoco, for a payment considerably in excess of what he could have earned from a whole night's fishing.
On the way, I asked him, "Have you heard of any fisherman or fowler losing a canoe recently? Of anyone's acali having floated away or been stolen?"
"No," he said.
I looked back at the island, sunlit and peaceful in the summer afternoon. It sprawled on the lake water as it always had and always would, except that it would never again know "the sound of small bells ringing"—or give another thought to such a small deprivation. The Lord Red Heron, the Lord Joy, my mother and father, my friends Chimali and Tlatli, all the other inhabitants of Xaltocan, they had already agreed to forget.
I had not.
"Why, Head Nodder!" exclaimed the Lady of Tolan, the first person I encountered on my way to my apartment in the palace. "You have come back early from your holiday at home."
"Yes, my lady. Xaltocan no longer feels like home to me. And I have many things to do here."
"Do you mean you were homesick for Texcoco?" she said, smiling. "Then we must have made you learn to like us here. I am delighted to think so, Head Nodder."
"Please, my lady," I said huskily, "do not call me that anymore. I have seen enough of head nodding."
"Oh?" she said, her smile fading as she studied my face. "Whatever name you prefer, then."
I thought of the several things I had to do, and I said to her, "Tlilectic-Mixtli is the name I was given from the book of divination and prophecies. Call me what I am. Dark Cloud."
I H S
S.C.C.M.
Sanctified, Caesarean, Catholic Majesty, the Emperor Don Carlos, Our Lord King:
Most High and Mighty Majesty, our Sovereign Liege: from the City of Mexico, capital of New Spain, this day of the Feast of the Dolors in the Year of Our Lord one thousand five hundred twenty and nine, greeting.
We regret that we cannot include, with these latest collected pages of manuscript, the pictures which Your Majesty requests in your most recent letter: "those pictures of persons, especially of female persons, drawn by the storyteller and referred to in this chronicle." The aged Indian himself, when questioned as to their whereabouts, laughs at the idea that such trivially indecent jottings should have been worth keeping all these years, or that, even if they had been of any value, they could have survived all these years.
We refrain from deploring the obscenities those drawings were intended to record, since we are certain that the pictures, even if available, would have conveyed nothing to Your Majesty. We know that our Imperial Sovereign's sense of appreciation is accustomed to works of art like those of the Master Matsys, whose painting of Erasmus, for example, is unmistakably recognizable as Erasmus. The persons portrayed in the daubs made by these Indians are seldom recognizable even as human beings, except in a few of the more representational wall frescoes and reliefs.
Your Most Lofty Majesty has earlier bidden your chaplain to secure "writings, tablets, or other records" to substantiate the tales told in these pages. But we assure you, Sire, that the Aztec exaggerates wildly when he speaks of writing and reading, drawing and painting. These savages never created or possessed or preserved any mementos of their history aside from some plicate paper folders, skins and panels bearing multitudes of primitive figures such as children might scribble. These would be inscrutable to any civilized eye, and were of use to the Indians only as mnemonic aids for their "wise men," who utilized the scrawls to jog their memory as they repeated the oral history of their tribe or clan. A dubious sort of history at best.
Before your servant's arrival in this land, the Franciscan friars, sent here five years previous by His Holiness the late Pope Adrian, had already combed every part of the country adjacent to this capital city. Those good brothers had collected, from every still-standing edifice that might be considered an archival depository, many thousands of the Indian "books," but had made no disposition of them, pending higher directive.
Wherefore, as Your Majesty's delegated Bishop, we ourself examined the confiscated "libraries," and found not one item that contained anything but tawdry and grotesque figures. Most of those were nightmarish: beasts, monsters, false gods, demons, butterflies, reptiles, and other things of like vulgar nature. Some of the figures purported to represent human beings, but—as in that absurd style of art which the Bolognese call caricatura—the humans were indistinguishable from pigs, asses, gargoyles, or anything else the imagination might conceive.
Since there was not a single work in which there was not to be seen rank superstition and delusions inspired by the Devil, we commanded that the thousands upon thousands of volumes and scrolls be made a heap in this city's main marketplace, and there had them burned to ashes, and the ashes dispersed. We submit that such was the fitting end for those pagan mementos, and we doubt that there remain any others in all the regions of New Spain thus far explored.
Be it noted, Sire, that the Indian onlookers at the burning, though almost all of them are now professed Christians, unashamedly showed a disgusting degree of regret and anguish; they even wept whilst they gazed upon the pyre, as they might have been so many real Christians watching the desecration and destruction of so many Holy Scriptures. We take that as evidence that these creatures have not yet been so wholeheartedly converted to Christianity as we and Mother Church would wish. Hence this most humble servant of Your Very Pious and Devout Majesty still has and will have many urgent episcopal duties pertinent to the more intense propagation of the Faith.
We beg Your Majesty's understanding that such duties must take precedence over our acting as auditor and monitor of the loquacious Aztec, except in our increasingly rare spare moments. We also beg that Your Majesty will understand the necessity of our occasionally sending a package of pages without a commentary letter, and sometimes even sending it unread by us.
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