Gary Jennings - Aztec

I stayed in attendance while the Mexíca lords ceremoniously presented the gifts we had brought from Motecuzóma. A gleam of avarice enlivened even the flat eyes of Cortés, as one porter after another laid down his burden and undid its wrappings—the great gold gong and the silver gong, the feather-work articles, the gems and jewelry. Cortés said to Alvarado, "Call the Flemish lapidary," and they were joined by another white man who evidently had come with the Spaniards for the sole purpose of evaluating the treasures that they might find in these lands. Whatever a Flemish is, he spoke Spanish, and, though his words were not translated for us, I caught the sense of most of them.

He pronounced the gold and silver items to be of great worth, and likewise the pearls and opals and turquoise. The emeralds and jacinths and topazes and amethysts, he said, were even more valuable—above all, the emeralds—though he would have preferred them cut in facets instead of sculptured into miniature flowers and animals and such. The feather-work headdresses and mantles, he suggested, might have some curiosity value as museum pieces. The many gem-worked jadestones he contemptuously swept to one side, though Ce-Malinali tried to explain that their religious aspect made them the gifts most to be respected.

The lapidary shrugged her off and said to Cortés, "They are not the jade of Cathay, nor even a passable false jade. They are only carved pebbles of green serpentine, Captain, worth hardly more than our glass trade beads."

I did not then know what glass is, and I still do not know what jade of Cathay is, but I had always known that our jadestones possessed only ritualistic value. Nowadays, of course, they have not even that; they are playthings for children and teething stones for infants. But at that time they still meant something to us, and I was angered by the way in which the white men received our gifts, putting a price on everything, as if we had been no more than importunate merchants trying to foist upon them spurious merchandise.

What was even more distressing: although the Spaniards so superciliously set values to everything we gave them, they clearly had no appreciation of works of art, but only of their worth as bulk metal. For they pried all the gems from their gold and silver settings, and put the stones aside in sacks, while they broke and bent and mashed the residue of finely wrought gold and silver into great stone vessels, and set fires under them, and by squeezing leather devices pumped those fires to fierce heat, so that the metals melted. Meanwhile, the lapidary and his assistants scooped rectangular depressions in the damp sand of the shore, and into those they poured the molten metals to cool and harden. So what remained of the treasures we had brought—even those huge and irreplaceably beautiful gold and silver disks which had served Motecuzóma for gongs—became only solid ingots of gold and silver as featureless and unlovely as adobe bricks.

Leaving my fellow lords to act their lordliest, I spent the next several days drifting to and fro among the mass of common soldiers. I counted them and their weapons and their tethered horses and staghounds, and other appurtenances of which I could not then divine the purpose: such things as stores of heavy metal balls and strangely curved low chairs made of leather. I took care not to attract attention as a mere idler. Like the Totonaca men whom the Spaniards had put to forced labor, I made sure to be always carrying something like a plank of wood or a water skin, and to look as if I were taking it to some destination. Since there was a constant traffic of Spanish soldiers and Totonaca porters between the camp of Vera Cruz and the rising town of Vera Cruz, and since the Spaniards then (as they still do) claimed that they "could not tell the damned Indians apart," I went as unnoticed as any single blade of the dune grasses growing along that shore. Whatever pretended freight I carried did not interfere with my subtly using my topaz, and making notes of the things and persons I counted, and quickly jotting down word picture descriptions of them.

I could have wished that I was carrying a censer of incense, instead of a plank or whatever, when I was among the Spaniards. But I must concede that they did not all smell quite so bad as I remembered. While they still showed no inclination to wash or steam themselves, they did—after a day of hard work—strip down to their startlingly pale skin, only leaving on their filthy underclothes, and wade out into the sea surf. None of them could swim, I gathered, but they splashed about sufficiently to rinse the day's sweat from their bodies. That did not make them smell like flowers, particularly since they climbed right back into their crusty and rancid outer clothes, but the rinsing at least made them slightly less fetid than a vulture's breath.

As I rambled up and down the coast, and spent the nights in either the Vera Cruz camp or the Vera Cruz town, I kept my ears as wide open as my eyes. Though I seldom heard anything rousingly informative—the soldiers spent a good deal of their talk in grumbling about the unfamiliar baldness of the "Indian" women's torsos, as compared to the comfortably hairy crotches and armpits of their women across the water—I did recover and improve my understanding of the Spanish language. Still, I took care not to be overheard by any of the soldiers when I practiced repeating their words and phrases to myself.

As a further safeguard against exposure as an imposter, I did not converse with the Totonaca either, so I could not ask anyone to explain a curious thing which I saw repeatedly, and was puzzled by. Along the coast, and especially in the capital city of Tzempoalan, there are many pyramids erected to Tezcatlipóca and other gods. There is even one pyramid that is not square but a conical tower of diminishing round terraces; it is dedicated to the wind god Ehecatl, and was constructed so that his winds might blow freely about it without having to angle around corners.

Every one of the Totonaca pyramids has a temple on top, but all those temples had been shockingly changed. Not a single one any longer contained the statue of Tezcatlipóca or Ehecatl or any other god. All of them had been scraped and scrubbed of their accumulation of coagulated blood. All of them had been refinished on the inside with a clean wash of white lime. And in every one stood only a stark wooden cross and a single small figure, also made of wood, rather crudely carved. It represented a young woman, her right hand raised in a vaguely admonitory gesture. Her hair was painted flat black, her robe a flat blue and her eyes the same, her skin a pinkish-white like that of the Spaniards. Most queer, the woman wore a gilded circular crown that was so much too large for her that it nowhere rested on her head but was attached at the back of her hair.

It was clear to me that, although the Spaniards had not sought or provoked any battle with the Totonaca, they had threatened and bullied and frightened those people into replacing all their mighty and ancient gods with the single pallid and placid female. I took her to be the goddess Our Lady of whom I had heard, but I could not see what made the Totonaca accept her as in any way superior to the old gods. In truth, from the vapid look of her, I could not understand why even the Spaniards saw in Our Lady any godlike attributes worth their own veneration.

But then my wanderings brought me one day to a grassy hollow some way inshore, and it was full of Totonaca who were standing and listening, with an appearance of attentive stupidity, while they were harangued by one of the Spanish priests who had come with the military men. Those priests, I might remark, seemed not so alien and unnatural as did the soldiers. Only the cut of their hair was different; otherwise their black garments much resembled those of our own priests, and smelled very like them, too. The one preaching to that assemblage was doing so with the help of the two interpreters, Aguilar and Ce-Malinali, whom evidently he borrowed whenever they were not required by Cortés. The Totonaca appeared to listen stolidly to his speech, though I knew they could not understand two words in ten of even Ce-Malinali's Náhuatl translation.