Gary Jennings - Aztec

During the following days, Motecuzóma personally conducted his guests on tours of the city, accompanied by the Snake Woman or others of his Speaking Council, and by a number of his court priests, who wore faces of extreme disapproval, and by me. I was always in the company, at Motecuzóma's insistence, because I had warned him of Malintzin's cunning aptitude for mistranslating. Cortés remembered me, as he had said he would, but apparently without any rancor. He smiled his thin smile when we were introduced by name, and he accepted my company amiably enough, and he spoke his words as often through my translation as through that of his woman. She also recognized me, of course, and with obvious odium, and she addressed me not at all. When her master chose to speak through me, she glared as if she were awaiting only a propitious moment to have me put to death. Well, fair enough, I thought. It was what I planned for her.

On those walks about the city, Cortés was always accompanied by his second in command, the big, flame-haired Pedro de Alvarado, and by most of his other officers, and naturally by Malintzin, and by two or three of his own priests, who looked about as sour as ours. We would also usually be followed by a straggle of the common soldiers, though other groups of them might wander about the island on their own, while the native warriors of their company tended not to stray far from the security of their barracks at the palace.

As I have said, those warriors wore the new headdress ordained by Cortés: it looked like a clump of high, pliant grass growing from the tops of their heads. But the Spanish soldiers too, since I had seen them last, had added to their military headgear a distinctive adornment. Each of them wore a curious, pale-leather band encircling the crown of his steel helmet, just above its flanged brim. It was not particularly decorative, and served no apparent purpose, so eventually I inquired about it and one of the Spaniards, laughing, told me what it was.

During the affray at Chololan, while the Texcalteca were indiscriminately butchering the mass of the city's inhabitants, the Spaniards had gone looking specifically for the females with whom they had disported themselves during their fourteen days of revel, and they found most of those women and girls still in their quarters, trembling with fear. Convinced that the females had coupled with them only to sap their strength, the Spaniards exacted a unique revenge. They seized the women and girls, stripped them naked, and used some of them a last time or two. Then, though the females screamed and pleaded, the soldiers held them down and, with their sharp steel knives, they cut away from each female's crotch a hand-sized flap of skin containing the oval opening of her tipíli. They left the mutilated and sexless women to bleed to death, and went away. They took the warm, purselike pouches of skin and stretched the lips of them around the pommels of their horses' saddles. When the flesh had dried but was still pliable, they slipped the resultant circlets over their helmets, each with its little xacapili pearl facing front—that is, the shriveled, beanlike gristle that had been a tender xacapili. I do not know whether the soldiers wore those trophies as a grisly joke or as a warning to other scheming females.

All the Spaniards remarked approvingly on the size and population and splendor and cleanliness of Tenochtítlan, and compared it to other cities they had visited. The names of those other cities mean nothing to me, but you reverend friars may know them. The guests said our city was bigger in extent than Valladolid, that it was more populous than Seville, that its buildings were almost as magnificent as those of Holy Rome, that its canals made it resemble Amsterdam or Venice, that its streets and airs and waters were cleaner than in any of those places. We guides refrained from remarking that the effluvium of the Spaniards was noticeably diminishing that cleanliness. Yes, the newcomers were much impressed by our city's architecture and ornamentation and orderliness, but do you know what most impressed them? What moved them to their loudest exclamations of wonder and amazement?

Our sanitary closets.

It was clear that many of those men had traveled widely in your Old World, but it was equally clear that nowhere had they encountered an indoor facility for performing one's necessary functions. They were amazed enough to find such closets in the palace they occupied; they were astonished beyond words when we took them to visit the market square of Tlaltelólco and they found public conveniences provided for even the common folk: the vendors and the marketers there. When the Spaniards first noticed the things, every single man of them, Cortés included, just had to go inside and void himself. So did Malintzin, since such conveniences were as unknown in her native backcountry of the uncivilized Coatlicamac as they evidently are in Spain's Holy Rome. As long as Cortés and his company stayed on the island, and as long as the marketplace existed, those public closets were the most popular and most often visited attractions of all that Tenochtítlan had to offer.

While the Spaniards were enchanted by the closets of continually flushing water, our Mexíca physicians were cursing those same conveniences, for they avidly wished to get a sample of Cortés's bodily wastes. And if the Spaniards were behaving like children with a new toy, those doctors were behaving like quimichime mice, forever following Cortés about or popping their heads suddenly from around corners. Cortés could not help noticing those various elderly strangers peeking and peering at him everywhere he went in public. He finally asked about them, and Motecuzóma, secretly amused by their antics, replied only that they were doctors watching over the health of their most honored guest. Cortés shrugged and said no more, though I suspect he formed the opinion that all our physicians were more pathetically ill than any patients they might attend. Of course, what the doctors were doing, and not doing very subtly, was trying to verify their earlier conclusion that the white man Cortés was indeed afflicted with the nanaua disease. They were trying to measure with their eyes the significant curvature of his thighbones, trying to get close enough to hear if he breathed with the characteristic snuffling noise, or to see if his incisor teeth had the telltale notches.

Even I began to find them an embarrassment and an annoyance, always lurking in the way of our walks about the city and abruptly pouncing from unexpected places. When one day I literally tripped over an old doctor who was crouching for a leg-level view of Cortés, I angrily took him aside and demanded, "If you dare not ask for permission to examine the exalted white man, surely you can invent some excuse for examining his woman, who is merely one of us."

"It would not serve, Mixtzin," said the physician unhappily. "She will not have been infected by their connection. The nanaua can be transmitted to a sexual partner only in its early and flagrantly evident stages. If, as we suspect, the man was born of a diseased mother, then he is long past being a hazard to any other woman, though he could give her a diseased child. We are all naturally eager to know if we rightly divined his condition, but we cannot be sure. If only he were not so fascinated by the sanitary facilities, if we could examine his urine for traces of chiatoztli..."

I said in exasperation, "I keep finding you everywhere except squatting under him in the closets. I suggest, Lord Physician, that you go and instruct their palace steward to have slaves dismantle the man's closet there, and explain that it is clogged, and provide a pot for him to use in the meantime, and instruct his chambermaid to bring the pot—"

"Ayyo, a brilliant idea," said the physician, and he went hurrying off. We were molested no more during our excursions, but I never did hear whether the doctors found any definite evidence of Cortés's being a sufferer of the shameful disease.