Aztec Rage (13 page)

“They found out I'm not lying, haven't they?”

He put his nosegay to his face distastefully. “You have caused your betters trouble and consternation. Some wish to try you in court, then hang you. Others wish to turn you over to the Inquisition to be tortured hard and burned at the stake.”

“The Inquisition? What have I done against God and the church?”

“You
exist
.” He struggled to maintain his composure. “You may thank God that the viceroy is not hanging you and the Inquisitors are not burning you alive . . . after breaking you on the rack.”

“I have done nothing wrong,” I said stubbornly.

“Get out of here, you swine, before I order you racked, flogged, castrated, and quartered myself.”

Lizardi was waiting in line to see the notary.

I whispered to him as I came by, “They're sending me to Manila.”

His jaw dropped, and he made the sign of the cross on his chest.

What's wrong with him?
I wondered. I got good news, and he acted like I had been sentenced to the holy fires of an Inquisitional auto-da-fé.

I went back to the cell and lay on my straw mattress. Lizardi and I were both back in the small, private cell. Someone—my Isabella, for certain—was again paying for me to have decent food and treatment. I was just as certain that she had arranged my voyage to Manila and that she would meet me there.

When Lizardi came back, he was ghostly white, his face haggard and drawn.

“What's the matter?”

Full of gloom, he crossed himself again. “I've been sentenced to Manila, too.”

“So? We were facing the hangman, and we have been saved. Now we can—”

“Are you so stupid?” He collapsed next to me, rubbing his face with his hands.

“What's wrong with Manila?” I demanded.

“It's a death sentence.”

I shook my head. “
¡Mierda del toro!
Manila is a Spanish colony like New Spain—”

“No, not like New Spain. A jungle, nine or ten thousand miles from here, a journey that many prisoners never survive. Chained in the ship's sewage-filled hold, the prisoners spend half their time wallowing in bilge, the other half fighting off rats. The survivors are sold into slavery on jungle plantations where fevers, snakes, and spiders kill more men than the Veracruz corridor when the vomito negro lies in wait.” He laid back on his straw pad and closed his eyes. “Then there are the wild savages who eat human flesh.”

“Something will turn up.”

“Our bodies. They will cross the galleon captain's palm with silver, and as soon as the ship leaves port, our throats will be slit and our bodies thrown overboard.” He stared at me, terrified.
“We're not meant to survive the voyage.”

I guffawed. “I see you are no longer just a bookworm and pamphleteer of ideas but a tomorrow-teller, like Europe's gypsies.”

An india servant who once tended to me when I was small, told me that her people believed the most intelligent creatures in the world were the worms that burrowed in books. I had never seen a bookworm, but this was how I viewed Lizardi, as a worm of knowledge.

“Juan, you don't understand guile because you were raised in a silk cocoon here in Guanajuato, cosseted by money and consumed solely by your desires. You've never dealt with the politics of the capital, where the viceroy and the archbishop have dissenters strangled in their cells at night.”

He sat up and locked eyes with me. “They have to get rid of us, can't you see that? They don't want either of us to have a public trial, to give me a forum to criticize their corrupt regime, to suffer the embarrassment of your acceptance as a gachupine. What better way to get rid of us than a sentence to Manila? Everyone knows no one returns from the exile. And if we die en route to those distant islands . . . not an eyebrow would be raised.”

My instincts were screaming that he was right. They would cut our throats and feed us to the fishes before we were a league out to sea.

It was a death sentence, not a reprieve.

“Señor,” I said, “we are doomed.”

He nodded. “You are finally beginning to understand life in New Spain.”

EIGHTEEN

S
EVEN MORE DAYS
passed, each one an agony of hard labor. My mysterious benefactor, whom I knew in my heart was Isabella, financed my private cell and sustenance. Lizardi still had not heard from his family, and I shared the bounty with him, telling him that I considered him the brother I never had, that I was repaying him for having shared his with me. These statements were not exactly true; he had only shared with me out of fear that I would harm him, and had the worm been my brother, I would have arranged a mortal accident for him. I shared with him because I knew in time he would be up again and I would be down. Eh, Don Juan the Caballero was learning to scheme like prison scum.

I could not truly love Lizardi as a brother because he carried a sense of racial superiority about him: He was a Spaniard and I was a peon. I still did not think of myself as of the lower classes—I was certain that I was indeed the real Juan de Zavala and that my uncle, in his final illness, had contrived the changeling story in revenge for the poisoning. As he lay dying, no doubt he assumed I had deliberately poisoned him.

Lizardi's attitude rankled me. He was especially contemptuous of my intelligence, conveying at every turn that I was intellectually inferior. Sometimes he treated me as if I were a naughty child, too immature for serious thought. It wasn't lost on me that I had treated my servants in the same way.

As the days went by, my hands, feet, and muscles hardened from the work. Thick shoulder and thigh muscles, and hard hands that evinced hard labor were unfashionable among caballeros. A slim silhouette on horseback was the fashion.

We had returned from a day's work and were finishing off my food and wine basket, when the trustee called Lizardi out. The trustee spoke to him privately. As Lizardi returned to our cell, I could see in the distance he was grinning, but when he approached the cell, he wiped the grin off his face and frowned.

“What news did you get?” I asked the worm.

“My family has forsaken me. We are doomed to the Manila galleon.”

I patted his arm. “As long as we go together, it is all right with me. I have come to think of you as the brother I never had. To share death with my brother would be fitting.”

He was a rotten liar. His news had been good, but he didn't want to share it with me. The only good news I could think of was that he had arranged some way to avoid the Manila death sentence, perhaps by betraying
me in some manner. He was a puzzlement to me: a man with the courage to offend the viceroy and church with fiery words but a physical coward.

I waited until late at night, when the only sounds were the snores and mutterings of other prisoners, before I made my move. I held him down and gagged him to keep him from shouting. I pinched his nose shut so he couldn't breathe. When he started turning purple, I released his nose.

“If you make a noise, I'll smother you. ¡Comprénde?”

Still holding him pressed down, I whispered, “Mi amigo, you hurt my feelings when you lie to me. You received good news and yet you deceived me. Now I must hurt you.” Holding him down with an elbow, I took an insect out of a jar that a fruit spread had come in. I dropped it in his ear. He began to wiggle and squirm. I let him turn over and slapped the side of his head to dislodge the insect. It fell out and scrambled away.

“Do you know what that was, worm? The kind of vermin that burrows into your ear and into your brain. I have a jar full of them. Now tell me what the trustee said, or I will pour them into your ears and let them eat your brains.”

I was certain I saw the whites of his eyes even in the darkness. I almost broke out laughing. I loosened the gag and let him catch his breath.

“What good news do you have? Your father has agreed to help you?”

“Sí, but—”

“
Shhh
, not too loudly. What's being done?”

“Another will take my place.”

“Who?”

“It doesn't matter. One of these disgusting creatures will be José Lizardi for a day. He will be paid, I will replace him.”

I nodded. “Ah, you will exchange places. He will be put on a wagon for Acapulco and the Manila galleon, you will be sent to work in the streets. At the end of the day, you will be released as an ordinary drunk who has fulfilled three days of work. That is it, no?”

“Sí.”

I released him.

“You are a disgusting animal,” he groaned, digging at his ear. “You are violent and dangerous. I truly believe you murdered the man who thought he was your uncle.”

“Believe this, señor—I will murder you if you betray me again.”

“How have I betrayed you?”

“Have I not protected you? Shared my bounty with you? Thought of you as my own blood and brother?”

“I'm not your brother. I'm a criollo, not a peon.”

“Keep slandering my blood and you'll be a dead criollo. We'll see what color your blood is as it gushes out your throat.”

“I can bring the trustee down on you with one shout.”

“That's all you would be able to do. And it would be your last shout because I'll rip out your tongue.” I leaned closer. “And gouge out your eyes with my thumbs.”

“Animal,” he muttered.

“Have you thought about what you will do on the street? You can bribe your way out of a jail, but where will you go once you have your freedom? Fool that you are, you wouldn't make it out of the city.”

“I'll make it.”

I could tell from his voice that he had doubts. “You will be freed at dusk. Do you think you can stay in an inn for the night and leave the city the next day? You're a stranger in town, you'll be easily spotted by the constables. You can't escape without a horse. And you don't know the city well enough to escape even if you had a horse. I have horses here in the city, ready and waiting.”

He was quiet for a long time. Then he asked, “What do you want?”

“Fund both of our escapes. I will see you well mounted and put you on the road to Méjico.”

“And if I refuse?”

“I kill you.”

My tone surprised me and chilled Lizardi. It left no doubt I would go through with the threat.

In the shadow of the gallows, life seemed less sacred.

“José de Lizardi! Juan de Zavala!”

Two léperos stood in front of me, and I jabbed them each in the back, whispering “That's you two.”

They had been lifted out of the gutter three days ago. We chose them because the guards would release them today, and even sober, their wits were dim, their vision blurred, their brains befuddled by decades of drink.

In exchange for a few pesos and the promise of much more, including a trip to Méjico City and a tour of its pulquerías they agreed to our take our places. The capital was a fabled place to these two, léperos who had never ventured far from Guanajuato's gutters.

That I was a changeling again did not escape my notice.

I grinned at Lizardi as the men were led out, chained in a tumbrel for the trip to Méjico and from there on to Acapulco and the Manila-bound galleon.

“I hope they like fresh ocean breezes,” I said, “and can swim well.”

“The jailers at the capital will know they've been duped.”

“We'll be on our horses and on our way by then.”

A few minutes later, we lined up with the nearly hundred other prisoners. Since we were assumed to be common drunks, no one slapped leg irons on us.

This time we were dispatched to a pasture outside of town, where the
mule trains transporting goods encamped. Mules transported almost all goods, whether imported or exported, throughout the colony. The only other transport system was the backs of indios.

At the pasture, we were to shovel manure into the back of wagons. The manure was hauled to local farmers and rancheros to use as fertilizers. In times past, the stench would have bowled both of us over, but in truth we smelled worse than manure and the fact that this was our last day in hell compensated for the stink.

An hour before darkness, the guards lined us up for the trek back to the city.

“We should return here tonight and steal the mules for our escape,” Lizardi whispered to me as we walked.

“I told you, we'll leave on my horses.”

“I don't understand how you could still have horses if you—”

“Horses are my specialty. You just think about the next pamphlet you'll write when you return to the capital.”

Dusk had fallen by the time we reached the heart of the city. When the guards stopped for a smoke break, Lizardi and I were released with the other drunks.

“Where are we going?” Lizardi asked.

“To a pulquería with this trash. You have pesos the trustee passed you from your family?”

“Yes, but I'm not going to buy that poisonous Aztec drink.”