Aztec Rage (19 page)

She shook her head slowly, as if she was trying to puzzle out my soul. She finally said, “You are very sure of yourself, señor.”

“No woman has ever complained.”

She laughed at that one, and I gave her a boyishly charming grin.

“And how many women
have
you taken to bed?” she asked in a challenging tone.

“I didn't count them, but,” I patted my crotch, “I'm told that I have a cannon for a garrancha . . .” The behemoth bulge, even beneath my “lay brother's” robes, was embarrassingly obvious but confirmed my assessment, “. . . and cannonballs for cojones.”

She started laughing as if she knew something I didn't. No woman had ever laughed at or derided my machismo before, and my vanity was pricked. I flushed with anger.

“See for yourself, woman!” I slipped off my robes and dropped them to the ground.

She gasped at the immensity of my member.

“¡Dios mío!” she cried out, crossing herself and looking away.

In the back of my mind I prayed that our sainted padre would not happen by. Who knows how many Hail Marys, Our Fathers, and countless other acts of contrition he would sentence my benighted soul to. We were both hopelessly compromised: Marina, her knife pointed at me, and me bare naked with my member at a raging right angle, an angry flag posted at half-staff yet arrogantly erect in a gale-force wind.

I quickly pulled off my boots. I didn't have to force the knife out of her hand. With a sudden turn and a shockingly swift throw she stuck her knife in the frangipani tree, impaling two gaudily fragrant frangipani flowers. She then fell into my arms as eagerly as I collapsed into hers.

With my lay-brother's robes for our sacred bed, we dropped to the ground. She spread her legs wide as paradise.

My garrancha—hard enough to cut diamonds—was furnace hot, thrumming and throbbing like her vibrating knife. Hovering over her own beauteous blossom, however, I was racked by a desperation I had never before felt, and agony of lust so painfully urgent it frightened me.

I had kissed women before but never like her. They weren't kisses so much as a tumbling into an abyss. I had never known lips so soft and a tongue so hot and inventive and lithe. I could have kissed her forever and never enjoyed consummation . . .
that
was how deeply I felt.

I did enter her though, and her flower was lava hot between her legs. I felt her body respond, even as my mouth devoured hers, my tongue ramming at hers as if simulating the ramming of my
cañón
. The bodily tremors
increased in intensity and frequency, and I accelerated the power of my stroke to accommodate her pumping, gyrating hips.

The deeper, harder I probed, the more the black fuzzy bush between her legs tickled my lower pelvis. Penetrating deeper, harder, my pelvis palpated her prickly pear, rotating, revolving on and around her clitoral star like a planet orbiting a black yet blazingly hot sun, until running amok, I crisscrossed and crosshatched the little orb, driving her maniacally mad. Rubbing and scraping my pelvis against the heated seed of her now trembling frangipani, I ground at it until not only her budding sprout flowered, but her whole being burgeoned and blossomed, exploding ecstatically into gaudily hued flowers of flamboyant fire.

I was erupting now as was she. All the previous spasms were put to shame by a climactic collective fireworks, an infinite succession of demented detonations blasting us apart, freeing us, as if all the harpies in hell and the demons in our souls were fighting to get out, bringing us ineffably closer together.

None of this slowed or softened my garrancha. He had been so long without a woman—and so embittered by prison—I only worried he might never go down again. He and his flowery friend came again and again. Was it a thunderous thousand-gun salute to heaven's gate or a colossal cannonade from the jaws of hell? I could not say, but my garrancha and his friend were making up for lost time and making their presence known. They clearly had a joint mind of their own. It was as if Marina and I had no say in the matter.

Shuddering with me as the spasms racked her—in time, in tune, with mine, over and over and over—she clenched me tighter, kissing, biting, gnawing, chewing at my lips, like she would never stop, could never stop. Fingernails clawed at my back, thighs, hips, haunches, ass, reaching into the crack of my ass, down to my cojones.

Only once did she make me stop that afternoon, to “cool her frangipani off,” she said.

Leading me by the hand into the pond, we gently rubbed each other all over, particularly our tender and much abused . . . friends. She wanted to kiss my manhood, “make it better,” she said, fearing she had injured the little bird.

When she took my manhood in her mouth, teasing and torturing its tender underside with her tantalizing tongue, laving and sucking on its hell-hot muzzle, my inconsiderate male part punished her tender caresses with alabaster bursts of blazing cannon fire, milk-white against the nutbrown softness of her cheeks and lips as she gasped for air and my fusillades erupted volcanically out of her mouth, after which I quickly returned for more artillery practice.

Eventually, I returned the favor. Whether I feasted on her fatal flower
at heaven's gate or my tongue stroked and probed the yawning jaws of hell. I could not say. The caressing and kissing, driving and pounding would not stop, could not stop. We continued on and on, through the afternoon, even into dusk.

I'd like to say I taught her the way of a man and a woman, but the best I can say is I fought her to a draw. She was indeed a bruja, a witch, because for the first time in my life, a woman had me as much as I had her. It was as if our hips and loins, blossom and balls, indeed had lives, wills, and desperate desires of their own. If I had any concern at all, it was to question whether we would ever stop, whether anything on earth could interrupt what we had started, wondering in all sincerity whether death itself could penetrate and part our ecstatic embrace.

When at last we did lie still, in each other's arms, quiet, exhausted, spent, innocent-yet-knowing in our nakedness, we said nothing for a long time. When I at last broke the silence, I did not even know I had spoken.

“It has been a long time?” I asked her.

“Yes, a long time, not since that bastardo husband of mine got shot with his pants down, but even then he was nothing like you.”

“Un hombre duro?” A hard hombre? I asked.

“Un hombre nada.” As a man he was nothing.

As she spoke, her eyes were closed. Opening them, she rolled on top of me. “You were wrong,” she said, as she pulled me back inside her. “Your manhood is bigger
and
harder than a
cañón
.”

Miraculously, my much abused amigo had returned to his
duro
stature. And we returned to our desperate dance.

TWENTY-SEVEN

B
EFORE WE MADE
our way back to her house, we cooled ourselves off in the pond. I enjoyed an ease and a comfort with a woman I had never before known. We talked casually of what we would do in the days ahead. I was enthralled by everything she said. I never even thought about the fact that she was an Azteca.

I must have cared for her, because I avoided the subject of when Lizardi and I would leave Dolores.

“I want to show you one of my horses,” she said. “I have a buyer for it, and I have to gentle him for saddle and ride.”

She walked the unbroken dun around the field for a time, stroking his neck, maintaining eye contact, whispering something ineffable to him. Suddenly swinging onto its saddleless back, she rode the unbroken horse bareback up and down her field. Bucking and kicking for a moment or so,
snorting, whinnying, shying bites at her arms and legs, the dun quieted down by fits and starts. Finally he broke into a high lope, then a spirited canter, eventually a slow walk.

After a half hour or so of working the dun, she returned with him, now gentled. Throwing a saddle on him and cinching it up, she rode him back out into the field. Eventually she put a bridle on him, and he didn't seem to mind.

I watched awestruck not only by her control over her horses but also by her ease, aplomb, and grace. Few vaqueros could match her horsemanship. None could match her assurance. And at one time I would have dismissed her as a woman.
¡Ay!

“How did you do that?” I asked.

“I just talk to him from time to time like this . . .” She whispered in the horse's ear, stroking his ear gently, caressing his neck and nose.

“How long did you talk to him?”

“A few days.”

I would have required a week of ungentle training to have broken the dun to my saddle: a week of spurs, spade bits, and a well-worn quirt.

After schooling the horse a while longer, she came over to where I leaned against the fence smoking my cigarro.

“Not your type of horse training, is it?”

I shook my head. “I train horses like I train my women—I ride them hard and put them up wet.”

She laughed so loud the horse took up the chorus, neighing and whinnying with her. Her up-from-the-gut laugh was utterly different from the crystal-tinkling bell of Isabella, but I enjoyed the sound of Marina's laugh more.

I nodded at the horses. “I thought you'd given up breaking caballos.”

“I found a customer who'd buy a horse trained by a woman. The buyer is a woman, of course, the widow of a hacendado.” She studied me appraisingly with sharp shrewd eyes. “Speaking of hacienda owners, I understand Señor Ayala is still with us. He tells everyone you are a miracle worker.”

I shrugged, trying to look modest. “It was nothing. A brilliant medical procedure with God guiding my hand.”

“Then you won't be disturbed if sick people line up at the church for your miracles.”

The look on my face started her laughing again.

“If you wish to remain in Dolores, you will have more business than you can handle.”

“Only one thing could keep me in Dolores.” I took her, rubbing her flower once again, and smothered her mouth with my lips.

Again, we fed our hunger.

Afterward I decided to do something constructive. This time I helped her feed her horses, again feeling strangely, inexplicably at ease with her . . . talking with her. We talked for a time about Father Hidalgo.

“The padre is a most unusual priest,” I said.

“And a most unusual man. He's a great thinker, yet his head is not in books but with people. He's caring and compassionate toward everything and everyone. He loves all people, not just his fellow Spaniards, but indios, mestizos, chinos, and African slaves as well. He says someday all people will be equal, even indios and slaves, but that it will happen only when the peons are permitted to use all their God-given talents instead of being treated like farm animals. And he respects women, not just for cooking meals and bearing children but for their minds, for the contribution we make in all things, including books and world events. He wants to change the world so that the underprivileged everywhere are treated equally.”

“That will only happen when God comes down and runs our lives Himself.”

Later, we sat by the creek that ran by her small rancho and fed our empty stomachs. I asked her about her name, curious as to why her mother would give her a name that was not well-respected by the Aztecs in the colony, that was honored only by the Spanish.

She told the story of Marina, the most famous woman in the history of New Spain.

The lover and translator of Cortés, who bore him a son, before the Conquest Marina had been an india princess, the daughter of a powerful leader.

“Doña Marina's” father died when she was young, and her mother remarried. To prevent Marina from laying claim to her deceased father's property, and to seize the estate for her own son, Marina's stepbrother, her mother switched Marina for the dead child of a slave.

Her mother than gave Marina away to a Tabascan tribe. Later, when Cortés landed to conquer the Aztec empire, the Tabascans gave Marina—also called Malinche or Malintzín—to Cortés along with nineteen other women. His priests baptized the women and gave them Christian names—“Marina” was the young woman's baptismal name—and parceled them out among Cortés's men as concubines.