Aztec Rage (4 page)

“Your uncle asks that you accept this brandy as a symbol of his affection for you,” José said.

I was not in a forgiving mood. José left, and I stared at the goblet. Even drunk, however, I knew I should make amends with Bruto. I knew nothing about the quicksilver trade and less about managing finances. After I had purchased a title and married Isabella, I had planned to return management to him.

I called José back. “Thank my uncle for the brandy. And take this one to him,” I handed him back the same goblet, pretending it had come from my own stock. “Tell him I ask that he also join me in a drink to seal the family love and blood loyalty I bear him.”

I went to bed, still much disturbed by the earlier disagreement. Bruto and I had few quarrels. Our views of life differed, but we rarely clashed. His interests were in ledgers and pesos, mine were swords and guns, horses and whores. Our preoccupations kept us from colliding. Other than to complain about my spending, he seldom even spoke to me.

True, I was a loner, and perhaps that affected my relationship with Bruto. But it didn't explain the lack of familial warmth between us, the subtle undercurrent of ill will that I sometimes sensed. But only once did true animosity toward me slip out.

As a boy, bleeding from a cut, I had run into the house. Sleeping in a chair, Bruto snapped awake.

“Get away from me, you puta's bastardo,” he shouted.

To call me a whore's son was not just an insult to me and my mother but also a grave offense to my father, who, were he alive, would have avenged the slight with a blade. It wasn't just Bruto's words that were hurtful;
I also felt hatred in his heart. I never understood the source of his animosity. Withdrawing into myself, I never sought his help again.

The only other time we had a serious disagreement was when, at age fourteen, he sent me to study for the priesthood.
¡Ay!
Don Juan de Zavala a
priest
?

Besides those who heard God's call, the priesthood was a refuge for the younger sons of the affluent. In the church they would have income and position when the family property was transferred to the eldest son. To send the firstborn—and in my case, the only born—to a seminary to study for a life in the church would have left the Zavala family fortune heirless. Only those called upon by God were driven to such a radical act, not that I fear serving God; with horse reins in my teeth, a red-hot smoking pistol in one hand, and a Toledo blade in the other, I would happily dispatch God's enemies to everlasting hellfire.

But serving Him with prayers, alms, and abstinence was not in the cards. The seminary prefect cashiered me after unfortunate incidents: I horsewhipped a fellow seminarian who branded me a sodomite after I described my lurid deflowering of a servant girl. Turning white as a winding sheet, the youth raced straight to the prefect to inform on me. When the prelate attempted to whip me, I brandished a Toledo dagger, offering to castrate him like a steer if he bloodied my back.

I went to confession after each transgression, repented for my sins, made a good act of contrition, deposited a few pesetas in the church poor box—along with a pouch of gold for the priest—and then recited a dozen or so Hail Marys. My soul was cleansed, and I felt redeemed—and privileged to transgress again. Finally, I was sent home. Bruto showed his disappointment but made no further attempt to geld me.

All I acquired from my short-lived preparation for the priesthood was an unusual ability to learn languages: I mastered Latin, the tongue of priests, and French, the language of culture, quickly, by ear, simply from hearing them. I already spoke the Aztec dialect of the vaqueros on my hacienda.

I had just dozed off when I heard a disturbance in the house. I got out of bed and went into the hallway, as my uncle's servant, José, came out of my uncle's room with a chamber pot.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Your uncle has stomach problems. He's been vomiting.”

“Should we call a doctor?”

“He insists that none be called.”

If he was not sick enough for a doctor, it was no concern of mine. I still smarted from his wicked utterances about my beloved Isabella. I wondered whether God was torturing him for his foul words.

That night I suffered one of the nightmares that had plagued me since childhood. In every violent dream, I found myself not a Spanish grandee
but an Aztec warrior, fighting—and dying—in bloody battle. Years ago, while drinking too much with the vaqueros at my hacienda, I had in jest consulted an india witch who told me that my nightmares were not dream-sleep but nighttime visitations from the ghosts of Aztec warriors who had died while fighting the Spanish. Fool that I was, I believed the old woman at the time, but as the dreams became less frequent and finally stopped, I realized the dreams were created by the many stories I had heard about the wars between the Spanish and the Aztecs.

But of late the nightmares had come back, more violent than ever. On this night I had seen myself in Mictlan, the Aztec underworld, where the dead must endure the trials of nine hells before their souls are extinguished.

¡Ay!
I erupted from sleep drenched in sweat and with a heavy sense of dread. Packs of hellhounds had snarled at my heels, murderous beasts my priest had warned me would drive my sin-blackened soul to Fire Everlasting. I'd even felt the flames sear my flesh. Trying to return to sleep, I tossed and turned, my thoughts crowded with those baying hellhounds snapping at my heels.

In the morn I got out of bed, leaving those hellhounds under the covers, I hoped. But irritation dogged me. My manservant, Francisco, had not yet brought my morning cup of cocoa, invigorated with chili, herbs, and spices, nor had he emptied my chamber pot. I found him in the kitchen kneeling on the floor next to Pablo, my vaquero, engaged in casting copper coins at a clay plate across the room.

The indio groveled. “My apologies, patrón. I didn't know you had awakened.”

He was lazy and had corn mush for brains, though the men of his Aztec race were known for being hard workers.

As I left the kitchen I stopped and studied the new india kitchen maid. I agreed with my fellow gachupines that indias were dutiful and delightfully concupiscent.

I have been told that these Aztec women do not favor the male of their own species, because the men make them work in the fields all day, even while heavy with child. Later, while her man relaxes with his amigos and putas in the evening, the india must prepare dinner and work into the night to prepare the tortillas and other food for the next day's breakfast.

Life is so harsh for indias, my priest claims that many indias kill their own girl babies at birth to spare the girl the terrible burdens that she will carry through her lifetime as a woman.

She looked shyly at me. I found her pleasing. I knew she was not married, so I marked her fine figure in my head for later. Now I had to meet Isabella on the paseo.

My head swarmed with plans to capture a title and Isabella. But no man can fight his destiny, eh? We can't stand before the galloping horse of
Fate and make her stop. She's a fickle nag, no? We can shout and struggle, conquer and kill, but Señora Fortuna rules the mast and controls the rudder directing our lives as we brave her storm-tossed sea of chance.

Still, I had not counted on that foul puta to tip the scales and send that blood-crazed pack of baying hounds on my trail, howling for my hide.

FOUR

I
N MY ROOM
, after I sponged off, Francisco helped me dress in my finest riding clothes. My hat was black, with a large brim and a very flat, low crown. The crown and brim were both laced with gold and silver worked into an elaborate mesh. My shirt was white silk, with a high collar, under a short jacket of black with silver thread and calico patterns. My breeches were covered with leather chaps emblazoned with dozens of silver stars. Boots made in the colony were among the best in the world, and I wore only the finest. Of cinnamon color, the leather was cut in relievo in an elegant pattern by indios who spent weeks on a single pair. From my shoulders, held on with a silver chain, was a cloak, raven black and laced with silver.

I thought highly of myself, but Isabella said my complexion was too dark against her alabaster skin, my brown eyes too common compared to her dazzling emerald orbs. Eh, my crooked nose came from being thrown by a horse at the age of seven; my forehead scarred from butting heads with a bull when I was playing matador at the age of eleven. My hair was black and came down as thick sideburns almost to my chin. Because of my looks, when I was small, the vaqueros called me El Azteca Chico, the Little Aztec.

“You are no beauty,” she told me, when we were introduced soon after her family moved here from Guadalajara last year. “If I didn't know you were born in Spain, I would take you for a lépero!”

Her comparison of me to the street trash of the colony caused her girlfriends to squeal like piglets being tickled. Had a man jested thus, he would have tasted my blade. When Isabella so mocked, I melted like a timid boy.

I left the house and went into the courtyard, where Pablo was waiting with my horse. I checked the stirrup length and cinch. As usual, they were exact.

As my personal vaquero, Pablo was the finest cowboy at my hacienda. I kept him in the city most of the time to help train and exercise my horses. A mixed-blood mestizo, he had neither the bronze complexion of Aztecs nor the lighter shade of Europeans. I didn't care if Pablo had claws and a tail if my mounts prospered under him.

Pablo had saddled my favorite stallion, Tempest, the one I always rode when courting Isabella. Its former owner claimed that Tempest was a direct descendant of Cortés's fabled mounts, the sixteen warhorses that enabled Cortés and his men to conquer a kingdom and carve out an empire. But almost every horse trader in New Spain claimed his horses hailed from that sacred stock, most notoriously from Cortés's own warhorse.

Tempest was sloe-black, with an inky sheen that blazed like blueblack fire in the noonday sun. His tack was even more ornate than my caballero attire. An elaborately decked-out ebony saddle with expansive stirrup leathers and a broad black pommel, it was richly embellished with silver, treasure more precious than a peon saw in a lifetime. He was skirted by a “Cortés shield” of thick black leather, all of it heavily embossed. The shields dated from the age when every caballero's mount was a warhorse.

I only burdened Tempest with fancy tack when I rode him into the city to visit Isabella. When I rode him into the llano to hunt, we only wore and carried what we needed.

Before I swung into the saddle, I waited while Pablo dropped to his haunches and heeled my boots with spurs that had three-inch Chihuahua rowels of hammered silver, burnished to a mirror gloss—spurs fit for a gachupine.

Pablo had the bridle knotted across the pommel. As was the custom, my bridle was small, but the bit large and powerful so the horse could be stopped abruptly, even when racing, though that was not always easy with Tempest; he earned his name.

I saw my uncle's servant come out of the house. I yelled at him as he hurried for the gate to the street as if one of the hounds I dreamt about was snapping at his heels.

“José! How is my uncle?”

He threw me an odd look, gawking as if I were a stranger instead of one of his masters, then disappeared through the gate. The fool never answered my shouted question. He would pay for his impertinence later, though I knew how cantankerous my uncle can be. He had probably sent José on an errand and told him to move double quick or he'd get a beating. José got more beatings than any other servant in the house. But why José would ignore me was a mystery. Certainly I was not known for sparing the rod. His rudeness fueled the gloom that had already blackened my morning.

After riding through our compound's gate, I headed toward the paseo and the lovely Isabella. I hadn't gone far when I was accosted by a lépero, a disgusting gutter rat, the kind that beg and steal on the streets when they are not passed out from cheap drink. Léperos are human maggots with the social standing of lepers. These peons were addicted to pulque, a foul, stinking indio beer made from the cactuslike maguey plant.

“Señor! Charity! Charity!”

The lépero grabbed at my horse's polished silver saddle flap with a filthy hand. I struck the creature's hand with my riding crop. He staggered back against a wall.
¡Ay!
He had smeared his filth on the flap. I raised my crop to scare him away when someone shouted.

“Stop!”

An open carriage had pulled up behind me. The person who shouted the command—a priest—leaped out and rushed toward me, holding up the skirt of his robe so he wouldn't trip as he ran.

“Señor! Leave that man alone!”

“Man? I see no man, padre. Léperos are animals, and this one placed his filthy hand on my tack.”

I let the lépero escape without striking him. The priest glared up at me. He was hatless, a man somewhere in his fifties, showing his age, with a ring of white hair circling his bald pate like the crown of a Roman emperor.