Aztec Rage (52 page)

The talkative barber also told me a tale about the face of a man he had been shaving.

“You see how the soap stays wet on your face?” he asked. “When I put it on the man's face last week, it dried quickly. I told him that he would be dead within two days. It happens every time I shave a man and the soap dries so quickly. They are soon dead from the black vomito. The man was dead the next day.”

If the barber thought he could prophesize death, I didn't want to disabuse him. However, as one who has had considerable experience as a healer and physician, I knew the shaving soap dried quickly because the man was hot from fever.

To get to Jalapa, I had had to pass through the corridor of death: the sand and swamps of the coastal plains, the dreaded region where breathing miasma from the swamps infects one with the black vomit. Naturally,
thoughts about my parents, whoever they were, collided with speculations on the life I might have led had the real Juan Zavala not perished from yellow fever.

It was true, I no longer considered myself a gachupine. But the purity or even the impurity of my blood no longer mattered to me. I was Juan de Zavala, and I would kill any man who sullied my honor.

Soon I was approaching the capital itself.

Méjico City was in the great Valley of Méjico, on the plateau region the Aztecs had called Anáhuac, a word I was told meant “Land by the Water” because it had five interlocking lakes. In the midst of that water had stood the Aztec capital Tenochtitlán, a large city served by three causeways. It was on the broken bones and ashes of Tenochtitlán that the conquistadors had built Méjico City.

The mining treasures of Guanajuato, the arid far reaches of New Méjico and Texas, the nearly uninhabited region of New California, the hot-wet jungle regions of the Mayan south—none of these were the prize of New Spain. Méjico City was not just the gem of the colony, not just the greatest city of the Americas, it rivaled the great cities of the world. One could damn the Spaniards for many things—and they committed wrongs in the colony in ways too numerous to enumerate—but they truly excelled at city building.

Raquel had called the capital a metropolis, a word that she said was from the Greeks and meant “mother city.” The word applied to Méjico City because while 150,000 souls lived inside its limits, ten times that many dwelt in the surrounding area, all of whom were dependent on it.

I stayed at a small inn an hour from the city because I didn't want to arrive anonymously, like a thief in the night. I wanted to ride tall into the city, proud and defiant in case a reception committee pounced on me as the one in Veracruz had.

My return to the colony was to terminate in the capital. I had no desire to revisit the maddening memories of Guanajuato. Isabella was the object of all my desires, and now she lived in the capital. I intended to make my mark in the city before long and reclaim my woman.

I still wore the boots she had given me when I was a prisoner in Guanajuato. They had taken me through jails, jungles, deserts, and wars, and I'd had them repaired innumerable times. Even now, however, they were serviceable. When she saw them, she would know my love was true. Naturally from time to time in the presence of a pretty señorita the beast in my pants had soiled her sainted memory, but my love for her was pure.

In the early morning, the route to the city was already a fervent hive of frantic activity a league back from the causeway. The energy of the awakening city was like no other I had experienced. Long mule trains and armies of indio carriers transported food and supplies to the city's merchants, who flung open their shop doors to hawk these myriad wares. The
streets swarmed with beggars and merchants fighting for space on the sidewalks and streets. It was everything I remembered about the brief but memorable visits I had made to the city with Bruto many years before: noisy, smelly, violent, crazy, and chaotic but also vivid, thrilling, and alive.

A newspaper I picked up in Veracruz posted the population of the capital according to a census made five years earlier as 3,000 gachupines, 65,000 criollos, 33,000 indios, 27,000 mestizos, and about 10,000 africanos and mulattos, giving a total of 138,000 back then. The figures were not representative of all of New Spain, of course. Because it was the center of wealth and power, there was a higher concentration of Spanish in the city than in the colony as a whole. And a higher concentration of africanos used as servants by the wealthy.

As I approached the causeway, the landscape flattened and turned arid, despite the gloomy, melancholy marshlands where sparkling lakes had stood before the Conquest. Nearly three centuries of “civilization” had almost drained the lakes and filled in many of the lakebeds.

I entered the city with the incredible migration that crossed the calzadas each morning—indios piled high with goods like beasts of burden, two-wheeled carts and four-wheeled wagons, long trains of mules commanded by arrieros—all competing with droves of cattle, flocks of sheep, herds of pigs, and packs of dogs for shoulder room.

The congestion didn't end once I was off the causeway and on city streets, even though the capital was well laid out with many straight streets running east-west and north-south. When the city was awake, the peddlers and porters began their day's work. Peddlers walked down the streets loaded with merchandise that they hawked to people on the business and residential streets. Sellers of fruits—mangos, lemons, oranges, and pomegranates—cheese and hot pastry, salted beef and tortillas, rivaled the retailers of tubs of butter, cans of milk, and baskets of fish.

The streets were so hemmed in by peddlers and makeshift wooden stalls that porters were more adroit at carrying merchandise across and down streets than four-legged beasts of burden pulling carts. The porters carried mountainous stacks of goods in burden baskets strapped to their backs and held in place by tump lines stretched tight across their foreheads. Porters, acting as human aquadors, transported large clay jugs of water from the two great aqueducts connecting the city with the mountain springs to the west to dwellings that lacked access to the city's public fountains.

Goods that weren't transported over the causeways arrived in hundreds of canoes loaded with fruits and vegetables and handicrafts. Few of the craft were paddled. Instead, long poles were used to push them along in the shallow marshy lakes that had not been filled yet.

At this time in the morning, women were coming out of their dwellings and emptying bedpans into the channels of water that ran down
the middle of streets. Waste and rubbish was simply thrown into the streets, most of it ending up in the shallow water channels. Once a week street workers removed the refuse from the water and left it along the banks to dry, eventually carting the stinking mess away.

The government and wealthy merchants congregated in the plaza mayor. The viceroy's palace was the finest looking building on the square. It served not only as the residence for the ruler of New Spain and his family but also as government offices for many of the officials and agencies that administered the colony. On another side of the square stood their great cathedral.

The differences and inequalities of the classes were most evident in the main plaza. I rode by bronze, near-naked indio men with a ragged blanket or a serape covering their upper body, their women modestly dressed but often in little more than rags. Their poverty contrasted with the well-to-do Spaniards attired in handsome clothes embroidered with silver and gold and riding blooded horses. In carriages so brazenly expensive they would have even embarrassed the high and mighty of Cádiz and Barcelona, Spanish women were carried to the jewelry and clothing shops that provided them with the dazzling gowns and gems they needed for the balls that dominated their lives.

The laws that prohibited mixing of the classes prevented indios from even dressing like or living among Spaniards and prohibited the Spanish from residing in indio areas. But commerce brought the peons and spurwearers shoulder to shoulder in the crowded main plaza.

I rode aimlessly through the city, reacquainting myself. The police carts that hauled drunks away like stacks of dead bodies were gone before dawn. The lepéros who hadn't gotten removed lay passed out in the gutters or deployed themselves on the sidewalks screeching for alms. Some of the drunks who had been hauled away unconscious during the wee hours were also back, cleaning the streets.

I could have given them lessons.

My circuitous odyssey took me past four bloody gibbets festooned with dead prisoners. I casually rode past the main jail as well, where last night's murder victims were laid out in front so families with missing members could come and search among them. I journeyed past the noise and smells of vegetable and meat markets to the place where the Inquisition used to conduct its autos-da-fé, burning the “unfaithful” at the stake, “mercifully” garroting those who had repented their sins, before the flames devoured them. And finally down Calle San Francisco, one of the most pleasant and attractive streets in the city, with its fine houses and shops.

I explored the alameda, a rectangular-shaped green park at least three hundred paces across where many of the city's notables enjoyed the shade of the many trees and shrubbery, most of them refusing to ever step out of their carriages and walk; everyone had feet to walk on, but to ride in a carriage
was a sign of distinction. In the middle of the park a handsome fountain geysered water. Once considered a dangerous place after sundown, menaced by wolves—both the four- and two-legged variety—I wondered if the city constables still allowed the park to become a jungle after dark.

I headed up Paseo de Bucareli, the long, broad path that had become more popular than the alameda among the city's gentry for promenading their fine carriages and horses. But it was too early in the day for the señoritas, young señoras, and dandies to come out to socialize and flirt.

Was I half-hoping I would run into Isabella, la Señora Marquesa? Of course I was. But were I to meet her by “accident,” I would prefer to encounter her at the paseo instead of the alameda, which attracted the older gentry. Most of the people on the paseo usually took their promenade from four in the afternoon until near sundown. During that time, ladies filled two long rows of carriages while countless caballeros traversed the promenade on horseback.

When I was prepared to present myself as the caballero I once was, I would return to the paseo and find Isabella.

I took a room at an inn around the corner from the Plaza Mayor, then left to explore the great square on foot. When I heard a familiar voice shouting, I looked over and saw someone I knew hawking pamphlets.

“Hark the words of the Mejicano Thinker! Laugh! Cry! Be angry at injustices!”

“Does the viceroy know you were once a bandido?” I asked Lizardi.

He gaped at me.

“Shut your mouth; you're gathering flies.” I slapped him on the back. “It's been a long time, no?”

“Juan de Zavala, as I live and breathe. Dios mío, the stories I have heard about you: you have been hanged at least six times for your crimes, seduced wives and daughters, stole from widows and orphans, fought duels, and even vanquished Napoleon himself on the battlefield.”

“Just Napoleon? No, amigo, it was Napoleon, his brother Joseph, and a thousand of his best troops that I single-handedly bested.”

“I've been excommunicated,” was the first thing out of the pamphleteer's mouth as soon as we were seated in the inn and he had swallowed half a cup of wine in a gulp. “When a plague hit the city, I wrote a pamphlet in which I advised the government to clean up the streets, burn all refuse, quarantine the sick, bury plague victims outside the city rather than in the churchyards, and to use monasteries and the homes of the rich as hospitals.”

“Your plan would cost the church their death tribute.”

“And make the rich give something of which they stole back to the people. It did not make me popular. I've published more bombasts under the name The Mejicano Thinker. Do you like it?”

There was that word mejicano again. But Lizardi used it to refer to
himself as the greatest mind in Méjico City, not as a reference to race or birth.

“It sounds worthy of a scholar such as yourself.”

“Yes, I agree,” he said. “I've also put out a pamphlet in which I called our viceroyalty the worst government in the Americas, stating that no civilized nation has had a government as corrupt and illegitimate as ours. I called the viceroy a cursed monster who leads an evil government.”

I made the sign of the cross. “Have you gone insane, Lizardi? Why have they not hanged you? Burned you at the stake? Drawn and quartered you?”

“They are too busy protecting their own ill-gotten enterprises ever since Napoleon overran Spain. Besides, the junta in Cádiz has decreed freedom of the press, not that the viceroy permits it, of course. And they consider me a madman. They arrest me occasionally and hold me until friends buy my way out.”

The little bookworm had not changed since I last saw him. He was still ghostly pale as if he lived in a cave and never saw the sun. Still as unkempt as a lépero, his cloak looked as if he used it as his dinner table and his bed. I had no doubt that when the police confronted him, he informed on everyone around him. He had great courage, but he fought with a quill, not a sword, and was not above sacrificing someone else to save his own skin.

I listened to him boast of the caustic broadsides he had written, scolding criollos for having the same vices as gachupines, condemning the Spanish for plundering the colony and giving nothing in return, and even excoriating the lower classes as thieves, beggars, drunkards, and malingers.

I listened to his boasts and diatribes for an hour before I asked him about the subject closest to my heart: Isabella.

“A typical society woman with too many jewels, too many dresses, and too few brains. Her husband, the Marqués del Mira, is very rich, though I've heard he has had some financial problems due to an investment in a silver mine that flooded. Water is the bane of mining, no? So many fortunes get washed away. She has the usual love affairs for a woman of her decadent and mindless class. Her latest indiscretion is said to be with—”