Aztec Rage (65 page)

“Señor Padre, I can set fire to the door.”

“Set fire to the door?”

“Sí, if you give me fire, pitch, and rags that burn well.”

The padre nodded. “I salute you, my brave son.”

As the youth set off, Father Hidalgo called after him. “What is your name?”

“They call me Pípila,” he said.

Watching the youth as he struggled toward the door, slumped under a large stone, which he held overhead, I was awed by his courage. He had rags and a container of pitch strapped to his chest, a lit miner's candle lamp attached to the bundle. A hail of lead rained down on him, ricocheting off the thick stone, but he continued on.

A mercury-flask bomb exploded overhead; the youth went down to his knees, the great stone that protected him from musket shot sliding away. He got back under the stone as the dirt around him kicked up from bullets. He crawled up to the door and paused for only a moment.
Catching his breath
, I thought. The next moment he was smearing the door with pitch and piling rags against it. He quickly set the door aflame.

I shook my head in amazement. Between the attackers and the defenders, for a certainty, more than a thousand men had died fighting over that door. And a guileless boy had breached it with a candle and some oily rags.

With fire consuming the door, indios surged forward, a group of them ramming the door with a tree trunk.

I could see the wild panic on the faces of the defenders who leaned out windows to drop bombs and fire their muskets at the indios at the door. Once the door went down, they would face the Aztecs man to man. Some leaned out windows begging for mercy. Another man poured a bag of silver coins down at the indios, the madness of the moment leading the fool to believe he could buy his life with a bag of silver.

At the last minute a white flag flapped from an upper window, and we all grinned with relief. The indios battering down the door stopped to
cheer, when Gilberto Riano and two others suddenly leaned out from windows and dropped shrapnel-filled mercury-flask bombs down on the men.

The carnage was horrific, but so was the almost inhuman howl that went up from the Aztecs at the sight of their compadres treacherously murdered under a flag of truce. The indios renewed their assault on the door. When it burst open, they poured into the granary. Deadly fire at point-blank range mowed down the front ranks, but the indios were again a tidal wave with no beginning or end, a primal force that simply surged forward with more indios taking the place of their dead comrades.

The padre signaled me. “Take some of my trusted men and secure the treasures in the granary.”

I gathered Diego, his fellow spy, and four more men. Marina came to join us. I snarled to get her to relent, but she just glared back. The woman was more stubborn than Tempest—and meaner.

The musket fire inside continued as I approached the granary doors with my men, but it was sporadic. A more terrible sound filled the air: the hellish screams of the defenders in the hacienda de Dolores. A mining facility adjacent to the granary, the hacienda had held out for some time, but our indios breached it just as I entered the granary.

I came through the opening, pistol in hand. A Spanish officer, wounded and bleeding from half a dozen cuts, stood on the steps of a stairway. He kept himself erect by leaning on a lance still flying his regimental colors, all the while cutting down indios with his sword. A lance took him in the stomach, then another and another until he was on the ground, impaled by a half dozen shafts.

The victorious indios rampaged through the granary, killing without mercy. They had paid in blood for this moment. Now it was blood for blood, life for life. A man begging for his life was beaten to death by a club. I had no pity for him; he had been one of those who, with Gilberto Riano, had thrown down the bombs under a flag of truce. Gilberto had fallen, too. His body was twisted at an obscene angle, his neck partially severed.

Where would the treasure be? The first time I entered the granary the soldiers had blindfolded me, then removed it on the roof. My lépero/bandido instincts, however, served me well. Through the open roof, I had observed a guard posted in front of a room on the second floor about halfway down the corridor. It was the only room where I had seen a guard posted. Riano would have scattered his munitions caches all over the building rather than in one place where they could be destroyed by a single explosion; so it was unlikely the guard was protecting arms. I quickly divined that the treasure was stored in the room.

Shoving past indios, I shot up the stairs, quickly outdistancing Diego and the others. The carnage all around me was stomach turning. Fighting went on in scattered parts of the second floor, but already clothes were torn from the dead, the wounded, even the living, as indios transformed
themselves into gachupines with broad-brimmed leather hats, fancy pants, and silver-stitched jackets.

Anything that could be ripped or torn or found went to the victors. These were not just the spoils of war but trophies of conquest. Men who had never possessed anything but the ragged shirt and pants they wore, who lived in mud huts and didn't even own the dirt between their toes, now wore the costly jackets of men who had treated them as slaves.

Blood was everywhere: hemorrhaging from the wounded and the dead, pooled on the slippery floor, splattered on the walls, and smeared on the dying and the victors, on muskets and piles of maize. And, likewise, death was everywhere: in the cries of the victors and the screams of the defeated.

The door to the room in question was half-open, a dead Spaniard blocking its entranceway. As I stepped over the body and entered, I saw the chests with the coat of the arms of Guanajuato on them. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a movement. Stepping over the body had left me off guard, and I threw myself back as the blade of a sword came at me. I fell backward, my own blade coming up quickly, deflecting the other foil. I was still on my feet but off balance. Facing me was a Spaniard with blood on his face. He held a sword in his right hand and a pistol in his left. As he pointed the pistol at me, someone came up to the now fully opened door.

Diego Rayu suddenly leaped between me and the pistol, shouting “No!” The shot rang out in the small room. I avoided Diego as he was blown back toward me. Slipping around him, I came in low and then jabbed up, catching the Spaniard under the chin with my blade. He rocked back on his heels and collapsed.

I knelt beside the young fallen Aztec. He had deliberately taken a bullet meant for me, and blood enveloped his white shirt.

“Diego . . .”

He clutched my arm for a moment. “Amigo . . .” he whispered. Then his body convulsed, settled, and went limp.

I heard a noise from the downed Spaniard, who was gasping for air. I took my sword to him until he lay still.

When I turned around, Marina was there, sword in hand. Hers was bloody, too. She struggled to hold back tears as she stared down at the fallen Aztec. She said, “Too many . . . too many have died.”

Late that afternoon the killing finally stopped, and the padre told us to take the survivors to jail. I had the trunks that were filled with silver and gold stacked outside on the street. I smoked a cigar as I waited for a wagon to pick them up. Watching the prisoners come out, I noticed a mestizo woman exit the granary. Riano had taken a couple dozen women to fix their tortillas and no doubt ease the urgings of their male parts during what he had conceived would be a long siege.

But this woman's features were familiar to me. As she was trying to slip into the crowd, I came up behind her and hit her in the back of the head, sending her crashing to the ground. Then I yanked off her hair.

“Ah, it's my old friend the notary,” I said, grinning down at the bastardo who had tried to wring a confession from me when I had been in jail and was part of the plot to ship me off to my death.

He gaped up at me.

“Don't you know, Señor Notary, it is cowardly and shameful for a man to dress as a woman?”

I gave him a good kick.

“Take this swine to the jail,” I told an indio working on the jail detail. “If he gives you any trouble, cut off his cojones so he won't have to pretend to be a woman anymore.”

NINETY-ONE

F
OR THE NEXT
two days, the army of liberation ransacked the city, attacking and looting the homes and businesses of the Spanish. Allende had once again ridden into the crowds, slashing at his own troops with his sword, demanding that order be restored. Again, he failed, and this time I didn't join him. The padre ordered the troops to pass over the homes of married Spanish, but didn't curb the looting and celebrations. He understood the great passions that the Aztec victory had ignited. Allende and his officers, though brave and intelligent men for the most part, didn't understand the indio. They expected them to act like trained soldiers.

¡Ay! If they had acted like trained soldiers, they would never have charged the granary fortress almost bare-handed. Over five hundred Spaniards had died in the attack. They took with them two thousand indios. The carnage was so great, a long trench was dug in a dry riverbed to accommodate the bodies. The indios had achieved victory not through military stratagems but through cojones and blood.

I was not a spiritual person or even a sensitive one. As I walked through the streets of Guanajuato, I thought about how the battle had affected me. Even after I fell from grace with my Spanish ancestry and lived as a lowly peon, I disrespected the Aztec blood in my veins. I had been raised to believe that a drop of that blood polluted my system and gave me the dreaded blood taint, a social and racial disease as repugnant to “people of quality” as the pox.

Seeing the peons as people who were innately subservient to the wearers of spurs, I had believed implicitly in the myth of their inferiority. But as I watched the way the peons had fought, bled, and died for liberty, I realized
that the padre was right: that three centuries of oppression had left the lower classes morose and defeated but that a true leader could reawaken their courage and resolve. That person was the padre, of course. They loved, admired, and revered them. He believed in them. They in turn showed extreme courage under fire, charging the lethal volleys with crude weapons and bare hands. Some, like Diego, had given his life not just for the cause but for a friend.

Did I have the courage to die for a cause? In my entire life, no cause had inspired me to risk my life. These peons didn't give up their lives for possessions or bedroom passions. They gave up their lives for a dream of freedom.

We'd all been baptized in blood and fire, and the images of what I witnessed haunted me.

Engrossed in my thoughts, I strolled past several of Allende's officers, who were standing in the street, watching the indios' rampage. One of them called the indios “filthy animals.” It was the same man who said that a pig dressed in silk was still a pig. Without thinking, I drove my steel-toed boot into his groin. Clutching his crotch, he dropped to his knees in sobbing genuflection. His two comrades reached for their swords.

“Touch those swords,” I told them, “and I will kill you all.”

Marina joined me, shaking her head. “
You
are the animal, not the indios.” She squeezed my arm. “But I know that was for Diego.”

“For all the Aztec warriors who fell today. A piece of land, food for their children, freedom from slavery, not to die in some Spaniard's mine or under the hooves of a gachupine's horse or under his coach or whip—that is all they wanted. And they died for the dream.”

She pretended to examine my skull. “Juan, a cannonball must have creased your head. This is not like you.”

“Woman, you have always misunderstood me.” I tapped my temple. “Don Juan de Zavala is not the mindless caballero you think him to be. Soon I will be reading books and writing poetry.”

I shook my head at the anarchy around us. People who wore rags before were parading around in silks. Indios were ransacking inns and pulquerías, looting stores, setting fires.

“It's not good,” I said. “We've won the battle, but we're losing the peace.”

“What do you mean?”

“The people of the city are hiding, even the common people. They're terrified of the indios who were supposed to liberate them from the gachupines.”

“The anger of our army will subside in a while,” she said.

“Yes, but will the fears of the people of Guanajuato? Mark my words, Señorita Revolucionaria, we will see few volunteers from this great city. No regiments of trained soldiers, no criollos bringing muskets.”

“Then we will win the way it was done today: with the courage of our men.”

“They faced hundreds today. God protect us when they must face thousands of trained troops with cannons.”

NINETY-TWO