Body and Bread (16 page)

“I was on my way out after paying a hooker eight dollars, and this creep at the door says I owe him five more. No way I’m doing that.” He spat a puff of air. “I didn’t see
him
with us upstairs. It’s a clear matter of principle.”

“You were with a prostitute?” Where was Mariana? Did Terezie know?

“When Jaime told Mariana, she called Mom.”

“Did Mom come to Mexico?” I didn’t remember her being gone, but now I’d believe anything.

“Dad had to pay fifteen hundred dollars to get me out.” He folded the article and slid it back into his wallet. “What a rip-off.”

“Was he mad?”

“The great man of principle, and guess what he says?” He lifted his hand in a mock plea. “
Just once, couldn’t you try to do what’s right?
”

The term “Aztec” usually refers incorrectly to the founders of
Tenochtitlan
, now Mexico City; or it refers to one of several other possible definitions.
Aztecah
is a
Nahuatl
word that means “people from
Aztlan
,” the mythological homeland in Northern Mexico from which several tribes migrated between the 12
^th
and 13
^th
centuries to south and central Mexico. The group split, and the members who moved into the Basin of Mexico named themselves
Mexihca
. In other contexts, “Aztec” includes inhabitants of
Tenochtitlan
’s principal allied city-states, the
Aculhuaque
of
Tetzcohco
and the
Tepanecah
of
Tlacōpan
. Other times, “Aztec” includes all city-states that shared the
Mexihcayōtl
language, history, culture. This definition was originated by the German explorer Alexander von Humboldt in 1810, but these “Aztecs” are now referred to as
Nahuah
. In 1843, William H. Prescott spread acceptance of Humboldt’s definition, resulting in its use by 19
^th
century Mexican scholars to distinguish modern Mexicans from pre-conquest Mexicans. Although “Aztec” is consistently misused or misunderstood, it’s still common. As a high school student, my uneducated use of the term and misinterpretations of the culture were logical. But society’s repeated misuse of these terms only illustrates history’s continual evolution.

The mask’s magic, though, didn’t feel tied to one time or title.

Monday, I switched stations on my bedroom radio, alternating between sentimental blues crooned to three strummed chords and a band of joyfully ironic Brits hooting in minor keys. I did the frug while I sang “A Hard Day’s Night.” Sam’s mask hung on my papered wall.

By Wednesday, shadowed patches showed through its openings. Lying on my bed, the fan ticking, the image of my gravy-covered hand against my mother’s shoulder made me laugh. I remembered Sam wearing the jaguar face.

Once during his senior year, he’d stomped the car’s brakes as we’d passed the vacant lot behind Phillips Food Mart on our way to school. “What?” I said as he jumped out, the door ajar. A group of boys shouted, one shoved, while some barked accusations at two others: Emil Kulhanek, a known bully, and Wade Nyank, a watchful boy who was sometimes spotted with Sam. Whacks thudded and twice Sam went down, but his concentrated expression never altered. Weepy, I called him, wondering if I should phone the police. After Wade turned, staring, he pulled Sam toward the car, and they got in. “Are we late?” Sam said, steering the Corvair away from the curb, rolling his sleeve to hide a tear at the elbow.

Sam slept with at least one prostitute, a revelation surprisingly inconsequential, but had he been with his girlfriend? Sure, a few of the girls I knew were having sex, but we didn’t talk about it. I’d seen couples necking on
As the World Turns
, a show I watched furtively while eating lunch. Sam’s hand would slide like a soap star’s under Terezie’s blouse, rubbing its way to her pursed nipple. He’d kiss her then, and maybe she’d touch him, pressing, as I had in our father’s lab—did he remember?—against the bulge in his jeans. But Sam wouldn’t push Terezie away. He’d probably moan like they did on TV, moving his mouth down her neck. “No,” I said to myself, turning my back to the mask on the wall.

The next morning, I heard what sounded like someone speaking a foreign language, a looping of vowels with tongue-clicked endings, words I somehow thought I could translate.
Beat your breath. Be a cornstalk. Be possessed of eyes and ears
. I didn’t know what it meant, and, worse, it manifested what I’d secretly feared: a parent-like god-spirit. I pulled my knees to my chest. Sam’s eyes had fluttered behind the mask; his voice had been muffled:
for somebody not afraid to look.
I pictured his hands, kicked free of the sheets, walked to the dresser.

“Sarah,” my mother called. “Breakfast.”

I searched through drawers, in a chair’s stack of clothes, in my phys ed bag for my favorite bra but couldn’t find it. I yanked my blouse from its hanger, poked my arms through, buttoned. No one will notice, I thought. Why do we have to wear those things anyway? I pulled on a half-slip, brushed my hair.

“Sarah!” my mother called.

I wiggled into my skirt, ran down the stairs, breasts bobbing, then slid into my chair at the table. Not until I swirled a last bite of toast in egg yolk did I realize I’d forgotten to put on panties. I tightened my hem across my knees, then remembered being a girl, swimming, sometimes naked, in the farm creek. No one, especially me, had been bothered.

“Missy, Mama needs help with the dishes,” my father said, nodding toward her at the sink.

“Sorry, can’t today,” I said, ducking. “Latin club meeting.” I climbed two stairs at a time, thinking,
a nurse would never go without underwear
.

At school, I hugged my books or folded my arms as I pictured my nipples flopping. Later I forgot to hide myself, and by lunchtime, my blouse felt like a pajama top. I threw my shoulders back, ignoring glances. Wind puffed up my skirt, and I shivered, sweaty, a sensation that reappeared when I realized I wasn’t embarrassed.

For my last class, tennis, I had to change into a gym suit. The girl I shared a locker room cubicle with belonged to an orthodox religion that outlawed makeup, boys, and knowledge about bodies. She stared, shocked by my total nakedness.

“Once in a while,” I said, “girls have to let their breasts and vagina breathe.” Her gullibility was irresistible. “If you don’t, the natural bacteria will mutate into an infection that looks like mold. And it can spread. See?” I showed her a mole on my chest. “When I saw this, I knew it was time.”

Frowning, she turned, unsnapped two buttons, and inspected herself. I hung my skirt and blouse on a hook, thinking maybe I would/maybe I wouldn’t tell her the truth when we changed clothes again at the end of the hour.

I wasn’t part of the 2006 archeological team that discovered the twelve-ton, pinkish andesite monolith of
Tlāltecuhtli
near the ruins of the sacred pyramid known as Templo Mayor. Broken into four pieces, it squats to give birth while drinking its own blood, devouring its own creation, a symbol of death perpetuating life. But I was part of the team, led by Leonardo López Luján two summers later, that found a deep pit beside the monolith. When Leo and his assistant pulled off a stucco block in the plaza floor, we stepped back, startled. Twenty-one flint knives painted red—teeth and gums in the open mouth of
Tlāltecuhtli
, the earth god—positioned to receive the dead. Underneath, in a shaft eight feet deep, we uncovered a stone box. Leo allowed me to open it, but when I took off the lid, my gloved hands shook like an amateur’s. I retrieved, avoiding all but the slightest pressure, the skeletons of two golden eagles, twenty-four knives wrapped in fur, and the remains of a dog or wolf wearing a collar of jade beads, turquoise ear plugs, and gold bells on its ankles. The objects had been arranged according to a certain logic, re-creating the
Mexihcayōtl
cosmos.

After dinner, I searched my father’s shelves for Sam’s Aztec book. The cover image, a marketplace, reminded me of Otis and his stories about Houston’s years with the Cherokees in Arkansas. I’d told Sam that East Texas Comanche had once kidnapped a girl, Cynthia Ann Parker, and that when she was returned to white, germ-free order in Navasota twenty-four years later, she’d died of heartbreak. He gave me the book the next day, but I didn’t understand how he’d gotten from Comanche to Aztecs, so I’d stuck it with my father’s orthopedic journals, dog-eared copy of Thomas Merton’s
Seven Storey Mountain
, and the
Bhagavad-Gita
.

I turned to a chapter titled “The Eagles and Jaguars.”
Men
, it said,
earned knighthood by capturing four prisoners for ritualistic sacrifice. The knights kept concubines and drank
octli,
an alcoholic drink. They worshipped
the warrior sun god with cannibalistic feasts
.

Archaeologists had discovered a life-sized pottery statue of a jaguar knight at the entrance of the order’s private hall inside the Great Temple. A photograph covered two pages, its background black, the terra-cotta figure with detailed features. Crouched, the warrior bent his sinewy arms upward; his fingers curled, ready for battle. He wore the animal’s speckled skin, complete with sticklike tail, his human feet magically attached at the ankles.

Reaching for a lamp switch, I glimpsed my father’s desk topped with bills, pens and pencils in a jar, a copy of
The Journal of the American Medical Association
. My silhouette reflected from the glass-fronted bookshelves, superimposed over rows of colored bindings. I pulled off my socks and Weejuns, twisted the lamp knob.

The knight wore the jaguar’s head like a helmet, the small ears pointed, the eyes black-rimmed, the whiskers jutting. Here was the marvel: Fanged jaws were unhinged, spread impossibly wide, the man’s face protruding as though he were being swallowed. His lips parted; he frowned, his eyes wide, focused on some distant sound. Was he man or animal? Was the jaguar animal or man?

If I could, I’d slide my palm around his killing arm. Together we’d catch fish with our hands, tear white flesh, eat it raw, each slick morsel a gift from
Tlāloc
, the rain god. We’d drink
octli
and rub oil into each other’s hair.

I carried the book to my room, took down the mask, set it next to the picture: same rosettes, same leather tongue. Pulling the jaguar face to my face, I looked in the mirror. The pin-sized eye holes worked like binoculars. I moved closer, crouched, raising my arms, curling my fingers. “Night hunter, maguey dust,” I said.

Later, lying in my nightgown, breasts pressed against the mattress, fan cooling my legs, I read:
Eager to join the gods, some captives sprinted up the temple steps, then bent backward over the sacrificial stone so a priest could scoop out their still-beating hearts with an obsidian knife
.

Then Hugh walked in, his bare feet slapping the carpet. “Where is it?” he asked, glancing at the top of my dresser, my desk.

I couldn’t believe he was almost a teenager.

“Sam told me,” he said, his brows lifting, clownish, a kid again.

The mask lay next to me, and when I held it up, he ran over. “Oh, man.” He tapped the nose and tongue then put it on. When I reached for it, he shoved my arm.

“Hey, be careful,” I said as he strode around the room, the mask an obvious attachment, unable to transform someone so young. “Sometimes an Aztec wore a dead man’s skin.” I leaned on an elbow, wiggled my feet.

“Yeah, right.” Hugh took off the mask and studied it, rubbing the eyes, peeking inside the ears.

“Really. Every spring they had a holiday, like Easter. They cut out prisoners’ hearts, and then jaguar warriors wore the skins.”

“Gross,” he said, frowning. He sat on the bed. “How come?”

“It’s their religion,” I said, sitting, marking the page with my finger. I longed to show Hugh that he, like Sam and I, should be unafraid to look. “The first guy died for this god,
Xīpe Totec
, and the second one wore the dead guy’s skin to honor him.”

Hugh positioned the mask over his face as he stepped to the mirror. “Can I have this? Please?” he said, hunching, pretending pain.

“Let’s say it’s ours together.”

“Yeah!”

“But it stays in here.”

That night, I dreamed a muscled boy lay across a bloody stone. The dream started with him whole, brawny one minute, then limp, mutilated the next, his eyes glazed, his mouth open. As a priest held up the heart, his cowl slipped back. Cuts surrounded his eyes; his mouth puckered, a mashup of teeth and skin. I saw myself—next to the body, across from the priest—dip fingers in a bowl, smear blood on my lips. Hands appeared then, rubbing, oiling me: slithery. As I grunted, pulling on the skin, I thought, Why don’t men have to wear these? When I woke, I remembered the stench, the itching, the faint pressure of a daisy garland on my head.