Part 9 (1/2)
”Its n.o.blest exemplar.”
I stared at him a long moment. Finally, shaking my head, I said, ”In India, maybe, but don't voice those views too loudly around here. The Inquisition has a burning ground, too, and its glowing pinchers and blazing stakes have nothing to do with amour vincet omnia. Some of the women around here might not endorse your beliefs either.”
”But you have Aztec blood in you as well. You carry in your heart the Aztec flame. They knew the truth of which I speak.”
”They won't help you either when you're screaming on a rack or strung from a strapaddo.”
Yet it was true about my indio ancestors. I had heard stories from Snake Flower and the woman I once called mother-stories of the many indio G.o.ds, of ancient worlds created and destroyed many times over, each new world ”a Cycle of the Sun.” Snake Flower told me our benighted world would one day die by fire.
And I knew, too, of Homer's Land of the Dead, his Elysian Fields, and G.o.ds on high.
I kept those views to myself as well.
But I listened with rapt fascination-and learned. Not only tales of his G.o.ds, but the secret arts of the mysterious East-stoicism, endurance, meditation, indifference to pain, and corporeal contortion. Contortion's skills alone took me hundreds of hours to perfect, but I practiced religiously. Eventually I was as supple as Gull. I could twist my joints as if they were the mellifluous sap that flows from the trees of our Rubber People.
Gull was a curious mentor. Tiny, with small delicate bones, he had for a time been a flyer of Papantla, that terrifying spectacle in which men swing from a rope around the towering tip of a vertiginous pole. Unfortunately for Gull, his line snapped one day, and like his namesake, he flew for real. Launched into s.p.a.ce like a slung stone, he soared and soared and soared. For a while it seemed he might even take wing, until he dropped like a rock.
His doomed flight terminated against an abandoned pyramid, its stony slope breaking both his legs. Unconscious for a month-”wandering through the Aztec nether world,” which was how Gull put it-when he came to, he told me he'd seen wondrous sights: Creation's dawn, the extinction of stars, the death of the G.o.ds, the end of time. But he never walked again. Not that he complained. He said those sights would inspire him all his days.
”I am content,” he said simply. ”The True Self behind the mask remains faithful to itself, remote, fearless, impervious as stone.”
For a time he appropriated another's legs. A huge lepero nicknamed ”Mountain”-because of his height and heft-conveyed him on his shoulders. Mountain, however, was an inept thief, who in the end was ambushed by his vindictive victims. This murderous mob stripped his hide with a flogging cat, hacked off both his hands, and cauterized the wrists in boiling oil. In the years to come his severed stumps grew even more scarified and unsightly, none of which affected his l.u.s.t for life. He continually joked that his double amputations kept him out of the mines. Not even the alcalde wanted a handless slave. So Gull rode his mountainous shoulders, all the while contorting himself into monstrous convolutions, even as Mountain stuck his obscenely cauterized stubs under the nose of potential patrons and bellowed. ”Alms! Alms for the handless, the legless, and the jointless!”
Gull was the brains, Mountain the feet, legs, and power. For a time they were the most successful beggars in Veracruz.
Until I came along and stole Gull's act.
The crowd parted for the vast procession of priests, friars, and nuns descending on the waterfront. Most of the priests wore a roughspun sackcloth of goat hair, wool, or burlap, their habits white, gray, brown, or black, depending on the order. Around their waists they wore rope belts. From their necks were strung wood-beaded rosaries. They held crosses before them. Cowls covered their heads. They favored hemp sandals, which kicked up dust as they marched. There seemed to be a contest as to whose robe could look the most threadbare. Several of the habits looked ready to dissolve off their bodies. Nor was much value placed on cleanliness. Sweat and dirt defaced habits and faces.
Fray Antonio had been one of them once-faithful to his vows of humility, good works, and poverty. Some of the priests and frays, however, clearly disdained that creed, clerics who rode in on horseback, wore s.h.i.+rts of fine linen and stockings of silk, whose monasteries were wealthy haciendas run by slave labor, and who lived like kings on the backs and sweat of the indio peons they had ostensibly come to save.
”The New World was conquered not only by the sword but by an army of priests,” the good fray once told me. ”Most gave everything they possessed, even their very lives, to bring Christ's cross to this benighted land. But these wicked ones arrive in silk and drive their flock like beasts of burden.”
”For filthy lucre,” I'd observed.
The fray nodded sadly. ”And for a priest to pillage his flock, like a wolf on the fold, is a sin against G.o.d.”
The great parade of priests and nuns swept by me. Holy men had arrived from all over New Spain, each order eager to outdo the other in hailing the new archbishop, and their music and dust billowed in the hot, warm air.
Their crosses extended before them, they sang ”Te Deum” as they marched, a sacred paen to the Lord.
You are G.o.d:
We praise you.
You are the Lord:
We acclaim you.