Aztec Autumn - Jennings Gary - Страница 82

And all the three branches of the Yaki, I learned, were closely related to the To'ono O'otam, or Desert People, of whom I had first heard from the much-traveled slave Esteban. The To'ono O'otam lived far away to the northeast of the Yaki lands. To do some enjoyable killing of them required a long, long march and an organized onslaught. So, about once a year, all the Yaki yoem'sontaom would put aside their mutual animosities and would companionably combine to make that march against their Desert People cousins. And those would almost rejoicingly welcome the incursions, as giving them good excuse for butchering some of their Opata, Mayo and Kahita cousins.

About one thing, however, I had not been misinformed, and that was the Yaki's abominable attitude toward their womenfolk. I had always referred to G'nda Ke simply as Yaki, and it was not until we got to Bakum that I learned she was of the Mayo branch. I would have thought it her good fortune that the hunting party we had encountered were also Mayo, bringing her to a Mayo community. Not so. I soon realized that Yaki women were not regarded as being Mayo or Kahita or Opata or anything else except women, the lowest form of life. When we entered Bakum, G'nda Ke was not embraced as a long-lost sister blessedly returned to her people. All the villagers, including the females and children, watched her arrival as icily as the hunters had done, and as icily as they regarded us male outlanders.

That very first evening, G'nda Ke was put to work with the other women, preparing the night's meal—lardy tlecuachi meat, maize cakes, roasted locusts, unidentifiable beans and roots. Then the women, including G'nda Ke, served the fare to the village men and boys. When those had eaten their fill, before they went off to chew peyotl, they indicated offhandedly that I, Ualiztli, Machihuiz and Acocotli could scavenge among their leftovers. And not until we four had eaten most of what was left did the women, including G'nda Ke, dare to come and pick through the scraps and crumbs.

The men of whatever Yaki breed, when they were not fighting one cousin or another, did nothing but hunt all the day long—except in the Kahita village called Be'ene, on the shore of the Western, Sea, where later I saw the men do some lackadaisical fishing with their three-pronged spears and some lazy digging for shellfish. Everywhere, the women did all the work and lived only on remainders, including what little remainder of—I cannot say "affection"—what little remainder of forbearance their men might come home with, after a hard day afield.

If a man returned home in a fairly benign mood, he might greet his woman with a mere passing snarl instead of a blow. If he had had a really successful hunt or fight, and came home in a really good frame of mind, he might even condescend to fling his woman to the ground, lift her cotton skirt and his skirt of scalps, and engage her in a less than loving act of ahuilnema, uncaring of how many onlookers might be present. That, of course, was why the village populations were so scant; the couplings occurred so seldom. More often, the men came home disgruntled, muttering curses and would beat their women as bloody as they would like to have bloodied the deer or bear or enemy that had got away.

"By Huitztli, I wish I could treat my woman so," said Acocotli, because, he confided, back in Aztlan he had a wife almost as mean-spirited as G'nda Ke, who bullied and nagged him unmercifully. "By Huitztli, I will, from now on, if I ever get home again!"

Our G'nda Ke found few opportunities in Bakum to exercise her mean spirit. Being worked like a slave, being regarded as otherwise worthless, she endured those humiliations not apathetically like the other women, but in sullen and smoldering anger, because even the other women looked down on her—for her having no man to do the beating of her. (I and my companions refused to oblige her in that respect.) I know she would mightily have liked to command some awed and admiring adulation from her people, by boasting of her far travels and her evil exploits and the turmoils she had caused among men. But the women scorned to respect her in the least, and the men glared her to silence whenever she tried to speak to them. Perhaps G'nda Ke had been so long away from her people that she had forgotten how miserably insignificant she would be even in such coarse and ignorant company—that she would be accounted something less than vermin. Vermin at any rate could make themselves an annoyance. She no longer could.

No one beat her, but she was subject to orders from everyone, including the women, because they performed or assigned all the work of the village. They may have been envious of G'nda Ke's having seen something of the world outside the dreary Bakum, or of her having once ordered men around. They may have despised her simply for her being not of their village. Whatever the reason, they behaved as maliciously as only small-minded women of petty authority can behave. They worked G'nda Ke unceasingly, taking special delight in giving her the dirtiest and hardest of tasks. It gladdened my heart to see it.

The only injury she received was a small one. While gathering firewood, she was bitten by a spider on the ankle, and it made her slightly ill. I personally would have thought it impossible for one tiny venomous creature to sicken a much larger and far more venomous one. Anyway, since no woman was allowed to shirk her work for any indisposition short of giving birth or visibly dying, G'nda Ke—screeching and protesting in mortification—was forced to stretch out on the ground for the ministrations of the village ticitl. As Ualiztli had said, that old fraud did nothing but don a mask designed to frighten off evil spirits, and bellow a nonsensical chant, and make nonsensical pictures on the ground with varicolored sands and shake a wooden rattle full of dried beans. Then he pronounced G'nda Ke hale and whole and ready for work again, and to work she was put.

The single small distinction G'nda Ke was accorded in Bakum was the permission, when she was not at some other labor, to sit as interpreter between me and the five old yo'otui. There she could speak, at least, and—since I never learned more than a few words of the language—she almost certainly must have tried to make herself a heroine by denouncing me as a quimichi, or an agitator of dubious motives, or anything else that might have made the elders order us outlanders ousted or executed. But this much I know: There is no word for heroine in the Yaki tongue, no concept of any such kind of woman in the Yaki mind. If G'nda Ke did desperately try that tactic, I am sure the yo'otui heard her rantings as nothing but woman-wind to be ignored. If she did insist that we Azteca be exterminated, and if the old men took any notice at all, they would perversely have done just the opposite. So it may have been thanks to another of G'nda Ke's attempts at perfidy that the yo'otui not only let me stay and speak my message but also listened attentively to me.

I should explain how those yo'otui governed—if governed is the word—for the Yaki system was unique in The One World. Each of the old men was responsible for one ya'ura, meaning "function," of the five ya'uram of his village: religion, warfare, work, customs and dance. Necessarily, some of their duties overlapped, while others were scarcely required at all. The elder in charge of work, for example, had little to do but punish any female malingerer, and such a woman simply did not exist in Yaki society. The elder in charge of warfare had only to give his blessing whenever the yoem'sontaom of his village decided to make a raid on some other, or whenever the yoem'sontaom of all the three Yaki branches combined to make their almost-ritual raids on the Desert People.