Aztec Blood - Jennings Gary - Страница 66

I soon discovered that there were two things that Mateo loved most to do—besides making love and fighting duels—drinking and talking.

As we went along, he frequently imbibed from a goatskin and told many tales. Por Dios! This picaro caballero had had more adventures than Sinbad suffered setting out from Basra, and Odysseus sailing from Troy.

"He's like a songbird," the Healer said, when we were alone. "He likes to hear the music of his own words."

Mateo's tales were of his adventures as a sailor and soldier for the king.

"I've fought the French, English, Low Country rebels, and heathen Turks. Blasphemous Protestants, heretic Dutch, and Infidel Moors have all tasted my blade. I fought from the back of a horse, from the deck of a ship, and climbing a castle wall. I've killed a hundred men and loved a thousand women."

And told a million tales, I thought. I had great curiosity as to why the picaro autor of plays and books had ended up with Sancho, a common cutthroat, but it was not a subject I could broach.

They were a strange pair. I knew from personal experience that Mateo was lethal. And I could tell that Sancho was a killer. But the difference between them was that of a fine Toledo blade and an ax. Mateo was a picaro, a braggart, a swordsman, and an adventurer. But he was also a writer and actor, neither of which he appeared to excel at, but which gave him a rough quality as a scholar and gentleman.

Sancho had nothing of the scholar or gentleman about him. He was coarse and crude and pugnacious, filthy of word and body, arrogant and a bully.

And there was something else about him, something that didn't settle right in my mind, yet I could not figure out exactly what it was. His appearance bothered me. He appeared to be powerfully built... yet at times he seemed more fleshy than muscular, almost in a feminine sense. Years ago I heard Fray Antonio and Fray Juan talk about harem guards the Moors used called eunuchs, men whose cojones had been cut off. They said that the men grew soft and fleshy like a woman, even developing breasts. I supposed that the same thing happened to africano slaves who were castrated.

Despite his brutal manner and threats, Sancho had that feminine softness I imagined eunuchs had.

"As a boy younger than you, I sailed in the fleet of Medina Sidonia, who commanded the great Armada that fought the English in the northern waters. We were beaten by the weather, the wind howled like a mad dog, driving my ship ashore. I washed ashore and spent the next years in the guise of a French boy who had run away from his Scottish master. I joined a traveling group of actors on the road, first as a helper with their trunks and later as an actor and writer of plays.

"The English theater is not as brilliant as our Spanish one. They had a few modestly competent playwrights, one Will Shakespeare, another named Christopher Marlowe, but they lacked the genius of Spanish masters like Lope de Vega and Mateo Rosas de Oquendo. History will remember Mateo Rosas and sing his praise along with Homer long after the names of others have been blown away as dust."

I never knew if he was joking or boasting... or just plain drunk. His own peculiar "modesty" caused Mateo to often refer to himself as if he was talking about an entirely different person.

"I was captured by the Moors, by the Bey of Algiers himself, black heathen infidel devil that he be. I was tortured and starved until I made my escape."

I had heard this story before about an author whose name was sung more alongside that of Homer than Mateo's. Miguel Cervantes, the author of Don Quixote, had been captured by the Bey of Algiers and spent time in a Moorish prison. I had once spoken Cervantes's name in the presence of Mateo years prior and had nearly gotten my head lopped off. Only the devil knows why I do such stupid things, but I decided to demonstrate a little innocent knowledge to test a suspicion that Mateo borrowed other men's ideas just as casually as he did their purses and women.

"The priests at the church who taught me Spanish used to speak of another author of books and plays who had been captured—"

I suddenly found myself lying on the ground with a ringing in my head. Mateo had delivered a blow to my head.

"Never speak the name of this person in my presence," he said. "In a prison cell after enduring heinous tortures and deprivations, I revealed to this swine the story I would write about a knight-errant upon my return to Spain, the story of my life. He stole my life and published it before I got back—except, of course, he purloined my grandest accomplishments and held them up to ridicule, depicting my life before the entire world as the lunatic folly of a ridiculous buffoon. He stole my life, Chico. Eh, I admit I've done things the world deems dishonorable. Yes, I have helped myself to the coffers of the rich, drunk the wine of life to the bottom of the bottle, gambled my days, my years, my youth, my fears, my hopes, my dreams, my very soul far into manana's dawn—and never looked back. I've killed men and seduced women. But some things I have never done. I have never stolen from a friend. I have never stolen a man's life. Now the world sings the praise of this thief, and none knows the name of poor Mateo Rosas de Oquendo." Mateo gave me a kick. "Now do you understand?"

Monte Alban crowned hills nearly fifteen hundred feet above the valley of Oaxaca and the city of that name. The hills were bare, almost bald of trees, and did not distract from the majesty of the ancient stone edifices.

Like other temple cities in New Spain, the example of Teotihuacan, the Place of the Gods, had been followed in building Monte Alban, a city dedicated to worship. The ancient stone structures were laid out in a rectangular plaza on the leveled mountaintop; about half a league long, the terraced plaza had pyramid temples, an observatory, ball court, and palaces.

Like so many of the holy places of my indio ancestors, Monte Alban was shrouded in mystery, a place of the gods, which more people visited than actually resided in. It was not Aztec, but Zapotec. South of the Valley of Mexico, the Zapotecs were not defeated by the Aztecs until about fifty years before Cortes's conquest. Beaten in battle, but not completely conquered, the Zapotecs and Aztecs were at each other's throats right up to the time of the conquest.

Today Monte Alban was devoid of life, the droppings of pack animals passing through and grass that had been crushed underfoot the only signs that anything but time had trespassed on the sacred grounds. At these ghostly stone cities of my ancestors, I got a sense of the forlorn, as if the people had left behind some of their sadness when they abandoned the city to snakes and tarantulas.

After the conquest, the people of the Oaxaca area traded masters as Cortes was granted tribute rights from indios. Granted the title of Marques del Valle de Oaxaca and over twenty thousand tribute-paying indios, his actual feudal holdings came to be the size of some European kingdoms.

We made camp and later I walked among the ruins with the Healer. I felt a familiar chill breeze, the wind that I had felt in a cave below the Temple of the Sun in Teotihuacan.

"The gods are not pleased," the Healer said. "No good will come of this. These men have come here not to praise the gods but to offend them."

FIFTY-SIX

The Healer and I camped away from the others. We were not alone on the hillside. A merchant from the fair had camped some distance from us with his peculiar merchandise: four prostitutes. He had rented them out at the fair and was returning to Oaxaca with his merchandise. I heard Sancho tell the man that he would use one of the putas.