He dismissed me forthwith, and one of the Cathedral's tame indio servants made no attempt to be unobtrusive as he trailed me all the way home.
XII
I had resolved to quit the City of Mexíco even before Alonso so coldly recommended that I do so. That was because I had despaired of ever raising an army of rebellion from among the city's inhabitants. Like the late Netzlin—and now Pochotl—the local men were too dependent on their white masters to want to rise up against them. Even had they wanted to, they were by now so enervated and unwarlike that they would not have dared to make the attempt. If I was to recruit any men like myself, resentful of the Spaniards' domination and bellicose enough to challenge it, I must retrace my journey hither. I must go again northward, into the unconquered lands.
"You are more than welcome to come with me," I told Citláli. "I truly have treasured the blessing of your nearness, your support and—well, everything you have meant to me. But you are a woman, and some years older than I, so you might find that I set too brisk a pace on the road. Especially since you would have to be leading Ehécatl by the hand."
"You are definitely going, then," she murmured unhappily.
"But not forever, despite what I said to the notarius. I fully intend to come back here. At the head of an armed force, I trust, sweeping the white men from every field and forest, every village, every city, including this one. However, that cannot be soon. So I will not ask you to wait for me, dear Citláli. You are still an exceedingly handsome woman. You may attract another good and loving husband, aquín ixnentla? At any rate, Ehécatl is old enough now for you to take the child with you when you tend the market stall. With what you earn there, and with the sum we have put by, and without my being an extra mouth to feed—"
She interrupted, "I wouldwait, dearest Tenamáxtli, however long. But how can I hope that you will ever be back? You will be risking your life out there."
"As I would, Citláli, even if I stayed here. As you have been risking yours. If I had been caught in the crime of experimenting with the pólvora, you would have been dragged to the stake along with me."
"I risked that because it was a chance we were taking together. I would go anywhere, do anything, if only we did it together."
"But there is Ehécatl to consider..."
"Yes," she whispered. Then, suddenly, she burst into tears and demanded, "Whyare you so determined to pursue this folly? Why can you not resign yourself to recognize reality, and bear with it, as others have done?"
"Why?"I echoed, dumbfounded.
"Ayya, I know what the white men did to your father, but—"
"That is not reason enough?" I snapped. "I can still see him burning!"
"And they slew your friend, my husband. But what have they done to you?Tenamáxtli, you have suffered neither injury nor insult, beyond those few words spoken long ago by the mesón friar. Every other white man you have mentioned, you have said only good things of him. The kindness of the man Molina, the other teachers who gave of their knowledge, even that soldier who started you on your quest for the pólvora..."
"Crumbs from their table! The richly laden table that used to be ours! Whether my tonáli dictates that I shall succeed in restoring that table to our people, I do not know. But I am sure it bids me try. I refuse to believe that I was born to settle for crumbs. And I am wagering my life on that."
Citláli sighed so deeply that she seemed to shrink a bit. "How much longer will I have you by me? Or how little longer? When do you plan to go?"
"Not immediately, for I will not slink away, like a techíchi dog, with its head hung low and its tail tucked under. I want to leave something for the City of Mexíco—for all of New Spain—to remember me by. And what I have in mind, Citláli, is one final crime that you and I can commit together."
I cannot refute what Citláli had said: that I myself had never had pain, deprivation, imprisonment or even indignity inflicted on me by the Spaniards. But, during my years in the city, I had met or become aware of a multitude of my fellows who had.There were, as I have mentioned, the onetime warriors branded with the G,and the other slaves branded with the mark of their owners. There were the wretched, drunken men and women I had seen beaten and minced to death by the patrols, as Netzlin had been. And I had seen the once-pure blood of our race diluted, dirtied and disgraced in the varicolored mongrel offspring of the Spaniards and Moros.
Also I knew—not from personal experience, I rejoice to say, but from those very few who had somehow escaped—the horrors of the obrajes.These were vast, stone-walled, iron-gated workshops where cotton or wool was washed, carded, spun, dyed and woven into fabrics. The obrajes had first been established by the Spanish corregidores as a means of making a profit from convicted criminals. Criminal indios, I mean. Rather than just being locked up in idleness, such miscreants were put to that filthy, dreary and laborious work (and a cruelly demeaning work, for a man). They were paid no wages at all, were given only squalid quarters and no privacy whatever, were poorly fed, barely clothed, never let to bathe—and never let to leave the obraje until the expiration of their prison sentence, which few of them lived long enough to enjoy.
And the obrajes wereprofitable, so much so that individual Spaniards set up their own, and were freely given state prisoners to work in them, until eventually there were not enough prisoners to go around. At which time, the obraje owners began wheedling our people into handing over their children. Those boys and girls, the owners promised, would be apprenticed to learn a trade that they could follow in later life, and meanwhile the parents would be saved the cost of their upbringing. Worse yet, the abbots and abbesses of Christian orphan asylums, such as that at the Refugio de Santa Brígida, were easily persuaded to give their indio wards a choice, as soon as the children were old enough to understand: either take holy orders, to become a Christian nun or friar, or be damned to go and live and labor in an obraje. (The orphans of mixed blood, such as Rebeca Canalluza, were exempted from that damnation, because the Christian asylum-keepers could not be sure that some Spanish parent might not someday come looking to acknowledge and claim them.)
Whether or not the enslaved criminals had been deservedly convicted, those were at least grown men. The conscripted orphans and "apprentices" were not. But, just like the criminals, those boys and girls were almost never seen outside the obraje gates again. Like the criminals, they were worked unmercifully, often to death, and they suffered degradations and defilements that the grown men were spared. The obrajes were guarded and overseen not by their Spanish owners, but by cheaply hired Moros and mulatos. Those creatures delighted in showing their superiority to mere indio rustico children by beating and starving them, when they were not repeatedly forcing ahuilnéma upon the girls and cuilónyotl upon the boys.
The Christian corregidores and alcaldes and the Christian owners of obrajes and the converted-Christian native tepísquin all colluded in these atrocities, and the Christian Church connived at them, for their own aggrandizement, of course, but for another reason as well. The Spaniards had firmly convinced themselves that every single one of our people was a lazy, shiftless layabout who would never work unless compelled by imminent punishment, starvation or violent death.
That was not and never had been true. In the old days, our able-bodied men and women had often been commandeered by their lords—whether local nobles or Revered Speakers—to do unpaid labor, much of it drudging, on many a public project. In this city, for example, those had ranged from the building of the Chapultépec aqueduct to the erection of the Great Temple of Tenochtítlan. And our people did such work willingly, eagerly, because they regarded communal labor as just another way of getting together for cheerful social intercourse. They would undertake any task assigned to them if it was presented—not asa task—as an opportunity for convivial mingling. The Spanish masters could profitably have taken advantage of that trait in our people, but they preferred to use the lash and the sword and the prison and the obraje and the threat of the burning stake.