"And why should we not?" they demand. "There are still some fifteen thousand red men to every white one in these lands. What harm in our reducing that dangerous disparity, especially if we can wring useful work from the wretches while we do it?"
The Spaniards who hold that attitude claim that they have good religious justification for it, viz.: because we Christians rescued these savages from their devil worship and inevitable damnation, because we brought them hope of salvation, therefore the Indians should be eternally obligated to us their redeemers. Your Majesty's chaplain cannot deny that there is logic in the argument, but we do feel that the Indians' obligation should not require them to die indiscriminately and arbitrarily—of beatings, brandings, starvation rations, and other mistreatments—certainly not before they have been baptized and fully confirmed in the Faith.
Since the cadastral and census records of New Spain are still necessarily haphazard and incomplete, we can offer only rough calculations of the number of the native population, past and present. But there is reason to believe that approximately six million red men formerly lived within the confines of what is now New Spain. The battles of the Conquest of course took a considerable toll of them. Also, at that time and in the nine years since, an estimated two and a half million more of the Indians under Spanish authority have died of various diseases, and only God knows how many more in the yet unconquered regions, and they continue to die in great numbers everywhere.
It has apparently pleased Our Lord to make the red race peculiarly vulnerable to certain afflictions which, it seems, were not heretofore endemial in these lands. While the pestilence of the great pocks was previously known here (and not surprisingly, in view of the people's general licentiousness), it appears that the plagues of the buboes, the cholera morbus, the small pocks, the pease pocks, and the measles were not. Whether those diseases began to occur only coincidentally with the overthrow of these peoples, or are a chastisement visited upon them by God in His judgment, they ravage the Indians with far more virulence than Europeans have ever suffered.
Still, that loss of lives, while of distressing magnitude, is at any rate of natural cause, an inscrutable Act of God, and not of our countrymen's doing nor amenable to their amelioration of it. We can, however, call a halt to our countrymen's deliberate killing of the red men, and we must do so. Your Majesty gave us another office besides those of Bishop and Inquisitor, and we will uphold that title of Protector of the Indians, even if it means bearing also the hateful title of Scourge bestowed by our fellows.
That the Indians profit us, as cheap and expendable labor, must be a secondary consideration to our saving of their pagan souls. Our success in that noble task is diminished by every Indian who dies not yet a Christian. If too many should perish thus, the good name of the Church would suffer. Besides, if these Indians all die, who then would build our cathedrals and churches and chapels and monasteries and convents and cloisters and shrines and houses of retreat and other Christian edifices, and who would constitute the bulk of our congregations, and who would work and contribute and tithe to support the servants of God in New Spain?
May Our Lord God preserve Your Most Renowned Majesty, executor of so many holy works, that you may enjoy the fruits thereof in His High Glory.
(ecce signum) Zumárraga
SEPTIMA PARS
Does Your Excellency join us today to hear what my married life was like?
I think you will find the account rather less crowded with incident—and, I should hope, less abrasive to Your Excellency's sensibilities—than the tempestuous times of my younger manhood. Although I must regretfully report that the actual ceremony of my wedding to Zyanya was clouded by storm and tempest, I am happy to say that most of our married life afterward was sunny and calm. I do not mean that it was ever dull; with Zyanya I experienced many further adventures and excitements; indeed, her very presence brought excitement into my every day. Also, in the years following our marriage, the Mexíca were at the peak of their power and were wielding it with vigor, and I was occasionally involved in happenings that I now recognize as having been of some small importance. But at the time, they were to me and Zyanya—and doubtless to the majority of commonfolk like ourselves—only a sort of busy-figured wall painting in front of which we lived out our private lives and our own small triumphs and our inconsequential little happinesses.
Oh, not that we regarded any least aspect of our marriage as insignificant. Early on, I asked Zyanya how she did that twinkling contraction of her tipíli's little circlet of muscles, which made our act of love so extraordinarily exciting. She blushed with shy pleasure and murmured, "You might as well ask how I wink my eyes. It simply happens when I will it. Does it not happen with every woman?"
"I have not known every woman," I said, "and I have no wish to, now that I have the best of all."
But Your Excellency is not interested in such homely details. I think I might best make you see and appreciate Zyanya by comparing her to the plant we call the metl—though of course the metl is nothing like as beautiful as she was, and it does not love or speak or laugh.
The metl, Your Excellency, is that man-high green or blue plant you have taught us to call the maguey. Bountiful and generous and handsome to look at, the maguey must be the most useful plant that grows anywhere. Its long, curved, leathery leaves can be cut and laid overlapping to make a watertight roof for a house. Or the leaves can be crushed to a pulp, pressed, and dried into paper. Or the leaf fibers can be separated and spun into any kind of cord from rope to thread. The thread can be woven into a rough but serviceable cloth. The hard, sharp spines that outline each leaf can serve as needles, pins, or nails. They served our priests as instruments with which to torture and mutilate and mortify themselves.
The leaf shoots that grow nearest the earth are white and tender, and can be cooked to make a delicious sweet. Or they can be dried to make fuel for a long-burning, smokeless hearth fire, and the resultant clean white ash is used for everything from surfacing bark paper to making soap. Cut away the central leaves of the maguey, scoop out its heart, and in the hollow will collect the plant's clear sap. It is tasty and nutritious to drink. Smeared on the skin, it prevents wrinkles, rashes, and blemishes; our women used it extensively for that. Our men preferred to let the maguey juice sit and ferment into the drunk-making octli, or pulque, as you call it. Our children liked the clear sap boiled down to a syrup, when it is almost as thick and sweet as bees' honey.
In brief, the maguey offers every part and particle of its being for the good of us who grow and tend it. And Zyanya, besides being incomparably more, was rather like that. She was good in every part, in every way, in every action, and not just to me. Though of course I enjoyed the best of her, I never knew another person who did not love and esteem and admire her. Zyanya was not only Always, she was everything.
But I must not waste Your Excellency's time with sentimentality. Let me return to telling things in the order in which they happened.
After our escape from the murderous Zyu and our survival of the earthquake, it took me and Zyanya fully seven days to return to Tecuantépec by the overland route. Whether the quake had annihilated the savages or made them assume that it had annihilated us, I do not know, but no one pursued us, and we were not otherwise bothered in our crossing of the mountains, except by occasional thirst and hunger. I had long ago lost my burning crystal to the robbers on the isthmus, and I carried no fire-drilling device, and we did not ever get quite hungry enough to eat raw meat. We found sufficient wild fruits and berries and birds' eggs, all of which we could eat raw, and they also provided enough moisture to sustain us between the infrequent mountain springs. At night, we piled up billows of dry leaves and slept in them intertwined for mutual warmth and other mutual comforting.