"I am sorry," I said. "Have you consulted a physician?"
"No, and I did not come to speak of that. Mixtli, was it you who did it?"
I made no hypocritical pretense of ignorance. I said, "I know what you mean. Béu remarked on it some time ago. But no, it was not my doing."
He nodded and said miserably, "I believe you. But that only makes it harder to bear. I will never know who it was. Even if I beat her half to death, I do not think she would tell. And I could not beat Quequelmíqui."
I consider for a moment, then said, "I will tell you this. She wanted me to be the father."
He nodded again, like a palsied old man. "I had supposed so. She would have wanted a child as much like your daughter as possible." After a pause, he said, "if you had done it, I would have been hurt, but I could have borne it—"
With one hand he stroked a curiously pale patch on his cheek, almost silver in color. I wondered if he had again absentmindedly burned himself. Then I noticed that the fingers of his stroking hand were almost colorless at the tips. He went on, "My poor Quequelmíqui. She could have endured a marriage to a sexless man, I think. But after she came to have such a mother love for your daughter, she could not endure an unfruitful marriage."
He looked out the window, and he looked unhappy. My little girl was playing with some of her friends in the street outside.
"I hoped—I tried to provide a substitute satisfaction for her. I started a special class for the children of the servants already in my charge, preparing them to follow their parents into domestic service. My real reason was that I hoped they would divert my wife's yearning, that she could learn to love them. But they were other people's children... and she had not been acquainted with them from infancy, as with Cocóton—"
"Look, Cozcatl," I said. "This child in her womb is not yours. It never could have been. But, except for the seed, the child is hers. And she is your beloved wife. Suppose it had happened that you married a widow already the mother of a young child. Would you suffer torments if that had been the case?"
"She has already tried that argument on me," he said gruffly. "But that, you see, would not have been a betrayal. After all these years of a happy marriage. Happy for me, at least."
I recalled the years during which Zyanya and I had been all in all to each other, and I tried to imagine how I would have felt if she had ever been unfaithful, and finally I said, "I sympathize sincerely, my friend. But it will be your wife's issue. She is a handsome woman, and the child is bound to be a comely one. I can almost promise that you will soon find yourself accepting it, taking it to your heart. I know your kind nature, and I know you can love a fatherless child as deeply as I love my motherless daughter."
"Not exactly fatherless," he growled.
"It is your wife's child," I persisted. "You are her husband. You are its father. If she will not name a name even to you, she will hardly tell another. And of the physical circumstances, who else is there who knows? Béu and myself, yes, but you can be certain that we would never tell. Blood Glutton is long dead, and so is that old palace doctor who tended you after your injury. I can think of no one else who—"
"I can!" he interrupted grimly. "The man who is the father. He may be an octli drunkard who has been boasting of his conquest in every lakefront drinking house for months past. He may even appear at our house someday and demand—"
I said, "One would suppose that Ticklish exercised discretion and discrimination," though privately I could not be too sure of that.
"There is another thing," Cozcatl continued. "She has now enjoyed a—a natural kind of sex. Can she ever really be satisfied any longer with... with my kind? Might she not go seeking a man again?"
I said sternly, "You are agonizing over possibilities that probably will never come to pass. She wanted a child, that is all, and now she will have a child. I can tell you that new mothers have little leisure for promiscuity."
"Yya ouíya," he sighed huskily. "I wish you were the father, Mixtli. If I knew it was the doing of my oldest friend... oh, it would have taken a while, but I could have made my peace with it—"
"Stop this, Cozcatl!" He was making me feel twice guilty—that I very nearly had coupled with his wife—and that I had not.
But he would not be silenced. "There are other considerations," he said vaguely. "But no matter. If it were your child inside her, I could make myself wait... could have been a father for a time, at least..."
He seemed to have drifted into senseless rambling. I sought desperately for words that would bring him back to sobriety. But he suddenly burst out weeping—the harsh, rasping, dry sobs with which a man cries; nothing like the gentle, melting, almost musical weeping of a woman—and he ran from the house.
I never saw him again. And the rest is ugly, so I will tell it quickly. That same afternoon, Cozcatl marched away from his home and school and students—including all the palace servants in his charge—marched off to enlist in the forces of The Triple Alliance fighting in Texcala, and marched onto the point of any enemy spear.
His abrupt departure and sudden death occasioned as much puzzlement as grief among Cozcatl's many friends and associates, but his motive was generally assumed to have been a rather too reckless loyalty to his patron, the Revered Speaker. Not Ticklish nor Béu nor I ever said anything to cast doubt on that theory, or on the equally accepted assumption that the bulge under his wife's skirt had been put there by Cozcatl before he so rashly went off to war.
For my part I never said anything to any of our acquaintances, not even to Béu, about a suspicion of my own. I remembered Cozcatl's unfinished fragments of sentences: "I could make myself wait... could have been a father for a time, at least..." And I remembered the poquietl burn he had not felt, the thickened voice and gummy eyes, the silvery stain on his face....
The funeral services were held over his maquahuitl and shield, brought home from the battlefield. On that occasion, in the company of countless other mourners, I coldly proffered formal condolences to the widow, after which I deliberately avoided seeing her again. Instead, I sought out the Mexícatl warrior who had brought Cozcatl's relics and was present at their interment. I put to him a blunt question and, after some hesitant shuffling of his feet, he answered:
"Yes, my lord. When the physician of our troop tore open the armor from around this man's wound, he found lumps and scaly patches of skin over much of the man's body. You have guessed right, my lord. He was afflicted with the teococoliztli."
The word means The Being Eaten by the Gods. Clearly, the disease is also known in the Old World you came from, for the first arriving Spaniards said, "Leprosy!" when they encountered here certain men and women lacking fingers, toes, nose or—in the final stages—much of a face at all.
The gods may begin eating their chosen teococox abruptly or gradually, and they may do the eating slowly or voraciously, or in various different ways, but none of the God-Eaten has ever felt honored to be thus chosen. At first there may be only a numbness in parts of the body, as in the case of Cozcatl, who failed to feel that burn on his forearm. There can be a thickening of the tissues inside the eyelids, nose, and throat, so that the sufferer's sight is affected, his voice coarsened, his swallowing and breathing made difficult. The body's skin may dry and slough off in tatters, or it may bulge with numberless nodules that break into suppurant sores. The disease is invariably fatal, but the most horrible thing about it is that it usually takes so long to eat its victim entirely. The smaller extremities of the body—fingers, nose, ears, tepúli, toes—are gnawed away first, leaving only holes or slimy stumps. The skin of the face grows leathery, silvery-gray, and loose, and it sags, so that a person's forehead may droop down over the aperture where his nose used to be. His lips may bloat, the lower one so heavy and pendulous that his mouth hangs open ever after.