He slapped the massive household water jar nearby. On its dull brown clay surface there was now a gleaming red handprint. Travel these lands, Your Excellency, and you will see that same signature on many a temple mural and palace painting. Chimali did a prodigious amount of work before he stopped working.
He and Tlatli were the last of the guests to leave our house that night. Those two stayed, on purpose, until we actually heard the drums and conch trumpets from the temple pyramid, announcing the start of the nemontemtin. While my mother dashed about the house to douse the lights, my friends scampered to get to their own homes before the beating and the bleating stopped. It was reckless of them—if the hollow days were bad, their lightless nights were far worse—but the two friends' staying saved me from chastisement for my insult to the Lord Joy. Neither my father nor mother could undertake something as serious as punishment during the ensuing days, and by the time the nemontemtin ended, the matter had been pretty well forgotten.
However, those days were not entirely uneventful for me. On one of them Tzitzi got me aside to whisper urgently, "Must I go and steal another sacred mushroom?"
"Godless sister," I hissed at her, though not angrily. "Lying together is forbidden even to husbands and wives at this time."
"Only to husbands and wives. To you and me, it is forbidden always, so we run no exceptional risk."
Before I could say anything else, she moved from me to the waist-high clay jar that held our household water supply, the one that now bore Chimali's blood-red handprint. She shoved it with all her strength; it overturned and broke, and water cascaded across the limestone floor. Our mother stormed into the room and let loose one of her tirades at Tzitzitlini. Clumsy wench... jar took a whole day to fill... supposed to last through the nemontemtin... not another drop in the house and not another container that size....
Unruffled, my sister said, "Mixtli and I can go to the spring with the largest other jars, and between us bring back as much in one trip."
Our mother did not think highly of that suggestion, and so she did a good deal more of her shrilling, but she really had no alternative, and finally let us go. Each of us left the house carrying a handled, big-bellied jug in either hand, but at the first opportunity we set them down.
I last described Tzitzi as she looked in early adolescence. She was now full grown and, of course, her hips and buttocks had filled out to graceful, womanly curves. Each of her breasts overflowed my cupped hand. Their nipples were more erectile, their areolas were of larger diameter and a darker russet brown against the fawn skin around them. Tzitzi was also, if possible, more quickly aroused each time than the time before, and more wanton in her responses and movements. In just the brief interval we allowed ourselves between the house and the spring, she came to culmination at least thrice. Her increased capacity for passion, and one noticeable maturation of her body, gave me the first hint of a premise, and my experiences with other women in later years served always to confirm it. So I consider it not a premise, but a proven theory, and it is this:
A woman's sexuality is in direct proportion to the diameter and darkness of her breast's areola. Never mind how beautiful her face, how shapely her form; never mind how approachable or how aloof she may seem. Those aspects can be misleading, even deliberately so on her part. But there is that one reliable indicator of the sensuality of her nature, and, to the knowing eye, no cosmetic art can hide it or counterfeit it. A woman with a large and dark area surrounding her nipple is invariably hot-blooded, even if she might wish to be otherwise. A woman with a nipple only—like the vestigial nipple of a man—is inevitably cold, although she might honestly believe herself to be otherwise, or even behave shamelessly in order to appear otherwise. And of course there are gradations of areola size and color, the gauging of which can be learned only by experience. Thus a man need contrive to get but a single glance at a woman's bare breast and, with no waste of time or chance of disappointment, he can judge how passionately she will—
Your Excellency wishes me to have done with this subject. Ah, well, no doubt I dwell on it only because it is my theory. I have always been fond of it, and of testing it, and I never once encountered disproof. I still think the correlation of a woman's sexuality and her areola ought to have some useful application outside the bedchamber.
Yyo ayyo! Do you know, Your Excellency, it suddenly occurs to me that your Church might be interested. It could use my theory as a quick and simple test for choosing those girls best suited by nature to be nuns in your—
I desist, yes, my lord.
I will just mention that, when Tzitzi and I at last returned to the house, fairly staggering with the four heavy jugs of water, we were berated by our mother for having been so long out in the open on such a day. My sister, who only a short while before had been a young wild animal—thrashing, panting, and clawing me in her ecstasy—now lied as casually and smoothly as any priest:
"You cannot scold us for loitering or dallying. There were others wanting water from the spring. Since the day forbids any congregating, Mixtli and I had to wait our turn at a distance and move nearer bit by bit. We did not waste any time."
At the end of the dreary hollow days, all The One World breathed a great sigh of relief. I do not know exactly what you mean, Your Excellency, when you mutter about "a parody of Lent," but on the first day of the month The Tree Is Raised there commenced a round of general gaiety. Throughout the following days, there were private celebrations in the bigger homes of nobles and well-to-do commoners, and in the local temples of the various villages, during which the hosts and guests, the priests and worshipers indulged in excesses of which they had been deprived during the nemontemtin.
Those preliminary festivities might have been a trifle dampened that year, for we got word of the death of our Uey-Tlatoani Tixoc. But his reign had been the shortest in the history of Mexíca rulers, and the least noteworthy. Indeed, it was rumored that he had been quietly poisoned—either by the elders of his Speaking Council, impatient with Tixoc's uninterest in mounting new war campaigns, or by his brother Ahuítzotl, Water Monster, next in line to the throne and ambitious to show how much more brilliantly he could rule. At any rate, Tixoc had been such a colorless figure that he was not much missed or mourned. So our grand ceremony in praise and supplication of the rain god Tlaloc, held in Xaltócan's central pyramid plaza, was also dedicated to celebrating the accession of the new Revered Speaker Ahuítzotl.
The rites did not begin until Tonatíu had sunk to sleep in his western bed, lest that god of warmth should see and be jealous of the honors paid to his brother god of wetness. Then there began to gather—about the edges of the open plaza and on the slopes rising around it—every single inhabitant of the island, save those too old, too young, too ill or disabled, and those who had to remain at home to tend them. As soon as the sun set, the square and the pyramid and the temple on top were aflutter with the black-robed priests, busy at their last preparations of lighting the multitude of torches, the artificially colored urn fires, and the sweetly smoking incense burners. The sacrificial stone atop the pyramid would not be used that night. Instead, there had been brought—to the foot of the pyramid, where every spectator could see into it—an immense, hollowed-out stone tub, full of water previously sanctified by special incantations.
As the darkness deepened, the grove of trees beside and behind the pyramid also came alight: innumerable little wick lamps flickering as if the trees were nesting all the fireflies in the world. The trees' branches began to sway, swarming with children: very young and small but agile boys and girls wearing costumes lovingly fashioned by their mothers. Some of the little girls were enveloped by stiff paper globes painted to represent various fruits; others wore ruffs or skirts of paper cut and painted to represent various flowers. The boys were even more gaudily dressed, some covered in glued-on feathers to act the role of birds, others wearing translucent oiled-paper wings to play the part of bees and butterflies. All during the night's events, the boy birds and boy insects flitted acrobatically from branch to branch, pretending to "sip the nectar" of the girl fruits and girl flowers.