Aztec Rage (17 page)

The novice, Diego Rayu, was a young man with searching eyes and a bright smile. I learned he had studied for the priesthood and now waited to see if the church would accept him. Indio priests were a rarity in the colony.

Don Roberto Ayala, the hacienda owner, gave Marina and the young novice looks that left no doubt that the only way they would have gotten near his own dinner table was with a serving tray.

One of the visiting priests said the padre's home should be called Francia Chiquita, or Little France. France was the world's guiding light in arts and sciences.

The conversation turned to literature and philosophy, and I felt that I was surrounded by a table full of Raquels—except for Don Roberto, who was as happily ignorant about such things as I was.

After dinner, the padre had his actress-mistress, Marina, and the novice read and act out scenes from
El sí de las niñas
(When a Girl Says Yes) by Leandro Fernández de Moratín. The play dealt with the conflicts between an older, more rigid generation and a younger, rebellious one.

In the play a wealthy fifty-nine-year-old man wants to take a pretty young sixteen-year-old as his bride. Things get complicated because she is in love with a younger man, not knowing that he's the older man's nephew. Nor do the uncle or nephew know each is vying for the girl's hand. The muddle has a happy ending when the rich older man allows his nephew to marry the girl.

The notion of a wealthy man marrying a beautiful girl even though he is four times older than she rang true for me. But that he would hand the hot young señorita over to his nephew rang as false as those chivalric romances that so vexed poor Don Quixote. In the real world, the old man would keep his money, bed the girl, and send the nephew off to be killed in a war.

The padre's guests droned on and on about literature after which Padre Hidalgo read from Molière, a long dead French writer of even deader French comedies.
L'École des femmes
(The School for Wives) the padre said was based on a Spanish story, featuring one Arnolphe, a scholar who never takes his head out of books. When he must marry, he is so frightened of women he chooses a bride who is totally naïve to the ways of the world.

As the padre read the inane utterances of Arnolphe and the young woman, my eyelids drooped, and I reached for the brandy bottle. Arnolphe falls hopelessly in love with the idiotic girl and spends the rest of the play attempting to romance her into bed, making an ass out of himself the entire time.

It took all my willpower to keep from imbibing my brandy straight out of the bottle's neck. I could have told Arnolphe how to handle the woman: I would have ridden up to her on Tempest, carried her off to some quiet place, told her whatever lies she needed to hear, then had my way with her. That was the sort of romancing women respected, not whining sniveling talk.

From small talk between Marina and the actress, I learned that Padre Hidalgo had a child with the actress and had fathered two daughters in another town. Having a mistress and children was not unusual for a parish priest; they were not monks, cloistered in a monastery. But it made the priest even more unfathomable to me.

Dolores was the strangest place I had ever seen. Running Aztec industries in defiance of the king's decrees? Treating peons as social and intellectual
equals? Treating women as equals? The priest's mistress reading French plays at the dinner table . . . Was he going to produce it as a play for her?

Meanwhile Padre Hidalgo never intimated that I was the caballero he had encountered in Guanajuato. More than anything else that went on in Dolores, that puzzled me. Why didn't he expose and denounce me as a vicious brute and a fraud? That he recognized me I had no doubt. Why he kept his own counsel I did not know. Even more disturbing he seemed to like me.

While all this was going on, Marina offered her opinion on the Viceroy's recent decree increasing the tax on corn to aid the war effort of our Spanish king. I took it in stride; an Aztec with a mind of her own no longer shocked me. I simply helped myself to more of the padre's admirable brandy. The hacienda owner, however, grew increasingly out of sorts with Marina expressing opinions.

She intrigued me. Despite Marina's literary education, her skill with horses, her considerable beauty, her obvious forthrightness interested yet confused me.

Watching her quick-but-subtle movements, she reminded me of a wild forest creature, not a delicate doe but a menacing feline with the indolent grace of a sated jaguar at rest. A raw power radiated through her. Her interest in the arts and politics matched Raquel's, even though Raquel's reasoning had more depth. Marina compensated in her arguments with primal passion.

She brought out passion in all the guests that night, as they debated the events in the capital and the wars in Europe. After Britain's terrible defeat of the combined Spanish-French fleets at Trafalgar several years ago, the king was again bearding the British lion. This time Spain had invaded Portugal at the behest of the French, who wanted to isolate Britain from its last ally on the continent.

“Tragic,” Padre Hidalgo said, “just tragic, so many lives lost, so much of our nation's wealth going into wars. First we ally ourselves with the British and fight the French, now we align with Napoleon against the British, only to court more disaster.”

“From what we have heard, we have lost so many ships-of-the-line, we may never be a great naval power again,” Lizardi said.

“I blame Godoy,” Marina said. “They say he's the queen's lover, no less. First he led us into a disastrous war with France, then another against the British.”

Marina's remark provoked an outburst from Señor Ayala, the hacendado. The same age as the padre, the hacendado's rapacious greed and Rabelaisian appetites had endowed him with ridiculous riches, a glutton's girth, and a tyrant's intolerance for political dissent. He had not visited the padre's table to have literate women lecture him on world affairs. The
padre's industrious indios he declared beneath contempt. Their lack of basic rights he deemed a cause for jubilation.

I knew him well. He was every aged caballero I grew up around and the sort of gachupine on whom I modeled my own ignoble views.

“Women should breed babies, satisfy their husband's needs in all ways, and refrain from speaking of matters that concern the church and the crown,” he fumed at Marina.

“Señor, all men, women, and races are free to express themselves at my table,” Hidalgo spoke softly but forcefully.

Most parish priests would pander to a rich hacienda owner and later seek recompense in the name of the church. To side with an india over a grandee was financial folly. The padre, on the other hand, truckled to no man, voicing his beliefs without fear or favor.

Lizardi prudently changed the subject to Diego Rayu, the table's candidate for the priesthood, asking him:

“Do you plan to parish in León?”

Silent for most of the evening, the young novice responded to Lizardi's question. “I am not welcome in León.”

While small in stature, Diego had the muscular frame of an indio laborer. As with most Aztecs, he looked to be in better physical condition than Spaniards. With his black hair cropped and large brown eyes, he had a deliberative demeanor and intense gaze.

“Why have you and León become estranged?” Lizardi asked.

“I made trouble for the parish priest who sponsored me for the priesthood. He asked me to speak to the father of a fourteen-year-old servant in a gachupine's house. The grandee had whipped then raped her. When the girl's father confronted the Spaniard, the caballero horsewhipped the father half to death. When the curé told me the Spaniard would compensate the girl and her father in exchange for the church's blessing and absolution, I told the curé bribes would not buy off God or the need for justice. When he disagreed, I complained to the alcalde.”

“What did the alcalde do?”

“Threw me in jail.”

A silent pall settled over the table.

The hacendado asked, “The servant girl, she was an Aztec?”

“Yes.”

He scoffed. “Then what was there to complain about? She was her master's property. Perhaps she was resentful that she did not bear his bastard.”

Rising in her chair, Marina caught a look from the padre and sat back down. Diego stared down at his plate, his face working in anger.

“This is my dinner table,” Hidalgo said, “and all of you are my guests. Everyone is welcome to express themselves at this table, and I will express myself, too: I hope that this young man enters the priesthood and proves to
the church that the Messiah is in all people, including indios, and that we are all God's children and that God does not condone the enslavement or abuse of
His
children.” He nodded at the novice. “I hope you can demonstrate to the church that men of your race make fine priests, but whichever path you follow, I am sure you will grace it with dignity and righteousness, with honor and love. Your name already is divinely blessed: Rayu, the Nahuatl word for ‘thunder.' ”

As I said, Dolores was a very strange place.

Before dinner, Lizardi learned from a discussion with the visiting priests that the padre had once been head of a college. The Inquisition had sanctioned him, however, and he'd lost his seat for his liberal beliefs and his spirited life, which included, it was whispered, gambling and affairs of the heart. But, do we judge a man for his good deeds or his youthful indiscretions?

The hacendado slammed his fist on the table. “You're too damn tolerant, Padre.” He glared across the table at Marina. “In my entire life, I have never heard
anyone
permit peons and women to speak their minds on important subjects. You sow insurrection. Men have gone to the rack and the stake for less, even priests.”

The padre was undeterred. Instead of shying away from controversy, Hidalgo, indeed the entire table, exploded into another dangerous discourse.

Ignorant of such matters—in fact, not having the vaguest idea what they were talking about—I wisely kept my mouth shut. But for the first time in my life, I had seen caballeros in a different light. No, I suppose it really started back when I was on the streets, hungry and dirty, working like an animal while the “quality” people passed me by, not giving me as much consideration as one would a stray dog. I saw that this old caballero was not the equal of the priest, the novice, and for that matter the women at the table in anything, even his knowledge of horseflesh. I had no doubt Marina knew more on that subject than he did.

I cannot say that I agreed with the padre's radical notions, or that I truly believed that women should speak their minds in the company of men, or even that a woman should be permitted to improve her mind, as Marina and Raquel had, but I didn't like the way the hacendado tried to bully Marina and Diego. I was even more affected by the realization that the two Aztecs were more than a match for him.

“Don't criollos treat peons the same way gachupines treat criollos?” I asked, almost without thinking, breaking my meticulous silence. My remark had been reflexive, and I was guilty of a horrific heresy, which had escaped my lips before I could retrieve it. That statement also provoked a tumultuous debate.

During a pause in the discussions, the hacendado leaned over to me and said, “Brother Juan, I came into town to see the doctor, but he's a
quack. He tried to give me medicine I would not swill to my pigs. The padre tells me you are a trained healer. If you can cure me, you would not find me ungenerous.”

“What is your condition, señor?”

He reached grabbed his crotch. “I have a hard time passing water. Tonight I've drank a goodly quantity of wine and brandy, I have the burning urge to pass water, but when I attempt it, it's a dribble.” He nudged me and gave me a knowing look. “I confess, Brother, I have enjoyed too many india whores.” Grinning, he quickly crossed himself.

He had spoken within Marina's hearing, and I saw fury flash across her face. Averting her eyes, she turned her attention to the others.

I felt her anger as my own. Bruto said my mother was an india whore, and I, the son of a whore. What was a whore to a caballero? A woman he took—by force if he so chose—because he could. Rank and privilege conferred on him that right. Nothing else. And those who exposed his rank wrongdoing, he punished brutally.

“Are you in pain right now?” I asked.

“Terrible pain.”

“Then come with me.”

I stood up. “Padre, your meal was a feast for kings, but Señor Ayala and I have some serious business to transact. You will excuse us, I'm sure.”

On the way out Lizardi grabbed my arm and pulled me aside.

“What are you doing?”

“He needs treatment. I'm going to give it to him.”

“You know nothing about medicine.”

I grinned at him. “You instructed me this morning.”

“You'll get us hanged!”

“Can they hang us twice?”

In the room the padre had assigned to me and Lizardi, I selected the proper instrument from our medical bag. I went down the hallway to the hacendado's room and knocked on the door.

He answered the door, and I gave him what I considered to be a professional frown.

“I am ready, señor,” I said.

“What are you going to do?” he asked.

“Lay down on the bed. And pull down your pants.”

TWENTY-FOUR