Aztec Rage (10 page)

After two days in the stocks, certain that I was permanently deformed into the shape of a horseshoe, I was sent back to the cell, to the tender ministrations of the cyclops trustee. My first assignment was to empty the excrement from the three latrine buckets into a barrel, which was hauled away and dumped somewhere outside the city. After emptying their foul contents, I had to scrape the buckets clean with a spoon and rinse them with a little water.

María, Madre de Dios
, have mercy on me! The stench, the filth. The closest I had ever gotten to a bucket of excrement in my life was using a chamber pot that the servants kept clean and fresh.

I had to lug three buckets at one time, two of them awkwardly with one hand. As I staggered under the weight, the two that were unbalanced slopped and spilled, splashing onto my bare feet.

Outside, by the jail's back entrance, I emptied the buckets into a waste barrel sitting in a donkey cart while a nearby guard watched. Using a wooden spoon, I scraped the sides of the buckets, poured a little water in them, splashed it around, and poured the slop into the barrel. I used dirt to wipe the splash off my feet and hands.

Two men came by, well-dressed merchants, no doubt on their way to visit a government office as my uncle frequently had done. I had seen one of them before, the manager of a mine who purchased quicksilver through my uncle, but I didn't know his name. Giving me a wide berth, they placed handkerchiefs over their noses. The man I had met before glanced at me, perplexed, as if he thought he knew me.

I said nothing because a guard stood by, musket at the ready. I'm sure if I had spoken to the two men he would have butt-stroked the back of my head.

Three days after I was released from the stocks, another unruly prisoner relieved me of bucket duty. The guards then lined me up with the other prisoners to meet an official.

The official sat behind a small, crude desk and made notes on paper with quill and ink as he spoke to each of us in turn. Finally, it was my turn.

“Name.”

“Juan de Zavala. Are you my attorney?”

He looked up at me. “You have money?”

“No.”

“Then you have no attorney.”

“Who are you?”

He sniffed a nosegay, a scented pouch that relieved the smell of me and the other prisoners. “Your tone is offensive, but I know who you are. I've been warned about you. A murderous Aztec who once masqueraded as a gentleman. You're here because you killed a man who'd befriended you.”

He had an empty look, cold and unfeeling, a piece of stone with no marks on it.

“None of that's true. Please hear my side of it. I'm innocent, but no one will listen.”

“Shut up and answer my questions. I'm a notario, my job is to take your explanation of why you committed the crime. It will be presented to the judges of the audiencia. They will decide your fate.”

A notary was a clerk who legalized papers, gave oaths, performed clerical duties of filing governmental papers, and took statements from those charged with crimes. They were typically criollos, which, given the dominance of gachupines in New Spain, meant they were not of great importance. However, at this moment, the man was as crucial to my survival as the musket at my shoulder when I faced a charging jaguar.

“Will I be permitted to speak to them? The judges? To tell them what happened?”

He waved away my questions with his hand. “I will report to them, and they will decide how to proceed. New Spain is a nation of laws, and the courts are just, but you'll taste the whip end of the system if you're a troublemaker. I'm informed by the jailors that you're a violent man who wreaks violence even in jail.”

“More lies. I am the victim here, not the aggressor. If there's justice in this world, let God be my witness.” I made the sign of the cross. “Señor Notario, I'm innocent. I didn't poison my uncle. He tried to poison me and poisoned himself by mistake.”

His eyebrows went up. “Some of that shit you have waded in has gone to your brain. Do I not look white to you? Do you take me for a fool or an indio? How could he have poisoned himself?”

“Please, señor, listen to me. José, his servant, brought me brandy the night before my uncle died. We had had an argument earlier, and I had threatened to seize control of my own money. The brandy was a gift of conciliation. It was fine brandy, from a supply my uncle kept for himself.”

“Bruto de Zavala was not your uncle, and you are not a gachupine. You have no money, no estate, no right or claim to any estate. You are an imposter, an Aztec or mixed blood who tricked an old man into believing you were his nephew.”

“That's ridiculous. I was raised from childhood to believe I was a Zavala. I was one year old when my parents died, and I inherited their estate. Bruto made up this lie about my parentage because—”

“It was not your rightful inheritance. You were an imposter. Bruto discovered your deception, and you killed him to keep the fraud hidden. He exposed your true identity on his deathbed.”

This notario had fewer brains than the intoxicated indios who had been brought here from the gutters outside pulquerías. How could a babe in arms be an imposter and trick a grown man? I wanted to shake some sense into him and beat the arrogance out of his voice, but I had already found that fists alone did not suffice in jail.

“Señor Notario, please listen, even if what you say is true—that I'm not Juan de Zavala—that still doesn't prove me a murderer. If Bruto brought me in as a changeling to claim the estate, when he thought I was going to take control of the money, he sent me the brandy—”

“His servant said
you
sent Don Bruto the brandy, that soon after he drank it, he became ill. The doctor examined the dregs of the brandy left in the goblet, he could smell the poison.”

“My uncle—”

“He was not your uncle.”

I took a deep breath. “Bruto de Zavala, the man who claimed to be my uncle, sent the brandy to me, I sent it back—”

“Eh, so you admit you killed him by sending him poisoned brandy.”

He began to write frantically, dipping the quill in the pot of ink repeatedly as his hand flew across the paper. I stared down at the paper in complete puzzlement. The man was estúpido, an ignoramus. How could he conclude such nonsense?

When he was finished, he turned the paper around, so the bottom of the page was in my direction. “Sign here.”

“What am I signing?”

“Your confession.”

I shook my head. This miserable little maggot of a criollo clerk, a week ago had he brushed me on the street, I would have sent him tumbling into the gutter and stepped on his face.

I leaned forward, and he rocked back in his chair, grabbing his nosegay. “You stink worse than any of the others.”

“The only thing I confess, señor, is that I have squashed barn mice with my foot that have more brains than you. What do I look like to you? A—”

“You look like a filthy creature who murdered a gachupine. One who will hang for his crimes.”

I was still boiling with anger and disappointment when I was returned to the cell, angry at the fool, angry at myself. I was foolish to have threatened
the notary, foolish to have lost control, a folly that has plagued me all my life. I would need more than brute aggression to escape this place alive.

When I returned to the jail chamber, a newcomer had commandeered the private cell, recently vacated by the cacique's son, whose crimes the facile touch of dinero had scrubbed clean.

I recognized the man immediately, not his name, but his status: Like the notary, he was both a criollo and some sort of clerk, scholar, or lower-level government employee. His clothing lacked a caballero's splendor. His hands were meant more for quills and paper, books and ledgers than for horses and pistols. Most important, however, was his food basket.

Did I mention that I was hungry? I had lost weight in jail because of the putrid corn gruel. The more I ate, the more it chewed on my intestines and flushed through my bowels.

I stepped into his cell and sat down beside him, grinning at his startled expression.

“Amigo, I am Don Juan de Zavala, gentleman and caballero. I will consent to share your lunch.”

I grabbed a big turkey leg and clamped my teeth into it.

He jumped up. “I'm calling the guards.”

With my free hand, I reached up and grabbed the crotch of his pants, getting his two little cojones in my fist.

“Sit down before you lose your manhood.” I gave them a squeeze that caused his eyes to bulge.

As soon as he was seated, I nudged him with my elbow. “You hear my voice, see my mannerisms. Like you, I am a gentleman.”

“You smell worse than rotting meat.”

“A fallen gentleman. Look.” I nodded at the prisoner chamber outside the bars of the small cell. “What do you see?”

His eyes bulged more, and his jaw went slack. Prisoners, the worse street trash, had gathered before the cell.

“They know you're not strong,” I told him. “You smell the jail stink on them, and they smell fear and weakness on you. They're a pack of wild animals who will devour you whole. You can call the guards, and the guards will beat me and a few others, but the animals will come for you in the night, when it's dark and the guards are asleep.”

I nudged him again. “Do you understand, señor? I can protect you. I can keep the animals from eating your liver.” I took a big bite of turkey leg. I spoke as I chewed it, the savory juices running down my chin. I'd forgotten what real food tasted like. “You feed me, and I protect you.”

He looked at me askance, his facial expression shouting that he did not know what was worse, me or the pack of wild men.

I grinned at him as I chewed the succulent meat. “It's not a match made in heaven, but I will be your friend.” I grabbed the wine bottle from
the basket, uncorked it with my teeth, and spat out the cork. “But if you prefer to battle this rabid pack of baying hounds yourself . . .”

He stared through the bars at the beasts of prey. They settled onto their haunches and stared back, transfixed by his food and drink. My newfound friend turned pale enough for a trip to the grave.

FOURTEEN

M
Y CELLMATE'S NAME
was José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi. He was thirty-two years old, born in Méjico City. Although his parents were criollos and claimed to be closely allied with the city's most affluent families, they themselves were not wealthy. As it is said about those of modest means with connections to wealthy families, their heads are in the clouds and their feet in the mud.

His mother was the daughter of a bookseller from Puebla, his father a physician in Méjico City. Most doctors were criollos because it was a profession not highly esteemed, although those who had a reputation as healers could earn a comfortable living. Many people preferred barbers when they needed leaching or bleeding. And, of course, most surgery was performed by barbers.

I knew of his kind immediately. He was a “Don Nadie,” which meant a “Señor Nobody,” a criollo from a family with Spanish faces but without significant property. Not poor, certainly, but not of hacendado and caballero status either. They probably owned a small, open carriage pulled by a single horse—unlike the grand, gilt carriages that carried people of quality—and would more likely live in a modest, two-story house, walled, with a small courtyard in front, managing with but a single servant.

They would not sit at the viceroy's table and would not ascend to high rank in the Spanish royal forces or even the militia. They would never own government monopolies on government-controlled products or services, licenses that manipulate prices, markets, and the supply of those goods and services. People like his parents were New Spain's shopkeepers, teachers, small ranchers, priests, petty bureaucrats, and comprised the lower ranks of our officer corps. Their sons—at least those who failed to follow them into shopkeeping or failed at the priesthood—were sometimes letrados, learned young men, scholars like the one I sat next to in this jail cell, a man of book learning but no common sense.

When he told me what led to his arrest, I asked, “A pamphlet? You are in jail for something you wrote? How could one be arrested for something written on paper?”

Lizardi shook his head. “You are singularly ignorant. Have you not heard of the Revolution of '89, the revolt during which the French killed the king and made themselves a republic? Or the Revolution of 1776, the year of my birth, when the norteamericanos revolted against the British king and made themselves independent? Do you know nothing of politics, of the rights of people, of the wrongs perpetrated against them?”

“You confuse indifference with ignorance. I know of those things. I just don't care about politics and revolutions, which are concerns of fools and bookworms like yourself.”

“Ah, señor, your disinterest only confirms your ignorance! It is because of your kind that tyrants rule and wrongs are not righted.”