Aztec Rage

  I was careful to ask only general questions about the various regions of Spain, not giving any clue that I might want to flee to another area. The captain told me Barcelona was only thirty-odd leagues from the French border. He had never visited Madrid but knew it to be an even bigger city than Barcelona. The sheer size of the capital attracted me. Furthermore, the road between the two large cities was well traveled, permitting me to melt in with legitimate travelers.

  I would get out of Barcelona as soon as possible, not even spending a night in the city, pausing only to sell the locket and ring and buy a mount. Once in the capital, I would try to make enough money through honest labor—or dishonest, more likely—for passage to Havana.

  I was deep in thought, devising and revising my plans, when the captain leaned beside me on the rail.

  “It is the most magnificent city in the world, my Barcelona,” he said. “It is the city of discovery, too. On his return from discovering the New World, Columbus raced the Niña to Barcelona, where the king and queen were holding court, outsailing the treacherous Captain Pinzón aboard the Pinta. The men were racing to be the first to claim credit for the discoveries. Columbus brought six Carib indios and took them with him to the royal place in the Barri Góti, where he presented them to Isabella and Ferdinand.”

  I told him about something curious I had seen earlier: fishing boats throwing large pieces of wood weighed down with iron and dragging a net overboard.

  “Red coral,” the captain said. “Very valuable but too deep for a man to dive down and chip off. The boats are dragging the wooden rams along the coral, breaking off pieces which are then picked up by the net.”

  We passed a French patrol boat, and I saw a man on board examining us with a spyglass.

  “They are checking the name of the boat. When the Sea Cat sailed out of the city, they made a note of it. Now they will check to see how long the boat was gone. If more than a couple of days, the captain and crew are arrested and accused of carrying information to our forces at Cádiz.”

  “Won’t they realize you’ve been gone a couple weeks when they check their records?”

  “The Sea Cat has only been gone overnight,” he said, grinning. “That is what their records will show.”

  “You have someone altering their records?”

  “No, señor, we of the resistance just have more than one boat named the Sea Cat. The other one was noted by the French when it sailed out of Barcelona yesterday, and we take its place on the French rolls today as returning from an overnight fishing trip.”

  “Clever.” But risky, I thought.

  “We’ll dock near the Baceloneta district,” he said. “It is like a small village itself, a village of fishermen and dockworkers, even though it’s part of the city. Your inn is near there.”

  Again, the captain’s knowing grin made me uneasy.

  When we docked, I grabbed my sea bag of clothes and gear—I would have looked suspicious without it—and jumped down to the dock as soon as the crew had the lines secured. I waved good-bye to the captain and tried to keep my stride casual when I really wanted to break into a run. The wharf area was a busy one, bustling with fishing crews and fishmongers.

  As I waved, the captain’s grin got wider. He pointed at me and yelled, “There he is!”

  Two women waiting at the end of the dock stared at me: an older woman who was recognizable as the mother of a younger one standing beside her. My eyes froze on the old woman because of the intense look she gave me. She wore widow’s black from the scarf on her head to her shoes.

  As my feet drew me involuntarily closer, I realized it wasn’t my face she was staring at but the locket dangling from the chain around my neck. Her resemblance to Carlos was unmistakable, and just as the enormity of my dilemma sank in, she screamed: “Murderer!”

  I ran, and Carlos’s mother gave chase, still screaming: “Murderer!”

  I dodged fishmongers with sharp knives and ran into the arms of two constables.

  The widow and her daughter caught up with us. The king’s men held me as the older woman pointed an accusatory finger at me.

  “He murdered my son!” she shouted.

  “How do you know, señora?”

  Carlos’s mother pointed at the locket and the rings on my fingers.

  “He murdered my son and stole his jewelry.”

  SIXTY-ONE

  THE CONSTABLES TOOK me to the Barcelona jail. My first fear was that I would be turned over to the French, but the captain had been right when he described the French’s occupation as only being effective where the French stood. They occupied the massive, pentagonal fortress that dominated the city but left the day-to-day policing of the streets to the city police.

  I spent my first night in jail, contemplating my options—everything from escape to confession—when in the morning a jailer released me from my cell.

  “You’re a lucky one,” he said, as I followed him up a dim set of stone steps. “Your lover arranged your release.”

  I mumbled my appreciation and wondered who the hell my lover was. And if she would start screaming when she saw I wasn’t Carlos.

  I couldn’t keep the wonderment off my face when I was brought into a room and came face to face with the young woman who had been with Carlos’s mother on the dock. Her sisterly resemblance to Carlos was indisputable.

  She gave me a hug. “I’m sorry, Carlos, but now we’re together again.”

  A grinning constable handed me my sea bag. He slapped me on the back. “I know what you’ll be doing tonight!”

  I was glad he knew; I certainly didn’t.

  I followed her out of the jail, neither of us saying a word. When we reached the street, her affectionate demeanor evaporated. She said, “This way,” and walked briskly down the street.

  I followed her toward the heart of the city, questions with no answers buzzing in my head. Did she still believe I murdered her brother? Why had she rescued me? Was I being rescued only so her family could wreak blood vengeance on me?

  “I didn’t kill your brother,” I said.

  “Not now,” she hissed.

  Despite her clear resemblance to Carlos, her personality was different, more assertive. She exuded a hardness Carlos had lacked; I didn’t doubt she was capable of putting a blade in my gut. Perhaps living under foreign occupation had toughened her up. She was an attractive woman who no doubt had to resist the unwanted attention of French soldiers who thought Spanish women were spoils of war.

  She led me into a maze of crowded streets intersected by narrow twisting lanes. The surrounding buildings had been built in the Middle Ages, but they didn’t seem medieval; the atmosphere was too hectic, the district a frenzied hive of activity.

  Carlos’s sister had taken me to the Barri Gótic, the old Gothic section in the very heart of Barcelona. It was the oldest part of the city, dating back to Roman times. The area was filled with small businesses that manufactured many kinds of merchandise. In each a master craftsman employed an apprentice or two, producing wares such as wood casks, furniture, or iron goods. Generally the master and his family lived over the shop, while the apprentices slept wherever they could find room. The area contained the main cathedral and the Palau Reial Major, the royal palace where Columbus had appeared before the king and queen.

  The street names mirrored the commerce of their shops. We passed a street called Boters, and as its street sign suggested, it housed wine cask makers. Agullers Street, true to its name, employed needle makers, and Corders featured shops full of rope spinners.

  “A blind man could make his way through the Barri Gótic and know where he was with every step,” the captain had said, “just from the manufacturing sounds and smells.”

  When we came to the royal palace, the woman—whose name I knew to be Rosa only because Carlos had told me—glared at me and said, “There’s a room in the palace where the Inquisition used to conduct trials. They say the walls trembled when people lied.”

  Was she trying to tell
me something?

  We came to a knife grinder’s shop on Dagueria Street. Two young apprentices grinding blades did not even glance at us as we walked through the shop and to a stairway down to a cellar. I followed meekly—a lamb led to the matadero—conspicuously short on options. When we reached the bottom of the steps, two men appeared from out of the cellar’s shadowy corners. Two more came down the steps behind me. All four men had daggers out.

  “This is the bastardo that murdered my brother,” Rosa said.

  SIXTY-TWO

  I THREW UP my hands to show I had no weapons. “I was Carlos’s friend, not his murderer.”

  “Kill him,” she hissed. “He’s a French spy.”

  “Don’t listen to her. I was sent here on an important mission by Colonel Ramírez in Cádiz. I’m here to contact the guerrillas fighting the French.”

  “Murderer!” She lifted her skirt and pulled a dagger from a sheath strapped to her leg.

  “Stop it!” one of the men commanded.

  “Casio—”

  “No, we need information before we draw blood. You can take your revenge later.”

  “I’m only here to serve,” I said, smiling. “Question me, and then she can kill me.”

  The man called Casio stepped closer to me. I suspected he was only a few years older than me, perhaps around thirty but already world-weary. The hands holding the dagger were large and scarred from some sort of manual labor. Perhaps he’d been a smith. Stocky, powerfully built, he was a formidable presence.

  I said, “I came here to help the resistance, not be killed by it.”

  “What happened to Rosa’s brother? Why are you pretending to be him?”

  My life was on the line. Such moments arose now with numbing frequency, so numbing I did something shockingly out of character for me: I told the truth.

  “My name is Juan de Zavala. I’m a colonial, from Guanajuato in the Bajío region of New Spain. I’m a liar and sometimes a thief by necessity, but not a murderer. I have only killed in self-defense. I didn’t kill Carlos. He was my amigo. I tried to save his life when indios attacked us in the Yucatán. I nearly did so. He gave me his locket and ring to return to his family.”

  Casio chuckled without humor. “And you came here, halfway around the world, to return them.” It was not a question.

  “I came to Spain because I was mistaken for Carlos after I escaped from the savages. I had his identification on me when I was found. I was wanted in New Spain, not for capricious crimes, but for ones I was forced to commit because Señora Fortuna had stacked the deck against me.” I told them the sad tale of the caballero who woke up one day to find that he was a changeling, of how I met Carlos at Teotihuacán while running from constables and stayed with him as his servant until he died in the Yucatán. I left out a few details, among them the countess in New Spain and the killing of the inquisitor-priest in Cádiz.

  When I finished, silence filled the room. An uncomfortable silence. Casio looked at me as if I were one of those people Carlos had believed lived on another planet. He slowly shook his head. “I don’t know if I should cry because of your sad story . . . or cut your throat because you are the biggest liar in Christendom.”

  “No one could make up such a story,” the man beside Casio said. “Not even Cervantes could have dreamed up such a tale.”

  “We shall see,” Casio said. “Get the indiano.”

  I’d heard the word before. Men who had gone to the colonies in the Americas and returned after making their fortune were called americanos or indianos in Spain. We called them gachupines in the colony.

  When the man left to bring back the indiano, I turned to Rosa. “I’m sorry about Carlos. I truly came to think of him as my own brother. I would have given my life for him . . . and almost did.”

  She said nothing. I couldn’t tell if she was still ready to kill me or not. One thing was for certain: she was not a compromising woman. While Carlos was a person of reason, his sister struck me as one who would make quick judgments and not change them.

  After an hour or so the man returned with the indiano. Older than the men in the room, who were in their twenties or thirties, the so-called indio had grayish hair and was perhaps in his fifties.

  “Tell him your story,” Casio said.

  I started through it once again, slowly. I got as far as breaking out of the Guanajuato jail when Casio interrupted.

  “What do you think?” he asked the indiano.

  “Who is the intendent of Guanajuato?” he asked me.

  “Señor Riano.”

  “Anyone can know the governor’s name,” Casio said.

  “What’s his oldest son’s name?” the indiano asked.

  “Gilberto.”

  He asked me directions from the center of town to roads leading to other areas, from the largest cathedral in the city to two other prominent ones. He asked me the best place to buy jewelry in the city, and I confessed my ignorance. “Ask me who makes the best saddles,” I said.

  “Tell me what your uncle—what Bruto looked like.”

  “Not like me. His skin, hair, and eyes were lighter, but the most important thing was a mark here,” I touched the side of my head near my right temple. “He had a brown mark. He called it a birthmark.”

  “He’s Juan de Zavala,” the indiano said.

  “Are you certain?”

  “Without doubt. He’s lived in Guanajuato, that’s for certain. I met Bruto over ten years ago but don’t remember him well. I don’t remember the birthmark at all. But I know the changeling story from a letter my cousin sent me. It is the biggest scandal in the colony.” He shrugged. “Besides, he is obviously a colonial; he has their accent. But the most convincing proof is his boots.”

  We all looked down at my boots. And his.

  “Indios also make my boots. The boot makers of Spain cannot match their craftsmanship.”

  “Thank you, señor,” I said, truly grateful.

  The indiano left, and Casio faced me again.

  “How do we know you are not a French spy?”

  “I care as little about the French as I do about you Spanish,” I said. “Besides, I didn’t spy for the French. Carlos did.”

  “That’s a lie!” Rosa snapped.

  “It’s not a lie,” Casio said. “That Carlos was a lover of the French is well known. Do they know in Cádiz this story of the changeling?”

  “No, the colonel thinks I’m Carlos.”

  He nodded his head. “Then you will be Carlos.”

  I almost sighed with relief.

  “We can’t trust him,” Rosa said. “You heard him, he’s not loyal to us.”

  “But he’s not loyal to the French either. He only cares for his own hide, so we know where he stands. Right now we need him. He was sent here because he reads French, and his face is not known to the French military here.”

  “Rosa is right,” I said. “You need someone who is loyal to the Spanish cause. If you will permit, I will leave the city and never—”

  “Our people watch every road in and out of Barcelona night and day. Not a mouse gets through unless we permit it. If you try to leave the city, we will give you the special treatment we reserve for traitors to our cause.”

  I bowed in surrender. “Señor Casio, consider me a soldier in the war of independence from the French devils.”

  “I don’t trust him,” the she-demon said. “I think we should kill him,”

  “Then you are the perfect person to watch over him. Let’s go. I’m tired of this dark place,” he said to his companions.

  As he started up the cellar steps, he paused and looked back at Rosa. “Don’t worry, señorita, it’s an extremely dangerous mission. He will more than likely be killed.”

  SIXTY-THREE

  I’M HUNGRY,” I said, when we came out of the knife-grinding shop.

  “You can starve as far as I’m concerned.”

  Such sentimentality for a man who was her loving brother’s amigo. I stopped and faced her. ??
?When I said Carlos was like a brother to me, I wasn’t lying. I would have given my life for Carlos and he for me. I don’t care if you like me or not, but you have no right to be angry at me.”

  She stared at me for a long moment, no doubt pondering whether she should put a knife in my ribs.

  “I know a decent café at the square around the corner,” she said.

  We drank vi blanc—white wine—and ate arrós negre—black rice—a dish with rice and pieces of monkfish, shellfish, onion, garlic, tomatoes, olive oil, squid, and squid ink. As we ate, we watched people on their afternoon siesta dancing the sardana, a dance uniquely Catalonian. The dancers held hands and formed a circle as they performed intricate and rather sedate steps. It was a dance of deliberation rather than the wild passion of a flamenco.

  “Flamencos are for mindless gypsies,” Rosa said. “The sardana is for inner contemplation. The dancers have to concentrate to do the steps correctly, counting their short and long steps, skips and jumps.”

  Later, as we listened to the guitarist Fernando Sor, Rosa said he was the best guitarist in Spain. Something about the way she spoke caused me to ask, “Is he a guerrilla?”

  She didn’t answer, but her lack of response left me with the impression that this famous plucker of strings was also a partisan in the patriotic cause.

  So far I had only one tiny clue as to what my mission was, other than Casio’s pronouncement that I would probably be killed. The clue came from Casio’s mouth. These people needed me because I read French, but what I was supposed to read was still a mystery. And I had to wonder whether there weren’t other people in a city so close to the French border who read French.

  I would be wasting my breath asking her, so I kept my mouth shut about the subject, hoping she would warm to me. As it was, she loosened up and began to explain some things. She said, as had the fishing boat captain, that they were fighting to bring Ferdinand, El Deseado—the Desired One—back to Spain and restore him to the throne. I held my tongue and didn’t mention Carlos’s opinion that Prince Ferdinand was an ignorant tyrant who would make a bad king.