I was still on the high plateau between the mighty mountain ranges invisibly far to the east and west, but as I progressed the plateau perceptibly sloped downward before me. Each day I descended a little farther from the highlands of crisp, cool air, and those days of late springtime got warmer, sometimes uncomfortably warm, but the nights were gentle and balmy. That was a good thing, for there were no wayside inns in the Otomí country, and the villages or farmsteads where I could request lodging were often far between. So most nights I slept on the open ground, and even without my seeing crystal I could make out the fixed star Tlacpac hung high above the northern horizon toward which I would plod again at dawn.
The lack of inns and other eating places did not work much hardship on me. The paucity of people in that region made the wild creatures less timid than they were in more populous places; rabbits and ground squirrels would sit up boldly from the grass to watch me pass; an occasional swift-runner bird would companionably pace at my very side; and at night an armadillo or opossum might even come to investigate my campfire. Although I carried no weapon but my maquáhuitl, scarcely designed for hunting small game, I usually had to do no more than make a swipe with it to secure for myself a meal of fresh meat or fowl. For variety or for side dishes, there was a plenty of growing things.
The name of that northern nation, Otomí, is a shortened rendition of a much longer and less pronounceable term meaning something like “the men whose arrows bring down birds on the wing,” though I think it must have been a very long time since hunting was their chief occupation. There are numerous tribes of the Otomí, but they all live by pastoral pursuits: farming tidy fields of maize, xitómatin, and other vegetables; or gathering fruit from trees and cactus; or collecting the sweet-water sap of the maguey plants. Their fields and orchards were so productive that they had a great surplus of fresh foods to send to Tlaltelólco and other foreign markets, and we Mexíca called their country Atóctli, The Fertile Land. However, as an indication of how lowly we regarded those people themselves: we ranked our octli liquor according to three grades of quality, respectively called fine, ordinary, and Otomí.
The Otomí villages all have nearly unpronounceable names—like the largest of them all, N’t Tahí, the one your explorers of the northern regions now refer to as Zelalla. And in none of those mumble-named communities did I find a hidden supply store or any other trace of the Aztéca’s ever having passed. In only an infrequent village could the aged local storyteller strain his memory backward to recall a tradition that yes, untold sheaves of years ago, a vagrant train of footsore nomads had slouched through the neighborhood, or stopped to rest for a time. And every such elder told me, “They brought nothing with them, and they left nothing when they went.” It was discouraging. But then, I was a direct descendant of those vagabonds and I likewise brought nothing. Just once during my journey through those Otomí lands, I may have left a little something….
The Otomí men are short, squat, dumpy, and, like most farm folk, sullen and surly of disposition. The Otomí women are also small, but slim of body, and far more vivacious than their glum men. I will even say the women are pretty—from the knees upward—which I realize is a curious kind of compliment. What I mean is that they have fetching faces, nicely molded shoulders and arms and breasts and waists and hips and buttocks and thighs, but, below the knees, their calves are disappointingly straight and skinny. They dwindle tapering down to their tiny feet, giving the women somewhat the look of tadpoles balancing on their tails.
Another peculiarity of the Otomí is that they enhance their appearance—or so they believe—by the art they call n’detade, which means coloring themselves with permanent colors. They dye their teeth black or red, or alternately black and red. They adorn their bodies with designs of a blue color, pricked into the skin with thorns so the designs remain forever. Some make only a small decoration on the forehead or on a cheek, but others continue doing the n’detade, as frequently as they can stand the pain of it, over the skin of their entire body. They appear always to be standing behind the web of some extraordinary spider that spins blue.
The Otomí men, as far as I am concerned, are neither improved nor impaired by their adornment. For a while, I did think it a shame that so many otherwise handsome women should obscure their beauty behind those webs and whorls and patterns they could never remove. However, as I became more accustomed to seeing the n’detade, I must confess that I began to regard it as a subtle beguilement. The very veiling made the females seem in a measure unapproachable, and therefore challenging, and therefore tantalizing….
At the farthest northern extent of the Otomí lands was a riverside village called M’boshte, and one of the villagers was a young woman named R’zoöno H’donwe, which means Flower of the Moon. And flowery she was: every visible part of her blossoming with blue-drawn petals and leaves and fronds. Behind that artificial garden, she was fair of face and figure, excepting of course those disappointing calves. At first sight of her, I felt an urge to part her clothes and see how much of her was flower-petaled, then to make my way through the petals to the woman underneath.
Flower of the Moon was attracted to me, too, and I suspect in much the same way: an urge to enjoy an oddity, since my height and breadth, oversized even among the Mexíca, made me rather a giant among the Otomí. She conveyed to me that she was at the time unattached to any other male; she had been recently widowed, when her husband died in the R’donte Sh’mboi, the River Slate, which trickled past the village. Since that water was only about a hand span deep and almost narrow enough for me to jump across, I suggested that her husband must have been a very small man to have drowned in it. She laughed at that, and made me understand that he had fallen and cracked his skull on the river’s slate bed.
So the one night which I spent in M’boshte I spent with Flower of the Moon. I cannot speak of other Otomí females, but that one was decorated on every expos able surface of her skin, everywhere but on her lips, her eyelids, her fingertips, and the nipples of her breasts. I remember thinking that she must have suffered excruciatingly when the local artist pricked the flower designs right to the margins of her tender tipíli membranes. For, in the course of that night, I got to see every blossom she wore. The act of copulation is called in Otomíte agui n’degue, and it began—or at least Flower of the Moon preferred that I begin—by examining and tracing and fondling and, well, tasting every last petal of every single flower of her whole body’s garden. I felt rather like a deer browsing through a sweet and abundant meadow, and I decided that deer must be happy animals indeed.
When I prepared to depart in the morning, Flower of the Moon gave me to understand that she hoped I had made her pregnant, which her late husband had never done. I smiled, thinking she paid me a compliment. But then she conveyed her reason for hoping to bear my son or daughter. I was a big man, so the child should also grow to goodly size, so it would have an exceptional expanse of skin to be embellished with a prodigious number of n’detade drawings, so it would be a rarity that would make M’boshte the envy of every other Otomí community. I sighed, and went on my way.
As long as my course lay beside the waters of the R’donte Sh’mboi, the land about was green with grass and leaves, dotted with the red and yellow and blue of many blossoms. However, three or four days later, the River Slate bent westward, away from my northering course, and took all the cool and colorful verdure with it. Ahead of me were still some gray-green mízquitin trees and silver-green clumps of yuca and a heavy undergrowth of various dusty-green bushes. But I knew that the trees and shrubs would gradually thin out and move farther apart as I moved on, until they would give way to the open and sun-baked and almost barren desert.
For a moment I paused, tempted to turn with the river and stay in the temperate Otomí country, but I had no excuse for doing so. The only reason for my journey was to backtrack the Aztéca, and, as well as I knew, they had come from somewhere yonder—from that desert—or beyond, if there was anything beyond. So
I filled my water bag from the river, and I inhaled a last deep breath of the river-cooled air, and I walked on northward. I turned my back on the living lands. I walked into the empty lands, into the burned lands, into the dead-bone lands.
The desert is a wilderness which the gods torment, when they are not ignoring it utterly.
The earth goddess Coatlícue and her family do nothing to add interest to the monotonous and almost uniformly level terrain of gray-yellow sand, gray-brown gravel, and gray-black boulders. Coatlícue does not deign to disturb that land with earthquakes. Chántico does not spurt volcanoes through it, nor Temazcaltóci spit any spouts of hot water and steam. The mountain god Tepeyólotl stays aloofly far away. I could, with the aid of my topaz, just make out the low profiles of mountains far to east and west, jagged mountains colored the gray-white of granite. But they remained always infinitely distant; they never came nearer to me nor I to them.
Each morning, the sun god Tonatíu sprang angrily from his bed, without his accustomed dawn ceremony of selecting his bright spears and arrows for the day. Each evening, he plummeted into bed without donning his lustrous feather mantle or spreading wide his colorful flower quilts. In between the abrupt lifting and dropping of the nights’ blessedly cool darkness, Tonatíu was merely a brighter yellow-white spot in the yellow-white sky—sultry, sullen, sucking all the breath from that land—burning his way across the parched sky as slowly and laboriously as I crept across the parched sands below.
The rain god Tlaloc paid even less attention to the desert, though it was by then the season of rains. His casks of clouds often piled up, but only over the granite mountains far away to east and west. The clouds would belly and billow and tower high over the horizon, then darken with storm, and the tlalóque spirits would flail their blazing forked sticks, making a drumming that came to me as a faint mutter. But the sky above me and ahead of me remained forever that unrelieved yellow-white. Neither the clouds nor the tlalóque ventured into the oven heat of the desert. They let their rain spill only as distant gray-blue veils onto those distant gray-white mountains. And the goddess of running water, Chalchihuítlicué, was nowhere in evidence, never.
The wind god Ehécatl blew now and then, but his lips were as parched as the desert earth, his breath as hot and dry, and he seldom made a sound, since he had practically nothing to blow against. Sometimes, though, he blew so hard that he whistled. Then the sand stirred and lifted and drove across the land in clouds as abrasive as the obsidian dust that sculptors use to wear away solid rock.
The gods of living creatures have little to do in that hot, harsh, arid land; least of all Mixcóatl, the god of hunters. Of course I saw or heard the occasional coyote, because that beast seems able to forage a living anywhere. And there were some rabbits, probably put there only for the coyotes to live on. There were wrens, and owls not much bigger than the wrens, living in holes gouged in the cactuses, and always a scavenger vulture or two soaring in circles high above me. But every other desert inhabitant seemed to be of the vermin variety, living underground or under rocks—the venomous rattle-tailed snakes, lizards like whips, other lizards all warts and horns, scorpions almost as long as my hand.
The desert likewise contains little to have interested our gods of growing things. I grant that even there, in the autumn, the nopáli cactus puts forth its sweet red tónaltin fruits, and the gigantic quinámetl cactus offers sweet purplish pitaáya fruits at the ends of its uplifted arms, but most of the desert cactuses grow only spikes and spines and hooks and barbs. Of trees there is only an occasional gnarled mizquitl, and the yuca of spearlike leaves, and the quaumátlatl which is curiously colored a light, bright green in its every part: leaves, twigs, branches, and even its trunk. The smaller shrubs include the useful chiyáctic, whose sap is so like an oil that it makes an easily lighted campfire, and the quauxelolóni, whose wood is harder than copper, almost impossible to cut, so heavy that it would sink in water, if there were any water about.
Only one kindly goddess dares to stroll through that forbidding desert, to reach among the fangs and talons of those touch-me-not plants, to sweeten their ill nature with her caress. That is Xochiquétzal, goddess of love and flowers, the goddess best loved by my long-gone sister Tzitzitlíni. Each spring, for a little while, the goddess beautifies every meanest shrub and cactus. During the rest of the year, it might seem to an ordinary traveler that Xochiquétzal has abandoned the desert to unenlivened ugliness. But I still, as I had done in my short-sighted childhood, looked closely at things that would not catch the eye of people with normal vision. And I found flowers in the desert in every season, on the long, thready vines that crept along the surface of the ground. They were miniature flowers, almost invisible unless they were sought, but they were flowers, and I knew that Xochiquétzal was there.
Though a goddess may frequent the desert with ease and impunity, it is no comfortable environment for a human being. Everything that makes human life livable is either scarce or absent. A man trying to cross the desert, ignorant of its nature and unprepared for it, would soon come to his death—and not a quick or an easy one. But I, though I was making my first venture into that wasteland, I was not entirely ignorant or unprepared. During my schooldays, when we boys were taught to soldier, the Cuachic Blood Glutton had insisted on including some instruction in how to survive in the desert.
For example, I never lacked for water, thanks to his teachings. The most convenient source is the comitl cactus, which is why it is called the comitl, or jar. I would select a sizable one and lay a ring of twigs around it, and set them afire, and wait until the heat drove the comitl’s moisture toward its interior. I then had only to slice off the top of the cactus, mash its inner pulp and squeeze the water from that into my leather bag. Also, each night, I cut down one of the tall, straight-trunked cactuses and laid it with its ends propped on rocks so that it sagged in the middle. By the morning, all its moisture would have collected in that middle, where I had only to cut out a plug and let the water trickle into my bag.
I seldom had any meat to cook over my evening campfire, except an occasional lizard, sufficient for about two mouthfuls—and once a rabbit which had still been kicking when I drove off the vulture tearing at it. But meat is not indispensable to the sustenance of life. Throughout the year, the mizquitl tree is festooned with seed pods, new green ones as well as the withered brown ones left from the year before. The green pods can be cooked to tenderness in hot water and then mashed into an edible pulp. The dry seeds inside the old pods can be crushed between two rocks to the consistency of meal. That coarse powder can be carried like pinóli and, when no fresher food is available, mixed with water and boiled.
Well, I survived, and I traveled in that dreadful desert for a whole year. But I need describe it no more, since every one-long-run was indistinguishable from every other. I will only add—in case you reverend friars cannot yet envision its vastness and emptiness—that I had been trudging through it for at least a month before I encountered another human being.
From a distance, because it was dust-colored like the desert, I took it to be just a strangely shaped hummock of sand, but as I got closer I saw it was a seated human figure. Rather joyfully, since I had been so long alone, I gave a hail, but I heard no reply. As I continued to approach I called again, and still I got no answer, though by then I was close enough to see that the stranger’s mouth was open wide enough to be screaming.
Then I stood over the figure, a naked woman sitting on the sand and wearing a light powdering of it. If she had once been screaming, she was no more, for she was dead, with eyes and mouth wide. She sat with her legs out before her and parted, with her hands pressed flat on the ground as if she had died while trying strenuously to push herself erect. I touched her dusty shoulder; the flesh was yielding and not yet chill; she had not been dead for long. She stank of being unwashed, as no doubt I did too, and her long hair was so full of sand fleas that it might have writhed had it not been so matted. Nevertheless, given a g
ood bath, she would have been handsome of face and figure, and she was younger than I was, with no marks of disease or injury, so I was puzzled as to the cause of her death.
During the past month, I had got into the habit of talking to myself, for lack of anyone else, so then I said to myself, forlornly, “This desert is surely abandoned by the gods—or I am. I have the good fortune to meet what is perhaps the only other person in all this wasteland, and by good fortune it is a woman, who would have been ideal for a traveling companion, but by ill fortune she is a corpse. Had I come a day earlier, she might have been pleased to share my journey and my blanket and my attentions. Since she is dead, the only attention I can pay is to bury her before the vultures come flocking.”
I shed my pack and my water bag and began to scrape with my maquáhuitl in the sand nearby. But I seemed to feel her eyes reproachfully on me, so I decided she might as well lie down restfully while I dug the grave. I dropped my blade and took the woman by her shoulders to ease her onto her back—and I got a surprise. She resisted my hands’ pressure, she insisted on remaining in a sitting position, as if she had been a stuffed doll sewn to stay bent in the middle. I could not understand the body’s reluctance; its muscles had not yet been stiffened, as I proved by lifting one of her arms and finding it quite limber. I tried again to move her, and her head lolled onto her shoulder, but her torso would not be budged. A mad thought came into my mind. Did desert people, when they died, perhaps grow roots that fixed them in place? Did they perhaps gradually turn into those giant but often very human-shaped quinámetin cactuses?
I stepped back to consider the incomprehensibly stubborn cadaver—and was surprised again when I felt a sharp stab between my shoulderblades. I whirled around to find myself in a half circle of arrows, all pointed at me. Each was poised on the taut string of a bow, and every bow was held by an angrily frowning man, and every man was clad in nothing but a greasy loincloth of ragged leather, a crust of body dirt, and some feathers in his lank hair. There were nine of the men. Admittedly, I had been preoccupied with my peculiar find, and they had taken pains to come noiselessly, but I should have smelled them long before they were upon me, for their stink was that of the dead woman multiplied by nine.