I nodded, feeling rather deflated and foolish. There was more to picture writing than just recognizing the drawing of a tooth. In case I had not realized it, the governor made it plain:
“Writing and reading are for those trained in such arts, son of Tepetzálan.” And he gave me a man-to-man clap on the shoulder. “They take much learning and much practice, and only the nobility have the leisure for so much study. But I admire your initiative. Whatever occupation you do undertake, young man, you ought to do it well.”
I daresay the son of Tepetzálan should have complied with the Lord Red Heron’s broad hint, and stuck to the trade of Tepetzálan. Weak-eyed and ill equipped as I was for any more ambitious or venturesome occupations, I could have drudged away an uneventful but never empty-bellied life as a real mole of a quarrier. A life less satisfying, perhaps, than the one I stubbornly persisted in pursuing, but it would have brought me far smoother roads and more tranquil days than I was to know when I went my own way. Right at this moment, my lords, I could be employed in helping to build your City of Mexíco. And, if Red Heron was right in his estimation of my abilities, possibly making of it a better city than your own imported architects and stonemasons are doing.
But let it pass, let it all pass, as I myself let it all pass—heedless of the Lord Red Heron’s implied command, heedless of my father’s genuine pride in his trade and his attempts to teach it to me, heedless of my mother’s carping complaints that I was reaching above my ordained station in life.
For the governor had given me another hint, and one that I could not ignore. He had revealed that the picture writing did not always mean what it looked like, but what it sounded like. No more than that. But that was enlightening enough and tantalizing enough to keep me searching out bits of writing—on temple walls, on the island’s tribute roll in the palace, on any paper carried by any passing tradesman—and doing my untaught, earnest best to make sense of them.
I even went to the ancient tonalpóqui who had so glibly given me my name, four years before, and asked if I might pore over his venerable naming book when it was not in use. He could not have recoiled more violently if I had asked to use one of his granddaughters as a concubine when she was not otherwise busy. He repulsed me with the information that the art of knowing the tonálmatl was reserved for the descendants of tonalpóque, not for unknown and presumptuous brats. It may have been so. But I will wager that either he remembered my declaring that I could have named myself as well as he had done, or—more likely—he was a frightened old fraud who could no more read the tonálmatl than I could at that time.
Then, one evening, I met a stranger. Chimáli and Tlatli and I and some other boys had been playing together all afternoon, so Tzitzitlíni was not along. On a shore far distant from our village we found a holed and rotting old hulk of an acáli, and got so absorbed in playing boatmen that we were taken by surprise when Tonatíu gave his red-sky warning that he was preparing for bed. We had a long way to walk home, and Tonatíu hurried to bed faster than we could walk, so the other boys broke into a trot. In daylight I could have kept up with them, but the dusk and my blighted vision forced me to move more slowly and pick my way with care. Probably the others never missed me; anyway, they soon outdistanced me.
I came to a crossroads, and there was a stone bench there. I had not passed that way in some time, but now I remembered that the bench bore several incised symbols, and I forgot everything else. I forgot that it was now almost too dark for me even to see the carvings, let alone decipher them. I forgot why the bench was there. I forgot all the lurking things that might descend on me as the night descended. I even heard an owl hoot somewhere nearby, and paid that omen of danger no attention. There was something there to read, or try to read, and I could not pass by without trying.
The bench was long enough for a man to lie upon, if he could have lain comfortably on the ridges of stone carving. I bent over the marks, and stared at them, and traced them with my fingers as well as my eyes, and moved from one to the next and the next—and nearly sprawled across the lap of a man sitting there. I sprang away as if he had been red-hot to the touch, and stammered an apology:
“M-mixpantzínco. In your august presence …”
Politely enough, but wearily, he made the customary reply, “Ximopanólti. At your convenience …”
Then we stared at each other for a space. I assume he saw only a slightly grubby, squinting boy of about twelve years old. I could not see him in detail, partly because the night was well upon us now, partly because I had leapt so far away from him. But I could make out that he was a stranger to the island, or at least to me, that his mantle was of good material though travel-stained, that his sandals were worn from long walking, and that his coppery skin was dusty from the road.
“What is your name, boy?” he asked at last.
“Well, they call me Mole—” I began.
“I can believe that, but it is not your name.” Before I could put in a word, he asked another question, “What were you doing just now?”
“I was reading, Yanquícatzin.” I really do not know what there was about him, but it made me address him as Lord Stranger. “I was reading the writing on the bench.”
“Indeed?” he said, in what sounded like tired disbelief. “I would never have taken you for an educated young noble. What does the writing say, then?”
“It says: From the people of Xaltócan, a resting place for the Lord Night Wind.”
“Someone told you that.”
“No, Lord Stranger. Excuse me, but—see?” I moved close enough to point. “This duck-billed thing here stands for wind.”
“It is not a duck bill,” the man snapped. “That is the trumpet through which the god blows the winds.”
“Oh? Thank you for telling me, my lord. Anyway, it stands for ehécatl. And this marking here—all these closed eyelids—that means yoáli. Yoáli Ehécatl, the Night Wind.”
“You really can read?”
“A very little, my lord. Not much.”
“Who taught you?”
“No one, Lord Stranger. There is no one on Xaltócan to teach the art. It is a pity, for I should like to learn more.”
“Then you must go elsewhere.”
“I suppose so, my lord.”
“I suggest you do it now. I tire of being read to. Go elsewhere, boy called Mole.”
“Oh. Yes. Of course, Lord Stranger. Mixpantzínco.”
“Ximopanólti.”
I turned back once for a last look at him. But he was beyond the range of my short sight, or he was swallowed up in the dark, or he had simply got up and gone.
I was met at home by a chorus of my father, mother, and sister expressing a mixture of worry, relief, consternation, and anger at my having stayed out so long alone in the perilous dark. But even my mother quieted when I told how I had been delayed by the inquisitive stranger. She quieted, and she and my sister looked with wide eyes at my father. He looked with wide eyes at me.
“You met him,” my father said huskily. “You met the god and he let you go. The god Night Wind.”
All through a sleepless night I tried, without much success, to see the dusty, weary, surly wayfarer as a god. But if he had been Night Wind, then by tradition I was due to get my heart’s desire. There was only one problem. Unless wanting to learn to read and write might qualify, I did not know what was my heart’s desire. Or I did not know until I got it, if that is what I got.
It happened on a day when I was working at the first apprentice job I was given at my father’s quarry. It was no onerous work; I had been appointed watchman of the big pit during the time when all the workmen downed tools and went home for their midday meal. Not that there was much risk of human thievery, but if the tools were left unguarded, small wild animals would come to gnaw the tool hafts and handles for the salt the wood had absorbed from the workers’ sweat. A single prickly little boar could chew up a whole, hard ebony pry-bar during the men’s absence. Fortunately, my mere presence ther
e was sufficient to keep the salt-seeking creatures at bay, for whole swarms of them could have invaded unseen by my mole eyes.
That day, as always, Tzitzitlíni ran out from home to bring me my own midday meal. She kicked off her sandals and sat with me on the sunlit grassy rim of the quarry, chattering gaily while I ate my fare of tiny boned lake whitefish, each rolled and broiled in a tortilla. They had come wrapped in a cloth and were still hot from the fire. My sister looked warm too, I noticed, though the day was cool. Her face was flushed and she kept fanning the square-cut top of her blouse away from her breasts.
The fish rolls had a slight but unusually tart taste. I wondered if Tzitzi instead of our mother had prepared them, and whether she was chattering so volubly just to keep me from teasing her about her apparent lack of cooking skill. But the taste was not disagreeable, and I was hungry, and I felt quite replete when I had finished. Tzitzi suggested that I lie down and digest my meal in comfort; she would keep watch for any intruding prickly little boars.
I stretched out on my back and looked up at the clouds which once I could see so clear-cut against the sky; now they were but formless white swatches among formless blue swatches. I had got accustomed to that by now. But all at once something more disturbing began to happen to my vision. The white and blue commenced swirling, slowly at first, then more rapidly, as if some god up there had begun to stir the sky with a chocolate beater. Surprised, I started to sit up, but I was suddenly so dizzy that I fell back upon the grass.
I felt uncommonly odd, and I must have made some odd noise, for Tzitzi leaned over me and looked into my face. Addled though I was, I got the impression that she had been waiting for something to happen to me. The tip of her tongue was caught between her brilliant white teeth, and her narrowed eyes gave me a look of seeking some sign. Then her lips smiled mischievously, her tongue’s tip licked them, and her eyes widened with a light almost of triumph. She remarked on my own eyes, and her voice seemed strangely to come like an echo from far away.
“Your pupils have got so large, my brother.” But she still smiled, so I felt no cause for alarm. “Your irises are scarcely brown at all, but almost entirely black. What do you see with those eyes?”
“I see you, my sister,” I said, and my voice was thick. “But somehow you look different. You look …”
“Yes?” she prompted.
“You look so beautiful,” I said. I could not help saying it.
Like every boy my age, I was expected to disdain and disprize girls—if I even deigned to notice them—and of course one’s own sister was more to be disparaged than any other girl. But I would have known Tzitzitlíni to be beautiful even if the fact had not been remarked so often in my hearing by all the adults, women and men alike, who caught their breath at first catching sight of her. No sculptor could have captured the lissome grace of her young body, for stone or clay cannot move, and she gave the illusion of being always in flowing motion even when she was most still. No painter could have mixed the exact golden-fawn color of her skin, or the color of her eyes: doe-brown flecked with gold….
But that day something magical had been added, and that was why I could not have refused to acknowledge her beauty, even if I had been so inclined. The magic was visible all about her, an aura like that of the mist of water jewels in the sky when the sun comes out immediately after a rain.
“There are colors,” I said, in my curiously thickened voice. “Bands of color, like the mist of water jewels. All around your face, my sister. A glow of red … and outside that a glow of purple … and … and …”
“Looking at me gives you pleasure?” she asked
“It does. You do. Yes. Pleasure.”
“Then hush, my brother, and let yourself be given pleasure.”
I gasped. Her hand was underneath my mantle. And remember, I was nearly a year short of the age to wear a loincloth. I should have found my sister’s bold gesture an outrageous violation of my privacy, except that somehow it did not now seem so, and in any case I felt too numb to raise my arms and ward her off. I could feel almost nothing except that I seemed to be growing in a part of my body where I had never noticeably grown before. So was Tzitzi’s body changing. Her young breasts ordinarily showed only as modest mounds beneath her blouse, but now, as she knelt over me, her nipples were swollen; they poked like little fingertips against the thin cloth covering them.
I managed to raise my heavy head and gazed blearily down at my tepúli in her manipulating hand. It had never before occurred to me that my member could be unsheathed of its skin so far down its length. That was the first time I had ever seen more than the tip and the pouty little mouth of what was now, with its outer skin slid back, revealed to be a ruddy and bulbous-ended shaft. It looked rather like a gaudy mushroom sprouting from Tzitzi’s tight grasp.
“Oéya, yoyolcatíca,” she murmured, her face almost as red as my member. “It grows, it becomes alive. See?”
“Tóton … tlapeztía,” I said breathlessly. “It becomes glowing hot …”
With her free hand, Tzitzi lifted her skirt and anxiously, fumblingly unwound her diaperlike undergarment. She had to spread her legs to get it entirely undone, and I saw her tipíli, close enough that it was clear even to my sight. Always before, there had been nothing between her legs but a sort of close-shut crease or dimple, and even that had been almost imperceptible because it was blurred by a light fuzz of fine hairs. But now her cleft was opening of itself, like
Ayya, Fray Domingo has upset and broken his inkwell. And now he leaves us. Distressed by the accident, no doubt.
During this interruption, I might mention that some of our men and women grow just a trace of ymáxtli, which is that hair in that private place between the legs. But most of our race have no hair at all there, or anywhere else on the body, except for the luxuriant growth on the head. Even our men have only scant facial hair, and any abundance is regarded as a disfigurement. Mothers daily bathe their boy babies’ faces with scalding hot lime water, and in most cases—as in my own, for example—that treatment discourages the emergence of a beard all through a man’s life.
Fray Domingo returns not. Do I wait, my lords, or go on?
Very well. Then I return to that hilltop long ago and far away, where I lay dazed and wondering while my sister worked so busily to take advantage of my condition.
As I said, her tipíli cleft was opening of itself, becoming a budding flower, showing pink petals against the flawless fawn skin there, and the petals even glistened as if drenched with dew. I fancied that Tzitzitlíni’s new-blossomed flower gave off a faint musky fragrance like that of the marigold. And meanwhile, all about my sister, about her face and her body and her now uncovered parts, there still shimmered and pulsated those inexplicable bands and waves of various colors.
She lifted my mantle out of her way, then raised one of her slender legs to sit astride my lower body. She moved urgently, but with the tremor of nervousness and inexperience. With one quivering small hand she held and aimed my tepúli. With the other she seemed to be trying to spread farther open the petals of her tipíli flower. As I have told earlier, Tzitzi had already had some practice at utilizing a wooden spindle as she now utilized me, but she was still narrowed by her chitóli membrane and was tight within. As for me, my tepúli was of course nowhere near man-size. (Though I know Tzitzi’s ministrations helped to hurry it toward mature dimensions—or beyond, if other women have spoken true.) Anyway, Tzitzi was still virginally pursed, and my member was at least larger than any thin spindle substitute.
So there was a moment of anguished frustration. My sister’s eyes were tight shut, she was breathing like a runner in a race, she was desperate for something to happen. I would have helped, if I had known what it was supposed to be, and if I had not been so numbed in every part of my body except that one. Then, abruptly, the threshold gave way. Tzitzi and I cried out simultaneously, I in surprise, she in what might have been either pleasure or pain. To my vast amazement, and in what manner I stil
l could not entirely comprehend, I was inside my sister, enveloped by her, warmed and moistened by her—and then gently massaged by her, as she began to move her body up and down in a slow rhythm.
I was overwhelmed by the sensation that spread from my warmly clenched and slowly stroked tepúli to every other part of my being. The mist of water jewels about my sister seemed to brighten and grow, to include me as well. I could feel it vibrating me and tingling me all over. My sister held more than that one small extension of myself; I felt totally absorbed into her, into Tzitzitlíni, into the sound of small bells ringing. The delight increased until I thought I could no longer tolerate it. And then it culminated in a burst even more delicious, a sort of soft explosion, like that of the milkweed pod when it splits and flings its white fluffs to the wind. At the same moment, Tzitzi breathed out a long soft moan of what even I, even in my ignorance, even half unconscious in my own sweet delirium, even I recognized as her rapturous release.
Then she collapsed limply along the length of my body, and her long soft hair billowed all about my face. We lay there for some time, both of us panting hard. I slowly became aware that the strange colors were fading and withdrawing, and that the sky above had stopped its whirling. Without raising her head to look at me, my sister said against my chest, very quietly and shyly, “Are you sorry, my brother?”
“Sorry!“ I exclaimed, and frightened a quail into flying up from the grass near us.
“Then we can do it again?” she murmured, still without looking at me.
I thought about it. “Can it be done again?” I asked. The question was not so hilariously stupid as it sounds; I asked out of understandable ignorance. My member had slipped out of her, and was now wetly cold and as small as I had heretofore known it. I can hardly be derided for thinking that perhaps a male was allotted only one such experience in a lifetime.