“Sí, señor.”
But I understood nothing, though thoughts were buzzing in my head like an angry hornet’s nest. It sounded like the stable owner was saying that I could live and work in the stable, that I would actually have a home among the horses, but the idea was too incredible, too incomprehensible to be true.
“You’re lucky the stallion didn’t stomp you into the ground,” Gomez growled at me.
“Sí, God was watching over me.”
“God doesn’t watch over lépero trash. Phew!” Gomez again waved away the stink flowing from me. “You smell worse than the manure. Go wash yourself down at the river.”
“I can use the horse—”
“You’d poison the horses if you used their troughs.”
I stopped him with a question as he started to walk away.
“This man, my benefactor, who is he?”
“He’s the son of the conqueror, birthed by Marina, the india interpreter that helped our heroes fight the Aztecs.”
A son of the conqueror! Even an ignorant lépero like me knew about Hernán Cortés.
“The Marquis del Valle de Oaxaca?” I asked.
“Of course not. That is his brother, a pureblood and conceived in a marriage bed sanctioned by God. El Mestizo is a bastardo who carries the blood taint.” The stableman spit. “A mestizo bastardo has less rights and fewer brains than a jackass.”
Gomez quickly looked behind him to see if El Mestizo could have returned and heard the insult.
“Get out of here,” he told me. “Leave that stench at the river or don’t come back.”
The hornets in the nest in my head swirled as I hobbled to the river. I no longer actually felt any pain. I was too numb from what had just happened to feel any pain.
A mestizo bastardo who wears fancy clothes, owns a valuable horse, and is the son of the conqueror.
And he had arranged for me to work in the stable.
I had never realized that a mestizo could be more valuable than a toad, much less own a champion stallion.
Was it possible that even I had as much worth as the horses I stole grain from?
PART 3
OAXACA
A.D. 1565
OAXACA
We came to the city of Oaxaca … and though not very big, yet a fair and beautiful city to behold. It standeth fourscore leagues from Mexico in a pleasant valley from whence Cortés was named Marqués del Valle …
The valley of Oaxaca is of at least fifteen miles in length and ten in breadth, which runneth in the midst a goodly river yielding great store of fish. The valley is full of sheep and other cattle … but what doth make the valley of Oaxaca to be mentioned far and near are the good horses which are bred in it, and esteemed to be the best in all the country.
—Travels of Thomas Gage
EIGHTEEN
PUSHING THROUGH THE crowd of jubilant people in the town square, I made my way past the card tables set up under torchlight in front of the inn. I pretended to show little interest in the game that had just started, but it was the reason I had come to the square.
I was up to my first larceny since I had found a home in the stable nine years before and left my life as a lépero.
Well … perhaps not really my first—old habits are hard to break—but it had been a very long time since I had stolen anything. Even though life had some bumps and rocky places, since the day I was taken in at the bequest of the eldest son of Cortés, I had had food and shelter and worked with horses—what more could a young man ask for? Perhaps a good woman to share his bed? That would come when I could afford to have a wife.
Yes, there was that one more burning necessity, but since I was not ready for marriage, I satisfied my lust on Saturday night at the whorehouse and obtained absolution Sunday morning at confession.
My Saturday-night enjoyment kept me broke for the rest of the week, but it took the edge off of my urges, too.
Sí, I am no longer a stinking, dirty, hungry, thieving lépero, though as a half-caste, I still sleep in the stable and I am only one rung up the social ladder from the léperos on the street.
Even though I am granted a tiny bit of respectability from gachupins because I care for their horses, I have a place to sleep and plenty of tortillas, frijoles, peppers, and even carne … but in truth I still thought like a lépero. That cunning and alertness to watch my back was still part of me, hidden inside my soul.
When the time came that it was needed, my lépero sense of survival and larceny would come to the surface. That included the ability to climb walls, a feat I planned to perform tonight, though not in view of the hoards of people who have come to the festival.
People around me were happy and drunk; there was food, drink, gambling, dancing, and music. I was eager to join them as soon as I accomplished the task I had agreed to perform.
The laughter and dancing seemed to have broken the tension that had gripped the town for days after another indio incident in which a Spaniard was killed. Many indios, almost all of them only guilty of being nearby when the drunken gachupin was killed in a struggle with a man whose daughter he was raping, were murdered by a posse of Spaniards in retaliation.
The dead Spaniard had an evil reputation for cheating indios and raping their women, but because he was a wealthy landowner and the victims were indios, Spanish legal administrators looked the other way as a group of Spaniards took action against indios to ensure that they would not get up the courage to kill another gachupin.
It wasn’t that the Spaniards were totally insensitive to the evil that their deceased amigo had done—more important to them was to keep the indio population, which vastly outnumbered them, frightened and submissive.
Night had fallen and Oaxaca’s main square was lit up with torches as more and more people crowded in for the festivities. Most of the people were indios, with a small number of Spaniards, a few mestizos, and too many whining, drunken, begging léperos. Even I found the stinking, whining street trash insufferable.
I was no longer Juan the Lépero—now I was Juan the Mestizo—but the size of my physical world had not grown much. I had still never been farther than the river at the edge of town and the pasture along the river where horses were traded and trained. But I had learned many things about the colony and what had happened outside of Oaxaca since I had become respectable—at least as respectable as one who bore the blood taint could be.
On the surface it appeared that I had gained little of consequence. For sure, I had a warm place to sleep and a bellyful of tortillas, but I was still just a stable boy. But the effect on me wasn’t just that I didn’t smell worse than manure anymore—once I realized that a mestizo was at least as valuable as a horse, I gathered knowledge, though I had avoided learning how to read and write, turning down the help of a young priest who thought he could save my soul if I could read stories about the prophets in the Bible.
Learning about horses, how to stable them, shoe them, and treat their illnesses and injuries, had more meaning to me than lifeless words on a piece of paper.
I learned that Oaxaca was not the center of the world, was not even one of the grandest towns of New Spain; that Mexico City, Puebla, Vera Cruz, Guadalajara, and the northern silver mining towns were all larger; and that many of the larger cities had cobblestoned their main square and even many of the main streets, while Oaxaca’s were packed dirt that turned to mud during the rainy season.
Rather than being a crossroad of trade or sitting atop mountains of silver, Oaxaca was a quiet farming community; only instead of just the beans, maize, and peppers that had been grown here since indios first scratched the land, the Spanish brought with them horses, mules, cows, goats, sheep, chickens, and oxen, all of which thrived in the green river valley.
But the Spanish also brought with them things that were not as beneficial as farm animals—disease.
The priest told me that in the days before the 1521 conquest, the valley supported around a million and a half indios, but ninety percent of
the population had been wiped out by the diseases that the invaders carried with them from Europe. The population number increased little over the years because so much of the food and other products indios created ended up being taken from them without compensation.
Ayyo! Tonight, with my help, a little of what was stolen from the indios and mestizos was about to be returned.
The noisy festival in the town square was the Guelaguetza celebration, which, like many traditions in New Spain, was held to attract the indios with what they were already familiar with; the church had converted a traditional indio fete to one with Christian religious principles—leaving out the bloody indio rituals, of course.
Before the conquest, the celebration honored Centeotl, the Zapotec and Mixtec goddess of corn, and a virgin slave girl had been sacrificed in the name of the goddess.
What a waste of womanhood!
As soon as the indio empires collapsed, Spanish priests set out to completely destroy the religion of the indios, burning their books and using the stones of their temples to build churches. That left a religious void for the indios because they were not able to instantly convert to the religion the invaders brought with them.
The clever priests realized that it would be easier to get indios to participate in a festival that was familiar to them than trying to teach them a Christian one from scratch. So they eliminated the indio sacrifice of a virgin girl and instead made Guelaguetza a celebration in honor of the Virgin del Carmen, with music, dancing, gambling, and games of skill.
While the celebration was going on in the main square, the governor had posted constables armed with muskets at strategic points to ensure that the fete stayed peaceful.
The precaution was a reminder that, despite the destruction of the indio culture and the substitution of a Spanish one, the conquerors did not have a firm grasp on all of the colony they called New Spain.
Nor was the colony completely “civilized” by Spanish standards. Only the heart of the territory—Mexico City, Guadalajara, Guanajuato, Vera Cruz, Acapulco, and their environs—were firmly dominated by the conquerors.
The Oaxaca region was on the fringes of being completely under the control of the Spanish, but Zapotec and Mixtec uprisings still spontaneously ignited, only to be put down harshly.
Beyond the silver mining regions in Guanajuato and Zacatecas to the north of Mexico City and Oaxaca to the south, much of the colony was still dominated by indios, many of whom carried on continuous resistance as the Spanish pushed farther and farther north in the search of more silver, gold, or valuable farmlands, destroying what little the indios had, impoverishing them, and forcing them to work for Spanish masters in order to survive.
The Maya region to the far south was not completely under the control of the Spanish. The jungle terrain was difficult, the people stubborn, and the lack of land that could be farmed all worked against total subjugation.
Even where the Spanish did not completely dominate, they had scattered settlements and mining towns that were armed camps and missions that were little more than church-fortresses.
These entities outside the direct control of the colonial administration existed in an uneasy peace with the surrounding indios that sometimes turned violent.
Tonight I would strike a small blow against the Spanish, at least against one particularly cruel Spaniard.
NINETEEN
PASSING BY THE card tables set on the sidewalk in front of the inn, I gave one table a quick glance as two players were getting prepared to engage in a play-off.
One of the players was a mestizo, a small ranchero I had become friendly with because he owned two horses, a mare and a stallion, and I had treated the stallion for a hoof that had become infected after suffering a cut.
A Spanish hacienda owner would have considered the horses that the mestizo owned only good enough to pull a work wagon, but to the mestizo they were a treasure trove that would become the beginning of a herd when the mare became pregnant.
The owner of the hacienda bordering the mestizo’s small property resented the fact that a mestizo had two horses, much less that he had what could be the start of an actual horse ranch.
Getting the mestizo drunk in town one night by pretending to be friendly to him and supplying strong brandy, the hacienda owner cheated him in a game of cards and took the horses as payment.
Tonight the mestizo was playing against the Spaniard again, but this time he was putting his rancho into the pot while the hacienda owner’s ante were the horses he had cheated to get.
If the ranchero won, he would only get back what he had lost, but when a mestizo is pitted against a Spaniard, that would be a miraculous victory.
If he lost … he would have to build a shack for his family to live in and hope to raise a crop of corn before they starved to death.
The hacienda owner had a reputation as being both arrogant and vicious, a man who enjoyed hurting people and animals when he had a bellyful of booze. I witnessed him hit his horse across the head, blinding it in one eye, after he fell off trying to mount the horse when he was drunk. Onlookers had laughed when he fell, but that was enough to put the man into a rage against the helpless animal.
I had gone to the aid of the horse, and the drunken lout had struck me with his quirt.
I took the blow because to have hit back would have put me in the constable’s jail if I wasn’t killed on the spot by the hacienda owner’s Spanish friends.
The hacienda owner thought of himself as particularly good at cards and had invited his friends to watch him humiliate and destroy the mestizo he had once cheated.
Of course, the Spaniard had not counted on the ranchero having a friend who had once been a thieving lépero—and loved horses.
The horse he blinded in one eye was in my thoughts as I made my way past the table.
Leaving the packed square, I went down a deserted alley at the back of the inn. It was familiar ground to me because I had once shared a space under the eave with a pig—that was before I got a roof over my head at the stable.
Years later, another of the swine’s fellows was tied up there, waiting for slop to fatten up on until the day he is invited to be the guest of honor at the dinner table.
Looking around to make sure I was not watched, I started up the grape-vines attached to the back wall, going quickly all the way up to the open window of the room at the top. The windows were glassless and the shutters were closed only for rain.
I was heavier now than in those days when I could climb like a squirrel, but the vines were thick and would hold my weight—I hoped.
An indio servant told me that the room was rented by an important Spaniard visiting from Mexico City and that the man was a guest of the bishop and would be watching the festivities from a raised pavilion in front of the church.
No one was in the room as I entered.
I looked around, curious as to how the wealthy gachupins lived. The only room in a house I had been in was the front room of the stable owner’s quarters next to the stable. This one here was much fancier, with a big bed that had a canopy over it.
The door to the dressing room was open and I took a peek in. The man’s carriage trunks were inside and his clothes neatly laid out. The silk material and other fine cloths belonged to a personage of importance.
A jewelry case was open on the dresser and I paused to look at the pearls and other gems just long enough to remind myself that this was forbidden fruit. I might get away with taking a fancy handkerchief, claiming I found it on the street, but it would be impossible for me to wear or sell jewelry in Oaxaca without finding myself with a date for the hangman.
Besides, I was on a mission that even the good Lord would approve of even though cheating at cards was needed to bring about a just ending to an injustice.
Then I spotted something I could steal without risking arrest: his perfume bottle on the dresser. I shook a generous amount of the lilac-smelling liquid into my palm and stuck my hand inside my shirt to rub it un
der one underarm and then the other.
Ayyo! I smelled like a gachupin!
But it was time to go to work.
I got down on my hands and knees and crawled out onto the balcony, staying low enough to avoid being spotted. The inn was the tallest building in town, outside of the church, and I would not be seen even if someone was in the church bell tower because the railing was covered with flower vines.
I slipped a short spyglass I had “borrowed” from the stable out from under my shirt.
The vertical supports of the railing were spaced far enough apart to permit me to push aside the vines and stick my head through to look down at the card game with my spyglass.
The two players had their sides to the inn. The fancy playing cards, being dealt by another gachupin, were about the size of a man’s hand, and I could easily make out the details.
The cards were not the typical ones based upon the French design with kings and queens and jacks but had swords and wands, goblets and coins for symbols. The game to be played was a simplified version of Cacho, in which the winner has the highest three-card combination.
If the mestizo had a winning hand, I would nod the spyglass up and down; if a loser, side to side. The mestizo’s wife was across the way, watching for my signal. She in turn would pass the signal to her husband.
Easy, no?
TWENTY
NINA ALVAREZ OPENED her room door on the top floor of the Oaxaca inn and peeked out. Two women guests were in the hallway chatting, and Nina quickly closed the door.
She would check again in a couple of minutes to see if the coast was clear. If it was, she would scurry down the hallway and use the key her lover gave her to enter his room and wait for him.
Carlos de Rueda, her lover, was married to a sister of the marquis. Carlos had come to Oaxaca for a Cortés family gathering to celebrate the return of the marquis from Spain. His wife remained in Mexico City because she was ill.
Carlos had come in his own carriage, and Nina had followed in the public stage that made the trip from the capital to Oaxaca in considerably less comfort, but she had made the journey for love.