Captive Universe

Old Atototl passed in the next row, carrying a plump eating dog to the priest. Since he was the cacique, the leading man in Quilapa, this was his privilege. Chimal pushed his way into the crowd as they all turned to follow. At the edge of the field Citlallatonac waited, a fearful sight in his filthy black robe, spattered all over with blood, and thick with embroidered skulls and bones along the bottom edge where it trailed in the dust. Atototl came up to him, arms extended, and the two old men bent over the wriggling puppy. It looked up at them, its tongue out and panting in the heat, while Citlallatonac, as first priest this was his duty, plunged his black obsidian knife into the little animal’s chest. Then, with practiced skill, he tore out its still beating heart and held it high as sacrifice to Tlaloc, letting the blood spatter among the stalks of corn.

There was nothing more then that could be done. Yet the sky was still a cloudless bowl of heat. By ones and twos the villagers straggled unhappily from the fields and Chimal, who always walked alone, was not surprised to find Malinche beside him. She placed her feet down heavily and walked in silence, but only for a short while.

“Now the rains will come,” she said with bland assurance. “We have wept and prayed and the priest has sacrificed.”

But we always weep and pray, he thought, and the rains come or do not come. And the priests in the temple will eat well tonight, good fat dog. Aloud he said, “The rains will come.”

“I am sixteen,” she said, and when he did not answer she added, “I make good tortillas and I am strong. The other day we had no masa and the com was not husked and there was even no lime water to make the masa to make the tortillas, so my mother said…”

Chimal was not listening. He stayed inside himself and let the sound of her voice go by him like the wind, with as much effect They walked on together toward the village. Something moved above, drifting out of the glare of the sun and sliding across the sky toward the gray wall of the western cliffs beyond the houses. His eyes followed it, a zopilote going toward that ledge on the cliff… Though his eyes stayed upon the soaring bird his mind slithered away from it. The cliff was not important nor were the birds important: they meant nothing to him. Some things did not bear thinking about. His face was grim and unmoving as they walked on, yet in his thoughts was a twist of hot irritation. The sight of the bird and the memory of the cliff that night — it could be forgotten but not with Malinche’s prying away at him. “I like tortillas,” he said when he became aware that the voice had stopped.

“The way I like to eat them best…” the voice started up again, spurred by his interest, and he ignored it. But the little arrowhead of a

“I see Malinche out there. She is a good girl and works very hard.”

Malinche was framed by the open entranceway, legs wide, bare feet planted firmly in the dust, the roundness of her large breasts pushing out the huipil draped across her shoulders, her arms at her side and her fists clenched as though waiting for something. Chimal turned away and, squatting on the mat, drank cool water from the porous jug.

“You are almost twenty-one years of age, my son,” Quiauh said with irritating calmness, “and the clans must be joined.”

Chimal knew all this, but he did not wish to accept it. At 21 a man must marry; at 16 a girl must marry. A woman needed a man to raise the food for her; a man needed a woman to prepare the food for him. The clan leaders would decide who would be married in such a way that it profited the clans the most, and the matchmaker would be called in…

“I will see if I can get some fish,” he said suddenly, standing and taking his knife from the niche in the wall. His mother said nothing, her lowered head bobbed as she bent over her work. Malinche was gone and he hurried between the houses to the path that led south, through the cactus and rock, toward the end of the valley. It was still very hot and when the path went along the rim of the ravine he could see the river below, dried to a sluggish trickle this time of year. Yet it was still water and it looked cool. He hurried toward the dusty green of the trees at the head of the valley, the almost vertical walls of stone closing in on each side as he went forward. It was cooler here on the path under the trees: one of them had fallen since he had been here last, he would have to bring back some firewood.

Then he reached the pond below the cliffs and his eyes went up along the thin stream of the waterfall that dropped down from high above. It splattered into the pond which, although it was smaller now with a wide belt of mud around it, he knew was still deep at the center. There would be fish out there, big fish with sweet meat on their bones, lurking under the rocks along the edge. With his knife he cut a long, thin branch and began to fashion a fish spear.

Lying on his stomach on a shelf of rock that overhung the pool he looked deep into its transparent depths. There was a flicker of silver motion as a fish moved into the shadows: it was well out of reach. The air was dry and hot, the distant hammer of a bird’s bill on wood sounded u

As always, his thoughts started to veer away from that memory — but this time they did not succeed. The hot dart of irritation that had been planted in the field still stirred at his mind and, in sudden anger, he clutched at the memory of that night. What had he seen? Pieces of meat. Armadillo, or rabbit perhaps? No, he could not trick himself into believing that. Man was the only creature who was big enough to have furnished those lumps of flesh. One of the gods had put them there, Mixtec perhaps, the god of death, to feed his servants the vultures who look after the dead. Chimal had seen the god’s offering and had fled — and nothing had happened. Since that night he had walked in silence waiting for the vengeance that had never arrived.

Where had the years gone? What had happened to the boy who was always in trouble, always asking questions that had no answers? The prod of irritation struck deep and Chimal stirred on the rock, then rolled over and looked up at the sky where a vulture, like the black mark of an omen, soared silently out of sight above the valley’s wall. I was the boy, Chimal said, almost speaking aloud, and admitting to himself for the first tune what had happened, and I was so filled with fear that I went inside myself’ and sealed myself in tightly like a fish sealed in mud for baking. Why does this bother me now?

With a quick spring he was on his feet, looking around as though for something to kill. Now he was a man and people would no longer leave him alone as they had when he was a boy. He would have responsibilities, he must do new things. He must take a wife and build a house and have a family and grow old and in the end…

“No!” he shouted as loudly as he could and sprang far out from the rock. The water, cool from the melting snows of the mountains, wrapped around and pressed onto him and he sank deep. His open eyes saw the shadowed blueness that surrounded him and the wrinkled, light-shot surface of the water above. It was another world here and he wanted to remain in it, away from his world. He swam lower until his ears hurt and his hands plunged deep into the mud on the pool’s bottom. But then, even while he was thinking that he would remain here, his chest burned and his hands of their own thinking sent him arrowing back to the surface. His mouth opened, without his commanding it to, and he breathed in a great chestful of soothing air.