I asked no questions right then. I dutifully sat down on one of the benches set in rows and—while those youngsters craned and leaned around to gawk at this hulking adult in their midst—waited for the first lesson to begin. Alonso stood behind a table at the front of the room, and I must say that I admired his clever approach to the teaching of us.
"We will start," he said in Nahuatl, "by practicing the open
On that, my first day, the teacher-priest was expounding on the Christian concept of
said,
meant.
trinity
somethings
four.
could
Of course, the notarius was already well acquainted with such basic matters as the Azteca's and Mexica's method of counting numbers, and the differing methods used by other peoples—in the Tzapoteca and Mixteca languages, for example—and those used by older nations that no longer existed, but had left records of their times—the ancient Maya and Olmeca, for example. He also knew that in any book drawn by any scribe of any nation a person depicted with a nahuatl—that is, a tongue—near its head meant the person was speaking. And if the pictured tongue was curly, it meant the person was singing or speaking poetry. And if the pictured tongue was pierced by a thorn, it meant the person was lying. Alonso could recognize the symbols that all our peoples employed to indicate mountains and rivers and the like. He knew many such features of our picture writing. But I was able to correct him, now and then, in some misapprehension.
"No," I might say, "the southernmost inhabitants of The One World—the peoples of Quautemalan—do not call the god Quetzalcoatl by that name. I have never visited those lands but, according to my calmecac teachers, in those southern languages the god has always been known as Gukumatz."
Or I might say, "No, Cuatl Alonso, you are misnaming these several gods shown here. These are the itzceliuqui, the
decimosexto,
Coyotes, barcinos, bajunos,
and many more. Keeping records of those can be vexatiously complicated, but maintain the records we must, and we do, to distinguish every person of every quality, from noblest to basest."
"Of course," I said again.
It would eventually be evident on any city street, and not at all ambiguously, that many of my own people came to accept, even to agree with, that Spanish-imposed notion of their being less-than-human beings. Their acceptance of that evaluation, that they were inherently inferior, they expressed with—of all things—hair.
The Spaniards have long known that the majority of our peoples of The One World are markedly less hairy than they. We "indios" have abundant hair on our heads, but except for the people of one or two anomalous tribes, we have no more than a trace of hair on our faces or bodies. Our male children, from their birth throughout their infancy, have their faces repeatedly bathed by their mothers with scalding lime water. So, at adolescence, they do not sprout even a fuzz of beard. Female children, of course, do not have to endure that preventative treatment. But, male or female, we grow no hair on the chest or in armpits, and only a few of us have even the merest wisp of ymaxtli in the genital region.
Very well. White Spaniards are hairy, and white Spaniards, by their own definition, are immeasurably superior to indios. And I gather that the blood of a white forebear, however much diluted down the generations, confers on every descendant a tendency to hairiness. So, in time, our men ceased to be proud of having a smooth and clean visage. Mothers no longer scalded the faces of their male infants. Those adolescent boys who found the least tufts of down on their cheeks let it grow and did whatever they could to encourage it to full beardedness. Any who sprouted hair on their chests or under their arms refrained from plucking or shaving it.