Mexico (26 page)

"No," Ixbalanque said, "if you are the rabbit, I am the coyote, and I'm going to catch you!"

Together the two leaders of the state crawled around the king's chambers, Nopiltzin leaping like a rabbit and Ixbalanque yelping like a coyote, until the chase became so noisy that the queen sent her older sister to see what was happening. When that austere and ugly woman pushed aside the curtains, she was aghast to find the two men rolling around the floor, but this reaction soon turned to utter confusion when the king saw her, leaped across the room on all fours, and grabbed her by the knees, pulling her down onto the floor beside him.

"I've found my darling little rabbit!" he shouted.

"Oh no!" the high priest barked in protest. "Only coyotes can have little rabbits." He leaped past the king and started biting the queen's sister on the forearm, whereupon she screamed, and he suddenly came to his senses. In amazement and confusion he rose, brushed himself off and looked down at his king, who was still groveling on the floor, holding the woman by the knees.

"Nopiltzin!" the priest cried. "Get up!"

With some difficulty, for he had been drinking for some hours before the arrival of the high priest, Nopiltzin released his sister-in-law and staggered to his feet. The astonished woman adjusted her clothing and fled, while the king banged himself on the temples to clear his head. Mouthing ill-formed words, he asked: "What were we doing, down on the floor?

I've always thought of her as the ugliest woman in the high valley."

That night Ixbalanque, once more in command of his reasoning powers, walked disconsolately among the temples atop the pyramid, and in trying to understand what had happened that confusing afternoon he reached several frightening conclusions. Under questioning, after the queen's sister had left, Nopiltzin had assured his priest that the strange liquid had consistently reliable power: the same results had been achieved with each batch. Furthermore, it could be easily made. Finally, when one was drinking it, a god did indeed seem to inhabit one. There was a sense of excitement and colors seemed brighter. What was most shocking was that during the time when the god of pulque had been in command, the queen's sister had actually been a rather attractive woman, so that when he, Ixbalanque, had attacked her and started nibbling her arm, what he had really wanted to do was to drive the king away, tear off the woman's clothes and enjoy her.

"There will be no new pyramid," the high priest admitted in the darkness that enveloped the top of the pyramid. "The god of the smoking mirror, which might have saved us, will not be welcome. The flowered serpent is gone with his sponsorship of beauty, and I'm afraid that all we have accomplished in the high valley is in danger." He looked down at the sleeping city, then one of the loveliest and best governed in Mexico, and sensed accurately that the great decline had begun, that subtle dry rot that overtakes societies when vision and grand design have been surrendered. In anguish he went to the dormitory where his priests slept and cried: "Brothers! I need your counsel!" and long after midnight the guardians of the high valley's conscience debated the most danger-filled question the clergy ever had to confront: "The king seems to have lost control of his powers to govern. Shall we depose him?" The younger men listened in bewilderment as Ixbalanque reported the king's curious behavior while saying nothing of his own when he was galloping about as a coyote.

Relying only on what the high priest had told them, the group could reach no conclusion about deposing the king, and Ixbalanque was left with the dismal realization that he must act but had no idea of what that action should be. In his confusion he asked two of his senior advisers to walk with him among the temples he and they were supposed to serve and protect, and in the darkness he revealed the cause of his consternation.

"It has a potent magic. It's made from the liquid at the heart of the maguey, so it must be sacred. When you drink it, you weigh less. Your eyes see colors more clearly. Your tongue is loosened and you become a golden-voiced orator." At this point he stopped, looked out over the valley below and confided: "When I drank some of the new liquid and looked at Coxlal, the queen's ugly sister, she became sixteen years old, a ravishing princess."

"It must be magic," one of the priests said. "We must protect our city from the king's madness."

In the dark hour before dawn, Ixbalanque faced the critical problem: "I think we must consider carefully the king's future," and now his colleagues knew he was speaking of deposition. Beating his fists against his chest, Ixbalanque cried: "I should have forced a change years ago. Well, I'll perform my duties now," and he returned to the dormitory, where he roused his two advisers and whispered: "The king must go. This city must be saved." And he hastened down the long flight of stone steps to the level below, where he went immediately to his quarters and prepared for the painful meeting at which he would inform the king that his reign was over.

But one of the priests who had learned of the decision scurried down the stone steps in the breaking dawn and alerted the king to what was afoot, so that when Ixbalanque appeared at the palace, the king was waiting with two henchmen secreted behind a wall. Since Nopiltzin had spent the previous night drinking huge drafts of pulque, his capacity for understanding what the high priest wanted to tell him was severely blunted, but at the first sign that Ixbalanque had come to recommend abdication, he flew into a towering rage and, summoning his two thugs, shouted: "Kill him!" and the obsidian daggers, gleaming black in the morning sunlight, plunged into the chest of the high priest.

As he fell at the king's feet he looked up to see his drunken monarch and mumbled: "We shall have a new god, but it won't be the one we need," and he perished, the one man who might have saved the civilization of the Builders.

For the next two hundred years, roughly 900 to 1100, which is not an insignificant length of time as the lives of nations go
,
City-of-the-Pyramid enjoyed one of the greatest levels of human happiness ever attained by an early organized community. There was no war, no hunger, no forced labor on state projects, no human sacrifice, no grinding social injustice. Some were rich and some were poor, but the gap between the two was not immense. There was an army of sorts, but it played no significant role in the affairs of state. Adultery was punished severely so as to protect the family, and there was even a rude educational system that enabled even the poorest of boys to rise to the priesthood.

What gave City-of-the-Pyramid its greatest distinction, however, was its worship of the god of pulque. The beverage was fermented in great amounts at maguey plantations, which now occupied fields that had once produced only cactus. For mile after mile the spidery arms of the blue-green maguey twisted into the air like the flames of earth, and one of the most common sights in the high valley was the maguey harvester passing among his plants, armed with a hollow gourd, one end of which he pressed into the heart of the plant while the other end was kept in his mouth. Then, by sucking vigorously, he drew up the honey water, depositing it in large gourd buckets which carried it to the fermenting areas, where it was transformed into pulque, the beer, the wine of Mexico.

One of the curiosities of history is that the god of pulque was named Four Hundred Rabbits, since the king who had discovered the drink felt that any man, given enough pulque, could be as carefree as four hundred rabbits. There was a temple to Four Hundred Rabbits--not a large one because the high valley's energy for building had long since been dissipated. The god was represented by a green stone statue of a rabbit with ears like a maguey leaf, and he was perpetually surrounded by flowers of four colors. A troupe of dancers was usually in attendance at his temple and the outer walls of the little structure were festooned with gourds and garlands of fruit. Celebrations in honor of Four Hundred Rabbits consisted of music and singing, the burning of nopal-and-rubber incense, and all who worshiped the god were supposed to be gentle, happy and, above all, kind. It is no exaggeration to say that Four Hundred Rabbits was the loveliest god who ever reigned in Mexico.

Although I'm an American and not a trained historian, I believe I'm entitled to make a judgment about the reign of King
Nopiltzin because, through a quirk of Mexican history, I was born a lineal descendant of the king: my grandfather married an Indian woman who sprang directly from his line. So when I try to evaluate his performance I am speaking not of some Indian stranger long dead but of my own ancestor. My summary of his reign is this. The god of pulque acquired a significance greater than that of any other deity. No priest like Ixbalanque tried to call the city back to its high destiny, and the king, unlike tough old Ixmiq, did not dream of building a city so powerful and vast that it would be a monumental tribute to the gods. Instead, king and priest alike worshiped fairly constantly at the shrine of Four Hundred Rabbits, and a hazy indifference settled over the city and the entire valley.

I am convinced by various murals that life in the latter years of Nopiltzm's reign was very good indeed. There is evidence from some of the memorials dug up around Mexico City that other states looked upon City-of-the-Pyramid as the apex of accomplishment, and the decorated pottery and featherwork produced in the high valley was treasured even as far south as present-day Guatemala. Some of the songs composed in those years are still sung in Mexico, including the one that accompanies the hilarious pulque dance that tourists love to photograph: the singers jig up and down on one foot like rabbits while bystanders bark like coyotes. Tradition claims that Nopiltzin himself composed both the music and the dance.

But after his death the city began to decline. As the years passed, artists in the rest of Mexico began to depict City-of
-
the-Pyramid not as a triangle accompanied by a flute but as an Indian dignitary whose many headdresses were cocked to one side, as if he were drunk. The envy of others had given way to contempt, even by local artists.

And there was an ominous development whose menace the rulers of the city were too befuddled by pulque to appreciate. From time to time, starting in the year 992, when Nopiltzin was long dead, a strange group of Indians who occupied caves far to the north began wandering down to the high valley; we know this from the decorated pottery of the period. Invariably they are depicted as barbarians, ugly and ferocious people lacking the graciousness that had marked the citizens of City
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of-the-Pyramid. We find not a shred of evidence that any of the pulque people appreciated the significance of these stragglers. Just as the rest of civilized Mexico now treated the
Builders with contempt, so the latter dismissed the northern barbarians as insignificant.

One aspect of this darkening period around the year 1000 saddens me, for it reflects on what I had come to think of as "my people." The descendants of Ixmiq, those fine people who had built some of the grandest structures in all the Americas, would be known in history only as the Drunken Builders, a name taken from the days of their decline. This misnomer has deluded many into thinking that men who were habitually drunk could have built those enduring memorials. I think those ancestors of mine should more generously be termed the Beautiful Builders Who Took to Drink. But I know that's too cumbersome, for historians, like us journalists, seem always to prefer the simplification, whether it represents the truth or not.

Chapter
6.

INDIAN ANCESTORS: THE ALTOMECS

AT THE BEGINNING of the tenth century, when Nopiltzin was preoccupied with the discovery of pulque, there existed in a series of dark caves along a network of rivers that ran through the steaming jungles several hundred miles north of Mexico City a tribe of Indians who for three or four thousand years, at least, and possibly much longer, had kept alive in their tribal traditions memory of an age when they had lived in a high place. This recollection was so persistent that after the Conquest the tribe was given the name Altomec, a mixture of Spanish and Indian meaning "Those who seek a high place," but during the time of which I speak they were called by others either the Cave People or the Followers of Glittering-Fish Color-Bird.

They were a short-statured, very dark people. Their standard of living was abysmal. In three or four thousand years, huddling in their caves, they had failed to invent cloth, or to develop any simple decoration for their pottery, or to tame the turkey. But they had made two discoveries that were to remake the history of Mexico. Along with their relatives, the Aztecs, who were a little more advanced, the Cave People had learned the effectiveness of organized tribal action, and they had found a god ideally suited to lead them.

Their capacity for unified movement was remarkable, and all during the first half of the eleventh century their rulers sent out disciplined bodies of men to scout the rest of Mexico in the search for a new homesite, for it had become apparent that continued life in the caves was not desirable. Some of these scouting parties penetrated as far south as the areas beyond
Guatemala. Others had spied upon the lands of the Drunken Builders, and these had reported favorably on that domain.

Sometime about 1050 the Cave People decided to abandon the caves. Loading their men and women with heavy burdens, they set forth with rude implements, statues of their god weighing thousands of pounds, seeds, gourd baskets, totems of one kind or another and hundreds of small children. Each year, from September to April, they moved a few miles from their old camping ground to a new site, where in the spring they planted the seeds they had been carrying through the winter. For five months they tended their crops and during another month they harvested, and then they pushed south. Scouting parties were constantly probing the areas ahead and for a period of ten years it was intended that they would settle somewhere in the Yucatan peninsula. It was a strange fact that most of the people in the areas spied upon by these nomads were not aware of their presence, so stealthy were their operations. But they did leave a trail, for wherever they probed, a few local men would mysteriously disappear; Glittering-Fish Color
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Bird required the constant sacrifice of young warriors.