I knew that my throbbing garrancha belonged in there. Although the fray expressly forbid any misconduct in the house of the poor and put up a blanket to part.i.tion off an area whenever a woman stayed, I had seen a lepero atop a puta pumping with his rump in the air, just as Don Fernando had mounted Miaha. My position now, on my knees with my head between her legs and her half-standing behind the table, made that impossible.

Unsure how to continue her pleasure, my coyote instincts took over, and I did what I felt was natural. I stuck my tongue into her hot, sultry opening.

It was a mistake.

She moaned and squirmed and a salacious shudder ran through her. G.o.d only knows what expression she had on her face. As I waited to be dragged out from under her dress and my throat slit, slowly, ever so slowly, her spasms began to subside. Panicking, I slipped out from under her dress as the alcalde addressed her.

"Mi amor, my love, your face is hot and flushed with excitement. It never occurred to me that you would get so excited by my performance!" The alcalde's voice was awed and gleeful at his wife's s.e.xual excitement.

I lifted the tablecloth enough to make eye contact with the woman. Sweat lines from our antics were visible as trenches in the thick beauty powders on the sides of her face.

I held the note so she could take it. I smiled at her to show her that I was pleased to have given her pleasure. She allowed me a small, mischievous smile, half grin, half grimace, then lifting her knee, booted me in my face back through the wide opening in between the boards. On the way down I bounced and banged, careened and caromed off every cross beam, support joist, and shoring timber on my way down, hitting the ground with a resounding thump.

Slowly I rose and crawled out from under the pavilion. I hurt in many places, but mostly in my soul. The rogue was nowhere to be seen. As I limped away, I considered my experience. I had made two important discoveries about women. They had a secret spot where they could be touched to give them pleasure. And once they had had their pleasure, a kick in the face was all you could expect.

I had gone only a short distance when the crowd parted for a coach. I saw a chance to ply my trade. But as I trotted toward the coach, an old woman in black stepped out of it and paused, looking down at me as she was being helped by attendants. Her raptor's eye caught mine, and an icy hand squeezed my heart.

The woman drew back in shock, but the surprise quickly left her face and alarm took over. I had once observed the same sort of reaction from a man bitten by an iguana-first the recoil in surprise, then revulsion, then anger as he beat the iguana to death.

I had no intimation as to why this aristocratic Spanish dona found me so loathsome, but my lepero instincts put wings on my feet. I raced into the cheering crowd as the archbishop reached tierra firma and bent to kiss the dirt.

I never looked back until I was clear of the crowds and well up an alley too narrow for a coach to follow. Even in the alley I felt naked and exposed, as if the sun itself were spying for this woman.

THIRTEEN.

I went home to the House of the Poor, skulking along side streets, convinced the Angel of Death was everywhere. The hospice was empty. Fray Antonio and his charges, who would that night sleep on the floor's piled straw, were with the crowds honoring the archbishop. Soon the waterfront reception would move to the alcalde palace. The buena gente would attend the festivities inside, while in the plaza Veracruz's citizens, along with those in town for the treasure fleet, would celebrate through the night and into the next day. To miss the greatest celebration of my lifetime was deeply disappointing, but my fear outweighed my eagerness.

The Casa de los Pobres was little more than a large, rectangular room. One corner was blanketed off for the fray. Behind the hung blanket were his private quarters-a bed of straw in a wood frame, a small table with a reading candle, a chest with his personal effects, and several shelves for his modest library. The books weren't much-a few religious tomes, the rest cla.s.sics from Greek and Roman antiquity. No doubt the local church and the alcalde had more books. Perhaps a few wealthy citizens as well, but it was a substantial collection of libros in a city where the vast majority of the people could not read their own names, let alone buy books.

My greatest pleasure was to sit in the fray's draped-off bolt-hole and read, but today I entered it to hide. I sat on his bed with my back to the corner and gathered my arms around my knees. Veracruz's streets had honed my survival instincts to a razor's edge, and I had felt stronger emotions emanating from the old woman than mere malice.

Fear.

Had I-or the parents I never knew-done anything to her? The fray never indicated any such thing, so her hatred, by itself, was inexplicable. But her fear? Why would an aristocratic, all-powerful matrona, the dowager of a great house, fear a lepero boy who cadged alms to earn his bread?

It was not the first time I had been mistaken for another. The day Don Francesco had beaten me within an inch of my life, his guest had claimed to recognize my true paternity. Perhaps the old woman saw the same similarities.

From time to time I'd questioned the fray about my father's ident.i.ty, but he denied all knowledge. Once deep in wine he said my father had been a wearer of the spurs, but then grew angry, perhaps for having said too much.

But the old woman, like Don Fernando's guest before her, saw something in my face, knew what she saw, and it put me at risk. I now feared what she saw might cost me my life.

I tried to put the woman out of my mind, but I could not stop thinking about my parentage. That my mother might have been a thief and a wh.o.r.e made no special impression on me. We so-called "Children of the Lord" were notorious for base parentage. That my father might have been a wearer of spurs was also of no significance. The gachupins ceaselessly debauched our women, watching them drop their b.a.s.t.a.r.ds without remorse, with contempt rather than love. To them, we were a slander against their stock and blood. They demonstrated their hatred in the laws they enacted against us, their own offspring. We b.a.s.t.a.r.dos had no rights in society. We could not inherit from our fathers; we were not even recognized as their children. Not just the streets of Veracruz-Bueno Dios!-one end of New Spain to the other, swarmed with the b.a.s.t.a.r.dos of Spanish hombres. If anyone had proven to a gachupin that I was his son, he would have stared right through me as if I'd never existed, because under the eyes of the law I did not exist. Our gachupin masters could use and abuse us at will.

Sometimes one heard the expression "son of a gun" applied to street children because their mothers were wh.o.r.es who did not know which men impregnated them. The term was first applied to the children born to prost.i.tutes on ships. Large war galleons often carried putas to service the crew. When the women were about to give birth, they were laid next to one of the ever-burning braziers near the big guns, which had to be continually available to ignite the black gunpowder. Their propinquity to the cannons earned the appellation of "son of a gun."

Being the b.a.s.t.a.r.d son of a gachupin gave me no more rights than had I been the son of a gun.

And now I had met two people who apparently hated me for my parentage, as if I was responsible for parents I had never met, as if my very existence fomented blood feuds, as if I had committed the sins of my forebears.

Ayyo, perhaps the fray would tell me why this woman hated me. Perhaps he would find some way to take care of this problem. I knew he would if he could. Fray Antonio was a good man. He helped everyone. His only sin was that he was too good. After he was defrocked, he turned to the secular community for help. He talked a well-to-do merchant out of a rundown building in the heart of the mestizo barrio. In his spare time he solicited money, food, clothing, and medicine from the wealthy. He provided all that and lodging, too, to the poor.

In other words, like myself, he begged.

Once I accompanied the fray to these great houses and watched the contortions he performed wringing alms from parsimonious grandees. No, he did not twist his arms out of their sockets, but he twisted money out of their coffers, telling them all the time, with a serene smile and saintly eyes, that G.o.d hated doubt money but loved a cheerful giver and how the golden road to heaven was paved with loving largesse.

His doctoring skills were schooled in necessity, not academy, he often said. His surgical instruments consisted of carpentry tools and kitchen utensils. His medical knowledge he'd gleaned from a volume of Galen of Pergamum, a Greek physician a century after Christ. Translated from Greek into Arabic, then into Latin, Galen's works were frowned on by the Church for their Moorish taint, but they were the best guide the fray possessed. Occasionally, a real doctor-at the fray's behest-provided help and instruction. Beyond that all the fray had to go on was his experience in treating those whom other doctors spurned.

"I received my degree," the fray sometimes said, "from Galen and the School of Necessity."

The House of the Poor was no palace of the poor-just rough, unpainted boards nailed onto raw, unfinished timbers. I slept in the common area with those who were too starved or sick to find shelter elsewhere. Piles of straw and a few ragged blankets served as our beds. The fray had a few good blankets for when the nights turned cold, but he kept them hidden. The poor stole anything they could get their hands on.

But most nights the heat caused the very air to sweat, so much so it was hard to breathe in the hospice, though in truth it was hard to breathe anywhere on the tierra caliente except the cool, enclosed gardens of the rich. When it rained, which was often, water seeped throughout the main room. When it became too wet, I slept on the long table on which Veracruz's starvelings took their evening meals each night. When the weather was bad and people could not beg, we had more mouths to feed.

In one corner was a small fire pit. An indio woman came in each day and prepared tortillas and frijoles at the pit, which, along with occasional corn mush, were the only nourishment the fray could afford. Smoke from the open fire covered the ceiling, eventually working its way through the cracks between the roof and the walls.

Only the bookshelves were safe from the rain.

I turned and studied the t.i.tles on those shelves. A hacendado had given him most of them when he'd been the priest at a village church. There was the tome on medicine, a few religious works, notably San Augustine's The City of G.o.d, but most of the books were the cla.s.sics of Greece and Rome. My favorites were Plutarch's Bioi paralleloi (Parallel Lives) in which he explored the character and n.o.ble deeds of Greece and Rome's greatest soldiers, legislators, orators, and statesmen; Homer's Iliad and Odyssey; Virgil's Aeneid; Dante's Divine Comedy and Aesop's Fables.

Other than what the fray and his books taught me, my possessions consisted of the dirty, ragged pants and shirt I begged in, and the only marginally cleaner garments and sandals I wore to church. The pants and shirt were made of coa.r.s.e-spun indio cotton and maguey, the sandals were hemp. To save wear on the sandals, I only wore them in the church.

Then there was my silver cross. The fray confessed one night, steeped in drink, that the crucifix did, in fact, belong to my mother, and that it had been given to her by my father. It was the only article of theirs I owned. The cross was pure silver, red stones adorning each corner. One would not expect "an india wh.o.r.e" to own so fine an ornament, but then my father was alleged to have been a wearer of spurs.

A lot of good it did me. If I wore the cross publicly, I'd be killed for it or jailed as a thief. It wasn't even safe in the hospice. To disguise its worth, the fray finally covered it with pitch, and I strung it from my neck on a piece of hemp.

I fingered the blackened cross and thought of the fray. Had he been defrocked for fighting Church corruption? For opposing its exploitation of the indios and its oppression of the mixed bloods? Or had he fallen from churchly grace through his taste for wine and ladies of the night, as others have intimated?

To me the questions were fatuous. He did more good than anyone in all of Veracruz, and he had given me something, at great personal peril, even pure-blood Spaniards seldom enjoyed: the world of cla.s.sical literature.

Nor had he neglected our more contemporary authors. The fray's priestly friend, Fray Juan, was a lover of such writers, most of whom were banned. He would loan the fray their illicit writings, which the fray concealed in a secret cache, and so through him I perused the books and plays of Miguel Cervantes sub rosa.

I knew Cervantes to be the creator of Don Quixote, the restive knight errant who tilted at windmills, and the fray had reluctantly permitted me to read the borrowed book. However, he forbade my reading the other banned authors-such as Lope de Vega and Mateo Altman-even though Fray Juan often brought their books to him. I, of course, perused them when he wasn't around.

I was asleep one morning when Fray Juan, greatly excited, visited and hid for the fray a copy of the book called Guzman de Alfarache. I asked Fray Antonio later why the book had to be hidden.

"Books like Guzman de Alfarache are read only in Spain," he told me. "The Inquisition has banned the importation of them into New Spain because the Church believes that indios will be corrupted by such fare. Not even we pure-blood criollos are permitted to read them, for we, too, can be corrupted."

The fact that few indios read did not enter into the matter. And at fifteen years old, to be "corrupted" had a different meaning than that the fray put on the word.

A day later, when I was alone, I satisfied my curiosity.

The fray's "rabbit hole" was a secret storage hole under his bed with a trapdoor over it. Anything of value we kept in it-away from the thieving street people. Usually there was nothing in it except a few blankets. The blankets were donated to the fray for when the weather turned bitter. Sometimes when we did not have enough money to buy maize for the evening meal, he sold one of them.

I opened the trap and removed Fray Juan's book.

I sat with my feet dangling in the hole and began reading the book, which, to my surprise and pleasure, dealt with the adventures of a young rogue who found himself homeless and on the street of life. As I said, when I met the rogue, Mateo, my own Guzman de Alfarache, I learned much of Guzman's ways, of which I will apprise you later.