Cannon fire from across the bay announced that the archbishop was coming ash.o.r.e. The flowing crowd carried me to the docks to welcome in the big ships. The treasure fleet had left Spain six weeks earlier: forty-one ships sailing out of Seville. Sixteen were bound for Veracruz, while the others went to other Caribbean ports in places like Cuba, Puerto Rico, Hispaniola, and Jamaica.

For weeks mountains of goods had piled up at the waterfront, where they would be loaded aboard the ships. The treasure and other products of New Spain were unloaded in Seville once a year. The ships returned to Veracruz laden with skins of oil and wines, barrels of figs, raisins, olives, coa.r.s.e wool called kersey, fine linen, and iron ingots. Endless kegs of quicksilver were also there for the mines-with which to leech the pure silver out of Zacatecas's earth and ore.

As I neared the harbor, I saw the products of New Spain ready to be loaded aboard the ships after the Spanish goods were unloaded. The colonies produced silver, sugar, mola.s.ses, rum, cochineal, indigo, chocolate, and hides.

Cochineal was a dye, developed by the Aztecs, its garish crimson prized by Spanish royalty. Its gaudy hue derived from a dark insect called the cochineal, which always resembled in my mind a dog tick. Our india women harvested the female cochineal from cactus pads with the flick of a feather. The insects were boiled to the bursting point, then dried and bundled into hemp bags.

Vertiginous stacks of sacked coca beans tottered above the waterfront, and in Spain they would be worth a fortune. There, the chocolatl would be pounded in a mortar together with small, very hot green chili, a vanilla pod, and some aniseed. Maize flour and water would be added, and the whole concoction brought to a boil.

The Spanish also added sugar to the drink, which made it as habit-forming there as it was here to our women-and here its hold over them is undeniably powerful. Our women drink so much of it in church, prepared by their servants, that the bishop had issued an edict prohibiting the practice. He became very sick afterward and rumors spread that some of the women had poisoned him.

The beverage, coco, was created by the Aztecs. Forbidden to the common people, chocolatl was imbibed solely by the n.o.bility and considered sacred. The most famous of these Aztec connoisseurs was Montezuma, their emperor, who drank numerous cups a day, cold. Its beans, ubiquitously treasured, were used throughout New Spain as currency. Some even believed chocolatl to possess spirit power, that chocolatl mixed with menstrual blood was an irresistible love potion.

The exotic cargoes of the Manila galleons also poured into Veracruz. Ivory and sandalwood from East India; silk and tea from China; Chinese porcelain as well, packed in pepper grains and other spices to keep it from breaking-these were all hauled from the Acapulco port by mule train.

As I reached the waterfront, I saw the ships anchor and moor in the lee of San Juan de Ulua, the island fort less than a musket shot from the city. Disembarking pa.s.sengers in longboats were already coming ash.o.r.e. Clambering out of their boats, they all dropped to their knees in prayer, many kissing the ground. Some priests broke down and sobbed, not because they'd survived the savage sea, but because they believed they'd landed on hallowed ground. By their lights Veracruz was indeed the City of the True Cross, welcoming them to a land where the Sacred Church claimed heathen souls by the millions.

In celebration of the archbishop's arrival, two thousand head of cattle had been driven through the city streets at dawn, their hooves all but shaking us out of bed. The streets still stank like a stable. The purpose for this cattle drive was ostensibly medicinal. The holy fathers held that cow respiration cleansed the air of pestilence, specifically the plague-infested swamp fumes befouling our city. Thus the heaving herd would deliver our sainted archbishop from the dreaded peste. When I asked the fray about the curative value of panting cattle, he grumbled, "The Lord acts in mysterious ways."

I wasn't so sure. Nor were some of my more skeptical indios friends. That the holy fathers deemed an out-of-breath bovine more health-giving than the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost I found a bizarre joke. Furthermore, the collective stench of swamp fumes, rotting river corpses, and cattle dung was an auto-da-fe worthy of Torquemada himself.

One group coming ash.o.r.e was garbed not as clerics but servants. Two were full-grown men, one a dwarf, two women servants. They exuded a joie de vivre lacking in our own servants.

They must have very careless masters in Mother Spain, I thought. Our gachupins would wipe those grins off their face in a hurry.

Beatriz Zamba joined me. She had named herself Zamba after her caste, not her parents. Since her father was a slave, she had no surname. Each day Beatriz strolled through Veracruz with bundled sugarcane packed on her back and cocuyo beetles hanging from her hat. Everywhere she went she sang out, "Sugar! Cocuyo! Sugar! Cocuyo!"

She peddled these vendibles in the streets.

The sugar was grown locally, and her lover-an africano sugarcane slave and father of her son-filched the cane she sold. In New Spain people l.u.s.ted after it. Half the people around me sucked on cane or its various confections. And as Beatriz pointed out shortly after I arrived in Veracruz, "Soon they are sucking it up with no teeth."

Tooth loss among its enthusiasts was endemic. No doubt the worms that burrow holes in teeth had come from sugarcane.

Cocuyos, on the other hand, are harmless and, due to one strange trait, even decorative. A small black beetle with luminously green spots, when a cocuyo is captured, its back reflexively cracks, and a small loop protrudes beneath its sh.e.l.l. Through this rigid ring, hair, a necklace or a bracelet cord can be threaded. The owner of a beetle often treats the living beetle as a pet, as well as an ornament, feeding it bits of sugarcane or tortilla.

Beatriz fed the cocuyo strung around her neck sugarcane.

"Sweets for the sweet," she said, smiling. Since Beatriz never indulged in sugarcane and still had all her teeth, her smile was resplendent.

Beatriz was a friend, and I called few people that-only she and the fray. Life on the streets was too hard for more than casual acquaintances. The friend you treasured today you found dead in a gutter tomorrow en route to the northern mines, which amounted to the same thing, or you found him picking your pocket and purloining your last tortilla.

But Beatriz was different. I once a.s.sisted Fray Antonio when he cured her baby of a soaring fever and a frightening a.s.sortment of peste blotches inflaming his face and body. When we brought the fever down and rid him of the dreaded bubos, she thought we had conjured miracles. She carried her child, Jacinto, on her hip this very day, and never forgot what we had done.

Her child's legal status was unclear. Nothing in the Spanish legal system was simple when it came to race. Spanish law acknowledged twenty-two racial categories, each governed by differing statutes, each category further subdivided into subcategories for predominately "white," "africano," and "indio" individuals.

A child with a Spanish father and an india mother was a mestizo.

A Spanish father and an africano mother yielded a mulatto.

Beatriz had an africano father and mulatta mother, and her category was zamba.

As people with mixed blood intermarried, it became increasingly difficult for the bureaucracy to categorize them. The strangest category was that of the child of a mulatto father and a zamba mother. The offspring of this union was called a zambo miserable. I do not know why the offspring should be called "miserable," but Jacinto's category was zambo miserable, because the law said he had "corrupted" blood.

Racial determinations could also be made when parentage or marriage records were in doubt. In that case a physical examination was conducted. Little attention was paid to skin color because many Spaniards were not light-skinned. More attention was given to hair shades and structure. Short, woolly hair indicated africano. Straight, coa.r.s.e locks or an inability to grow bodily hair meant indio. Mestizos were a problem because they bore traits of both Spaniards and indios, and one trait occasionally stood out over the other.

The reason for this system, the fray explained, was that our traits and abilities were ostensibly pa.s.sed along by blood. Pure Spanish blood inclined people to build ships, sail seas, and conquer empires. When the purity of the blood was diluted, these strengths were commensurably diluted; hence, Spain's strength was diluted.

"The obsession with pureza de sangre grew out of the centuries-long battle to force the Moors and Jews out of Spain, thereby unifying our kingdom," the fray once whispered to me while in his cups. "But what began as a holy crusade has ended in the rack, the gallows, and millions of graves. Our gachupin make the Ottomans look like cloistered nuns. It is all muy loco."

In the system of racial delineation, there were no categories for espanol women who wed indios, or africanas.

"Men who ruthlessly debauch our india, africana, and mixed-blood women," the fray said, "cannot conceive of Spanish women desiring men of differing blood. Hence, their offspring know no category. That child's life is purgatory on earth."

"So many people and so much happiness," Beatriz said, with a mocking smile.

"Maybe in the next world."

"You are such a fraud, Cristobal," Beatriz said. She was one of the few street people who called me by my given name. "Where else could you make a living, playing the crippled clown?"

"Everyone needs someone to look down to."

"But those tricks-twisting the body G.o.d gave you into obscene contortions-are they not a mockery of His gift?" Her sly grin glittered derision.

"If I, a poor lepero, offend G.o.d's pride, we're all in more trouble than I thought."

Beatriz threw her head back and laughed. "That is one of the many things I admire about you, Cristobal. You are utterly without virtue."

"I am practical."

I did not take offense, it was a game we played. She loved to tease and taunt me, then wait for my rejoinder. Everything I said she found funny.

But the old East Indian who had taught me the arcane arts of contortion did impugn my beliefs. Scrawny, gnarled, mango-bald, and with a scratchy voice of throat-sore gull, he'd been dubbed Gull by some long-forgotten wit, and the appellation stuck. Nor was Gull a partisan of the Christian faith. He believed in countless G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses, heavens untold, thousands of h.e.l.ls, often declaring that we suffered them all, returning to earth life after life, through afterworld after afterworld in infinite reincarnation-"like a dog unto its vomit," he once averred. He believed justice was nothing more than a Dark Diceman, casting lots for our souls, who spun our destiny on a Karmic Wheel, and that in the end all life was illusion-earth, death, life, karma, afterworld, even the Dark Diceman himself, even belief, everything, he'd said.

"The best way to survive so much chaos, falsehood, and pain is to conceal your True Self behind a mask," he used to say. "Oh, the mask might laugh and scream, rage and cry, but the face beneath the mask, your True Countenance, is impervious, impa.s.sive, heartless as void."

He also told me of Shiva, a G.o.d of creation and destruction. He had built and destroyed the world many times, would do it again, sooner than we thought, and yet paradoxically he was the most ardent of lovers-in the heavens, on earth, in all the h.e.l.l worlds there ever were for all of time. Women everywhere worshipped his every move, look, and touch. When one of his wives mistook a pyre for his own burning ground, she flung herself onto the flames. Gull sang to me Kali's hymn to love and death:

Because you love the fire

I have made a burning-ground of my heart

Where you, oh Dark One,

Might dance.

In his India, Kali became the feminine avatar of lovers everywhere. Overnight widows, mistresses, and concubines all over India threw themselves on their lover's pyres. Like Kali, women chose the burning ground over bereavement.

"Death equals love?" I asked, incredulous.