XIII XIIIOUR PEOPLE HAVE a saying: that a man who goes he knows not where does not need to fear losing the road. My only aim was to get well away from the City of Mexíco before I turned northward into the unconquered lands. So, from Tlácopan, I took the roads that continued to lead me westward. In time, I found myself in Michihuácan, the homeland of the Purémpe people.
This nation was one of the few in The One World that had never been subsumed or put under tribute by the Mexíca. The chief reason for Michihuácan’s sturdy independence in those days was that the Purémpe artisans and armorers knew the secret of compounding a brown metal so hard and sharp that, in battle, the blades made of it easily prevailed over the brittle obsidian weapons of the Mexíca. After just a few tries at subduing Michihuácan, the Mexíca were satisfied to settle for a truce, and thereafter the two nations engaged freely in trade—or almost freely; the Purémpecha never did let any other people of The One World learn the secret of their marvelous metal. Of course, that metal is no longer a secret; the Spaniards recognized it on sight as what they call bronce. And those brown blades could not prevail against the white men’s even harder and sharper steel—nor their softer metal, the lead propelled by pólvora.
Nevertheless, even with inferior weaponry, the gallant Pur-émpecha fought more fiercely against the Spaniards than had any other nation thus invaded. As soon as those white men had conquered and secured what is now New Spain, one of the most cruel and rapacious of their captains, a man named Guzmán, led a force westward from the City of Mexíco—the same way I had just now come. His intent was to seize for himself as much land and as many subjects as his commander Cortés had acquired. Though the word Michihuácan means only “Land of the Fishermen,” Guzmán soon found—as the Mexíca had found before him—that it could as well have been called Land of Defiant Warriors.
It cost Guzmán several thousand of his soldiers to advance—and advance only creepingly—across the lush fields and rolling hills of that eye-pleasing countryside. Of the Purémpecha, many more thousands fell, but there were always some remaining to go on fighting, undeterred. To slash and blast and burn his way to Michihuácan’s northern border, where it abuts the land called Kuanéhuata, and to its western edge, which is the coast of the Western Sea, took Guzmán nearly fifteen years. (As I have mentioned, back when my mother, my uncle and I journeyed to the City of Mexíco, we often had to circle warily around parts of Michihuácan in which bloody battles were still being waged.) As a warrior myself, I must concede, considering what it had cost Guzmán in years and casualties, that he had fairly won the right to claim all that land and to give it a new name of his own choosing—New Galicia, honoring his home province back in Old Spain.
But he also did things inexcusable. He herded together the few Purémpe warriors he had taken prisoner alive and all the other Purémpe men and boys throughout New Galicia who might someday decide to turn warriors, and he shipped them off as slaves, over the Eastern Sea, to the island of Cuba and another island somewhere out there called Isla Espanola. Thus Guzmán could be sure that those men and boys, unable to speak the tongues of the islands’ native slaves and the imported Moro slaves, would be helpless to foment any further defiance against their Spanish masters.
So it was that, by the time I arrived in Michihuácan, the population consisted entirely of females young and old, aged males and barely adolescent boys. I being the first adult-but-not-elderly man seen thereabouts in recent memory, I was regarded as a curiosity, and a welcome one. During my travel westward across what had been the Mexíca lands, I had had to request food and shelter in the villages and farmsteads I had come upon. The menfolk of those places always agreeably accorded me that hospitality, but I had had to ask, Here in Michihuácan, I was positively besieged with offers of food, drink, a place to sleep and “stay as long as you like, stranger.” When I passed homesteads along the road, their womenfolk—because there were no menfolk—would actually run out from their doorways to tug at my mantle and invite me inside.
If I was a novelty to them, so were the Purémpecha a novelty to me—even though I had expected them to be the kind of people they were. That was because I had met a number of their elderly (hence surviving) men in the City of Mexíco—pochtéca merchants or messengers or mere vagabonds—at the Mesón de San José or in the marketplaces. The heads of those men were as bald as huaxolómi eggs, and, they told me, so was the head of every man, woman and child in Michihuácan, because the Purémpecha regarded sleek, shiny baldness as the crowning touch of human beauty. Still, my having seen those men with their heads shaved clean of everything but eyelashes had not made much impression on me; after all, they were old enough to be bald in any case. It was quite different when I got to Michihuácan, to see every single soul—from infants to children to grown women and grandmothers—as hairless as the old men among them.
Most of The One World’s people, including myself, took pride in our hair and wore it long. We men let it grow to shoulder length, with a heavy fringe across our foreheads; women’s hair might reach to their waists or below. But the Spaniards, deeming their beards and mustaches the only true symbols of virility, thought our men looked effeminate and our women slatternly. They even coined a word, balcarrota (roughly “a haystack”), with which to speak of our hairstyle, and spoke it disparagingly. They also—since they were continually accusing us of petty pilferage from their belongings—assumed that we hid such stolen items under all that hair. So Guzmán and the other Spanish lords of New Galicia doubtless highly approved of the Purémpe custom of total baldness.
However, there were in Michihuácan other customs of which I am certain the Spaniards, being Christians, could not have approved. That is because Christians are disquieted even by any mention of sexual acts, and are veritably horrified by any out-of-the-ordinary sexual behavior—far more so than they are repelled by, say, human sacrifices to “pagan gods.” Those Purémpe men in the city, when I was learning what I could of their Poré language, had taught me many Poré words and phrases relating to sexual matters. Those men, I repeat, were old, long past any capacity for coupling or the least cravings of that sort. Nevertheless, they lustfully smacked their gums as they recounted the various and remarkable, even unseemly and scandalous ways in which they had slaked the sexual appetites of their youth—and had been allowed by local custom to do so.
I say “unseemly and scandalous” not because I myself have ever been any paragon of chastity or modesty. But my Aztéca people, and the Mexíca, and most others, always had been almost as prudish as Christians in regard to sex. We had no written laws and regulations and shall-nots, as the Christians do, but tradition taught us that certain things simply were not to be done. Adultery, incest, promiscuous fornication (except during certain fertility ceremonies), the conceiving of bastards, rape (except by warriors in enemy territories), the seduction of the underaged, the act of cuilónyotl between males and patlachuia between females, all those were forbidden. While we, unlike the Christians, acknowledged that any person might be of a deviant or even depraved nature, and that any normal person might misbehave when overwhelmed by lust, we did not sanction such doings. If anything of that sort was discovered, the perpetrator (or participants) would at the very least be shunned by all decent people forever after, or be banished into exile, or be severely punished, or even be put to death with the “flower garland” noose.
But, as those aged Purémpe men in the city had so gleefully and bawdily forewarned me, the customs of Michihuácan could not have been more different. Or more lenient. Among the Purémpecha, not any imaginable kind of sexual congress was prohibited, so long as both (or all) the participants concurred in the act—or at least did not vociferously complain of the act, as in the case of animals employed by men and women who had a taste for that sort of coupling. In former days, said the old men, only the native doe and buck deer had satisfactorily met those people’s two requirements: namely, that the creature be catchable and that it have a usable feminine orifice or masculine protuberance. Indeed, they said, copulation with a buck or a doe was regarded by everyone, especially the priests, as a praiseworthy act of religious devotion, because the Purémpecha believe that deer are earthly manifestations of the sun god. Since the coming of the Spaniards, however, said the old men, more than a few Purémpe females and the surviving adolescent males had found reason to be glad for the white men’s introduction of embraceable jack and jenny asses, rams and ewes, billy and nanny goats.
Well, I had no predilections of that sort, and, if any of the many females I encountered in Michihuácan had previously been entertaining themselves with bestial surrogates for their vanished menfolk, they were happy enough to discard the animals when I came along. There being such an abundance of women and girls eager for my attentions, everywhere I wandered in that land, I could take my pick of the comeliest, and I did. At first, I admit, it was a trifle hard for me to get accustomed to bald women. It was even hard sometimes to tell the younger among them from the younger males, because both sexes of the Purémpecha dress almost exactly alike. But I gradually developed an almost Purémpe admiration for their baldness, as, over time, I learned to perceive that the facial beauty of some women is actually enhanced by being otherwise unadorned. And in their having shed their tresses, they had by no means diminished any of their feminine fervors and amative abilities.
Only once did I make a misjudgment in that respect, and I blame that occurrence on chépari, the beverage that the Purémpecha make from the honey of their land’s wild black bees, a drink incalculably more inebriating than even Spanish wines. I had stopped for a night at a travelers’ inn, where the only other guests were an elderly pochtécatl and a messenger almost as old. The inn’s owner was a bald woman, and her three bald helpers were apparently her daughters. Over the course of the evening I partook indiscreetly of the inn’s delicious chépari. I got sufficiently sodden that I had to be helped to my cubicle and undressed and deposited on my pallet by the smallest and most beautiful of the servants, who then, unbidden, lavished on my tepúli that wonderfully ardent ingurgitation I had first experienced with my birthday auyaními in Aztlan and later, many times, with my cousin Améyatl and other women. No man is ever too drunk to enjoy that experience to the utmost.
So, afterward, I bade the servant undress and let me gratefully reciprocate with the same attention to her xacapíli. Muddled as I was, I had it well within my mouth before I realized it was rather too prominent to be a xacapíli. It got spit out of my mouth, not in revulsion, but because I gave such a sudden laugh at my own befuddled mistake. The beautiful boy looked hurt, and backed away, and his tepúli instantly wilted very nearly to xacapíli stubbiness—which sight inspired in me some drunken ideas of experimentation, so I beckoned him to me again. When he finally departed, I gave him a drunkenly extravagant maravedí coin by way of thanks, then fell drunkenly asleep, to wake the next day with an earthquake of a headache and only the dimmest recollection of what experiments the boy and I had engaged in.
Considering Michihuácan’s abundance of available womanhood and girlhood—not to mention boys and domestic animals, should I ever get so very drunk as to essay further experimentation—and the land’s bounty of other good things, I could have supposed myself prematurely transported to Tonatíucan or one of the other afterworlds of eternal joyfulness. Besides its limitless sexual license and opportunity, Michihuácan offered also a voluptuous variety of food and drink: the delicate lake and river fish that can be found nowhere else, eggs and stews of the turtles that abound on its seacoast, clay-baked quail and toasted hummingbirds, vanilla-flavored chocólatl and of course the incomparable chápari. In that land, one could even feast with only one’s eyes: on the profusely flowered rolling meadows, the sparkling streams and limpid lakes, the richly fruiting orchards and farm fields, all bordered by the blue-green mountains. Yes, a man young, healthy and vigorous might well be tempted to stay in Michihuácan forever. And so I might have done, had I not dedicated myself to a mission.
“Ayya, I will never recruit any warlike men here,” I said. “I must move on.”
“What about warlike women?” asked my consort of the moment, a radiantly lovely young woman, whose feather-fan eyelashes seemed even more luxuriant in contrast to her otherwise hairless and glowing visage. Her name was Pakapeti, which means “Tiptoe.” When I only looked blankly at her, she added, “The Spaniards committed an oversight when they killed or abducted only our menfolk. They ignored the capabilities of us women.”
I snorted in amusement. “Women? Warriors? Nonsense.”
“It is you who speak nonsense,” she snapped. “You might as well claim that a man can ride a horse faster than a woman can. I have seen both Spanish men and women on horseback. As to which can ride the faster, much depends on the horse.”
“I have no men or horses,” I said ruefully.
“You have that,” said Tiptoe, indicating my arcabuz. I had been practicing with it all afternoon, trying with only middling success to knock individual ahuácatin fruits off a tree near her hut. “A woman could use it as expertly as you do,” she said, trying hard not to sound sarcastic. “Make or steal more of those thunder-sticks and…”
“That is my intention. As soon as I have enough of an army to warrant the need of them.”
“I would not have to travel very far hereabout,” she said, “to recruit for you a considerable number of strong and willing and vengefiil women. Except for those whom the Spaniards took for household slaves—or bed-warmers—the rest of us would not even be missed, if we disappeared from our customary abodes.”
I knew what she meant. On my way westward, thus far, I had carefully stayed clear of the many Spanish estancias, all of which, naturally, encompassed Michihóacan’s prime growing and grazing lands. There being no more Purémpe men, and the Purémpe women having been judged suitable only for indoor services, the outdoor work of the farms and ranches and orchards was done by imported male slaves. From a distance, I had seen the black Moros laboring, overseen by Spaniards on horseback, each usually with whip in hand. The new masters of Michihuácan had planted the fields mostly with marketable crops—the alien wheat and sweet cane and a greenery called alfalfa, and the trees that grow alien fruits called manzanas, naranjas, limónes and aceitunas. Less tillable fields were thick with herds of sheep or cows or horses, and there were pens full of pigs, chickens and gallipavos. Even places so swampy they had never been tilled before were planted with a foreign water-growing grain called arroz. Since the Spaniards managed to wrest harvests and profits from almost every piece of Michihuácan, the plots left to the surviving Purémpecha were few and small and only grudgingly productive.
Pakápeti said, “You have spoken of eating well in this land, Tenamáxtli. Let me tell you why that is. What patches we have of maize and tomatoes and chilis are tended by our old men and women. The children gather fruits, nuts, berries, the wild honey for making sweets and chapari. It is we women who bring in the meat Wild fowl, small game, fish, even the occasional boar and cuguar.”
She paused, then added wryly, “We do not do that with thunder-sticks. We use the ancient means of fowling nets and fishing lines and obsidian hunting weapons. Also, we women continue the ancient Purémpe crafts of making lacquerware and glazed pottery. Those objects we barter for other foods from the seacoast tribes, and for pigs or chickens or lambs or kids from the Spaniards. We live, even without menfolk, and we live not badly, but we live only by the sufferance of those white masters. That is why I say we would not be missed if we marched off to war.”
“At least you live,” I said. “You would assuredly not live so well if you went to war. If you lived at all.”
“Other women have fought the Spaniards, you know. The Mexíca women, during the final battles in the streets of Tenochtítlan, stood on the rooftops and threw down on the invaders stones and nests full of wasps and even lumps of their own excrement.”
“Much good it did them. I knew an even braver Mexícatl woman in more recent times. She actually slew a number of the white men, and much good it did her. She lost her own life in consequence.”
Tiptoe said urgently, “We, too, would gladly give our lives if we could take some of theirs.” She leaned close, those extraordinary eyelashes wide, fixing me with eyes as dark and lovely as the lashes. “Only try us, Tenamáxtli. It would be the last thing the Spaniards would ever expect. An uprising of women!”
“And the last thing I should ever hope to be involved in,” I said with a laugh. “Me—at the head of an army of females. Why, every dead warrior in Tonatíucan would be convulsed, either with hilarity or with horror. The idea is ludicrous, my dear. I must seek men.”
“Go then,” she said, sitting back and looking extremely vexed “Go and get your men. There still are some in Michihuacan.” She waved an arm vaguely northward.
“Still some men here?” I said, surprised. “Purémpe men? Warriors? Are they in hiding? In ambuscade?”
“No. They are in swaddling,” she said contemptuously. “Not warriors and not Purémpecha. They are Mexíca, imported here to settle new colonies around the lake Pétzcuaro. But I fear you will find those men much less stalwart and much more meek than myself and the women I could gather for you.”
“I grant, Tiptoe, that you are anything but meek. Your name-giver must have badly misread his tonélmatl book of names. Tell me about those Mexíca. Imported by whom? For what purpose?”
“I know only what I have heard. Some Spanish Christian priest has founded colonies all around that Lake of Rushes, for some peculiar purpose of his own. And there being no Purémpe men still in existence, he had to bring men—and their families—from the Mexíca lands. I hear also that the priest coddles all those settlers as tenderly as if they were his children. His babes in swaddling, just as I said.”
“Family men,” I muttered. “You are probably right about their not being very much disposed to rebellion. Especially if they are being so well treated by their overlord. But if that is so, he sounds little like a Christian.”
Pakápeti shrugged, and that made my heart smile, for she happened to be naked at the time, and her darling breasts bounced with the movement. Not at all heart-smilingly, but frostily, she said, “Go and see. The lake is only three one-long-runs from here.”
* * *
The Lake of Rushes is the exact color of the chalchíhuitl, the jadestone, the gem that is held sacred by every people of The One World. And the low, rounded mountains enclosing Pátzcuaro are a darker shade of that same blue-green color. So, as I crested one of the mountains and looked down, the lake appeared to be a bright jewel that had been dropped upon a bed of moss. There is an island in the lake, Xarókuaro, that must once have been the brightest facet of that gem, for I am told that it was covered with temples and altars that glowed and coruscated with colored paints and gold leaf and feather banners. But Guzmán’s soldiers had razed all those edifices and scoured the island down to the barrenness that it still is.
Gone, too, were all the original communities that had ringed the lake, including Tzintzuntzaní, “Where There Are Hummingbirds.” That had been the capital city of Michihuécan, a city composed entirely of palaces, one of them the seat of Tzimtzicha, last Revered Speaker of the vanquished Purémpecha. From my mountaintop, I could see only one thing remaining from olden days. That was the pyramid, east of the lake, notable for its size and form, not tall but lengthy, combining both round and square shapes. And that iyékata, as a pyramid is called in Poré, I knew was a survivor from a really olden time, erected by a people who lived here long before the Purémpecha. Even in Tzímtzicha’s day, it had been ruinously crumbled and overgrown, but it was still an awesome sight to see.
There were again villages scattered around the lake’s rim, replacing those that had been leveled by Guzmán’s men, but these were in no way distinctive, all their houses having been built in the Spanish style, low and flat, of that dried adobe brick. In the nearest village, directly below the height where I stood, I could see people moving about. All were clad in Mexíca fashion and were of my own skin color; I saw no Spaniards anywhere among them. So I descended thither, and greeted the first man I came upon. He was seated on a bench before the doorway of his house, painstakingly whittling and shaping a piece of wood.
I spoke the customary Náhuatl salute, “Mixpantzinco,” meaning “In your august presence …”
And he replied, not in Poré, but also in Náhuatl, with the customary polite “Ximopanólti,” meaning “At your convenience …” then added, cordially enough, “We do not have many of our fellow Mexíca coming to visit Utopía.”
I did not want to confuse him by saying that I was actually an Aztécatl, nor did I ask the meaning of that strange word he had just spoken. I said only, “I am a stranger in these parts, and I only recently learned that there were Mexíca in this vicinity. It is good to hear my native tongue spoken again. My name is Tenamáxtli.”
“Mixpantzinco, Cuatl Tenamáxtli,” he said courteously. “I am called Erasmo Martir.”
“Ah, after that Christian saint. I too have a Christian name. Juan Británico.”
“If you are a Christian, and if you are looking for employment, our good Padre Vasco may make room for you here. Have you a wife and children somewhere?”
“No, Cuatl Erasmo. I am a solitary wayfarer.”
“Too bad.” He shook his head sympathetically. “Padre Vasco accepts only settlers with families. However, if you care to stay for a time, he will most hospitably afford you guest lodging. You will find him in Santa Cruz Patzcuaro, the next village west along the lake.”
“I will go there, then, and not keep you from your work.”
“Ayyo, you are no hindrance. The padre does not make us labor unceasingly, like slaves, and it is pleasant to converse with a newcome Mexícatl.”
“What is it that you are making, anyway?”
“This will be a mecahuéhuetl,” he said, indicating some nearly finished parts behind the bench. They were pieces of wood about the size and gracefully curvaceous shape of a woman’s torso.
I nodded, recognizing what the parts would be when assembled. “What the Spaniards call a guitarra.”
Of the musical instruments that the Spanish introduced to New Spain, most were at least basically similar to those already known in our One World. That is to say, they made music by being blown through or shaken or struck with sticks or rasped with a notched rod. But the Spaniards had also brought instruments totally different from ours, such as this guitarra and the vihuela, the arpa, the mandolina. All of our people were much amazed—and admiring—that such instruments could make sweet music from mere strings, tightly strung, being plucked with the fingers or rasped with an arco.
“But why,” I asked Erasmo, “are you copying a foreign novelty? Surely the white men have their own guitarra makers.”
“Not so expert as we are,” he said proudly. “The padre and his assistants taught us how to make these, and now he says we make these mecahuéhuetin superior even to those brought from Old Spain.”
“We?” I echoed. “You are not the only maker of guitarras?”
“No, indeed. Every man here in San Marcos Churítzio concentrates on this one craft. It is the particular enterprise assigned to this village, as other villages of Utopía each produce lacquerwork or copperware or whatever.”
“Why?” was all I could think to say, for I had never before known of any community devoted to doing just one thing and nothing else.
“Go and talk to Padre Vasco,” said Erasmo. “He will be happy to tell you all about his engendering of our Utopía.”
“I will do that. Thank you, Cuatl Erasmo, and mixpantzínco.”
Instead of saying “ximopanólti” in farewell, he said, “Vaya con Dios,” and added cheerfully, “Come again, Cuatl Juan. Someday I intend to learn to play music from one of these things.”
I trudged on westward, but halted in an uninhabited area and went among some bushes to change from my mantle and loincloth into the shirt and trousers and boots I carried in my pack. So I was Spanishly attired when I arrived at Santa Cruz Pétzcuaro. On inquiry, I was directed to the small adobe church and its attached casa de cura. The padre himself answered the door there; he was in no wise so aloof and inaccessible as most Christian priests are. Also, he was dressed in sturdy, heavy, work-stained shirt and breeches, not a black gown.
I made bold to introduce myself, in Spanish, as Juan Británico, lay assistant to Fray Alonso de Molina, notarius of Bishop Zumárraga’s Cathedral and said I was presently engaged, at my master Alonso’s behest, in visiting Church missions in these hinterlands, to evaluate and report on their progress.
“Ah, I think you will give good report of ours, my son,” said the padre. “And I am pleased to hear that Alonso is still toiling so assiduously in the vineyards of Mother Church. I remember the lad most fondly.”
So I and my prevarication were instantly accepted, without question, by the good priest. And good I found him truly to be. Padre Vasco de Quiroga was a tail, thin, austere-looking but really merry-humored man. He was old enough to be bald enough that he required no tonsure, but he was still vigorous, as was attested by his work clothes, for which he humbly apologized.
“I should be properly cassocked to welcome an emissary of the bishop, but I am today helping my friars build a pigsty behind this house.”
“Do not let me interrupt—”
“No, no, no. Por cielo, I am glad to take a respite. Sit down, son Juan. I can see that you are dusty from the road.” He called to someone in some other room to bring us wine. “Sit, sit, my boy. And tell me. Have you yet seen much of what the Lord has helped us to accomplish hereabouts?”
“Only a little. I talked for a while to an Erasmo Martir.”
“Ah, yes. Of all our skillful guitarra makers, perhaps the most skillful. And a devout Christian convert. Then tell me also, Juan Británico. Since you are named for an English saint, are you perhaps acquainted with the late saintly Don Tomas Moro, also of England?”
“No, padre. But—excuse me—I was given to understand that the men of England are white men.”
“So they are. Moro was this man’s name, not his race or color. He was but lately and unjustly and vilely slain—his Christian piety his only crime—executed by the king of that England, who is an odious and despicable heretic. Anyway, if you do not know of Don Tomás, I suppose you do not know of his far-famed book, De optimo Reipublicae statu…”
“No, padre.”
“Or of the Utopía he prefigured in that book?”
“No, padre, except that I heard the artisan Erasmo speak the word.”
“Well, Utopía is what we are trying to create here, around the shores of this paradisal lake. I only wish I could have undertaken it years ago. But I have not been that long a priest.”
A young friar came in, bringing two exquisitely carved and lacquered wooden cups, clearly Purémpe products. He handed one to each of us and silently withdrew, and I drank gratefully of the cool wine.
“For most of my life,” the padre went on, sounding contrite, “I was a judge, a man of the legal profession. And any practice of the law—let me tell you, young Juan—is a venal and corrupt and loathly occupation. At last, thanks be to God, I realized how I was so foully defiling myself and my soul. That is when I tore off my judicial robe, took holy orders and eventually was ordained to wear the cassock instead.” He paused and laughed. “Of course, many of my former adversaries in the courts have gleefully quoted to me the old proverb: Hartóse el gato de carne, y luego se hizo fraile.”
It took me a moment to translate that in my head: “The cat got a gutful of meat before it turned friar.”
He went on, “The Utopía envisioned by Tomás Moro was to be an ideal community whose inhabitants would exist under perfect conditions. Where the evils bred by society—poverty, hunger, misery, crime, sin, war—would all have been done away with.”
I forbore from commenting that there would be some people, even in an ideal community, who might wish to retain the right to enjoy sinning or waging war.
“So I have repopulated this pleasant piece of New Galicia with colonist families. Besides instructing them in the tenets of Christianity, I and my friars show them how to use European tools and how to employ the most modern methods of agriculture and husbandry. Beyond that, we strive not to direct or meddle in the colonists’ lives. True, it was our Brother Agustín who taught them how to make guitarras. But we found elderly Purémpe men who could be persuaded to lay aside old rivalries and teach the colonists the age-old Purémpe handicrafts. Now each village devotes itself to perfecting one of those arts—woodwork, ceramics, weaving and so on—in the finest tradition of the Purémpecha. Any colonists incapable of learning such artisanry make their contribution to Utopía by farming or fishing or raising pigs, goats, chickens and such.”
“But, Padre Vasco,” I said. “What use have your settlers for such things as guitarras? That Erasmo to whom I spoke, he did not even know how to play music on it.”
“Why, those are sold to merchants in the City of Mexíco, my son. The guitarras and the other crafted objects. Many of them are bought by brokers who, in turn, export them all the way back to Europe. We get handsome prices for them, too. The bulk of our farmers’ and herders’ produce also is sold. Of the money received, I pay a portion to the village families, equally divided among them. But most of our income is spent on new tools, seeds, breeding stock—whatever will improve and benefit Utopía as a whole.”
“It all sounds most practical and laudable, padre,” I said, and sincerely meant it. “Especially since, as Erasmo said, you do not make your people drudge like slaves.”
“¡Válgame Dios, no¡” he exclaimed. “I have seen the infernal obrajes in the city and elsewhere. Our colonists may be of an inferior race, but they are human beings. And now they are Christians, so they are not brute animals without souls. No, my son. The rule here in Utopía is that the people work communally for just six hours a day, six days a week. Sundays, of course, are for devotions. All the rest of the people’s time is theirs to spend as they like. Tending their own home gardens, private doings, socializing with their fellows. Were I a hypocrite, I could say that I am simply being Christian in being no tyrannical master. But the truth is that our people work harder and more productively than any whip-driven slaves or obraje laborers.”
I said, “Another thing Erasmo told me is that you allow only men and women already married to settle in this Utopía. Would you not get even more work out of single men and women, unburdened with children?”
He looked slightly uncomfortable. “Well, now, you have broached a rather indelicate subject. We do not presume to have re-created Eden here, but we do have to contend with both Eve and the serpent. Or with Eve as the serpent, I might better say.”
“Ayya, forgive my having asked, padre. You must mean the Purémpe women.”
“Exactly so. Bereft of their own menfolk, and learning that there were young, strong men here in Utopía, they have frequently descended on us to—how shall I say?—entice our men into performing at stud. They were absolutely pestiferous when we first settled here, and still to this day we get the occasional female visiting and importuning. I fear our family men are not all—or always—able to resist the temptation, but I am sure that unmarried ones would be much more easily seduced. And such debaucheries could lead to the ruin of Utopía.”
I said approvingly, “It appears to me, Padre Vasco, that you have everything well thought out and well in hand. I shall be pleased to report that to the bishop’s notarius.”
“But not solely on my unsupported word, son Juan. Go all the way around the lake. Visit every village. You will need no guide. Anyway, I would not want you to suspect that you were being shown only the exemplary aspects of our community. Go alone. See things plain and unvarnished. When you return here, I shall be gratified if then you can say, as San Diego once said, that by works a man is justified, and not by faith only.”