Clash of Star-Kings Read Free Page B

Moxtomí
ejido
, the communal tribal lands: no wonder the Moxtomí were so poor! Had the church done anything to prevent this? No. Small wonder, then, that these poor, good Indios were more than half pagan.
    Most of all, perhaps, the townspeople scorned the Moxtomí because of their dark Indian skins, unlightened by a single drop of Spanish blood.
    This was not the least of the reasons why Luis felt himself to be so close to these Indians and considered them his friends. Why — it was not a week ago that Don Eliseo, the unlicensed veterinarian, come to inject the cows of Luis’s father, had asked, “Is this your oldest son?” And Francisco Santangel had answered, grudgingly, hastily, “Yes…. But you can tell that he doesn’t take after
my
side of the family because he is so dark.” He always spoke like that of his son … his own son. And it was true that Luis was the darkest child of the family. He was the best behaved child at home, and the least favored. He was the brightest student at school, and the most neglected. Fathers and mothers did not favor him as a suitor for their daughters unless the daughters in question were themselves too dark or too poor or too old or ugly or of too ruinous a reputation to hope for a suitor of lighter complexion. Luis, nevertheless, had finished school and, moreover, had even taught himself English — and what might he hope for in the way of a career?
    He might hope for the crumbs of the table, the jobs left over after the fairer applicants had been placed — regardless of their other qualifications in comparison to Luis. This was the ineradicable stain in the Mexican garment, the fatal inheritance of the Conquistadores and their Conquest, and he hated it. He even hated “La Conquistadora,” the Virgin de los Remedios, because she had come over with Cortez’s men and remained the patroness of the Spaniards. Other “true” Mexicans, dark as or darker than Luis, even though they might be less acutely sensitive, would tend to favor the Virgin of Guadalupe, who had no European origins, who had appeared shortly after the Conquest to the humble Indian convert Juan Diego: others might. Not Luis. He didn’t speak of it, but in his heart, deeply, he hated the Roman Catholic Church as much as he hated the Spaniards and his family.
    For a while more he would still try to swim upstream and ignore the snubs. There was a faint possibility that he might be able, nonetheless, to make his way successfully in the modern world. And yet — still if he failed — what then? Would he be content to live as a failure in the world which had refused him success? No. No, never. Rather than that, he would defy them all and shame them forever. He would do what no one of Christian education and secular, modern training, of even partly Spanish blood, had ever done: leave this corrupt civilization behind forever. Burn his modern clothes. And put on the homespun and the blue-black serape of the Moxtomi, ask for a dark-skinned daughter of the pueblo and an allotment of the shrunken
ejido
land. Already he knew much of the Moxtomi language; he would perfect his knowledge; they would initiate him into the sacred secrets which the townsmen did not know and, indeed, scarcely knew existed. And he would dance the holy dances and perform the sacred ceremonies and sing the chants to the Great Old Ones….
    Only not yet.
    His heart had begun to beat faster at the prospect, as it had used to at the prospect of a woman before he had ever really had one. But the joy of making a woman part of himself was a transient joy and this other anticipated pleasure would be a permanent joy. And so he hesitated. For, with every delight there is a sorrow, and the delightsome life of the Moxtomi Indians had a very sorrowful side, indeed. Almost every bit of it had its roots in poverty and this poverty was due entirely to the loss of the greater part of the
ejido
lands. He told himself that he might not do it, after all…. But