Part 5 (1/2)

”He can't make babies?”

”No babies, no pleasure for him or his woman. The potion will make his tepuli grow long and hard.”

Her gold-flecked eyes froze me to the bone; her dark power consumed me. I lay on my back on the sacrificial stone while she undid my rope belt. She pulled down my pants to expose my private parts. I felt no shame. While I had yet to lay with a girl, I had watched Don Francisco in the hut with my mother and knew that his garrancha grew as he suckled her b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

She gently stroked my pene. ”Your young juice will make him strong like a bull when he lies with his woman.”

Her hand was strong; her rhythm sure. A warm glow enveloped my extremities, and I smiled.

”You enjoy the touch of a woman on your man part. Now I must milk your juice like a calf sucking on its mother.”

She put her mouth on my garrancha. Her mouth was hot and wet, her tongue ingeniously energetic. My garrancha became more and more eager for the sucking, and I shoved it deeper into her mouth. I jerked up and down as a firestorm roared in me, trying to push it deeper and deeper down her throat. Suddenly I was pumping with a rhythm of my own as my juices exploded into her mouth.

When the rhythm stopped, she leaned over and spit the juice into the clay cup that had the other ingredients. She then put her mouth back on my organ, licking up juice that had gone down the side and putting it into the cup.

”Ayyo, boy-man, you have enough juice to fill the tipili of three women.”

EIGHT.

The next morning I was spit out of the mouth of a volcano.

”We are leaving the village,” Fray Antonio said. He awoke me in the hut I shared with my mother. His features were pale and drawn, his eyes red from a lack of sleep. He was nervous and anxious.

”Have you been wrestling devils all the night?” I asked.

”Yes, and I lost. Throw your things in a sack; we are leaving now. A cart is being loaded with my possessions.”

It took me a moment to comprehend that he did not just mean that we were going to a neighboring village.

”We are leaving the hacienda for good. Be ready in a few minutes.”

”What of my mother?”

He paused at the doorway to the hut and stared at me as if he were puzzled at my question. ”Your mother? You have no mother.”

PART THREE.

La Ciudad de los Muertos, the City of the Dead, is what the Spanish soon came to call Veracruz.

-Cristo the b.a.s.t.a.r.do

NINE.

For a while we were homeless, wandering from church to church as the fray sought food, roof, and sanctuary for us. Still short of twelve, I understood little of the misfortune that had been inflicted upon us other than the blisters on my feet from walking and the hollowness in my stomach when there was not enough food to fill it. From the conversations I overheard between the fray and his brethren in the church, an accusation had been made by Don Francisco that the fray had violated his faith and duties by impregnating an india maiden. Even at that age I was shocked to hear that the woman was Miaha, and I was said to be the child of that sin.

The fray was not my father, of that I was certain, although I loved him as a father. Once when the fray was besotted with wine, a not uncommon condition for him, he swore that my father was a muy grande gachupin, a very big wearer of spurs, but when the nectar of the G.o.ds has captured his mind, the fray was p.r.o.ne to say many things.

He told me that it was true that he had stuck his pene in Miaha, but that he had not fathered me. He further confounded the mystery of my birth in an enigma by saying that Miaha had not birthed me.