Текст книги "Aztec Blood"

Автор книги: Gary Jennings

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The fray, of course, claims I bring this hell of woe on myself by continually speaking out. He blames himself for my loose tongue, and there is some truth in that. He introduced me to the works of that indefatigable skeptic, Socrates. He challenged everythingand passed this loathsome habit onto me like a disease.

Fortunately this lamp of truth seldom illuminates my own unrighteous life. One cannot tread the lépero path with truth as a guiding light; some truths no one can bear.

I dusted myself off and went back to the fair with less enthusiasm than I had had before.

TWENTY-FIVE

Then I met the Healer.

The first time I saw him he stood on the remains of an ancient Aztec monument, one of many scattered around the area. The stone slab elevated him several feet above the assembled onlookers, allowing him to perform his magic and work the crowds.

He was not old. He transcended such mundane concepts. He was ancient of days, a being of eons and millennia, not weeks or years.

I did not know what time or place or people spawned him, but to me he was everythingAztec or, more properly, Mexica, since the word Aztec was more Spanish than indio. One could not tell by his speech. Like a jungle parrot, he addressed questioners in their own tongue. I soon suspected he could speak the speech of birds and snakes, of rocks and trees, of mountains and stars.

The soothsayer I had encountered, the peruser of bones, was, in contrast, a charlatan. The Healer abjured conjury. Written in the wrinkles of that old man's face and in the shadows of his veiled eyes were the secrets of the grave.

To me he was a god, not Greek or Roman replete with schemes and intrigues, but a darker deity, gentle in his wisdom but murderous in his scorn.

His cloak—reaching from his shoulders to his ankles—was fashioned of flamboyant feathers, all the colors of a glittering rainbow. His snakeskin belt was festooned with turquoise. The rope laces of his leather sandals coiled up his calves to his knees. He looked as I imagined Montezuma had, only more ageless and wise and weary and venerable.

He was "treating" a woman who was suffering from headaches. A mangy yellow dog, looking more coyote than hound, sprawled nearby on a frayed red blanket. The dog's head rested on crossed paws, his skeptical eyes taking in every movement, large or small, as if checking for enemies. I would soon learn much more about that strange animal and his even stranger companion.

The woman told the Healer that evil spirits had penetrated her brain and were screaming for her soul. In earlier times indio priests would have treated her with healing herbs, and even Fray Antonio acknowledged the power of some of these sacred remedies. The botanical garden of the Emperor Montezuma, he told me, had over two thousand different medicinal herbs. Much of this knowledge was lost to the world because the priests following the conquest incinerated its library of picture-writing scrolls collected by the Aztec doctors.

"They feared what they did not understand and burned what they feared," the fray once lamented.

Of course, failing herbal remedies, the ancient priests would have drilled into her skull and summoned the demon to leave.

The Healer was, of course, a tititl,a native doctor skilled in the use of herbs and chants; but unlike the Spanish herbalists called curanderos,a tititlused herbs, potions, andchants and magic ceremonies to heal. But that was the smallest part of the Healer's medical art. He had his own methods. At the moment he was whispering secret incantations into the woman's ears, designed to draw out her evil spirits.

While I know that the course of an illness, anymore than a life, is not determined by dice throws, we are from time to time engaged by demons. I have never confessed this to the fray, but I have seen people discourse with the devil; and it is an article of indio truth that fiends can spirit themselves into the brain through ears, nose, eyes, and mouth.

As I watched the old medicine man mouthing his sacred incantations, his lips brushed her ears. Suddenly, his eyes bulging, hand at his mouth, he jerked back. A writhing snake, which he'd sucked from her ear, thrashed in his teeth. The woman screamed, convulsing in his arms.

"Ahhhh!!!" rose from the crowd.

I dismissed it as legerdemain. The Healer had slipped a snake up his sleeve, then secreted it in his mouth. How could I think otherwise? I was by training and predilection a truth-teller. I'd studied Socrates; his disciple, Plato; and in my heart of hearts, I detested the mendacity surrounding me at every turn. I worshipped at Truth's Altar. Part of me wanted to roar with skepticism and expose him as a fraud. He was an indio puro, without power or protection. Yet I remained silent. Why, I do not know.

Then, as if reading my mind, his eyes picked me out amid all those faces in the crowd.

"Come here, boy."

Everyone stared at me– even the yellow dog.

The next thing I knew, I was standing on the rock slab beside him.

"You do not believe I drew the snake from her head?"

I could have said nothing. Given the plethora of enemies I was rapidly accumulating, I didn't need anymore. Dissimulation was undoubtedly the better part of valor. Somehow I couldn't lie.

"You hid the snake in your mouth or hand," I said evenly. "It was a trick."

The Healer's hold over the crowd snapped, and they began to hiss.

Still he was not chagrined. "I see indio blood in your veins," the old sage said, shaking his head sadly, "but you favor your Spanish ancestry."

"I favor knowledge over ignorance," I said.

"The question is," the old man said smiling, "how much knowledge can a boy bear?"

Chanting quietly in Náhuatl, his hands passed over my eyes. Swaying, my face flushed fevishly, and my eyes teared. Breath whooshed out of me, and all my skepticism died.

I was especially taken by his eyes. Black, bottomless wells filled with world weariness and tacit understanding, they gripped me like a vise. Helpless in their gaze, they wrung everything from me, knew everything about me, my people, my past, my blood—before the conquistadors, before the Aztecs, before the Mayans, time immemorial, time out of mind.

Reaching for my crotch—as if he was about to grab my garrancha—he drew a long, black snake out of my pants, writhing and hissing and spitting. The crowd erupted into laughter.

TWENTY-SIX

After the crowd dispersed, I sat with him. Still dizzy from his magic spell, I now felt humbled. Handing me a piece of locust cake, a bit of maize, and a gourd of mango juice, he said gently, "Never forswear your indio blood," he told me. "The Spanish think they subjugate our flesh with whips and swords, with guns and priests, but there is another, separate world beneath our feet, above our heads, and dwelling in our souls. In this blessed realm, the sword slays not, and the spirit holds sway. Before the Spaniards, before the indio trod the earth, before the earth itself was blasted and forged out of the void, these sacred shades wrapped us round, nourished our souls, and gave us form. Forever they cry to us, 'Respect! Respect!' Forsake your blood, grovel before the Spaniard's inane gods, spurn the specters of our hallowed pale, you do so at your peril. Their memories are long."

He gave me a black stone—two fingers wide, one long and iron hard. One side glistened, a gleaming ebony mirror. Its interior glinted eerily, and I could feel myself falling into its lightless depths, as if its center were not mere rock but the pit itself—an infinite abyss, eternal as time, its heart the heart of an ancient star.

"Our indio ancestors traversed the stars," he said, "werethe stars and carried in their hearts star-stones that foreordained our fate– allfate. Look into the smoking mirror, boy."

I was no longer of this earth but staring into a world before light and time. My hand trembled at its touch.

"It is yours," he said.

He had given me a piece of a star.

I dropped to my knees... overwhelmed.

"It is your tonal,your destiny, to have it."

"I am not worthy."

"Really? You have not asked what you must give in exchange."

"All I have are two reales."

His palm passed over mine without touching it, and the money vanished as if it had never been.

"The gift is immaterial. In the heart the blessing dwells, and your heart harbors the gods."

TWENTY-SEVEN

I found Fray Antonio under the tree where we had set up camp. I told him of my experience with the Healer, including the snake concealed in my loins. He was singularly unimpressed.

"Describe to me what happened—every detail."

I told him of the Healer's incantation, his hand sweeping by my face, my feeling of being both elated and dizzy—

"Ha! Your head went around in circles, you almost lost your balance, your eyes watered, your nose itched, you felt wonderful."

"Sí! From his incantation!"

"It was yoyotli, a powder that Aztec priests used to subdue sacrificial victims. Cortes first learned of it during the battle for Tenochtitlan, when he saw his indio allies, who had been captured by the Aztecs, singing and dancing on their way up temple steps where priests would rip out their hearts. Earlier the prisoners had been given a drink called obsidian knife water, a concoction made from cocoa, the blood of sacrifice victims, and a debilitating drug. Before they mounted the steps to the top, yoyotli dust was thrown in their face. Yoyotli makes one have visions. It is said that the warriors to be sacrificed not only went willingly but thought they were in the arms of the gods."

He explained that it was a trick known by enchanters. "Your 'Healer' had a little of it in his pocket. When he chants his incantations, he sweeps his hand in front of you so the dust flies in your face."

"No, I saw nothing."

"Of course. Only a tiny bit of dust is necessary. You were not going to be sacrificed. He just needed to stun you a little, weaken your mind, so you believed everything he told you."

"But he gave me the heart of a star!"

"Chico, Chico," the fray tapped his temple, "what have I taught you? Do you really think he steals stars from the sky? Or that he flew down to earth with Andromeda in his hand?"

I examined the black stone with the polished side.

"It is a shadow mirror," the fray said, "obsidian from a volcano, burnished until it blazes with a deep gloss. The indio magicians tell fools it foretells their tonal, their fate. If one breaks, they peddle the pieces to other idiots, saying they sell them the hearts of stars. You could buy mountains of them for a reale—or gather them by the wagonful on volcanic slopes. What did you offer the fraud for it?"

"Nothing," I lied.

The Healer was not at the stone slab, nor the spot where he robbed me of my dinero. I went looking where indios camped, ready to threaten him if he didn't return my money. I had never been so angry. Or embarrassed. Did this indio faker think he was a picaro? That was supposed to be my job.

Ay! I could not find the scoundrel. He was gone. With my two reales. My wounded pride would mend, but the money, the money was more sacred to me than the papal throne.

TWENTY-EIGHT

An hour before sunset, I went to watch the play.

The play was put on in a tree-enclosed clearing with blankets hung to conceal the players from illicit onlookers. The sloped terrain allowed the players to occupy the high ground.

I didn't have a silver reale, the price of admission, but I found an affordable vantage point. Climbing a nearby tree, high above the blankets, I had my own private balcony, gratis. The dwarf taking admission at the entrance naturally shot me irate glances, but I was picaro-born and ignored him. After all several priests took up positions outside the blanket wall, folded the blanket drapes over their ropes and robbed the troupe of the admission fee as ruthlessly as I. And naturally no one challenged them.

Before the play began, the two attractive picaras hustled the mostly male audience, purveying sweetmeats. Flirtation went with the vending. Spanish men outnumbered Spanish females twenty to one in New Spain; and these Spanish women, though picaras, spellbound these hombres. I sometimes wondered if these Spaniards were as entranced with their women at home.

The dwarf ascended the grassy "stage."

"Poland, an ancient kingdom by the sea, lies northeast of our sunny Spain. The Alamanians, Danes, and Ruskies abut this arctic realm.

"Before our story begins, a prince is born to the king of Poland. His beloved queen dies in childbirth. Soothsayers at the court foretell of hellish wars enshrouding the king's enthronement; bloodtime, swordtime, destruction engulfing all until the king himself lies prostrate at the prince's feet.

"What was the king to do?" the dwarf asked the audience, his voice a stage whisper. "Should he have the babe killed? His blood-son of his beloved bride?"

The dwarf paused to quaff a goblet of wine. I already knew from Mateo's recital of "El Cid" that acting was a thirsty business.

"The king, knowing the prince would reduce his kingdom to ruin, erected a soaring, impregnable, windowless tower."

The dwarf's voice became darkly sinister. "In the bowels of this bleak and lightless bastion, the boy was raised in chains, swathed in animal skins. Only one mortal attended the boy, an aged sage who schooled him in arts and letters and in the ways of beasts and birds, but instructing him naught in the wiles and guiles of men."

"Some education," an audience wit groaned.

"Some play," another grumbled.

"Where's the marauding pirate?" another critic complained. "Where's the dauntless hero?"

"Mateo Rosas, whose name most of you know from the great theaters of Seville and Madrid, has personally selected Pedro Calderón de la Barca's masterwork for your delectation. As we all know, Calderón is second only to Lope de Vega as a master of the stage."

From the audience's grumbling I had the distinct impression that Mateo's august name meant nothing to them. Nor did I understand their antipathy to the drama. A prince imprisoned in a dark tower stirred my fertile, if fevered, imagination. I wanted to know how he would feel when he got out—and confronted both his father and life. I was on tenterhooks.

The dwarf continued, undismayed.

"As our story opens, the king of Poland is near the end. But who will succeed him? His legitimate heir has languished in chains his whole life long. If he dies, the next in line is the king's nephew, the duke of a land called Moscovy, a bitter, ruthless place at the edge of the world to the east of Poland.

"The king, the duke, and all the great men of the kingdom meet at the palace to debate the problem: Shall the prince be permitted to rule or be put to death because of the prophecy? The king decides to test the prince, who is now a grown man, to see if he is ruled by reason or by savage rage. To ensure he is kept under control—remember, not only have terrible things been prophesied, but he has been rigidly sequestered—the king sedates the prince and orders his tutors to tell him that his memories are but dreams.

"Also, Rosaura arrives, but she comes to avenge her honor's loss at the duke of Moscovy's hands. Disguised as a man, she plans to run the miscreant through herself.

"Now, amigos, we begin at the tower prison on a craggy mountain where Prince Segismundo languishes."

The dwarf waved his hand to where Mateo and the other actors were waiting "off stage." The actors, except Mateo, wore false beards, and the two actresses wore wigs.

"Mateo Rosas will play the prince and several other key roles. Now for your pleasure, La Nómada players present Pedro Calderón's comedia, Life Is a Dream."

With a sweep of his hat, Mateo addressed the audience as Segismundo, prince of Poland.

"I try, oh heavens, to understand what crime I committed... but since I was born, I understand my crime... for man's greatest crime is to have been born at all.

"I have less liberty than birds and beasts and fish. As I reach this pitch of anger, like a volcano, an Aetna, I could tear pieces of my heart from my own breast. What law, justice, or reason can deny to man so sweet a privilege, a freedom God has given a brook, a fish, a beast, and a bird?"

Other actors tell us that the king orders the prince released from the tower and brought to the palace to see if he is fit to rule or is a mad beast. If he fails the test, he will be put to death, and the duke of Moscovy will marry the beautiful Princess Estrella and assume the throne. But the king pleas with those around him to give the prince a chance. The king was being played by the dwarf with the powerful voice.

In the palace, for the first time unchained and interacting with people, the Prince considers vengeance on a servant who was cruel to him while he was held captive in chains. Another man tells him it's not the servant's fault, that he obeyed the king's orders.

But Segismundo thunders, "Insofar as the law was not just, he was not bound to obey the king."

A murmur went through the audience and I heard the word "treason" muttered. Even at my young age, disobedience to any king, even a bad one, was unthinkable.

But the evil servant challenges the prince, baiting him to fight him.

The prince struggles with the wrongdoer and throws him off of the balcony.

The prince is drugged and returned to the prison tower, where he is told by his tutor that all that occurred was nothing more than a dream, that he had never left the tower.

I could see the audience was constantly stirring and restless. "Where's the pirate?" a man yelled.

"Where are the gorgeous women?" another thundered.

I was enjoying the play and eager to find out about the woman who dresses like a man and whose sword thirsts for bloody revenge, but the audience of merchants and hacienda majordomos was little interested in a prince's struggle with the demons in us all.

Mateo ignored the grumbling. As Segismundo, he said, "To live is to dream... a king dreams he is king and in this deception spends his days, commanding, governing, disposing. But the renown he receives is only written on the wind.... The rich man dreams of his riches, which only brings him greater concern and worry. The poor man dreams that he suffers misery and want. All men dream the Me they live. All life is a dream and dreams themselves are—"

"The hell with dreams! Where's the pirate?" someone shouted.

Mateo angrily drew his sword. "The next man who interrupts me will have this pirate spilling his blood."

This was no audience of city folk but rough colonists. A dozen men rose to the challenge, and Mateo was about to take them on when the dwarf and the other actors intervened, pleading with Mateo and forcing him off the stage.

Fray Antonio told me that when plays are presented in Spain, the common people stand closest to the stage and are called mosqueteros, musket bearers, because of the clamor they make and provoke. These vulgares, low vulgar people, pelt the actors with fruit and anything at hand if they do not like the play.

"Country boors!" Mateo yelled as he left.

There was something else he yelled back, a remark on their manhood and their mothers that I dare not repeat even in these secret words. The insult caused several men to draw their swords, which, however, they instantly sheathed when the two actresses placated them with honeyed words and seductive smiles, which implied everything but which would, I'm sure, deliver nothing.

In the meantime the troupe changed plays.

The dwarf explained that a simple Spanish soldier, rather than a Polish king, now trod their earthen stage.

"I am a simple soldier of the king," he said, "whose honor has been offended by the acts of an English pirate."

The actor-pirate bragged offstage, "I have enjoyed legions of Spanish women, by force at first but never with real resistance. They are all natural-born putas, endowed by their mothers in the harlot's art at birth."

The audience roared. Swords rattled, challenges were issued, and the audience was a howling mob. Shouts of ¡chinga su madre!—an aspersion proclaiming carnal knowledge of the man's mother—rocked the assemblage.

"This simple soldier," the dwarf said, waving his hands for silence, "returns from the Italian war to find his wife has been ravaged by an English brigand."

Gasps resounded. Several men shouted, "If he does not wreak vengeance on the Inglés son of a puta, he is no español."

"He is a mujer!" yelled a woman.

The Spanish soldier had no doubt raped and looted his way through Italy, just as the Spaniards to this very day raped and looted their way through New Spain, my very existence mortal proof of that sad fact; but given the temper of the audience, I kept that observation to myself.

The dwarf drew his sword. It was little more than a good-size dagger, but it looked like a broadsword in his diminutive hand. All the while his booming voice reverberated through us. "I have slit the throats of English, French, and Dutch swine, and my sword will drink their blood again."

Had there been a roof on the "theater," the audience's shouts would have blown it off. Men shook their swords and pleaded for the foul marauder to show his face. But discretion was the better part of showmanship. Either the actor was very good or he was very scared. He cowered offstage. I doubted that even the infamous mosqueteros of Seville were as menacing as our sword-swinging, dagger-slinging colonials.

The actresses, who'd sung, danced, seduced, and solicited hat money outright, now came on stage. This time they harmonized, not unmelodically, a ballad venerating the pristine honor and inviolable maidenhoods of Spanish women here, there, and everywhere. But even as they sang, they could not resist kicking up their heels, revealing a great deal of leg, including that now infamous garden of delights palpitating between their thighs. The two nearby priests pretended with elaborate insincerity to avert their voracious gazes.

The brutish English brigand revealed himself. Leaping to the stage, brandishing his sword, he accosted one of the dancers, roaring, "I've had you by force, and now I will have you again."

She was, of course, the wife of the simple soldier. Men in the audience implored her to take her own life rather than disgrace her husband's honor. It was not to be. As if confirming the corsair's earlier remarks, she yielded immediately, offering laughably little resistance. Murderous rage swept through the audience.

The Spanish soldier, played by the dwarf, continued his speech. Gesturing with much sweeping of his cape and doffing of his broad-brimmed caballero's hat, he spoke of the dauntless courage of Spanish men everywhere—of the righteousness of Spain's soldiers, merchants, and humble farmers. Like Mateo, the dwarf was more suited to play the peacock than the goose.

"Honor is not just the right and possession of the nobility," the dwarf orated, "it belongs to all of us who act as men should act. We Spanish are the greatest nation in the world. Our armies are the most powerful, our king the most generous, our culture the most glorious, our men the bravest, our women the fairest and the most virtuous."

Cheers erupted in the audience.

After each speech a singing guitarist serenaded us with ballads extolling the courage of Spanish men, particularly their love of women, honor, and war.

My ornaments are arms,

My pastime is in war,

My bed is cold upon the hill,

My lamp yon star;

My journeyings are long,

My slumbers short and broken;

From hill to hill I wander still,

Kissing thy token.

I ride from land to land,

I sail from sea to sea,—

Some day more kind my fate may find,

Some night kiss you!

Now the play moved quickly. The English freebooter returned again to ravish the soldier's clearly compliant wife, but this time found the soldier waiting for him.

After the dwarf took several bows and made another long speech, a sword fight flared between himself and the buccaneer. After dispatching the blackguard Britainer, he turned to the audience, saying it was now time to settle with his wife.

On this point the men in the audience were unrelenting. Male honor rose and fell on their women's fidelity. No matter how much he loved his wife or loathed her despoiler, her chastity's loss—or the rumor thereof—meant blood revenge. On this count his reputation brooked no slight or doubt or even hesitation.

The audience was blind hot. One man screamed for her head, complaining that she had not forced the brigand to kill her. Another shouted back at him that it wasn't her fault. The marauder's refusal to run her through revealed dishonor on his part, not hers. The two men started pummeling each other, which quickly led to drawn swords. Again the two actresses intervened. Separating the men, they lured each of them to the farthest corners of that blanketed alleyway with sugary words, sensuous smiles, and outrageously preposterous promises.

The actors had no more than got back into position when the dwarf suddenly stopped the action. "Amigos, my apologies. But I have been reminded that since we mount a second production, our troupe is due second recompense."

The picara women, who had extricated themselves from the swordsman with startling aplomb, again sashayed through the crowd, passing their hats. Despite jeering complaints, the money poured in torrents.

I stared at the women, dumbfounded. The performing of comedias seemed little more than rape, pillage, and highway robbery set in a theater—at least the way it was practiced in New Spain. As for the actresses, they only confirmed for me the incomprehensible power of women over men. Madre de Dios, the things these voluptuous vixens make us do worldwide, time out of mind. We are indeed helpless in their hands. At the drop of a garter, a quick come-hither smirk, or the flimsiest hint of chastity debauched, we are irretrievably lost.

True, most of the women I had known were Veracruz prostitutes, but I had seen great ladies from a distance. What little of them I had observed confirmed everything I glimpsed at the Jalapa fair. Women inevitably reduced the brave andthe brilliant to drooling imbecility, all the while still believing that as machos hombres we were the ones in charge.

After the two actresses ransacked the crowd, our hero-soldier-dwarf returned to the stage. Not that he was any happier for it. The predacious pirate was now servicing the Spaniard's wife with such stupefying regularity that not even her oaf of a husband accepted her claims to "fanatical resistance" and "fighting the brute off."

"Ever hear of suicide?" the frustrated soldier-dwarf finally asked her, at his wit's end.

"I lacked the means, blessed husband," she responded, with an eager-to-please grin.

"You lying strumpet!" the actor-dwarf-soldier thundered. "All decent women hide poison in their bosoms for exactly these occasions, so when kidnapped by pirates, they can quickly dispatch themselves and not disgrace their cherished husbands, beloved brothers, and doting fathers."

Murmurs of approval rose from the men in the audience.

At last, under questioning, the truth came out. She was not his wife after all but a Moorish whore who, while he was away in Italy, had murdered his faithful bride and taken her place.

The good soldier promptly decapitated her, hurling her heretic soul howling into hell, her infernal descent daringly dramatized by a hideous hell-bent fiend, dragging her offstage, presumably to the bottomless pit. All this was enthusiastically enacted to the wild cheers of the audience.

I thought—and hoped and prayed—that the play was over, but then another character was summarily introduced, the daughter of the soldier. The daughter, a little girl, was portrayed by the shorter of the two dancing women.

The dwarf-soldier discovered that his little girl was dying from the plague. He went to her side and prayed for her. In answer to his prayers, an angel pulled her from her bed and up to heaven—with a rope hung over the branch of a tree.

"God recognizes His own," the hero told the audience, some of whom now had tears rolling down their cheeks.

The play was similar in theme to Peribanez and the Comendador of Ocana,one of Lope de Vega's masterpieces. Fray Juan had let me read the play because Vega was the great master of the Spanish theater, which of course was the greatest producer of comedias in the world. The point of Vega's play was that "honor" was not the exclusive possession of the noble class but could be found in a simple peasant. Peribanez, a peasant, was not noble by birth; but was noble in heart and soul. When his honor and human dignity were violated by the comendador who lusted for his wife, Peribanez avenged himself upon the powerful aristocrat.

The comendador made Peribanez a captain in order to send him away from Ocana and leave the coast clear for his seduction of Casilda, Peribanez's wife. But the crafty nobleman had not counted on the courageous loyalty of Casilda, who stood ready to fight and die for her honor. Peribanez uncovers the nobleman's wicked plot, witnesses his wife's willingness to sacrifice herself, and slays the comendador in mortal combat.

The play put on at the fair was a pale imitation of de Vega's tale, but it had the same result of theatrical fare everywhere: to separate the audience from their hard-earned lucre.

Apparently, this was the way it was done: Challenge a man's honor, then watch the feathers fly. Nothing inflamed the audience's emotions like chastity besmirched and vengeance exacted. I personally preferred the complex emotional struggle of a prince drugged, lied to, and raised as an animal. But emotional complexity failed to fire our hot macho blood. Clearly, a play had to dramatize manliness, courage, and pureza de sangre,purity of blood. Honor was derived from whoone was and from whatone was—all of which was contingent on bloodlines. Not even riches, titles, and family names could compare with purity of blood, particularly when it was backed up by the willingness to die for it, which was universally heralded as hombría, the quintessence of Spanish manhood.