nose and on your skin. So, eat dog!” he bellowed. “This is nothing. These people planned to eat my father with tomatoes and peppers and perhaps a bit of salt. No, eating dog is nothing,” he said, finally spent. “Today, we eat dog, and tomorrow, perhaps a mule,” he laughed. “We’ll be happy to eat what we can get. You’ll see.” And with this, Juan sat back on his pack, and, with the juice of the meat running down his hairy arms, began to devour the piece in his hands.
* * *
In the province of the Tlascala the ground, although flat and wooded, was quite broken and difficult to traverse. In this difficult terrain, a number of Indians still lived in underground houses like caves, which was the custom of this particular group. Near the village of Tzompantepec, the Robledos came to an enormous plain. This was the site where Cortes’s 400 soldiers had met a Tlascaltec force of several thousands. Juan de Penol recounted how the Spaniards, who were required to use their wounded soldiers as combatants, had been victorious. They accomplished this, Juan said, by having superior weapons, steel armor, a better command of strategy, and the very significant advantage bestowed by having horses. However, Juan also pointed out, if it had not been for Cortes’s Indian allies, some of whom were his mother’s people, Cortes would have been defeated. With these expressions of pride by Juan for himself and for his muleteers, the members of the mule train set up camp. They spent the night of 28 October on the unprotected plain, in a cold wind that blew off the 14,636-foot cone of Malintzin (La Malinche) that lay immediately to their south.
Food was now more plentiful and the Indians, though more numerous, were quite friendly. Nonetheless, the members of the mule train remained on guard. They knew that they must not trust the Indians’ apparent peacefulness. It was a good custom, Juan said, to be prepared, and to conduct oneself as though an attack was imminent. The Indians, however, remained friendly, and the Robledos were able to purchase a considerable variety of foods from them wherever they went. These included fowl and even prickly pears or figs, an edible fruit of the flat-stemmed cactus family that was in season and plentiful in these parts.
* * *
From Tlascala, two routes were possible. They could go through the town of Huexotzinco (‘a place surrounded by willows’), or through Cholula, the route taken by Cortes. Each was in the same general area south of Tlascala, but as the former was 7,516 feet above sea level, and the latter somewhat lower, it was decided to go by way of Cholula. Either route would take them by the 17,887 foot Popocatepetl (‘Smoking Mountain’), an active volcano with smoke coming from its cone. It had last erupted in 1539 and seemed to present no great danger. What the Robledos hoped to minimize were additional frigid nights within the mountains.
* * *
Cholula was a large town on a vast plain with lofty towers and almost 400 great cues, or temples, now in ruin. The party found that it was a land rich in maize, peppers, and in the maguey from which the Cholulans brewed their alcoholic drinks. The people made excellent pottery of red and black clay painted in various designs. They supplied Mexico and all the neighboring provinces with pottery in the same way that Talavera and Placencia did in Castile. Pedro Robledo remarked that Cholula looked from a distance like their royal city of Valladolid in Castile. With many neighboring towns in its vicinity, it seemed a good choice both for travel and for obtaining the food they required, but the distance across the undulating plain from Tlascala to Cholula was greater than they had anticipated. With Catalina eight months pregnant and in great distress, it was decided to camp on the banks of a river. This was near a stone bridge within site of the town approximately three miles in the distance. At this encampment there were some abandoned huts, each consisting of one room with a hard-packed dirt floor. The party took shelter in them. From Indians dressed in cotton smocks they obtained poultry and maize-cakes. They posted sentries and remained in camp for three days until Catalina was again able to travel.
* * *
From the time they had left Vera Cruz, the entire party had been concerned about Catalina. The child she carried was pushing her organs aside in it movement toward birth. She was eating and breathing for two, and there were times when she was in severe pain and could neither walk nor ride. Although her pregnancy would have been ignored under most circumstances, as was the custom of the times, her painful condition could not be. Pedro feared she would miscarry and the loss would kill her. He was resolute that his beloved Catalina would not lose the baby! Pedro’s determination to travel only when she was able to do so required that they spend more days in camp than would have been normal. Therefore, they doubled and even tripled the length of their stays on several occasions. This had appeared to suffice, but it was now apparent that even greater periods of rest would be required and he decided to provide them.
When the party was finally able to leave their encampment, Juan’s mules were hobbled and blindfolded so as to get them to perform their task of crossing the stream. The party was lucky that the stone bridge was in place, since without it, they would not have been able to cross the river. For several days it had been a raging brown torrent. The flood carried logs, trees, brush and boulders that resounded in the dark of their camp like cannonades as they rolled and smashed their way down the streambed. The river was still in flood when they left their encampment on 3 November and moved into the town.
In the town of Cholula itself, where the god Quetzalcoatl had stopped on his way to the sea, the Robledos took up residence, moving into one of the large courtyards. Here Cortes’s soldiers had successfully defeated the townsmen who had conspired with the Indians of Mexico to annihilate them. The courtyards, which comprised a portion of the temple complex dedicated to the worship of Quetzalcoatl, stood undemolished as a memorial to this history. The members of the mule train remained here for an additional two days, hoping for better weather, but really praying that Catalina, now bleeding rather than spotting, would again be able to travel.
While in Cholula, during one of their daily excursions for food, Pedro and Diego, led by Juan de Penol and three of his men, rode to the so-called Temple of Cholula. Here, Diego and his father were astonished to see a pyramidal mound, built with, or rather encased in, unburned brick. It rose to the height of nearly 180 feet, the largest pyramid by volume in the world. The traditional belief of the Indians, Juan related, was that a family of giants who had escaped the great flood had built it. They had designed it to be raised to the clouds. However, the gods, offended with their presumption, bombarded the pyramid with fires from heaven and compelled them to abandon the attempt. What remained was a remarkable structure greater than anything either of the Robledos had seen in their native Castile. Pedro probed Juan and his men for additional information regarding this pyramid but could learn no more. The Indians of their train, most of whom came from the Valley of Mexico, knew nothing of the mound beyond what they had heard from the Indians of Cholula. What they did know a great deal about was how to obtain bounty from the land.
The Indians of the Valley of Mexico provided abundant information about the richest and most diversified flora to be found in any country on earth. The medicinal plants they enumerated could provide a remedy for everything from flatulence to gout. They told about vanilla, bananas, and sugar, the latter which they obtained from the stalks of corn, and spoke at length of beans and plantains: “Not as sweet as the banana,” they said, “but from it we make flour.” They extolled the virtues of cacao from which they obtained chocolate, and they expounded on the virtues and uses of maize, sisal, and especially maguey. It was from this latter plant, an agave, that they obtained paper, pulque, as well as a sweet and nutritious food when roasted in a pit oven. When not on the trail, all of the muleteers tended small fields or kitchen gardens they had beside their homes. The men chiefly did the tasks of cultivating the soil with the women scattering the seed, husking the corn, and taking part only in the lighter labors of the field. In this, the Indians presented a remarkable contrast to the people of Spain who so abhorred agriculture. These men with whom Pedro worked were excellent teachers and Pedro an apt and avid pupil. He had nothing to teach them, but as Juan had told him (and as he was happy to discover), he had a lot to learn from them.
The
