"Hear me and know. When our people first came here to this lake region, when we were still the Azteca, our great god Huitzilopochtli bade our priests look for a place where there stood a nopali, and upon it an eagle perched, eating a snake...."

Well, Your Excellency, so much for history. I cannot change the pitiful little falsities of it, any more than I can change the far more deplorable realities of it. But the history I have told is the history through which I lived, and in which I had some part, and I have told it truthfully. I kiss the earth to that, which is to say: I swear to it.

* * *

Now, it may be that I have here and there in my narrative left a gap that Your Excellency would like bridged, or there may be questions Your Excellency would wish to put to me, or further details Your Excellency would desire on one subject or another. But I beg that they be postponed for a time, and that I be allowed a respite from this employment. I ask Your Excellency's permission now to take my leave of you and the reverend scribes and this room in what was once The House of Song. It is not because I am weary of speaking, or because I have said all that might be told, or because I suspect you may be weary of hearing me speak. I ask to take my leave because last night, when I went home to my hut and sat down beside my wife's pallet, something astounding occurred. Waiting Moon told me that she loved me! She said that she loved me and that she always had and that she still does. Since Beu never in her life said any such thing before, I think she may be approaching the end of her long dying, and that I ought to be with her when it comes. Forlorn things though we are, she and I, we are all we have—Last night, Beu said she had loved me ever since our first meeting, long ago, in Tecuantepec, in the days of our greenest youth. But she lost me the first time and she lost me forever, she said, when I decided to go seeking the purple dye, when she and her sister Zyanya did the choosing of the twigs to see which of the girls would accompany me. She had lost me then, she said, but she had never ceased to love me, and never encountered another man she could love. When she made that astonishing revelation last night, an unworthy thought went through my mind. I thought: if it had been you, Beu, who went with me, who married me soon after, then it would be Zyanya whom now I would still have with me. But that thought was chased away by another: would I have wanted Zyanya to suffer as you have suffered, Beu? And I pitied the poor wreckage lying there, saying she loved me. She sounded so sad that I endeavored to make light of it. I remarked that she had chosen some odd ways in which to manifest her love, and I told how I had seen her dabbling in the magic art, making a mud image of me, as witch women do when they would work harm upon a man. Beu said, and she sounded sadder yet, that she had made it to do me no hurt; that she had waited long and in vain for us to share a bed; that she had made the image that she might sleep with it and possibly enchant me into her embrace and into love of her. I sat silent beside her pallet, then, and I thought over many things past, and I realized how undiscerning and impervious I have been during all the years Beu and I have known each other; how I have been more unseeing and crippled than Beu is at this moment in her utter blindness. It is not a woman's place to announce that she loves a man, and Beu had respected that traditional inhibition; she had never said it, she had disguised her feelings with a flippancy that I had obstinately and always taken for scorn or mockery. She had let slip her ladylike restraint only a few times—I remembered her once saying wistfully, "I used to wonder why I was named Waiting Moon"—and I had refused ever to recognize those moments, when all I need have done was hold out my arms—True, I loved Zyanya, I have gone on loving her, and I always will. But that would not have been diminished by my later loving Beu too. Ayya, the years I have thrown away! And it was I who deprived myself; I can blame no one else. What is more hurtful to my heart is the ungracious way in which I deprived Waiting Moon, who waited so long, until now it is too late to salvage even a last moment of all those misused years. I would make them up to her if I could, but I cannot. I would have taken her to me last night, and lain with her in the act of love, and perhaps I could have done it, but what remains of Beu could not. So I did the only thing possible, which was to speak, and I spoke it honestly, saying, "Beu, my dear wife, I love you too." She could not reply, for the tears came and choked what little voice she has left, but she put out her hand to mine. I squeezed it tenderly, and I sat there holding it, and I would have entwined our fingers, but I could not even do that, since she has no fingers.

As you have probably already divined, my lords, the cause of her long dying has been The Being Eaten by the Gods, and I have described what that is like, so I would prefer not to tell you what the gods have left uneaten of the woman who was once as beautiful as Zyanya. I merely sat beside her, and we were both silent. I do not know what she was thinking, but I was remembering the years we have lived together, yet never together, and what a waste they have been—of each other, and of love, which is the most unpardonable waste there is. Love and time, those are the only two things in all the world and all of life that cannot be bought, but only spent. Last night, Beu and I at last declared our love... but so late, too late. It is spent, and cannot be bought back. So I sat and recalled those lost years... and beyond them, to other years. I remembered that night my father carried me on his shoulders across the island of Xaltocan, under the "oldest of old" cypress trees, and how I passed from moonlight to moon shadow and to moonlight again. I could not have known it then, but I was sampling what my life was to be—alternate light and shadow, dappled days and nights, good times and bad. Since that night, I have endured my share of hardships and griefs, perhaps more than my share. But my unforgivable neglect of Beu Ribe is proof enough that I have caused hardship and grief to others as well. Still, it is futile to regret or complain of one's tonali. And I think, on balance, my life has been more often good than bad. The gods favored me with many fortunes and with some occasions to do worthwhile deeds. If I were to lament any one aspect of my life, it is only that the gods refused me the one last best fortune: that my roads and my days had come to their end when my few worthy deeds were done. That would have been long ago, but still I live. Of course, I can believe, if I choose, that the gods have their reason for that too. Unless I choose to remember that distant night as a drunken dream, I can believe that two of the gods even told me their reason. They told me that my tonali was not that I be happy or sad, rich or poor, productive or idle, even-tempered or ill-tempered, intelligent or stupid, joyful or desolated—though I have been all of those things at one time or another. According to the gods, my tonali dictated simply that I dare to accept every challenge and seize every opportunity to live my life as fully as a man can. In so doing, I have participated in many events, great and small, historic and otherwise. But the gods said—if they were gods, and if they spoke truly—that my real function in those events was only to remember them, and tell of them to those who would come after me, so that those happenings should not be forgotten. Well, I have now done that. Except for any small details Your Excellency might wish me to add, I can think of nothing more to relate. As I cautioned at the beginning, I could tell of nothing but my own life, and that is all past. If there is a future, I cannot foresee it, and I think I would not wish to.