“Such is thy recompense, friend of mankind, for thyself a god, and not reverencing the anger of the gods, thou didst endow with humans not their due.” Aeschylus
Cuáte was around nine years old when Don Juán Arelláno and his wife, Doña Lola adopted him, a little old maybe, but so were they. They had not been able to have children in their twenty years of marriage. The man from the agency said that he didn’t know where Cuate’s name (which is either short for Cuauhtémoc or else means “twin” or “buddy”) came from, but that that was all that he was ever called since he was found on the front step. Juan and Lola were happy to have him, and they decided to call him Quetzalcoátl Deo Arelláno, for which Cuate could very well be short for. Juan was a secret wag of sorts.
And as usually happens under these circumstances, three months later, Lola became pregnant. Cuate took famously to the baby, José, when he was born, and rather than jealous, became very protective of him. Happiness reigned in the Arellano household. But outside, happiness is an unholy grail. Many people (for whom maybe Gerónimo Séis, Juan’s brother-in-law, might have appointed himself spokesman) were not pleased with the attitude of the Arellanos.
“It is as much as blasphemy to name a foundling such as that for the god of our ancestors,” Geronimo said.
“And which ancestors are those, Jerry?” Juan said, “the ones that lined defenseless people up for miles and tore their beating hearts out of their chests, or the ones that brought guns and horses and sucked the land dry of its riches and installed eternal poverty and forced an alien religion on the native-born that keeps them hopeless and humiliated and hungry?”
“Our great heritage should not be brought down to such a trivial and cynical form,” Jerry said.
“And which heritage is it today, Jerry? The Aztec, the Mixtec, Mexican, Cuban, Puerto Rican?” Juan said.
Because Jerry was an activist, and a member of every group that carried a banner for Hispanic (or Latino, or Spanish, or Chicano, or the Téco du jour) causes. He wrote “tracts” and “treatises” and “treatments” on ‘the Honduran issue,” the East L.A. issue, “the Puerto Rican issue,” (et cetera) for La Gente Unida and La Rasa Unida and La Prensa Unida (et cetera) and such things, using such statements as, “Under threat of pocket isolation by the forces of hyper-colonialism, the Latin descendancy must form a Pan-Hispanic ethno-methodology to prevent the fragmentation of our peoples into splintered threads of techno-induced cognitive dissonance,” whatever that meant.
Juan said, “You shouldn’t take life so seriously.”
Jerry said, “Our traditions shouldn’t be allowed to become a joke that allows for the names of our ancestral gods to be given to curs.”
Juan said, “Jerry, you don’t know a real cause when you see one.”
Jerry’s brother, Arnúlfo, got drunk one day, and while Juan was at work, went in and tried to rape Lola. Amid screams that nobody responded to, Cuate jumped to Lola’s defense, doing the best he could, and sunk his teeth into Arnulfo’s thigh. The bastard took his gun out and shot him and ran off. Nobody came, neither the police nor a concerned neighbor. Bárrios like this are common through Pan-Hispanicism. Later, they said that Arnulfo had run off to
Lola recovered, but Cuate’s leg never set right where it was shot, and it became just something that he dragged beside the good one.
But that scar of sacrifice became the badge of honor that warmed the home of the Arellanos.
One day, Lola left the house for a minute to run to the store quickly for flour. The baby was asleep on a blanket on the floor with Cuate curled up beside him. And as houses do when nobody is looking, the house caught on fire. Lola saw the smoke as soon as she came out of the store, and she dropped the bag of flour and ran, her instincts telling her whose house it had to be. Nearing the house, she saw Cuate moving backwards on all fours dragging the baby out the door with his teeth clamped on the blanket. And as she came up, Cuate hobbled back into the burning house, and the house collapsed on him; it became his funeral pyre—as is worthy of ancestral gods. There was little trace left of him, nor of the stuffed tiger—the baby’s favorite toy—that Juan and Lola figured Cuate must have gone back in for. Because the fire department never came, and not one person on the block threw even a bucket of water on the blaze until it spent itself out.
Two days later, in response to a neighbor’s complaint, Animal Control came to serve a warrant on Cuate for being unvaccinated and unlicensed in a high rabies area. Juan and Lola still have the paper. It is the only proof that exists that Quetzalcoátl did once walk among the people.
Noe.
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