A child with a Spanish father and an india mother was a mestizo.

A Spanish father and an africano mother yielded a mulatto.

Beatriz had an africano father and mulatta mother, and her category was zamba.

As people with mixed blood intermarried, it became increasingly difficult for the bureaucracy to categorize them. The strangest category was that of the child of a mulatto father and a zamba mother. The offspring of this union was called a zambo miserable. I do not know why the offspring should be called "miserable," but Jacinto's category was zambo miserable, because the law said he had "corrupted" blood.

Racial determinations could also be made when parentage or marriage records were in doubt. In that case a physical examination was conducted. Little attention was paid to skin color because many Spaniards were not light-skinned. More attention was given to hair shades and structure. Short, woolly hair indicated africano. Straight, coarse locks or an inability to grow bodily hair meant indio. Mestizos were a problem because they bore traits of both Spaniards and indios, and one trait occasionally stood out over the other.

The reason for this system, the fray explained, was that our traits and abilities were ostensibly passed along by blood. Pure Spanish blood inclined people to build ships, sail seas, and conquer empires. When the purity of the blood was diluted, these strengths were commensurably diluted; hence, Spain's strength was diluted.

"The obsession with pureza de sangre grew out of the centuries-long battle to force the Moors and Jews out of Spain, thereby unifying our kingdom," the fray once whispered to me while in his cups. "But what began as a holy crusade has ended in the rack, the gallows, and millions of graves. Our gachupin make the Ottomans look like cloistered nuns. It is all muy loco."

In the system of racial delineation, there were no categories for español women who wed indios, or africanas.

"Men who ruthlessly debauch our india, africana, and mixed-blood women," the fray said, "cannot conceive of Spanish women desiring men of differing blood. Hence, their offspring know no category. That child's life is purgatory on earth."

"So many people and so much happiness," Beatriz said, with a mocking smile.

"Maybe in the next world."

"You are such a fraud, Cristóbal," Beatriz said. She was one of the few street people who called me by my given name. "Where else could you make a living, playing the crippled clown?"

"Everyone needs someone to look down to."

"But those tricks—twisting the body God gave you into obscene contortions—are they not a mockery of His gift?" Her sly grin glittered derision.

"If I, a poor lépero, offend God's pride, we're all in more trouble than I thought."

Beatriz threw her head back and laughed. "That is one of the many things I admire about you, Cristóbal. You are utterly without virtue."

"I am practical."

I did not take offense, it was a game we played. She loved to tease and taunt me, then wait for my rejoinder. Everything I said she found funny.

But the old East Indian who had taught me the arcane arts of contortion did impugn my beliefs. Scrawny, gnarled, mango-bald, and with a scratchy voice of throat-sore gull, he'd been dubbed Gull by some long-forgotten wit, and the appellation stuck. Nor was Gull a partisan of the Christian faith. He believed in countless gods and goddesses, heavens untold, thousands of hells, often declaring that we suffered them all, returning to earth life after life, through afterworld after afterworld in infinite reincarnation—"like a dog unto its vomit," he once averred. He believed justice was nothing more than a Dark Diceman, casting lots for our souls, who spun our destiny on a Karmic Wheel, and that in the end all life was illusion—earth, death, life, karma, afterworld, even the Dark Diceman himself, even belief, everything, he'd said.

"The best way to survive so much chaos, falsehood, and pain is to conceal your True Self behind a mask," he used to say. "Oh, the mask might laugh and scream, rage and cry, but the face beneath the mask, your True Countenance, is impervious, impassive, heartless as void."

He also told me of Shiva, a god of creation and destruction. He had built and destroyed the world many times, would do it again, sooner than we thought, and yet paradoxically he was the most ardent of lovers—in the heavens, on earth, in all the hell worlds there ever were for all of time. Women everywhere worshipped his every move, look, and touch. When one of his wives mistook a pyre for his own burning ground, she flung herself onto the flames. Gull sang to me Kali's hymn to love and death:

Because you love the fire

I have made a burning-ground of my heart

Where you, oh Dark One,

Might dance.

In his India, Kali became the feminine avatar of lovers everywhere. Overnight widows, mistresses, and concubines all over India threw themselves on their lover's pyres. Like Kali, women chose the burning ground over bereavement.

"Death equals love?" I asked, incredulous.

"Its noblest exemplar."

I stared at him a long moment. Finally, shaking my head, I said, "In India, maybe, but don't voice those views too loudly around here. The Inquisition has a burning ground, too, and its glowing pinchers and blazing stakes have nothing to do with amour vincet omnia. Some of the women around here might not endorse your beliefs either."

"But you have Aztec blood in you as well. You carry in your heart the Aztec flame. They knew the truth of which I speak."

"They won't help you either when you're screaming on a rack or strung from a strapaddo."

Yet it was true about my indio ancestors. I had heard stories from Snake Flower and the woman I once called mother—stories of the many indio gods, of ancient worlds created and destroyed many times over, each new world "a Cycle of the Sun." Snake Flower told me our benighted world would one day die by fire.

And I knew, too, of Homer's Land of the Dead, his Elysian Fields, and gods on high.

I kept those views to myself as well.

But I listened with rapt fascination—and learned. Not only tales of his gods, but the secret arts of the mysterious East—stoicism, endurance, meditation, indifference to pain, and corporeal contortion. Contortion's skills alone took me hundreds of hours to perfect, but I practiced religiously. Eventually I was as supple as Gull. I could twist my joints as if they were the mellifluous sap that flows from the trees of our Rubber People.

Gull was a curious mentor. Tiny, with small delicate bones, he had for a time been a flyer of Papantla, that terrifying spectacle in which men swing from a rope around the towering tip of a vertiginous pole. Unfortunately for Gull, his line snapped one day, and like his namesake, he flew for real. Launched into space like a slung stone, he soared and soared and soared. For a while it seemed he might even take wing, until he dropped like a rock.

His doomed flight terminated against an abandoned pyramid, its stony slope breaking both his legs. Unconscious for a month—"wandering through the Aztec nether world," which was how Gull put it—when he came to, he told me he'd seen wondrous sights: Creation's dawn, the extinction of stars, the death of the gods, the end of time. But he never walked again. Not that he complained. He said those sights would inspire him all his days.

"I am content," he said simply. "The True Self behind the mask remains faithful to itself, remote, fearless, impervious as stone."