Sometimes, however, the youth selected for the honor of godhood would be averse to that aspect of the performance. If it was a young woman, and she tried to decline the opportunity to wallow, she would be forcibly deflowered by the high priest of Xipe Totec. In the case of a determinedly chaste young man, he would be tied down and straddled by a female temple attendant. If, once introduced to the pleasure, the young person was still recalcitrant, he or she would have to endure repeated violation by the temple women or priests and, when those were sated, by any commonfolk who might desire to take a turn. There was always a sufficiency of those, the devout who slavered to couple with a god or goddess, the merely lecherous, the curious, the childless women or impotent men who hoped to be impregnated or rejuvenated by the deity. Yes, Your Excellency, there occurred every sexual excess Your Excellency's fancy can envision—except the coupling of god and man or goddess and woman. Such acts, being the very contravention of fertility, would have been repugnant to Xipe Totec.
On the day of the ceremony, after the attending crowd had been entertained by many performances of dwarfs and jugglers and tocotine and such, Xipe Totec made his public appearance. The young girl or man was dressed as the god, in a costume combining dry old maize husks and bright new sprigs of greenery, in a wide-spreading fan crown of the most colorful feathers, in a flowing mantle and gilded sandals. The youth was carried many times about The Heart of the One World in an elegant litter chair, with much pageantry and deafening music, while he or she scattered seeds and maize kernels over the cheering and chanting throng. Then the procession came to Xipe Totec's low pyramid in one corner of the plaza, and all the drumming and music and singing stopped, and the crowd hushed, as the young personifier of the god was set down at the foot of the temple's staircase.
There two priests helped her divest herself of the costume, piece by piece, until she stood entirely naked before all the plaza's massed eyes—some of which already knew every detail and private crevice of her body. The priests handed her a bundle of twenty small reed flutes, and she turned her back to the crowd. The two priests flanked her as she slowly climbed toward the altar stone and temple above. She played a trill on one of the flutes at each of the twenty ascending steps, then broke that flute in her hands. On the last step, she may perhaps have played a little longer and more sadly on the last flute, but the escorting priests would not let her prolong the song unduly. It was required that Xipe Totec's life end when the final flute's trilling ended.
Then she was seized by the other priests waiting at the pyramid summit, and was laid backward across the stump of stone there, and two of the priests whipped out their obsidian knives. While one rent the breast and tore out the still pulsing heart, the other sawed off the still blinking and mouthing head. In none of our other ceremonies was the sacrificial victim decapitated, and it had no religious significance even in the Xipe Totec rites, where the xochimíqui was beheaded only for a practical reason: it is easier to remove a dead person's skin when the head and body are separated.
The flaying was done out of sight of the crowd, the two pieces of the youth having been whisked inside the temple, and the priests were very deft at it. The head's skin was slit up the back, from nape to crown, the scalp and face peeled off the skull and the eyelids cut away. The body was also slit up the back, from anus to neck stump, but the skin of arms and legs was carefully loosed as untorn empty tubes. If the xochimíqui had been a young woman, the padding of soft flesh inside her breasts and buttocks was left intact to preserve their rotundity. If it had been a young man, his tepúli and olóltin were left attached and dangling.
The smallest priest of Xipe Totec—and there was always one small man among them—quickly doffed his robes and, naked, donned the two pieces of the costume. The body skin being still moist and slippery on the inside, it was not difficult for him to wriggle his own arms and legs into the corresponding tubes. The dead feet had been removed, for they would interfere with the priest's dancing, but the dead hands were left attached to wave and flap alongside his own. The torso skin of course did not meet at the back, but it was there perforated for thongs which laced it tight around his body. The priest then put on the dead youth's hair and face, positioned so that he could see through the empty eyeholes and sing through the slack lips, and it too was laced up the back. Any traces of blood on the outside of the costume were sponged off and the slit in the chest skin was sewn shut.
All that took very little longer than it takes me to tell it to Your Excellency. It seemed to the onlookers that the dead Xipe Totec had scarcely left the altar stone than he reappeared alive in the temple doorway. He stood bent, pretending to be an old man, leaning for support on two glistening thighbones, the only other parts of the xochimíqui's body utilized in the ceremony. As the drums roared to greet him, The Dear One Flayed slowly straightened up, like an old man becoming young again. He danced down the pyramid stairs and capered maniacally about the plaza, flourishing the slimy thighbones and using them to give a tap of blessing to everyone who could press close enough.
Before the ceremony, the small priest always made himself drunk and delirious by eating many of the mushrooms called the flesh of the gods. He had to, for he had the most arduous part in the remainder of the proceedings. He was required to dance frantically and unceasingly, except during those periods when he collapsed unconscious, for five days and nights thereafter. Of course, his dance gradually lost its first wild abandon, as the skin he wore began to dry and tighten on him. Toward the close of the five days, it was so shrunken and crackly as to be really constrictive, and the sun and air had turned it to a sickly yellow color—for which reason it was called the Garment of Gold—and it smelled so horrible that no one then in the plaza would come near enough for Xipe Totec to bless him with a tap of a bone—
His Excellency's latest anguished departure impels me to remark—if it is not irreverent, lord scribes—that His Excellency has a remarkable faculty for joining us always to hear only those things that will most annoy or disgust him to hear.
In later years I was to say, with deep regret, that I wished I had never denied Zyanya anything; that I ought to have let her do and see and experience everything that caught her interest and dilated her eyes with wonder; that I should never even once have thwarted her blithe enthusiasm for every smallest thing in the world about her. Still, I cannot reproach myself that I kept her from ever seeing the Xipe Totec ceremony.
Whether or not I can claim any credit, no bad influences got into Zyanya's milk. The baby Cocóton thrived on it, and grew, and grew ever more pretty, a miniature of her mother and aunt. I doted on her, but I was not the only one who did. When Zyanya and Béu one day took the baby with them to market, a Totonacatl passerby saw Cocóton smiling from the shawl sling in which Béu carried her, and asked the women's permission to capture that smile in clay. He was one of those itinerant artists who turn out quantities of terra cotta figurines from molds and then tramp about the countryside to sell them cheaply to poor farm folk. On the spot, he adroitly did a little clay portrait of Cocóton, and later, after he had used it to make his mold for stamping out the duplicates, he came and presented Zyanya with the original. It was not really a perfect likeness, and he had put upon it the flared Totonaca headdress, but I instantly recognized my daughter's broad and infectious smile, complete with dimples. I do not know how many copies he made, but for a long time you could see little girls everywhere playing with that doll. Even some adults bought it under the impression that it represented the laughing young god Xochipili, Lord of Flowers, or the happy goddess Xilonen, Young Maize Mother. I should not be surprised if there are still some of those figurines here and there, still unbroken, but it would, lacerate my heart if I found one now and saw again that smile of my daughter and my wife.