It was a shock to sit down at the printing press, take the six letters that formed the word "C-r-i-s-t-o," place them in a type holder and attach the holder to one of the two metal plates of the press, brush a few drops of ink over the letters, slip in a piece of paper, and bring the other plate of the press so the letters and the paper pressed together...
Santa Maria! When I saw my name in print, saw that like what God had done for Moses, I had created a work that could be passed down the ages, something of me that could be read by future generations besides the name on my headstone, I was so impassioned tears came to my eyes.
After that I played with the press, experimenting with type setting, until I had become rather proficient at it. All this knowledge came to fruit when I awoke Mateo to tell him what scheme had captured my thoughts.
He came out of sleep and bed with a dagger in hand, but lay back after threatening to quarter me with a dull blade.
"I have found our fortune."
He moaned and rubbed his forehead. "I am no longer interested in earning a fortune. A true hombre wins treasure with his sword."
"Mateo, it has occurred to me that if the works we spend so much money to import from the peninsula were printed here, we could make great profit on them."
"And if the king offered you his daughter and Castile, you could wear fancy clothes and eat the best food."
"It's not that difficult. We have imported copies of some of the best indecent books available in Spain. If we printed them, we would avoid the great expense of getting them here."
"Have you been kicked in the head by one of the don's horses? It takes a printing press to print books."
"We have a printing press."
"It takes knowledge."
"I have learned how to use the press."
"Workers."
"I can buy a bond servant that is heading for the obrajes."
"Someone to burn at the stake if the Inquisition finds out."
"I will obtain a very stupid bond servant."
We selected a very thin volume of lewd nonsense as our first project. Appropriately enough, our bond servant's name was Juan, the same as the printer of the first book in New Spain. He was not as stupid as I would have liked him to be, but he made up for it with greed. He had been sentenced to four years in the silver mines and to have been diverted to a print shop had saved his life—the average life span in the mines was less than a year for those sentenced to penal servitude.
Like myself, he was a mestizo and lépero, but unlike me, who had claims to being a gentleman, he epitomized the common concept that léperos are the product of abuse of pulque.
The fact that I had saved his life from the dreaded northern mines had not endeared me to him because he was a street animal. However, knowing how the mind of a lépero works, not just the avarice but the tainted logic, rather than paying him in the hopes he would not run away but remain faithful to the sentence imposed, I provided the opportunity for him to occasionally steal from me.
One of his most important benefits, besides the fact that his criminality and fear of going to the mines gave him a small amount of obedience, if not loyalty, to me, was the fact that he could not read or write.
"That means he won't know what's he's printing. I told him we are printing nothing but copies of the lives of saints and I have an engraving of the stigmata of San Francis that we will use over all our books."
"If he can't read or write, how can he set type?" Mateo asked.
"He doesn't read the books he's setting the type for, he's merely duplicating the letters in the book with letters from the type tray. Besides, I will set much of the type myself."
The first book we published in New Spain, which while not having the solemn tone of Bishop Zumárraga's work on Christian doctrine, and would have been considered scandalous by respectable people, was a great success.
Mateo was deeply impressed by the pile of ducats that was left over after paying our expenses. "We have cheated the author of his due, the publisher of his profit, the king of his fifth, the custom officials of their bite.... Cristo, you are a gifted scoundrel. Because of your talent as a publisher, I am permitting you to publish my own novel, Chronicle of the very remarkable Three Knights Tablante of Seville who defeated Ten Thousand Howling Moors and Five Frightful Monsters and set the rightful King upon the throne of Constantinople and claimed a Treasure larger than that held by any King of Christendom."
My dismay was revealed on my face.
"You do not want to publish a literary masterpiece that was proclaimed the work of angels in Spain and sold better than anything those dolts Vega and Cervantes ever wrote—or stole—from me?"
"It's not that I don't want to publish it, it's just that I don't think our little printing venture could do justice to—"
Mateo's dagger blade appeared under my chin.
"Print it."
We had been in the business for some months when we received our first visit from the Inquisition.
"We did not know you were in the business of printing," a fish-faced man wearing the uniform of a familiar of the Inquisition told me. His name was Jorge Gomez. "You have not submitted your materials to the Holy Office and obtained from it permission to print."
I had carefully prepared a cover story and had prominently displayed, the "book" on saints that we were printing. I apologized profusely and explained that the owner of the shop was in Madrid to obtain exclusive rights to print and sell in New Spain matters concerning saints.
"He left Juan and me here to prepare for full printing of the tomes when he returns with the royal license and presents it to the viceroy and the Holy Office."
I again expressed my regret and offered the man a gratis copy of the book when printing was completed.
"What else do you print while your master is gone?" the Inquisition official asked.
"Nothing. We cannot even print the complete book on saints until our master returns with enough paper and ink to finish the job."
Familiars were not priests but technically just "friends" of the Holy Office, volunteers who assisted the inquisitors. In truth, they wore the green cross of the Inquisition and acted as a secret constabulary who performed services ranging from acting as bodyguards to inquisitors, to breaking into homes in the middle of the night to arrest those accused and haul them to the dungeon of the Holy Office.
Familiars were feared by all. Their reputation was so dreadful that the king occasionally used the terror they strike to keep those around him from swaying in their loyalty.
"You understand that you are forbidden to print any books or other works without first obtaining the proper permission. If it should be found out that you were in fact involved in any illegitimate printing..."
"Of course, Don Jorge," I said, rewarding the honorific to a peasant whose closest encounter with being genteel was stepping in the manure of a gentleman's horse. "Frankly, we have so little to do until our master returns, if there are any simple printing jobs that we are capable of and can do as an accommodation for the Holy Office, we would be happy to do so."
Something stirred deep in the familiar's eyes. The eye motion, which I could not have defined at the time but that I have come to realize is a slight widening of the inner circle of the eye, is a reaction that few people except successful merchants and successful léperos would recognize.