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I could feel the pointed tips of my ears burning.
That turned into a lesson about the aesthetic differences between Aztec and Maya artistic styles. And, now that I actually bothered to reallylookat his tattoo, it didn’t look all that much like the circular design fragment from the museum. Or the intricate carving on the inside of the whelk shells. Similar, but definitely not the same.
“Also, my people didn’t think that the gods would send a bunch of natural disasters if they didn’t murder a whole bunch of people.”
I blinked. “That seems like a pretty fucking important distinction.”
Taavi put a potato in his mouth. “That’s not to say that my ancestors didn’t also engage in human sacrifice, but not… quite to the same degree. And not as a necessary way to avoid torrential downpours or earthquakes.” His lips quirked up in a smile. “We also came first and still managed to survive theconquistadoresfor longer.”
“Because you didn’t piss off the Spanish?” I guessed.
He smiled again. “Oh, no, we did. We were just better at hiding when they came looking. And we had fewer enemies to begin with, so nobody felt motivated to turn us in the way they did the Aztecs.”
I snorted.
Taavi ate another potato. “Although to be fair, there are still Aztecs, as well.” He smiled. “There are just more of us.”
I ate one of my own potatoes. “How many Maya are there?” I asked. Weirdly, despite the fact that Taavi clearly existed, it hadn’t occurred to me that there might be alotof Maya.
“There are, oh, probably five or six million?” he answered.
“Wait, seriously?”
“Mmhmm.” He affirmed around a mouthful, then swallowed. “Only about a million Aztec descendants, though.”
“All in Mexico?”
Taavi shook his head. “The Maya empire extended farther south. Southern Mexico into Central America. Guatemala, Honduras, Belize. Guatemala still legally recognizes our languages.”
“Languages? Plural?”
“Mmhmm. There are a dozen or so.”
“Do you speak all of them?” I’m sure I sounded incredulous.
Taavi laughed. “Of course not. I speak Huastec.”
“Not Spanish?” I could have sworn he’d spoken Spanish to me.
“Also Spanish. I grew up speaking mostly Spanish and English, but my father made sure I learned Huastec because my mother wanted it.”
“So your mom was Maya?”
“Mmhmm. My father, as well, although his parents had come up to the US when he was little, so he and myTíaAna grew up in Arizona.”
“In Yuma?”
“Si.” He smiled. “That means ‘yes.’”
“I do know that one,” I replied smiling back at him. My Spanish vocabulary consisted of that,hola, andcomo estás, which I was pretty sure meant ‘how are you?’ “And not much else.”
“You didn’t take Spanish in school?”
“German, actually,” I told him, finishing my food and leaning against his leg, enjoying the warmth of it against my side. “My great-grandparents on my mom’s side all came from Germany, so my grandparents grew up speaking it. My dad’s side is a little more scattered, although they’re mostly German, too.”
“Say something in German.”
“Etwas.”
