The Disastrous Voyage of the Santa Margarita

by Richard Woodman

  For Don Baldivieso matters were incomparably simpler: Iago possessed what he himself had lost and there was no justice in the comparison. Arrocheros had noticed a lack of sincerity in Iago’s devotions, instinctively divining a distance between the man’s true intellect and his faith. Arrocheros was, after all, a man who made his living from bargaining, of reading a face and making an assumption informed by experience. He was also a devout Catholic whose devotion embraced the sacerdotal fear of nonconformity and feared the workings of the Holy Office. Moreover, devotion to the one true faith required proof of zeal. Such massive considerations rose to the top of a troubled mind. That he was unhinged after the tragic death of his lovely wife only increased these natural – almost instinctual – tendencies. Like an old man whose age appears to confirm wisdom but only actually exposes hitherto hidden qualities, Arrocheros read Iago as a man distinct from the normal.

  If this hypothesis needed any further confirmation it lay in the isolation of Iago, his wife and his unspeakably odious dwarf. Arrocheros fastidiously reasoned to himself – and anyone else who would listen – that evidence of apostasy or something worse existed under their very noses. Look how this Iago and his crew of familiars were immune from any interference from the heathen, evil, unchristian Chamorro. These black devils were the Devil’s spawn and see: this Iago lay among them like a brother! What more condemnatory evidence did one want to suggest witchcraft and a cogent explanation for all their troubles?

  In the hours of boredom and inactivity forced upon the survivors of the wreck of the Santa Margarita such notions took avid root. No one except Olivera recalled the stalwart duties undertaken by the sobrasaliente, particularly after the pilot-major, Juan Lorenzo, had been washed overboard. And as their numbers reduced, they formed into two camps: those whose natural allegiance led them to cling to that other wreckage, the institutions of Rey Felipe II and his new captain-general, Joanes de Calcagorta; and those who regarded Don Iago Fernandez as the last of the true gentlemen who had shipped out of Cavite aboard the Santa Margarita.

  As the representatives of the most advanced society in Western Europe, it might be supposed that the Spanish survivors of the wreck of the Santa Margarita would have reviewed their situation and seen the benefits attending it. Not only had they found refuge on the very route of east-bound shipping where rescue was only a matter of time, but – had they possessed the wit to perceive it – their treatment at the hands of the Chamorro people was not entirely unkind. Only, as the subtler Iago had realized thanks to his long sojourn at the hands of the alien Chinese, when Spanish behaviour failed to conform to what their hosts required and expected, was punishment meted out. What the Chamorro visited upon their unwelcome guests was not the murder the Spaniards took it for, but execution for unacceptable acts. Such a course of action was not merely a punishment for the transgressor, but a warning to the others. It puzzled the Chamorros that this obvious and condign message did not appear comprehensible to the Spaniards, despite the clear and deliberate escalation of horror in the method of each execution, and the involvement of as many men as ought to have made them realize the entire population supported the action. Help, the Chamorros intended the Spaniards to understand, was conditional upon their absolute obedience to the rules of conduct prevailing in Chamorro society.

  Thus those whose islands had been named by the Spanish navigators for the thieves who inhabited them sought to impose their will upon the human flotsam cast up upon their shores. Nor was the severity of that first example of the bludgeoning of the men in the boat of boxes misplaced. On the contrary its immediate and deterrent effect was deemed absolutely necessary by the tribal chiefs. The Chamorro people had been too often the victims of the casual cruelty of the passing Spanish who, landing from their enormous ships with their great hulls, huge sails, fluttering banners and fire-spitting sides, sought to make them kneel and pay respect to the image of a tortured man nailed to a cross. And when one of their hideous and malodourous company, beyond himself with deprivation and inflamed with lust, raped one of their women, they were astonished when a party of steel-clad arquebusiers shot the six men who beat him to death for his crime. From such major violent encounters to the petty cheating that went on in trade transactions, the Chamorro formed a deep pool of grievance and resentment which made it the more remarkable that they gave an inch of room in their huts to the scarecrows arriving at Çarpana in their battered não.

  Only the oddly habited religious, who tenaciously clung to the distasteful image of the tortured man nailed to his cross and who sought to learn their language and their ways, earned any respect and persuaded the Chamorros that not all Spaniards acted with such high-handed arrogance. But even these hooded and habited strangers insisted upon the destruction of their own gods and the incomprehensible superimposition of the dying martyr as the one true God. Moreover, though this was a further incomprehensible aspect of the strangers’ religion, this aspect of the sole True God was but one leg of a three-legged combination they puzzled over called the Holy Trinity.

  To the Chamorro, death was extinction in this world, and they could only try and understand if it was this insistence on the veneration of a crucified man that moved the visitors to such contempt of themselves.

  The view of the remnant Spaniards clinging to Calcagorta as their captain-general was very different. After their protracted ordeal at sea their arrival at Çarpana was at once a blessing and a curse. It did not seem the safe refuge that it promised, for their vicious reception at the hands of the Chamorros and the ambivalent way in which they had been treated left them profoundly uncertain. This sense was heightened by the weakened state to which they had been reduced, increasing their susceptibility to paranoia. The realization that their lives depended entirely upon the goodwill of the despised ‘Indians’ deepened their impotence but increased their desire to recover the mastery of their fate.

  Some might have argued that the final workings of the tragedy demonstrated the ultimate perversity of man’s supposed virtues, for it arose from a collective desire to strive against the perceived hostility of providence. But, just as death is separated from life by the integrity of a fragile membrane or the uncertainty inherent in the perfectly sequential timing of a heartbeat, so too is civilization divided from barbarism by the turn of a word, or a phrase, or the imperatives of blood and discipline.

  Other than Iago, Ah Fong and Ximenez, living in the hut of the fisherman who had befriended them, the handful of remaining Spaniards still in Atetito were domiciled in the huts near that of Calcagorta. All were Basques who saw in this specific and tribal reduction a mark of God’s favour. Their original leader, Juan Martinez de Guillestigui, had paid the sacrificial price for their survival and there were those who now whispered that this was not unlike the sacrifice of Christ. Such arguments gained credibility from their isolation and fear as much as from the results, both physical and mental, of the privations they had endured. From this part-mystical, part-blasphemous and part-visceral consensus they sought a means of re-empowering themselves.

  It was Don Baldivieso de los Arrocheros who provided the catalyst to fuse aspiration with conclusion. Alone among the castaways, Arrocheros seemed impervious to any attempt the Chamorros made to control him. With his abstracted air and torn finery he simply shoved past any warrior intent upon obstructing him and so amused were the Chamorros by his behaviour that, making the gesture by which they indicated insanity, they let him go as a harmless curiosity, evidence of Spanish inferiority, to be ridiculed by the women and children. At first he wandered from Atetito to the other villages and tried lodging with the few Spanish quartered there. At Pago he found Olivera, pale and sick, his legs still swollen and wracked with pain. The old Chamorro woman who had taken Olivera in and looked after him indicated where Arrocheros might sleep and brought him food, only to shoo him away next morning. He went without any outward sign of resentment, shambling back along the path towards Atetito followed by a small barking dog and a handful of childr
en, muttering to himself as he went. In time he settled upon a routine. Every morning he would walk to Pago and see Olivera, merely squatting to stare at the wretched pilot and defying the assiduously tender old woman’s curses. Then he would amble to the southern extremity of Atetito where Iago lived.

  Iago went often to sea with the fisherman. He had come to admire the skill of the Chamorro at catching fish and quickly learned that his own help was appreciated so that they began to communicate and in doing so established a simple friendship. More personally satisfying to Iago was the discovery that the proa – with its outrigger alternately lifting and kissing the glittering surface of the tropical sea and its triangular sail full of wind – sped faster than he could have imagined possible for any boat. Caught up in this experience, enjoyed daily except when the weather threatened and the surf ran so high that it broke over the wreck of the Santa Margarita, Iago paid little attention to the concerned reports given him by Ah Fong or Ximenez at the equally quotidian appearances of Arrocheros.

  The madman would sit squatting a little distance outside the hut throughout the heat of the day, simply staring at Ah Fong and Ximenez as they came and went. He appeared to mutter ceaselessly and seemed impervious to the natives’ taunts or to the floods of abuse that from time to time a frustrated Ximenez would fling at Arrocheros in an attempt to drive him away. Then finally, and entirely in his own time, Arrocheros would rise and wander off into the undergrowth from where, an hour or two later, he would emerge, heading for the huts of the Basques.

  He came here, night after night, to sleep outside the hut in which Agustin was quartered. He would kneel in prayer alongside the last of the Discalced Franciscan brothers, devoutly telling his rosary and praying for the souls of Doña Catalina and the miraculous baby Francisco de los Arrocheros who had risen miraculously from the dead, Christ-like in his innocence.

  Such devotion was a mere mask, for it brought him no comfort. Malice festered within Don Baldivieso, stirred by the imbalance of his reason, and it found form in a vast and consuming animus against the man he knew as Don Iago Fernandez. So audibly, eloquently and obviously in his nightly prayers did Arrocheros utter his apparently heartfelt supplications that Don Iago’s sins should be forgiven that Agustin grew increasingly intrigued. Arrocheros, in pleading that the Almighty should recognize the great contribution made by Iago Fernandez in the preservation of them all during the Santa Margarita’s disastrous voyage, adumbrated a great sin attaching to the hero.

  Eventually the Franciscan could no longer hold his tongue and invited Arrocheros to confess. In seeking a state of grace the merchant perjured his soul and bore false witness, though he had gleaned the supposed evidence – or most of it – from long and patient observation. The man they knew as Iago was, Arrocheros assured Agustin, an impostor and a Protestant. He had little absolute proof of these facts but they found resonance in Agustin’s mind with certain doubts cast by Fray Mateo Marmolejo when they were discussing the state of Iago’s soul and his relationship with the odd Chinese hermaphrodite with whom he lived.

  Of this enigmatic figure, whose revelation as a woman had deeply troubled the celibate Franciscans, Arrocheros had concrete information. She was without doubt a witch; he had himself watched her go through a daily ritual, a ritual which set aside the sacrament of her Christian baptism.

  ‘And what is this blasphemous act?’ Agustin asked with outward patience and inner turmoil.

  ‘She worships at a shrine of devils. She keeps it hidden, a small thing which opens like a miniature altarpiece revealing in scarlet and yellow and blue and gold the most hideous of devils who . . . who . . .’ Arrocheros spluttered in his outrage, his tongue coated with white saliva, and spittle frothing from his mouth.

  ‘Who what, my son?’ cajoled Agustin with the patience of the inquisitor.

  ‘Who . . . who . . . who . . .’ Arrocheros almost grunted with sexual fervour as he sought to process the images that rushed through his imagination. ‘Who fuck . . . fuck . . . fuck with coiling dragons!’ he managed at last.

  After a pause, during which Arrocheros’s violent breathing subsided, Agustin asked, ‘And is there anything else you wish to tell me of her?’

  Arrocheros nodded. ‘She makes curious characters on leaves with soot and then lights them, muttering incantations . . .’

  Agustin drew in his breath sharply, his eyes lighting with fervour as he crossed himself. Arrocheros copied him, warming to his subject and watching the Franciscan in the hope of encouragement.

  ‘And there is . . .’

  ‘Go on, my son. These are God’s words, not your own.’

  ‘There is the dwarf, Ximenez. He is her familiar.’

  ‘I see. You have evidence?’

  Arrocheros nodded. Watching daily, Arrocheros had observed the close relationship that had grown up between Ximenez and Ah Fong, fostered by the long hours of Iago’s absence at sea. Not that the slightest impropriety took place between them but in helping the fisherman’s wife by tending the fire, cleaning the simple clay pots, washing clothes and attending to the primitive tasks of daily life, they chatted and smiled. Ximenez had never been so happy, no other woman had ever touched him with the kindness of Ah Fong and he would have died for her rather than have her hurt in any way. When one day she cut herself on her leg and the wound turned septic, Ximenez opened the red and throbbing scab and sucked it until he had drained it of pus. This action, reported by Arrocheros, was clear and unambiguous evidence that Ah Fong suckled the subhuman error of God’s creation.

  To this Arrocheros was able to add one further and damning incident. On two occasions he had followed Ximenez into the brushwood. The dwarf moved fast through the undergrowth and outran his shambling pursuer, who stumbled awkwardly in his boots. When Arrocheros caught up with Ximenez he was kneeling at the rear of a goat.

  ‘And what was he doing?’ Agustin asked, prompting Arrocheros for an answer as he fell silent, his eyes wild and his right hand moving beneath his tattered gown.

  ‘It,’ Arrocheros gasped with heavy emphasis, closing his eyes and expelling his breath in a long sigh.

  ‘You mean . . . ?’ The shock of comprehension spread across Agustin’s face.

  ‘Yes,’ gulped Arrocheros, falling silent and kneeling back on his haunches, his eyes closed and breathing heavily.

  Agustin crossed himself but Arrocheros was lost in onanistic ecstasy. He did not say – and perhaps he had not seen – that Ximenez rose from the nanny goat’s udder with a small bowl of milk for Ah Fong and the fisherman’s wife. His mind had been filled then, as it was filled now, with other visions.

  Agustin spent that night on his knees, seeking guidance. The long months of privation, the poor diet, the loss of his fellow Franciscans and so many of the Holy Ones in the aftermath of the wreck, combined with his own preservation as if for some purpose, to confer upon him a sense of spiritual unity with the ineffable.

  He rose with the sun and went in search of Calcagorta and found the captain-general lying with one of the last surviving of the sailors’ women. ‘You sin, Excellency,’ he said matter-of-factly after wishing the captain-general good morning.

  ‘It is a common sin, Fray Agustin, to which I am irredeemably attached,’ Calcagorta said sharply. ‘You have not come here to save me.’

  ‘No, I have come here to tell you that we shall receive neither God’s grace nor rescue until we have purified ourselves of all the evils that surround us.’

  The precise meaning of this was obscure to Calcagorta. ‘If you mean that trull,’ he said, half-turning to indicate the hut and the woman within, but Agustin held up his hand.

  ‘I talk not of peccadilloes, Your Excellency. The having of a wench is, for a man of your vigour, stamp and high office, a pardonable offence in the eyes of God. No, Excellency, I mean that we have laboured under a curse for too long. Fray Geronimo de Ocampo was not wrong, for we have dwelt with the most insidious of associations: a witch, her familiar and a man whose very origins we
know nothing of and yet have suspected since we sailed from Cavite.’

  ‘Iago Fernandez,’ hissed Calcagorta a slow smile crossing his face. ‘Iago Fernandez and his Devil’s household. And to think I gave the bastard my sword.’

  ‘Exactly, Excellency,’ Agustin said, raising his crucifix to his lips. ‘Arrocheros has been watching him.’

  Calcagorta frowned, his pleasure seemingly modified by this revelation. ‘But he is mad.’

  ‘May not the mad see the divine, Excellency? Does their insanity not enable them to penetrate the cloisters of our closed and circumscribed minds?’ He paused as a puzzled Calcagorta digested this difficult argument, adding, ‘Since nothing happens without God willing it, is this not the purpose for which He turns their reason?’

  ‘Is it?’ Calcagorta asked ingenuously, staring at the friar.