It was the admiral I watched. He was totally clothed, along with six of the others. The rest of them, bare chested, wore short pants and on their heads, red stocking caps. One man in particular was very hairy, large tufts covering even his shoulders, and all their faces, except the admiral’s, were hairy, too. As he finished his oration, the admiral handed the staff to two sailors, who jammed it solidly into the sand and then took positions around him, weapons at the ready, as he walked toward our brush.
I must admit something now that still confuses me. As I looked at Don Christopherens the first time, I felt a great glow of warmth, a happiness inside my chest I have never been able to explain, and it drew me out of the brush and onto the beach, pulling a dozen of my men. As if enchanted, we walked toward the admiral, directly and without fear. Suddenly the two sailor-soldiers brandished swords, running forward menacingly and we all jumped back. They ran toward us, and we ran, a powerful terror in the calves. Then they stopped. We stopped and I could hear laughter from them. I spotted their red-haired chief, their Guamíquina, whose palm was raised toward us and the soldiers now dropped behind him. So I walked toward him again, and he came toward us with palm raised as my father-uncle, Cibanakán, properly walked before me to pronounce our people’s formal greetings.
June 19, 1532
Twenty. Meeting Rodrigo and the Castilians, my turn of life, and leaving Guanahaní, my home.
Today, I think of young Rodrigo, and it is indeed a very proper day to think of my dear friend. One of my two twins, born on this day, named Heart of Earth in Taíno, I named Rodrigo in the Castilian, after my good friend. Among the Castilians, I value no one higher than Rodrigo, not even the good friar.
Rodrigo was there on the first day, a young man of fourteen years, kind and soft-spoken. I remember how he came to me, a hawk’s bell dangling from his fingers. “Para ti,” he said. I responded, “Taíno-ti.” And though we spoke different languages, we understood each other immediately. I took the hawk’s bell, a great wonder as it would ring when shaken, rather as one of our maracas, or gourd rattles, but with a high, metallic pitch. Then I cast around to spot one of our men who held a jaba, or cord sack, full of fruit. I pulled several guayabas and returned the gift, indicating with my hand that he should crack it open and eat. Rodrigo followed my instructions, whereupon Don Christopherens came toward us and I also offered him a guayaba, cracking it quickly to expose the sweet part as he extended his hand.
Thus we stared at each other and smiled. More hawk’s bells were offered, more guayabas and other fruits were returned. Three men from a coastal village situated around the bend of the cove now joined us. Don Christopherens spoke out loud, locking into our eyes as we crowded around him. Several times Don Christopherens raised his arms toward the sky. Then my father-uncle, Cibanakán, also spoke. “The spirit men of the skies have arrived,” he said. “Tell your communities to bring them food and other gifts.” Turning toward me, he said: “We must go and tell our elders. They have instructions for such a day. Where these men come from there is no death. We may be very lucky today.”
By instinct I now looked for Rodrigo. I spotted him by the sea brush, urinating. “Para-ti,” I called to him in our new language. “Guaikán I am, and I go now.” He looked at me in wonder, then pointed to my chest and his ear. “Nombre?” he asked, and though I did not know the word, I understood him. I said again, “Guaikán, Guaikán.” He repeated: “Guaikán.” Now he said: “Rodrigo.” I said: “Oligo.” He smiled and nodded his head to affirm my word. He put his hand on my shoulder. “Amigo,” he said. “Oligo,” I said. We laughed.
I looked him up and down. He was all covered with clothes, even his feet were crisscrossed with rope. I caught myself staring, and he read my thoughts, grabbing his groin and pointing at mine, again nodding. I laughed, as I had noticed him passing his waters. Our men, of course, went naked. My yuán was free. Everybody, both our men and theirs, stared a lot that day. Then, while some remained to stare a while longer, most of us walked away.
Twenty-one. Report to the elders and pubescence.
That night we had a meeting at Old Guanahaní village. Everyone came, even the oldest of grandmothers, crowding around the cohoba elders as the inhaling mixture was prepared and the men lined up at the edge of the trees, inserting vomiting spatulas to cleanse themselves.
The old-man title holder of Guanahaní, whom we called the Guanahabax, chose the opening song. Appropriately the song told of Deminán and his three brothers—the dual set of spiritual twins—our spirit forebears who traveled the clouds, enduring adventures and creating the sea and islands of our world. Yucahuguama Bagua Maórocoti, Grand Spirit of our sustaining world, was thanked for the creation of the mother of the four brothers, but it was the four, the doers and makers, who were intoned. Significantly, the cohoba was not touched to start. The old men had opted to inhale only after the reports of the greeting on the beach.
Everyone was so greatly excited, waiting in anticipation for the reports, even the food was neglected. The song ended and there was a pause in expectation of what we called, in our ceremonies, the little feast, which did not materialize, as the women food preparers and all their assistants were intent on listening. Aware of the anticipation, the nimble Cibanakán stood, holding his open palm out to the group.
“I will start,” he said, as the old men nodded, “to tell of the wondrous day. A Guamíquina has come, I saw today. A Guamíquina and three vessels, full of hair-faced, covered beings. Nothing I have ever seen prepares us for this day. Yet I saw them smile, mostly. They traded gifts with us, and everything they have is wonderful, just wonderfully wonderful. Small rattles, made of guanin, pretty, pretty noise. A cloth so smooth I wanted to eat it. A long sharp edge, so sharp and heavy my cousin Turey was cut in his hand as he tried to hold it.”
Everyone looked at Turey, who stared shyly at the ground. A bandage made by the red-haired Guamíquina himself was wrapped around his hand. His old mother, next to him, took the hand and raised it up and Turey smiled.
“The Guamíquina,” Cibanakán continued. “He speaks to the sky, and his men murmur with him as he intones orations. It sounded nice, very nice. His hair is red like the inside of a parrot’s wing and wavy like the sea. And he has a very quick way to strike fire. Amazing. A click on a click and there is flame, red like his hair.”
Something wonderful and strange was happening to me. The sun was low on the horizon, one of those beautiful afternoons, red on the water, red in the sky, the end of a day so full of wonder I could hardly sit. Yet the elders had opened the meeting and it was impolite to fidget. So I sat still though my heart raced, flapping in my chest like a fish in a canoe, and a warming glow covered my abdomen, my inner thighs, my yúan.
I want to be truthful, so much I have seen and endured since that evening. But that night, after Cibanakán’s story was discussed and digested, as my turn came to speak, a great honor considering my age, I felt myself stiffen as I stood and in my chest a heat, an excitement I had never imagined could happen.
I write this because it truthfully happened to me. That very day and moment, my body came of age. Everything in my heart and body and in my mind expanded at once. As we are used to among my people, especially in those days, I paid no attention to my nudity, I only felt my heart expand. “I love the new people,” I said quite forcefully. “They are of the sky and of the earth, too. They have wonderful things, and as my father-uncle relates, they think of fire and flame erupts.” I admit that I rhapsodized, and with an eloquence I did not know I contained: words of love, excitement, reverence, and wonder flowing from my delirious heart. I recalled the oldest of areitos, how they expressed the beauty of our ways, how happy must be the far-gone spirits (everyone, of course, thought of my father), how the wonder of Deminán and his creative hand must have guided the covered men here, how lucky we were. They are friendly, I kept repeating, there is nothing to fear, they smile and bring wonderful gifts, and we should love them so very, very much.
After me, others wanted to describe the day, but Guanahabax cut off the speaking. “We have heard the essence,” he said. “Now the old men will smoke. Then we will snort our cohoba powders. The spirits will advise us. Of one thing I am certain: the life of our people has changed forever.”
Only the old men sat in Guanahabax’s circle that night. His women assistants brought them the big and small hicara, the big one brimming with the sacred powder. Twice before I had snorted with them, gestures of sympathy with a bereaved boy. Both times I simply slept and afterward remembered nothing. Guanahabax told me this was proper, as I was not yet a man. “Their messages will come later, in your dreams. All at once, at your age, it would kill you.”
Sleep took me in a hammock in my mother’s thatch-roofed bohío as I surrendered my hold to the sounds of the cohoba; the wheezing and coughing, the snorting and the whacking, the loud wails and thick laughter, and the early morning songs blending with my dreamtime thoughts. Once, turning over, I caught glimpse of my mother’s gentle face, gazing enchantedly at me. I was the light of my mother’s eye. All of my young life, except for times at sea with my father, I always took sleep in my mother’s gaze. She would often sing me an old mothers’ oration. It went: “I sense your breathing with my eyes, I collect the motion of the distant waves into my ears; blowing my loving breath toward you, I wish you into your dreamtime peacefully, with all the love of a mother’s heart.”
The sun was just up when the urge to piss awoke me. I walked to the brush with such a terribly stiff yuán I could not force it down to piss. I had to nearly hunch over on all fours to direct my spray at the ground.
Some eyes were already watching, and company soon gathered to greet the day. But I was sleepy and dived into my hammock once more, barely clutching in my mind the scene of sleeping cohoba elders, curled up as babies where they had fallen around the fire. A man who had seen me take the dog stance in my morning predicament walked by. “Sleep, puppy,” he teased me.
And I slept. And thus it happened for me, a dream I have always remembered. I dreamed a rare woman, light of hair and complexion, not on a hammock but on long, white sheets on a wooden bed, in a cool, moist room, my yuán growing like a yucca, old in my spirit and young in body, and she held me tightly in her sand-colored arms in a place very far away, a place I had to go to, a place of huge caves, and her body so appealing, and suddenly the dissolving sensation, full release, sounds and smells of yucca starch popping from the squeezing of the yucca massa in the long squeezing net, what they called the çibucán.
I woke up sticky with the generational water. It was my first time, and I understood that the time of turning had come upon me. It was not very strange, as many times I heard the men talk, my brother-cousins and father-uncles, about how it happened to them. Since we come from the earth, they always said, it is a natural thing. I felt not strange thus that morning, but oddly weakened, yet agreeable with myself.
Nearby, a group of women did squeeze yucca juice out of a çibucán. I could smell its starch. My mother was among them. She had eight women working in rhythm. As always, I felt respectful of the sight of women’s hands squeezing out the yucca’s sticky white sap, powerfully poisonous yet a great preserver of food. Across the batéy, at the ceremonial fire, several elders huddled, whispering with a sharpness that pulled my gut. I washed at the stream and joined them.
Twenty-two. The old cahobaneros’ vision on the night and morning of my short farewell.
“I found confusion in our Spirit World, nothing was familiar to me, except the wailing of an owl. I heard loud, sharp noises, booming like thunder. I heard strange voices, a strange loud singing, and I heard Taínos, men and women, with voices like ours, also wailing,” old man Garaboy reported. He was a hearer. In the cohoba this was his gift. Often he heard old songs, orations, even conversations. Spirit frogs would talk to him, and snakes and, not long before this day, a grandfather manatí.
Sometimes Garaboy returned from his cohoba journey with great stories. All day he could tell us tales. He would say: “Only the fish do not speak; only their world is silent.” Then he would tell about the pregnant manatí who fooled two hungry sharks, “just a few suns ago,” and he would say exactly where this had occurred, on what reef of what cove of our little island. We were always enchanted by his recounting of events from the lives of our relatives in the sea and the forest. “The secret of the pregnant manatí,” he would wink. “She stiffens like a log in the water. You see, sharks are so easily fooled.”
The fish would not talk to Garaboy, so he would not hunt them. He accepted their meat, though sparingly, as gift food from men he had raised, such as my father. But he would not kill a being to whom he could not apologize in the cohoba. Even in my excitement to go, I felt a great love for old Garaboy, who was so keen and could blend into trees like a flat brown vine.
Sad this morning, old Garaboy spoke little this day of a cohoba night full of wailing. I struggled to appreciate what he had said, holding back my impatience to arrive at the beach, to greet again my friend Rodrigo, the Guamíquina, and their many wonderful things. Old man Garaboy looked truly old to me, flabby thin legs that he now crossed, dropping like a sack upon his haunches.
Axeax was even older than Garaboy. He reported his experience next. “I saw a large number of grandfathers,” Axeax said. He as a seer in the cohoba. “They were crying, too. They scratched at themselves. One stood forward and put on a garment, covering his arms. Then, he put on a garment that covered his legs. I was walking closer when suddenly this man pulled his garments off and threw them at me. He was young but very bony. He had scabs on his face and puss came out of his eyes…” Axeax stopped in midsentence. He cried softly. Lifting an old, wispy hand, he showed that it trembled. “There was much fear in my dream.”
Axeax went on at length, repeating his cohoba dream. What he related would scare anyone, and it touched me to my spine, but I couldn’t find a place for it in my reflecting heart, vibrating on that special day with my great recent discoveries, both on the beach and in my hammock. Yes, I was impatient with the old men’s stories. They seemed remote compared with a run to the beach and the sight of the marvelous mountain canoes and the many shapes and colors the covered men gave their things. I loved my father’s uncles and grandfathers but I felt at that moment I would have them forever.
Guanahabax felt my impatience and called me to him. “You must stay with us a while this morning,” he told me, much to my dismay. Guanahabax knew me the best. He had backed up my mother’s midwife when I was born, praying with my father for strength of my mother’s and me over several nights. Guanahabax grasped my knee firmly, and as always I felt a great deal of love from him. He called on Ayragüex, the third old man who had snuffed cohoba the previous night.
Ayragüex smiled as he pushed a staff into the earth to help himself up before casting it aside. His thin, muscular forearm was extended into a fist, which now made a slow lizzard-head bobbing motion. “I saw them fucking,” he said. “The new men have white haunches, hairy white haunches. They are spirits, I am certain. But they are the fuckingest spirits,” he said in a chuckle that stopped suddenly. “It rains until it stops. They fall on our women like logs. My advice is: nothing sacred should take place today.” Ayragüex stopped talking and stood silently a few moments. I lost concentration until I found him staring at my eyes. He moved slightly toward me, whispering with a smile, “Guaikán.” Ayragüex stepped up to my ear. He was serious now. “I saw the white-skinned woman who touched you last night. She walked through our camp and straight to your hammock.”
Guanahabax leaned into me with his shoulder and put his cheek on mine. Even old man Garaboy moved toward me.
They looked determined to do something with me, but Guanahabax spoke. “There are twelve suns of ceremony prescribed for you in the cohoba, if you are to ready yourself. But we can see you are impatient to go. You have all of your life ahead but not twelve days to give us, not even one.”
Guanahabax asked me to wait for him while he went inside his bohío.
I was embarrassed by their directness, even mildly scared, but their knowledge of my intimacy was actually reassuring. I was overwhelmed with the need to run, fast as a panicked iguana, to the shore. Mind you, I had yet no sentiment that I would leave with the Castilians. I didn’t know then that I was never to see my uncles again.
Guanahabax came out of his bohío. He put a bundle in my hand, my father’s cohoba bundle. “Take this bundle of cohoba, your own spatula and rattle, your gourd and two-pronged sniffer, your feather fans. Remember that cohoba loves you. As you walk, do not turn back. We will speak to your mother and her house. Take our hearts with you. Take our dreams.”
A sadness passed over me as I percieved the farewell, but Guanahabax yanked my shoulders and pointed me toward the beach. “No more speeches,” he said. “We know there is no more time for Guaikán.”
As I walked away, he said: “Go, young son of our beloved Cohobanax. Don’t look back. Go to your destiny with the covered men.”
I ran and ran and ran, bundle in my macoutí pack. At the beach, relieved to find the ships still there, I noticed little of what was going on. With Rodrigo’s help, I snuck in early and hid out in the hole of the Guamíquina’s ship. Not only men now, but many of our young women were on the beach, swimming and paddling canoes. By midafternoon, half of the Castilian sailors were swimming naked, too. I could see them through a porthole near the food bins, where Rodrigo had found me a cubbyhole. As Ayragüex said, the “fuckingest spirits.” The Castilians kidnapped six of our Guanahaní people as they left our shores the next morning, but I was not one of them. Drunk with the pull of adventure, I pressured Rodrigo to hide me—and was the first to go in. No one else can I blame for my captivity, not even Rodrigo. I captured my own self that day, choosing to cast my lot with the Castilians. It was the last free decision of my life, as I now consider it.
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