Taino

by Jose Barreiro

  The search for the Great Khan had been planned in Spain and the admiral ceremoniously entrusted Torres, the poor converted Jew, with gold samples and types of spices and a letter for the Mongol from King Ferdinand and Queen Isabel. “I am convinced we are on the mainland, near the cities of Zayto and Quinsay, a hundred leagues more or less distant from one or the other,” he told Torres. Instructing him to take no more than five days, the admiral said: “Find the Great Khan.”

  Thirty-three. Caréy’s doubts and my certainty.

  Caréy plotted to leave the Castilian ships as soon as possible. He hoped at Cubanakán’s village he could slip away to the forest and later make his way home. But now we were barely on the edge of old Camagüeybax’s territories, with whom we had no particular relations. “What do the Castilians want, really?” he despaired, as we walked thin trails south over the coastal hills into Camagüeybax’s plains. “They want to see Cubanakán but won’t sail west; now he sends us here. I do not like this, Guaikán, and I don’t understand what you find so curious about them.”

  It was true. I was still intrigued. I still liked the Castilians. What’s more, I believed them to be men-spirits, sent by the Spirit of Spirits, first Creator, Yayá, first grandfather to us, in the Castilians’ words, “Our Father, Who Art In Heaven.” The Castilians, I felt, were wonderfully superior and clever, and anything they said was bound to be right.

  “They have done you no harm, Caréy,” I argued with my guaxeri.

  “They take me against my wish,” he responded.

  “Don’t worry so much,” I remember I told him. “We’ll all return home safely.”

  Thirty-four. Meeting Baigua, a ni-Taíno of Camagüeybax, the old ladies call for jaguajiguatu.

  We walked two days, joined by crowds that reached into hundreds, arriving at the village of a secondary cacique, one of old Camagüeybax’s ni-Taínos, by the name of Baigua. Baigua’s village was the largest by far that we had encountered, and he had been preparing a feast for a day before we arrived. Along the way we had seen small clusters of bohíos, maybe four or five together, but Baigua’s yukaieke was made up of more than fifty bohíos, probably a thousand people, and it was where Torres finally decided to stop.

  Baigua greeted us with great courtesy, in the open Taíno style. He was the sweetest of caciques, only middle-aged but doted upon by grandchildren and old ladies and appeared to have not a care in the world. He had a kind face that stood out for its gentility, even among Taíno. All around his large yukaieke, as far as you could see on a valley of rolling hills, there were planted conucos (raised beds) of yucca, ñames, potatoes, and other types of tubers, much maize, pineapple, herbs, and edible grasses, all interwoven with fruit stands of guayaba, mamey, caimitu, anon, guanabana and other fruit and nut trees. The batéy, or main plaza, had been recently swept clean. Around the cacique’s central fire, several Taíno ceremonial seats, duhos, were arranged for us.

  After exchanging gifts and eating (they served much meat of the delicious yaguasa, the Cuban tame duck), Caréy let me do the talking. As I was by then accustomed, I conveyed my heartfelt views that the covered men were truly special, sacred, that they had come from the sky in huge canoes with wings like seagulls, and they could guide a ship against the wind. Instructed by Torres, I inquired after the Great Khan. They responded that they knew him but that he lived farther west. I asked, too, after caona, guanin, or any other metal, of which they claimed to have none. Torres was obviously disappointed with the second answer but gratified by the first, although, certainly, they only referred to Cubanakán, the Cuban cacique and not the Mongol ruler. Torres showed profound relief when informed that the walk to the “Khan’s” towns would take more than fifteen suns, as it excused him from continuing the exploration. With an air of great solemnity, he announced we would spend the night at Baigua’s village and return to ship at first light.

  Poor Torres, whom I came to like very much, was a sensitive man, and could read and speak several languages. On ship, he was under constant suspicion for any lapse in his Catholicism, as he was a first-generation converted Jew. He compensated for his fate with a very light foot and quiet demeanor. Among the Castilian men, he was one of the very few who had abstained from lying with our women, making it a point to be at the admiral’s side at all prayers, although he was a man of fine features and liked to gaze nonetheless.

  The speeches over, Baigua had large gourds and clay pots of water brought in for us to wash. All the men first and then some of the women smoked large tobaccos. Torres was curious about their smoking and they showed him the tobacco plant, our coxibá, sacred offering to the Creator Beings and all cemis. The older women, who liked the tone of his words, then whispered to the cacique a request that I had anticipated by the manner of our reception. Our own Guanahaní people had the same custom whenever, quite infrequently, visitors arrived at our villages.

  “Jaguajiguatu,” the old women whispered, meaning, literally, “fire in the loins,” an old right of the housemothers to mix into the village life, and their bloodlines, the potential contributions of men visitors. Baigua, gentle chief, was delighted, even enthusiastic at the request, which I explained to Torres as best I could as the older matrons ushered out their selected young women, who commenced to wash our feet and, in Torres and Jerez’s case, to pull and half-carry them into a large bohío scented by a thick floor of freshly cut pine boughs. I never looked in on them all night, but I laughed with Caréy at Torres’s ever-weakening admonitions as the women swarmed him and silently urged from him his traveler’s duty to our Taíno grandmothers, ever watchful for their future generations. Jerez, the old slaving hog, needed little prodding, though he was a peculiarly ugly man, short of leg and long of torso, little neck. “What good seeds you’ll get from Torres, you are losing with the no-neck,” Caréy kidded, in his sardonic way, and we laughed with Baigua’s old woman bohío-mother, who said, “We’ve never seen anything like those two. They look strong. I truly hope some of the girls will take.”

  August 14, 1532

  Thirty-five. Torres reports to the admiral, Cuba as mainland.

  Not ten minutes back from Baigua’s village, while waiting for Don Christopherens to complete his meal service, Jerez had told the Santa Maria’s pilot, Sancho Ruiz, about his night of abandonment. Torres’s participation in the overnight adventure came out in the telling, and, immediately, several sailors made the most of it. Three men in particular, bad characters from the ship’s home port of Palos, made a song about “the converso’s hiccups of ecstasy, how the old rabbi must have left something for him to use, after all.”

  Finished his dinner, the admiral came out of his cabin. “Torres!” he called. Torres was before him as the sound faded.

  “Did you meet officials of the Khan?”

  “No, my captain.”

  “What did you see?”

  “A very large village, sir, very large.”

  “And the people?”

  “About the same as our guides, sir.”

  “No slipper shoes, head casks?”

  “No, sir, they were all naked as their mothers birthed them, sir.”

  “The way Torres likes them!” someone shouted, from starboard, causing some laughter. It was Clavijo, a nasty character who was one of three convicted criminals granted clemency to join the expedition.

  The admiral would have none of it. “Alguacil!” he ordered, quieting everyone. “Arrest that man.”

  Clavijo was led down the hatch by three men.

  Don Christopherens asked next about geography and the Great Khan’s whereabouts. “It’s a long way,” Torres told him. “Two weeks’ journey, maybe more.”

  “Maybe much more,” said the admiral. “Probably many leagues, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Probably, my captain.”

  “I am convinced this is mainland,” Columbus said then. He had learned that Cuba means “large territory, well planted” in the Taíno language. “We are at the southern extensions of the Great Kh
an’s dominions,” he pronounced. “Cuba of the Great Khan.”

  Torres, of course, knew better, as did Jerez. Caréy and I had even told the admiral, several times, that Cuba can be rounded by canoe. It is a very large land, indeed, but an island. The admiral never quite conceded the point. He kept insisting it a mainland, and, as I have written earlier, insisted on it completely on the second voyage, as we traveled Cuba’s long southern coast.

  Thirty-six. Cibanakán, my father-uncle, comes on board.

  We sailed east from there, as the admiral decided to round the cape of Cuba at Maisí Point and strike southward to explore the large island of Bohío, now Santo Domingo or Española. Touching points on the coast of Cuba, the ships took in sixteen more Taínos, chosen from the crowds to be kept as captives. This new action disconcerted me. Like our own Guanahaní people taken by force, the Cuban Taínos were selected for their strength and physical appeal. Of our own men, three had already slipped overboard at appropriate moments, hitching rides on the canoes of friends. In one case, the rescuer was none other than my uncle, Cibanakán, who later returned to get me, talked at length with me, and ended up staying. Cibanakán being at the time some forty-five years of age, we made up a story about his wife and children being aboard in order to obtain the admiral’s permission. “He should work with you to keep our captives calm,” he told me.

  Thirty-seven. The old man Guamax, his curse on the admiral.

  I promised to tell about the elder Guamax, the old cacique of Baracoa who held the name at the time of the first voyage. I believe he was related to the other great cacique of eastern Cuba, Bayamo, whom we met in the first of my pages.

  As the Taíno men and women taken on the Cuban coast numbered twenty or more, the story of the takings spread on land. From coastal promontories, signals of smoke that told of seaborne danger (very black smoke from the resin of the jobo tree) could be seen, and for days after a taking, shore after shore turned up empty. Once our sailors, ashore to search an empty village, found the skull and bones of a grandfather, as customary, resting in a basket near the ceiling of a tall bohío. After the admiral inspected it and both Caréy and I explained its significance, the sailors played with it on the beach, in sight of his hidden relatives, who watched from a hill out of reach. Two sailors tossed the skull around by its long hair, finally discarding it into a river. I remember being sickened by their game. This occurred, I am reasonably certain, near the end of November 1492. I had been with the admiral six weeks.

  On December 3, as I count suns in my memory, after three days of absolutely contrary wind, the caravels moved east along the coast of northern Cuba, entering small coves as they made their way out of the Baracoa area. That day, as we took final pass of a wide river mouth, the local ni-Taínos, despite their fear of the Castilians, perceived us to be leaving and several dozen canoes came out. One of our captive Indians, taken days before, pointed out to me an old man, tall and thin and wrinkled, wearing a wide headdress, who directed his young paddlers round the stern of the Santa Maria, where Columbus was standing. “Taíno-ti, Guamax-cacique,” I heard a captive man say, next to me, by way of greeting the old man.

  The old man who at that time held the title of Guamax pointed directly at the admiral, took off his headdress, and slipped into the water. Kicking against the current, he rubbed himself with sudsy digo herbs all through his body and, when cleansed, swam to just below the admiral, who looked down at him. Guamax spoke.

  “Here I am in the water, a fish in my river. Understand that my words are clean, like my body in this river. Now hear me: my sons and daughters you have in your canoe. I know they have been swallowed. You are to let them go. Those are my children who belong to me. Now, you must respond.”

  The admiral understood not a word, and I wasn’t much help. I was getting so I could understand many of their Castilian words, and I could interpret their wishes for my people, but old Guamax’s speech shocked me dumb, speaking as it did to the only secret doubt in my immense (at that moment) reverence for the Castilians.

  “Respond!” the cacique demanded, when the admiral, who perceived the scolding tone, stared at him.

  “Do not take them, for I will curse the Guamíquina his red hairs,” old man Guamax said. “You will be crazy among our trees and rocks. You will die a fool.”

  At this moment, another man taken from us, Manaya, yelled back from the boat. “You will be the one that dies, if you threaten the Guamíquina.” Manaya took up a sword and a crossbow, showing them to old man Guamax, who was still in the water. “This big knife, it slices a tree in half. This arrow shooter will pierce the clouds. Don’t make the sky-men angry, old cacique.”

  Old man Guamax made no answer, swimming slowly away and slipping into his canoe. From the canoe, he stared at the stern of the Santa Maria, then ordered his men to paddle away. I remember Caréy standing next to me on the Santa Maria. He was more trusted now and had the run of the ship after his trek into Camagüey. Increasingly fearful to be lost among Taíno angered at the loss of their relatives, he had not dared run away. At that moment, like many times during those first days, Caréy took my hand in friendship and held it tightly. “I hope you are right about our getting home safely,” he would say.

  August 17, 1532

  Thirty-eight. Life on board and learning Castilian ways; out from Punta Maisí, at one with the admiral.

  All us shipboard Indians, as the admiral had begun to call our people, were closely watched. No more escapes were to occur. We were to sail to Haiti, the Bohío, a major Taíno homeland. Among the captives, and even myself, an intense fear arose, moving now as we were to lands beyond our usual realms. We knew of the Bohío land, of course, as we knew of Borikén and Xamaica and all the many islands in our fecund sea, but we feared the added distance from our home. A fearful outcry now began among three women from the village of Quiribe, across my island from Old Guanahaní village. I had not known them much before this trip and had kept my distance as they were harsh to strangers, even people from the same island. They wailed about not going home, about their fate to be eaten by our legendary enemies, the Kwaib “thigh-eaters/heart-eaters,” who were known to raid our coasts.

  By day’s end, the outcry affected the men so that everyone was sad and crying, and the leaders took the job of imploring for their liberty, for canoes to make the trip home, for guarantees of return. “We are heading for the heart-eaters’ islands, the thigh-eaters. Bad men who eat other men,” our people claimed to the admiral. I seconded them, though timidly, but the admiral had made up his mind that we would sail across the (windward) passage to Bohío, and there was nothing to be done.

  Thirty-nine. Ignoring the feelings of my own people.

  I am chagrined now, asking myself what kept me hopeful about the covered men. Yes, many of us were taken forcefully, I would think, but no one has been harmed. It did not seem so to me, in any case, and, then too, I was busy every moment on board. I kept with young Rodrigo and often Caréy joined us. Among our men, six were learning ship’s ropes, and they included three from Guanahaní—Cibanakán, Caréy, and myself. Those of us on the ropes, or, in my case, often at the admiral’s side with Rodrigo, had little contact, for days at a time, with the huddled group in the holds that came on top to sit together in the sun and, without task, could only wonder on their fate.

  Forty. Getting closer to the admiral.

  Rodrigo was grommet, cabin boy, and, with my arrival, Castilian instructor. He taught me the daily routines, their timings and sequences and commands, and he taught me to never disturb the admiral’s habits of prayer and dining, so that his mood of fatherly disposition toward young men could be sustained. That was the knack of the early Don Christopherens, I think, that fooled my tender heart. Going through his day, particularly when busy with stellar calculations and the making of knots and sea leagues, the admiral could be a most happy and pleasing personality. The day he saw me keep the ampolleta, the hourglass, for the first time, he worked at his desk, writing and y
et noticing my attentiveness. Rodrigo had set me up to the task of turning over the glass as the sand ran out every half hour. I took the shift from three to seven in the afternoon and was strictly attentive throughout my eight spins. “Excellent,” Don Christopherens commended, talking to Rodrigo, who came to relieve me. “Your friend has a sharp eye.”

  Don Christopherens liked chickpeas and lentils in soups, took to using our cassabe bread almost immediately (for mopping his bowl). Near shore, he was always pleased to get a basket of fresh fruit, which I would get for him at least once a day, and often he would have me sit and look out his small porthole as he wrote and napped, then wrote again. Not often, but occasionally during those first days, in the reverie of long tropical afternoons, he would pull my head to his shoulder and sing me a song or recite a poem or tell a story from the Bible. He never reached that kind of intimacy with Rodrigo, who served him zealously, but would with me, which endeared me to his instinct and his ways and added to my considerable resolution at the time to champion the covered men’s mission to my people.

  Even Caréy and Cibanakán, who followed my lead but wearied of the experience, could not help admire the admiral his way with a ship or any kind of boat. Although we helped him a great deal to navigate our channels and reefs, it was always uncanny the way he could immediately size up shoals and sandbanks, depths and winds, and the landfall ahead. Long after I too knew the Castilians were no good at all, I would be startled awake by the certainty of his directions, that quality he had to pull my heart, to make me want to cling to his back. That certainty of his word during storms and dangerous moments at sea later carried me through my second season of servile stupor with the Castilians; truly, he projected a God of Destiny, a naming God, his suddenly distant eyes focused on the far point of the horizon.