Of the meeting, I heard the first part, up until the good friar’s intervention, when Doña Catalina got my attention. After the bishop’s blessing, Suazo called it to order, explaining the contemplations now before the king’s court, relating to the troubles of the Bahuruku Indians, under Cacique Enriquillo. The meeting got started with a recounting of the Enriquillo affair through its thirteen years of hostilities and campaigns. The lesser oidores read testimonies from important people in the island expressing the wish to settle a peace with Enriquillo. I looked at Valenzuela, Enriquillo’s pushed-aside master, who sat silently as even Suazo acknowledged the early grievances of the young cacique. The oidor principal even spoke of some “lack of understanding” shown to Enriquillo when his complaint came to old Vadillo’s jurisdiction. The oidor Vadillo, brother-cousin of the early magistrate, also sat silently.
The commander of the guard reported next. He informed the señores that Enriquillo’s fortresses had been attacked by half a dozen well-stocked campaigns. Not a one had been successful, he said. The loss of Castilian men was more than two hundred, counting all the campaigns. Several major estates had gone to ruin pursuing the military destruction of Enriquillo. There was considerable fear that more and more Africans, slaves, would take the cimarrón trail and join Enriquillo. “The Indians are very hard to pursue,” said the commander. “They eat anything, anywhere, and somehow always manage to survive and keep going. Our troops must be supplied and are not used to the constant climbing. The Bahuruku mountains have many ridges and tall points. The only attack that might succeed would be to penetrate the Bahuruku with fighting cuadrillas from at least fourteen directions at once. Such a crusade would be very expensive, and even that could fail. Were a major campaign to fail now, I am afraid many Indians and Africans would determine to join the armed camps.”
Perhaps not too long ago, that commander would have been called for cowardice and lack of spirit, however, tonight there was considerable approbation in the assemblage. One cattleman said: “Give the cacique his due; bring him to a peace, negotiate with him. We shall give the group a tract and be done with the damnable war.”
A merchant man added: “Not only are the armed campaigns ruinous for our townships and estates; while the Indians are in the bush, all merchandizing is reduced. Little of consequence travels overland anymore. And even docking ships have been attacked. Our commerce is at times paralyzed by the nuisance assaults. I say as the cattleman from Juan de la Maguana, make peace with the devils and be done with it.”
When Judge Suazo introduced Las Casas, he was most generous, crediting the good friar his steadfast search for a more just treatment of the natural race of the islands. An acquaintance of the rebel cacique in his youth, said Judge Suazo, Las Casas should be recognized for his providential demeanor to make himself available to help secure the peace that is sought. I prayed silently as Las Casas stood to speak that Enriquillo’s safety would be at the center of his thoughts and words.
“Many of you no doubt believe the Indian to be inferior to our race,” he began, and my heart sank as my mind paid attention. “You are incorrect. The Indians of these islands and over most of the mainland are a race of innocents, pure and gracious people, who had their own beliefs. The original inhabitants you hold now as servants and slaves met us in a state of grace. They have ancient stories, like the Greeks of our ancestry. They are still endowed with that nature. But our own ancestor, Adam, only lasted six hours in that state before the Lord kicked him out of paradise.”
Everybody murmured at once. Las Casas was so brazen it made me shudder. “Sodomites,” I heard a guard say at a nearby window. “That priest is still a puker.”
The good friar further demanded that the assembled encomenderos guarantee their Indians sufficient food and other benefits “if you are not ready to give them up, although that is precisely what you should do if you would respect the doctrine of Jesus Christ.” He reminded them, “I have not absolved anyone holding Indians for almost twenty years. Wolves thou shalt not be among these sheep. I believe it is wrong in the eyes of our Lord.”
More murmuring was heard, some quite loud. One phrase I agreed with: “Stick to the issue, cura. What about the cacique Enriquillo, in the Bahuruku?”
“Peace with Enriquillo, yes. Respect Enriquillo. But free all the Indians, as the king would have them do in Peru and Nicaragua, where he sent word via my own person, to dissolve the encomienda.”
From the center row, immediately before the oidores, a rather stout man in a long blue shirt stood and reared his head. He said: “The good friar, as he is called, protector of the Indians, will forgive a mere writer and servant of the king if he takes issue with the friar’s usual misbegotten logic.”
It was Oviedo himself, I could tell, as the speaker approached the platform. Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, the official historian and enemy of Las Casas—I had heard he was a recent arrival on a caravel from Spain. He went on: “The king, whom I have seen frequently, has not renounced the encomienda and has in truth congratulated the encomenderos, I heard him say so just this past summer, for the dutiful task of imparting Christian doctrine to Indians. Your information is old, Father Las Casas. Or maybe it simply does not apply to Española.”
It was at this moment that Catalina called to me from the street through her daughter Julia, who simply walked by and gained my attention. I was sorry to have to go, as I was both fascinated and chagrined by the widening debate the good friar had aroused. The anti-encomienda talk, as I had anticipated, bothered everybody. I could see the discussion was going to get heated.
Fifty-three. Dissimulated romancing with Catalina.
For an extra moment, I watched the clique of Vadillo, Valenzuela, and, not far distant, Pero Lopez, the man I hate most in the world. I stared at Lopez that extra moment, thinking quickly in my mind as usual how much I have wanted to kill him. I could see Father Las Casas’s face reddening, too, and said a silent prayer for him to stay with Enriquillo’s cause. Then, lowering my hat and showing a bit of limp to give the appearance of a smallpox-scarred mánso Indian, I went looking for Doña Catalina.
The street was quite crowded, but I found my old friend around two right-hand corners, sitting in a group of young women in a crowd of mánsos. Catalina wore a long cotton skirt and blouse and, as usual, held a baby in one arm. She was small and thin but wiry and alert. As I found her, she was instructing the baby’s young mother, no more than fourteen years old, in the use of an aloe salve for a case of butt rash. In the moonlight, my eyes watered, as I had not seen her in more than three years.
Catalina had loyal people around her, including several Negro girls who challenged me directly with their eyes. But Catalina jumped up to greet me as I lowered my head to get her blessing. “Diego,” she said. “My old boyfriend.”
I had to laugh. I had never been her boyfriend, but it is true she is not ten years older than me, and once, when I knew her after the Massacre of Anacaona’s Banquet, we shared a common adventure. At that time I still had Ceyba, my wife, and our twin sons, all of whom I hid with Catalina for several months before being pressed into Diego Velazquez’s service in 1505. Later, we toiled at the same encomienda, survived it, lost track of each other, and reencountered around 1520, by which time we both had gained a semblance of freedom, I as monk’s servant and she as housemaid in the Valenzuela estate. Time and again we have seen each other, which I truly enjoy, as she is the closest person I have for a relative; Catalina is like a mother-aunt to me, or maybe like an older, distant cousin.
Tonight, for this guajira of mine from an earlier life, I had a present. She received it graciously. It was the ground manatí brain bone, not for the baby, so much, but our own best cure for side pains, which Catalina and the women she cares for often suffer. She had something for me, too, a good stack of tobacco leaves, selected for low aroma and consistent dryness, the kind to be mixed in our cohoba.
Slowly, without any overtness, we walked into the darkness, where we held han
ds. Nearby, in door frames on both sides of the street, pairs of lovers embraced in the darkness. One man was a guard, and it seemed safe to assume that other guards would not disturb couples there. “We are not a sun’s walk from each other,” she said. “But I never see you.”
“In my moon walk, I see you,” I said. “ I will always do that for you, and for your line.”
The moon walk is a ceremony I acquired through Catalina, in the days of our bush run with Ceyba and the boys. Already a midwife to her people, Catalina took Ceyba in and nursed her ailments through that nightmare of violence and persecution. More than once we gave thanks together, and it was during one of those times she taught me the midwife’s moon walk as a thanksgiving to the women’s medicine and a way to bind our spiritual lines.
“My concern is for your nephew,” I said, contemplating that no one else around us would know whom I meant. But I leaned Catalina against the wall, facing me.
“The baby boy is in danger,” she whispered. “There is talk of striking him at the first opportunity, at the earliest point of actual contact, before getting to the stage of sitting down together.”
“Why early?” I said.
“They would commit the act in the moment of confusion between war and peace. They are certain that he will be drawn out of the Bahuruku this time, maybe into the fields or the lake shore.”
“Who would do it?”
“My master’s talk is to pay two guards to strike him quick. Valenzuela, as rightful holder of the nephew’s encomienda, would be easily validated to attempt an apprehension or a punishment. Your former holder, Pero Lopez, has made visits to the Valenzuela house.”
“And if the king mandates different? If he mandates a clear peace offering? Such is the good friar’s claim.”
“You know these señores, mi Diego. They blasphemy the king his goiter. They believe in cutting off the head, then finding the body. It is true that many are for peace, but only because Enriquillo has proven so costly in war. And they are desperate to quiet the island and attract more ships.”
“What you tell me may save the nephew’s life,” I said.
“I will think of everything I remember and hear everything I can,” she said.
She worried that Enriquillo might expose himself prematurely and offered the use of one of her daughters as a go-between that the young cacique could trust. I reminded her such an offer would divulge her relationship to him. Maybe, she said, but if the negotiations are final and conclusive, it will not matter. We all want to help in my family, she said. We would be offended, especially Inez (her own name for Julia), if we could not help in every way we can.
I agreed to set up the deal with Enriquillo and to use her daughter Inez as both currier and message. I mean by this that her actual identity will tell the cacique whether an ambush is expected or not. If an ambush is planned, we would not send Inez but a Castilian as a messenger.
Fifty-four. Catalina believes in both us and them.
Catalina. She is so keen. How good it was to talk to her again. How good to hold her and pretend to be lovers.
We agreed to meet in church, at the earliest Mass each Sunday. She is a beata, a church matron. Her Catholic vocation has saved her life many times and has given her a certain respect among the Castilian ladies and even the señores. But she has given up nothing of our peoples’ beliefs. “I believe what they tell me about the Jesus, but what they say about us, that our cemis and areitos are the devil’s works, that I don’t believe,” she says. Before we parted, she stroked my right leg, always sore. Her thin hands are strong. She massaged the muscle at the front of the leg but directed the strength to the back of the thigh, where the Cuban caimán’s long tooth dug deep into nerve and muscle nineteen fateful years ago. When she was done, I stroked the back of her neck and shoulders. “Take bark from the jobo tree,” she advised. “Boil it thick and make a jelly. While still warm, rub this jelly into the back of your thighs and calves. If you cannot, I have some. We could meet someday, and I will do this for you.”
Fifty-five. The meeting ends.
It is late in the evening. I tire now of writing, although I like it more and more. I find I enjoy the telling of actual happenings and think to preserve these memories for my boys, if they would ever return. This is the hopeful part of me. Catalina is one of my old ones; I have been a fool not to look for her more. She is an ally, a sister, a doctor, a knower of my heart.
The meeting was still going on as I got back to my place by the window. Judge Suazo, oidor principal, was giving the summation. On the platform, Las Casas looked one way, and from his chair on the main floor Oviedo looked the other way. Suazo pressed the question of peace with Enriquillo, and he once again praised Las Casas for enlisting in the endeavor. I chuckled that he admonished Las Casas as I had, although for different reasons. “The protector of the Indians is perhaps too persistent in his opinions about the encomienda,” Suazo said. “But we all thank him for his involvement now and continue to encourage his assistance in bringing the Enriquillo to a negotiating parley.” It seemed that despite Las Casas’s antagonistic words, the group was more than agreeable to a peace settlement on the Enriquillo war.
“Enriquillo will come in,” Las Casas said. “He is a man of peace.”
“Yes, a treaty of peace from the king will bring the Carib out,” Vadillo responded for the oidores, using an ominous word, Carib, that signaled dubious intent. Las Casas simply nodded back, and just past him Pero Lopez wore a thin smile as he stood to go join the crowd around the oidores.
A toast of wine was made for the oidores by the major señores and the meeting was concluded.
September 20, 1532
Fifty-six. Good-bye to Las Casas, ashamed of my writing.
I helped Las Casas embark for Puerto Rico, Borikén in our language, this morning, ferrying his trunks to the docks on the convent wagon. I know he means to go to Spain from there but dares not anounce it beforehand. We spoke while the ship’s servants loaded up water and high stacks of freshly baked cassabe bread.
All Spanish here eat our cassabe bread now, although I remember a time when, except for the admiral, most of them disdained it, “Like eating chalk.” If kept dry, the cassabe lasts a long time and is good food. Our sacred torts complement any type of meat soup or gravy and will fill your gut, even by themselves. I say they are sacred because to us our main foods were all appreciated in ceremony, and among them the most appreciated was the yucca, which had its own areito songs and was represented in our principal cemi. I looked around this morning, as the cassabe was loaded on ship, and had to remark how much of our Taíno ways the España people (the good friar taught me this word) have taken up. Looking back from the docks, nearly all of the houses, including the tavern, are actually bohíos, walls of palm wood tied together with wet, hard-drying bejuco vines and roofs made of palm thatch. In the interior and along the coasts, the small Spanish settlements all rely on the bohío construction. Many a Spanish fisherman now sails our waters in our Taíno canoe, and lots of them sleep in our hammock.
“Temporary matters,” Las Casas commented back, cutting my argument. “For all its ills, our Christian civilization will impose itself. It is inevitable. For instance, you don’t see many thatch-roofed churches or government houses anymore.”
“You don’t hear many areitos, either,” I said. “Not after Velazquez, for one, beheaded every behike holy people he could find.”
“The behikes were idolators,” he said. “I disagreed with their execution, but I worked many times to convince them to Christianity.”
I felt particularly proud of our Taíno ways this morning. Yesterday afternoon I prepared Catalina’s recipe for jobo bark liniment to rub on my legs, and it greatly lessened the stiffness. I admit, too, that seeing Catalina has rekindled many sentiments. But I did not want to fight with the good friar today, particularly as he was about to board ship, so I held my tongue.
Las Casas cleared his throat. He had a way of doing that when he wan
ted to change the subject. My reference to the execution of behikes he clearly found discomforting. My “for one” recalled a particular event, from the time of the campaign after the Massacre of Anacaona’s Banquet, in 1503, when Diego Velazquez, sent later to conquer Cuba, beheaded two behikes. Las Casas, before becoming a priest, was a soldier in that campaign and witnessed the murders without objecting.
In front of us, several sailors watched as two muscled Negro dock workers struggled to load a recently fixed anchor. “I have read your pages on the discovery and your first look at Cuba,” Las Casas said, as we walked up the dock to kill a bit of time. “Some of the detail is interesting, but your memory is a bit clouded. For instance, you don’t mention the Pinzóns at all, Columbus’s other captains. Pinzón left him, you know. Took off for Jamaica or God knows where, while the admiral made his way here to Española.”
“But I haven’t gotten that far,” I protested. “I planned to write something about Pinzón taking off like that.”
“The other thing is you make them sound so wise and good—I mean your old people.”
“Yes, that is how I remember them,” I said.
“No doubt, but try to be more true, more realistic. You have to tell the bad with the good.”
For some reason I felt his commentary on my writing like a slap on my forehead. I felt revealed and vulnerable to the priest.
“Finally, don’t write so much about yourself,” he continued. “You embarrass me with your midnight ejaculations…”
I wanted to run. I had forgotten what I actually wrote, and it was something very private as I wrote but to hear it spoken revolted me. I felt trapped by my words, and I didn’t like it.
“Writing is very much like confession,” Las Casas commented, softening, as I think he could see my chagrin. “But the best writing goes beyond one’s own person to describe the sequence of events accurately.”
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