God Carlos

by Anthony C. Winkler

  Carlos knew about none of this history though its teachings and lessons had been subtly imprinted on his soul and informed his outlook in ways that he could only act out but did not understand. He was barely able to read, having had only three years of schooling at the hands of an overworked village priest who was ahead of his time in his belief in public education. What Carlos was proudest of was that he had learned to write his first name in a shaky cursive hand and did not, like most of his shipmates, have to mark an imbecilic X when he signed up to work on a ship.

  On his way to the quay, he encountered a beggar whom bone disease had twisted into a misshapen caricature of the human body, and desiring God’s mercy after his sinful encounter with the whore, Carlos dug deep into his pocket and fished out a single maravedi, which he flipped to the wretched man, drawing peals of extravagant blessings that God would surely not overlook.

  He was whistling merrily when he finally came to the waterfront. The smell of fish assailed his nose and, as he turned a corner, a tangle of masts and rigging hung like an enormous spiderweb above ships tied up abeam on the quay. A gale churning over the Atlantic had sent many vessels scurrying into Cádiz as a haven from the storm, where they now bobbed disheveled and weather beaten.

  Scattered over the quay was a familiar ensemble of castaways, adventurers, ship jumpers, whores, scavengers, cutthroats, pickpockets, and foreigners—the same found in dirty waterfronts all over this rounded earth. Some scruffy characters ambled aimlessly past the ships; others slouched against the stained walls of stone warehouses, staring blurrily at memories of distant shores or long-lost sweethearts left behind in faraway homelands. Here and there men skulked in the shadows, scanning every stranger with a vague predatory curiosity. Some seamen huddled together in boisterous discussion about voyages and adventures they had survived. On a few of the tied-up ships, sailors squatted on deck splicing ropes or patching sails. One grommet was cleaning the foredeck of a noa with soapstone. Trolling the banks of the quay for customers were a couple of painted, aged whores. Beyond the ships and the human jetsam unfurled the open ocean, crinkled and gray in the distance, and far out to sea Carlos could glimpse an ominously dark squall line that made a sailor give thanks for solid land underfoot.

  He walked slowly down the quay, eyeing the lashed-together vessels, appraising each one with a practiced eye. He passed frigates, dismissing out of hand those equipped with oars. An impatient master who found himself on a windless sea would have his men break their backs with rowing. For similar reasons, he turned up his nose at an opulent-looking brigantine and passed up several coastal barks. He had a personal distaste for hybrid vessels that combined sails with oars. Such ships were usually not only ungainly under sail, but nearly impossible to row.

  He strolled past a weather-beaten noa, looming bulky over the neighboring vessels, her high forecastle and raised quarterdeck giving her a top-heavy profile.

  A noa was not a bad ship. Christopher Columbus himself, Admiral of the Ocean Sea, dead these past fourteen years now, God rest his soul, had chosen a noa—the famed Santa Maria—for his flagship. Yet Carlos still preferred a vessel that did not brandish a broad beam and high freeboard at capricious seas. Such a vessel was wonderful for running before a following wind but handled poorly to windward.

  What he wanted was to find a sturdy sailer such as a caravel, particularly one headed for the New World. He had been to Africa. He had scoured the length and breadth of the Mediterranean, sailing as far away as Crete. He was tired of these old seas and their nasty ports.

  On waterfronts all over the Mediterranean and Atlantic the talk was of the New World and the strange, exotic people who lived in it. Carlos had never seen one of these creatures himself, but he’d heard many drunken exaggerations about them. The women, it was said, walked around naked as the day they were born and gave freely of their affections to strangers. One sailor who claimed his cousin’s brother-in-law had shipped on the second voyage of discovery with the Admiral of the Ocean Sea himself swore that there were so many lovely available women that the intemperate man could easily kill himself with too much lovemaking.

  He was musing quietly to himself about sailing to an exotic land where all the woman were lovely and willing when he heard a voice hailing him. One of the blessed saints had heard his prayers, perhaps St. Anthony, and answered them, for right before him was a caravel whose low rakish waterline bespoke a ship loaded and ready for sea. Painted on her bow was her name, Santa Inez.

  From her raised quarterdeck, a man in his later years, who carried himself with the authority of a master, was calling him.

  “I said, are you looking for a ship?”

  * * *

  At first, Carlos admitted nothing. He had learned a long time ago that in a new situation it was better to listen than to talk. So he was cryptic and noncommittal in his replies, irritating the stranger, who said he was from Mallorca. He said he was master of this ship, which would sail tomorrow for the New World, but he was shorthanded because unexpected death had visited his crew. If he was an experienced sailor looking for a ship, here was opportunity.

  “What’s your name?” the stranger asked.

  “Carlos.”

  “I am Alonso de la Serena, and this is my ship,” the stranger said, pounding the railing with his knuckles like a shopkeeper boasting about a new counter.

  “Where are you bound?” Carlos asked diffidently.

  “To Jamaica, where there are fortunes waiting to be made. Gold so plentiful that it washes down rivers like gravel. Labor so cheap that it costs a man nothing to put in a crop. Feed the natives, and they work like mules. A climate so beneficent that men live to be seventy and eighty years old without infirmity of mind or body because the air is so sweet and the nights so mild. It is a paradise that awaits us only a month’s sail away.”

  Carlos glanced at the ship, noting the neatness of the ropes and the cleanliness of the deck. He swept his eye over the main mast and noticed the tight furl of the sails. She was a three-masted lateener that bore the influence of Portuguese shipwrights, but she had been rerigged to fly a square sail, her lateen yards removed. Alonso anticipated his query.

  “The wind will be behind us for most of the voyage. On the return, if we foolishly decide to leave paradise, we will ride the westerlies back to Spain. A lateen sail is difficult for running. It is the same change that Christopher Columbus made to his vessel.”

  Carlos knew well the deficiencies of the lateen sail. He remembered the nightmare of steering a lateen-rigged frigate bound from Tangier for the west coast of Africa. The ship yawed badly, and with every little shift of the wind, the lateen had to be readjusted, which meant lowering the sail and hoisting it again on the other side of the main mast. Five men had to do this in the darkness with a lumpy following sea pounding them astern and the light from the three-quarter moon barely enough to illuminate the rigging. That was one of the worst nights he’d ever spent on a ship since he took to sea as a grommet of eleven—and it was all because of an unsuitable lateen sail. The Mallorcan was truly a seaman.

  The discussion veered to the particulars. It was the particulars that drove sailors mad on a long voyage, the little pinpricks that the master would enforce at sea. Sometimes a man who was harsh in port turned into a mild and friendly master once the ship was underway. But more often than not, it was the opposite that was true—the man who was gentle when his feet were on land became a demon at sea. One had no way to predict this change, but Carlos had a theory. He had found that capricious and harsh masters showed their true underside in port when questioned on one issue: the sleeping arrangements permitted aboard ship.

  “Where do you allow your men to sleep, señor,” he asked mildly, fixing the older man with a careful stare.

  “Anywhere they like,” came the crisp reply, “so long as their presence does not interfere with the smooth running of the ship.”

  “On deck, at nights?”

  “Certainly, on deck. But I warn every ma
n to lash himself down with rope so he won’t be washed overboard.”

  “You do not insist that the men sleep below?”

  “It is an oven sometimes below deck,” de la Serena said candidly. “No man should be asked to sleep in an oven.”

  Carlos tried to read the craggy face before him, to fathom its temperament, its truthfulness. De la Serena returned his stare openly, and for a brief moment the two of them looked at each other deeply like lovers. Then Carlos, feeling uncomfortable, turned away with a casual shrug.

  He did not understand how anyone could be born on Mallorca—one of the Baeleric Islands, consisting of eleven islets and four larger islands, none of which Carlos particularly liked, probably because he had visited them only during stormy seas when his ship was in danger of floundering. He thought the island barren and inhospitable, suitable with its ironbound shoreline as a rookery for sea birds.

  De la Serena asked a series of nautical questions, to test Carlos’s seamanship, and the Spaniard answered with an offhanded nonchalance that bespoke his experience. The older man knew a sailor when he saw one. Carlos knew the names of all the kinds of vessels tied up around them. He had strong opinions on the handling differences between a lateen sail and square rigging. Like most seamen of the day, he was filled with suspicions and had stories to tell about how some talisman had saved his life. But more importantly, to de la Serena at least, was that he bargained hard for the little comforts that true seamen loved to have around them—liberal run of the ship, for example—asking questions about the cook and the types of meals that would be served.

  It remained only for Carlos to pass one more test, and de la Serena, who had already decided to sign him on, asked him to shimmy up the main mast and climb into the crow’s nest. The Santa Inez, like all vessels of her day, was without ratlines, which had not yet been invented, and reaching her crow’s nest required a seaman’s agility and strength.

  Carlos walked over to the main mast, gripped a halyard, leaped onto the mast, and propelled himself up, using his hands and feet to clasp the wood. In a blink, he was in the crow’s nest and pretending to be scanning the horizon.

  “Come down and sign the papers,” de la Serena invited.

  Carlos slid down the mast. “I have nowhere to sleep tonight,” he began, but de la Serena cut him short.

  “Sleep aboard ship,” he said, heading below for the papers.

  A few minutes later, the mostly ritualistic signing was complete, and Carlos got the opportunity to show off his cursive signature with all its elaborate curlicues. His contract said that until the Santa Inez returned to Cádiz, Carlos was bound to service aboard her at one thousand maravedis per month. It was not much, but it was a little more than Carlos had earned on his last ship.

  De la Serena opened a bottle of wine and they drank a goblet each and shared some bread. Other than the two of them and a cabin boy named Pedro who mostly stayed out of sight, the ship was deserted, the crew having gone carousing for what might be the last night ashore for many weeks. With a little wine under his belt, de la Serena became very talkative, and the two men sat on deck and chatted about the Indies while a grainy darkness settled over Cádiz.

  Carlos was content. He listened sleepily to the other man’s rambling, casting an occasional eye at the whores prowling the shadows and weighing his chances of sweet-talking one of them into giving him a free sample.

  Such a thing had never happened to him, but a long time ago, he had shipped out with a man from Albacete who swore that it had happened to his cousin in Perpignan, France, during a layover of five days while a bitter storm raged over the Mediterranean. It was a miraculous interlude that his cousin had enjoyed with the whore, all done freely and with affection. In fact, when the bad weather lifted and the time to sail again had come, the whore handed him a sackful of money and begged him to jump ship and live with her. Such a thing had never happened to Carlos, yet he was hopeful.

  Some few hours later, he curled up in a corner of the deck and went to sleep. De la Serena retreated to his quarters below. Like many ships of her time, the Santa Inez had only a single private compartment, which belonged to the master. Everyone else aboard shared the common areas of the ship as living space.

  Carlos fell into a deep sleep as a crescent moon leaked a soft saffron light over the minarets of Cádiz erected in the eighth century by Moor invaders. Over the centuries, all of Spain had been a bloody battleground between Christianity and Islam, and everywhere on this ancient land vestiges marking the dominance of one creed over the other lingered. The bulbed towers soared over the smaller buildings of the sleeping city like stalks of giant tulips, and it required only a little imagination to hear the bleat of a muezzin calling the Islamic faithful to prayer. But that custom was no longer observed, Alfonso the Wise, king of Leon and Castile, having driven the Moors out of Cádiz in the early thirteenth century, restoring Christianity.

  None of this was known to Carlos, who, though he was not an innocent, always slept soundly, for a seaman learned to sleep anywhere and anytime when he was tired. And today, a long and trying day by his own calculation, had been exhausting. So although the deck was hard and the wood cold against his bones, he was asleep almost as quickly as his head touched the floor.

  Chapter 4

  Carlos was jolted from the blurriness of a dream by what he thought were squabbling birds. But then from the rear of the ship he heard a coarse male voice booming and realized that he had been awakened by a noisy quarrel.

  Raising his head carefully to peep over the deck railing, he saw a knot of four women on the quay, one old and three young, gesturing angrily and screaming at the ship. On the quarterdeck de la Serena stood hurling insults back at them.

  “You are an old man, an unwell man! It is madness to go to sea in your condition. Come home, Alonso. Give up this rashness. Accept God’s will and be thankful!”

  “There is nothing wrong with me that a long voyage won’t cure!” de la Serena thundered.

  “Papa! I miss you already! I beg of you, return home with us,” one of the young woman bleated pitifully.

  “Don’t worry,” de la Serena bellowed back with heavy sarcasm, “your dowry is safe. I have made arrangements on your behalf. You will not be deprived of one maravedi.”

  “Papa, it’s not the money. It’s you.”

  “And how long did your mother rehearse you in that touching speech?” de la Serena sneered.

  Crewmen who had returned late began to emerge from different parts of the ship, rubbing their eyes and yawning at the commotion. A few of them leaned against the railings, grinning and spitting.

  The row waged on, with the women spilling tears and wailing like they were demented while de la Serena blasted them from the quarterdeck with a string of rebuttal oaths. The older woman called on the Virgin Mary to bear witness to how a hard-hearted husband and father was deserting his family in their greatest hour of need and fleeing like a young caballero to the so-called New World.

  “There’s nothing new about it!” shrieked the wife. “It is just as old as our world. You will die there and be buried an old man unmourned among strangers. Your bones will be eaten by wild dogs. No grandchildren will ever put flowers on your grave.”

  “Papa, stay with us. Don’t leave us here alone!”

  “I curse this ship, this Santa Inez. If it takes my husband from me, may it be cursed with bad weather and sea serpents! May the Holy Virgin raise her hand against this vessel that would separate a husband and father from his wife and daughters.”

  On hearing this malediction against their ship, some sailors began to surlily mutter among themselves, and one or two, as if they could stand to hear no more, drifted away below deck or stepped onto the quay and wandered off out of earshot.

  “We sail with the tide,” de la Serena called after two of the men as they left. They waved in dismissive acknowledgment and continued strolling down the quay without looking back.

  “When did you sign on?” an older s
ailor who spoke with the accent of an Andalusian asked Carlos.

  “Last night,” Carlos replied. “I am Carlos Antonio Maria Eduardo Garcia de la Cal Fernandez.”

  He did not know why he gave his full name except that he felt like it. The old man acknowledged him with a little nod and muttered, after spitting elaborately over the side and watching his spittle float away, “My name is Hernandez Medina. I do not like it when women curse a ship before she sails. It brings the worst kind of bad luck.”

  “So I have heard,” Carlos responded indifferently.

  Another man joined them. “Hernandez, did you hear what she said? She has put a curse on our ship.”

  “That is what we were just talking about. I do not like this.”

  “I will not sail on this ship unless the curse is taken back,” the man muttered darkly, walking off.

  “I’d better tell the captain about this,” Hernandez said with a sigh. “We’re already shorthanded.”

  He scurried across the deck and conferred with the captain while the women continued to wail at the ship, their voices rising in a shriller stridency. After some back-and-forth whispering between the two men, de la Serena, with obvious reluctance, crossed the gangplank and waded among the women, pleading with them in a low voice as they sniffled and wept and touched his clothing as though to keep him land bound. Huddled closely together, the group drifted away, still chattering animatedly with each other.