God Carlos

by Anthony C. Winkler

  Orocobix did not understand why the cacique would say something like that, but he thought perhaps he was under the influence of the cohiba. He had no reply to such a comment, so he said nothing.

  His eyes darting furtively at his clutch of advisers who squatted nearby, the cacique sighed and mumbled, “What do you think about the gods from the sky who walk among us, Orocobix?”

  Orocobix was silent for a long moment, almost to the point of rudeness, before he finally stirred and said, “I believe that the gods are good and mean us no harm.”

  “That is a good belief,” the cacique whispered in the voice of a fellow plotter. “Others say that they are bad gods who must be resisted.” He made a vague motion with his head toward where his advisers sat in a gossipy group, and Orocobix could almost hear the voices of dissension shouting conflicting advice to the young cacique.

  “I will try to meet these gods myself and learn about them,” Orocobix quietly replied. “I will go fishing and perhaps meet one of the ships that fly and see the gods face-to-face for myself.”

  “That is good,” the cacique said, “because I have seen them face-to-face and still do not understand their nature.”

  A few remaining celebrants, sluggish from too much food and revelry, were sprawled out drowsily around the fire that licked at the darkness with a serpent’s tongue. Here and there, in the roseate glow of the flames, some couples lay entwined in their private passions. Most people had drifted away to their bohios—the round wooden houses built with poles driven in the ground and lashed together with river withes and vines and covered with a roof of palm fronds. Foraging among the drowsy celebrants sprawled on the ground were alcos—the small barkless dogs that squeaked like rats—hunting for scraps of discarded food. Occasionally, a drowsy reveler would slap irritably at one of the animals, sending it scurrying away squeaking.

  Orocobix left the celebration and walked into a vast moonless night splattered with the pinpricks of numberless stars. The trail underfoot was dim but he had walked it so many times before that his feet saw what his eyes could not. All around him the lights of the cocuyos—small lightning bugs—flickered a blue glow in incomprehensible patterns.

  The next morning he put out to sea in his small canoe.

  * * *

  De la Serena was like a child in his excitement and was openly brimming with delight as Orocobix paddled his canoe furiously toward the hove-to ship whose sails were flapping like the wings of an enormous sea bird. From every part of the ship, bored crew members streamed onto the deck of the Santa Inez to gaze with curiosity at the solitary figure who was paddling energetically toward them as though he feared they would flee.

  “Gods from the sky,” Orocobix occasionally cried over the effort of paddling the canoe, “wait for me!”

  “Look at him,” de la Serena chortled to no one in particular, “he is a man of the New World. What is he saying, I wonder?”

  The boatswain bellowed to the men gathered along the railing of the ship, “Anyone understand him?”

  The string of seamen shook their heads.

  Old Hernandez stepped forward. “George, the Englishman who is the cook’s mate, has been to the New World and says he understands the Indians.”

  “George?” someone scoffed. “The one they call the magpie because of his constant chatter? If you listened to him, you’d believe he can talk even to birds!”

  “Nevertheless,” said old Hernandez, “this is his third trip to the Indies.”

  “Call him!” de la Serena said sharply.

  The cry went up for the Englishman George, who emerged from the bowels of the ship, wiping his greasy hands on a soiled apron. He was a little man who stunk of the kitchen and yesterday’s food, and his pale complexion was soft and puffy like that of a mushroom growing under a rotting log.

  De la Serena looked him up and down. “You understand Indians?” he asked incredulously.

  “Oh, yes, monsieur,” George said with an ingratiating smile, inflating visibly with a show of self-importance before the watching crew. “This is my third trip to the Indies and I have learned their ways.”

  “Yes, yes,” de la Serena said impatiently. “But can you understand their words?”

  “Not every one of them, signor,” George admitted, adding quickly, “but enough of them to catch their meaning.”

  Orocobix, meanwhile, had clambered aboard the ship from his small canoe and was staring at the gods with open adoration. He threw himself facedown on the deck, prostrating himself just as Moses had done when he saw the burning bush.

  “Gods from the sky, I know you are good. And I do believe,” Orocobix said fervently. “I have come to serve you.”

  “What’d he say?” asked de la Serena.

  “He said,” George answered, “that he’s most pleased to make your worship’s acquaintance even though the weather has been foul lately.”

  De la Serena looked suspiciously at George. “Are you absolutely certain that’s what he said?”

  “No, not absolutely. But these people here are a funny lot. You have to learn to read between the lines, if you follow my meaning.”

  The seamen who gathered to gawk at Orocobix stirred restlessly. One of them touched him on the shoulder as if to verify that he was made, like them, of flesh. They saw standing naked before them a trim brown man in his early twenties, with dark glistening straight hair and a physique as well proportioned and sleek as that of a deep sea fish. His body was decorated all over with streaks of ocher, white, and red paint, his dark eyes burning with the glint of intelligence. Between his legs dangled his bare genitals under a ruff of wiry hair. The Spaniards around him, in contrast, looked gnomic, squat, and misshapen, like burrowing animals.

  “He’s as naked as when his mother bore him,” murmured one seaman.

  “Are the women also unclothed?” another asked hopefully.

  Orocobix looked nervously from the face of one god to another and got to his feet slowly, his hands held palms-up in front of him to show that he had no weapon and had come in peace.

  “Ask him if he knows where the settlement is,” said de la Serena. “Sevilla la Nueva.”

  “Mmmm,” George said, scratching a trail of soot across his grimy chin, “that’s not easy.”

  He turned to Orocobix and practically shouted in his face, “Sevilla la Nueva. Where? Here? Or back there?”

  Orocobix took a step backward and bowed from the waist. “You are the gods. Anything you want me to do, I will do.”

  George thought for a minute and then exclaimed, “Here, let’s try this!”

  He began an elaborate pointing all over the ship, meaning to indicate everyone aboard as well as the vessel itself, and then he pointed to the shoreline and gestured with his hands to show where they were headed. After some minutes of this pantomime, Orocobix gradually began to understand—the gods were looking for the dwellings of the other gods. He had never been there himself but he had rowed his canoe past it many times. His face lighting up with understanding, he pointed to the east where the land clubbed at the ocean with the blunt end of a distant promontory.

  “He says it’s over there,” George announced, clapping Orocobix on the back.

  With the canoe in tow, the Santa Inez caught a land breeze and ghosted up the coast. De la Serena took the breeze as a good sign, for it eased his fear of a deadly lee shore in strange waters. Nevertheless, he sent a grommet forward to keep a sharp lookout for shoals that splattered the clear water like the grimy handprints of children.

  The Santa Inez rounded the promontory and sailed into a broad open bay in which several coastal vessels and one brigantine swung at anchor. Beyond the bay the land swept up a slope and furrowed into a dark green mountain. Scattered over the hillside were several small houses and buildings laid out in roughly a circular pattern. A tail of smoke curled into the air from one of the buildings, and one slope of the mountain range showed scribbles of a plow and other signs of cultivation.

  It was imp
ossible to say why, but from the point of view of the Santa Inez, the settlement was so crude and dilapidated that it seemed infected with the lassitude of malarial fever, and even so far out to sea, the men of the Santa Inez could feel the dispiritedness of the colony.

  De la Serena, who had remained on the deck all day, said to George, “Ask the Indian the name of that settlement.”

  George pointed to the shoreline with its few buildings and a decrepit wharf, and raising his voice as if he was speaking to a deaf man, he bawled out, “What settlement name?”

  Orocobix gestured to show humility and said in a prayerful voice, “I’m your servant. I will do anything you wish because I believe with all my heart that you are good, kind gods who will do me no wrong. Tell me what to do.”

  “Well?” snapped de la Serena.

  “He says he’s not sure, that the name keeps changing.”

  “I don’t believe you understand a word of what he’s saying,” de la Serena said crossly. “Go back to your pots and pans.”

  “I do understand,” yelped George, “although he’s speaking with a funny accent. Nobody’s perfect, you know.”

  “I said, get back to your station.”

  George retreated, grumbling that it was all unfair, and disappeared below deck. Orocobix glanced around him at the men, who were staring openly at him with intense curiosity.

  Some of them were ogling his canoe, which was dug out from the trunk of a cotton tree and had no seams or joinery and no thwarts. A few of them were discussing his paddle, which they had never seen before although they were quite familiar with oars. Several of them seconded the opinion of Columbus that it resembled a baker’s peel.

  Orocobix, uncomfortable at being the center of attention, was nevertheless pleased. He was in the company of the gods, aboard their vessel that soared magically through the seas. They were good gods, just as he had thought. None of them had attempted to harm him. All of them were staring at him if they had never seen a man before.

  “I wonder what he’s thinking,” de la Serena muttered to no one in particular.

  “He thinks we’re gods,” Carlos said brashly.

  “How can you tell?”

  “Let me show you,” Carlos replied in a strangely formal voice.

  Stepping forward until he was face-to-face with Orocobix, Carlos pointed imperiously to the deck on which the two men stood. Orocobix stared at him fixedly before he understood.

  He fell to his knees and prostrated himself before God Carlos. Orocobix did not know the tradition of kneeling and had no inkling of the various body positions used by European Christians to signal self-abasement. But the posture he struck was a universal one that required no interpretation—one human being groveling abjectly at the feet of another. Some of the seamen took a step forward as if to help Orocobix stand, but the eyes of Carlos the murderer flashed a warning.

  With a ceremonial flourish, the Spaniard extended an arm out to Orocobix like a king bidding a servile subject to rise. As the men gaped in disbelief, the Indian came slowly to his feet, his eyes burning with a worshipful adoration which, if the scene had been portrayed in the overwrought religious art of the sixteenth century, would have earned Orocobix the painted gold halo of an angel or saint.

  “Am I not his god?” Carlos chortled with triumph.

  “This is blasphemous,” old Hernandez grumbled.

  “Prepare to drop anchor,” de la Serena ordered.

  The crew scrambled to their various posts, some manning the tangled ropes that controlled the sails, others readying the anchor rode.

  Scruffy and weather-beaten, the Santa Inez limped gingerly into Santa Gloria Bay on the north coast of Jamaica.

  Chapter 12

  On the vastness of the ocean, an island often seems like a blur in a daydream. But this island looming over the Santa Inez was crowned with burly mountains full of the solid substance and vivid color found only in wakefulness. It was so lush and green that the eyes of the crew—used to the monotonous blue of the deep—lingered lovingly over its folds and pleats as though finding newly discovered treasures. Near the shore a poinciana tree in full bloom was afire with gaudy red blossoms.

  Her crew chattered excitedly like a flock of roosting parrots as the Santa Inez anchored in the middle of the bay near the brigantine. De la Serena changed into his shore clothes and began pacing the deck irritably.

  “How do they know that we’re not pirates?” he fumed. “We could be an enemy ship! No challenge! No warning shot. No official on hand to examine our papers. What kind of colony is this?”

  “We flew a friendly flag when we sailed in,” old Hernandez said mildly. “They know we are not the enemy.”

  “Anyone could capture such an island!” de la Serena raved.

  His words would prove prophetic. In 1655 an English expedition, after failing to take Cuba on the orders of Oliver Cromwell, would fall on defenseless Jamaica like a lion on a foundling. In a matter of only months the Spanish would be driven from the land, leaving behind them, after an occupation of over 150 years, a handful of names that still cling like burrs to some few rivers and towns: Ocho Rios, Rio Bueno, Savanna la Mar, Mount Diablo, Rio Cobre, and in a supreme irony, the Anglicized name of what used to be the island’s capital under the Spaniards—Spanish Town.

  But this would not happen for 135 years and by then all souls, the fretful and the uncaring, alive in 1520 would be wiped off the face of the earth.

  “A boat approaches,” a seaman called out.

  De la Serena rushed to the side of the ship and saw two men in a battered rowboat pulling up alongside the Santa Inez. A resplendent young man climbed aboard with some effort and looked around at the gawking crew. He wore a uniform decorated with ribbons and rosettes and a cockaded hat that might have been the crest on the head of an extinct prehistoric bird.

  “My name is Juan Mazuelo,” he announced officiously, snapping the heels of his boots together and touching the brim of his ridiculously ornate hat. “I am the personal secretary of the alcade of Jamaica. What ship is this and what is your business?”

  “I am Alonso de la Serena, and this is the Santa Inez, my ship,” came the sharp reply followed by the sound of knuckles banging with the authority of ownership against the cabin.

  “Are you under a commission?”

  “This is a privately owned vessel on a voyage of exploration,” de la Serena said stiffly. “I request permission to land and to have an audience with the alcade.”

  “We were hoping you were a supply ship. We are sorely in need of supplies,” said the secretary.

  De la Serena took the man aside and invited him down to his private quarters. An hour later, the two men emerged from the cabin, guffawing and looking a little wobbly.

  Bidding de la Serena goodbye as though he were parting from an old friend, the official climbed over the side, got into the rowboat, and set out for the shore.

  “How did he do that?” the boy Pedro whispered.

  “He got him drunk and bribed him,” old Hernandez grunted cynically.

  “Prepare to tow the ship to the pier,” de la Serena ordered.

  The men ran out the long boat, which the Santa Inez carried upside down on her forward deck. A line was attached to the ship’s anchor bitt and she was towed slowly to shore and tied up at the end of the pier.

  Ahead of her, nestled on a gently sloping stretch of land, was Sevilla la Nueva, New Seville, Spain’s frail toehold in Jamaica.

  * * *

  In 1520 New Seville existed mainly as a drawing, where it was laid out according to the royal grid plan first used in the construction of Santa Fe, Spain, and later in building the towns of Santa Domingo in Hispaniola and Caparra in Puerto Rico.

  Overlooking the bay, the town was discreetly set back in the foothills so that pirates and other marauders would have difficulty bombarding its buildings from the sea. The settlement, in spite of its ambitious name, consisted of only an incomplete government building, a masonry church, a clut
ch of small houses and commercial buildings, a few storage sheds, and a crude wooden barracks for a garrison of soldiers.

  However splendid it looked on paper, the real New Seville was a settlement of dour poverty and wretchedness. Its streets were little more than mud-lined trails tamped down and made smooth by the hooves of animals and the feet of men. Clinging to the sloping land was a sparse collection of buildings constructed of masonry and wood.

  There was no parade of horse-drawn carriages, no promenading of the gentry showing off their elegant silks and satins like preening peacocks; no elaborate town square with statues of dead European butchers; no memorials to victories and slaughter; no hint that here was an outpost of a mighty empire with a heritage of discovery and conquest. There was only a grubby starkness befitting the breeding ground of a colony of migrating locusts.

  The signs of hardship, boredom, and want were everywhere—in the dinginess of the houses, the griminess of the land, the stultified expressions on the faces of uncurious passersby and indifferent loiterers. Everyone and everything seemed to sag and droop with a noticeable weariness.

  The crew of the Santa Inez found a shack that served as a makeshift cantina and settled in to get drunk. A few Spaniards were strewn throughout the room, which was streaked with bad light and reeked of the laborers’ stench. The bar owner’s wife, fat and slovenly and desperately in need of a bath, was the only female in sight.

  “Where are all the women?” asked a seaman.

  “There are plenty of Indian women to be had,” the bartender said with an ugly leer. “Just grab one and take her in the bush.”

  “This is what I came over three thousand miles to see?” growled the boatswain.

  No one answered him.

  * * *

  Carlos was not particularly eager to go ashore. Some seamen need transition time to get accustomed once more to land, and he was one of them. He preferred to slowly ease into land like a swimmer who enters a body of cold water toe first. So, before lots could be drawn to see who would stay on the ship and who would go ashore, Carlos volunteered to stay aboard. The boy Pedro said he would also stay.