God Carlos

by Anthony C. Winkler

  One of the reasons Carlos remained behind was to play with Orocobix, who kept pointing to the sky in their discussions, convinced that the myth of the sky gods had come true with the arrival of these strangers. So he followed Carlos everywhere, watching the god closely to understand how gods think and what they want.

  He was amazed to find that the gods and the Arawaks more or less did the same things throughout the day, such as eating, sleeping, and relieving themselves. He followed every move Carlos made and studied what he did and why. Occasionally, he would ask a question, but the god would not understand him and he would get no sensible reply.

  Carlos offered the Indian something to eat, but Orocobix declined. Later, assuming the air of a proud proprietor, Carlos led the Indian on a tour of the ship, showing off its mysteries. He showed Orocobix one of the four Lombard cannons the Santa Inez carried for defense, making it clear through gestures and pantomiming that this was an implement of death and destruction. He demonstrated this power by making a booming noise, slapping the muzzle of the weapon, and then pretending to fall before its onslaught of deadly shot.

  Orocobix did not understand at first, but he soon grasped the significance of this particularly ugly piece of metal. Using gestures, Carlos told the Indian to try and lift the cannon. Orocobix did and found that he could not move it even an inch, it was so heavy. He had never seen metal before, and he rubbed the thick muzzle of the cannon slowly as if he were caressing it.

  “Thunder stick,” he said in Taíno, looking impressed.

  “Sí! Sí!” Carlos agreed affably.

  Savoring the awed expression on the Indian’s face, Carlos showed him a crossbow, and when Orocobix did not understand its use, Carlos fired a bolt that flew over the deck and sank deep into a piling with a loud thwack. For the next twenty minutes Carlos struggled to retrieve it. He ended up digging out the metal bolt with his knife.

  Carlos then showed Orocobix a harquebus, which belonged to the Santa Inez. One of the first handguns ever invented, the harquebus was like a miniature cannon, it was so heavy, and its firing gave off a deafening sound and required the help of several men. Orocobix dimly understood that this was another thunder stick, and as he and Carlos gabbled in languages that the other did not understand, the Arawak shuffled throughout the ship looking cowed by the power and might of the gods’ possessions.

  It was a hot day, and growing bored, Carlos decided for fun to teach the Indian a trick. The two men communicated with crude gestures and miming, and at first it was difficult for Orocobix to understand what the god wanted him to do. Finally, the god made it plain that what he wanted was for Orocobix to fall on his knees and bow down low before him at the snap of his fingers. To the Indian, it was a strange game for a god to enjoy but one he was quite willing to play for the god’s pleasure.

  The boy Pedro did not like this game because he thought it blasphemous, but he held his tongue for fear of angering Carlos. So for the rest of the first day, he watched quietly as Carlos strutted up and down the deck snapping his fingers as a signal for the Indian to bow down low before him like a Muslim at prayer and to rise again at a gesture of his hand.

  From a distance, the Arawak and the Spaniard might have seemed as if they were performing a complex mating dance, complete with curtsying and bowing, on the deck of the battered, tied-up ship. Carlos would swagger past the Indian, turn, and snap his fingers. Orocobix would immediately fall on the deck in the prostrated stance of a groveller. The Spaniard would use his hands to indicate that the Indian could now rise, which he would, looking hard at Carlos for another cue. All this was possible because the Arawaks were a bright people with a natural gift of mimicry. As Columbus cold-bloodedly wrote about the Arawaks in his journal, “They ought to make good and skilled servants, for they repeat very quickly whatever we say to them.”

  It was an endless, pointless, stupid game—or so it seemed to the boy Pedro, who finally blurted out in a moment of brashness, “Carlos, why do you do this thing?”

  “Why not?” Carlos mumbled. “There is no harm in it.”

  Orocobix strained to understand what the two gods were saying, but he couldn’t quite grasp their meaning.

  Next, the Spaniard taught the Indian to say “God Carlos,” until he was able to say the words so that anyone would understand them. To test this, Carlos called out to the boy Pedro, who was now walking on the beach, and when the boy came running, Orocobix solemnly faced him and said, “God Carlos, God Carlos, God Carlos,” until the god ordered him to stop with a gesture.

  “Did you understand that?” Carlos asked excitedly.

  “Yes,” the boy Pedro whispered, “but you’re not God. You’ve taught him a lie.”

  “To him I am God,” Carlos boasted. Then he snapped his fingers and Orocobix fell on his knees and prostrated himself on the deck. “See!”

  “I do not think this is right, Carlos,” Pedro whispered, hanging his head as if he’d just witnessed something shameful.

  Carlos chuckled. He thought it was very funny. Orocobix remained prone on the deck, awaiting the hand signal from God Carlos to rise.

  * * *

  During the night only a few men returned to the ship, most preferring instead to sleep on solid ground. Many by then were drunk and found a tree to curl up under; others rented a sleeping pallet in a dirty, makeshift inn run by a Portuguese settler. Sometime around midnight, de la Serena returned to the ship and went down the companionway to his bed—the only one on the Santa Inez.

  At daybreak Carlos awoke to find his worshipper curled up two feet away, staring at him intently. Yawning and stretching, the two men peered at the sunrise as if they were mystified to find themselves still on the earth. The boy Pedro lay nearby, asleep.

  Carlos was becoming annoyed at the constant attentiveness of his worshipper. Yesterday it was flattering, but now as he woke up he was beginning to find the Indian irksome. He couldn’t ask the naked creature about anything that required more than pointing and miming. And when he did frame a question with elaborate gestures, the sign-answers he got in reply were barely comprehensible.

  As the dawn light spread across the sky, Carlos stood up on the foredeck and looked around him. It was a windless morning, and although the sun had not yet cleared the horizon, the clamminess of a whore’s loveless wet kiss hung over the bay. In the distance, an Arawak fishing canoe was passing. Orocobix was staring at the god keenly, expectantly, like a puppy who wanted to continue yesterday’s play.

  Carlos abruptly pointed to the sea and indicated to Orocobix that he should get in his canoe and go. The Arawak did not understand at first that the god was sending him away.

  “Oh, God,” he said to God Carlos in a supplicating voice, “I long to understand your words and will obey them all if only you would teach me their meaning.”

  “I said, get off!” Carlos roared, gesticulating to show what he wanted the Arawak to do.

  Orocobix, although he now understood, did not move. Carlos grabbed him by the hair and shoved him brutally off the Santa Inez and onto the pier.

  “Now you stay there!” God Carlos commanded.

  Orocobix clambered to his feet and tried to step back aboard the ship.

  “Stay there!” Carlos screamed, pushing the Indian back onto the pier. Orocobix fell to his knees in the prostrated position and seemed to be begging for mercy.

  The shouting woke up a few of the hungover men who were strewn asleep all over the deck in curled-up lumps of flesh and clothing. Groggy and drowsy, a few of them propped their heads up on their hands to watch. A couple of them grumbled about the noise but no one made a move to intervene.

  Orocobix did not understand. “Why does the god treat me so harshly?” he asked pitifully from the pier, holding out his arms as if he would embrace his god.

  “I do not think, Carlos,” the boy Pedro muttered, “that you should do these things to one who worships you.”

  “I’m tired of playing with him,” Carlos snarled.

  �
�I’ll go for now, but I will return,” said Orocobix sadly after he had been roughly thrown off the ship for the fourth time. Then he shuffled off to his tied-up canoe, looking forlorn and rejected and pausing frequently to turn and see whether Carlos had changed his mind. The god had not; so the Indian rowed away and headed out to open sea.

  Orocobix was paddling away when de la Serena appeared on deck, looking around as if he’d lost something.

  “Who was shouting?” he asked a drowsy seaman sprawled out on the poop deck.

  “It was God Carlos sending the Indian away,” he responded sleepily. But he did not say it too loudly for fear Carlos would hear. And before he settled down again to catch another snatch of sleep, the seaman glanced around to be sure that Carlos was not nearby.

  “What a dismal place this colony is,” de la Serena moaned.

  Chapter 13

  Shortly after the Santa Inez made her landfall, de la Serena fell mysteriously sick, leaving the crew fretting that their captain would die and they would be abandoned in the New World. Feverish, he lay abed in a grubby little room in the makeshift inn whose walls were stained with sooty candle smudges and whose single window was smothered under a soiled bedsheet that served as a crude curtain. Here, at the ends of the earth, he lay sprawled out on a narrow homemade bed under a frayed dirty blanket, haunted by his wife’s prophecy on the pier that he would die and be buried unmourned among strangers in the New World. That she might be proven right galled him more than the prospect of dying itself.

  A physician, who was also the settlement’s barber, was summoned to his sickbed where, after prodding and poking him with thick, greasy fingers, he announced gravely that de la Serena had to undergo bleeding or he would die.

  Bleeding—opening a vein in the patient’s arm and drawing off a quantity of blood to reduce the imbalance of so-called humors—was a standard sixteenth-century medical treatment for virtually every disease. And although de la Serena had no reason to think the practice the quackery that it was, he had bad memories of previous bleedings that had left him breathless and weak.

  He refused the treatment, dismissed the physician, and sweated out the fever, which came and went capriciously, gradually abated, and eventually disappeared. One morning he woke up weak but free of fever and was able to eat for the first time in days.

  Without knowing it, de la Serena had weathered the seasoning—as the initial perilous days of acclimatizing to Jamaica later came to be called. For the first three centuries of the island’s occupation, the mortality rate of new arrivals to Jamaica was so ghastly that one writer characterized the island as “a vast graveyard.” A classic example was the arrival in December 1656 of 1,600 colonists who settled near Morant Bay. By March of 1657, a scant three months later, 1,200 were dead, including the leader and his wife. Responsible for this indiscriminate slaughter was yellow fever spread by the mosquito. Later, medical science would find that while whites had no immunity to this disease, blacks often had a natural resistance that enabled them to better adapt to life in the West Indies.

  De la Serena thought often during those days of the fever that he, too, would die. But death held no terror for him, for he believed that it would return him to the unknowing void which had spawned him. And, being a logical man, since he believed that after death he would have no more memory of having existed than an adobe brick, he did not find such an end fearful.

  But once the fever broke and he was out of bed, de la Serena became nearly overwhelmed by a feeling of absurdity about what he was doing in such a remote and desolate part of the world. He wondered what could have possessed him to make such a long, pointless voyage, and for a day or two he moped like one who had lost his life’s purpose. But as he grew stronger, his spirits rebounded and once again he became determined to imprint his name on this new land.

  How were geographical features of a newly discovered land named? On the daily walks he took to regain his strength, de la Serena pondered this question as if it were a holy mystery. Obviously there was some protocol at work that he did not know. What he knew was common knowledge: all explorers, including Columbus, felt free to name lands that they encountered. But many explorers named only the most conspicuous features of their discoveries, leaving other geographical scraps unnamed. It did not occur to de la Serena that a land already occupied by an indigenous people was not unknown and therefore could not be discovered—that claim of its discovery was based on an underlying presumption that nothing existed unless known to Europeans.

  With his strength flooding back, de la Serena plotted his next move. He made an appointment to see the alcade of Sevilla la Nueva.

  * * *

  The alcade, an official roughly equivalent to a governor, was responsible for the maintenance and upkeep of a new colony as well as for ensuring that the Crown received its share of any discovered wealth.

  At the time of the arrival of the Santa Inez in 1520, the appointed alcade of Sevilla la Nueva was one Juan Caro, a brownnoser from Castile who had lobbied hard for an administrative position in a colony of the New World. He had done so in the mistaken belief that to be an alcade in the Indies would shower him with glory and renown. Wild rumors about the vast wealth of the Indies were then in circulation throughout Spain, and every young man with an adventurous heart hungered for a colonial posting.

  A lanky man with a potbelly incongruous for one of his build, Juan Caro had gotten his position in a way commonplace for the times—through his connections to the court of Charles I, grandson of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, the original sponsors of Columbus’s explorations.

  Juan Caro had said a word about his ambition to an important uncle who was owed a large sum of money by a spendthrift grandee highly placed among the brilliant courtiers who kept the twenty-year-old Charles I amused. The uncle murmured to the indebted courtier, who whispered to his mistress, who breathed the name of Juan Caro to the wife of the official on the board in charge of employing the alcades, and through this capillary seepage of influence, the appointment was secured.

  It was an act that Caro bitterly regretted. He had been at the post now for eighteen months and had never detested a country or people more passionately. He was not enchanted by the lush green fields or the rolling hills or the loveliness of the clear blue ocean. The gentleness of the Indians he regarded as laziness and weakness. Nothing about his position interested him, and he had already begun the reverse process of having himself recalled through the same uncle’s influence.

  De la Serena found the alcade squatting morosely behind a desk made of rough-hewn lumber, his office little more than a dark burrow in a building that seemed to slump against the hillside. Caro knew the name and reputation of de la Serena, for like every brownnoser then or now, he had a keen nose for the smell of money and could tell that the elderly man sitting before him was rich. Trying his best to disguise his hatred of his present life, the alcade struggled to be cordial.

  “You mean to tell me, señor, that you sailed all the way from Spain to this godforsaken island for no other reason but sightseeing?” Caro exclaimed with astonishment after listening to de la Serena’s jumbled tale about having the desire to see the New World before he died.

  De la Serena glanced around the empty room as if he suspected that eavesdroppers lurked nearby.

  “No, señor,” he whispered as though he told a shameful secret, “I do have another reason. I am seeking a legacy. I would like some part of this new land to be named after me.”

  A foxy gleam shining in his eyes, the alcade stared at the old man. “I do not understand what you mean, señor.”

  “You go into the interior and find a river you’ve never seen before. What name do you give it?”

  The alcade thought about the question. “Of course,” he said blandly, “everything in this island already has an Indian name. But we pay no attention to it. They call it one thing, and we call it another.”

  “And whose name prevails?”

  “The one who ha
s writing, iron, and gunpowder.”

  The two Spaniards chuckled.

  “I should also warn you to hide your dead from the Indians, señor,” the alcade said softly. “They think we are gods and cannot die. It is to our advantage to encourage them in this belief.”

  “Dead? We have no dead.”

  “You will. This is a place of death.”

  De la Serena lapsed into a pensive silence. Finally, he stirred as if awakening from a sleep. “Then, have all the mountains been named?”

  “Señor, all the mountains have not even been explored. This is a big island and it is filled with mountains. We do not even know what kind of animals live on it. We do not know if there are venomous snakes or poisonous insects. We only know what the Indians have told us and what we have learned for ourselves.”

  “So there are many physical features still to be named,” sighed de la Serena happily.

  “There are countless unnamed promontories, districts, mountains, rivers, and for all we know, there may be nameless inland lakes or volcanoes.”

  De la Serena rubbed his hands together with the eager anticipation of a banker about to fondle a stack of newly minted money. “And who gives a new mountain its name?”

  Caro thought for a moment. “I suppose the one who first finds it. But,” he added hastily, “that name would have to be approved by the official in charge.”

  “Which is you.”

  A smile creased the alcade’s face. He leaned forward expectantly. “A cartographer in our company is to begin a survey of the island soon and will draw a new map. I will speak to him about your wishes.”

  The two men stared at each other with a deep understanding.

  “I would be grateful for that favor. And I’m a man who knows how to express gratitude.”