The other woman, witnessing the miracle, came running back, still clutching her feverish baby, and cried, “You cured her baby. Why not mine?”
“What did she say?”
“I do not understand the words,” the boy replied, “but I think she wants you to also cure her baby.”
“Tell her to go away. I have no cure for fever.”
Carlos made a gesture at her to leave him alone, but the woman redoubled her cries. Brown faces popped out from the open doorways of the bohios like turtles from their shells to peer at the commotion.
Carlos was on the verge of kicking the wailing woman when he noticed a curious ornament she wore in her nose: it was a pin, yellow and shiny like gold.
He reached over and touched it, murmuring, “What is this, and where did you get it?”
Orocobix stared at the god. The woman hurriedly pulled the pin from her nose and handed it to the god, her hands shaking, blurting out, “Now will you cure my baby?”
“This is gold,” Carlos breathed with an expression of rapture.
“How can you tell?” the boy wondered.
“Any fool knows gold,” Carlos declared. “And I’m no fool. Ask the woman where she got it.”
“I cannot,” the boy Pedro said. “I do not know the words.”
Carlos worked some hurried mumbo-jumbo over the sick child then sent it away after trying to make its mother understand that it was cured. As soon as she reluctantly left, mumbling discontentedly to herself, he began to question Orocobix about where she could have found the gold.
Orocobix gradually understood. He pointed to the mountains looming in the distance and asked the god if he would like to go there.
“What did he say?” Carlos asked the boy.
The boy said he did not know.
“Of what use are you?” Carlos asked with exasperation. “You don’t know gold. You don’t understand these Indians. Of what use are you?”
The boy hung his head and said that he did not know.
His eyes burning with greed, Carlos exclaimed, “This is gold, don’t you understand? Finding it can change our lives forever!”
“I can take you there, God Carlos,” Orocobix repeated.
* * *
Gold: nothing in all of God’s creation was to Spanish explorers more precious. Gold was the object of their deepest cravings.
Yet you could not eat gold. You could not feed it to dogs. Cattle would not graze on it. Pigs would scorn it in their slop. Gold was soft like the belly of a matron and could not withstand heavy manual labor like iron. Colombian Indians used it to make fish hooks, ornaments, and hair tweezers. Later, it would be used to fill decayed teeth. But in 1520, the main use for gold was to make jewelry and trinkets.
The Spanish believed that great quantities of gold lay in the mountains of Jamaica. It was a rumor they had picked up from the other islands, and the attempt to find this phantom gold was a direct cause of the enslavement and eventual extermination of the Jamaican and other West Indian Arawaks. Linked to this futile search for gold was the creation of the evil system known as the encomienda.
Introduced in 1501 by Nicolas de Ovando during his term as governor of Hispaniola, an encomienda was the grant of a parcel of land along with absolute rights to the landowner to use its Indian residents as a source of free labor. In exchange, the landowners agreed to convert the Indians to Catholicism and thus save their immortal souls from the fires of hell. Instead of worshipping the wooden zemis of their forefathers, the Arawaks would be taught to kneel before Catholic zemis such as crucifixes and figurines of the saints, angels, and the Virgin Mary. It amounted to throne-sanctioned slavery.
Gold mining in those days required the painstaking sifting through of tons of alluvial deposits in the mountainous areas of the interior. Getting to these deposits meant slogging through dense forests and swamps, braving the heat and mosquitoes and attack by hostile tribes.
The method of mining the gold was crude and labor-intensive. Holes dug into the banks of a fast-flowing section of the river gradually accumulated deposits of dirt and sand, which were carefully sifted through for gold. It was exhausting drudgery that yielded specks of the valuable metal per day and often nothing at all for hours.
In some islands—Hispaniola, for example—this technique, although crude and backbreaking, did result in significant finds of gold. But Jamaica had no gold—not in the interior, not in the foothills, not on the coastline. What Carlos had seen in the woman’s nose was an ornamental pin made of guanin, an alloy of copper and gold. It was not real gold.
But believing that gold lay strewn over the mountains like wild fruit falling from a government tree, Carlos was plotting to find some and smuggle it back to Spain. If he was successful, he would never be a poor man again. And the truth was that he was sick and weary of being poor and ignored like a stray animal. He hungered for respect, recognition, comfort—all the accoutrements that went with being rich. He wanted what de la Serena had but did not appreciate.
Carlos vowed that once he had the gold, he would not be cynical and indifferent to it like the old man was. He would attend Mass every day. He would make novenas, give money to the poor. He would stop pretending to be God, for he would be rich, and being rich was better than being God.
* * *
Carlos had not meant to stay longer than overnight in the Arawak village. But as soon as the women had left, Orocobix served the gods drink and fruit with an expression of devoutness that Carlos, in his vanity, could not resist.
“Already it is hot, God Carlos,” said Orocobix apologetically, “but the bohio is cool and comfortable.”
God Carlos did not understand. Neither he nor Pedro knew the time but the sun told them that they would have to hurry back to help with the careening.
Since they had slept in their clothes and lived in a time before dental hygiene was a daily ritual, it remained only for Carlos to strap the scabbard in which he kept his dagger around his right ankle and they were ready to return to the beached ship.
That one night at the village was all Carlos and the boy Pedro expected. But at the end of another long day of careening the Santa Inez, the two were walking off the beach with the other men when Orocobix glided out of the bush where he had been waiting all day.
“God Carlos!” he called out. The other men heard and looked knowingly from one to the other, but no one spoke a word within earshot of Carlos about the bizarre name the Indian was calling him.
And so Carlos and the boy Pedro went over to Orocobix and ended up passing another night in the village.
On this second night there was no areito—no communal celebration in which the whole tribe participated. Many of the bohios had open fires just outside their doorways around which families of Indians gathered talking among themselves or playing with their barkless dogs. There were sounds of laughter and a low background babble of soft, intermittent chit-chat that people all over the world use at the end of the day, and every now and again the wail of a hungry baby would pierce the blanket of darkness whose immensity was riddled by pinholes of light made by the scattered open fires, and a mother would dart into a thatched hut to feed her infant.
Some of the Indians curled up and dozed around the dancing sprigs of fire, occasionally stirring to take part in the chatter. There were no guards or sentries posted, and if the night occasionally crackled with an unrecognized sound, as all nights will do, here or there a man might sit up and look around or even pad to the edge of light and peer briefly into the darkness before returning to the fire. They behaved like a people without enemies.
That second night Carlos brought with him a crossbow from the bowels of the ship, for his was an untrusting heart. Using a hand crank, he armed the crossbow with an iron bolt and carried three spares with him.
Carlos and the boy Pedro sat outside the open doorway of Orocobix’s bohio, having eaten their fill of cassava, fruit, and roasted fish. The village around them seemed to be floating on the smoky darkness, the ind
ividual thatched huts resembling a fleet of ships.
Sometimes an Indian would wander over to the fire and squat next to the gods and say a few words to them. It became evident to the Indians that the older god was not as friendly as the younger one, and many soon learned to leave Carlos in peace and say nothing to him except a cordial greeting.
In the dimness of the night, Carlos and the boy could make out the shape of the village, which was circular, with bigger rectangular bohios in the middle—where the cacique and his kinsmen lived—surrounded by smaller rounded ones occupied by ordinary people. By daylight, the gods could see the design of the village, the small stream that ran nearby, the neat gardens—conucos—that were planted with cassava, garlic, potatoes, yautias, and mamey. They discovered that part of the Indian village was staked off as a playing field called a batey, where a ceremonial game was played with a rubber ball. Carlos and the boy had never seen rubber before, for it was a material unknown to the Spaniards, and they marveled over it.
They stayed a third night and a fourth, and soon they were sleeping every night in a hammock. Carlos was content. Everywhere he went throughout the village he was greeted with reverence. Indians bowed their heads as he walked past as if he were royalty. Whatever he desired from them was granted immediately. True, he could only make himself and his wishes crudely understood. But even this difficulty made him appear more truly godlike. For as he told Pedro boastfully, which god has ever been completely understood by his worshippers?
“You are not a god, señor.”
“Shut up!” Carlos barked. “Your mouth spoils everything.”
* * *
Now that he was an acknowledged god, Carlos took a new woman every day. Some lay with him willingly, being young and venturesome and curious to know what it was like to be penetrated by a god. Most of the women he took on an impulse, meeting them on the footpath that led to Santa Gloria Bay where the Arawaks beached their canoes. The mood would suddenly come over him, and he would walk boldly up to the woman and rub her pubis and let it be known what he desired.
Some terrified women would flee, dropping behind whatever fruit or gourd filled with fish they were carrying. Carlos would give chase through the woods. For such an ungainly man, he had a surprising quickness and Pedro would hear the woman shrieking and see the bushes spasm where he took her. Sometimes he would not give chase but would simply wait for another woman to appear.
Whatever Carlos did to the women, with their consent or not, it did not take long. The boy Pedro was curious and many times felt the urge to ask Carlos what he did and how he did it. Based on snatches of talk he had overheard from other men combined with what he had imagined, Pedro had a vague idea. But he longed for someone to tell him what was true and what was false. Yet he never asked Carlos.
Several times the boy would stalk close and hide behind a tree to watch, but all he saw was the naked rump of Carlos pumping up and down violently while almost hidden underneath him wriggled the woman, pinned by his bulk, her arms flailing the air helplessly. One time he saw another woman smothered under his bulk but whose hands clasped his naked cheeks as if to help him with the pumping.
Lately, Carlos had been spending hours talking wildly about what he would do when the gold he intended to find had made him rich.
The boy was a good listener and he would hear out the braggadocio plans without interruption or discouragement or contradiction, although he would sometimes accurately point out to Carlos that last night he had bought an estate in Cordoba and therefore tonight did not need another in Sevilla. Carlos would stand corrected and admit his mistake unless he had been smoking cohiba by inhaling it through his nose from the y-shaped pipe known as tabaco. Then his disposition was likely to be contrary and he would insist on buying castles and estates that were hopelessly close to each other, regardless of the enormous expense. If he had taken snuff made of seeds of anadenanthera peregrina, which the Arawaks used as a hallucinogen, he would become openly belligerent and buy recklessly without regard to reason or economy. At such times, the boy Pedro had learned to leave him alone to spend his imaginary gold as wantonly as he pleased.
Sometimes when he had used the snuff, Carlos would fall into a quarrelsome mood and become aggressive and pick fights. In one such fight, he killed a warrior right in front of the man’s family, drawing the dagger from his ankle sheath and plunging it into the man’s eye. Orocobix, who had tried his best to break up the fight, witnessed the ugly scene. Afterward, Carlos was testy and surly and appeared ready to kill again until the hallucinogen had worn off and his sanity returned.
In these early days of his godhood, Carlos grew puffed up with pride and self-importance. Women still came to him for help—even though the feverish baby had died the day after he’d proclaimed it cured—and the village as a whole seemed content and boastful that not only was the god from the sky their friend, he also slept among them.
Carlos, who had the build of a warthog, began to strut like a peacock. Pride and arrogance oozed out of every porcine pore. The more women he lay with, the more inflated he became, swelling visibly on his own estimation. And always there was a chatter about finding gold and becoming rich and the dreams of how he would live the rest of his life as a man of wealth.
One evening he attacked a pretty Indian woman in the woods, beat her for resistance, and raped her repeatedly. She was the daughter of the elder, Calliou.
Chapter 17
This Carlos is not a god nor a man,” said Calliou bitterly. “He is a beast.”
Orocobix stirred restlessly. He was sitting cross-legged outside his bohio in the glow of a small fire with Calliou and his daughter Colibri, whose name meant hummingbird, her face still bruised and swollen from the beating Carlos had given her during the rape.
“He is no god,” she said in a sullen voice, barely able to speak because her lips were so swollen. “I have taken men inside me before. This was a man.”
Calliou winced at such frankness from his daughter. He rubbed the dirt with his naked feet and stared around him at the slumbering village.
It was well past midnight, and the moonless night was cooled by a breeze scented with rain. The village was girthed by a belt of darkness so immense and deep that the three people sitting before the embers of a dying fire might have thought themselves abandoned castaways. Fifty yards away, in Orocobix’s bohio, slept Carlos.
“The beast should die for what he did to my daughter,” Calliou said angrily.
“He is a god,” Orocobix said. “He cannot die.”
Colibri shifted on the dirt and looked up at the stars. “If he is a god . . .” she said thoughtfully.
“He is,” insisted Orocobix.
“Then he will not die even if he is killed,” she murmured.
No one spoke for a long time, and the silence was broken by the whistling of tree frogs and the sinister rattling of croaking lizards.
“He wishes to go where gold is found,” Orocobix said, after another long stretch of silence.
No one said a word; no one moved, not even when an alco slunk past the sputtering fire and was swallowed whole by the yawning mouth of darkness.
* * *
In 1520 death was a presence that frequented every corner of life and walked everywhere that men did. People died suddenly, often young, and of ailments that no longer kill. Smallpox, for example, was a global wholesaler of death. Today it is a lame peddler that hobbles door-to-door retailing death to a few remote villages in the undeveloped world.
So it was no surprise to the hardened crew of the Santa Inez when some among them began to die. The first to die was the grommet Alonzo, a boy of unknown age—possibly thirteen—who succumbed to the fever. He died aboard ship crying for the mother he never knew, for he was a foundling who had been raised by unloving nuns. He died in spite of being bled three times at the expense of de la Serena.
The next day, the Santa Inez, manned by a skeleton crew of eight, barely enough to handle the ship, set out with Monsieur
for a mapping sail around the island. Her bilge had been scraped clean, her old ballast of European stones that had grown foul and smelly with moss and mold thrown out and replaced by new stones found on the banks of a nearby river. Once emptied of ballast, her bilge was sprinkled with vinegar. With her armpits freshened and her ballast changed, the Santa Inez smelled unnaturally sweet, like a recently bathed whore.
She left at dawn in a light land breeze blowing off the mountains steadily enough to ghost her out of the bay and around the edge of the reef. Before she cleared the reef, the small body of the dead boy, wrapped in sailcloth and weighted down with river stones, was cast into the sea without ceremony.
“Look here!” de la Serena screamed at the men. “You should have waited for deep water!”
“He was beginning to stink,” one of the men cried.
“Look sharp now!” de la Serena bellowed. “Watch for shoals.”
Because the island had not yet been charted, the Santa Inez had to tap her way with a sounding line through unmarked shoals that mottled the clear water like dark sores. Once clear of the shallows she found blue water, caught a northeast quartering wind, and loped west with the serrated coastline off her port beam.
She sailed without Carlos and the boy Pedro. The boy had just weathered a bout of belly sickness. Carlos was afire with gold fever. Moreover, he thought that now was the time, with most of the crew gone, to comb the hills for the gold that he hoped would make him rich. He forced Pedro to come along because his young brain better understood the Taíno language than Carlos did.
As the Santa Inez nudged her nose around the edge of the reef and lay a course toward Negril Point, the two gods and Orocobix set out for the mountainous bosom of the island.
On the outskirts of the village, they were joined by Calliou.
“Why is he coming too?” the boy Pedro wondered.
God Carlos Page 12
