Orocobix indicated with gestures that Calliou knew the place of gold well and would be useful.
“I do not think he should come,” Pedro said to Carlos.
Carlos scanned the naked Indian. He had no weapon; he wore no clothing where one might be hidden. Carlos, on the other hand, had with him a loaded crossbow from the ship’s armory with four additional bolts. His dagger was sheathed in his ankle scabbard. He also wore a cuirass—chest armor—even though it was heavy and oppressively hot. He took the boy’s advice as a dare rather than a warning. His contemptuous glance said that he was more than a match for twenty Indians.
“He can come,” Carlos said, “but if he ever stands right behind me, I will cut his throat.”
Once the wishes of God Carlos were made known to the two Indians, the four set out in single file on a thin trail through the undergrowth and toward the looming mountains, which looked deceptively close. After slogging through the thicket for hours, they seemed to draw no closer to the mountains. Weighed down by the heavy cuirass, Carlos stopped frequently to rest. The two Indians and the boy would sit and dally in the shade while Carlos blew hard like an overworked mule.
“How much farther?” Carlos asked querulously, pointing to the mountain and to the small twig of gold the grateful mother had given him.
Orocobix understood. “It is close, God Carlos,” he said soothingly.
“What did he say?” Carlos asked Pedro.
The boy shrugged and guessed that it was no more than what the Indian had already said—that the gold was not far away.
“I’ll cut your damn throat if you don’t stop staring at me,” Carlos growled at Calliou, who looked quickly away.
“I think we should turn back,” the boy Pedro urged.
“Why?”
“Because I do not like the way they’re whispering.”
“Let them whisper. I’ll kill the first one who looks at me again,” and Carlos drew his finger across his throat.
With that threat in the air, the god lumbered to his feet and the men and boy resumed their journey.
* * *
It was hot that day in 1520. The month was October, the end of the hurricane season then and now. In the afternoon of this particular day a feverish stillness had seized the land as the heat mauled both living and dead without mercy.
It was too hot to talk, so they walked without talking. It was too hot to walk, so they stopped often to rest in the shade of majestic trees that grew all over the island—mahogany, royal palm, cotton, and flame heart. Massive flocks of birds passed overhead, dragging the woodlands with enormous shadows like wavering fishnets.
As they walked deeper into the woodlands, the boy Pedro became even more fearful and kept looking over his shoulder.
“Someone is following us,” he whispered to Carlos.
Carlos stopped and took a long look through the leaves and bramble. The two Indians also stopped and peered curiously at the gods.
“There’s no one there,” Carlos said gruffly.
“I tell you I heard something,” the boy insisted.
“It is your imagination,” Carlos scoffed, indicating to the Indians that they should continue.
The trail had been tamped down by the accumulated footsteps over the years but was so narrow that the three men and the one boy were scratched repeatedly by the overhang of bushes and trees.
Eventually, weary and sweaty, they came to a shiny river unreeling an endless tongue through the throat of a gorge. The two Indians immediately plunged into the water with joyful whoops and were soon splashing and ducking one another like exuberant children. Pedro joined them and also began frolicking in the cool water.
Suddenly the boy stood up and pointed, crying to Carlos, “There’s someone hiding behind that tree!”
Carlos turned quickly to look but saw nothing except the woodlands veiled like a penitent by the shadows.
“Are you going mad?” he asked the boy crossly.
Carefully setting on the ground his loaded crossbow and his deerskin shoes, Carlos put his right big toe into the cool river and waded in cautiously, almost distastefully, for he was a man who heartily disliked being wet. Grimacing, he stepped gingerly into the water and felt the current coiling around his ankles like a noose.
The river looked shallow, but its sandy bed was uneven, rocky, and hollowed out with holes marked only by stiller, shinier patches of water. The Indians knew where these were and avoided them, but Carlos did not see them in the placidity of the moving river because he was in the middle of a vivid daydream about how rich he was about to become and how he would relish all the treasures that wealth would bring—respect, comfort, love, attention, servants, and fine clothes.
Caught up in this fantasy he stepped suddenly into a hole in the riverbed and, weighed down by the cuirass which gripped his chest in an iron fist, he plunged like a dagger into the river’s heart.
The boy Pedro saw and cried, “Carlos!”
The two Indians splashed over to where the god had disappeared. Looking down, they saw him clawing desperately at the water and gaping up at them with terror.
Between them a dark thought darted like a foraging bat. Neither one moved. They simply peered down stonily as Carlos, pinned to the bottom of the hole by the body armor, waved frantically for help.
“Help him!” the boy Pedro screamed, rushing toward them. “He’s drowning!”
Calliou blocked his way. “If he is a god, he cannot die,” he said gruffly, holding back the boy.
As they watched, Carlos struggled to tear off the cuirass, which held him on the sandy bottom of the river in a death-grip of weight that all his furious wriggling could not loosen. His eyes screaming for help, Carlos exploded in a frenzy of movement, wildly flailing his arms. Pedro’s screams rolled through the river gorge in a deafening volley.
The short and furious fight ended abruptly as Carlos drowned: his wriggling dwindled into uncoordinated spasms; his bursting lungs, filling with water, surrendered the last pocket of precious breath in a spiraling coil of bubbles. Carlos went limp in the murderous embrace of his own body armor, his starkly staring eyes gaping with silent terror. His body slumped over and sank deep in the hole where it remained upright like an underwater stump. The two Indians watched him attentively to be sure that he was dead. Then they pulled him up and wedged his waterlogged body between two rocks.
Staggering out of the river, the Indians collapsed wearily on the bank, panting for air.
“You murdered him,” the boy howled.
“Don’t cry, young god,” Orocobix said soothingly to the sobbing boy, “for he will come back.”
Colibri drained out of the dark woods and cautiously waded into the river to peer at the dead body crumpled white and puffy between the rocks like a giant waterlogged slug. She poked at it repeatedly with a stick to be sure it was dead.
With a shriek, Pedro ran away in the direction from which they had come. Calliou leaped to his feet to give chase.
“Let him go,” Orocobix said. “He has hurt no one.”
* * *
The afternoon faded into evening and the dust of nightfall gathered over the gorge. On the riverbank, the three Indians sat together, their toes tingling in the sliding sheet of water.
God Carlos, wedged between the rocks, was beginning to bloat as his lifeless body occasionally twitched to the tug of the current, and his gaping, sightless eyes stared at the gorge with the stern fixity of a public statue.
“Any moment now, he will regain life,” Orocobix said repeatedly as their wait first began. But as the afternoon crested into evening, he said it less and less often. By the time dusk was furrowing like a darkening brow, he was silent.
The first time he said it, Calliou grated, “If he comes to life, I’ll hit him with a rock.”
“No!” Orocobix had replied sharply. “We kill him only once.”
“It is enough to do only once,” agreed Colibri.
“It is enough,” conceded her fath
er.
“Any moment now, and he will return,” Orocobix whispered.
A darkness without mercy settled over the gorge.
“It grows dark,” Colibri murmured.
“It is nothing,” said Orocobix. “Darkness does not hurt.”
The others didn’t reply. Calliou grabbed his legs and pulled them against his chest as a chill from the river seeped through the gorge and into his bones.
“He will come back,” Orocobix said. “Any moment now. You will see.”
Chapter 18
They slept on the bank of the river close to where the body of Carlos was wedged between the rocks, and on this moonless night the dead Spaniard seemed to blossom in a pouch of whiteness like a night-blooming flower. They talked about whether they should stay awake to see if Carlos would return, but Calliou said that there was no need since the man from the sky was not only clearly a man but one who was also dead. Orocobix disputed this and vowed to stay awake to greet the risen Carlos.
And at first, Orocobix did stay awake. But the sounds made by the river were so soothing that he eventually fell asleep along with the others. When he woke up dawn was breaking and the river humming contentedly to itself as it fed on the gorge.
Leaping to his feet, he rushed to the water’s edge and looked for the body. It was gone. All he could see was the river sliding through the gorge in a continuous tongue of shiny water. But there was no sign of the body.
“He has risen!” Orocobix cried triumphantly, awakening his two companions.
Calliou and Colibri did not believe even after they were fully awake and standing beside Orocobix and carefully scanning the empty river. They still did not believe even after they waded into the river out to the rocks where they had left the body and saw for themselves that it was gone. All they saw shining in the bottom of the hole was the cuirass lying on its side like a dead fish. Even then they did not believe.
Calliou splashed downstream, searching among the fringe of water plants and reeds lining the riverbanks but could find no trace of the body. The more the three Indians looked the more jubilant Orocobix became. He was convinced that Carlos had come back to life while the three of them slept and was vexed with himself for not staying up to greet him.
“I’m sorry, God Carlos,” he kept muttering like one possessed.
“We will find it if we look long enough,” Colibri declared as they waded downstream combing the banks.
But they did not find it even after walking until they came to where the sluggish river was shattered into an eddying cataract by the steep drop of a waterfall. If the body had drifted downstream it would not have cleared this part of the river where the water was a shimmering slice rolling taut and thin over sheer rock. And if it had miraculously come this far, the body should be trapped in the foaming cataracts at the foot of the falls.
But they saw no sign of a body. They saw no scraps of clothing that Carlos wore. A quarrelsome mood broke out among them. In his heart Orocobix fervently believed that God Carlos had risen and walked away from the gorge. Calliou and Colibri were just as adamant that some physical explanation was behind the disappearance of the body.
After some discussion, the three Indians decided to return to the village. They saw no reason to remain here, for there was no body. Calliou thought to dive down and retrieve the peculiar garment that the God Carlos had been wearing when he drowned, and several times he battled the current of the river and tried to lift up the cuirass lying at the bottom of the hole, but he did not have the strength or the breath, and when he asked Orocobix to help, the other said no, that he would not retrieve anything that might be used to prove that Carlos was not a God. And so they squabbled on the riverbank but the cuirass was not brought up and eventually they set off for the village.
They trudged in silence through the thicket of the woodland following the trail that marked the land like the scar of an old wound. Orocobix tried his best not to gloat. They were almost to the village when Colibri wondered, “What will we tell the cacique?”
“We can only tell him what we saw,” Calliou said gruffly, “for anything we say, Orocobix will say something different.”
“I will tell only the truth,” said Orocobix.
“There is no truth,” Colibri countered. “There is only explanation.”
* * *
What had happened to God Carlos?
A crocodile had taken him. During the night the hunting beast had detected the putrefying carcass and glided over and seized it by the leg. It had dragged the body upriver and stored it in a hole in the riverbank where in the underwater murkiness it would snack piecemeal on it over the next two weeks, for the beast liked flesh that was rotting.
Between the Arawaks and crocodiles there was no love and little contact. None of the middens left behind by the extinct Indians contains any trace of crocodile bones, an absence that would in our own time mystify paleontologists. But its explanation is simple: the Arawak weapons were too puny to kill crocodiles. Moreover, the Indians found the beast so fearsome that they avoided its haunts.
While the three Indians were searching for dead Carlos, the body was snug in the underwater pantry of an ancient reptile that was breeding a clutch of eggs with a surprising gentleness. And every now and again, like an ugly, translucent shadow, the creature would glide out of the hole in which it lived to tear off another chunk of flesh from the dead Spaniard.
God Carlos was no communion Eucharist that the monster ate for the sake of its soul, for it was impossible to imagine that there could be a spiritual half to such a grotesquerie. To the soulless beast, God Carlos was nothing more than food.
* * *
What was he to do?
That was the question that tormented the boy Pedro as he fled through the woodlands toward the settlement. Most of the time he ran, but occasionally when he was breathless, he would stop and rest against a tree and listen for the footsteps of a pursuer. But he heard nothing. The woodland was a frightening place of thick shadows and suspicious sounds and he did not stop long in it, for whenever he did he felt a touch of raw fear.
Over and over again he relived the drowning and saw the Indians looking on stonily as it happened. Pedro had not particularly liked Carlos, but he was only a boy and had spent many hours in the company of the older man. Carlos had never treated him kindly, but neither had he ignored him as the other crew members did. He had been to the older man like a tolerated dog, and though Carlos often cuffed him on the side of the head for capricious reasons, even such rough treatment was better than being ignored.
What puzzled the boy was why the Indians had allowed Carlos to drown. He thought the act had something to do with the woman Carlos had dragged screaming off the trail and into the woods a few days ago. What he had done to her in the woods the boy Pedro still did not entirely know. But somehow that deed was responsible. He did not know that the woman was named Colibri and that her father was Calliou.
As for the indifference of Orocobix during the drowning of his god, what explanation could anyone give as to why he had done nothing to help save Carlos? His behavior made no sense to the boy.
Deep in thought, he came to the outskirts of the village where Arawak women were busy planting by walking in a line across a field and using sticks to bore holes in the soil into which they dropped seeds. All of them knew the young god by sight, and many glanced up and greeted him as he walked past looking at no one, his heart torn by the drowning of Carlos.
He disappeared into the woods, with the cries of, “Young God! Young God!” from Arawak women ringing in the air. He reached the settlement that evening, still undecided about what to do, when he ran into old Hernandez.
He found the old man resting against the trunk of a tree. The time ashore had made him ragged and disheveled, for since the ship had sailed, he had been living outdoors and eating very little. Yet his mood was not downcast. He had an old man’s view of life and knew there was no point in either extreme jubilation or dejection, for neithe
r feeling was lasting. The church preached this doctrine of temporariness, and to this day it is the underpinning of the serious religious temperament. But a long full life that made him witness to the inevitability of change, not any proclamation by the pope, had brought old Hernandez to this period of steadiness.
After sharing some pieces of bread with the old man, the boy Pedro told his gruesome story with much weeping and gory detail. The old man listened calmly, and at the end of the story, he stared long and hard at the sky like one reading omens from the pattern of clouds.
“I do not know what to do,” sobbed Pedro.
“Nothing is the best thing to do if you’re unsure about what to do,” mumbled the old man.
“They let him drown.”
“But they did not hurt you,” observed old Hernandez. “And after he drowned, they sat on the banks of the river and waited. Why? What were they waiting for?”
“I do not know the why or the what, señor,” blurted the boy. “I only know what they did. I do not know their reason for doing it.”
The two sat silent, deep in thought, and then the old man stirred, for he had a sudden idea.
“Could it be that they were trying to prove that he was a god?”
The boy was struck by this idea. He sat up and stared at the old man with undisguised wonder. “It must be,” he said in a hushed voice. “That is it, of course.”
“Allowing Carlos to drown was a test of faith, then,” old Hernandez said without irony, “like saying a Mass for a soul in Purgatory.”
After a long pause for reflection, the boy Pedro asked, “So what should I do? What should I say if anyone asks me about Carlos?”
“You should do nothing, and say nothing. No one will care. He is not a soul that the world will miss.”
“Señor de la Serena is sure to ask about him.”
“Then you must tell a lie, for if the soldiers find out what happened, they will slaughter the Indians.”
“I do not like to tell lies, señor. It is a sin that can land you in hell.”
God Carlos Page 13
