* * *
More than four hundred years have passed since the voyage of the Santa Inez. She was a brave, stout vessel and did all that was asked of her by a race of hard, brutal men.
After the voyage was over and the Santa Inez had returned to Cádiz, she remained tied up at a public wharf for a year, gradually assuming the frowsy look of abandonment. Eventually, de la Serena sold her to a Spanish merchant who restored her to her former sleekness and put her to work transporting goods throughout the Mediterranean.
She plied this trade faithfully for many years, before succumbing to the ravages of age and labor. When she had outlived her usefulness, she was sailed to Barcelona and sold to a salvager for scrap. Picked apart, she sat at the dock a rotting hulk with no masts or spars or rigging, unloved and forgotten. During an especially bad winter in 1565, her hull was broken up and used as firewood.
She had never lived and therefore could not die, and in the end, no one mourned her passing. But like all sailing ships she was so lifelike that she seemed to have her own spirit, personality, and life force. And when she was broken up and burned as firewood, the space she had formerly occupied became vacant, which is a sign of death. Her destruction should have been mourned if only by the little humans she bore safely across the ocean sea to the Indies.
* * *
Orocobix did not give up easily on his belief in God Carlos. He retrieved the cuirass from the bottom of the river and brought it to his bohio, where he painted it with shapes and figures he had seen in a dream, and it became his most treasured zemi.
He stubbornly maintained to all the tribe that Carlos has been resurrected, and when Calliou and Colibri swore that the invaders were men and not gods, he strongly disagreed.
At first, the elders did not know what to believe, and so things might have stayed as they were except for a discovery Calliou made a few weeks later when a body washed up on the shore, which turned out to have been the boy Alonzo who had been so carelessly buried at sea. There was no mistaking the body for an Arawak’s, and to make his grisly point unmistakably clear, Calliou lugged it to the village so that all could see a dead god.
Nonetheless, as Orocobix grew older, his memories of God Carlos became mythic and sacred. Every time he told the god’s story he enriched it with such lavish details that it soon became weighted down and cryptic like the Catholic liturgy. Tribesmen cringed and hurried out of earshot if they thought he was about to recite it. Yet he was so respected as a holy man that on the death of Ganiquo, the shaman, Orocobix was named his replacement. In this capacity he prayed many times to various zemis to save his people, but there was no heavenly thunderbolt, no intervention, nothing but the hideously indifferent silence of heaven.
Orocobix lived a long life and saw repeated proof that the men from the sky were not gods, nor spiritual, nor anything more than greedy, wicked men. He witnessed their ravaging of his tribe, and in various skirmishes with the Spaniards, he inflicted wounds on their soldiers, some of which caused death. Yet he clung to the myth of God Carlos to the bitter end. His people forgave him this obsession, and he rose so high in their esteem that upon becoming a feeble and sick old man, he was honored by the elders with death by strangulation as he slept.
To escape the predations of the Spaniards, the entire tribe, when Orocobix was still alive, moved into the deep mountainous interior of the island, setting up a village at the headwaters of the White River. Today the site, located in the mountainous district of St. Ann’s marked on the map as Bellevue, is one of the best preserved Arawak middens or garbage dumps in Jamaica, and anthropological excavations have yielded many artifacts and shards of pottery that tell of the life and death of a once flourishing people.
* * *
De la Serena returned to his family in Majorca and settled down into the community where he became known as a pious man who was always a good choice for leading public prayer. He grew old and died still fixed in his belief that Mount de la Serena towered over Jamaica. It did not. A scribe in the cartography office threw out Mount de la Serena and reinstated the simpler Blue Mountain because the young King Charles had expressed his displeasure with the recent ornateness of Spanish place names. De la Serena went to his grave unaware that no feature of the New World bore the imprint of his name.
* * *
Old Hernandez went back to sea until he was truly too old for the work of a seafarer and retired to the countryside where he lived to an ancient age honored by his family and friends.
* * *
Calliou and Colibri both died in battle against the Spaniards.
* * *
The cacique, Datijao, was lured into a trap by the Spaniards, who invited him to a peace talk—a common ploy used by the invader. When he arrived, the Spaniards seized him and threatened him with hanging as an example to his people unless he converted to Catholicism. A priest gravely warned him that his soul would go to hell if he were hanged.
Datijao asked, “And where do the souls of Spaniards go?”
“To heaven.”
“I prefer an afterlife without Spaniards,” the cacique said quietly.
They hanged him.
* * *
The boy Pedro did not intend to tell anyone about what had really happened to Carlos, but he was badly in need of a father and tended to gravitate toward any man who paid him attention. Over the course of the voyage home, he dogged the footsteps of Monsieur, following him throughout the ship wherever he went.
Monsieur embodied the appetites and idiosyncratic ways of the stereotypical Frenchman. He ended every day by drinking wine heavily and always went to bed drunk. One night, he persuaded Pedro to have some wine, which made the boy tipsy and dizzy. It also made him chatty, and as the Santa Inez ghosted under the stars, he told Monsieur what had really happened to Carlos.
When the boy was finished with his story, Monsieur exclaimed sympathetically that it was the most moving tale he’d ever heard. He was in his cups and began to sob loudly and made such a commotion that the night watch wandered over to see what was wrong. Eventually, after much sniffling, Monsieur lay out on the deck of the Santa Inez and fell asleep.
Some days later, as the Santa Inez was approaching the Canary Islands, Monsieur was working on a final draft of his map when he remembered the story the boy had told and was so moved again that he impulsively named a bluff on the Jamaican south coast Pedro Bluff and the bay beneath, Pedro Bay. He did this on his own without telling anyone.
The same scribe who had erased the name Mount de la Serena from the map because he thought it clumsy, left Pedro Bluff untouched because his sister had just given birth to her first child whom she also named Pedro. Over four hundred years after the voyage of the Santa Inez, the names Pedro Bluff and Pedro Bay still exist on maps of Jamaica.
* * *
Monsieur soon disappeared from the stage, for his was a nomadic spirit that would wander the rounded earth over his lifetime, mapping it. If his theory is correct, by now he would have outlived twenty generations, assumed dozens of nationalities, had scores of wives, and fathered thousands of children. Otherwise, muttering the last words, “I do not agree with this,” he has gone to the place that all men go when their years are spent.
* * *
The boy Pedro returned to his childhood village in the Pyrénées, where he grew into a good man who was especially gentle and kindly with women. He never found out that a part of Jamaica had been named after him, just as the people who live today on Pedro Bluff have no idea that its name was inspired by a Spanish cabin boy who visited the island briefly in 1520.
* * *
Is this account of the voyage of the Santa Inez true? And what does it mean? In this confused world where truth and meaning are dark and unknowable, it is as good a truth as any.
As Colibri, the hummingbird, said in a moment of wisdom, “There is no truth. There is only explanation.
The End
Bonus Materials
God Carlos is the first novel in Anthony C. Wi
nkler's three book series exploring the effect of colinization on the modern Jamaican man. The second novel in the series, The Family Mansion, focus's on the British Colonization of Jamaica at the turn of the century. This final novel in the series takes place in contemporary Jamaica.
To follow, please find an excerpt of the opening pages of The Family Mansion, set for release in the summer of 2013. We've also included a reading group guide, and some more information about Anthony C. Winkler and Akashic Books.
Excerpt
The following is an excerpt
of the opening pages of
The Family Mansion
___________________
CHAPTER ONE
The family mansion, a hulking presence of mortar and stone, squatted with the indifference of a concrete Buddha in the center of an enormous manicured lawn ornamented with flower beds, ivy hedges, topiary trees, and an army of neatly trimmed bushes. No one was in sight, and a vast sea of silence covered the land like a morning fog. The trees had shed their leaves in the cold, and the bushes looked stumpy and dowdy like old women at a funeral. Occasionally the morning stillness was broken by the startling sound of wild laughter that seemed to rattle from somewhere deep inside the house and that had a humorless herky-jerky lilt to it like the bleat of a disgruntled goat.
It was February 1805, the dark of night in a country borough in England, placid and seemingly deserted of all life. The only human forms to be seen were frozen statues of Artemis, the Greek goddess of hunting, caught in the middle of a chase with a leaping dog, also made of stone, bounding at her side, both of them posing in the petrifaction of sculpture next to an enormous yew tree. Nearby was another statue, this one of the god Pan gamboling beside a rosebush, which in the general dreariness had the squat appearance of a pygmy. Here and there in the dimness lurked similar figures made of stone, part of the garden statuary that had gradually accumulated over the years acquiring the green tint of mildew or bad beef.
From the house came another peal of laughter, automatic and regular like the horn of a fogbound ship. Inside the house, in a chilly room flickering to a half-dead fire, an imposing gentleman, his cheeks bracketed by gaudy mutton chops, his face red and swollen from the cold, was peering intensely across a desk at the young man who sat before him laughing. Nothing funny had been done or said, and the older man occasionally wiggled his nose as if to signal his perplexity at the periodic salvos of laughter.
The room in which the two men sat was crammed with ornate plaques and paintings and figurines. Behind the older gentleman, some distance above his head, hung the stylized painting of a distant ancestor gazing out proprietarily at the world as if he were its owner. He stood against a backdrop of a fuzzy cloud bank or what some viewers might take to be a foggy mountain. (In portraits like this one the mountains were always made to look fuzzy and inconsequential so as not to upstage the gentleman or lady who was paying the artist.) On the head of this particular ancestor was an imposing and ridiculous-looking furrowed wig that draped down past his breastbone and might have been mistaken for the pelt of a full-grown Merino sheep. On one side of the ancestor in the painting was a stack of books no reasonable man could imagine such a puffed-up, pretty creature reading, and on the other a spy glass suitable to a pirate or a peeping Tom.
Books littered not only the painting, they were also scattered everywhere throughout the room: in a disciplined phalanx on the bookshelves; in small piles on the spacious desk like the rubble found on the grounds of a half-built brick building. Many of the books had the crispness of unsoiled newly printed money. None of them had been read completely through. All of them, however, had been fondled over by the older gentleman. He liked being surrounded by books since he believed that they reflected well on him even when unread. His son, who sat across the desk and was at that age when he didn't care much about what the world thought of him, disliked books and made no bones about it.
The two gentlemen were members of the Fudges family, the older one being the paterfamilias, the younger man who laughed a lot being his unfortunate second son. They had been discussing the young man's future, about which the old gentleman was quite concerned. He had had high expectations that tonight his son would have announced his engagement to the widow Bentley, who was the best catch available in the entire district. But something had happened, something extraordinary that not only did not result in the engagement being announced, it sparked an announcement of just the opposite kind by the widow—namely, that there would be no marriage between Fudges and Bentley. What exactly had happened was known only to Fudges the younger, whose Christian name was Hartley, and it was this information that his father was trying his best to pry out of him. But all he had gotten for his efforts so far were the annoying mocking laughter of his son and the dismissal reply that everything was fine, nothing was wrong.
Fudges was a peculiar surname that was oddly plural even when it referred to a single family member. This was the deliberate design of the elder Fudges'. Many years ago the name of the family was Fudge, but by the early seventeenth century that word had come to suggest shiftiness and hedging, to say nothing of a particular kind of confectionery. So the elder Fudges began spelling his name with an added "s," lessening the linkage between the family name and the namesake candy and confusing hostesses who didn't know whether it was singular or plural. If you meant one family member you said Fudges. But what did you write if you meant several family members—Fudgeses or Fudges? This sort of confusion was exactly what Fudges the elder calculated would cause his name to become memorable. A man liked his name to be enigmatic and mysterious, not circumstantial and ordinary.
The elder Fudges, as he faced his second son, was asking himself what could have possibly happened between his boy and the widow to upset all their hopes and carefully laid plans. Hartley Fudges, on the other hand, was being so tight-lipped and secretive that he conceded nothing and offered no explanation.
Hartley Fudges was twenty-three years old. He was neither particularly bright nor especially dumb, neither ugly nor good-looking. His facial features were a bit jumbled as if nature, with no theme in mind, had assembled them from various grab bags of miscellaneous noses, eyebrows, chins, and foreheads. If a man may be compared to an earthquake, Hartley Fudges was an imperceptible tremor that left no lingering aftershocks. He had been born the second son into a minor aristocratic family and had been his mother's favorite child—she had six children but only two survived to adulthood, Hartley and his older brother Alexander. Before she could thoroughly spoil Hartley, which she was devoutly trying to do, she herself was carried off by an outbreak of typhoid when she was only forty-two. In spite of this tragedy, Hartley was definitely born with a silver spoon in his mouth. He was as pampered as any young aristocrat child could be, raised by nannies and cosseted by a small company of servants and sent to both Eton and Oxford where he learned to talk like an aristocratic Englishman.
Every time an Englishman opens his mouth he tells the world to which social class he belongs. Upper-class Englishmen went to the finest schools where they were taught how to speak with a certain posh accent that would distinguish them from the man in the street. This accent is known as received pronunciation or, informally among academics, as RP.
Received pronunciation is a hideous style of speech that sounds as if the alphabet were being blown through the speaker's nose. It is so distinctive that its use immediately signifies that the speaker is from the upper classes. Why it was necessary to so publicly tell the classes apart is baffling to us who live in the twenty-first century. We can only guess that part of the perceived necessity may have been founded on the fact that dueling was an accepted albeit illegal custom among the upper class for resolving conflicts and settling differences, and without knowing it, if telltale accents did not exist, a bamboozled earl or duke or count might find himself trading shots at fifteen paces with his neighbor's gardener. That would never do. Only gentlemen who used received pronunciation as their main mode of speech were en
titled to slaughter each other on the field of honor. Hartley Fudges, by this measure, was indubitably a gentleman. Every word he spoke came through his nose. He faithfully tacked an aspirant sound before any word beginning with "h." He committed no malapropisms. And if he swore, he uttered odd expressions such as "egad" and "zounds."
England of Hartley Fudges's day was a rigidly stratified society with horrendous and gaping differences between the classes. There were more lords and earls and dukes and counts and marquises than blackberries in summer. Lifestyle differences between the privileged and the poor were obscenely evident and indefensible even while a glib windbag such as Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) tried to justify the principle of subordination as necessary to the survival of England. By subordination he meant the shuffling of the population into layered classes where the few had much and the many had little. Belonging to the few who had much was Hartley Fudges, a man of twenty-three on whom an expensive education had been wasted, producing a jack-in-the-box who did not like to read but who spoke impeccably through the nose using only the purest received pronunciation.
* * *
The father of Hartley Fudges gazed at his second son with obvious fondness. Earlier he had glimpsed Hartley and the widow sitting in the corner of the drawing room talking animatedly while all around them revelers swirled in a kaleidoscope of bright colors and convivial chatter. He had not drawn close enough to overhear their conversation, but if he had, he would have noticed that the widow had gotten progressively drunker and drunker as the night passed. She began to slur her words and issue grand opinions about everything under the sun, from blasting that Gallic beast Napoleon to praising the wonder of Johann Ritter (1776–1810), the German electrochemist who claimed to have discovered some new properties of light.
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