Light Action in the Caribbean

by Barry Lopez

  An old-fashioned two-story hotel, the Essex, stood in good repair and it was suppertime so I went in to eat, and then took a room when I learned from the clerk where I was, and where I had to go to get back on the road for Glasgow and U.S. 2 on in to Williston.

  The town was an oddity in eastern Montana. Barely a sign of ranching and none of mining. No railroad. No Indian faces. It was agreeable country, the short-grass prairie appealing with its seasonal creeks and woody draws. It might have been homesteaded early on, but the sign of constancy in it was its flocks of crows calling, the pale sky and the short grama grass.

  The meal was good and well served, the room comfortable, without a phone or television, without advertising or promotional circulars. The mood in the hotel was akin to that at some resorts, each thing perfectly tended to but the overall atmosphere undisturbed. Any inchoate threat of retaliation one might have experienced, or the weight of indifference known from moments lived out in airports and buildings among strangers, was absent here. I opened the sash-weighted windows and abandoned myself to a deep and dreamless sleep.

  My obligations in Williston, attending to some details of my father’s will, were not pressing. I remained in Gannett for three days.

  The single store in town, a kind of mercantile, had much to covet in the way of antiques—old carpenter’s tools, some well-preserved harness, equipment I recognized for candle-making, and about fifty running feet of old paperbacks. The first morning I went through the books title by title and bought two, but when I stepped outside again I realized that was where I wanted to be, out, on foot and looking up north past the orchard where the road didn’t go, where the land dipped into a swale and then rose into low curving hills and fell away again. If, in fact, it hadn’t been farmed it could have been for stones in the soil, some rock like flint that tore the plows apart. Standing in the street that morning I saw her for the first time, walking in from the hills and up to a white house with dark green trim, which she entered.

  Who can say why a person or a place is attractive? I found Gannett and the hotel and the cant of the girl’s stride to be so, and stayed on the extra days to know why. I read one of the paperbacks on the hotel porch, hoping the why of it would come over me, but it didn’t. A few people passed in and out of the store. Someone drove away south out of town. In the afternoon, I watched five children at play. They might have spent the morning in class together in someone’s home. Remembering those days now, it occurs to me that outside of ordinary noises—a door closing, an engine starting, the ticking of wood cooling in the hotel’s walls in the night—one sound hummed beneath it all, the streaming down of light from the empty sky.

  I drove off early that last day and went on to Williston. It was a year before I returned, backtracking the roads from Glasgow. I had no other idea but to eat at the hotel and read. It was on that trip that I saw the girl wading through the waist-high grass in her black frock, like another sort of bare-limbed, rain-darkened tree, a cogitating body. The clerk at the Essex told me she’d lost her hearing in a shooting accident, but I guessed there was more than this and let our conversation go into awkward silences until he gave me the rest, that she ‘d been hit in the head by a stray bullet one night in Long Beach, that it had eclipsed the hearing in both ears, and the day she got out of the hospital her father moved them, straight to northeastern Montana from south L.A. The same day I saw her crossing the hillside, I passed her on the street. Her blue eyes were fierce as black jet; the determination in her face approached a leer. She didn’t even glance toward me.

  The first time I returned to Gannett—and I came back only once after that—I was having an evening cigar on the hotel porch after a day of wind and rain, and in that baleful light I spotted a figure walking in from the north, a boy with a rifle balanced across his shoulder, the barrel forward in his fist. I could tell it was a boy by the stride. As he came on I saw his silhouetted head was close-cropped and that his jeans bagged in a style popular in large cities but rarely seen at the time in rural Montana. A dog followed which looked pensive and dour and mostly bluetick hound.

  The boy chucked his chin as he went by, but in a surly manner. The dog glanced up as he passed, but with no more interest than if he were taking in the familiar chair, occasionally occupied.

  I smoked the cigar out, ate supper, and retired. I was reading a collection of unsettling stories I’d bought called Jesus’ Son. Its premises kept me awake until two, after which I decided to get up and go down to the porch and sit in the moonlight. A flaring match to light another cigar would have ruined the stillness, quite inseparable from the moonlight, so I only sat there in a jacket and my undershorts. I was not surprised when I saw a small figure walking the same path the boy had walked hours before. It was a continuation of a disturbance, one initiated by the boy’s passing, and it was this that had really brought me out onto the porch. I soon saw that it was the girl, and I could tell that it was bad, the lopsided way that she advanced, sweeping a hand in front of her to locate obstruction. I sat rigid, a motionless spectator.

  I could pick out little detail in the dimness, but when she drew near I saw plainly the dark welt of blood congealed like paint on her face and run out across her chest in her blouse. I didn’t want to move my eyes, to deliberately examine her body, but I sensed her clothing was twisted, and one hand hung still and distorted. He had left her for dead, I thought.

  She stopped a few feet away. Her disheveled body seemed an object dragged in the wake of her will.

  “Are you all right?” I asked. Despite her wounds she appeared calm, even invulnerable.

  “He’s got a surprise,” she said evenly. Within the keep of herself, I imagined, she had not heard my question. “He knows I was shot before,” she continued. “He wanted to be part of that. He was always asking to see the wound. The thought of it, the bullet going through my head, made him excited. He wanted to see where it went in, where it came out, and put his fingers against the places. And then he did it himself, shot me in the head. He pulled down my pants. And then he walked away. But I’m here now and he has to look at me. He has to look right here”—she lifted the stiff hand to her creased temple—“where the bullet went, be forced to look at it until he makes a mess in his pants. For him, that’s going to be the beginning.”

  I wanted to stop her, cut her off. I didn’t know where the boy lived, where a doctor might be, and, strangely, had no urge to help. The girl was eerie in her stillness and independence. She’d suffered adversity, and perhaps knew better than I now what she needed to hold herself together. The boy would suffer. I knew there was hell to pay for this, and for the other shooting.

  She had me fixed with a stare from her dark face. Her breath was winded but steady. It seemed she expected me to go with her.

  I stood up, gesturing at my legs. “I haven’t got any pants on here. I’ve got to get my pants.” I lit a wooden match and held it to my lips. “Where’s the boy? Where’s he live?”

  She remained still as a dog with a leg shot away.

  I guessed the boy might be sleeping in a trailer somewhere, maybe with the gun. What about her parents, why weren’t they out looking? Why weren’t people off searching, lights on, the sheriff arriving? Nothing but the girl alone.

  “You can’t take his life,” I continued. I struck another match. “You can’t hurt him back for what he did, can’t kill him for it, even if it’s justified. Only the state can kill him,” I counseled. “If it’s premeditated, if he left you for dead, then the state will do that.”

  She drew in a breath through clenched teeth. I could tell from the angle of her head, the flick of her good hand, that she was done. What did she want from me? How could this be business of mine? She stepped back and turned to cross the street, walking toward two buildings and a path between them that led to a trailer house.

  I whiffed the match out. I watched her enter, halt but straight, the building’s shadows. I loped the opposite way, across the street toward her house. Maybe some
one there would help. I couldn’t; nor could I help the boy. She was out there somewhere, way past where I had gone. She was walking in from some distant place, and I knew I had to get there.

  Rubén Mendoza Vega, Suzuki Professor of Early Caribbean History, University of Florida at Gainesville, Offers a History of the United States Based on Personal Experience

  In 1524,1 an ancestor of my father2 named Bernardo Marín3 received a land grant4 from Hernán Cortés.5 He expanded these holdings until in the seventh generation6 the family controlled7 an extent of tobacco8 fields unexcelled in the New World.9 My son, with no grasp of history,10 no sense of proportion about the broad effects of tobacco,11 and a Romanticist’s infatuation with the Indian,12 repudiated his heritage in an act of suicide. When Communism fails in Cuba, as it must, and Castro13 flees, our family will again take up its place on the island.14 We will once again make the finest cigars in the world. And I will resist feelings of bitterness toward a middle son15 who could not wait. His grandfather told him as I did: patience. In this neglected virtue16 is the story of America.

  NOTES

  1. As a historian I have an obligation in my short paper to the exigencies and dictates of my profession, as well as a duty of courtesy toward the reader. I must, therefore, make clear at the outset that even though I am dealing for the most part with primary materials in the archives of my own family, I have after many years of meticulous research and also careful comparison with contemporaneous histories developed the confidence to let my family stand, like Everyman, for all families. (And I now provide access to these documents, formally, to my fellow historians.) I must state, too, that in my paper, which deals with incidents familiar even in their detail to amateur historians, I have deliberately chosen to consult not just lesser-known works, or works not as yet translated into the major research languages, but works that are at odds with contemporary historical thought. In doing so, I realize I open myself to criticism and invite contempt for the foundation of my ideas. But how else a fresh wind?

  2. Julio Cartena Mejordigas. My family dropped in 1912 the Spanish practice of a doubled surname, commemorating the lineages of both parents. Wilford F. Grace, in the closing years of a brilliant career at the University of Witwatersrand, devoted himself to the study of my father’s correspondence with relatives in Asturias. My father, a manic-depressive personality, wrote obsessively to even remote relatives in a kind of pathetic (though to me quite noble) attempt to clarify his place in history. It was he, for all his good points, who first gave my middle son, Petrero, whose life I take up at the end of my essay, doubts about his lineage. See “Julio Cartena Mejordigas: The Early Correspondence (1936–43)” by W. F. Grace in South African Review of Colonial History 18, no. 4 (1967): 54–78; and The Asturian Temperament by Nolan I. Benito.

  3. In addition to material in the family archives at the University of Texas at Austin, the reader is directed to the Marín Collection at the municipal library in Santander and to the Cormuello Collection of Cuban Historical Documents at the University of Oviedo. Marín was a sailmaker and an innovator of stitching techniques as well as the developer of a resinous treatment for sail thread that made early sixteenth-century Spanish sails, with their greater flexibility in cold weather and resistance to rot, the envy of European mariners. See The Advent of European Power by Hu-Li Huang; Galician Sailcraft by George G. Borcello; and “ ‘El Hilo Maravilloso’: A Key to Early Sixteenth-Century Spanish Sea Power” by M.D.R. Meltwater in Atlantic Maritime History 108, no. 5 (1974): 435–88.

  Marín sailed with Cortés and is mentioned in the standard biographies in his capacity as sailmaker-to-the-fleet; but references are few to his agrarian predilections and to his more or less sudden shift of occupation, which occurred when he was granted 17.6 hectares of arable land and the services of 30 indigenous workers in Cuba. I have been in correspondence with Roberta Nesserman-Phillips of the Department of History at Florida International University, who is preparing a book-length manuscript of Marín’s early years in Cuba, including his role in the suppression of the Mortemos Revolt. Early drafts of her manuscript make it plain that the renowned sailmaker and the lesser-known agrarian pioneer are one and the same, a point contested some years ago by Makelos Kostermela in a seminal article, “Technical Achievement in Sixteenth-Century French, English, and Spanish Sailcraft,” in Journal of Sewn and Fastened Materials 16, no. 7 (1947): 136–59. See also “Early Agrarian Reform Movements in the Caribbean” by Victor Brent in Panamanian Perspectives 44, no. 2 (1985): 227–89; and L’Insurrection des indigènes de l’île de Cuba et la répression espagnole by Jean-Bédel Bosschère, pp. 508–15.

  4. The property, a grant from Carlos V made upon the recommendation of Cortés, was one of sixteen Cortés authorized in 1524, each of equal size, the so-called “peach,” or “durazno,” of 17.6 hectares (43.5 acres). The grant was located in the southern piedmont of the Organos Mountains in the Pinar del Río, at the heart of what was to become the Vuelta Abajo. At this time the land was not so highly valued that Marín could not purchase tracts cheaply and trade to his advantage, perhaps with a sense of intuition. At the time of his death in 1551, he held title to 251 hectares (620.2 acres).

  The land-grant system of patronage in early Cuban history was, of course, politically motivated, and the process was subject to a certain amount of corruption. One must be careful, however, not to assume unblessed intentions prevailed or that invidious plots existed where none has been proven. Among the most lucid and penetrating analyses of this volatile aspect of Spanish colonial history is “Terrenos en barbecho, trabajadores disponibles: Una visión de agricultura duradera,” a 1988 doctoral dissertation by Manuel Peña, which draws heavily on two obscure works: La punizione di Cuba by Luigi Pernotti and Servitus in Novo Mundo by Henri Latrousse, S.J.

  5. Cortés, of course, has been studied handily by Demott, Esperanza, Bouchald, Clackas, Merriman, and Dorger. All of these biographies are rich and each one is distinctly valuable. Among more recent work, both the Tesraffe and Urbanowitz biographies suffer in my mind from vindictiveness and offer no improvement on earlier scholarship. Quite the contrary is true of Cortés and the Institution of an Imperial Order by Esther Manas vanKamp. She not only brings to bear her extensive knowledge of the Tomás de Bivar collection, which has only recently been opened to scholars, but pioneers a psychoanalytic approach long missing in studies of Cortés. In addition to her singular modern work, see her “Iconography in the Mexican Journals of Cortés” in Journal of Historical Psychoanalysis 52, no. 3 (1989): 279–301.

  6. In tracing the lineage of fifty-one New World families of Spanish origin whose founders arrived in the Caribbean in the sixteenth century, I’ve found that with thirty-six the consolidation of great wealth came in the seventh generation. (By great wealth I mean a perennial wealth, an aggregation of investment, credit, and land that cannot be depleted at that point by scandal, squandering of opportunity, ordinary prodigality, or even criminal activity.) I am no mathematician; but, noting that this wealth does inexplicably begin to dissipate in the eighth generation and that by the ninth or tenth generation, it is on a par with that, respectively, of the fifth and fourth generations, a formula is present here seemingly worth divining.

  7. A relative term, which benefits from the clarification offered in Carlson Kildfray’s Subterranean Economics. Kildfray has, of course, been heavily criticized for his putative insensitivity to human plight; but I believe he comes closer in his work to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century economic reality in the Spanish Caribbean than any other economic historian. The fact is that Taino, Ciboney, Cuna, Island Carib, Mosquito, and other indigenes were at a primary level of social and economic organization, but this was not their fault. It was necessary that they be brought along quickly with the development of New World wealth; and it was inevitable in such a process that some individuals would be treated roughly. In El florecimiento de la economía política occidental by Juan Ramón Aruba and Kasumasa Asahi’s Dotchakuteki keizai chitsuj
o no jokyo (The elimination of indigenous economic boundaries), such provocative concepts as “ordained wealth,” “penetration economics,” and “disparity compassion” are subjected to stunning exegeses.

  The storm-tossed subject of the exercise of economic and political control in previously occupied New World territories having been addressed, the further question of authority in these new lands vis-à-vis the desires of competing colonial family groups arises; and here, certainly, we have some dark chapters before us. For a discussion of criminal subterfuge among the ruling classes in the Spanish Caribbean, see Politika potrebleniia i politicheskii konflikt v Kube xvii veka (Consummation policies and political conflict in seventeenth-century Cuba) by Maldano Pestrovich. For a frank discussion of extortion and murder among the same, see “The Tenebrous Light of Grief: The Economy of Santo Domingo and Cuba in the Sixteenth Century” by Beverly Weissbaum in International Journal of Colonial Theory 62, no. 2 (1986): 1245–91.

  Alternative views of indigenous land rights, and the legal and moral implications arising therefrom, are ably set out in Malcolm Batson’s A Woeful Tide and Créatures de la lune by Rebecca Tide Assiminy.

  8. Although a strong home market for tobacco developed almost immediately after colonization by the Spanish, the cultivation of tobacco in Cuba did not begin until 1580, according to Demster Poltcaza in his authoritative Tobacco: Its Origin and Production. Bernardo Marín, however, in a letter to his father dated 15 May 1545 (BMLS 3.4506), states that he seeded his first crop of Nicotiana tabacum in the spring of that year. As nearly as I can determine, he was the first to export Cuban tobacco, probably by 1548.