God Carlos (13 page)

Sitting in the shade of a tree, they discussed the difficulties of mapping a new land. The main problem, said Monsieur, was that a cartographer saw the world like a rabbit—from ground level. He had to translate this horizontal view of the shoreline into its flat aerial equivalent on paper, as if he shared the overhead perspective of the cursed bird. Drawing such a map accurately was a heavy burden.

“There is not even an available ship to take me around the island. Yet I'm supposed to map it within six months,” whined the Frenchman.

“I have a ship,” announced de la Serena. “She needs to be careened. But when she is ready, I myself would like to see the island.”

“For what? To have a mountain named after you? What is the reason for such a senseless ambition?”

“So I'm remembered after I'm dead,” de la Serena said softly.

“There is a better way,” crowed the Frenchman. “Don't die.”

“What're you saying, Monsieur?” de la Serena asked, looking perplexed.

“I have noticed that people who die are those who agree to die. I do not agree to die. So I will not die.”

“Señor, you're mistaken,” de la Serena said firmly. “You will die whether or not you agree to it. Nothing can prevent eventual death.”

“Prove that.”

“It is common knowledge, señor.”

“No, señor. It is a common superstition that passes for knowledge. I oppose dying. And I will not do it.”

“You will die when your time comes,” said de la Serena with quiet conviction.

“No, señor. I'm against this waste of human life. Death cannot happen without one's consent. And I will never consent.”

De la Serena stared hard at the Frenchman, trying to decide whether he was joking. The Frenchman met his gaze without flinching.

“That is a mad opinion, señor.”

The Frenchman shrugged like one who had heard this so many times before that it had become wearying. “So have a mountain named after you and then die. As for me, I prefer to remain alive.”

“I regret to say that we're both destined to become dust.”

“You may become dust, if you like. I choose to remain flesh.” With that, Monsieur abruptly stood up, rubbed his belly languidly, and indicated that he was ready to return to the settlement. De la Serena trailed after him, half sliding and half walking down the steep, twisting footpath.

At the bottom of the hill de la Serena said, “When my ship is ready, she is still yours for circumnavigating the island, señor.”

“You do not mind sailing with a cartographer who holds mad opinions?”

“Not if he will name a mountain after me.”

The two men dusted themselves off and trudged toward the settlement. “What a pity you must die, señor,” Monsieur chuckled sympathetically, “when death can be so simply avoided.”

“I'm a hopeless traditionalist,” de la Serena moaned sarcastically.

“A pity,” murmured the Frenchman. “Such a pity.”

Chapter 14

The gods were inconstant and changeable as the land breeze, and because no one could understand their words, speaking with them was a troublesome task.

In the flicker of the open fire, the old, creased faces aglow with the reddish tint of freshly boiled lobster remained impassive. One or two of the elders looked sympathetic and stirred as if moved to offer consolation to the speaker.

It was the first time Orocobix had been invited to address the elders at their council. Word about his visit to the craft belonging to the gods of the sky had spread throughout the village and reached the elders, who had summoned him to come and tell them what he had learned. And they were listening to him respectfully, for he was known to them since infancy as one whose heart was truthful.

Orocobix told the hushed elders about God Carlos, the one god he had come to know, of the god's strange hunger for signs of worship and respect, of his changeable nature and how the god had abruptly exiled him for no offense.

Calliou, one of the youngest and most hot-blooded of the elders said, “This is not like a god, but a man. He is no god.”

“He is a god,” Orocobix nodded confidently.

“Show us this sign of respect that the god taught you,” prompted another elder whose nickname was “Peacemaker” because he was always trying to soothe any hard feelings that arose among disputing tribe members. “Perhaps it is not what you think.”

Orocobix demonstrated. First, he snapped his fingers like God Carlos did; then he fell on his knees and prostrated himself facedown on the floor. Next he showed the contemptuous hand gesture with which the god bid him to rise.

When he was finished, the elders sat quietly thinking, and there was no sound but the occasional bubbling of a full belly and the fire gnawing on the wood pile like a noisy rodent.

“Only vain men require such signs of humility from other men,” said Calliou.

“No,” Orocobix said sharply. “They are gods. They are not like you and me. They have strange implements and powers. They eat bitter food. Their vessel flies on the wind.”

He described the thunder stick and the crossbow and other wonders whose rightful names he did not know but whose magic he himself had witnessed. He spoke of the immensity of their vessel and the intricate tangle of its rigging. He described the iron of the cannon, which was unlike any wood known to his father's father, harder even than stone.

One doubtful elder protested that nothing was harder than stone, that Orocobix exaggerated. Orocobix replied that he could only describe what his eyes had seen and that anyone who did not believe could visit the gods for himself and find out what magical powers they truly possessed.

The ring of elders fell silent and there was no movement except flickering shadows that writhed and danced to the flames of the crackling wood.

“It does not matter whether they are powerful men or gods,” said another elder quietly. “Everyone knows what they do to our women. Evil is evil, whether done by gods or by men.”

“We can kill men,” observed Calliou sensibly, “but we cannot kill gods.”

“We have tried to kill them before,” said Peacemaker. “It is not easy to do.”

Another elder repeated the story that had come down to the tribe. One day a long time ago—no one could say when—the gods from the sky suddenly appeared off the coast of Xamaca in their strange vessels. (It was 1494, the second voyage of Columbus.) Thinking them a new enemy, warriors poured down to the landing beach and attacked the invaders. But the gods rained down thunder and lightning on the Arawaks, slaying several warriors on the beach. Then the gods unleashed a pack of enormous, ferocious dogs no Arawak had ever seen before that savagely mauled the warriors, who fled in a crazed panic.

“I was there that day,” said one elder faintly. “I have bitter memories of it.”

Like all the others at the council, this elder—sitting with his legs crossed—was naked. Now he stood up unsteadily, for he was a very old man, and he opened his legs to reveal the teeth marks the dogs had tattooed that day on the soft flesh of his thighs near his stringy, wrinkled genitals.

The elders gaped at the wound, many shuddering as they imagined their own flesh being pierced by dog teeth in such a tender place.

Another long silence ensued.

“They are gods,” Orocobix muttered. “And I do not believe they are wicked.”

A mood of uncertainty fluttered over the council, and someone sighed as if longing for a time before these days of complexity and trouble—a sound so heartfelt and mournful that it might have come from any one of these sad fretful old Arawak elders struggling to understand their people's latest calamities.

 

* * *

 

Aside from being a settlement of want, boredom, and poverty, New Seville was also a cauldron of merciless heat. Every day was as blistering as the one before. The town itself was tucked in a stitch of coastline that turned and twisted like the scribble of a child. Farther up the coast, breezes blew daily, cooling the land with the clean smell of the ocean. But because of the chiseled cut of the landform and the hulking presence of the mountains, no breezes blew over Santa Gloria Bay, and man, beast, and land were steeped in the relentless stillness of an airless tomb.

Every afternoon the heat became so terrible that the heavens exploded in bone-jarring peals of thunder as a blackness more menacing than the darkest night curdled against the mountains and torrential rain exploded across the bay. It was a tepid rain that did not relieve or freshen but merely coated man and beast with the sticky wetness of warm mouthwater. Then the detonation of thunder would lessen and the sun would come out and begin licking the bay with a dog's warm tongue, spreading a sticky sweet mist over the land.

“If I were a god,” Carlos muttered to the boy Pedro as they huddled under a tree for protection from one of these thunderstorms, “I would not make it so hot.”

“But you are not a god, señor,” the boy replied boldly.

Carlos cuffed him sharply on the side of the head.

The boy flinched and mumbled, “That still does not make you a god, señor.”

 

* * *

 

For several days, even as de la Serena lay recovering on his sickbed, the
Santa Inez
was careened on a nearby beach.

To careen a wooden ship meant hauling her up on the land and using ropes to pull her over on her side, exposing her wooden bottom to the sky for the crew to scrub and scrape off barnacles and algae. Then the seams between her planks, opened up by shipworms, teredos, and the constant pounding of the waves, would be recaulked and sealed. Careening had to be performed regularly to keep a wooden vessel afloat. Otherwise, she would take on water and sink.

Lying on her side, the
Santa Inez
looked like a beached sea monster, her masts and rigging sticking across the beach like lifeless tentacles while the crew swarmed over her and cleaned and scraped her rounded bottom. In the relentless heat, all the crew, even the cook, took part. The work was dirty, hard, and hot, and many of the men suffered cuts and splinters on their fingers and dripped bloody spots over the gristly underbelly of the beached ship.

Then the ship's carpenter, aided by the boy Pedro and another grommet, Alonzo, went to work on making the seams watertight. Using a caulking iron and mallet, the carpenter pounded strips of oakum into the openings between the planks and sealed the newly stuffed slits with a coat of hot pitch. Within minutes of clambering atop the exposed bottom of the ship, the caulking crew was drenched in sweat and speckled with splotches of tar and shreds of oakum.

One afternoon as the men huddled for shelter from a thunderstorm cannonading the bay with deafening salvos, they glimpsed an Indian woman crouching behind a leafy tree. At the sight of the gods from the sky, the woman froze like a stalked fawn, but when she realized that they had seen her, she leaped to her feet and hurried through the thicket, casting looks of terror over her shoulder. The men caught her, threw her to the ground, pried open her legs, and took turns on top of her while all around them the thunderstorm rumbled like an avalanche of boulders.

Her screams, shrill and discordant, pierced the woodland over the sounds of the storm like the cries of a crazed bird. When he realized what was happening, Carlos left the boy Pedro and old Hernandez under a tree and hurried to take his turn atop the woman.

“What are they doing to her?” the boy Pedro asked in a frightened voice.

“What men do to women,” old Hernandez said gruffly.

“What is that? And why do you not do it also, señor?”

“Because I'm too old for such things.”

“Will I do it also when I become a man?”

“Not if you grow into a good man.”

They fell silent and listened grimly to the sobs and wails of the woman mixed incongruously with the sound of rain that seemed to come from a million unseen mouths howling in chorus.

Then, abruptly, the screaming stopped and only the rain and the fretful drumming of thunder against the mountains could be heard. Carlos, looking muddy and soiled like a hog after wallowing, returned to sit beside old Hernandez and the boy Pedro. Both shied away from him, for to the old man, Carlos stank of barnyard rutting, and to the boy Pedro, of a strange, raw musk.

Old Hernandez remained in a crouch and said nothing. The boy Pedro, who looked as if a question would explode out of him, squirmed and also made no remark.

Soon the rain was over and the men trooped out of the woodland and across the beach and swarmed once more over the dark bottom of the ship.

 

* * *

 

Later that day, as the twilight thickened around them, the men slogged wearily for the settlement where most of them would sleep outdoors.

One of them who had participated in the rape suddenly said, “What will we do if she makes a complaint against us?”

“We should have finished her off,” muttered a second. “Now the authorities may send soldiers to find us.”

“It's her fault for going around naked as a baby,” a third complained. “What else can they expect? We are men.”

“She was going around that way long before you left Cádiz,” said old Hernandez.

“Shut up, old man,” the complainer snapped.

“Do not tell me to shut up, señor,” warned old Hernandez. “I will speak as freely as I please.”

“Then,” replied the man, “perhaps I will have to shut you up.”

“You are welcome to try, señor,” said old Hernandez, coming to a stop and turning to face the seaman.

For a brief moment, the two men faced each other threateningly. But the younger man saw something deadly in the eyes of old Hernandez that made him pause. He suddenly broke off and walked away, saving face by saying, “I do not fight with men old enough to be my father.”

The men resumed their fretful trek toward the settlement.

“I wonder if we will be bought up on charges,” said one. “I did not come to this land to be put in jail.”