God Carlos (16 page)

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.

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.