God Carlos (19 page)

 

The Christians, with their horses and swords and pikes, began to carry out massacres and strange cruelties against them [the Arawaks]. They attacked the towns and spared neither the children nor pregnant women and women in childbed, not only stabbing them and dismembering them but cutting them to pieces as if dealing with sheep in the slaughterhouse. They laid bets as to who, with one stroke of the sword, could split a man in two or could cut off his head or spill out his entrails with a single stroke of the pike. They took infants from their mothers' breasts, snatching them by the legs and pitching them headfirst against the crags or snatched them by the arms and threw them into the rivers, roaring with laughter and saying as the babies fell into the water, “Boil there, you offspring of the devil!”

 

Las Casas was writing about what he had witnessed in Santo Domingo, but the same grisly genocidal scenario was played out in Jamaica.

No one knows for certain how many Arawaks were living in Jamaica when Columbus “discovered” the already well-known island in 1494. Some estimates put the population at 50,000; others, at 100,000. What is known is that by 1655 when the English overran Jamaica, the Indians had become extinct. Many would die of infectious diseases spread by the invaders. Others would be slaughtered by the Spaniards in skirmishes and battles. Still others would be sent to dig futilely for gold in the interior of the island and would die from hard labor. In despair over their enslavement, thousands of Arawaks would commit mass suicide by drinking unfermented cassava juice.

Las Casas lived to be ninety-two years old and came to be nicknamed Apostle of the Indians. Through his efforts, the New Laws were enacted in 1542 abolishing the encomienda system and forbidding the use of Arawaks as a source of slave labor. It was too late: the Arawaks were already trudging down the road to extinction.

Las Casas had by then also planted another terrible seed that would grow even more bitter fruit: he had recommended the use of African blacks as a source of labor in place of the Arawaks. Horrible and prolonged would be the nightmare to ensue from a proposal intended innocently as an act of mercy.

There were two distinct peoples thriving in the Caribbean—the Arawaks and the Caribs—when the Spanish first arrived in 1492. A little more than one hundred years later the Arawaks had been exterminated. Today the Caribs, who put up a fierce fight against the invader, still exist. Many Spanish soldiers fell to the poisonous arrows of these canaballi, and soon the invader learned to avoid those islands they were known to occupy. If the drama of the Arawaks teaches anything, it is that passivity in the face of a vicious invader is a bad tactic.

 

* * *

 

In an ironic twist, the Arawaks got their revenge on the Europeans. In 1494, John de Vigo DeVito wrote this of a strange new disease:

 

In the yeare of our Loard, 1494, in ye monethe of December when Charles ye Frenche kynge toke hys iorney into the partes of Ytaly, to recouer the kyngdome of Naples, there appered a certayne dysease through out al Ytaly of an unknowen nature, whych sondrye nations hath called by sondry names . . . Thys dysease is contagious, chiefly yf it chaunce through copulation of a man wyth an unclene woman, for the begynnynge therof was in the secret members of men and women . . .

 

The new disease was syphilis, which was endemic to the Arawaks and is spread through sexual contact. The boil on his penis that de Morales spoke of before his death was the first sign of infection. If Carlos had not killed de Morales in a knife fight, syphilis would have done the job or driven him mad. Once transmitted to Europe, it spread throughout the population and resulted in an untold number of deaths. That was the legacy, and revenge, of the Arawaks.

 

* * *

 

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. Winkler'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.