God Carlos (7 page)

Orocobix gathered up the zemi carefully in his arms, said goodbye to his uncle, and headed toward the village.

“Orocobix,” his uncle was shrieking in a surprisingly strong voice, “you might as well pray to my hammock! If that wood is God, so's my hammock.”

Orocobix did not answer the taunt, for any reply would only goad Uncle to harsher blasphemies. What he had already said was enough to bar him from entering coyaba.

The young Indian walked doggedly through the thicket, waving to his uncle without looking back and pretended not to hear the sacrilegious words.

In his painted arms, he cradled the zemi gently as if he were carrying a newborn.

Chapter 8

Brayou passed sometime that night in the presence of no loved ones or even indifferent onlookers. The next morning, Orocobix found him curled up in his hammock like a man not asleep but dead.

It was time for weeping. Orocobix stood silently beside the hammock on which his dead uncle lay, and he wept. He touched his uncle on the arm and felt the chill and stiffness of death. The zemi said nothing about his sorrow and made no move to console him. So Orocobix just stood beside the hammock, with the sadness pouring out of him.

Brayou had been a big man when he was young, but age had shrunk him over the years. Now there were two uncles, the little naked one who was shriveled up dead on the hammock, and the big, strong one who lived on in Orocobix's mind.

A black bird perched on a nearby branch and sang a lighthearted song almost boisterously until Orocobix threw a stone and drove it away. Then he was sorry for he thought it might have been a sign sent by his uncle. From somewhere in the woods came the song again, and Orocobix felt consoled.

He did not know how old his uncle was. He did not know what had killed him. He did not know his uncle's birthday. He had no name for this day, but it was marked forever in his heart as a day of pain and grief. He would observe it in his memory, and it would never leave him, but without a calendar and with no writing, Orocobix would have no anniversary of his uncle's death and no way to remember to mourn it with the passing years. He would remember only that the uncle died at the end of the rainy season and before the coming of the hot weather that brought hurricanes.

Unlike the Spaniards, Arawaks like Orocobix felt the years flow past only in the rhythm of the seasons. The naming of days and months and the mechanical segmentation of time into repetitious and measured units was beyond them because they had no writing.

European Romanticists would later celebrate the West Indian Arawak as a man of nature and praise his unlettered ignorance as if it were a blessing. But illiteracy and naturalness are no blessings if all they do is make you easier prey for literate invaders. Over the next century the privileged sons of Europe would gather in brocaded drawing rooms to read asinine poetry extolling Arawaks as
noble savages
—all this while her armies of
conquistadors
and adventurers would be kept busy slaughtering these mythical innocents.

These ruminations and speculations, however, were beyond the grieving young Arawak. As he stood over the hammock on which the dead man lay curled up, Orocobix felt that he should go and inform the elders that Brayou had become a
goeiz
—a spirit—before he took the body to the burial cave, for it was his obligation to let them know. But his heart was still burning with anger that the elders had not strangled Brayou in his sleep as they would have a cacique.

He was thinking about what he should do when he heard the crackle of approaching footsteps. He darted behind a bush and crouched low and rummaged over the ground for anything he could use as a weapon in case the intruders were marauding Caribs. Finding a big stone half buried in the dirt among the tangled roots of a bush, he dug it out with his fingernails and clutched it in his right hand like a club while he kept his eyes riveted on the trail.

As the footfalls drew nearer, Orocobix tensed and held the stone ready. He was crouching behind the bush when he saw an old man limping along with the aid of a stick toward the hammock, glancing around like a frightened bird. He was naked and had a full head of graying hair, but he looked like no one else Orocobix had ever seen. He stooped over as if weighted down by a heavy load on his back, and his legs were as crooked and thin as drought-stricken bamboo. His entire body was covered by a fine pelt of thin hair. What was most curious about his features was that he was missing the thick forehead of the Arawak.

But it was the fear and furtiveness of the intruder that Orocobix noticed first. He acted like a preyed-upon wild animal that sensed it was being stalked, and with almost every move he paused to gaze around him, his small eyes darting from bush to tree, his frame freezing against the foliage while he cocked his head, sniffed the air, and listened.

He saw the hammock, and his eyes flitted indifferently over the dead body and came to rest, burning with hunger, at the pieces of cassava bread that the elders had left for Brayou.

His eyes fixed on the cassava bread, he was making his way cautiously toward it when the sound of approaching footsteps thumped softly on the morning wind like a baby's heartbeat. The old man spun in his tracks, glanced longingly at the cassava bread before plunging into the thicket with surprising stealth and melting into the foliage. He had just disappeared when a group of elders emerged into the clearing, talking animatedly among themselves.

One of them was the shaman of the tribe, Guaniquo. He was in a bad mood, and when he noticed Orocobix, his face darkened with anger.

“Brayou is gone?” he asked abruptly, making a gesture of impatience with his right hand.

“He is gone, Guaniquo. He went sometime during the night.”

“It is well that he is gone, Orocobix,” said Guaroco, who everyone in the tribe said was the oldest and wisest of the elders.

“He went alone, with no one to watch him go,” Orocobix said bitterly.

“And what would watching him have changed?” Guaniquo asked harshly. “Would you have caught his spirit and held it back so it could not fly away into the darkness?”

There was a long, strained silence while Orocobix carefully weighed his reply. He was tempted to speak some sharp words, but the combined presence of the elders momentarily cowed him and made him hold his temper. “When your own time comes, Guaniquo,” he said carefully, “we will see how eager you are to take that journey.”

“The time must come for all of us,” one of the elders muttered. “There is no cause to fear.”

“What is that doing here?” Guaniquo suddenly demanded to know, pointing at the zemi that Orocobix had placed against a nearby tree. “It is unclean for the zemi to be in a place of death.”

“He goes where I go,” Orocobix said defiantly. “If he were displeased, he would tell me so.”

“Zemis do not talk to everyone,” Guaroco said cautiously, flicking a deferential glance at the shaman, who was known to be very jealous of anyone else's claim to be able to talk to the gods.

“It is a way of the young,” Guaniquo, the shaman, spat. “They would claim privileges without fasting, without sacrifice, without a knowledge of the gods. It is the times. That is why the gods from the sky have come among us. That is why many of them are so cruel to our people.”

Orocobix almost laughed out loud, which would have been sacrilegious with Uncle Brayou lying dead nearby, but again he held himself in check.

“I am not to be blamed for the movement of gods, Guaniquo,” he said. “Gods can do as they please.”

Guaroco interposed with the weight of his years. “It is enough,” he said. “Brayou must be taken to the place where all eventually go.”

Orocobix nodded, asked Guaroco if he would carry the zemi for him, then gathered his dead uncle in his arms, and set out heavily toward the burial cave. His uncle was light but burdensome because his limbs had stiffened and his flesh had grown cold. And even though the elders offered to help him, Orocobix said no, and continued carrying his uncle on the trail that led to the burial place.

Every now and again, especially after the trail had wound up a little slope, he would set his uncle's body gently on the ground and take a brief rest.

Everywhere around them was a surrounding loveliness, a benignity of climate, and a land softly rising in undulations of flowering bushes and trees. The day was mild and stirred by a soft breeze. Being naked, Orocobix reacted to climactic conditions like an animal, with an innate sense of comfort and discomfort. He did not know what temperature meant or how it would be measured more than a hundred years later by the German physicist Gabriel Daniel Fahrenheit. He only knew that on this day he was hot from the burden of carrying his dead uncle, but when he could sit in the shade and rest, he felt cool. The year-round sameness of the island's climate made this day seem no different from the rest.

Again the elders offered to help him with the load, but he politely refused. One elder complained that it was the custom for several hands to bear a dead man to the burial cave, but when Orocobix insisted that he could do it alone, none of the old men argued with him.

Occasionally, someone heading for the seacoast would come tramping down the trail, encounter the funeral procession, and look to see who had died. All the passersby had known Brayou. In the Arawak village lived about seven hundred souls, and everyone knew everyone else, if not deeply, then at least by name and kinship. Some of the passersby touched the dead body with respect and reverence as if to say goodbye. Others made a clucking sound with their tongues in quiet lamentation and averted their eyes as if not to see an unclean sight.

In death, every part of Brayou, as he had been in life, was physically revealed to the sky, the sun, the wind, and to every passing eye. He had lived his entire life naked, and in death he was also naked, giving him the appearance of a defenseless creature that had crawled out of its protective shell. Every runic scar that the adventures of a long life had engraved on his flesh stood out in stark relief like an embossed hieroglyphic.

A few passersby were moved by the sight of the dead man, and one or two women continued down the trail emitting a faint ululation of mourning. Uncle had died an old man, and the last years of his life had found him crotchety and blunt. There would be a feast to honor his death, but other than his immediate family, few in the tribe would truly mourn his loss.

With frequent stops to rest, Orocobix, flanked by the solemn clutch of elders, trudged up the hillside and eventually came to the burial cave.

Inside, he placed Brayou's body atop a pile of old bones. Strewn throughout the dimness of the cave were skulls of Arawaks, young and old, all baring the humorless grin of the ancient dead. To some skulls a tuft of dark hair clung like a stubborn moss. Rib cages, emptied of lungs and viscera decades ago, curled symmetrical bones around the empty abdominal cavity like a partly clenched fist. Scattered all over the damp floor of the cave were elongated femurs, tibia shadowed by fibula, all etching in bone the shape of some long-dead Arawak. Painted on the walls of the cave, curious shapes and geometric figures bore mute testimony to an unknown mourner's stifled grief. Every breath Orocobix and the elders drew in that cave tasted ripe with decay like the smell of a rotting tooth.

Orocobix had to lay Uncle down on top of old, dislodged bones, as there was no room left in the cave for a body to lie by itself. He arranged the body as comfortably as he could.

“We need another burying place,” old Guaroco muttered sympathetically. “There's almost no room left for me.”

“It is the young today who are too lazy to seek one,” Guaniquo said crossly.

Guaniquo performed the ceremony of the dead, scattering some dust over the dead man and muttering incantations known only to him because of their secret powers. Orocobix stood with his head bowed, remembering his uncle as a younger man, and half listening to the shaman. At the mouth of the cave stood the remaining elders, their heads hanging as a sign of respect.

Then everyone filed out of the cave and into the bright sunlight where the air smelled of blossoming trees and flowering plants and an enormous flock of parrots fluttered overhead in the breeze like a skein of green and blue tapestry, dragging behind them a gliding shadow.

No one spoke, but it was clear from the long sighs of the elders that they were all glad to be away from the place of death. They trooped down the footpath toward the village, each man keeping his thoughts to himself.

Orocobix said, like a man thinking aloud, “I wonder if Brayou will like
guabasa
.”

Guaroco chuckled. “He had better grow to like it,” the old man said. “It is all that spirits eat.”

“I do not know if I would like having nothing but that to eat,” one of the elders said contemplatively. “I'd rather stay here and eat fish and turtle.”

A titter of amusement arose from the old men, and everyone felt normal again and relieved to be out in the sunlight and alive in the breeze on this day, March 30, in the year of our Lord Yochuna, 1520.

 

* * *

 

That night a feast was held. The dead man's clan built a bonfire and there was singing and dancing and reminiscing about Brayou.

The older generation remembered Brayou mainly for his sacrilegious opinions about zemis, but a few also recalled the night when the canaballi had attacked the village, and Brayou had killed three of them with their own spears, sending the others fleeing into the night. He'd had no sons or daughters of his own, even though he had lain with many women. His
moin
—his blood—was bad, the women said, and that was why he had no children.

But now that Brayou was gone, the people gathered at the feast spoke about him the way people everywhere speak of the recently dead, with affection and forgiveness. Some of the women wept quietly, more for themselves than for Brayou. Everyone had a favorite memory to tell, and all listened respectfully to the stories.