Yiddish for Pirates (29 page)

“Eternal relief.”

“An everlasting finger to those who tried to erase us: here we are, a permanent stain on the pages of history. What’s that? Wine? Jizz? Jews? Once shpritzed with Fountain water, we’ll never forget because we’ll never grow old.”

Just then a commotion. Men calling. The trumpeting of a conch.

After four days, Luis de Torres, Rodrigo de Xerez, Diego Columbus and the other natives had returned from their colonial probe inside the island. They brought with them a procession of inland Tainos carrying several baskets and hog-tied animal carcasses. One older, highly decorated Indio appeared to be the lovechild of a warrior and several ostentatious birds: his head was plumed with tailfeathers rising like Technicolor thoughts from out of his dark scalp. The natives and their chief stood motionless in the shade of the forest while the crew approached Columbus, the viceroy of beaches and the governor of sand.

Columbus had some islanders shlepp a large carved chair onto the shore. He sat enthroned, benevolent and regal in the shade of the
munificent palms. The infinite regress of power: he was an island Ferdinand and Isabella holding court before his own exploring Columbuses.

“Señor,” Torres said, approaching him. He inclined his head as if to bow, but then straightened and began his report.

“Two days’ walk, Admiral. Through the thickness of jungle. Along a path that was often defined only by its vagueness. Several times it appeared to disappear. But Los Indios could read it and they led us forward.”

“What did you find? What of cultivated fields and of agriculture?”

“There were rivers, ponds with frogs and fish but no indication of crops. We found no large animals, but strange lizards, snakes and rodents. In the glades, gaudy parrots and bats large as foxes. Small birds drink from flowers, the murmur of their wings like bees. In a clearing, a thousand butterflies, their wings iridescent blue. We filled our baskets with specimens both live and extinguished, which we have here conveyed.”

“Good, good,” Columbus replied. “But tell me of villages, of mining and of gold?”

The King and Queen would not finance another voyage for glimmering wings and large bats.

Luis de Torres continued. “Far into the island’s dark heart, we came upon a village: fifty large wooden huts, palm-thatched. The people came to greet us.” He motioned to the older man with the avian haberdashery. “This is their chief—what they term a ‘cacique.’ Diego spoke with him of gold.”

“Bring the man here. Let us speak with him.”

The cacique, grey-haired, muscular, stepped forward. His aquiline nose and walnut-coloured ears were studded with small pieces of gold.

There was more gold, he said. In the south. Where the Caribs live.

Of course. Gold was where they weren’t.

A first, pre-cinematic “they went that-a-way.”

Gold?

That-a-way.

Oh, and by the way, the Caribs are the people who eat people.

You can pick your friends.

And you can pick your teeth.

And you can pick your friends from your teeth. Sometimes little bits of them get stuck there after a nosh.

Martín Pinzón stood near Columbus’s carved throne, listening. Something was glistering in his rodent brain: gold.

Early next morning Pinzón comandeered the
Pinta
. He would put his own gilded island on the charts, his own hand into the open jar of the Caribbean. He would sail back to trumpets, parades, fame, and hereditary wealth and power. He would write his own chapter in the history books,

And with the persuasive eloquence of an arquebus, he press-ganged Moishe.

“Board the
Pinta
,” Pinzón commanded. “You must tend to our pilot, Cristobal Garcia Xalmiento. He suffers.” The
Pinta
’s surgeon was only help for the removals of either blood or limb and the
Santa María
’s physician himself lay below deck in a hypnogogic fever, yammering mishegoss about the hairy backs of sailors being sucked by teams of spine-hungry leeches and the heated mouths of glass cups.

And so Moishe, who had assisted physicians aboard Mediterranean ships and as we sailed from Spain, had helped administer salves, bloodletting, and, to be plain, medicines slippery as snakeoil became great khan of the medicine chest.

Moishe, a doctor? His mother would have been so proud.

The pilot, Cristobal Garcia Xalmiento, was splayed on a pallet below deck on the
Pinta
, the air fetid and constellated with flies.

“Drink,” Moishe said and unstoppered a bottle of Madeira, pouring it between Xalmiento’s dry and trembling lips.

“Jacome,” Moishe called. “We must carry him on deck. He needs new air.”

“Better to whore with a holeless mermaid as to think him salvageable,” Jacome spat.

“Take his legs,” Moishe instructed.

“Better to toss the neargone overboard and feed me the wine,” Jacome said, but still, he hove on Xalmiento’s legs and helped.

Optimism and the open air, and not a frank diagnosis, appeared the best medicine for the man and he soon began to moan. Which was improvement. To feel close to death after feeling nothing was convalescence.

And to kvetch about it meant recovery was likely. Soon he would sing opera and wrest anchors from the seafloor with his teeth.

Pinzón strode about the deck, surveying his mutinous duchy. He was admiral of this floating nutshell yet considered himself king of infinite space: what was undiscovered was boundless and filled with possibility.

All about the ship, the crew was ministering to sheets and yardarms while Moishe in the bow herded Xalmiento away from fever. Pinzón went aft to his cabin. Through the small window, I saw him heave a book from chest to table.

I knew it by the pattern of its cover. We had carried this text from Lisbon—from one Columbus to another. Pinzón had thieved not only boat but book. Onboard were two of the five which spoke of the Fountain. Moishe must find means to poke his nose between the broad flanks of this tome. Such knowledge was power.

The
Pinta
sailed in search of a new island. Pinzón certainly sought gold. The yellow teeth of his acquisitive grin seemed to desire a grille-work of the stuff. But perhaps he, too, sought, immortality or to become its gatekeeper.

Soon he was back at the binnacle directing the helmsman toward a distant shadow.

An island.

The native people had seen the white flukes of our sails rising from the horizon. They had gathered on the beach as if awaiting the arrival of a Leviathan or emperor. They stood shoulder-to-shoulder with little more than plaited reed loinclothes mantling their scrolls. Several wore headdresses of feathers and shells, some held gourd bowls filled with fruit, coloured stones and feathers.

Mariners and philosophers regularly state that such newly encountered natives are handsome, as if one could say that noses, beauty and nobility existed in equal quantity among all members of a people. Surely there’s always an Auntie Faygel or a Zaiydee Shmuel with a nose like a tableau from Exodus played out on an anthill. But nu, these people were impressive pieces of bronze. Bright coins on the sand: their skin more lustrous than our sailors’ pockdotted and leathered parchment; their strong bodies, the muscled arms and chests of the men, the smooth torsos and naked breasts of the women.

Ach. Perhaps these are but overheated words from the ajar mouths of Pinzón’s gawking sailors for each member of this mutinous crew was now a sail billowing full with the Zephyrous thrill of recklessness in a kvelling gale of ambition and freedom. Each thought himself his own admiral, cut lose from the halyards of society, travelling into the unwritten margins.

Each man, now individual, thought himself impressive. The great canoe of our caravel growing into the barque of a giant as it rose from beyond the horizon, our vast mainsail like the banner of an advancing army entering a city, emblazoned with a green cross: F for Ferdinand, Y for Ysabella, large as trees surmounted with crowns broad as horses.

Pinzón: “We arrive from the East like the rising sun bringing light to the dark unknowing, these uncivilized lands on the fringes of Cipangu, Cathay, and the territories of the Great Khan. Here, each of us shall be as an emperor or king.”

Of course, to the islanders we may have appeared as monkeys dressed up in silks. A hundred monkeys typing Shakespeare would seem to them to be chattering gibberish. Though they would have been impressed by the typewriters.

We dropped anchor and the men rowed to shore, sacks filled with tchatchkes, the swag of visiting gods. Moishe was in the second boat, and I travelled on his leeward shoulder. We stood like rock stars awaiting special effects: Pinzón in his furs and silk breeches, some of the men in metal breastplates, ready to stride into the Promised Land or to re-enter Eden.

All the men, armed.

Pinzón wanted to replay Columbus’s landing, with himself in the role of Columbus. But this time we would not trade small talk and worthless chazerei. We were not pedlars and tinkers, but Odyssean conquerors.

The ship’s master unfurled the flag of the Spanish kingdoms and planted it in the sand. For we shall have dominion over every living thing that moveth upon the earth and have a fancy brocaded flag to prove it.

The natives fell to their knees and then, their arms stretched before them, touched their foreheads to the ground.

“They think we’re gods,” Moishe exclaimed.

“Maybe you,” I said. “Me, they think of as a bird.”

The islanders rose up and surrounded us. Some held out their gourd bowls of gifts. Our men made ready to receive them. Pinzón looked warily at them, and seeing no gold and not wanting a repeat of Columbus’s giltless meetings with the natives, gave the order for the men to take up their arms and make ready to fire.

What did war look like to the natives of this island—if they had war? In a war, a duel, or a chess game both sides need to know they are playing. Otherwise it’s hunting. Skeet shooting. Murder.

To Pinzón, the islanders, though statuesque as rippling stallions or shapely as does, were little more than animals inside: Less-than-Calibans. Un-Christianizables. Primitive though noble Golems without souls. And like Golems or magpies, they knew how to find shiny and precious things.

The men loaded their arquebuses with powder and gunshot while the natives looked on in fascination. Pinzón’s orders echoed in the stillness. “We don’t need a translator to explain this,” he said.

Then, “Fire.”

The sound was like a rank of cannons. The vessel of the world shattered to hellflame and thunder.

Islanders dropped to the sand, ragged hibiscus-flower wounds on their bare chests and contorted heads. Some ran into the forest.
Some began to run and then collapsed. Surely not so many could have been hit. A kick and a brief inspection revealed that some had fainted in terror, while others had been slain by fear alone.

Pinzón ordered several men captured and chained to the flagpole. Some women he had bound and carried back to the ship. A man adorned in a feather headdress and long cape, likely the cacique, lay on his back in the sand, bleeding from his mouth. Pinzón stood over him, sword pressed against his heaving throat.

“Gold,” Pinzón said.

The man looked up at Pinzón, not understanding.

“Gold,” Pinzón repeated.

A gloaming light in the man’s eyes. Then darkness.

“Pah,” Pinzón spat, then drove the sword into the dead cacique’s neck.

All about us, twisted bodies amongst fallen gourds, the beach strewn with feathers, coloured stone, the bodies of women and men.

Moishe had an arquebus in his hands. When Pinzón had given orders, he, too, had fired.

“Sh’ma Yisroel,”
he had muttered. He had prayed. He had expected to die.
“A bayzeh shu.”

This was evil.

He felt that surely God would wake and come down to the island for this.

And Moishe expected that He would strike him dead.

After fireworks: smoke and ash. A bitter scent. Pinzón ordered his men over the killing field to pursue the natives who had fled. The bo’sun hoisted Moishe to standing, hauling his arm toward him like a halyard.

“Come. We hunt. And you, our surgeon: there may be a gash or two which needs your tending, a man rent asunder who’ll want his two halves knitted back together.”

And so we joined the slavering pack as they left their guns and strode into the foliage.

The silent woods. Even the songbirds held their breaths. All that was not rooted had fled or disappeared into stillness.

When soldiers march, all destinations hide.

Several natives were compelled to be guides and by the evening, they had led Pinzón’s men into a village. The buildings were quiet, but none more quiet than the Indios, haunched in a scrubby square, staring at us toytshreken terrified. At one end of the square was a large
bohío
, a sizeable structure of tree trunks and thatch. Inside, hundreds of villagers, close-packed and fearful. They did not dare exchange shelter for unprotecting sky.

The Spanish mariners, only lately pirates and conquerors of land, stood before the village considering the art of plunder.

But few spoils are as enticing as a good nosh when a warrior’s kishkas snake with hunger and so, when a steady-faced young woman rose and gathered a basket of roasted chickens—aleychem ha’shalom, peace be upon them—and walked up to the strangely bearded strangers, they accepted them as tributes.

Each fressed upon this Jeanne d’Arc meat, gnawing on the juicy poulkes with grave enthusiasm.

Alvaro Sanchez, a cousin to Pinzón, was first among the crew to finish. His thick cheeks glistened with grease, chicken pieces like burrs in his greasy beard.

He was an ox-large bruiser with a groys belly, fat as a booty sack.

A body into which the devil entered, for now, his dinner over, a fire enflamed his gaseous soul. He dropped his oily clutch of chicken bones and unsheathed his sword. This was not a spontaneous impulse toward cutlery and the graces of the table, for he howled, a monstrous beast.

As one, the twenty others seized their blades and they began to hack bellies and slice throats like crazed shochets dispatching sheep—men, women, children, and the old alteh Indios, all of whom were seated, unarmed, and caught off guard.