by Max Besora
And that is precisely where we find our illustrious hero, wearing a soldier’s dress coat and armed with a harquebus that he is now firing from a watchtower onto the Dutch hordes who’d joined forces on the beach to the rhythm of drums. But Gregorio Izquierdo has only one thought: finding the original Gregorio Izquierdo’s treasure in Caracas and leaving behind this soldier’s life that was steadily leading him to certain death. There, in that critical situation, our hero makes a brave decision: to flee.
“People, tis highe time for me to go AWOL. As ye may hath noticed, those cannons art wreeking a considerable amount of damage here, ravaging the western walls whilst their soldiers attack us from the east. We’re surrounded. We shall die here, indubbitably.”
“Tha’s not in oul best interest, sil,” said Estebanico the Blackamoor.
“It’s troo, I’m not putting my ass on the line,” complained a soldier of Jewish extraction, whom everyone knew as “The Scourge,” who’d come to the New World searching for the ten lost tribes of Israel.
“What’s thy plan, Gregorio?” asked another of the soldiers, a Catalan by the name of Jeremies with a long neck and a blond beard, who was shooting this way and that toward the beach from behind the walls.
“If we run off they shall hang us!” said Martulina.
“If we linger here we shall die for certain!” barked our hero, as he smacked a blood-sucking mosquito on his nape. “Perhaps we have a prospecte of survival if we pilfer one of the Dutch ships and beat a hastee retreat.”
“Don Gregorio, thou art allways cogitating something!” said another soldier, an Andalusian known as “Octopus” who was a good egg, albeit very vainglorious.
“Thinking for one’s self be a responsibility not all art willing to accept, but, mine friends, the greater the risk the great’r the victory,” said our hero.
One morning when the bullets on both sides lay calmly inside their weapons, the soldiers were sleeping the sleep of the just, while their horses’ ears were at rest and the birds chirped in the sky, Gregorio Izquierdo and Martulina, followed by Estebanico, Octopus, Jeremies, and The Scourge slipped through a side door unseen. Once they’d jumped into a small leaky shalop, they rowed along a low coast covered in swampland and mangroves and headed, armed to the teeth, toward the largest of the Dutch ships, where the enemy captains were sleeping. Splashing along the ship until they could grab one of its rope ladders, they climbed in silence to the deck. There they found three sailors on watch, and dealt them each a dagger blow to the abdomen.
“Now we just hath to take the boat and we canst hightail it outta here,” ordered our hero.
But he’d scarcely gotten to the end of that sentence when the cigarette that Estebanico was smoking fell into a barrel of gunpowder. It went off with a big BOOM! and, immediately after, all the other powder kegs exploded.
“Ay, mamasita, this is hellich!” exclaimed Estebanico, his clothes burning like torches.
“Jump into the water, ye idiots!” bellowed Gregorio Izquierdo, as the ship resounded with a bulimic BOOOOOMMMM and all sorts of objects rained down into the ocean: shattered glass, split wood, sailors and soldiers tossed through the air. The explosion was heard from every point, from the nearest beach to the Castilian fortress. The main Dutch ship was exploding in a clap of gunpowder and licking flames, while Gregorio and his gang went back to the shalop amid the morning fog, having failed in their mission.
And then, since everything depends on who and how stories are told, an extraordinary bit of news spread through the Spanish soldiers’ ranks: one of their own, a brave man named Izquierdo, acting of his own volition, had gathered a group of kamikaze heroes and blown up the biggest ship in the Dutch fleet. The Castilians, armed with renewed morale, opened the doors to the fort, storming out against the Dutch trenches. The enemy, horrified by the assault of the hotheaded Spaniards, rushed off to the dinghies and rowed toward their three remaining ships, ignoring their captain, who brandished his officer’s saber in an attempt to hold them back. In the midst of that tumult, other Dutchmen emerged from the forest and ran scared down the beach, chased by the Castilians who, emboldened by that act of war, were shooting and insulting the enemy until they finally trapped many in a fierce battle beside the sea. Ferocious hand-to-hand combat had soldiers rolling on the sand, stepped on, sliced and diced, bloodied, split in two, choked, chopped into bits, bullets whistling to and fro and, every once in a while, bluntly entering an inert body lying on the ground like a doll. In the end, the enemy surrendered and the few Dutchmen still fighting were corralled against the twisted landscape of rocky salt pans and executed right there, mercilessly. And that was how, by mistake, Gregorio Izquierdo was honored as a hero and promoted to second lieutenant.
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98. i.e. Following the Union of Utrecht (1579) and the separation of the Kingdom of Castille from the provinces of the United Netherlands (1581), the Dutch went from stealing salt on the Iberian Peninsula to stealing it in the Castilian viceroyalties in the New World.
99. i.e. Famous family of Italian military engineers who worked for the Spanish crown.
Chapter II
In which our hero becomes infuriated and has an outburst of righteous rage
Now, our hero—after defending the Araya salt pans from the sanguinary Dutch siege, where each side lost a few hundred soldiers—had seen with his own eyes the politics of conquest. His squadron had been sent further inland into Venezuela, a virgin territory filled with extremely dangerous native tribes, and he spent eight years there earning a salary of four escudos a month, advancing laboriously through the thicket, beneath tropical rainstorms. The scent of wet earth, humus and sap, reached the soldiers’ bearded noses as they hacked through dense brush so they could advance their portable cannons. The expedition, made up of a hundred soldiers and fifty natives, fed themselves by hunting and fishing. There were many dangers in the forest, and a couple of soldiers died that very day, one from a rabid puma attack and the other from a fatal zebra-snake bite.
One day, while the troop was traveling up the Orinoco stung from head to toe by the jejenes,100 the Spanish boats were riddled with holes from a rain of arrows. Despite being protected by sayos,101 it turned out those arrows were poison-tipped, and anyone struck by the lethal arrowheads vomited black bile and died, and those merely nicked went mad and jumped from the canoes into the river, where they drowned in the current or were devoured by piranhas and alligators. After unloading their guns into the tangle of trees, the soldiers landed their canoes and relentlessly pursued the natives, who were from the Tagare tribe, through the brush. The Spaniards soon had the upper hand with their firearms (bombards, harquebusses, and pistols), which were like thunder and lightning to the natives, equipped with very technologically inferior bows and arrows.
Once they’d arrived at the Tagare village, Gregorio Izquierdo and the rest of the soldiers saw the tribal women—bare-breasted with their arms painted red—weeping over the deaths of their warriors with bone-chilling wails. The king of the tribe, seeing himself defeated, offered his daughters to the Spanish captain.
“Tobaya, tobaya,” said the tribal lord.
“That means ‘son-in-law,’ bro,” said an army interpreter, a short, squat polyglot from the Guaiqueri tribe, whose Christian name was Luis Pajares.
“Hand ’em over,” said Captain Domingo Vázquez de Soja, a fat man with the red nose of a drinker, who inspected the girls’ teeth and flesh as if they were animals. “These wille do for bedding, not for labour. Proceedeth with the requerimiento!”
One of the soldiers unfurled a half-rotten parchment and began to read:
I doth hereby declare that with the help of the allmightee God I shall enter powerfull against ye, and wage war on all sides and manners that I can, and I shall subject ye to the yoke and yobedience to the Church and Monarchs, and I shall take thyne people and thine women and children and I shall make of them slaves, etc.
The proclamation, read without translation, made
no impact on the natives because they didn’t understand a simple word. Luis Pajares translated the moratorium as best he could to the tribesmen, so they would recognize the one God of the Christians, and abandon their own. The tribal leader murmured a few words to the interpreter and he said:
“The chief asks why do they have to abandon their gods, whom they received from their elders and who bestow good harvests unto them.”
“These fuggin inverts … !” exclaimed Captain De Soja, cuffing the translator. “These sauvages go around in their birthday suits all day long with errybody getting it on with errybody else. Loathsome sin! Set the dogs uponst them!”
No sooner said than done, the soldier in charge of the captain’s dogs, untied them, ordering, “Attack, Leoncillo! Sic ’em, Becerrillo!” while the two enormous mastiffs pounced on the women and children, tearing off chunks of their flesh.
Afterward, the captain ordered all the village’s huts burned, killing all the children and elderly and turning the rest of the men and women into slaves. Our hero and his soldier friends observed that butchery, flabbergasted: babies were smashed against trees, children’s throats slit, young women raped and old women burned alive.
The Spanish captain, who had come there to claim dominion, said, “Clear the lande!”
A scribe drafted agreements taking possession of the discovered lands and an inspector was careful to account for the expenses and the percentage of found gold that was due to the Crown.102 The problem was that, as for what we call gold, there wasn’t even a speck. That made Captain De Soja even more furious, and he burned village after village, murdering hundreds of innocent people and collecting slaves only to calm his fever for gold.
One day, when the soldiers were resting, after having set up camp amid the howling of the jungle, Gregorio Izquierdo confessed the following to his friends:
“I must say that I amm nowise in agreement with this policy of brutal conquest. These inquisiturient terror methods make this seem less like Paradise and more like hell.”
“Chumbamenea! And I do not subscribe to the malinchismo103 of these Indian chiefs, bro,” added the native translator Luis Pajares, who happened to be passing by and had joined the meeting.
“I feele we should complain to the Crown,” said Father Claver. “We hath come here to create a Christian republic, not to murder right and left. Bartolomé de las Casas hath already declar’d that these beings be ‘neither evill nor duplicitous.’”
“I wouldst give the valiyant captain a piece of mine mind,” threatened Martulina the Divina.
Finally, our hero made a decision. And the decision was the following: to speak face-to-face with Captain De Soja, which was only possible since our hero had accumulated enough merits in those early days in the New World to be considered a captain by the soldiers, despite not having that actual rank.
“Mine captain,” he said, before Captain Domingo Vázquez de Soja and all the soldiers, “as a lawyer I must warn ye that thine behaviour withe the Indians is illegal from a human standpoint as well as a juridical one, commensurate withe the 1512 Laws of Burgos.”
“I knowe nothing of laws, I hath just comme to make just war,” said Captain De Soja.
“Yeah, right, and I’m Virgil in the nine circles of hell,” said Gregorio Izquierdo. “Having two hundred slaves and murdelating everyone left and right appears just to you?”
“On Aristotle’s authority, slaves be natural born,” defended the captain. “In the case of resistance, war is justified.”
“Sir, I rather incline toward the Gospel of Saint Mark, who sayeth: Praedicate Evangelium omni creaturae. Besides, from what I doth understand, in his Ethics, Aristotle did say that the just man be he who respects the mandates of fairness, and thou hath been anythyng but just. Less than an hour agone you vilely murdered women and children. I request you turn in your stripes as War Captain.”
“Insurrecktion!” howled the captain, unsheathing his saber. “Contempt! I shall report solely to my main man King Philip!”
“Well I shall report solely to the justice of the courts,” said our hero, with typical lawyer’s tenacity.
So Vázquez de Soja called for his personal guards and the encampment was soon divided in two: those who supported Gregorio Izquierdo and those who supported the captain. The matter would have been resolved the way these matters usually are, which is to say by blows, but common sense prevailed in favor of resolving the issue via legal means. And it was in Santo Domingo where the trial would take place, before the Royal Audience of the Supreme Council of the Indies, as we shall see forthwith.
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100. i.e. Tiny but very vicious mosquito.
101. i.e. Protective quilted tunic.
102. i.e. The famous “royal fifth.”
103. i.e. A derogatory term derived from the name La Malinche for Doña Marina (ca. 1500-1527), a native Mexican noble daughter who was Hernán Cortés’s translator and lover, considered by some to be the supreme traitor for helping the conquistador to defeat Moctezuma, but also the mother of all the mestizos in America.
Chapter III
In which our hero defends himself before a jury and very nearly gets burned
Seems the trial took place in a room filled with crucifixes and holy oils and was presided over by three judges of the Council of the Indies. The courtroom was full of Castilian gentleman, except for the indigenous translator Luis Pajares and Estebanico the Blackamoor, who were sitting in a dark corner observing it all with their enormous black eyes. Further up, sitting in the second row, was the imperial administration of the lettered city with all the human instruments of its bureaucracy. Before the judges, to the left, was Domingo Vázquez de Soja, accompanied by other noble military men, all of them criollo sons of illustrious conquistadors who’d been born in the New World and considered it their own. To the right, was only our hero, defending himself, dressed in a black lawyer’s robe. The judge spoke first:
“In the name of the King of the Islands and Terra Firma of the Ocean Sea, we openne this court of the first instance in order to reconsile the fyude between troop lieutenant Gregorio Izquierdo versus the nobleman De Soja, both loyall servants of the Crown.”
De Soja’s lawyer began the trial with a dissertation on the savage figure of the native, before the smiling faces of the noblemen:
“… and it canst be asseverated, without a shaddow of a doubt, that the natives are uncultured, inhuman barbarians, as they knowe not God nor recognise his law. Therefore, ours indeed be a just war, as declared by Sepúlveda in Democrates Alter or, On the Just Causes for War Against the Indians, where he recognises the right of the Pope and our Catholic King to enslave the Indians, being as they art natural servants of the Crown. Furthermore, it upholdes the right, under juridickal, theological, and political bases, for iusta causa posesionis, in other wurds, the legitimacy of our conquest, from the Capitulations of Santa Fe to the Laws of Burgos, gathered in the treatises On the Islands of the Ocean Sea by Palacios y Rubios and Concerning the Rule of the King of Spain over the Indians by Matías de Paz. And as syuch, our actions are justified and preserv’d by the law of those just treatises.”
Two of the judges nodded, while the third scratched his curly white wig and gestured with one hand for our hero to begin his rebuttal.
“Much obliged, Your Excellency. All the arguments put forth hath been call’d into question by umpteen people,” said Gregorio Izquierdo, pulling a bundle of books out of his satchel. “Fray Bartolomé de las Casas hath already refuted, in his Apologetic History, the savage nature of the Indians. As for their conversion to Christianity, that art a right of the Indians but not an imperative to be imposed bloodily.”
The people sitting at the back of the room murmured some astounded “oohs” and “aahs” at the impertinence of our hero.
“Conquest for the Gospel, yes, mero et mixto imperio104,” he repeated, reasserting himself. “Howsoever, the era of epics and novels of chivalry has long pass’d, my lords. Now tis re
gistry and law which rule, the tangible and the rational. These natives are not the devil, they art human beings such as ourselves, and as such their treatment at Spanish hands be unjust, and based solely on the fact that they doth not believe in our God, of whom they hath ne’er before heard telle. The plena potestas in re of the Kingdom of Spain and its dominum over the Indians, derived from Roman law, cannot be absolute for were it so then the very Pope in Rome and his Romanus Pontifex bull must necessarily take sides in this trial!”
There was a considerable upturn in the courtroom’s commotion when someone shouted out “heretick!” and the judge banged his gavel as he shouted, “Order … ! Order in the court!”
“Your Excellency, I invent none of this, it’s all in the books,” continued Gregorio. “Fray Francisco de Vitoria revisits the juridical & theological corpus of De potestate civili (1528) in favour of an international law grounded in natural right and not on force. Correspondingly, from a legal perspective, war against innocents goeth against natural and divine law.”
“I object, Your Honor!” said the lawyer for the State. “The Eramist ideas of Second Lieutenant Izquierdo do not correspond with the reality of the colonies. Dost thou not concede that it should be preposterous not to oblige the Indians to labour for and submit to both Church and King?”
“Objecktion overruled,” said the judge. “Allow the soldier Gregorio Izquierdo persevere with his defense.”
“With all due reverence, counsel,” said our hero, “what thou deemst ‘preposterous’ is verily the possibility of true justice.”
“What art thou propounding? That the Indians simply do as they wish?” said the nobleman’s attorney, adopting a surprised expression. “For tis it not also true that in another of Francisco de Vitoria’s books, namely De indis prior (1539), he states that the Indians have no convenyent laws, no magistrates, and are not even capable of governance? The Seven-Part Code hath already establish’d the ocupatio and governance of these savages and their lands, being as they were res nullius, all became ours. And for that motife and none other, the Crown must acte as Father to these savages and, concurrently, govern them so as not to relinquish all that the Crown has achieved, the trade and economic benefits to our Empire.”