Taino

by Jose Barreiro

  The friar laughed heartily, contentedly. “I have always heard that Enriquillo is not blood thirsty,” he said.

  No, Enriquillo is not blood thirsty, but he is tough. As I write now, thirteen years later, Enriquillo and his many warriors, who number into the hundreds and include African men, have this Española island near paralyzed. Christians, whether Castilian or Indian, dare not travel the roads without strong guard. The Spanish are not as numerous as they once were on these islands, many having gone on to the mainland, although the encomiendas that remain are quite large. Not a few have lost great sums paying for useless expeditions against Enriquillo, who is one Indian cunning beyond the Castilians and forceful enough to frustrate them at every turn.

  “I think all authorities want to kill Enriquillo,” I told Don Bartolomé. “I will do all I can do to save him.”

  Six. My own truth I pledge.

  I write this now in a late night of full moon and calm waters. I feel the sea breeze enter my room, lick at my lips. Crickets chirp their long rasp, again and again, and the tree frog bellows back. Beyond earshot but not far, the waves, I know, caress our shore, once and again, an ancient stroke by which my people breathed. What our world was, how we saw life, how we lived by our heart, by the belly button of belonging and the memory of ancient teachings—this of my blood and my heart, it seems, the friar does not hear. He has an argument that we were almost like them, nearly Christian, as if this proves us a better people, we who were Taíno—“the good people.” No, I respect him, but I have lived too long. I know what we had, the personality of our people that was like a gentle breeze, how they saw only seed in the rotting fruit, what would come forth. But, in forty years, I have yet to hear a Castilian priest express such a thought. Yes, I have seen too much, and now, in my time of illness and pain…my arm and leg on the right side stiffen with their own memory of injury and travail…[illegible]…in this providential gift of paper, I pledge my own truth to the mysteries, even if in the foreign language of Castile, which I have commanded since my first weeks with the admiral.

  April 24, 1532

  Seven. What the friar wants.

  I worked the garden all morning, ate lightly at lunch, attended a Mass, then napped. I was washing up after waking when the knock came and my benefactor, Don Bartolomé, pronounced by King Ferdinand “Protector of the Indians,” entered forthrightly. He announced the continuation of what he called our “historical witness,” and requested I take notes.

  “I remember a story told by Michele de Cúneo,” the friar began, and he must have seen me grimace, because he said, “I know you did not like Cúneo—but you were there in his story. It happens during Columbus’s second trip, when he explored the southern coast of Cuba.”

  I remember the trip, during the admiral’s second voyage, in April to September of the Christian year of 1494. Don Bartolomé has brought up this episode before. I can tell he wants this episode because of his argument about our Taíno people being almost Christians in their old beliefs.

  “Cúneo told my father about that trip. He said that a Cuban cacique spoke of a heaven and a hell among his people…”

  It was not quite so. However, I held my tongue. Cúneo was a total bastard, abusive, deceitful, a man who let his balls squeeze his mind, a rapist of women and buggerer of boys. Cúneo was on board only because he was a boyhood friend of Don Christopherens, from his own city of Genoa. He came back from Castile with us, on that second trip, a guest of honor of the Grand Admiral of the Ocean Seas.

  “It was the trip to the south of Cuba,” the friar continued. “Cúneo told my father that a prominent Cuban cacique, chief of a large yukaieke called Bayamo, feasted the admiral, then had long words about his own spiritual doctrine. Cúneo said you translated at the meeting.”

  “I was translator,” I said, and I felt faint to remember that time. The friar went on but, again, he had thrown my mind back. That was the voyage of the miserable, when I confirmed for my thick-skulled self that the Castilians were not only cruel and violent men but also liars and crazy. It was during that voyage, too, that Don Cristopherens lost his own mind for weeks at a time.

  “Cúneo said the cacique spoke in Christian terms about Heaven and Hell, and expressed his belief that good people go to Heaven and bad people go to Hell,” Don Bartolomé repeated.

  “Cúneo is full of shit, Father, with your permission,” I actually said. I could not help myself.

  “He was a loyal friend to my father,” Don Bartolomé responded solemnly. “Though he was a rake.”

  “A perverted man, Father, with your permission,” I said.

  The good friar looked past me for a few moments. He admonished me finally. “You speak with vehemence again, Dieguillo.”

  “Yes, Father,” I said. “With your forgiveness, Father.”

  He was right. I insulted him, and I do not mean to do that. But my breast was a sail taut with wind.

  “I beg your forgiveness, Father. I only meant to say it was not like that. Cúneo did not understand the language, and in any case he was not there during that talk between the cacique and the admiral.”

  “Where was he?”

  “He was exploring, Father.”

  “Exploring what? The coast?”

  “Yes,” I told him. “The coast.” I did not need to tell him that Cúneo was, as my people would say, emptying his fleshy gourd all through that evening. Chasing for a place to stick his yuán was always the main occupation of Monsieur Michele de Cúneo.

  “And well then, did the two men discuss the existence of Heaven and Hell?”

  “It happened,” I said. “But it did not mean what you think it meant.”

  “Write about it anyway, Dieguillo. It could be very important.”

  I told him: “That was the time Don Cristopherens lost his mind.”

  The good friar shook his long face. “No wild stories now, Dieguillo. I can take your testimony to the king. I need something new from that time that will help him sympathize with your people.”

  Eight. Starting out.

  The problem is: I remember so much more.

  The trip to Cuba of Don Bartolomé’s question came after our return from Castile, during the admiral’s second voyage and four months into the settling of the new colony of Isabela.

  But for Don Bartolomé’s insistence, I would not begin my narrative there. My inclination is to start at Guanahaní, when we first saw the admiral. That would be the proper sequence. I would start that first morning, with my father-uncle, Cibanakán, who was the first to see the giant seagulls and tell how in the company of six of my kin, I sailed away in the Castilian ships through our small islands of the Bahama, how we guided the admiral to Cuba, then to Bohío, now the island Española, where he lost a ship, was embraced by Guanacanagari’s people, and left forty men at Fort Navidad.

  I saw Castile in my youth. I would write about that next, how I traveled through Spain in 1493. Then I would write about our return, the shock of what we encountered at Fort Navidad. All that and more would come before, in my story, because from the time I met the admiral to the time we sailed to Cuba and met Bayamo, the cacique who cursed Columbus, it was a year and more.

  Now, it is forty years since that morning at Guanahaní, when after a night under lock in the hatch of the Santa Maria, I heard the pilot, Sancho Ruiz, holler the order to pull up anchors, and the three caravels hoisted up sails, gliding swiftly as they let the seven of us Guanahaní-ti, or as they called us, Indians, come out on deck just in time to see our beach disappear, our little turtle island of Guanahaní, become a sliver in the horizon, gone from our eyes.

  Nine. I begin with the return.

  Later in this journal, I will take up the proper order. I want to tell my own stories and I have plenty of paper. But first I will let the good friar guide my pen.

  In Castile, the admiral was received as a hero, but when we arrived again at our shores, that time with seventeen ships and more than fifteen hundred men, it was a not a good mo
ment. The colony Don Christopherens left behind, Fort Navidad, was destroyed and everyone killed. Trouble brewed.

  I remember well those first nightmare days of the new Isabel town, when all Castilian eyes were nervous and distant, weapons always at the ready and quickly used. The admiral’s authority was daily challenged. The Castilian captains and the priest, the buzzardhead Buil, disdained him as a mere Genoese. Daily were the fights and contentions between Castilians themselves and against our Indian people.

  A simple thing: the taking without permission of a cutlass from a sleeping Christian man. For that I saw the broad ax come down and a fourteen-year-old Taíno boy hopping and hopping as blood poured from his wrist, as the admiral, walking the ship’s deck in long steps, shrugged his long shoulders, nodding, “It is the lesson we must teach, Diego. Always understand, I myself have no bloodlust, but the lesson must be sharp (tajante) to be understood.” His hair was still red, that marvelous red hair we all had wondered at. I remember now how I told myself over and over that the bloodletting had its reason: The Guamíquina knows what he does, I cried against hope that night. The Guamíquina knows what to do.

  April 26, 1532

  Ten. A route home denied.

  Columbus was by then my adopted father, this having happened in Barcelona, after his triumphant reception by the queen. And I still loved him, though it was a love in its final instances. Nevertheless, those first few days sailing, the openness and natural generosity of the sea made my heart soar. Too, Don Christopherens was a man who came alive on a ship. A thing to behold was his certainty of signal from wave and wind and cloud. I admit I sailed happily off with him from Isabella, still as his main interpreter, escaping the troubles of landlocked men.

  The hope of my innocence that time was to once again arrive home at my island of Guanahaní. I rejoiced in the possibility of return to my own village by paddling home around the Maisí Point of Cuba. That first night, starting out, when I mentioned this wish to the admiral, he said: “It is possible to do so, Dieguillo.” I envisioned rounding Cuba’s easternmost point and heading north. Night after night I dreamed myself in a canoe, paddling home those last few suns to arrive at Guanahaní in the early morning, where I would make fire for my mother and awaken her gently by stroking the skin of her face.

  Sighting Cuban land, our three ships indeed hugged the shore but turned west, not to round the Maisí tip of Cuba and out to my little island of Guanahaní. I questioned not the admiral, but waited; he spoke soon enough. To the officers and crew that very evening he asserted that this land of Cuba, which he renamed first Juana and then others called Fernandina, was not an island but a peninsula of the mainland of China. He meant to determine this thesis, he said, by exploring the southern coast going west. Don Christopherens got that distant look in his face, a dreaminess, when speaking of Cuba this way. So we sailed around the southwestern point of Cuba, which the admiral renamed Cape of the Cross.

  In my heart I despaired I would never again see my mother, my village, or my people. Suddenly I felt the loneliness that would be with me the rest of my life. Yes, stingray jolt was for me that trip to Cuba, that trip that exploded my wonderment about the admiral, this arrogant man that renamed the world at will, changing the nature of everything, mixing what was ours with what was to be theirs. Yes, that was the moment. My beckoning like a son to this man we believed could cross the barriers to the Spirit World shattered. My heart was as the dried out carapace of the great sea turtle left out in the midday sun.

  Eleven. The trip to Cuba, barbecuing on the beach.

  On the beach in southern Cuba, from the distance, we could see Indian fishermen cooking. Then on the open sea in front of us, we saw two men in a canoe. They turned out to be brothers, and one fished with a net, the other by means of a guaikán, or sucker fish, which I am named after. This clever method of my people was unfamiliar to the Castilians on board. It makes use of the powerful circle of suckers on the guaikán’s flat head, by which the fish attaches itself to larger fish and even bigger turtles. The fishermen tied the fish’s tail with a long, thin bejuco string and asked us to slow our approach as they were then pulling in a big turtle.

  I talked to the brothers from aboard ship. They gave our ship four large caguama turtles and invited me to the beach in their canoe. The ship’s boat followed us to the shore, where we found other men cooking hundreds of smoked lobsters, yellowtails, barbecued hutías and iguanas, most of it wrapped in maize husks and stacked in small huts.

  The men were of cacique Bayamo’s village. Immediately they stated that from there to Baracoa, on the northern coast, and including all the mountain ranges of the region, their cacique and his line of behikes were respected. Their cacique had told them to prepare food for visitors. They said Bayamo was a seer who knew many things. Believing that we must be those expected visitors, they directed us to a place up the coast, a fishing village of a lesser cacique named Macaca, where we would find Bayamo. They gifted me with many foods for our ships. When the sailors thanked them, they shrugged, and said together, “We’ll catch more.” Since they had seen me emerge from the caravel’s hold, the brothers were sorry to see me go, for they wanted to hear my stories about the hair-faced men who traveled in wooden caves.

  Twelve. Bayamo and Macaca: not a discourse but a curse.

  The next day, I sat next to the admiral in the rowboat going to the shore. The three caravels sat behind us in the thick of the bay. Waiting on the beach, hundreds of men, women, and older children surrounded the cacique, an old man, frail but spry, who carried a woven tunic over his shoulder. In one hand he carried a basket of small guayabas. The admiral spotted him. “Regard thou this Indian his apparel,” he said to Captain Juan de la Cosa, his mapmaker, who sat behind us. I, too, was impressed. The old cacique of Bayamo watched sternly as his men pulled our boats to shore, then waved us to him. The admiral stiffened but went to the old man, standing before him a few seconds, then offering his hand. Old Bayamo grasped the hand and held it, peering directly at the much taller Don Christopherens.

  Bending slightly toward me, the admiral said: “Tell him he may kneel and kiss the ring, which is granted me by the sovereigns of Castile and Aragon, now the united Christian Kingdom…” But, before I could begin to put that into our language, another old man, the local cacique Macaca, came up and took the admiral’s other hand. The two caciques turned and began walking fast, the multitude closing behind them and suddenly it was all we could do to keep up, Don Cristopherens, myself, Captains Herrera and Navarra, a dozen soldiers and sailors, plus the braggart Cúneo, walking for half a league, the soldiers hacking a trail through the greenery, sweating gourds before arriving at a deserted yukaieke of twelve bohíos built in a square.

  Their round bohíos were very well made, with tight thatch ties in the roof poles and bamboo and palm board walls fastened so sunlight could not penetrate. All had good dimensions and some large ones were forty and fifty feet wide. The square was recently swept. Large woven mats made from palm fronds lay covered with baskets of sweet fruits, pots of cooked corn ears, ñame, boniato soups, barbecued duck, lobster, iguana, and a fragrant herbal tea, freshly squeezed with cool mountain stream water. It all had been left out, smoking and steaming in the empty village, awaiting our arrival. Immediately I felt at home. This was the way it was done among our Guanahaní people, to leave food out like that, as if dropped from the sky. Even among small caneys of three or four families, often a family might return from harvesting or fishing and find a meal prepared like that, all warm and freshly made and no one around. As we sat and feasted on the axiaco and cassabe, I felt a great homesickness grip my chest.

  Thirteen. The Castilians change everything.

  I promised, good friar, to tell about the meeting and not get too involved in my own story. You say we were like Christians in our ways of worship, that we believed in similar spirits. I will say it is true, that our people had some similar ideas to yours. But another truth is you came from a world other than ours. A
nd that world you brought with you, and with it you saw everything of ours, and with your words you renamed and changed everything that was obvious before.

  At Bayamo’s open-air batéy, or plaza, a dance was held. First the young men drummed and sang, then the women and all children joined in, holding hands in two long rows on both sides of the fire, singing long and melodic areito songs. They gave a beautiful rendition of the areito of Bayamanacoel, which they would, of course, being the Bayamo people. They did this in greater detail than I had heard before or since. Bayamanacoel was the first maker of guanguayo, our sacred cohoba paste and the areito tells how Bayamanacoel found cohoba the first time, what great trials he suffered to gain its favor and the favor of fire itself to prepare its powers for creation. Later, in one part of the story, he spits this paste on the back of Deminán, another of our ancestral grandfather-creators…

  A Taíno such as myself could appreciate this offering, which was ceremonial and spiritual. Truly, I have loved reclining in the wide hammocks of my mother and grandmother, listening to the areitos of our Taínos that can go on and on, night after night, and never lack for songs. Bayamo’s areito was so intricate, so ancient, that it ended after almost two hours where the same areito of other places would begin. Then, four old men and one old woman, all wearing the white, woven tunics, joined the great cacique Bayamo in reciting ancestral stories for our ears. These doings put through by the old cacique represented a great honor and normally would have been reciprocated with several days of ceremony.

  Sitting next to me, the admiral was impatient to be back in his ship as night was falling and a bright moon was our only fighting advantage. I knew and informed the admiral that his turn to speak, as honored guest, would surely come, and thus he waited quietly, observing everyone at the same time that his agonized mind calculated everything. Here, he had been seated by our people in a duho, or ceremonial chair, his back placed against a wide root that protruded, tall as a cathedral wall, from a huge tree that towered over the clearing. Here he was feasted and sung to and offered the hospitality of the village, but in his mind that I know so well, he was in his mission, calculating possession and achievement.