Taino

by Jose Barreiro

  As I think about it now, this despicable man who predicates the enslavement and inferiority of my people is right to taunt me. And I do take responsibility that I seconded the admiral his claims during my stay on the Castilian lands. I got so used to talking up the good things, telling everyone what the admiral wanted them to hear, that I myself elaborated how much my people would love them, treat them graciously, and feed them, and I know that already in these claims the elements were being gathered for our destruction.

  Why did I not see that earlier? Why was I so trusting to continue to believe that the Castilians had our best interests at heart? Why did I not see that as I bragged up my people’s gentility, the men of those cities saw not friendly tradesmen and neighbors but easy servants and slaves; as they heard of gold in our hills, they thought not to go themselves to gather it but of how to force my people—men, women, children—to dig the gold and take it out for them. Oh, what my people have endured, what suffering and physical reduction for that mining of the gold! I hate to think of how I helped open that door, and even now I feel the need to atone for that and to do what I can to see that our people, however reduced, survive.

  November 2, 1532

  Ninety-one. With Rodrigo’s Gallegos at Otero del Rey, his mother’s offering to the duendes of the water spring.

  Rodrigo Gallego, our faithful friend, was going home and invited me to go along. He was from Galicia, from the village called Otero del Rey, near Lugo, west of Catalonia across the Basque country to the northwesternmost part of Iberia, north even of Portugal, where his own Gallego people lived. The admiral was done recruiting investors and granted me permission to go for the more than four months of the journey. That was my good-bye to Barcelona, as I would head south to Seville from Galicia. Rodrigo was not to go on the second voyage, but, as he was granted a royal appointment for the Academy of Guards at the court in Seville, after our visit to his parents he would accompany me to the Andalusian city, where I was to meet the admiral, Caréy, and the other travelers.

  Leaving Maria del Carmen was difficult. I had little realized how deeply in love I had become. She was my first love, and, for days, as we rode away from Barcelona, lonely as a baby possum, I longed for her and cried. I thought of my elders in Guanahaní, and I remembered the dream of my puberty night and it was certainly her, Maria del Carmen, waiting there in my destined path, coming toward me across the batéy, old Ayragüex laughing at how he had seen it and it was all true.

  The trip with Rodrigo had many weeks. He had bought all sorts of provisions for his family, including ax and hoe heads for his father and needles, cloth, and iron pots and pans for his mother. We traveled on two horses and led two pack mules, one with our provisions and the other loaded with gifts. We also carried the queen’s seal in a letter of free passage, which proved useful while crossing the country of the Basques, through the low southern hills of the Pyrenees.

  Ninety-two. A run with bulls for San Fermín.

  One of our stops, about halfway to Galicia, found us among the Basques, in a town called Pampeluna. I do remember we arrived there on July 6 of that year, 1493. I remember the day because the admiral had instructed me to keep a count of my days. He gifted me a pen, which I kept for many years, and two long-scroll rolls of paper. Every day of every week and month I made a mark. I did not yet know how to write or read (my Jewish friend Torres would begin me in that stead later in Seville), but nonetheless, I dutifully made my daily mark. This is why, often, long-distant dates jump before these written memories in the eye inside my mind, certain as the convent calendar.

  Pampeluna was a crazy place, as cattlemen had driven in their cattle and their vaqueros had money for wine. A ceremonial time it apparently was, too, and a god of the Pamplones, a spirit man they called San Fermín, was on everyone’s lips that day. In the early morning, an explosion of cannon or rocket awakened me to see Rodrigo already dressed and hanging out the window.

  It was a cool summer morning, crisp as baked cassabe, but everything was confusing for me. The streets of the large village were crowded with people yelling and dancing with their arms around each other’s shoulders. Before I could ask who San Fermín might be, so that I might greet him, too, Rodrigo joined in with the crowd, squirting wine out of bags into everyone’s mouths. Then the crowd was yelling, “Encierro, encierro,” meaning “enclosure,” which I also wondered at, and then we were all moving down a very dusty street, the dust so thick I could hardly breathe. Down the street I could make out two big wooden corrals on the edge of an enclosed field, both full of ornery, horny bulls, big and thick as a fat manatí, thicker even, and with pointed stakes coming out of their heads and big sacks of balls dangling under the hind legs.

  I was carried by the crowd at times, as everyone pressed together, jumping and crowding around the corrals. There was a priest, and some of the cattlemen stood by the gate of the corrals and they, too, were drinking wine. The crowd, all men, was hooting and laughing, and the bulls pranced around wild-eyed inside the corrals. Then the priest blessed the bulls with holy water. The crowd quieted and he was very solemn, speaking not Castilian but the old Basque language, and it made sense suddenly for me that they lived off the balls and production of these great bulls, and they were appreciating their food in a way we do also our yucca and our hutía, our doves and parrots, our iguana and our many fish and turtles, especially the turtles, which are so very useful and sacred to us.

  What happened next was craziest of all. As the priest ended his blessing, cries of “Viva San Fermín!” filled the air, and the jumping and hollering all began again. I wondered about this San Fermín, that he might be a bull spirit, and was thus daydreaming when the crowd began running past me, and I found myself facing four bulls sniffing an open gate briefly before charging on me like a pack of sharks.

  I folded myself into a ball on the hot sand. I pretended to be a turtle, just as I’d been thinking, and the bulls stopped short of me, again sniffing, and then there was Rodrigo actually hitting one on the snout and running, and the whole crowd running, and the bulls jumping past me. One stepped on my hand as he charged away.

  I always remember that afternoon, nursing my hand and climbing on a fence to watch the bulls running with the crowd from one end of the field to another, and how the men touched the bulls’ horns and jumped over them, and finally a bull charged into a group of men who fell back on each other, hooking his horn with a snap of the neck that sent men flying, one torn entirely across the gut so his entrails spilled out.

  It was that bull that was left behind in the field as the others were coaxed and herded, with the aid of several steer, back into the corrals. The violent part happened then. A dozen men holding knives and sabers came out. Without hesitation, they charged the bull, who faced them, a bit winded but still defiant. Then they were all over him, cursing and stabbing and cutting at him as he humped and ran with men hanging from his legs and neck, stabbing into him and making him bleed.

  Finally the bull stopped moving. He tried to hook under his own belly as a man gutted at him from underneath. Then the bull’s entrails dropped on the man and he still stood as the man crawled away. Then all the men stabbed at him again and succeeded in pushing him over. A great cry went up from the crowd.

  Rodrigo and I watched it together. I thought it way too bloody a ceremony. I wondered about the need of the men to kill the bull so violently, so bloodily. If they love the bulls so much, live off of them and even bless them, why do they fight them in a fury like that?

  “It is just a custom,” Rodrigo said when I asked him that as we rode west. “All over Spain they fight bulls.”

  He told me too that San Fermín is not a bull spirit, but a man saint, which confused me about it all over again. So I don’t know even now what connection they were trying to make, but, truly it was repugnant to me. In our way, killing was done quickly, not excitedly if at all possible, and always apologizing, not cursing the being that will feed us.

  Ninety-three. Rodrigo’
s home village.

  Otero del Rey, Rodrigo’s home village, sat on a knoll overlooking a tree-dotted plain. The whole valley plain was covered by small and large gardens and scattered sod huts. I saw men and women walking behind ox carts and leading pack burros down dusty roads. I saw the valley spread before me and it looked pretty.

  As we rounded a hill, across the bottomlands from Rodrigo’s family home, the news of our arrival preceded us. Descending a spiraling road opposite from us, a group of people was walking toward us. They met us halfway through the valley, shouting for Rodrigo and thanking out loud the Virgin Mary, Blessed Mother of God.

  Those days were my best in Spain, quiet, listening to Rodrigo telling tales of his travels with Columbus, about whom they had not heard the news yet in Otero del Rey. Of course, the people marveled at me, touched me and pinched me, felt my long hair, fed me many soups and breads, even slaughtered a big pig for me on our second week, which they roasted and we fed on for days.

  Rodrigo had four sisters and three brothers, all at home or living in nearby plots. They spoke a language called Gallego, different from the Castilian of Seville, the Basque of Euskera, and the Catalan of Barcelona. The brothers, their father, and two uncles worked the farms together, planting wheat, lentils, garlic, and large fields of cabbage. They also kept pigs, one cow with calf, and a flock of chickens. They all worked all day, every day, but, like in our own villages, Rodrigo’s people had enough food and water for their families. On Saturday they drove a two-wheel wagon to market, and on Sunday they gathered at the same plaza to hear Mass.

  One day I especially remember. Rodrigo helped his father fix a wagon wheel while his mother, Josefa, asked me to carry wide buckets of water for her. She was a small woman, rather wiry, and she was very kind to me, always ready with a broth or the herbal tea they called cocimiento. I walked with her and one sister up a mountain trail and then down to drop into a thicket of trees, where the air was suddenly moist.

  “Wait,” the mother of Rodrigo said. She had a small bundle of flowers in a bag and pulled it out. I watched as she knelt down and made a cross on the ground with a stick and then circled it. Then she lay down the flower bundle, thanking dragas for keeping the tree cover of the spring lush and maintaining the water flow. It impressed me that she used that very image, our own circle bisected, cut into the four directions. Her offering for the dragas, their “little people” guardians of the water spring. On the way back, Josefa said, “Don’t tell anyone about my offering to the dragas, but if you must talk about it, talk about it with Rodrigo.”

  I never did ask Rodrigo about their dragas. It was something private for me, shared by his mother, who reminded me of my own mother and her own stories of the higüe, our ancient little beings that live under trees on the shores of our Guanahaní lake. My mother, too, offered gifts to the higüe, sometimes tobacco seeds, sometimes food. Often, she would crack open a guayaba and other fruits and leave them out for them.

  I was sorry to leave Otero del Rey, where I met my friend Rodrigo’s family, his mother Josefa and his father Manuél, a countryfolk who treated me like one more brother in the family, but at least Rodrigo would ride with me as far as Seville, and from that point on I would be on ship to return to our islands. The fervent hope of my heart during the long days on our way to Andalusia, as we crossed the interminable plains and mountains on horseback, was to open my eyes and see our little cove in Guanahaní, see our fishermen paddling their canoes. I would jump overboard and swim, swim to my shore, run to my village and my mother, my uncles and their many bohíos. My urgent need, I remember, was to see them once more and to tell them of my trip and of what happened to the women and our other people who had left on ship and tell them, too, of the strange and astonishing things I had seen in the Castilian land and how Cibanakán died.

  Ninety-four. Good-bye to Atoya, and Castile.

  Once on board at the Port of Cadiz, it was thirty-four days before we sighted Caribbean islands. Caréy was with me, and we missed Rodrigo dearly. Three of our Taíno compatriots returned with us, all except poor Atoya, who was given to young Prince Juan, Queen Isabel’s son. Atoya, whom Caréy got to know quite well, was that nephew of Bayamo’s. He appealed that we both go to the admiral directly with his wish to take the voyage home with us. He cried with us several times as we readied to leave Seville, but the admiral admonished us not to raise the question. “Inform Don Juan,” as Atoya had been baptized, the admiral said, “that he now belongs to the prince of Castile, whom he serves. Tell him he will be educated in Christian ways by the prince’s own majordomo and will forever reside in the court of the prince, who someday might be king.” Poor, sad Atoya lasted less than a year in Spain, where he died of heartbreak at his lonely fate. Years later, when I heard that Prince Don Juan died after a hunting accident, breaking the heart of the king and queen, I felt Atoya and his people working their power from the other side.

  November 8, 1532

  Ninety -five. A Country where many are poor and destitute and a few are very rich.

  That second voyage to our islands opened my eyes and taught me what I had not yet learned about the covered men. I met Cúneo on that trip, and Alonso de Hojeda, Doctor Alvarez Chanca, Father Buil, Pedro Margarit, and many others. Only a very few were kind or generous people in that lot. The majority were nobility, but of the impoverished variety, and there was nothing noble about them. One sailor made up a ditty: “Poor in Seville gets rich in Antille—and always regal in the eye of the Lord.” They liked it so much, it was sung aboard many of the ships, over and over as we crossed the ocean.

  The royal nobility, or the Hidalgos, as they called themselves, laughed among themselves and often derided the crew and low-caste artisans and laborers on board. They ordered them around rudely and imposed so many punishments the ships’ captains had to intervene to quell rising hostilities. On one thing, however, all the Castilians were agreeable: all desired the gold of the islands, all dreamed of striking it rich and returning to Castile as gran señores, a goal for which they were willing to take amazing risks and inflict the most horrendous of punishments, particularly on us Indians.

  I had a better idea now what the Castilians meant by rich and poor. I had seen it in their cities and even in their villages. Among some families, you saw some very large houses, with walls around them, called castles, surrounded by stables and barns and fields of herds and crops. These big families mostly raised sheep. They employed or held some peasants, who are their poor people, but don’t feed them much. It happens these poor people don’t have enough to eat, yet they are not allowed to use the land freely, even if it is abandoned. All the land belongs to the king or the barons, or the church, and these vast expanses are not open to the common people.

  This I had noticed as we traveled south from Galicia across Extremadura to Seville. Their poor people were everywhere, and there was hunger everywhere. In the country villages, those who had land of their own survived better, raised crops, and kept their people together. But most of the people had no land of their own or land that they could work and inhabit. In the cities, they had next to nothing, not even food sometimes, and begged in the streets.

  The poor Castilian huts in the cities were crowded together, most often with pigs and chickens, even cows. While walking through those parts of their towns, I often found their stench unbearable, and I was always affected by the wild look in the eyes of so many children, who were scabby and sickly and kept begging and begging from anyone who walked by.

  November 9, 1532

  Ninety-six. The romance of Cúneo’s mares.

  I have written earlier about Michele de Cúneo, when I told about Bayamo’s curse on the admiral during our later trip to Cuba. Indeed, of that second and, for me, final crossing of the great waters, I remember most indeed the deeds of this great crony of the admiral’s. Of great interest, too, is Captain Hojeda, a powerful, brutal man. But first, I will write about Cúneo’s mares.

  Cúneo, that Genoese dandy, had a gr
eat eye for opportunity, and I believe he was the first of the colonists to make a profit on that journey. During the voyage, as an investment for settling in the islands, Cúneo transported two mares on board our ship. By the third week of warm, calm seas, many men on board felt desperate with lust. Cúneo perceived the opportunity and organized matters to make gains on his two mares, initiating a quiet affair that went on for several weeks. I was full of wonder that many of the men on board were comfortable with the use of the mares to pacify themselves, but it appeared to be so, as even of those that did not participate, none questioned the arrangement. And Cúneo took in thirty maravedí per session.

  A close friend of the admiral’s, Cúneo was the only man I knew who could tell raunchy stories to the Great Mariner. No one else would have dared, but Cúneo had a way of speaking Genoese that Don Christopherens appreciated and made him laugh. Even Don Christopherens knew about the romance of the mares, as Cúneo called it. Many evenings while they dined together in the admiral’s cabin, I heard Don Christopherens laugh as Cúneo regaled him with jokes and his tales of the “romance.”