Of course, Oviedo dominated in this regard. He liked speaking about my people, as he is also writing a history of the Indies, talking of Indios and ni-Taínos, this cacique and that one, about villages of the large islands and of the lucayas, speaking even of my long-lost home of Guanahaní. I sipped as he explained who we were and how we acted in the times before the Castilians. For nearly two hours, the wine, rather than excite me to violence, distanced me from Oviedo’s words.
At one point, while drinking steadily, Oviedo talked about the marriages of my people and how they were accustomed to making love. He went on and on, as I had heard him years before (and precisely at the table of Don Diego Columbus, the second admiral), about the caciques having many wives and how upon a cacique’s death, sometimes one or more wives would be buried with him.
Everyone laughed. “A hard lot on wives,” said an ascendado sitting to my left. “Of course, the Indians did many barbaric things.”
I twisted inside myself, not because what he said about cacique’s wives was totally untrue, but because in my mind it was not cause for such ridicule. In my mind, the Castilians did much more barbaric things. “It is of interest,” I said, “that more often than not, a wife’s devotion and love compelled her voluntary journey to the spirit island, what we call Coaybay.”
“Even so, a barbaric custom it is,” Oviedo answered quickly.
“Yet, I wonder if a Christian lady would ever consider doing so, that is, out of devotion?”
I got a laugh out of most of the men, including Oidor Suazo.
“The Indian is clever,” said the oidor.
“So observed the most revered Queen Isabel, the Catholic, at Barcelona, when she met me in 1493,” I said.
I realized I was being boorish to speak so much, interjecting myself like this, but as I sat in my chair and looked upon their persons, they all became smaller and smaller, and I felt the superiority of my knowledge.
“The Dieguillo is clever,” said the abbot, “but tonight his tongue rides the nectar of the vine. He forgets our Spanish ladies, whole convents of nuns, are devoted to the one true Lord.”
I raised my glass to him with a nod, both in deference and mockery. But it was a table gesture I had seen in the nobility, and it ingratiated me somewhat (or so I thought) to the group.
Oviedo continued, more calmly now, about our abilities. “It is true that here and there a clever Indian is found. Witness our natural companion this evening. But overall the Indians were a sorry lot before our coming. Most were imbeciles, made by nature to serve.”
About our holy people, he said: “Blindly, the Indians believed their witch-men, brujos they called behikes, who fooled everyone by babbling with their little cemi idols. Of course, our priests discovered immediately an assistant of the brujo who would hide behind the altar of cemi and emit sounds, so as to frighten the people.”
Oviedo lifted his wine glass and pretended to hide behind it, making phantasmal sounds, then feigning a witch’s voice: “I am your master. Give me your tribute!”
He might have gotten applause for his drama, but at that very moment I interceded. “We never had tribute; it was always exchange, trade.”
It was my mistake. He had had enough of me. Quietly, a blotchy redness flushed Oviedo’s oval face. “Idolaters!” he spat. “The true Indians from those days worshipped images of the Devil himself!”
“Never mind this diablillo know-it-all,” the abbot interfered, to calm him down. He looked at me sternly, then turned with a smile to Oviedo.
“I understand from Don Bartolomé that they were an abstinent people about coitus,” the abbot goaded him deftly, by way of deviating his anger.
Oviedo snapped forward. “Nonsense. They did as snakes, wrapped up under the leg, men with women, men with men. Anti-natura, in the wrong hole!”
I gestured to speak and spilled my glass of wine.
“Diego might consider a retreat,” the abbot said quietly.
I shook my head, and he did not insist. “Father Las Casas is a truthful man,” I said. “Of all Castilians, he understands our people best.”
“Only in going after gold did they abstain,” Oviedo said loudly, talking over me as if to ignore me. He glanced around the table and laughed loudly at the group. “Did you know that? Before going to gather gold, the Indians abstained from coitus. It was the only time. Every other time they plugged everything in sight, mothers excluded.” He laughed again. “But they abstained when they went after gold. Ha, and Las Casas the Great Defender says the Indians didn’t put value on gold!”
Of course, he was all wrong, but for the moment my head swirled and my heart raced. Twice, my elbow slipped on the table as I tried to keep a silent composure. The love I do feel for the good friar was suddenly high in my breast, mixing in with the many emotions.
Oviedo spoke on of sodomy now, in a torrent of words that pierced me deeply, though he ignored my face. “Repulsion and shame,” he kept repeating, calling our people “irredeemable liars, lazy, dumb, a people who would rather kill themselves than work hard. The pestilence,” he said, “was only to be thanked for wiping nine out of ten Indians off of the Caribbean islands.
“It was divine intervention directly worked to deny a place on the earth to such savage and bestial peoples, abominable and vicious. It fits them well and it is most convenient the frightful sentence carried out against them by an eternal and sovereign God!”
My head in a fog, his words pierced my breast, again and again. It was another half hour before my mind calmed enough to formulate words. This is where the wine lifts all caution.
“Only the blacks of Africa are more bestial than were our own natives,” Oviedo was claiming, recalling Governor Diego Columbus’s acts of swift violence in 1522 while suppressing a slave rebellion in his own sugar mill. Then he made a mistake as he wound down to stop. “Your own benefactor, Dieguillo,” he said, pointing at me. “He hanged them by the dozen, including many Indians who joined in.”
“The second admiral, who saved my life twice, was only a man,” I retorted. “And a Castilian.”
I saw young Silverio jump in a corner.
The abbot sized me up. As I only held him in check with the potential for greater scandal, I continued quickly, by way of explanation.
“In the case of the Negro rebellion, exactly ten years ago, the second admiral acted swiftly and brutally, it is true. More than twenty blacks had gotten away, and word was spreading to other sugar mills. He sought to—”
“Everyone knows he feared a general rebellion,” Oviedo had caught my challenge. “But why do you say, a Castilian—by what meaning?”
“The way of your punishment has been to hang and burn our elders,” I said. “Or is this strange to your learned ears?”
“Only rebellious ones,” Oidor Suazo intervened. I think he tried to change the conversation. “What say you, Don Gonzalo, of the efforts to deal with Enriquillo?”
“If done properly, he would be hanged,” Oviedo replied quickly, looking at me, and then spoke slowly. “He is a brigand, Indian or not, and has committed acts of theft and cruel violence.”
“He fights only for a justice denied him,” I said.
“He is an outlaw, a rebel and a murderer, regardless of—”
“He is a man of conviction,” I interrupted, “not a fingery gold-counter!”
Oviedo stood, making as if to reach for his dagger. “This Indian must go,” he yelled. “Insult I will not tolerate.”
Oviedo, now turned historian, came to these islands to count the king’s gold. Everyone knows that, and there are many stories on the depths of his pockets. Two monks stepped behind him, I think to prevent violence, as he stood erectly facing me, hand on the hilt of his dagger.
“Las Casas knows these things,” I said with deadly calm. “He writes the truth about us.”
The abbot stood. “Dieguillo must retire,” he said, as Oviedo, facing me, yelled: “Las Casas is another lying fool!”
I stood, t
oo, wanting to insult him again, but more words were not forthcoming. I was ready to kill that Oviedo, to yank out his lying tongue. Leaning on the table, my hand clasped a serving knife, a gesture noticed by the abbot. “Go at once, Dieguillo,” he commanded. “You are dangerously close to illegality. Do not threaten an officer of the king.”
Thus did I retire to my cloistered cell, in the early hours of this new year, marking now 1,533 since the birth of the Christ.
January 10, 1533
One hundred ten. In need of punishment.
Two days my body felt a wretch after contention with the bottle. Only Fray Remigio, the Franciscan, and young Silverio visited my room, and then briefly, after meals. I ate steadily from their offerings to stabilize my corpus, but as my body recovered, my mind and heart bemoaned my thoughtless indiscretion.
Now I am ashamed, not because of the insult to Oviedo, who is an old whore full of calumnies, but because my own stupidity allowed such a scandal. How I think of Enriquillo I gave away and precisely to the wrong people. Nothing did I hear from Oidor Suazo nor, of course, from “the intellect” about the need for peace with Enriquillo, though they pronounce such thoughts in their more public gestures. It is not a good moment to lose my anonymity.
With the knotted rope the convent keeps for such a purpose, I will ask Fray Remigio to flagellate me. I will ask him to strike me hard, make me bleed from the shoulders and suffer. I am such a fool, and I have always been such a fool. And how can I change now, but through more pain? I must concentrate my mind on the task before me, which is to ensure that Enriquillo lives, that his movement is not crushed just as he would make a peace.
January 12, 1533
One hundred eleven. Las Casas reports mixed news.
As if to torment my agitation, a letter arrives from Las Casas, but full of troublesome news—all the more reason provided me for the painful remedy I have dictated for my soul.
The good friar met with the empress, as King Charles was not yet back in his Iberian court. Long dialogues he reports, though the empress was not well disposed. As of July, 1532, she commissioned a captain to press the war on Enriquillo, annihilate him once and for all. His name is Barrionuevo, and according to the friar, he and more than two hundred soldiers will have left for our island by my receipt of the letter. The friar will also return now.
He writes: “I demanded from the Empress Isabel of Portugal, wife of King Carlos I, an adequate plan for a peace in Española based on the principle of just treatment.” “She called me a meddler and referred to more than a dozen documents of complaint against my person, several authored or seconded by the oidor Suazo, of late so endearing with me.
“What to make of all this I am not sure, except that a strong position at the court is that Enriquillo should be invited to come here on an embassy from which he will not return. I am more worried than always now, noting the empress’s response. I believe the king is more disposed to establish a peace, but he is tending to his German dominions and is not expected for several more weeks.”
One bit of good news: my old friend Rodrigo Gallego is to make the voyage as an officer of the guard. He is now a captain and well regarded. His application to join the mission was easily accepted. The good friar reports long conversations with Rodrigo, who professed himself a sympathizer these many years to the plight of our Taíno people. I am very happy about this news that I will see my friend, missing from my life since our tearful farewell in Seville, in 1493.
“Seize the initiative to negotiate on our own with Enriquillo,” writes Las Casas. “The island hidalgos have the stealth for a devious assassination, but I don’t believe they have the courage for more campaigns in the Bahuruku, which describes the empress’s plan. Assist the baby boy [here he employs my code] to design a careful negotiation. A captain and a soldier, Barrionuevo nevertheless carries secondary instructions to recognize Enriquillo’s original complaints. I expect, if our efforts are rewarded, that he will go empowered to grant pardons if peace can be achieved.
“As you receive this letter, I will be on board a returning ship. Please be very careful and strategic as the moment comes for definitive action to make gains at the end this fourteen-year-old affair. I have raised the encomienda as a point of discussion. Yes, it angers everyone anew to discuss this sin we all share, but it must be raised, again and again, until justice is done.
“My friend, I remember seeing you those many years ago, not far from where I now write these words, your skinny young frame and quick smile and the wonderful parrots you handled. I hope you are well and commend you to keep writing, keep writing. What you have to say about those early days is I believe of great importance.”
One hundred twelve. I must get to the Bahuruku.
Now I sit and ponder, hoping my lunatic indiscretion with Oviedo and the oidor will have minor repercussion. The monks, I know, are watching me more carefully. Most are sympathizers of the good friar’s mission, but I fear their constant curiosity for my expressions on the cacique. So they watch me, wondering, and I wonder, too, is there a traitor among them? And how can I leave here without notice? How can I get to the Bahuruku to talk to Enriquillo, which I clearly must do, and not give him away? I am such a magnus fool for what I have done, and at such a wrongful moment!
One hundred thirteen. Flogged out of my guilty stupor.
Finally I am flogged. Fray Remigio understood my request and gracefully backed me up without word, administering my torture faithfully and quietly, assisting me to my cot as on the fortieth stroke I crumbled from the pain. A prayer I intoned when I awakened, and for two days I have forced movement on my arms and shoulders, a dismay through my neck and head that has made me wretch anew. Such is the power, though, even in my stupidity, that one day later an opportunity arises. I feel the strength of the spirits in this, a prayer returned. The sugar mill near San Juan de la Maguana constructs a new trapiche building and has called for carpenters. I will go there and set a message out for the baby boy.
Folio IV
A Visit to the Rebel Camps
Francisco Pedro, Yoruba friend… Two weeks later, sugar mill story… A new day begins… In the free Taíno territory… Greetings by Enriquillo and Doña Mencia, council of captains… Younger captains’ proposals for raids to procure arms and munitions and tools… Touring the camp, the young men… The capture of Caonabó… Lessons for the boy-warriors… Castilians dance for gold… Caonabó serves notice on Fuerte Tomás… Blood not spilled, but a chopped hand… Discussions in the evening… Caonabó’s deception by Hojeda… Nobody liked the story… San Miguel’s deception… Seeking a path to peace, Enriquillo… Looking for the behike… Early cohobas with Guarionex… Fasting and old stories of Taínos… Peace-pact ways of Guarionex… Friar Pané, el terco, the busybody priest who got many good people killed… A Castilian army readies for battle… Maniocatex riles up a war… Pané riles up a cacique’s yukaieke… The Battle of Christendom over the Heathens… Guarionex is prisoner… Guarionex is released, Guacanagari disappears… A Taíno offer on the land… The first Castilian rebellion: Roldán attacks the admiral… I take a bride, Ceiba… Making a family, home days… Enriquillo’s camp is like the old yukaiekes… The old man knew so much… Death Spirits that open sores in our faces… Roldán and the first Indian repartimiento… Guarionex retreats to the mountains… Guarionex falls, and Mayobanex… Castilians swarm the island… Surrounded by young Taíno, education for peace… A song comes to me… Going to meet the medicine…
One hundred fourteen. Francisco Pedro, Yoruba friend.
I write tonight from a small bohío near San Juan de la Maguana, where I have come with young Silverio. The bohío belongs to a free Negro named Francisco Pedro, who served with me in the encomienda of Pero Lopez before that singular son of a she-dog lost his Maguana holdings, during the time of the admiral Diego, and returned to Santo Domingo. Francisco Pedro is a good friend who, like myself, has benefited greatly from the friendship of the second admiral and that of Father Las Cas
as. He is a lucky African just as I am a lucky Indian to come out alive from inside the nightmare of the past forty years. He was one of the first Yoruba men brought over by Antonio de Torres, before the time of Nicolás de Ovando in 1502.
When I was encomended in 1514, along with Enriquillo and his father, already Francisco Pedro, whom I call by his common nickname of Yoruba, was an older man. Today he fixed us herbal tea and cooked a hen in onions and rice and boiled yucca for us, and he seems as agile as in those days. “Muchacho,” he still calls me, though I am certainly not a boy anymore. “You better rest a day and be ready to work when you go over to that Solana’s sugar mill. You are now used to that soft life of the convent, dusting maguacokío altars and cooking for priests. But the mill—they work you, even a freeman, sixteen straight hours, with a one-hour stop after midday.”
He is right, of course. The life of the sugar mill is the worst now. And what he is too polite to say: Indians don’t work the cane or sugar-grind anymore. All that has gone to Negroes in the last ten years, the strongest arms for macheteros, and the biggest ones to work the grinding trapiche. Wielding the machete in a field of cane, spiny slivers by the millions falling on your face and sweaty neck, burning sun of the harvest torching your head, is about the hardest work a man can do on this island, now that the gold mines are nearly exhausted. Almost all macheteros (canecutters) are Negroes now, while Indians are harvesting yucca and herding cattle. Many Negroes are like us in build, but many more than us are big and muscled heftily, and those are put to work inside the mill, where the machinery is huge and heavy and everything is hot to the touch. “The Castilians treated Indians as if you were wild game,” Francisco Pedro told me today, “but they treat us Negroes like beasts of burden.”
Tomorrow I will ride into the Spanish village of Vera Paz, what used to be the main yukaieke of old Cacique Bohekio, here in the province of Xaraguá. I am to go to the sugar mill and cattle ranches of Don Diego Solana and his wife, Doña Maria de Arana, where a new trapiche building for squeeze-grinding sugar cane is to be constructed. Solana is probably the biggest cattleman on this side of the island, with more than twenty thousand head of cattle, thirty Spanish foremen, three dozen Indian peons, and more than one hundred African slaves. Most of the plain from Santo Domingo to the foothills of Bahuruku is crowded already with cattle, sheep, and sugar cane. It is hard to believe how much everything has changed. I count forty years since the first Castilian settlement on these parts, and it is amazing how the sugar cane sea of deep green has spread. Sugar cane tastes sweet enough, but it burns the land and feeds nothing but ships going to Castile. Not even animals or birds does the sugar cane feed; no animal does it feed except for the plague rat that came over in their own ships. And that one not even the mahá snake eats. The sugar feeds not even the men of the sugar boilers. At the refineries, the Negroes near the boilers are forced to wear bozales (muzzles) so they cannot open their mouths to swallow even a bit of its product.
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