Taino

by Jose Barreiro

  “Open wide your ears, my nephews. Only twice in thirteen years have they caught us unawares, and those only because of traitors, because careless warriors led them to us, giddy with the triumph of raids on the coast. Let me say, yes, I have gone out to take them in their own ground, to teach them their own homes will not be spared. But I seek not from them, I do not descend the mountain just to irritate them, just to steal from them.

  “Since those first days, when we defeated Valenzuela and his men with sticks and short knives, killing two of his dreaded foremen, we have sought to disengage, to build our own small ranches in the hidden valleys of the Bahuruku. Never have the Castilians wished to fight us on our grounds, and as we have left the forefront of their memories, passing from their eyes unnoticed like soft winds, for years at a time, they forgot us, and so we built our lives.

  “Nephews, continue to widen your ears.

  “I am not saying they do not want us. They want us very much. Ten hard captains they have sent against us. Each and every one our warriors routed. We have fought like cats gone to the wild, which is what we are, cats and dogs gone to the manigua; and, yes, hawks—hawks who have grown claws and teeth and even talons; we have made carapaces for ourselves, see, like the turtle, and even the thunder stick we now use. I will fight to the death, and I sleep not my nights in my vigilance, but I will remind you, it is our quiet watch and, of course, our willingness to fight when pressed that keeps our peoples here alive. Raids only scare the Castilians into action, into wishing to murder us and press our families into slavery.

  “Now, I repeat my observation: as we go about, quietly constructing our camps, we have what we need, and they do forget us for a time. But, as some of our captains continue to raid and kill, so do Castilian angers grow. They take up pesos and set squads actively against us. I remind you captains of this reality and ask you to temper your excursions. Think not just of your strongest arms, think of your weak ones, your children and old people, your women caring for your homes.

  “You hang much with warriors, Tamayo. Spend more time with the women and the children, the old men. Listen to them. Let them tell you their fears and their hopes.”

  The captains listened carefully and even Tamayo nodded. After a time, all looked to Romero, Enriquillo’s brother-cousin on his mother’s side, a genial man who is their main spider or webmaker man. It was Romero who brought Tamayo into Enriquillo’s circle. He is short and stocky with a face that cannot stop smiling.

  “I love you all,” he began to speak. “Taíno-ti, my fellow cousins. The words have been good and should not wound. Love each other, captains. Respect our cacique, who has guided our survival these many years. We have never defeated the Castilians but our mountains have. Their own thirst and exhaustion, their fear of our thick brush and darkened forests, these are the things that have defeated them. They cannot fight us if they must hunt us among these peaks. But they are many, many. And if enough of them came for us, they would find us, and they would kill us all.

  “Relatives, where is our Ciguayo comrade? Where our great brother, Hernandillo, the One-eye, whose great singing we enjoyed so much?”

  Romero never quit smiling though he shed a long tear before squatting back on his flat duho. The two captains he mentioned had been killed in recent raids. I had met the Ciguayo, that other time, and was touched to hear of his demise. The One-eye, Hernandillo, I knew only by reputation.

  Next, I was called on by Enriquillo to express my thoughts. I did this by informing the captains of my message from the good friar that, indeed, if peace could not be struck, the king himself would order total war on the Bahuruku. The words of the young cacique had warmed me, confirming the veracity of my own instinct for preserving his hard-won jurisdiction. I told the captains they had good friends among the friars and that the important men of Santo Domingo were tired of the war, so it was possible they could make a peace while keeping their freedom. “Some want to hang and burn you all; others would bring an end to the hostility and let you settle once and for all,” I told the group. The rest of my words I gave to Tamayo: “The cutoff hand of the young man has been much seen in Santo Domingo and has stirred up hornets,” I said to him. “But, since there was cruelty in the kindness and kindness in the cruelty, it has them confused.”

  Tamayo, whose face carries three large scars and one ear cut by half, smiled uneasily at my words, and Enrique invited them to smoke again, closing the circle with these words. “I seek the trail that allows us our survival. War is not the trail itself but only the horse we have been forced to ride. My captains, I am still on that horse, but I prefer to walk. Our people have been walkers, and we will live by walking, even if, for now, we must ride the horse.”

  One hundred twenty. Touring the camp, the young men.

  We eat well. There is plenty of corn, peppers, and tomatoes, lots of cassabe and many fruits, always a bit of meat. The yucca plots, I have learned, must be protected by young boys against packs of wild pigs, which have multiplied all over the island. A good job for the boys, they learn to shoot a straight arrow and bring in extra meat.

  Enriquillo has liked my words. Yesterday again, as I was writing, he honored me with a visit. “Come, uncle,” he said. “Let’s walk.”

  I quickly finished my last entry, where I write about Tamayo’s request. Enrique asked what I was writing so intently.

  “I write the early stories of Columbus,” I said. “And also some of what happens as I go every day.”

  He was leading me down a thin trail through a dark woods and suddenly stopped.

  “Do you write about me?” he asked.

  “I have,” I admitted. He cleared his throat and looked away, giving a moment of thought to this information then continued walking.

  We came upon a clearing where groups of boys were jousting. Enriquillo hurried. “Come see the boys,” he said.

  Some thirty boys and young men practiced with various arms in the open area, under instructions of two older guaxeri. The boys used sticks as lances and swords, pairing off in twos and fours, sparring and thrusting, feigning, and swinging at each other with more than enough ferocity. As we watched, one boy caught a stick behind the ear and nearly passed out. “Take a rest,” Enriquillo told them. Then he had a lesson for them, showing the boys how to take out a man on horseback bearing down on them. He asked me to put a young boy on my shoulders and charge him as he stood his ground with a long stick.

  “Squat down into a ball, and as the horse approaches, spring up. This will make him rear back,” he said. “Then jab at the face, first of the horse, then of the rider. One-two, one-two. If you face him and fight him, you are faster on your feet by jumping to and fro, jabbing, jabbing with your lance. But never turn your back on a horse unless you can make the bush. In open savanna, he will ride you down and lance your back.”

  The boys listened attentively. Enriquillo is incredibly agile, rolling on his back to land on his feet, back and forth as he demonstrated in front of me, jabbing his stick nearly into my face but never touching me. The demonstration over, he had the boys sit. He queried them on their dexterity with the crossbow, the spear throw, and their force and accuracy with rocks. “Always be alert,” he reminded them. “Walk our trails, go on watch to the coast. Learn to see and smell the Castilian and his mánso Indians and Negroes. Spot his track and sign. Never trust that Castilian man. He feigns friendship then captures you.”

  The young men were quite enraptured. Enrique described torture for them. The yanking of the fingernails, the slow burning of the feet and underarms—what the Castilians will do to make them tell where the camps are located. “Can you resist such a torture? Would such a pain make you betray your grandparents?”

  The young men all agreed they would die before betraying anything. “Live it then, boys,” Enriquillo said. “Be alert, but don’t go looking for trouble. Defend us. Help your mothers and grandmothers. Always help the women. Listen to these old guaxeri who would teach you, and never forget you are Ta
íno.”

  What I loved were the faces on the boys, who smiled so hopefully, so lovingly, even as they trained for war. They are still Taíno, young men of noble sentiment, who can be aroused by the love of grandparents. And I could see Enriquillo’s strength, its origin, in that same feeling, that warm, loving attitude that was foundation and center pole of our Taíno hearts, our strength in spirit. My people have been so beautiful and their reduction so brutal. What joy in my heart to be in this camp! What joy to see our survival yet in the light of our boy-men’s deep black eyes. Now I feel we are not dead men walking, like so many of our people encomended to the haciendas; no, not here in the Bahuruku, where the Taíno still walks alive and free.

  Enriquillo asked me to tell them a story. Of course, I wanted to back him up with his people, to have my own words serve the cause of his dignity and his survival. I thought of Caonabó and I thought of Guarionex, two of the grand caciques of the early conquest, who they were, what they tried to do, how they fell. I settled on the story of Caonabó, to illustrate both our valor and the deviousness of the Castilians, whom we then called the covered men.

  One hundred twenty-one. The capture of Caonabó.

  Not far from where I write, just down the mountains some five leagues, near where that so-called savant Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo now owns a large sugar estate with more than sixty encomended Indians and many more enslaved Negroes, Caonabó, our first warrior against the Castilians, was deviously captured. He was taken in his own village by Alonzo de Hojeda, that captain of the admiral of whom I have written in earlier pages when telling of his attack on the Carib canoe as we sailed on the return voyage from Castilian lands. It was precisely that Hojeda, a great devotee of the Virgin Maria, who drew first blood on both Carib and Taíno. And it was he who captured Caonabó.

  On this island, the first cut Hojeda made was in a village of Guarionex’s territory, where the noses of two caciques he himself left hanging on their faces like the split breast of our mountain dove. Not only that, their ears then he ordered cut, top half sliced completely off, again on both caciques. These wounds I witnessed myself later, and so I told the Taíno boy-men, whose eyes focused beyond my person to imagine the scene.

  What I told them happened in 1494, even as the town of Isabela was constructed. Remember in my story how we landed at Navidad, the first fort left here by the admiral. We found all Castilians here dead, punished by Caonabó, cacique of Maguana, of whom I am sure some of you, I told the young men, are descended.

  The young people’s faces were a wonder of curiosity, and I pledged to instruct them on their history as much as my memory allowed. To my bigger joy, four of the young men, two of the young women, two of the older women, and three of the captains can read, and they approached me last night and asked me to write it so they can read it to the others after I am gone.

  These stories in my memory, of Caonabó and the admiral and the first season of the Castilians, I told them over several days and nights, starting with the young men in the clearing and continuing later in the evenings, the circle growing each night.

  Today, my mind and imagination are strong and I feel charged in my heart with my people’s mandate to do this for them, their spoken request that makes me shiver in my determination to write these truths, as I pledged before, so that no matter what is forgotten, our inheritors, our people of the stones, like my young men and women of the xiba mountain, will remember.

  March 6, 1533

  One hundred twenty-two. Lessons for the boy-warriors.

  The young people knew parts of the history after the fall of Xaraguá to Ovando, in the year of 1503, more or less. They knew a lot about Ovando—Nicolás de Ovando, not to be confused with Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, with whom I quarreled on New Year’s Eve. Ovando was a knight commander and a priest who came to the islands with twenty-five hundred men. A cold and mean man, he conducted the worst of all massacres, the one against our queen of peace, Anacaona. Many of Enriquillo’s people are from her line, so the young people knew more of their Xaraguá region, here in the southwestern side of the island and of the fate of their revered cacica grandmother.

  But of Caonabó, who was her first husband, of Guacanagari, of Guarionex, of the Ciguayo Mayobanex, and the other old caciques from other parts of the island, they knew virtually nothing. Of our sister island, Borikén, they knew nothing. Of the largest of our islands, Cuba, they knew very little, only the story of Hatuey. Of the admiral and the first conquistadors, two boys believed still they had been spirits (my own lie persisting these many years).

  When I goaded the group for their ideas, nearly all the young men believed we had started the first wars, that we Taínos had first attacked the Castilians. About Caonabó one said he had heard that he had desired to eat Castilian meat. This bothered me very much, even though the boys laughed heartily at the image of Caonabó chewing on a Castilian thigh.

  Caonabó, I told them, whose name means “Lord of the gold,” was a very special man, a Ciguayo, part Kwaib, yes, from Guadalupe, but one who had come to Bohío as a boy and settled with three older brothers in the land of the Ciguayo cacique, Mayobanex. No, Caonabó, as I see it clearly, was a great man of our people, a defender who saw quickly, much before I did, the darkness hidden in the covered people’s desperation for the shiny light of gold. “It was really about the gold,” I told the boys. “This is what commands their thoughts.”

  And I told them, too. “Xán, Xán, yes. Believe, yes, that your ancestors fought over the women in our families, our mothers and grandmothers, sisters and wives and daughters. But it was not jealousy. We were not that way. It was because of what I saw with my own eyes, how they raped our mothers and sisters and butchered the grandmothers.”

  I could see the boys all stir, realizing what they had not yet learned.

  This Española, our Bohío, this Quisqueya island was a central point of the Taíno people, I told the boys. Here our people came to parley, here is where the great caciques talked and sang for days. They came from Borikén, from Cuba, from Xamayca, even from my little islands farther to the east, seamen chiefs of Taíno, the ni-Taíno and their relations met and knew each other and shared the knowledge of their ancestors. Here in the great Bohío, our great and first house is found, in the caves at Cacibajagua and at Amayauna, where the ancestors, good and bad, guided by the wish to bathe in the streams, emerged from the earth, from the long tunnel of our mother.

  We Taíno were a large people, with many learned ones among us, I told the boys. Our people knew how to do everything we needed to live well and happy. We were on these big islands a long time and knew our places of respect and prayer, where we gathered to remember our ancient stories. The Cuban caciques were the best traders, in ropes and in good conch; in Borikén, they held the best ball games; in Xamayca, where many Macorixe settled before our Taíno, they knew archery and there was interest about the bow and arrow among our other Taínos in how they did that. “Remember that your peoples had possession of these lands at one time. Just that will make your thinking stronger,” I told them.

  To the east, I told the boys, past Borikén, the Kwaib raiders still inhabit the little islands. Before Castilians arrived, only Kwaib raiders came to our shores to bother us. Truly they were fearsome, but they hurt us not that much, compared to what would come. Raids came and went for a very long time, generations upon generations, and yet our Taíno multiplied and grew stronger. And of the Kwaib, many also settled on the northwest coast of this island. These were the Ciguayo territories, which were a kind of defense and entry point for Kwaib people who tired of raiding and intermarried with our people, especially through Guarionex, who formed the most clever alliances.

  The young boy who became Caonabó was one of those, and he proved an able defender against Kwaib raids from other islands. In time he became well known not only among the Ciguayos, who were mixed descendants of Taíno and Kwaib, but also among the pure-line Taíno caciques, like Guarionex, Guacanagari (who greeted Columbus),
and Bohekio, the brother of Anacaona.

  Caonabó was fearless and feared. For years he warred on all sides, yes, on many sides, as he not only defended our island shores against Kwaib raids, but as often he disputed over land with the villages of Guarionex and Guacanagari, giving battle fiercely against them and raising the level of turbulence.

  Here in Bohío, when I arrived with the admiral, there were five chieftainship lines, each with many village and village cluster chiefs. They knew each other, spoke a common language, and shared many common memories of the clear lineages of careful intermarriages. On the other side were the Cuban cacicasgos, Taíno as well, and their simpler, older relatives, the Siboney. In Borikén, under one main cacique, Agueybana, they were the people of the ball game, of which I remember tales, even in my home islands, of how Borikén’s large valleys were framed with ball courts, where caciques in grand ways hosted dozens of competing villages and clans, and some of my own people had gone, in years past, to the Borikén ball games. Then we had people of our own talk in Xamayca, too, and they were quite belligerent, even against each other. And, of course, there were the smaller outer islands like my own Guanahaní, and we were the same people. But the origin island was always this one of Bohío, our home, where the origin caves remain, where our Taíno gold veins were born.

  The old caciques of that time, Bohekio and Guarionex, together held ceremonies and put through many doings for their peoples. These oldest areitos of the Taínos, kept among the grandmother-guided lineal-breeding sachem families and among the behikes and some of the learned guaxeri of the clans of the ni-Taíno lines, were the laws by which our villages were sustained, so that fighting could be kept to a minimum and never wars to destroy the mother lines. Mutual recognition there was among all the main caciques, both Taíno and Ciguayo, including Guacanagari, Bohekio, Guarionex, Caonabó, Cotubanamax, and Mayobanex—respect they had for each other’s place in our island world, and it was balanced.