by Aaron Thier
He was speaking too quietly for the fishermen to hear, and after a while he seemed to lose track of his text and fell silent.
“I don’t remember the rest.”
“It’s okay,” said Azar. “I think you said your piece.”
“You have to say the whole thing or it’s not legal.”
“We’ll all sign something. We’ll tell them you said it in full.”
“I remember this,” I said. “I know about this. This is the Spanish Requerimiento. Why does he know this?”
“Never mind,” said the ancient mariner. “It never mattered anyway. It’s more of a trick than a law.”
In a little while we got close enough to the other boat that we could say good morning. They said good morning too and one of them asked us if we were catching anything.
The ancient mariner said, “Anyone who wants to join our crew can do so without fear, but anyone who resists will be killed.”
They all laughed in a pleasant way and then one of them said, “A pirate, huh?”
Now the ancient mariner slipped into the clear water, no more than eight feet deep in this part of the bay, and swam with surprising grace over to their boat. They helped him in and congratulated him on his excellent swimming. The ancient mariner thanked them and then picked up a metal bucket and bashed one of them in the head. It was not a tremendously forceful blow, but the man’s face went blank and he sat down and put his head in his hands. His friends thought this was very funny and slapped him on the back.
“Uh oh!” said one.
The other said to us, “My own granpa was taken that way too.”
“Your grandfather turned into a pirate?” said Azar.
The wounded man had his head between his knees. He said, “Ouch.”
The one with the pirate grandfather, a large man with a red face and a Boston Celtics T-shirt, said, “He’s fine. Ain’t you, Stan?” But Stan didn’t say anything more. “Stan! Stanislas! He’s fine. Don’t worry about Stan.”
The ancient mariner was stuffing lures and things into his pockets, and now he snapped the whole tackle box closed and heaved it into the water. The fishermen retrieved it and recovered their other things too, but they let him keep a bright yellow lure. I was still up in the tuna tower with my shirt off, but Quaco had gotten behind the wheel or whatever it’s called and maneuvered our boat a little closer to theirs.
“You boys had better get him back into the boat,” said the man in the Celtics shirt. Then, seeing Quaco for the first time, he said, “Whoa! Nice keyboard there, my man!”
In a little while we were motoring away again. The ancient mariner seemed to feel that his act of piracy was a great success, and we indulged him. We complimented him on his skill and on the beauty of the lure his victims had let him keep. But when we got well clear of the other boat, he revealed that he’d also stolen a dry bag, which contained a watch and about a hundred dollars in cash.
“I just took the other stuff as a diversion,” he said.
This warranted some discussion, but no one said anything. I looked out over the water. Mangrove islands, wading birds, deep blue channels, even a manatee in the sea grass. It was a very beautiful place. I tried to imagine that I was looking at part of the Chesapeake Bay five hundred years in the future.
“But you haven’t talked much about piracy,” I said. “We didn’t know you were a pirate.”
“I’ll tell you about piracy. The average life span of a pirate was about two years. For two years you drank and stole things, but you knew you’d be caught. There was a sickening feeling about it. There was this carnival-at-the-end-of-the-world feeling. Tears and wildness, that was piracy, because every night was the last night and in the morning you were going to hang.”
“Why did anybody do it?”
“Why does anybody do anything? It was less bad than being a sailor on a merchant ship. On pirate ships you had big crews and everyone pitched in. Also these were kids, most of them. They didn’t understand they could die. They knew they were going to die but they didn’t understand it.”
“You didn’t die.”
“I spent some time in Newgate, though, until I was able to convince someone that I was just a merchant sailor who’d been forced into piracy, which did often happen. I was an old man, and what were they going to say? No one wanted to admit they had anything to fear from such an old man. I have often used my age to my advantage. I get no end of profit from it.”
“Maybe I should’ve been a pirate,” I said. “I’ve always had this feeling that I’m not meant for a quiet life. I’m biding my time now but I have this idea that I’m meant for immortality and destruction.”
“All young men have that feeling,” said the ancient mariner. “All young people, probably. Even me. Even in my long-ago days as a young person. Although in my case it proved to be true.”
We’d been out there for more than two hours when Quaco looked up at the sun—I should say he looked directly into the sun—and said, “What o’clock is it?”
“Eleven o’clock,” Azar said.
Quaco consulted the map.
“There’s the island,” he said, and there it was, higher than the islands around it, maybe eight feet above the bay, ringed with mangroves but with some real forest on it also.
Azar said, “It’ll be good to do some digging. Stretch out a little.”
We dropped our anchor and waded ashore. The island was bigger than I’d realized. There were at least two acres of old-growth tropical forest, gumbo limbo trees and mahogany and sea grape, an enormous fig tree, tall silver palms. The leaf litter was crisp underfoot. The wild coffee was flowering. I saw a blue snail.
“And this is lignum vitae,” said the ancient mariner. “You can cure the clap with lignum vitae wood. Quaco taught me that, didn’t you, Quaco?”
We had given no thought to the possibility that we would find any treasure. We were drifting along, so to speak, taking things as they came. But we’d hardly started digging when the ancient mariner told us to hang on. He stepped forward and lifted a small figurine out of the sand. It was a woman with the head of a cat.
“This isn’t right,” he said. “This is the wrong treasure.” He slapped his thigh in frustration and sat down in the sand. “Forget it, boys. I’m sorry. It’s a bust.”
We were staring at this mysterious artifact, which was significantly weathered but still artful and stylish.
“It looks pretty authentic,” said Azar. “And it was right here where you said it would be.”
Quaco was digging around. He found a corroded metal box with a broken latch. Inside there was a worn amulet of some kind, a flattened grimacing face, and another figurine. An animal like an ostrich.
“What is this?” he said.
“I think it must be the stuff from El Dorado. That’s a karawa bird.”
“From El Dorado?” said Azar. He was peering through the viewfinder on the camera, trying to ask leading questions, but he was out of his depth.
“El Dorado,” said the ancient mariner. “Sure.”
“Where are the coins?” said Quaco.
“I don’t know. I’m sorry.”
“It doesn’t matter. I never cared about the coins.”
“I’m sorry anyway. You trusted me with them.”
“I’m not clear on the main point,” said Azar.
No one was listening to him. Quaco was sifting through the sand. This was all more than I could assimilate. My mind shuddered to a halt.
Quaco said, “Don’t feel so bad. You can sell these things to a museum.”
“Oh sure,” said the ancient mariner. “I guess.”
Then he seemed to perk up again.
“Do you remember the kid who helped us steal the coins?”
“No.”
“I remember him a little. I want to say he was a Turk.”
“He wasn’t a Turk.”
They stood together, squinting into the past. Azar and I had nothing to contribute. We were speechless.
“But I didn’t steal these things, though,” he told us.
“It doesn’t matter now,” said Quaco.
“It matters to me. This particular treasure I didn’t steal. It was given to me by a goddess.”
1560
* * *
When we arrive in Anaquitos, we do not find houses roofed in gold. We do not find bread made from crushed pearls. We do not find a king who covers himself in gold dust and takes a ceremonial bath each morning. We do not find white Indians. We do not find Indians with some intimation of Christian theology. We do not find the city I remember.
We abandon our brigantines on the beach upriver and walk down the white highway. We meet no resistance. There are no gates. We see the great earthen mounds, which were once as smooth as a bald man’s head, and they are dotted with trees. We see the canals and streams that watered the manioc fields, and others that carried away the sewage, and they are not flowing at all. The fish ponds are dry. In the dazzling white plazas the macha trees have died and the fig trees have gone wild and pulled up the paving stones. The air is thick with flies. There are filthy people drunk at midday but many of the streets are empty and many of the houses are falling down. The market women have nothing to sell. They regard us with revulsion but without fear.
I see all of this, a city in decay, but the Pirahao do not, because for the Pirahao it is not proper to compare what exists now to what existed at an earlier time. The Christians do not see it either because they are not here, because for them Anaquitos does not exist at all. The Christians see a beautiful white city instead. They see El Dorado. They see heaven on earth.
“It’s like a dream from the tale of Amadis,” says Miguel Oreja.
Here is the city where I was born. I do not think about it. I can’t stop thinking about it. The city will not be destroyed and it will be destroyed and it has already been destroyed, and I have no home in the world.
We march into the city and nothing happens. We stand in the white plaza looking around and waiting. The air is the color of inaga fruit. There are iguanas here and I wonder if the people have forgotten how to eat them, or if there are now so few people that those who remain cannot eat the iguanas faster than they hatch. For a long time no one speaks to us, and then a madman comes. His speech is unintelligible and his hair is matted with monkey blood. The Christians think he is a priest. I tell them there are no priests in Anaquitos. There are no rituals. There are no gods. I try to make them understand how this world is different from their world, but I know that for them there is only one world.
Here is the city where I was born, and here are the people with whom I once belonged, but I have forgotten how to see them. I can see parts of them, but I can’t see them whole. An old woman is a strip of cotton cloth and a yellow incisor. A hungry boy is an eyebrow and a shoulder blade. I do not think of my childhood, although I think of it continuously. I do not think of the pet monkey in the basket and the tapir stew and the pieces of old pottery I dug up in the courtyard. I do not think of my father or of the days he spent teaching me to make black earth for the garden. I do not think of these things because it is not proper to think of the deep past. The deep past is not here anymore. The person to whom those things happened was called Xiako and she is not here anymore. I am Maria. I am not a Pirahao and I am not a Christian. I am nothing. I don’t think of this and I think of nothing else and I am stupid like the monkey when we made him drunk with rotting fruit.
There is no time for these things. There is no time to see the city or to wonder at its disintegration, because now we must undertake the business of politics. We must convert the Indians. We must read the Requerimiento. Miguel Oreja bounces on his toes and sings. His beard is a long bawdy sailor’s song.
I try to explain that there is no government to usurp, no king to negotiate with, no judges or mayors with whom we must come to terms. This city does not function in the way Christian cities function, and now it seems it does not function at all. But the Christians cannot understand this and because they cannot understand this I take them to see the Xipaohoani. These are the oldest men in each family and they meet in the house of darkness at every change of the moon, but they have no power. They make suggestions and they are ignored. They are just old men. I take the Christians to see them because there is no one else for them to see.
Miguel Oreja is very pleased. He tells me that the Xipaohoani are the city’s governing body. He feels certain that once I explain the precepts of Christianity to them, we will immediately and spontaneously create a new Christian polity, the Kingdom of El Dorado, in which we will all live as brothers and sisters in Christ.
So I explain Christianity. I say, “In the upper sky there is a man. He makes the world. He has a wife but no man has eaten her. She is called Maria. He nails his son to a tree. This happens so long ago it is forgotten.”
“Maria,” says one of the old men. He tilts his head in my direction. I have already introduced myself as Maria. They think I am telling a story about myself.
“Yes,” I say.
To himself he says, “She is Maria. Her husband makes the world.”
All of this is meaningless. It is a joke. In Pirahao, a story is true only as long as someone in the story is still alive. Afterward, when there are no witnesses left, the story is never told again. A golden crucifix is an idol that represents the execution of a god in a time beyond memory. How can the Pirahao understand this? Even if they could understand it, it would be improper. Only the Christians make idols. To the Pirahao it is meaningless to revere an object.
But the Xipaohoani do not laugh, as I expect them to. They don’t laugh because they know the Christians are a people to be feared, strange and disgusting as they are. And this is when I learn what has happened to the city. The old men tell me that when the starving and wounded Christians came here for the first time, their presence coincided with the eruption of a plague. The Pirahao physicians, who can cure everything, could not cure it, and it was this plague that reduced the city to its present condition. Now the Pirahao have come to understand that the Christians are themselves the plague. I ask what they will do about it but they don’t understand my question. There is nothing to do. I ask them if they think the plague will come again. The plague is already here, they say, pointing to the Christians.
For the Pirahao, the only truth is what happens. For the Christians, the truth is what doesn’t happen, the truth is everywhere, the truth is unknowable. I know that there can be no understanding between them, but there is no way to say this that is true in both languages.
I leave Miguel Oreja with the old men, to whom he tries to speak Spanish. I walk through the city looking for Daniel de Fo. I see the houses arranged neatly around each circular plaza, but their roofs are falling in. I tell myself I am Maria. I am not Xiako. Xiako is not here anymore and her anguish doesn’t exist.
Daniel de Fo is buying xaxa from a woman in the market. Rat meat and manioc. He takes a few bites and pronounces it the best thing he has ever eaten.
“If I live a thousand years, I’ll never have a meal so good,” he says.
He doesn’t finish it. He is in the sun but he isn’t sweating.
“There’s no treasure. I realize this now, but you must have known it all along. You tricked me!”
“Everything was different. I apologize.”
“I forgive you. But how will I get back to Spain now? How will I find Anna Gloria?”
“You have to find the world in which she exists. The language in which her name can be spoken. Otherwise you won’t know her even if you’re looking right at her.”
“That isn’t very helpful,” he says. Then he laughs and shakes his head. “What if she’s left Spain by now? She could be in Zanzibar, or Achem, or Goa. Every night I dream of camels and dust. What does it mean? It is the city of Aden?”
When the sun sets, there is a dance in the central plaza. I wonder if the Pirahao will murder the Christians as a way of controlling the spread of the
disease, but they do nothing. They dance. They are a bare leg, a necklace of palm nuts, a wrinkled breast, a strong jaw. There are prostitutes and they are nothing but their painted black teeth. At first the Christians will not dance because they say the music is idolatrous, but then they make themselves drunk with cashew wine. The Pirahao value drunkenness but I have trouble understanding why.
Soon everyone is drunk and laughing. There is a feast. There are electric eels, brazil nuts, piranha, otter, caiman, paási fruit. I eat baahóísi, the wild pig of the forest, and think of the alcalde of Santa Inés. There is nothing funny in the world but I’m the only one who isn’t laughing. I am the only one who can find no truth in any of this. The Christians are laughing and singing and Miguel Oreja is praising God and shoveling xaxa into his mouth. He is living in the kingdom of heaven and it is as good as he thought it would be. Even Daniel de Fo is happy, already thinking of Zanzibar, already looking forward to his reunion in the East Indies.
And this is how it is for weeks, laughter and cashew wine, xaxa and dancing. Miguel Oreja grows too fat to wear his armor. The vicar general is given a medicine that makes his arm grow back. This is the conquest, which succeeds and fails at the same time, and leaves everyone babbling absurdities, their lips greasy, their cheeks stuffed with rat meat.
All I see is a doomed people, black teeth, a strip of cotton, the forest picking apart the houses at the edge of the city. The truth is what happens. The world is only what it is. The world is filling up with numbers and gods, and soon the Pirahao won’t be able to live in it anymore. That is the truth. That is what happens.
2200
* * *
We was just walking now mile after mile. I were tired but the shoreline were interesting the air the smells the cries of birds. Also I had my helper Christopher the kitten who sat on my head. I were surprised to realize one day how I were not longing for corn whiskey. It is because corn whiskey made a hole in me could only be filled with more corn whiskey but if I didn’t drink it then it didn’t make no holes in me. It seems the cure for this problem of corn whiskey is to be shipwrecked. Amazing. I were not gloomy no more it were like magic. I said to myself I am a adventurer I am the happy helper of Dan Keyshote Knight of the Feverish Courtingplace.