Neither courtly Madrid, nor Córdoba with its rich ancient history, nor magnificent Sevilla where the great treasures and marvels of the world were displayed, and not even immortal and mythic Rome with its glorious ruins and its ghosts of the great still wondering about, could compete with Algiers, where Moors, Jews, Turks—and over twenty thousand Christian captives—made their home. I learned to identify the Algerians right away: their skin was the same shade of color as the desert dunes at sunset, which separated Algeria from dark Africa.
Jews were easily recognizable by the white cloaks they wore, and the black caps that covered their heads. Their white cloaks made them stand apart in the dark of the night. Under their garments they were compelled to wear black. I was grateful that my family had converted to Christianity so long ago that I could not be recognized as a Jew. Christian slaves were lucky compared to the way Jews were treated. Even street cats were held in higher esteem than the Jews. If they felt like it, Algerians spat in their faces when they passed Jews on the street. The slaves of the Moors and Turks ranked higher than them. At the fountains, Jews had to wait until everyone else filled their jars before they could collect water themselves.
Algiers was more Turkish than Arab. The Turkish men were robust and imposing. They wore loose-fitting pants under their short-sleeved jackets: a piece of cloth that hugged their ankles and which they tied with a band around their bellybutton. Their outsized turbans resembled cupolas. Scimitars, daggers, and pistols bulged under the sashes around their waists. Everyone in Algiers deferred to them. One of the first things Sancho told me was: “Rule número uno, never argue with those toads! Run away from them as you would from an elephant’s fart.”
I had no trouble learning to spot the Christian renegades from every known corner of the world. The ones who wore the turban adopted the look and the customs of their Moorish and Turkish masters. They spoke in Spanish among themselves, but not to Christian captives. These renegades were the most unsavory inhabitants of Algiers, for there was no greater criminal in my eyes than a man who abandoned his faith and then turned against the people of his own blood. To prove their allegiance to their new masters, and to be rewarded with riches and privileges, renegades invented lies and accused the captives, who had formerly been their brothers in faith, of unspeakable crimes.
I was spellbound by the Azuaga people, the Berbers, who were as white as the snowy peaks of the mountains where they came from. Tattooed crosses were carved on the palms of their hands. Their women had their entire bodies covered with tattoos, including their faces and their tongues. The women made a living weaving and knitting, or working as domestics in the palaces and houses of rich Moors.
Other foreigners came from as far away as Russia, Portugal, England, Scotland, and Ireland to the north; Syria, Egypt, and India to the south and east; and Brazil to the west. Many of these foreigners were adopted as sons of the Turks if they were circumcised, converted to Islam, and practiced sodomy like their masters.
I heard Spanish spoken everywhere in the souk, not only by my compatriot inmates of the bagnio, but also by the Moriscos and Mudéjares who were now citizens of Algiers, and the Spanish merchants who had licenses to operate their businesses in the port. The sound of Spanish spoken on the streets was an oasis to me. For a moment, I could pretend that Spain was nearer than it was. Sometimes I would stand close to people chattering in Castilian, just to hear the sweet sounds of our mother tongue. The language of Garcilaso and Jorge Manrique never sounded so beautiful to me. I made a practice to approach these people and ask them if they knew where one Rodrigo Cervantes lived. I described the physical appearance of my brother, but no one could help me in my search. Now and then a pícaro hinted that he might know something, but would need a gold coin to unlock his memory.
Each night, before surrendering to the disquieting shadows of my slumbers, my last thought was about discovering Rodrigo’s whereabouts; the first thought that entered my mind when my eyes greeted dawn was about him too; and the one thought that colored the hours of each day was wondering when I would see him again. To find Rodrigo, and escape with him from Algiers, became the sole reason for my existence. I was nearly thirty years old, and I had brought nothing except shame on my family. When I returned to Spain—and it was not a question of if but of when—it would not be as a hero dressed in glory and wealth, as I had hoped years ago, but as a cripple. My redemption would come in the form of liberating my brother and bringing him back safely to my parents. I would do everything in my power not to let them go to their graves knowing that their two sons were still slaves.
Hoping to garner information about Rodrigo, I roamed the dark passageways of the casbah, accosting anyone who looked Spanish or Morisco, stopping at the stalls in the souk where Spanish or Italian was spoken, to make inquiries about my brother. I cared not that my beard was long, my garments filthy, that I was repelled by my own smell, that my feet were permanently swollen and blistered from tireless walking and were often bleeding by the time I returned to the bagnio at sundown.
I needed to find a way out of my indigent state so I could buy ink and paper to write letters to my family and friends to inform them that Rodrigo and I were still alive. I had no way of knowing whether Rodrigo had been in epistolary contact with our family. It tortured me that the lack of news from us must have made our parents suffer a great deal. Making money became an imperative: that was the only way I might find out something about Rodrigo’s present situation. One night, as I was getting ready to go to sleep, Sancho said, “Miguel, if you haven’t noticed, the nights are getting chilly. In a few weeks your blood will freeze in your veins, and your bones will turn to ice, if you continue to sleep with the sky as your roof. If I may be so disrespectful as to offer my advice to someone so illustrated, to a poet and hidalgo who has seen the world and fought for the glory of Spain, if you don’t take care of yourself today, my young friend, you won’t live to find your brother tomorrow, let alone escape Algiers with him. My old master the Count of Ordóñez used to say, Carpe diem. To which I will add—because two proverbs are better than one—all good things come to those who wait.”
I thank God for putting Sancho in my path. Though he couldn’t read or write, he taught me many words and expressions of the lingua franca spoken in that Babel. Soon my confidence in my rudimentary knowledge of Algiers’s main language grew. I began to accost anyone who looked somewhat prosperous to offer my services as a servant. Necessity made me brazen: I knocked on every door I passed asking for work. But fetching water, scrubbing the courtyards, cleaning latrines, hauling sacks of grain, cutting weeds, digging, picking fruits in the giardini, or harvesting vegetables and other produce, were all impossible tasks to perform with only one good arm. I could grind wheat with a mortar, but I could not move the heavy concave stones after the wheat had been ground into flour. I offered myself to teach Spanish to the children of wealthy Algerians, but when parents introduced me to the little fiends, they started to shriek as soon as they saw my deformed hand. Occasionally charitable people handed me a piece of old bread or a few figs. Sancho was luckier, finding work carrying food and water to the homes of the well-to-do. My desperation grew. Even thieves needed both arms.
Had it not been for Sancho’s industriousness, I might not have survived those first few months in Algiers. For the first time, I knew the fear of those who suffered starvation. The rare days when I earned a few extra aspers selling fish, I treated my stomach to the cheap plates of delicious lamb stew and couscous made by the street cooks. These filling dishes were the staple of the poor of the casbah. Having been my father’s reluctant assistant in his barbershop, I thought of offering my services to the local barbers: with my good hand I could empty chamber pots and wash them; I could give medicines to the ill and feed them. But Algerian barbershops were strictly for grooming, shaving, and the procurement of slave boys. The beautiful youths who did not go to sea with the Turkish sailors stayed behind and worked in these places, where they shaved the Turks and
satisfied their carnal needs. The loveliest boys were highly valued and sought after, and the Turks wooed them with splendid gifts. It was sad to see Spanish boys become the whores of the sodomites. I could not work in one of those establishments.
I had seen slaves all my life—it was common for wealthy Spanish families to own Africans—but no one knows anything about slavery unless you’ve lived it in the flesh, unless you’ve been treated as less than human. We slaves were identified by the iron rings and chain we wore around our ankles. After a while, I became so used to wearing them that most of the time I forgot I had them on. The miserable men who had been in captivity a long time took on the appearance of dangerous beasts emerging from underground caves: their hair was matted, and ragged beards covered their chests. Many of us looked like savages that fed on raw meat. A couple of slaves walking together smelled like a battlefield of rotten corpses. Before long, I answered to people who addressed me as “Christian slave.”
Slave auctions were held every day, except on religious feasts, in the section of the souk called the badestan. They provided a source of information: who had been captured; who was sold; where the new shipments of slaves came from; who had died; who had been killed by the hook. I lived on the slim hope that at one of these events conducted by dealers in human flesh, I might get news about Rodrigo.
I didn’t know the name of the man who had bought my brother, but in piecing together the details I remembered about him from that afternoon when fortune had dealt us that grave blow, my persistence eventually paid off: from a renegade who did business with him, I learned Rodrigo’s master was Mohamed Ramdane, a wealthy Moor who loved music and gave his children a broad education that included learning European languages and the customs and manners of other cultures. I discovered that he had journeyed with his family and servants to his villa by the seashore near Oran, and that every year he returned to spend the winter in Algiers. Learning this much gave me the hope I needed to start planning our escape from Algiers.
I began to take an interest in my appearance, in the world about me, and to study the layout of the city looking for possible escape routes. I walked many times along the wall that encircled the city, which made Algiers impregnable to attacks from the land and sea, and also served as a deterrent to captives, criminals on the run, and slaves who tried to escape.
I took mental notes of the wall’s nine gates: which ones were sealed and never opened; which ones opened during certain hours of the day, but were heavily guarded; which ones led to the desert; and which ones faced the Mediterranean. I learned about the caves in the hills behind the wall.
Of the nine points of exit and entry, the gate of Bab Azoun, facing the desert, was the most transited. For hours, I would watch the travelers heading to inland settlements in the south; the sand-covered masses that arrived from the desert and dark Africa; the comings and goings of farmers and slaves who worked the fertile green lands that stretched from behind the city to the emerald mountains, behind which the Sahara begins; the farmers who came to the city to sell their produce; a stream of caravans of camels loaded with the treasures of Africa’s interior. I stayed in the vicinity of the gate until darkness fell and the door was padlocked. I became aware of the routines and shifts of the guards perched on the turrets on each side of the gate, armed with harquebuses, and on the alert to shoot—without any warning—at people they found suspicious. On the exterior walls of the gate of Bab Azoun dangling from iron hooks were men in various stages of putrefaction.
The desert was like the sea: if you lived near it and spent too much time gazing at it, it called to you and eventually claimed you. It was then I learned about the dangers hidden in the great beauty of that land whose majestic black-maned lions tore elephants apart, the same way that, in better days, I yanked off the legs and wings of a roasted quail to sate my hunger. It took me longer to understand that the extreme beauty of the desert was also an invitation to surrender to death’s embrace.
* * *
Time crawled in captivity, each day was unendurable, and every day a duplicate of the one before. The snail-paced passage of time was slavery’s most pernicious torture instrument. One more day in captivity meant one more day of my life that I would not know freedom. At the end of each day, with no news of Mohamed Ramdane’s return to Algiers, I went back to the bagnio fully demoralized. My whole life was about making sure I could find something to eat. How quickly I lost my dignity and became a beggar and scavenger. Yet the will to live is stronger than pride.
By keeping to a strict diet of the fish Sancho and I scavenged, I scraped together a few coins so I could by a good quill, a small bottle of writing ink, and a dozen sheets to write to my parents and friends. Though Luis Lara had never answered my letters from Italy, I wrote to him one more time asking for his help.
Letters from Spain took months to cross the Mediterranean. I was beginning to lose hope I’d ever have any news from home, when a missive arrived from my parents. Nothing made me happier than learning that my parents and my sisters were in good health. My mother added that she prayed to the Holy Virgin that no harm came to me, and that I would soon return to Spain. My parents reassured me they were doing anything and everything to find the money to ransom my brother and me. Unless my father’s fortunes had improved—which would have been a great miracle—I was well aware my family could not afford to pay our ransoms. I memorized the letter and placed it inside the pouch under my tunic. There was no answer from Luis.
My parents’ letter made me nostalgic for the familiar world I had left behind so long ago; my despondency grew. One day Sancho said to me: “To think all the time about our captivity weakens us, Miguel. Those sons of their whoring Turkish mothers count on that. The more they break us, the less trouble we’ll give them. You have to learn to look at our misfortune in a positive light, my young squire. Maybe all these bad things have happened to us for a reason.”
“I fail to see how any of my misfortunes could ever be seen in a positive light, friend Sancho,” I retorted angrily. Sometimes his relentless optimism was too much for me.
“Well, look,” Sancho said, “if my old master the Count of Ordóñez had not died, and his devilish children had not thrown me on the streets, and if I hadn’t had the good fortune to meet your saintly father, who treated me out of the goodness of his heart when I was sick and in a pitiable state, I would have never met you and now you would not have me here in Algiers to give you my five reales of wisdom.”
He had a point there, but how did it benefit him his captivity was a question I did not want to ask. Many years later, I realized that thanks to my imprisonment in Algiers, I had met my second most famous fictional character. It was then plain to see, too, that my miserable experience in that den of monsters had fortified me, and given me the forbearance necessary to withstand all the bad hands Fortune dealt me.
* * *
The muse of poetry began to visit me again. It had been years since I had thought of myself as a poet. Since my indigence made it nearly impossible to purchase more ink and paper, I had to compose the poems in my head and then memorize them. I began to exist in a world different than the material one, a place where the Turks could not touch me, a place where I was a free man. This activity became one of the rare consolations afforded me, and prevented me from going mad. Knowing that no one could take away from me writing that only existed in my brain made me feel powerful for the first time since I had been seized by the corsairs. Sancho warned me that spending hours sitting alone and murmuring to myself, while everyone else was out, would attract the unwanted attention of the guards. So I learned to compose poetry wandering in the souk.
It was during these walks that I became intrigued by the Moorish storytellers. All my life I loved listening to the stories perfect strangers told. People of all ages stood enraptured, under the harsh sun, breaking for a moment from their routines, to listen to these men who practiced the ancient art of storytelling. I only knew a few words and phrases in Arabic, so I unde
rstood the names of the characters in the stories but not what they were about. When the listeners made approving sounds of “Ehhhh,” or laughed, I interpreted their reactions to mean there was a new twist and turn in the tale. Even the women, their hair covered in hijabs and their faces hidden by white almalafas, stopped to listen. Sometimes the same story seemed to go on for days. Merchants, servants who came to buy provisions for their masters, and gaggles of lawless children repaid the storytellers at the end of the day’s installment with figs, oranges, eggs, a piece of bread, and occasionally a piaster or other very small coin. The faithful public returned day after day, with their baskets of food and their loads of laundry, hungry for more stories. I was so enthralled by these performers, and the crowd’s reaction, that the sounds and meanings of Arabic began to take root in my head. I was reminded of the actors in Andalusia, who performed snippets from their plays in the plazas of towns and cities. The great difference between the Algerian storytellers and our actors was that in the souk one man played all the characters, whether they were people or dragons or creatures out of a nightmarish bestiary.
Could I possibly earn a few coins by telling stories in Spanish? I wondered. The population who spoke Spanish in the souk was large: was it possible I could command the attention of a small audience? The main drawback was that I was a poet: I thought in verses and rhymes, in syllables and vowels, not in prose. Perhaps I could recite some of the poems by Garcilaso and other poets that I knew by heart?
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