by Markus Orths
Now Juan could only wait. On his seventh day in Seville he was sitting in a small tavern when suddenly someone tapped him on the shoulder. He had no idea who this person was. The man laughed, said he was Roberto Maldini from Genoa and enthusiastically recalled their year together in Alcala. Juan scoured his memory in vain, but in any event, he thought, he must have made a very strong impression on this Genoese, for why else should Roberto be so eager to help him? He actually managed to get him and Francisco onto a ship—a ship which Roberto said did not normally take passengers. Had Juan remembered that they had quarrelled in Alcala—over some banal affair involving a woman—then the true explanation for Roberto’s actions would have been obvious: he was taking his revenge for that defeat. As it was, Juan simply thought that Roberto wanted to do him a favour. And once Francisco had been released from prison there had been no time for reflection.
Juan and Catalina had no chance to talk until they were lying at anchor for a few hours off the southern tip of Spain, waiting for the Santa Isabella to come by. Then at last they were able to catch up, at least on the essentials. They stood there in the dusk, looking at the Cadiz coastline. “I don’t quite know how it happened,” Catalina said, as she described the stone-throwing episode in Seville to Juan. To make her actions more understandable, she altered the facts in her favour: suddenly it was twenty hooligans who had surrounded her, they were throwing fist-sized stones rather than mere pebbles, there was no doubt that they were planning to rob her, not just indulging in harmless horseplay, and what she did was therefore clearly an act of self-defence, not an inexplicable outburst of naked violence. She went on talking until Juan gave an understanding nod.
“And then,” Catalina said in conclusion, “when I was in prison somebody stole the money I had for my passage.”
“I’ve brought enough for us both,” said Juan.
“But what about you?” she asked. “Why did you come after me?”
“It was time to make a fresh start.”
Catalina looked at him. Her look seemed to say that this explanation was not enough, that she wanted to hear more, but Juan had fallen silent. They gazed at the Cadiz coast, bidding farewell to their homeland. Then Juan suddenly said a single word, casually, giving it no special emphasis. “Catalina.”
“Yes?” said Catalina without thinking, turning towards him. And then she nearly jumped out of her skin. It had been almost two years since anyone had called her by her old name, and yet when Juan did so that ‘yes’ had still slipped out, an automatic response. Juan looked surprised.
“What do you mean, yes?” he asked.
Catalina did not know what to say. There was no way to explain that ‘yes. This was the first time she had given herself away, she thought, and she flushed and looked straight ahead of her.
“I mean that fortress over there‘, said Juan. ”They’ve just finished building it. Named after Santa Catalina. Can you see it?“
“Yes,” Catalina said, recovering from her fright.
“There’s the fleet!” called Roberto.
The three of them climbed into the ship’s boat.
“Which ship is it?” asked Catalina.
“The Santa Isabella, over there,” said Roberto, grinning openly for the first time, a grin that did not inspire confidence, but Juan still thought nothing of it; only much later would he remember their quarrel and understand why his former fellow-student had played such a dirty trick on them. Now Roberto added—with gleeful anticipation of what awaited Juan Bautista de Arteaga and Francisco Loyola—‘She’s a magnificent vessel. A galleon, two-decker, brand new guns. I’m sure when you see her at close quarters, and especially when you’re actually on board, you’ll be speechless!“
*
Catalina found the situation on the Santa Isabella very difficult. She had so many things to discuss with Juan. She wanted to know more about why he had followed her, wanted to ask him whether he would go with her all the way to Potosi; above all she would have liked simply to lean on the ships’ rail and pour out her joy at finding herself, at last, on her way to where she longed to be. But all this was denied her. It was only the morning of the fourth day, and the coast of Africa was still sparkling on the horizon, when Catalina went onto the upper deck, climbed up into the mainmast shrouds, held on with one hand and in one sudden heave spewed out everything that had accumulated inside her during her four days of silence. The ‘speakers’ exchanged meaningful nods. They knew what was happening: some of them called it talking sickness and others silent sickness. Every one of them had had it, had stood on board raving, vomiting up garbled, meaningless fragments of speech, just for the sake of saying something.
Some of the tongueless men rushed to seize Catalina. They gagged her, bound her hands and dragged her past the guns on the upper deck and down the hatchway to the main gun deck. There was little room there because of the guns and the anchor capstan, but still the gun ports, gratings and hatches always let in sufficient fresh air and light. Catalina was squeezed past one of the capstans and pushed down the stairs to the orlop deck. Here, just below the waterline, it was musty and dark. She was dragged from the cable locker through the galley, the crammed cannonball store and the musty sail locker. They came to a small ladder which took them down one more level, to the hold. Here no light penetrated at all. The men lit a lamp and pushed Catalina ahead of them through the stinking, pitch-dark storage compartments filled with spare sails and ropes, barrels of drinking water and beer, salt meat and other supplies, back towards the bow, past the mainmast and the huge brick-lined oven which reached up into the galley above, and right to the forward end of the ship, the darkest place of all, where they tethered her to the bitts. Now there was nothing beneath her but the bilge, a hollow space that had been filled with stones to keep the ship from heeling over.
The men disappeared, taking the light with them. In a few moments it was so dark that Catalina could hardly make out anything at all. The gag made breathing difficult; the air that entered her nose was nothing but a confection of rank odours, a putrid mix of dirt, damp cloth, moss, salt meat and fish, kitchen smells and mould. Once or twice, when rats came nosing towards her, she had to make quick, jerky movements to scare them off. Down here the fathomless blackness of the ocean was almost palpable and the rolling and heaving of the ship much more immediate. After only a few hours she was so overcome by nausea that she was sick. Her vomit was blocked by the cloth in her mouth. To avoid choking to death she had to swallow the lumps back down.
By the time Catalina was released two days later she had learned her lesson. There was not another peep from her during the voyage, except of course during the allotted hour. However, her ordeal had not dampened her appetite for novelty. She was stuck on this ship, the voyage would take more than two months, there was absolutely nothing to do and she could not even pass the time by talking to Juan, so as an escape from boredom she began to observe the tongueless sailors. She rather liked the movements they made, the signs which every one of them could understand with ease. There were no uncertainties, no ambiguities of the kind she had often met with in spoken conversations: no, each sign had a fixed meaning and could therefore be clearly understood by anyone at any time. There were a mixture of arm and leg movements, simple hand signals, circular motions of the head, gestures made with the fingers, and contortions of the eyes and mouth. The more Catalina watched the mute sailors, the more she began to get the hang of their secret system of signs. She would have loved to go down and join them. At first she did not dare. But then she told herself that there was no rule against it, and one evening, after two interminable weeks utterly devoid of incident, Catalina went down to the gun deck, nonchalantly, as though it were a perfectly normal thing to do.
She found herself in a different world. About half the crew were lounging around down there—all those who were not needed on deck just then. No one took any notice of Catalina. No one stopped her from having a look round. This was a temple dedicated to the pursuit which
the men loved more than anything else in the world, and which no one could prohibit now that they had taken over the internal command of the ship; namely, gambling. In one corner Catalina could still see a throwback to the days when the captain had forbidden dice or card games: a group of men were sitting around a barrel and seemed to be cheering the barrel on with gruff growling sounds. As Catalina came closer she saw that a circle had been drawn in chalk on the top of the barrel, and that inside the circle there were some beetles, each of which, she assumed, belonged to one of the sailors cheering them on. The point of the game was obvious enough: the first beetle to crawl out of the circle would be the winner. Catalina moved on to the dice players, but that was a one-dimensional activity, based purely on the chance roll of the dice, and she soon got bored with it. However, when she came to the group who were playing cards, it took only a few minutes before she sat down on a nearby barrel and started to follow the game. It made a welcome distraction from the speechless, grey reality of the ship.
Time passed without her noticing. Here was a challenge for her ambitious nature: she would work out the rules of the game for herself, simply by taking note of the cards that the men took turns slapping down on the table. She made sure to remember which player had played which card and when, and who finally picked up the cards. In addition, she had a clear view of one player’s hand and could watch him as he hesitated, selected a card but then put it back, played a different one and was then either annoyed or pleased at the outcome of his choice. Storing up everything in her memory, Catalina used those weeks at sea to become fully initiated into the mysteries of card-playing. The secret of her success against the innumerable ordinary opponents who awaited her in the New World had its origin here, for never, when Catalina sat down to play a game of cards, would she speak—not a single remark, not so much as a word.
It turned out that the Santa Isabella was not—as Roberto had falsely claimed—going to be left behind at Cartagena, but was sailing on to Veracruz together with most of the other ships in the fleet. When they had passed the Antilles and were already in the Gulf of Mexico, the Santa Isabella was caught in a storm that far exceeded anything the sailors had ever known before. To make matters worse, when the storm began to rage they realized all of a sudden that this was the first one they had encountered since losing their tongues. For three years they had been spared, and they had come to take this good fortune for granted, to believe that Fate had a soft spot for them. They had quite forgotten what such a severe storm was like. When it broke over the ship it brought instant chaos. The bells, lanterns and drums were unusable, or were snatched away by the wind and waves. In the pitch darkness of the storm it was impossible to make out any gestures or signs. However frantically a man might flap and jerk about, there was no chance of his message being seen and understood. Before long the storm had the ship wholly at its mercy and was starting to play a gruesome game with it. Soon there could be no doubt of the outcome: the Santa Isabella was going to be lost with all hands, vanishing beneath the waves of the Gulf of Mexico as though she had never existed.
As the ship was going down, the only one to keep his head was Juan Bautista de Arteaga. He could see that the vessel was doomed. When the heavy oak door of the captain’s cabin broke free from its hinges and was swept along the deck towards the fo’c‘sle where he and Catalina were standing, he acted quickly. Staying cool and calm, but using the full strength of his voice, he shouted to Catalina that they were quite near to the coast and that their only hope of survival was to stay together. He wound a rope around his hips and another round Catalina’s, and they tied the ends of the ropes to the cabin door. The vessel was already listing heavily, the ship’s boat had been smashed to pieces, and the mainmast was close to snapping, when a wave breaking three feet over the deck washed the cabin door overboard, plunging the two of them beneath the surface and keeping them submerged. Unable to hold out any longer, Catalina was on the point of opening her mouth and taking water into her lungs when the sea suddenly released the door with a violence that robbed them of their senses but did not stop the cry which, freed at last, burst from their throats.
Chapter thirteen
Hail
Catalina regained consciousness. She spat out some water, realized that she could not feel the motion of the sea, and looked about her. A long white beach. She was still tied to the door, and lying next to Juan. She had clamped her arm desperately around his body. Sitting up, she tried to undo the knots in the rope, but her hands were trembling too much. It took her some time to recover herself. With every water-free breath, memories returned. Juan had saved her. He had acted decisively when the ship was going down.
Suddenly she doubted the reality of it all. Tongueless sailors? The hour set aside for talking? The card games? The storm? And now she was lying here. She must do something, must get help, but first of all she must free herself from this door. Gnawing at the rope with her teeth, she managed to unfasten it. Then she stood up, took a few tottering steps with the sun blazing down on her upturned forehead and made out, through narrowed eyes, the green shimmer of some tall trees. Palm trees, she thought. She turned in a complete circle, and began to see things more clearly. The sea stretching away into the distance. The beach sloping upwards at either end. Scattered rocks. Not a soul in sight. The stillness of a sunny day. So this was the New World.
She went back and knelt down beside Juan. She gazed at his arms, his chest, the hair falling across his face, the grains of sand on his cheeks, and she felt an unfamiliar stirring in her stomach. Not queasiness, not hunger, not joy at having been saved, but something else. Something that seemed to come from Juan. But there was no time to think about that now. She untied him, pulled him away from the door, laid him face down and shook him.
Juan took a long time to come to, as though he were waking from a sleep that had lasted for years. Catalina helped him to his feet. They had survived—but what now? Where were they? On an island? Surely not. On the mainland? In New Spain? They sat down on the sand again, and breathed life back into their limbs. It was an effort to talk. “We must move into the shade,” said Juan. Holding on to one another for support, they managed to cross the beach. Once again Catalina felt a pleasant ache in the pit of her stomach and moved even closer to Juan, but at that very moment the sensation was brutally extinguished, for Juan screamed. It was a single, long-drawn-out scream, and Catalina did not know whether to feel more alarmed by whatever had given rise to the scream or by the fact that he had so utterly lost his nerve.
“Indians!” he screamed, pointing towards the palm trees, from where twenty or thirty armed men were advancing upon them. Now Juan started whispering. Just isolated phrases, as if his mind were distracted, phrases not consciously produced but welling up unbidden, prompted by mortal terror. “They’ll kill us,” he whispered, “catch us, cook us, eat us, cut our hearts out, we must run…‘ He turned round. Catalina followed the direction of his gaze and saw that there was no escape. She forced herself to be calm. Reminded herself of Juan’s resolute behaviour the day before. That’s our only chance, she thought. When they were ten paces away the Indians came to a halt. Catalina walked towards them, raising her hand. Then she began to speak. She did not think about what to say: they would not understand her anyway. All that mattered was to sound as peaceable and friendly as possible. Catalina accompanied her words with gestures she had learned from the tongueless sailors. She folded her hands together and put them to her forehead; curved her left hand into a hollow close to her heart and stretched it out towards the Indians; put the backs of her hands together, fingertips pointing to the centre of her chest, and then spread out her arms.
One of the Indians stepped forward. He was carrying a weapon, a long staff resembling a spear, though without a sharpened head. This he thrust into the sand beside him. Then he cleared his throat and began to speak. To the ears of his European listeners his speech had a cold, raucous sound. Catalina knew she could not understand the other’s language, so she
thought she would focus her attention on his gestures: would they betoken good or evil? But there were no gestures. The Indian stood there motionless, doing nothing at all other than speaking, if those ugly sounds could be called speech. But still. Catalina concentrated hard. There must be something she could understand. She listened more closely, and tried to pick out any word that occurred with particular frequency, for a word that occurred frequently might be the key, the first clue to an understanding. Et, she thought, et, that might be the word for T. If W means T, Catalina thought, what does…then suddenly it hit her like a blow between the eyes: there was a word that she understood! But that was impossible! There, the same word again. Yes, she understood it! And the next word, she knew that too! It was so incredible that she could not take it in straight away. Only when at last she was sure, when she could almost have laughed with excitement, did she lean towards Juan and whisper: ‘It’s Latin! He’s speaking Latin! I can understand him! Every word!“
For a moment Juan thought that the murderous sun and a murderous enemy had conspired to rob Francisco of his sanity. But then he too started to listen more closely. And when he was no longer expecting to hear barbarous gibberish but the Holy Roman language, his ears too began to identify the familiar words that he had had to learn as a student, and he could suddenly understand what the Indian was saying. This was Latin spoken with a strong Aztec accent, but it was no crude Creole; it was pure, classical Latin. Now that Juan and Catalina knew what language it was, it no longer sounded jerky and contorted, harsh and uncouth; on the contrary, the rhythm swayed like grasses in the summer breeze, the vowels became purer, smoothing the angles and edges of the consonants into clearly-defined curves. The Indian was taking great pains to speak distinctly. What was he saying? It was some strange adventure story. At the centre of it was a young Aztec. He had set out to avenge somebody. This was an account of his exploits, especially his fights against the nonoualca, as the neighbouring tribe of hostile barbarians were called, a word which Catalina and Juan took to be a name, though in fact it meant ‘the mutes’, since the Aztecs used that expression for any of their barbarian neighbours who could not talk properly. Learning to speak well and intelligently was a most important component of Aztec education, and their leaders were chosen for their powers of eloquence and accorded the title of tlatoani, meaning ‘he who possesses the word’.