by Barbara Wood
Feeling a tap on his shoulder, he spun around and found himself almost eye to eye with the girl. God’s breath, she was tall! But she no longer giggled. Instead she touched his arms here and there, light little landings as if butterflies flitted along his skin. And she was babbling in her savage tongue, explaining something, or trying to. Gesturing. Pantomiming the crushing of something, and the boiling of something, and the pouring of that something over his limbs.
“What are you saying, girl? That you can cure the pox?” His red-gold eyebrows came together. “That’s why they put me overboard, you know. When I came down with the sickness the captain and crew thought I had a contagion that would kill them all. I’m a chronicler, y’see, traveling with Cabrillo. I became ill after we stopped in at a bay to the south of here and we went ashore for water. As soon as the poxy rash appeared on my skin, the sailors, those syphilitic sons of whores, put me asea off one of those cursed islands where others like you live. No one took pity. Not a Christian soul among them.”
He paused, rubbing his jaw. “I remember being put upon the waves,” he said softly, “and saying my Our Fathers and Hail Marys. I remember seeing the ships pull anchor and sail away, and me on a piece of wood drifting on the merciless tide, away from the islands. And my skin on fire with the pox. I wondered if there was a worse end to a man than that. And then…” His eyes turned inward and he tried to remember. “I passed out from thirst. And that is the last I recall. Until now.”
The girl listened with wide, keen eyes and the patience of a nun, he thought, as if she had understood everything he said. But of course she hadn’t. “How did you do it, when not even our ship’s doctor could help me?”
By gestures he got his question across. Motioning for him to wait, the girl ran out of the hut. In the meantime, he found his hose and breeches and managed to get himself halfway decent by the time the girl returned, carrying a stone with a twig upon it, prattling again in her incomprehensible tongue.
“I don’t understand,” he said, and reached for the twig. She cried out and drew back. Then she laughingly explained with gestures that it was this plant that had caused the sickness on his skin. He narrowed his eyes at the offending cutting of leaves in clusters of three with small, greenish flowers. He was a learned man who prided himself on his knowledge of botany. This species, he was certain, was unknown in Europe.
He was able to piece together what had happened: the plant was indigenous to this land and grew in profusion here. According to the girl’s gestures, it commonly afflicted her people, which was why they had a remedy. But as a foreigner, he would not know of its poisonous properties and must have walked among it when he and the crew went ashore in the southern bay.
She handed him a basket containing long, barky, reddish purple stems with dark green leaves and numerous brownish yellow flowers. He recognized it at once as mugwort, also known as the Mater Herbarum— the Mother of Herbs— and it was used all over Europe to cure common ailments, also as a tea and a flavorful herb in cooking.
“It was but an ordinary rash I had then?” he said finally. “What even children and old people know how to treat? And those blackguards,” he shouted, “put me to sea for it?”
She looked briefly startled, and then she smiled, and then she started to laugh again, recognizing indignation and the embarrassed fury of a man who had thought he was dying only to be told it was just an itch.
“You half-wit child,” he groused, angrily searching the grass shelter for the rest of his clothes. “Why do you find everything so funny?”
When he started to pull his shirt on, she grabbed his arm and violently shook her head.
“Why not? It’s my clothes and I’m not going to go about naked as you do!”
She shook her head again, sending long hair flying like raven’s wings, he couldn’t help thinking. She rubbed his arms and then gestured the length of his body, then to his great shock she shoved one hand in his armpit and with the other pinched her nose closed.
“God’s bones,” he said. “You think I stink? Well of course I do, woman, it’s the odor of an honest man’s sweat. What do you think perfumes are for? You savages wouldn’t know about perfume, but go about offending with your smells.”
When he followed her out of the hut he found a crowd waiting. “God’s teeth! Is everyone naked here?”
A few drew back at his outburst, but after the girl had quickly explained in her rapid tongue, they smiled and a few laughed. She spoke rapidly to a man with feathers in his hair, gesturing wildly, the stranger thought, not at all like the well-bred Spanish ladies he was used to keeping company with, until the feathered man nodded in understanding and, with a grin, took the visitor by the arm and started to lead him away.
“Where are you taking me? For the stewpot? Is that it? Are you savages going to eat me?” But it was only into a long, low grass shelter that he was taken, where the heat was intense and naked men sat and sweated and inhaled smoke and then scraped their skins of inner poisons.
When he came out of the sweat lodge cleansed, feeling decidedly refreshed, and wearing his breeches and shirt that had also undergone a pleasant fumigating, he found the girl waiting for him.
He looked at her more closely, now that his head had cleared. After peering into the girl’s intelligent eyes, and realizing what she had done for him, he said in a more tempered tone, “God’s teeth, you are rational beings. The captain said you were beasts without mind or reason. But by wit and will you saved my life,” he said. “And I wasn’t grateful. For that I ask your forgiveness. I awoke from death to find myself alive, and all I could think of was the blackguards who threw me off their ship. I am Don Godfredo de Alvarez. At your service.” He bowed. “If there is some way I can repay the favor?”
She stared blankly.
“Well, this is going to be interesting then, with no common language between us and no translator. How can I communicate to you that I wish to show my gratitude? But then what gift have I to offer, except the clothes on my back— which, I might add, you have already stripped me of once!”
Then he saw how she was looking at him, how the others in the crowd that had gathered pointed and murmured. His spectacles!
When he removed them from the bridge of his nose, the onlookers gasped. Some even turned and ran off in fear. “No, wait,” he said. “They’re nothing to be afraid of.” When he held them out to the girl, she backed away, horrified.
He settled them back on his nose. “I purchased these from a lens maker in Amsterdam, who charged me a thief’s price for ‘em. But without them I cannot guide my quill on parchment, nor can I read my blessed books.”
The man with feathers in his hair, whom Godfredo took to be the chief, stepped forward and pointed to Godfredo’s hand, asking a question. Godfredo frowned, and then, understanding, said, “It’s a ring, made of silver.” But when he held it out to the chief, the man drew back. This caused Godfredo to look at the grass skirts and animal skins, the shell-beads and bird bones, the spears with arrowheads made of stone. “Do you not know of metal?” he said in perplexity. Godfredo had just come from New Spain to the south, where the conquered Aztecs had knowledge of metal and wove textiles, where they had built massive stone pyramids and temples, made paper, lived by a complicated calendar, used writing, and attended schools of science and learning. Yet their neighbors so close to the north followed none of those modern ways. Why, Godfredo wondered now in deep puzzlement, had God spared these people from such knowledge? And was it a blessing or curse that He had kept them in innocence?
He grew thoughtful again, studying the bare-breasted Indian girl who held him with liquid black eyes. God’s teeth, he thought. A man could believe he was dreaming.
But the smell of the sea was too real, the cry of the gulls, and the bitter memory of having been put over the side for having a rash. “And they kept all my things,” he swore through clenched teeth. “My books and my parchments, my gold and my fineries. That they put me adrift in clothes can only
speak to the blackguards’ superstitious fear that to put a naked man out to sea brings bad luck upon a ship.” In that moment Godfredo made a silent oath that by the Precious Blood of Christ and Santiago, when the next ships arrived he was going to be on one, and when he returned to New Spain he was going to see to it that Cabrillo and his poxy crew regretted their mothers had ever spawned them.
* * *
A crowd had gathered on the beach to watch the antics of the stranger. Men squatted on the sand and made wagers as to what the fellow was doing— some said it was a shelter he was building, others speculated it was a canoe. Children followed the visitor as he trekked up and down the beach to fetch driftwood and seaweed, and then inland to haul back dried oak branches. Women brought their basketry and sat and wove while they watched the man named Godfredo grunt and strain at his peculiar labor. Marimi also watched. She alone knew what he was doing. And she alone felt his pain. His own people had cast him out, just as the First Mother had been cast out generations ago. How his heart must be crying, how lonely his soul. To be cut off from the tribe, from the stories, from the ancestors! She prayed that his bonfire worked, that his people would see it and come back for him and take him home.
Godfredo went every day down to the beach, carefully building up the hill of wood and grass, tending it, keeping it dry with skins and palm fronds. Then he would stand for hours, watching the horizon for a sail, prepared to light the fire as soon as he saw one and send up smoke puffs as a signal, in the way shipwrecked mariners had done for centuries. And after his rescue, he would seek his revenge, for what Don Godfredo de Alvarez felt in his heart was not pain or grief or sorrow, as Marimi thought, but fury, pure and strong, and the determination to make those bastards pay for every hour they had left him stranded in this place.
In the meantime, he had no choice but to live among the natives.
He was given a hut of his own, a round shelter of branches and grass with a hole in the roof for the smoke. So while he waited for ships to come, Godfredo tried to learn what he could about these people because this was why he had left Spain and the graves of his wife and children in the first place, to travel the globe and see the new lands that were being discovered.
Through gestures and drawings in the dirt, he and Marimi managed a rudimentary sort of communication, and after a while Godfredo picked up Topaa words, and Marimi, Spanish. He learned that she had several titles: Guardian of the Sacred Cave; Mistress of Herbs and Keeper of Poisons; and Reader of Stars, which she performed at childbirths to foretell a baby’s future and to give it its name. He also learned that she was never allowed to marry for fear sexual intercourse would sap her power, and that to lie with a man would not only cause her to sicken and die, but the whole tribe as well.
Don Godfredo thought this a terrible waste.
The people readily accepted him in their midst and the men invited him to join in their games of chance. The Topaa were nearly fanatical about their gambling and could keep a game going for days. Godfredo soon learned how to read the sticks, or knucklebones, or whatever the players tossed, rolled, threw into the air. He learned the strategy of betting his shell-bead money, and that a bad loser was frowned upon. He also quickly adapted to their habit of smoking a clay pipe and found he liked tobacco. But they didn’t ferment and therefore drank no liquor to lift their spirits. When he made wine from wild grapes and got riotously drunk one night, the Topaa shied away from him, refusing to share a drink that made him possessed by a spirit, and so he did his drinking in solitude after that. He also grew to appreciate and even look forward to the sweat baths in the lodge, where he sat with the other men in the heat and smoke of a fire perfumed by various barks, scraping his skin clean and emerging refreshed and invigorated. He much preferred it to his annual bath, which he had always disliked.
Other times the practices of the Topaa profoundly disturbed him. The women with their jiggling breasts and the men as naked as Adam! There was no sense of shame in them. And Godfredo thought their perplexing laws only encouraged promiscuity: if a husband caught his wife in adultery, it was his right to divorce her and take the other man’s wife. The Topaa held ritual fertility dances beneath the full moon and then retreated to their grass huts, where it was no secret what was going on. Unmarried girls were encouraged to choose partners, and on several occasions married women gave their favors to men who were not their husbands. While Marimi tried to explain the principle to a shocked and disapproving Godfredo— that sexual union between men and women awakened the earth’s fertility and ensured that the tribe was blessed with fecundity, that intercourse was in fact holy— he clung steadfastly to his belief that they were an immoral race.
One night, when a language had grown between them, Marimi told him the history of her tribe, all the way back to the First Mother. “How do you know this?” he asked. “Nothing is written down.”
“We tell our story every night. The elders tell the young. This way our story keeps going.”
“That doesn’t sound very reliable. The story is bound to change in the telling.”
“But it has to be reliable. We believe in the exact word of the story. Children memorize it from their grandparents, so that when it comes their turn to tell the story, it will be the same. How do you remember your ancestors?”
“We have paintings. Birth records. Books.”
They talked about their gods. He showed her the crucifix and told her about Jesus. She in turn tried to explain to him about the Creator Chinigchinich and the seven giants who began the human race. She also told him about Mother Moon, to whom the Topaa prayed, and Godfredo thought this very naive as everyone knew the moon was simply a heavenly body that orbited the earth, just as the sun and all the planets did.
The first few times he shared a meal with the tribe, he would find them staring at him not a little disapprovingly. Don Godfredo was the first to admit that he was a man of appetites. He gulped his food and guzzled his drink without apology, and broke wind without pardoning himself. But apparently among this people it was considered impolite to show gusto. And each night, when he sat down to yet another meal of acorn gruel or rabbit stew or clam soup, he would think longingly of meals back home: feasts of partridge and pheasant, sausages and bacon, quince jam, Florentine cheese, and marzipan from Sienna. He sorely missed beef, mutton, pork, poultry, pigeon, goat, and lamb; biscuits and breads, meat pies and tarts, crystallized sweets and sugared almonds; mushrooms and garlic, cloves and olives. He would close his eyes and dream of cheese, eggs, milk and butter. Who would have thought a man would have missed such common fare so? He recalled heated but amiable dinner arguments on the excellence of a particular cheese— Brie, Gruyère, Parmesan. He wanted to describe to the Topaa chief the delights of a good Roquefort or a sharp Swiss. But the man wouldn’t understand. The Topaa didn’t use animal milk. They were excellent fisherman, however, and food from the sea was always plentiful— although any civilized man knew that fish went better with a good sauce. Most of all Don Godfredo missed a cask of fine Bordeaux wine.
When not eating or sleeping or gambling, Godfredo maintained his vigilance at the beach, each dawn and dusk, through sunshine and rain, in fog and wind, a lone figure on the dunes, or perhaps with a group of children following him, still fascinated by the stranger in their midst. He would talk to himself in his foreign tongue, and pause to squint out to sea. If they could understand his language, the Topaa would learn that Don Godfredo was a man of science and learning and that he missed his books, his calculating instruments, his beakers and vials of alchemy, that he yearned for his astrolabe and quadrant and maps, his clocks and hourglasses and sundials, his quills and parchments, his inks and letters and words. They would also learn that Don Godfredo, being wealthy, was a man of comforts and that he missed castles and chairs, dinner plates and handkerchiefs, feather beds and fireplaces. He also missed politics and court intrigue, and knowing who was currently in favor, who was out. His tongue yearned for intelligent debate. He wanted his horse! All t
he things he had taken for granted he now longed for with a poignancy that was as real as physical pain.
And then one morning when the mist was gray and the gulls subdued, and not even the hunting canoes set out on the tide, Don Godfredo stood miserably in his layers of clothes heavy with the damp and recalled a novel that was currently the rage in Spain, called Sergas de Esplandian. It was the story of a knight named Esplandian who, during the siege of Constantinople, led the defense of the city against the attacking pagans. Suddenly, among the besiegers there appeared a queen, who had come from a fabulous island far away “on the right hand of the Indies, very near to the terrestrial paradise.” This island was inhabited by ebony-skinned women whose weapons were of gold, and in the mountains lived fabled griffins. When the griffins were young, the story went, the Amazon women captured them and fed them on male babies the women had given birth to and men they had taken prisoner. Later in the novel, the queen was converted to Christianity, gained respect for men, married Esplandian’s cousin, and took him back to her wondrous island.
Everyone who read the book or heard the story wondered, even though it was fiction, if that fabled island really existed. And so when Cabrillo had set sail from Mexico to explore this northern coast, he and his men had anticipated finding a land where the only metal, as in the book, was gold. But when they anchored in the bay to the south and saw how simply the natives lived, that there was no gold, no beautiful Amazon women, no fabled griffins, they named this place after that island— California— out of derision and disappointment.
Recalling this, Don Godfredo now grew somber with new realization. These people possessed nothing of worth to the Spanish Crown. It could be years before another ship came! And while the savages of this place could feed his body, they could not feed his soul. It would wither and die, and he would go insane.
In his new despair, he looked down the beach and saw Marimi watching him, her tall figure swathed in seal skins, a mournful look in her dark eyes. How could he convey to her this hell his fellows had landed him in, that a man needed occupation, that he would go mad if left only to eat and gamble and smoke a pipe? “I am a learned man!” he cried to the wind. “I have a mind, I have curiosity! And I have been left to rot in this place!”