God Carlos

by Anthony C. Winkler

  “We are already in hell,” old Hernandez responded.

  The boy Pedro did not understand, for although his brain was young and fresh, he had lived only a dozen or so years of life and had only begun to learn of the world’s wickedness.

  “The Indians are a doomed people,” old Hernandez said. “It’s too bad that Carlos wasn’t a real god, for perhaps he could have saved them.”

  “He wouldn’t have,” Pedro said bitterly. “He would’ve made them do tricks like dogs. He would’ve tormented them.”

  “That is how gods are,” murmured old Hernandez. “They are fickle. They like to tease.”

  They were silent for a little while, each consumed with his own thoughts.

  The boy gazed out at his surroundings: before his eyes in the golden glow of the sunset lay a land of unmatched loveliness. He beheld rolling hills bedecked in a shade of lush green that his eyes had rarely seen in desiccated old Europe. His eyes were treated to an ocean whose clarity and shimmering tones of blue and green would make the celebrated seas of the Old World seem like yesterday’s watery porridge. Beyond the slope of the hills he saw white sand beaches grinning endlessly at the heavens as if the small waves that lapped the shoreline were ticklish.

  And though he looked, the boy didn’t really take in any of this beauty. He had the mind of a child which could cope but had not yet learned to marvel. His eyes had feasted on the pestilential cities of slummy old Europe and were unused to seeing the land naked as its people, adorned only in the contours and colors of God’s handiwork. He did not see beauty; he saw only emptiness and desolation.

  “I want to go home,” he said. “I want to leave this place.”

  “You are an orphan,” replied old Hernandez in a gruff but not unkindly voice. “Everywhere is home to the orphan.”

  “I do not like this place.”

  “It is the time you do not like, not the place. Men always mix them up.”

  The boy Pedro settled down on the bare earth. Night had fallen. He did not understand the riddles in which old Hernandez spoke. There was no moon. There was only darkness and the overhead glistening immensities of starlight. He did not like when there were so many stars that no hand or mind could count them.

  * * *

  Everything has a beginning, a middle, and an end. It is no different with a voyage. Usually there is a specific commercial purpose behind a voyage—transporting men or goods to a distant land where they are needed—that will provide these stages. But the Santa Inez was in the New World for reasons of personal vanity—a rich old man desired a memorial in the newly discovered land. When its journey would be finished depended on one man’s whim not on the accomplishment of a shared task that all could see and measure. So no one knew when she would leave, and all the crew from old Hernandez to the boy Pedro felt as if they were wedged in a crack of time.

  When Pedro woke up the next morning, none of this was on his mind. Stark memories of his friend being drowned still haunted him. Instead of waking up gradually and peacefully, he bolted upright off the ground and burst into consciousness with a violent start. He found himself under a tree. Nearby old Hernandez slept curled up near the trunk.

  The boy was sore because the patch of ground that had been his bed was hard and rocky, and he had tossed fitfully for most of the night. It was only sunrise but already he was sweaty.

  He wondered where the ship was and scanned the empty sea for a sail. He saw none. All he saw was a vast and crinkly spectacle of blue water stretching to the horizon that arced against the skyline like a drawn bow.

  Old Hernandez woke up and looked at the boy.

  “No sign of the ship,” Pedro said gloomily.

  Old Hernandez rubbed his eyes and coughed. He curled up again on the ground and fell back asleep.

  It was Sunday, October 7, 1520. The Santa Inez had been in Jamaica now for over six months.

  Chapter 19

  The Santa Inez poked her way around Jamaica so the French cartographer, Monsieur, could make a sketch of the island’s shape. What would come of the voyage would be a blobby map that made Jamaica look like an amoeba, an organism invisible to the world until 1673 when Anton van Leeuwenhoek of Holland built the first microscope. In reality the island is tapered and symmetrical like a capsule—another invention that was several hundred years away—and does not at all look like the early attempts at mapping it.

  During the expedition the Frenchman was cheerful company for de la Serena, and they spent many hours on the night sea discussing the meaning of life and what would happen after death.

  What was wrong with oblivion? de la Serena asked the Frenchman often. Why did men fear it when it was nothing fearful? You had no consciousness. You had no memory. You had no fears. You had the unfeeling placidity of stone. No one had ever seen stone tossing and turning in a sleepless night. Stone did not fret about money. It did not have plots and ambitions that might come to nothing. What was so wrong with being stone?

  Monsieur knew immediately what was wrong with oblivion. There was no food in oblivion—no sauces, no sausages, no soufflés. A man who loved his belly as much as Monsieur did found the idea of oblivion gastronomically revolting.

  So the argument went back and forth, sometimes late into the night when the Santa Inez would heave to in a land breeze, her head bobbing up and down like a trotting donkey.

  Circumnavigating Jamaica, which would ordinarily take a vessel like the Santa Inez barely a day, consumed almost a week because she kept circling the island to give Monsieur ample opportunity to perfect his map.

  As he drew the map, Monsieur lavishly proposed naming different notable features of the island after de la Serena. He threw the older man several bones—proposing to name the westernmost point of the island Point de la Serena instead of Negril Point. He did the same for Morant Point, the Blue Mountains, and Lovers’ Leap, until even de la Serena realized that his name could not be on every geographic feature and, after some bargaining, settled for the island’s most prominent feature—the Blue Mountains.

  On his map of Jamaica in 1520, Monsieur named this rugged mountain that crowns the island with a massive monarchial presence Mount de la Serena. When the Spaniard saw by flickering candlelight his name scribbled on the parchment above this massive bulk, he shook with a tremor of happiness and felt that the long voyage of the Santa Inez had been more than repaid. He had his memorial. Now he could go home.

  On her third turn around the island, off the south side near the stretch of coastline known on maps today as Alligator Reef, the Santa Inez encountered a large canoe filled with many Indians. She drew near to investigate when an Arawak guide who had briefly gone below, appeared on deck with a warning cry. De la Serena and Monsieur were trying to understand what the Indian was shrieking about when a volley of arrows flew out of the canoe and peppered the deck of the ship. One arrow grazed the shoulder of Monsieur. By the time the undermanned crew ran out the guns of the Santa Inez, the canoe had scuttled toward the shoreline in an area too shallow for her to follow, and the Indians escaped.

  “Canaballi! Canaballi!” the Arawak was shouting over and over again, making a movement like one swooning.

  Monsieur sat down on the deck, carefully fingering his wound. The Indian guide, meanwhile, was babbling loudly and gesturing to make himself understood. Finally, one of the men grasped what he was saying: the Indians in the canoe were marauding Caribs, cannibals who ate the flesh of their human enemies. Their arrows were tipped with a deadly poison.

  Monsieur suddenly felt weak and had trouble breathing. He collapsed on the deck and began gasping from the effect of curare, a poison made from a rainforest vine that causes paralysis and the inability to breathe by blocking the work of neural transmitters.

  “What’s happening to me?” Monsieur gasped, seizing de la Serena by the arms.

  “The Indian says the arrow was poisoned,” de la Serena said softly, adding, “but what does an Indian know?”

  A hardened look took ahold of
Monsieur. “I do not agree to this,” he spat fiercely. “I will not die from this. I refuse to die.”

  The Santa Inez set a course for New Seville, her men scanning the sea for more canaballi. She encountered no more canoes, made her way into Santa Gloria Bay without incident, and tied up at the quay as Monsieur lay dying below deck in de la Serena’s private quarters.

  It was the worst possible thing that could happen from de la Serena’s point of view. If Monsieur should die, who would complete the drawing of the map of the island? Who would name the massive mountain Mount de La Serena? Once again his ambition would be thwarted. He was angry and frustrated and spent many hours pacing the quarterdeck and obsessively checking on Monsieur.

  De la Serena was, by now, fed up with drab settlement life. Indian women, on whom his crew preyed daily, meant nothing to him—an old man. Living in the New World was little better than living like a range chicken constantly scratching the earth for food. The days were long and boring. Even worse were the nights, which came and went with a depressing sameness. Death was everywhere. He was ready to go home. The voyage of the Santa Inez was approaching its end.

  During that week, while Monsieur hovered in a coma, de la Serena let it be known that his boat would sail shortly and he became engrossed in the many little details a ship’s master must attend to before embarking on a long voyage. Most important of all was to do a head count of the available crew.

  It was then that he discovered Carlos was missing.

  De la Serena summoned the boy Pedro and asked him what had happened to Carlos. The boy said he was unsure but believed that the man had gone off into the interior of the island with an Indian woman. Other crewmen were asked about the missing sailor, but none could add anything to the boy’s story. Finally, beleaguered with preparations for the voyage home, de la Serena gave up inquiring about Carlos and decided to leave well enough alone. The man had been a troublemaker to begin with. No one would miss him. As far as de la Serena was concerned, Carlos had jumped ship.

  He scratched off the name of Carlos Antonio Maria Eduardo Garcia de la Cal Fernandez from the ship’s roster, a preposterous combination of words that had been signified on the rolls only by the seaman’s careful scrawl of his first name on the parchment. It was as if he’d never come to Jamaica, never even been on the Santa Inez.

  And that was the official end of God Carlos.

  * * *

  One morning some days later, Monsieur awoke from his coma and got up off his deathbed.

  The Frenchman’s explanation of his recovery was simple enough: he had refused to die. It would be a topic that he and de la Serena would continue debating for the long voyage back to Spain.

  The Santa Inez had spent approximately six months on the island, and when she sailed early one morning in a brisk land breeze, no official delegation was ashore to see her leave. Of her arriving crew of twenty, she had lost seven, not counting Carlos who was presumed to have jumped ship—six to the fever, and one to Carlos’s dagger. Yet when she sailed on October 23, 1520, she had a full complement of men because several soldiers whose military term of commitment had expired signed on as crew. To this number was added a handful of vagabond adventurers who had come to the New World to seek their fortunes and were now returning empty-handed to their grim lives in sixteenth-century Spain. She had arrived unannounced like a thief; she sneaked out like an unwelcome guest. And almost no one cared.

  There was one sorrowful witness who grieved to see her leave. It was Orocobix, who had just begun a day of fishing on the deep side of the reef.

  He did not know that the Santa Inez would sail that morning, for he had avoided her and her crew ever since the drowning. His entire tribe had lived in fear of retribution from the Spaniards and had been steeling themselves for attack. But none came. The days slipped past and every night watchmen posted on the outskirts of the village sounded no alarm. Eventually, the tribe relaxed and the village slipped back into its easygoing daily rhythms.

  With the men lounging about on the deck as men will do at the beginning of a long voyage, the caravel slipped through the channel and pointed her nose out to deep sea. The boy Pedro was in the bow, where his friend Carlos used to sit, as the ship sliced her way past the fishing canoe. His mind distracted by a daydream, the boy made eye contact with Orocobix and gave a little gasp of recognition. He stared at the fishing Indian and walked down the length of the deck as if to keep him in sight, but soon he was at the stern of the ship, where de la Serena paced with the Frenchman at his side as they slid past the little canoe and headed out to the deep blue sea unreeling a squiggle of a wake like the broken string of a kite. Then he was standing where he didn’t belong, staring silently at the receding canoe.

  “There’s a story there,” chuckled Monsieur to de la Serena, who was frowning at the effrontery of a cabin boy being on this part of the ship without reason.

  The moment was broken by the cry of old Hernandez, who was the only other person on the ship to know what was happening, summoning Pedro back to the bow. Orocobix waved, and the boy waved back.

  It did not mean much to either one, that wave. It signaled no understanding, no love, not even a once-shared feeling or commonality of purpose. Between them—the boy of Spain and the Indian of the New World—passed nothing deeper or of greater consequence than raw recognition. It was no more than stone waving to shell or metal waving to wood, the inanimate to the lifeless. As the vessels separated, the lovely landform that was Jamaica loomed between them like a referee.

  Chapter 20

  History is drama acted out by human beings on a worldwide stage. Most of the drama is inconsequential and repetitious. But some acts and scenes are highly instructive and teach valuable lessons. Often, it is only after the props have been put away and the actors have gone from the stage forever that we begin to glimpse the meaning of a particular act.

  By 1520, the Spanish had spread throughout the Caribbean like a virulent pestilence and were slaughtering the defenseless Arawaks. One observer of the Spaniards’ viciousness was Bartolome de las Casas, a Catholic priest who served as an adviser to the colonial governor of Santo Domingo. In 1542, in his Brief Account of the Devastation of the Indies, he described the brutality and barbarism with which the Arawaks were treated:

  The Christians, with their horses and swords and pikes, began to carry out massacres and strange cruelties against them [the Arawaks]. They attacked the towns and spared neither the children nor pregnant women and women in childbed, not only stabbing them and dismembering them but cutting them to pieces as if dealing with sheep in the slaughterhouse. They laid bets as to who, with one stroke of the sword, could split a man in two or could cut off his head or spill out his entrails with a single stroke of the pike. They took infants from their mothers’ breasts, snatching them by the legs and pitching them headfirst against the crags or snatched them by the arms and threw them into the rivers, roaring with laughter and saying as the babies fell into the water, “Boil there, you offspring of the devil!”

  Las Casas was writing about what he had witnessed in Santo Domingo, but the same grisly genocidal scenario was played out in Jamaica.

  No one knows for certain how many Arawaks were living in Jamaica when Columbus “discovered” the already well-known island in 1494. Some estimates put the population at 50,000; others, at 100,000. What is known is that by 1655 when the English overran Jamaica, the Indians had become extinct. Many would die of infectious diseases spread by the invaders. Others would be slaughtered by the Spaniards in skirmishes and battles. Still others would be sent to dig futilely for gold in the interior of the island and would die from hard labor. In despair over their enslavement, thousands of Arawaks would commit mass suicide by drinking unfermented cassava juice.

  Las Casas lived to be ninety-two years old and came to be nicknamed Apostle of the Indians. Through his efforts, the New Laws were enacted in 1542 abolishing the encomienda system and forbidding the use of Arawaks as a source of slave labor. It was
too late: the Arawaks were already trudging down the road to extinction.

  Las Casas had by then also planted another terrible seed that would grow even more bitter fruit: he had recommended the use of African blacks as a source of labor in place of the Arawaks. Horrible and prolonged would be the nightmare to ensue from a proposal intended innocently as an act of mercy.

  There were two distinct peoples thriving in the Caribbean—the Arawaks and the Caribs—when the Spanish first arrived in 1492. A little more than one hundred years later the Arawaks had been exterminated. Today the Caribs, who put up a fierce fight against the invader, still exist. Many Spanish soldiers fell to the poisonous arrows of these canaballi, and soon the invader learned to avoid those islands they were known to occupy. If the drama of the Arawaks teaches anything, it is that passivity in the face of a vicious invader is a bad tactic.

  * * *

  In an ironic twist, the Arawaks got their revenge on the Europeans. In 1494, John de Vigo DeVito wrote this of a strange new disease:

  In the yeare of our Loard, 1494, in ye monethe of December when Charles ye Frenche kynge toke hys iorney into the partes of Ytaly, to recouer the kyngdome of Naples, there appered a certayne dysease through out al Ytaly of an unknowen nature, whych sondrye nations hath called by sondry names . . . Thys dysease is contagious, chiefly yf it chaunce through copulation of a man wyth an unclene woman, for the begynnynge therof was in the secret members of men and women . . .

  The new disease was syphilis, which was endemic to the Arawaks and is spread through sexual contact. The boil on his penis that de Morales spoke of before his death was the first sign of infection. If Carlos had not killed de Morales in a knife fight, syphilis would have done the job or driven him mad. Once transmitted to Europe, it spread throughout the population and resulted in an untold number of deaths. That was the legacy, and revenge, of the Arawaks.