During this time, although we made every effort to learn who lived in that house, and if there was a renegade Christian woman there, no one would tell us anything except that it belonged to a very prominent and wealthy Moor named Agi Morato,6 who had been the governor of La Pata,7 which is a very distinguished position among those people. But when we least expected another shower of cianiis, we suddenly saw the reed appear, another handkerchief attached to it that had an even larger knot; this occurred when the bagnio, as on the previous occasion, was deserted and empty of people. We made the same test: each of the three men, the same ones who had been with me the last time, went forward before I did, but the reed was not given up to anyone but me, because as soon as I walked forward, it dropped. I untied the knot and found forty Spanish gold escudos and a paper written in Arabic, at the bottom of which a large cross had been drawn. I kissed the cross, took the escudos, and returned to the roof, where we all made our salaams; the hand appeared again, I signaled that I would read the letter, and the window closed.
We were all astounded and overjoyed at what had happened, but since none of us understood Arabic, our desire to know what the paper said was immense, and the difficulty in finding someone to read it to us was even greater. Finally, I decided to trust a renegade, a native of Murcia, who claimed to be a great friend of mine and made pledges to me obliging him to keep any secrets I confided in him, because certain renegades, when they intend to return to Christian lands, take with them signed statements from important captives testifying, in whatever fashion they can, that the renegade is a moral man, and always has treated Christians well, and desires to escape at the first opportunity. Some obtain these declarations with good intentions; others use them as a possible defense when they come to plunder Christian lands: if they happen to be shipwrecked or are taken prisoner, they show their declarations and say that these papers prove their intention to remain in Christian lands, which was the reason they came on a raid with the Turks. In this way they avoid the initial violence of their captors and reconcile with the Church, and no one does them any harm, and at the first opportunity they return to Barbary to be what they were before. There are others, however, who obtain and use these papers with good intentions and remain in Christian lands.
Well, my friend was one of these renegades, and he had statements from all our comrades attesting in every way possible to his good faith, and if the Moors had found him with these papers, they would have burned him alive. I had learned that he knew Arabic very well, and could not only speak it but write it, too, but before I told him everything, I asked him to read the paper for me, saying I had found it in a crack in the wall of my cell. He unfolded it and spent a long time looking at it, analyzing it, and murmuring to himself. I asked him if he understood it; he said he understood it very well, and if I wanted him to repeat it word for word, I should give him ink and a pen, which would allow him to do a better job. We soon gave him what he requested, he translated the letter slowly, and when he was finished, he said: 'Everything written here in Spanish is exactly what this Moorish letter contains; you should know that where it says Lela Marien it means Our Lady the Virgin Mary.' We read the paper, and this is what it said:
When I was a little girl, my father had a slave woman who taught me in my own language a Christian zala, or prayer, and she told me many things about Lela Marien. The Christian slave died, and I know she did not go to the fire but to Allah, because afterward I saw her two times, and she told me to go to a Christian land to see Lela Marien, who loved me very much. I do not know how to go: I have seen many Christians through this window, and none has seemed as much a gentleman as you. I am very beautiful and young, and I have a good deal of money to take with me; see if you can plan how we can go, and when we are there you can be my husband if you like, and if you do not, it will not matter, because Lela Marien will give me someone to marry. I wrote this; be careful who you ask to read it: do not trust any Moor, because they are all false. I am very worried about that: I wish you would not show it to anybody, because if my father finds out, he will throw me in a well and cover me over with stones. I will put a thread on the reed: tie your answer there, and if you do not have anybody who writes Arabic, give me your answer in signs; Lela Marien will make me understand. May she and Allah protect you, and this cross that I kiss many times, as the captive woman taught me to do.
Consider, Senores, if there was reason for the words of this letter to astound and delight us; our feelings were so intense that the renegade realized the paper had not been found by chance but had really been written to one of us, and he implored us that if what he suspected was true, that we trust him and tell him so, and he would risk his life for our freedom. And saying this, he pulled out from under his shirt a metal crucifix, and with many tears he swore by the God that the image represented, and in whom he, though a sinner, believed completely and faithfully, that he would be loyal to us and keep secret anything we wished to tell him; he thought, and could almost predict, that by means of the woman who had written the letter, he and all of us would obtain our freedom, and he would find himself where he longed to be, which was reunited with the body of Holy Mother Church, from whom, like a rotten limb, he had been separated and severed because of his ignorance and sin. The renegade said this with so many tears and displays of so much repentance that we were all of the same opinion and agreed to tell him the truth, and so we revealed everything to him, hiding nothing. We showed him the narrow window where the reed had appeared, and he took careful note of the house and agreed to take special and particular care to learn who lived in it. We also agreed that it would be a good idea to reply to the Moorish lady's letter; since we now had someone who could do that, the renegade immediately set about writing down the words I told him, which were precisely the ones I shall tell you now, because none of the substantive points of this matter has disappeared from my memory, and none will for as long as I live. This, then, was the response to the Moorish lady:
May the true Allah keep you, Senora, and the Blessed Marien, the true Mother of God who has given you the desire to go to Christian lands because she loves you dearly. Pray to her and ask how you can accomplish what she commands you to do; she is so good that she will certainly respond to your prayer. On behalf of myself and all these Christians who are with me, I offer to do for you everything that we can until the day of our death. Continue to write to me and tell me what you intend to do, and I shall always reply, for Almighty Allah has given us a Christian captive who can speak and write your language, as you will see by this letter. Therefore, without fear of any kind, you can tell us anything you wish. As for what you have said regarding becoming my wife if you reach Christian lands, I give you my word as a good Christian that you will, and you should know that Christians keep their promises better than Moors. May Allah and His mother, Marien, bless and keep you, Senora.
This letter was written and sealed; I waited two days until I was again alone in the bagnio, and then I went to the usual place on the flat roof to see if the reed would appear, and it did in a very short time. As soon as I saw it, though I could not see who was holding it, I displayed my letter as a way of asking that she attach the thread, but she already had, and I tied the letter to it, and a short while later our star appeared again, with the knotted handkerchief, our white flag of peace. She let it drop, and I picked it up, and found in the handkerchief, in a variety of silver and gold coins, more than fifty escudos, which increased our joy fifty times over and confirmed our hope of obtaining our freedom. That same night our renegade returned and told us he had learned that a Moor about whom we had already heard, named Agi Morato, lived in the house; he was extremely rich and had one child, a daughter who would inherit his entire estate; it was the general opinion in the city that she was the most beautiful woman in Barbary, and many viceroys had come to ask for her hand, but she never had wanted to marry; he had also learned that she once had a Christian slave woman who had died, all of which agreed with what she had written in her l
etter. Then we began to consult with the renegade regarding how we could rescue her and escape to Christian lands; finally we decided to wait for a second letter from Zoraida, for this was the name of the lady who now wishes to be called Maria,8 because we saw very clearly that she alone would be the means around all our difficulties. After we agreed to this, the renegade told us not to worry, for he would bring us to freedom or die in the attempt.
For four days the bagnio was filled with people, which meant that for four days the reed did not appear; then, when the bagnio was deserted once more, it appeared as usual, bearing a handkerchief so pregnant that it promised a most fortunate birth. The reed came down to me, and in the handkerchief I found another letter and a hundred gold escudos and no other kind of coin. The renegade was there; in our cell we gave him the letter to read, and he said this is what it said:
I do not know, Senor, how we shall go to Spain; Lela Marien has not told me, though I have asked her, but what we can do is this: I shall give you many gold coins through the window; use them to ransom yourself and your friends, and one of you go to a Christian land and buy a boat and come back for the others; you will find me on my father's country estate, which is near the Babazon Gate, 9 close to the ocean, where I must spend the summer with my father and my servants. At night you could safely take me from there to the boat; remember that you must marry me, because if you do not, I shall ask Marien to punish you. If you do not trust anyone else to go for the boat, pay your own ransom and go yourself; I know you are more likely to return than any of the others, for you are a gentleman and a Christian. Try to learn where the estate is, and when you come out to the roof I shall know the bagnio is empty, and give you a good deal of money. Allah keep you, Senor.
This is what the second letter stated and declared; when everyone had heard it, each man offered to be the one who was ransomed, promising to go and return quickly, and I also made the same offer; this was opposed by the renegade, who said that under no circumstances would he consent to one man escaping to freedom until all of us could escape together, for experience had taught him how badly free men kept the promises made in captivity; important prisoners had often used this same plan, ransoming one man so that he could go to Valencia or Mallorca with enough money to equip a boat and return for those who had ransomed him, but those men never returned, because, as he said, the freedom they obtained and the fear of losing it again erased from their memories every obligation they had in the world. As confirmation of the truth he was telling us, he recounted briefly an incident that had occurred very recently to some Christian gentlemen, the strangest that had ever happened in that place where astounding and remarkable things happen every day.
Eventually he said that what we could and should do was to give the ransom money to him so that he could buy a boat there in Algiers, pretending that he planned to become a merchant and trader in Tetuan and along the coast; when he was master of the ship, it would be easy to devise a way to get all of us out of the bagnio and on board. Especially if the Moorish lady did as she said and gave us enough money to ransom everyone, for when we were free, it would be extremely easy for us to go aboard, even in the middle of the day; the greatest difficulty was that the Moors do not permit any renegade to buy or own a boat, unless it is a large vessel used for making pirate raids, because they fear that if he buys a boat, especially if he is a Spaniard, he wants it only to go to Christian lands; he would avoid this problem by taking on a Tagarino 10 to be his partner in the purchase of the boat and to share in the profits, and by means of this deception he would become master of the ship, and then all the rest would be simple. Although my comrades and I thought it would be better to buy the boat in Mallorca, as the Moorish lady had said, we did not dare contradict him, fearing that if we did not do as he wished, he would betray us and endanger our lives by revealing our dealings with Zoraida, and to protect her life we would certainly have given our own; and so we resolved to put ourselves in the hands of God and the renegade, and we replied to Zoraida, telling her we would do everything she advised because her advice was as good as if Lela Marien had told her what to say, and it was entirely up to her whether the plan should be delayed or put into effect immediately. Again I offered to be her husband, and then, on the following day, the bagnio happened to be deserted, and using the reed and the handkerchief several times, she gave me two thousand gold escudos and a letter in which she said that next Juma, which is Friday, she was going to her father's country estate, and before she left she would give us more money, and if it was not enough, we should tell her, and she would give us as much as we asked for because her father had so much money he would not miss it, especially since she had the keys to everything.
We gave five hundred escudos to the renegade so that he could buy the boat; with eight hundred more I was ransomed, having given the money to a merchant from Valencia who was in Algiers at the time, and who ransomed me from the king by promising to pay the money after the next ship arrived from Valencia; if he paid right away, the king would suspect that my ransom had been in Algiers for some time and the merchant had concealed it for his own profit. Then, too, my master was so suspicious that I did not dare to pay out the money all at once. On the Thursday before the Friday when the beautiful Zoraida was to leave for the estate, she gave us another thousand escudos, and informed us that she was leaving, and asked that if I were to be ransomed, I should learn where her father's country estate was and at all costs find a reason for going there and seeing her. I responded with few words, saying that I would, and that she should be sure to commend all of us to Lela Marien with the prayers the slave woman had taught her.
After this, my three companions were ransomed to facilitate our leaving the bagnio, because if they saw me ransomed when they were not, and there was enough money, they might become alarmed and the devil could persuade them to do some harm to Zoraida; even though their being the men they were could have allayed this fear, still, I did not want to endanger the plan in any way, and so I had them ransomed in the same manner that I ransomed myself, giving all the money to the merchant so that he could offer a guaranty for us with confidence and security, but never disclosing our plans and our secret to him because of the danger that would have entailed."
CHAPTER XLI
In which the captive continues his tale
"Before two weeks had passed, our renegade bought a very good boat with room for more than thirty people, and to guarantee the success of his plan and lend it credibility, he wanted to sail to a town called Sargel, some thirty leagues from Algiers in the direction of Oran, where there is a brisk trade in dried figs. He made the trip two or three times, accompanied by the Tagarino he had mentioned. In Barbary they call the Moors from Aragon Tagarinos and the ones from Granada Mudejares: in the kingdom of Fez the Mudejares are called Elches, and these are the people used most by the king in war.
In any event, each time the renegade passed by in his boat he anchored in a cove not two crossbow shots from the country estate where Zoraida was waiting; there the renegade very purposefully joined the Moors who were at the oars, either to say a zala or to rehearse what he actually intended to do, and so he would go to Zoraida's house and ask for fruit, and her father gave it to him and did not recognize him; although he wanted to speak to Zoraida, as he later told me, and tell her that she should be happy and free of doubt, because he was the man who would take her, on my orders, to a Christian land, it was not possible, because Moorish women do not allow any Moor or Turk to see them unless instructed to do so by their husbands or fathers. They allow Christian captives to spend time with them and talk to them, even more than is reasonable, yet it would have made me unhappy if he had spoken to her, because she might have been alarmed to see that her affairs were being discussed by renegades. God willed otherwise, however, and our renegade did not have the opportunity to carry out his virtuous desire, but he saw that he could go back and forth to Sargel in safety and anchor whenever and however and wherever he chose, and that the Tagarin
o, his partner, followed his instructions to the letter; I had been ransomed, and all he needed to do was find Christians to man the oars, and so he told me to decide which of the prisoners, besides those who had been ransomed, I wanted to take with me, and to arrange for them to be ready on the following Friday, which he had determined should be the day of our departure.
Consequently I spoke to twelve Spaniards, all of them valiant oarsmen who could leave the city without difficulty; it was no easy task finding so many at that time, because twenty ships were out making raids and had taken all the oarsmen with them, and I would not even have found these if their master had not decided to make no raids that summer in order to finish building a galley that he had in the shipyards. I told them only that on the following Friday, in the afternoon, they were to sneak out one by one, go to the far side of Agi Morato's country estate, and wait for me there. I gave each of them these instructions separately and said that even if they saw other Christians, they were to say nothing except that I had instructed them to wait in that spot.
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