Cervantes Street (17 page)

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 understood 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?

For three consecutive mornings, when the souk was most ebullient, I stood near a fountain with Sancho as my captive audience: the few passersby who stopped to listen to my recitations for an instant looked at me as if I were speaking in an incomprehensible tongue, guffawed, and then hurried on their way—as if they were running from a leper. Here and there a weary soul stopped to listen to a few poems, but not one of them threw my way even a fleshless bone.

“Don’t get so downcast,” Sancho finally said to me. “What do you expect? To recite poetry to this crowd is like feeding truffles to pigs. I myself don’t understand poetry, if you want to know the truth. I prefer stories. When I’ve finished listening to one of those poems, I just want to scratch my head. Why are these poets always, always crying over damsels that don’t care for them? If you want to eat regularly, my friend, poetry is not the answer. I’m sorry.”

“What else can I do to make money, Sancho? My options are limited. My tongue is more useful than my one arm.”

“Tell stories like the Arabs do,” he said.

* * *

The first time I told a story about rival poets, I got the same result. The story of a poet who flees Spain with a band of Gypsies only got a slightly better reception. People listened raptly for a while, and then walked away looking puzzled or bored. One morning, a Spanish washerwoman who had stopped briefly to listen the previous two days, said to me: “Your voice is good, young man. And I understand what you’re saying. But you don’t know how to tell stories.”

“I beg your pardon, señora,” I replied. It was the first time a member of the audience had actually addressed me.

“I’ve been working for ten years as a washwoman in the house of a rich Moor,” she said. “I’ve lost all hope of ever going back to Spain and seeing my family before I die. Every morning, when I wake up, I look forward to the stories I’ll hear that day in the souk. Those stories are the only joy in my life.” She paused; I could see she wanted to help me. “But you don’t know how to entertain a crowd,” she went on. “All tales need a love affair and a suffering and beautiful heroine. I don’t want to hear a story unless it is about love, and the sadder the better. Look,” she pointed to a huge basket filled with dirty laundry that she had set on the ground by her feet, “that’s my work every day, if I want to eat and not be lashed. I will shed my tears over young, beautiful, rich lovers who are doomed and die for love. I don’t want to weep over my own wretched life. Young man, take me someplace away from here, where I can forget about this shit-hole and these mountains of filthy clothes I see even in my dreams. That’s what I want from a story. The Arab storytellers know that.” Then she tossed me a piece of bread she had lodged between her breasts, placed her basket atop her head, and marched off.

As my love stories became more elaborate and far-fetched, I gained a loyal following. My listeners did not care about logic. In fact, they preferred stories that made no sense—the more unbelievable the better. Sancho collected whatever people could spare: a few coins and assorted bits of food. He said to me, “Keep those tales coming, Miguel. This is much better than stuffing myself with sea urchins every day.”

One morning, as I was spinning a tale about shepherds and unrequited love, among the people in the audience I spotted Rodrigo. My heart stopped beating. Could it really be my brother, not a delusion caused by the Algerian sun? He was in the company of a richly dressed Moor and his servants. This was Mohamed Ramdane, the same man who had purchased Rodrigo at the marina. In Rodrigo’s eyes, I read:
Don’t say anything. Pretend you haven’t seen me. Don’t acknowledge or approach me. Continue with your story
.
Control your emotions!
Rodrigo wore a finely made ankle-length gray cloak with a hood. His master wore the white burnous that identified wealthy Moors. My brother looked well groomed and well fed.

Despite my befuddled state, I continued with my rambling tale. Abruptly, Ramdane walked away and my brother followed, keeping a step behind him. Rodrigo was going to disappear in the casbah, and it might be a long time before I saw him again. I brought my tale to an unexpected halt by having a bolt of lighting strike the hero as he was riding to rescue his beloved princess from the evil vizier. People started booing. I left Sancho to weather the insults, and whatever else the audience was willing to part with.

I followed Rodrigo at a distance, with great discretion, though every part of me wanted to approach my brother and embrace him, kiss his hands, his forehead, and his cheeks. I was dizzy and unsteady on my feet, elated and anxious, but I felt intrepid and invincible.