God Carlos (15 page)

The celebration came and went in receding waves of chanting and drumming broken by stretches of silence as the surfeited celebrants either passed out on the ground or staggered off to their bohios or sprawled around the fire staring at nothing. Soon, all that remained behind was the litter of sleeping naked brown bodies scattered around the clearing and the glowing heart of what had been the bonfire.

Carlos and boy Pedro spent the night in Orocobix's bohio, which was made of the trunk and thatch of a single palm tree lashed together in a circular pattern. Inside was cool and dry but bare, being hung with two hammocks, which neither of the gods had ever seen before. There was no armoire, no vanity table or dresser filled with clothing and jewelry, only the faithless zemi propped up against the thatched wall.

Orocobix demonstrated to the two gods how they should climb into the hammocks and sleep, and once Carlos and the boy had settled down, he went outside the bohio and lay across its small open entrance where he spent the night to ensure that no curiosity seeker would disturb his guests.

It was an unnecessary precaution: crime was almost unknown among the Arawaks. No one in a village wanted for anything. No one ever went hungry unless all went hungry. No one possessed anything that anyone else would crave. The nakedness of the people was a reflection of the sparseness and simplicity of their hearts.

The land of the Arawaks was a mild land of plenty with no dramatic change of seasons, no harsh winters, no recurring climactic catastrophes other than the occasional hurricane. In this gentle land the Arawaks went about in their bare skin painted with dye made from the roots of plants.

The Arawaks could have made and worn clothes if they had desired, for even in 1520 Xaymaca was renowned throughout the neighboring islands as a prolific producer of cotton, which the women spent much of their time spinning and weaving. Later, the Spaniards would use Jamaica as the source of sail cloth.

So Carlos and the boy Pedro passed a peaceful night in the bohio while their Indian host slept sprawled across the small doorway like a faithful guard dog.

All this took place during a waning moon that dusted the village and its rows of rounded bohios with a grainy light that resembled a faint yellow pollen. Arawak legends call it “the old man's moon” and say that it is a moon of impending change.

Chapter 16

The next morning two women appeared in the doorway of Orocobix's bohio. Both cradled in their arms sick babies. One infant had a roasting fever; the other was wracked with coughing spasms so violent that it seemed on the verge of exploding.

“The gods are still asleep,” protested Orocobix.

The women began to make a fuss and raise their voices so that the gods would hear them and wake up, and no matter how hard Orocobix begged them to be quiet, they would not stop.

Hearing the commotion, Carlos and the boy Pedro climbed sleepily down from the hammocks. For a horrible moment neither one of them knew where he was, and they stared at each other with the bewilderment of actors who had blundered into the wrong play. Then the noise from the open doorway recalled them to their circumstances as the world reassembled itself from the pieces shattered by sleep.

Carlos stuck his head out the doorway, which brought a renewed wailing of hope and expectation from the grieving women. The boy Pedro also stood in the open doorway, listening.

“God Carlos,” Orocobix said apologetically, “these are new mothers with sick children. They will not go away.”

“What did he say?” Carlos asked the boy Pedro.

“I do not know, but it looks like their babies are sick. When you can't cure them, they will know that we're not gods.”

Carlos scratched his hairy chest and made a guttural sound of clearing his throat. “Then I'll cure them both,” he boasted with a loud belch.

He took a baby from its mother and felt the surge of unnatural heat coursing through its tiny limbs. Hoisting the baby over his head, he pretended to be muttering an incantation. But what he actually said was, “Recover, baby, or I'll break your heathen neck.”

With that, he hurled the naked baby high in the air and caught it as it plunged headfirst back to earth. The mother screamed and yanked her baby from the god and stalked away, hurling at Carlos a backward look of disgust.

Carlos reached for the coughing baby, which the nervous mother handed him reluctantly. Grabbing that baby by the ankles, he began swinging it upside down in the long strokes of a pendulum, all the while chanting, “Get better, you little pagan rat, or I'll feed you to the dog that doesn't bark.”

After a few lazy swings, the baby stopped coughing and began changing color. Carlos handed the infant back to its perplexed mother.

“What kind of gods are these?” the mother said to Orocobix as she shuffled away. But she'd gotten no more than a few yards away when she suddenly stopped, turned, and exclaimed with amazement, “My baby has stopped coughing!” She hurried over to Carlos and threw herself at his feet, hugging her baby and moaning, “Thank you, God Carlos!”

“God Carlos,” Orocobix breathed devoutly, falling to his knees.

“What did you do?” asked Pedro.

“Who can say?” Carlos shrugged. “I was trying to terrify it so that it would not cough.”

The other woman, witnessing the miracle, came running back, still clutching her feverish baby, and cried, “You cured her baby. Why not mine?”

“What did she say?”

“I do not understand the words,” the boy replied, “but I think she wants you to also cure her baby.”

“Tell her to go away. I have no cure for fever.”

Carlos made a gesture at her to leave him alone, but the woman redoubled her cries. Brown faces popped out from the open doorways of the bohios like turtles from their shells to peer at the commotion.

Carlos was on the verge of kicking the wailing woman when he noticed a curious ornament she wore in her nose: it was a pin, yellow and shiny like gold.

He reached over and touched it, murmuring, “What is this, and where did you get it?”

Orocobix stared at the god. The woman hurriedly pulled the pin from her nose and handed it to the god, her hands shaking, blurting out, “Now will you cure my baby?”

“This is gold,” Carlos breathed with an expression of rapture.

“How can you tell?” the boy wondered.

“Any fool knows gold,” Carlos declared. “And I'm no fool. Ask the woman where she got it.”

“I cannot,” the boy Pedro said. “I do not know the words.”

Carlos worked some hurried mumbo-jumbo over the sick child then sent it away after trying to make its mother understand that it was cured. As soon as she reluctantly left, mumbling discontentedly to herself, he began to question Orocobix about where she could have found the gold.

Orocobix gradually understood. He pointed to the mountains looming in the distance and asked the god if he would like to go there.

“What did he say?” Carlos asked the boy.

The boy said he did not know.

“Of what use are you?” Carlos asked with exasperation. “You don't know gold. You don't understand these Indians. Of what use are you?”

The boy hung his head and said that he did not know.

His eyes burning with greed, Carlos exclaimed, “This is gold, don't you understand? Finding it can change our lives forever!”

“I can take you there, God Carlos,” Orocobix repeated.

 

* * *

 

Gold: nothing in all of God's creation was to Spanish explorers more precious. Gold was the object of their deepest cravings.

Yet you could not eat gold. You could not feed it to dogs. Cattle would not graze on it. Pigs would scorn it in their slop. Gold was soft like the belly of a matron and could not withstand heavy manual labor like iron. Colombian Indians used it to make fish hooks, ornaments, and hair tweezers. Later, it would be used to fill decayed teeth. But in 1520, the main use for gold was to make jewelry and trinkets.

The Spanish believed that great quantities of gold lay in the mountains of Jamaica. It was a rumor they had picked up from the other islands, and the attempt to find this phantom gold was a direct cause of the enslavement and eventual extermination of the Jamaican and other West Indian Arawaks. Linked to this futile search for gold was the creation of the evil system known as the
encomienda
.

Introduced in 1501 by Nicolas de Ovando during his term as governor of Hispaniola, an encomienda was the grant of a parcel of land along with absolute rights to the landowner to use its Indian residents as a source of free labor. In exchange, the landowners agreed to convert the Indians to Catholicism and thus save their immortal souls from the fires of hell. Instead of worshipping the wooden zemis of their forefathers, the Arawaks would be taught to kneel before Catholic zemis such as crucifixes and figurines of the saints, angels, and the Virgin Mary. It amounted to throne-sanctioned slavery.

Gold mining in those days required the painstaking sifting through of tons of alluvial deposits in the mountainous areas of the interior. Getting to these deposits meant slogging through dense forests and swamps, braving the heat and mosquitoes and attack by hostile tribes.

The method of mining the gold was crude and labor-intensive. Holes dug into the banks of a fast-flowing section of the river gradually accumulated deposits of dirt and sand, which were carefully sifted through for gold. It was exhausting drudgery that yielded specks of the valuable metal per day and often nothing at all for hours.

In some islands—Hispaniola, for example—this technique, although crude and backbreaking, did result in significant finds of gold. But Jamaica had no gold—not in the interior, not in the foothills, not on the coastline. What Carlos had seen in the woman's nose was an ornamental pin made of
guanin
, an alloy of copper and gold. It was not real gold.

But believing that gold lay strewn over the mountains like wild fruit falling from a government tree, Carlos was plotting to find some and smuggle it back to Spain. If he was successful, he would never be a poor man again. And the truth was that he was sick and weary of being poor and ignored like a stray animal. He hungered for respect, recognition, comfort—all the accoutrements that went with being rich. He wanted what de la Serena had but did not appreciate.

Carlos vowed that once he had the gold, he would not be cynical and indifferent to it like the old man was. He would attend Mass every day. He would make novenas, give money to the poor. He would stop pretending to be God, for he would be rich, and being rich was better than being God.

 

* * *

 

Carlos had not meant to stay longer than overnight in the Arawak village. But as soon as the women had left, Orocobix served the gods drink and fruit with an expression of devoutness that Carlos, in his vanity, could not resist.

“Already it is hot, God Carlos,” said Orocobix apologetically, “but the bohio is cool and comfortable.”

God Carlos did not understand. Neither he nor Pedro knew the time but the sun told them that they would have to hurry back to help with the careening.

Since they had slept in their clothes and lived in a time before dental hygiene was a daily ritual, it remained only for Carlos to strap the scabbard in which he kept his dagger around his right ankle and they were ready to return to the beached ship.

That one night at the village was all Carlos and the boy Pedro expected. But at the end of another long day of careening the
Santa Inez
, the two were walking off the beach with the other men when Orocobix glided out of the bush where he had been waiting all day.

“God Carlos!” he called out. The other men heard and looked knowingly from one to the other, but no one spoke a word within earshot of Carlos about the bizarre name the Indian was calling him.

And so Carlos and the boy Pedro went over to Orocobix and ended up passing another night in the village.

On this second night there was no areito—no communal celebration in which the whole tribe participated. Many of the bohios had open fires just outside their doorways around which families of Indians gathered talking among themselves or playing with their barkless dogs. There were sounds of laughter and a low background babble of soft, intermittent chit-chat that people all over the world use at the end of the day, and every now and again the wail of a hungry baby would pierce the blanket of darkness whose immensity was riddled by pinholes of light made by the scattered open fires, and a mother would dart into a thatched hut to feed her infant.

Some of the Indians curled up and dozed around the dancing sprigs of fire, occasionally stirring to take part in the chatter. There were no guards or sentries posted, and if the night occasionally crackled with an unrecognized sound, as all nights will do, here or there a man might sit up and look around or even pad to the edge of light and peer briefly into the darkness before returning to the fire. They behaved like a people without enemies.

That second night Carlos brought with him a crossbow from the bowels of the ship, for his was an untrusting heart. Using a hand crank, he armed the crossbow with an iron bolt and carried three spares with him.

Carlos and the boy Pedro sat outside the open doorway of Orocobix's bohio, having eaten their fill of cassava, fruit, and roasted fish. The village around them seemed to be floating on the smoky darkness, the individual thatched huts resembling a fleet of ships.

Sometimes an Indian would wander over to the fire and squat next to the gods and say a few words to them. It became evident to the Indians that the older god was not as friendly as the younger one, and many soon learned to leave Carlos in peace and say nothing to him except a cordial greeting.

In the dimness of the night, Carlos and the boy could make out the shape of the village, which was circular, with bigger rectangular bohios in the middle—where the cacique and his kinsmen lived—surrounded by smaller rounded ones occupied by ordinary people. By daylight, the gods could see the design of the village, the small stream that ran nearby, the neat gardens—
conucos—
that were planted with cassava, garlic, potatoes, yautias, and mamey. They discovered that part of the Indian village was staked off as a playing field called a
batey,
where a ceremonial game was played with a rubber ball. Carlos and the boy had never seen rubber before, for it was a material unknown to the Spaniards, and they marveled over it.