Taino (2 page)

Notes

1. José Barreiro, “View from the Shore: Toward an Indian Voice in 1992,”
Northeast Indian Quarterly
(1990).

2. Bartolomé de Las Casas,
History of the Indies
. Ed. Andree M. Collard. New York: Harper and Row, 1971.

3. Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo,
Historia general y natural de las Indias
. Asunción: Editorial Guaraní, 1956.

4. Ferdinand Colón,
The Life of the Admiral Christopher Columbus by his Son Ferdinand
. Trans. Benjamin Keen. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1959.

5. Michele de Cúneo, “Letter of the Second Voyage,”
Universidad de la Habana
, 1972.

6. Pedro Mártir de Anglería,
Décadas del nuevo mundo
. Trans. Joaquín Torres Asensio. Buenos Aires: Editorial Bajel, 1944.

7. Samuel Morison,
The European Discovery of America: The Southern Voyages
. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974.

8. Alejo Carpentier,
El arpa y la sombra, Obras completas de Alejo Carpentier
. Ed. Maria Luisa Puga. Coyoacán, Mexico: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1979.

Folio I

Our Reality and Theirs

The good friar Las Casas requests my witness of the early years… A reason to remember so much pain… An introduction of myself… The good friar's argument… The story of Enriquillo… My own truth I pledge… What the friar wants… Starting out… I begin with the return… A route home denied… The trip to Cuba, barbecuing on the beach… Bayamo and Macaca: not a discourse but a curse… The Castilians change everything… The admiral is cursed… Hard to explain our Indian religion, even to a good friar… Enriquillo's conditions and vigilance… The Bible guides Las Casas…

April 12, 1532

One.
The good friar Las Casas requests my witness of the early years.

The Castilians call this the Year of Our Lord 1532, and today they call the twelfth day of the month of April. This is the day I start.

I write from a small square room in the convent of the Dominican Order, in Santo Domingo de la Española, where I have resided for six years. These journal pages, where I will inscribe my memories, are a manifest of the kindness of a great man, a priest of the Catholic faith, Don Bartolomé de Las Casas, of whom I am a grateful servant and to whom I am greatly in debt for my life and my well-being.

I have had a quill pen, acquired many long years ago, and ink, too, I obtained on my own. But paper has been nearly impossible to come by. The great man of robes, just a few days ago, gifted me with a sheet-book of paper, blank pages for me to fill. Now I have it and today I begin to scratch these Castilian symbols on the page, these drawings that talk. For that, and for his unceasing labor on behalf of my people, I am very grateful to His Eminence. I add here, of course, a certainty: that as always in my dealings with the Castilians, the ones my elders called the covered men, I am aware that the friar has a reason for granting me paper. Don Bartolomé writes now the story of Don Christopherens and the taking of the islands. He requests that I put down on paper the stories of my times with the admiral.

“Write it now before your mind forgets,” the friar told me. “However you want, what you remember, note it down. The actual landfall—how the admiral first set foot on the New World. You were there, Dieguillo.” And this is true. I am the only one left who remembers the first landing, from the beach on my home island, my
bohío
of Guanahaní. And I do remember. I remember the ships, their sails like giant gulls; I remember the strange men with coverings like crabs and hairs like frayed rope on their faces. I do, I remember even the clouds, how they formed and what they said to us that day. I remember now, I feel now, a great sadness about that day. It pains me now as I relive it, reminded to remember it by a great man that I love as I come to hate, every day more and more, the twisted ways of his race. I am pleased to do this for Don Bartolomé, though I did warn him he might not like my words.

April 14, 1532

Two.
A reason to remember so much pain.

Much too busy with convent duties for two suns, today I rush to continue this work, and I am quickly flushed in the greenery of my memories. In this little room that the monks have allowed me, stiff-legged as I am, soft stomach, aching teeth, I still have my mind. For six years, as we have shared an existence in this convent's stone buildings, the friar has asked many questions, bringing up old times and writing down my stories. But now I feel the freedom of my hand, I draw my words on this paper, these words that will carry and be read by others.

I put pen to paper, close my eyes and I am there, almost forty years ago, but now fresh in my sudden memory, during those first days when close behind young Rodrigo, my new friend and captain's servant, I snuck under the poop deck of the
Santa Maria
(
Marie Galante
, the admiral always called her), anchored still on the small bay of my home island of Guanahaní, right into his master room. The admiral was bent over a table and quietly Rodrigo and I watched him from behind. He never took notice. That was the first time I saw him scratching the ink marks in his ship's log, engrossed in his mind, resembling one of our
behikes
in full ceremonial prayer. That act of the admiral's I pondered even at my early age. Later, as I learned their different ways, this writing on paper that could be taken over long distances and read directly again and again appealed to me. I think on that: that I, too, now can write, and it warms me.

I confess to the sky and I hope the friar can forgive me when he reads these words. I do intend to tell, to write on paper, what I did see and how I do see it. For the good father and for whomever else might read these pages, I will stall my anger, restrain my hate, retain my
cagüayo
lizard spirit, my revolving eye, the coolness in my body to see them clearly, and I will write what I have learned of their actions, their speech, during the early years and on to the present. But I confess: I am no longer enchanted by anything Castilian, anything Iberian, Portuguese, anything Genoese, or whatever else they have across the great open waters. Even as I write, and freely, I still ponder: How will these, my own words scratched on paper, how will they free my spirit? Or will they capture my thoughts, my heart? Will they betray me?

I am nervous to write of those times and those places where once flourished my Taíno relatives. The wounds of these forty years cut deep into my heart and so will mostly these pages. So I sit and I cry, and hurriedly before he returns, I sit down to pen these few words of a beginning, on my own. Many things I can say about the admiral that he will not like. And many things I can tell, too, about the great world of my ancestors, the people of the islands that the Castilians call Antilles but which to the eye of my mind I see as our long Cuban lizard (Caymán-Cubanakán), the land of great mountains (Haití-Bohío), the center of dancing (Borikén) and the little Carib turtles,
hicoteas
, in our language, arching south to the great forest.

And I start with this: What I do for this friar, our great defender, I do because I know what he endures for my people. But it is for my people, too, for that world in which we lived and which we lost, that I want to write also what I know of who we were, how we felt and believed, and what has happened. I want to be this friar's witness, by Yucahuguama Bagua Maórocoti, great spirit of my ancestors, I do, and even by the baby Jesus, I do, but in my witness I will write for you, my Taíno-ni-taíno, natural
guaxeri-ti
relatives, for those of you who will survive, for those of you in times to come who will remember that your fathers and your mothers, your grandfathers and grandmothers were a people.

April 15, 1532

Three.
An introduction of myself.

My Christian name in the Castilian language, from the time of my adoption by the admiral, is Diego or Dieguillo Colón. Fifty-two is the count of my rains. Of origin, I am from Guanahaní, the first land sighted in my world by the covered men of Castile. I am of the Taíno people and in my native language my name is Guaikán—the remora fish. My mother was Nánache, from the canoe-building clan of the
yukaieke
, or village, called Old Guanahaní. My father had several names but was most prominently called Cohobanax, after his functions and title in the council of the Cohoba. He was from our island's central village, called Guanahanínakan, but he lived on the coast with my mother's people, who esteemed him as a fisherman of great skill.

I think now of my father's death, only weeks before the admiral's arrival, in a moment of joy, climbing lazily on the overlapping branches of a palm tree, reaching over to the tree of the fruit called
mamey
, his tight muscular body, like the great
mahá
snake, with a stick he struck down two, three bundles of ripe
mamey
. Then, stretching for one more fruit, arm extended, body extended along thick, broad leaves like a brown
cagüayo
lizard, a sharp crack and how he dropped, long and hard and with no sound, all silent but the snap, the crack when the flat branch broke, as he dropped fast and hit rock.

My first sadness comes back to me now, the worst and best, and I must stop. Thinking of my parents, of their generation and their elders, fills me with longing.

This is all in me. I pull away now, lift the pen. I leave my father be. Slowly, I will approach it. There is so much. Again today my mind swims with colors and faces, turns of words and the many smells of the sea. The friar's request has filled me with force, my chest is warm and my mind turns. Even the pain of my right side, past injuries I carry from the time of my betrayal, when even his name that I still carry could not protect me, even the old pain that stiffens my arm and leg, even my tired limbs, have warmed so that my heart can almost feel glad.

April 21,1532

Four.
The good friar's argument.

At lunch today the good friar took his meal, as I usually do, with the Indian servants of our convent. We shared with him our
cassabe
tort,
axiaco
soup, and a fresh red snapper caught out in his canoe in the early morning by young Silverio. Don Bartolomé comes to eat with us quite regularly. Today, before taking seat, he was already agitated with our cause. As part of his prayer, he said, “Almighty God, help us condemn the
encomienda
system, brutal destroyer of our good Indian brothers.”

The good friar is very forceful. Once he intends to go in a certain direction, he will not be dissuaded. Every day, for his ideas about our Indian people, he suffers. Today, I watched him mop around his soup bowl with a piece of
cassabe
as we heard the first yeller. The shouting came from the stone road that runs down the hill by the convent, and you could hear the culprit hurrying by. “Las Casas, the great whoreson! Boogs the she-dogs and their sons!” he yelled.

Two or three come by every day. They shout their insults to the friar and run away before the younger monks can have at them. Most are sons or guards of
encomenderos
. They hate Don Bartolomé. Once, he was in the vegetable garden, picking our Taíno peppers that he loves so much, when several of the criminals pelted him with stones. They truly hate him and I believe would kill him if given a chance.

As usual, today Don Bartolomé sat quietly through the insults, his hawk's face and nose tilted down over his bowl with only the slightest of furrows lining his ample forehead. Two monks came back from a brief chase, empty-handed, and Don Bartolomé ignored them. He put his plate away and requested I follow him to my little room.

“How is the writing?” he asked, walking straight to the window as I closed my door.

“I am only starting,” I said.

“I need your memory,” he said. “I intend to sail to the kingdom soon. I will pretend to go to Puerto Rico. But from there I will go before the court in Castile. The king will hear my case.”

“Why now, Father?” I asked.

“These bastards have no backbone. The whole island is terrified.”

He spoke the truth. As we stood and talked today in the convent at Santo Domingo, a young countryman of mine, Enriquillo, the warrior chief of the Bahuruku mountains, remains at large. For thirteen years, Enriquillo and his warriors, among them his war captain, Tamayo, have been free in remote camps in the southwest mountains of the island.

“Enriquillo's warriors attacked a farm this side of La Maguana just eight days ago,” Father Las Casas continued. “The governor is trying to keep it quiet, but four soldiers were killed and their weapons seized.”

I asked the good friar if perhaps now the king might not be angrier with the rebel
cacique
, thus complicating his mission.

“The king will be upset. But with whom? Enriquillo's case is now well-known. Everyone wants the mountains pacified, including the king. My intent is to remind him that Enriquillo is a baptized Indian, a Christian. And he is at war for very good reasons. Others have argued with the king on that account. It is the brutal abuse of the
encomienda
that caused Enriquillo to war.”

The good father was right and as always I was glad to hear him say it, but what he said pricked me. Indeed, Enriquillo was baptized. But, this I do not see as so great an achievement.

I know the story of Enriquillo. I knew his father and his uncles, including his great aunt, the
cacica
Anacaona, hereditary tribal mother of the Xaraguá region, sister of the wise old
cacique
Bohekio and widow of the feared warrior
cacique
Caonabó. All are now dead, victims of betrayal, victims of slaughter, almost thirty years ago.

“At the court they call you idolaters, heathen, barbaric people,” he pressed me. “I want to argue that your people's beliefs were actually a form of Christianity, that you worshipped under similar ideas. Do you see? As Christians we are to conquer and war upon heathens at will; but a people who have had a measure of Christianity can command more consideration…”

I nodded, though not with the vigor he wanted.

“Yes or no?” he persisted. “Do you agree with what I maintain, that our best argument to the court is on religious grounds?”

“In truth, Father,” I told him. “I do not hope so much for that argument as you do.”

The good friar meant to press on. “I may convince the monarchs by asserting that your own religious beliefs before our coming are not so different from the Christian catechism,” he said.

Deeply in my heart of palm I refuse to accept this argument from Don Bartolomé. I like what he tries to do, how tirelessly he argues on our behalf, but it angers something deep in me.

“The closer to Christianity you are, the more the kings must care for you. Among all the abhorrent practices of your old
behikes
, I know some Christian notions were apparent. The idea of Heaven and Hell, for instance, maybe thoughts about a celestial trinity, things like this, which could lead to a king's recognition. A royal declaration is what your people need.”