Taino (31 page)

“My parents died in the famine of Guarionex,” he has told me since. “They sent me ahead with my father's father and his two wives into these hills. My grandfather was a
cohobero
, who left me two
cemis
, the Sleeper, which is a warrior spirit, and the Baibrama, which is center of my altar, the
yucca
-maker who can can reach Yucahuguama Bagua Maócoroti, the one who can thus give answers to our human questions.”

“My father, too, was
cohobero
,” I said.

“I can tell,” he said.

“Guaikán worked the peace pacts with Guarionex,” Enriquillo said to the young
behike
. “He knew the generation we missed.”

“They all died,” the
behike
said. “But they still can help us.”

“We are going to talk to the Castilians,” Doña Mencia said. “We are going to make the peace.”

“Then their help we need very much,” the
behike
said, reaching behind to touch his
cohoba
bundle and gazing deep into my eyes.

One hundred thirty-two.
Early
cohobas
with Guarionex.

Twice during my years with Guarionex I partook of the
cohoba
. Once, it was early on, shortly after the Battle of la Vega, when he sent runners to get me. This was months after my return with the admiral from the Cuban voyage. With Caonabó in chains, a calm of sorts had been worked out, but it was not peace. Guarionex was troubled. Early understandings he had assumed from the Castilians were not forthcoming. Instead, a great battle had taken place, not directly against his villages, but many of his people, including his own son and hundreds more, had been slain or taken prisoner. Many lesser
caciques
were beheaded. He himself had been taken and nearly executed before his brothers petitioned the admiral and his soldier brother, Bartolomé, with great offers of tribute.

One hundred thirty-three.
Fasting and old stories of Taínos.

Fasting I am for four days, while the
behike
prepares
cohoba
snuff for me, making his prayers and burning for me. This is the outcome of our meeting with him. I am to snuff
cohoba
on behalf of Enrique, whose keen senses are too protected to partake of
cohoba
's dream world.

Cohoba
I know will be a difficult ordeal for me. It has been a long time, and I carry too much life, too many convoluted thoughts.
Cohoba
respects not the twists of a mind but attaches to the cool-headed, sincere intent, for it cannot avoid opening the trails of memory, leading the sight spirit into your dream world of blended time, where so much is possible. Already, the memories of earlier ceremonies remind me of the deepest pain, make me cry just to think about her. I think of
cohoba
and Guarionex and I think of her, my Ceiba, mother of my twins. Of all my loves and relatives, I have had her memory buried from my sight, a pain so deep it makes me sleep.

“I am your relative by marriage,” I told the young
behike
today. “Guarionex and his principal wife, Ainaicua, became my second family; his young sister, Ceiba, was my wife. We joined together in 1497.”

“I remember my grandfather's mention of them but vaguely,” Baiguanex said. “When I was very young, a little boy, he talked of
areitos
at Guarionex's main village. He said there was always a lot of food and a lot of singing.”

“Yes, Guarionex handled both food and
areito
with mastery,” I said. “His ni-Taínos held the oldest of our songs and dances. They were truly beautiful ceremonies, and the Ciguayos and even Caribs themselves coveted those songs and teachings. Guarionex was best at using the teachings as exchanges to develop his permanent relationships between Taíno and Ciguayo villages. But when he tried his mastery with the Castilians, it all went the wrong way.”

“With the sand-faced men everything is contrary,” the
behike
said. Since he is of Guarionex's line, I am glad to tell him this story, though I never met him or his family in those days.

Guarionex was tall among our people and quite stately. He was already an elder when I met him, and he moved slowly. His hair was very long, and his wives would braid it for him so that it reached his knees. They said that as a young man he had wrapped an enemy's neck in that braid, holding the man for capture. Even then, they said, Guarionex sang peace songs to the Kwaib raider as he held him.

Today, his great-nephew
behike
worked the fire for me, he purified me with smoke (I gave him the tobacco leaves Catalina gifted me) and heard my dreams. The
behike
is quick to grasp the way to go with a thing. He told me: “In the humility of your hunger, consider this: What makes them do what they do? Why are they the way they are?” He said then: “Remember well and tell your stories of Guarionex, and later we will call him and see what he can tell us.”

One hundred thirty-four.
Peace-pact ways of Guarionex.

Tonight, on the third full day of fast (only water am I allowed), I close my eyes and think of Guarionex and his times. I think of the peace pacts, how they were working. I think of the love and respect my people were instructed to carry for each other.

The main value of the peace pacts was to share the soil, share the bounties of the
yucca
and
maize
and other harvest cycles. This was the basis of our law. The world had so much for our people in those days, in the way we made our lives. We had great fishing, much fowl, iguana,
manatí
, and
hutía
, great tubers, great fruits, grasses and herbs, and, always, the wish for peace.

I state without hesitation: our Taíno ways sought peace. We did fight sometimes but briefly and with small consequence. Our people simply had not the wish to war. This is why I say: prior to the Castilians, Guarionex was defeating the Kwaib raiders with love—with food, and with our oldest of ceremonies, which they loved to receive, and, most of all, through the marriage of our sister-women, making marriages that would bind.

The Kwaib raiders, Carib or Caniba, as they might be called by the Castilians, and sometimes the Ciguayos, the mixed people, and even the migrating Macorixes, who were great archers—they could be mean and hard but, truly, they admired, many of them, admired the peaceful, prosperous way of the Taíno. Many a Kwaib captured among our people and married in found himself intrigued by our name for ourselves, Taíno, “those of the good,” and by our elders' argument for happy human existence based on good heart and dutiful mind. Honesty and generosity, amongst a clan or a village, and even with strangers, were greatly valued by our old ones. Thieves and liars were quickly purged among our people. Truly, a skinny reed across the door of a
bohío
was all the fortification needed against theft. Not all of us always lived up to those ancient ways, but it is true that these beliefs caressed our people's minds from childhood, and most of our people accepted the truth that good treatment begot good treatment. It was disrespectful and impolite to deny or to offend other people. The Kwaib could see the thinking in that, whenever they were broken out of their predatory track, and Guarionex, following the prophesy of his own grandfather, Caiçiju, made it his life's vision to interrelate them with the main
cacicasgos
of the Bohío island. Guarionex was a great man, I say.

It was Guarionex who, over the objections of the timid Guacanagari, worked through the marriage of Caonabó, the Ciguayo, with Anacaona, a queen of exemplary Taíno line. It was Guarionex who gifted the other Ciguayo
cacique
, Mayobanex, with two important
areitos
, something the Ciguayo treasured and never forgot. It was Guarionex who was working intermarriages between that same Mayobanex and Cotubanamá, the Taíno
cacique
of Higuey. It was Guarionex who offered Columbus to take in a simpleton friar named Ramon Pané, who was assigned, as the admiral put it, “to gather Taíno idolatries and to impart the true Christian beliefs.”

One hundred thirty-five.
Friar Pané,
el terco
, the busybody priest who got many good people killed.

I would tell here about the
cohoba
ritual, how Guarionex ran them, but it does not feel right to do so yet.

Yesterday afternoon they accosted me, many young men who gathered from several camps. “We respect you are fasting, but your stories we would gladly hear.” So I told them about Pané and how he introduced the gospel of the Holy Trinity on our lands, the Christian evangelism Friar Las Casas talks about in such great affirmation.

Father Pané came to the islands with the toughest Columbus brother, Bartolomé, the
adelantado
(forward commander), who arrived in Española shortly after our departure for Cuba. A man of action and well titled, Bartolomé Columbus imposed rigid controls on behalf of the admiral. He fixed on Guarionex's obvious prestige among all
caciques
on the island and was equally preoccupied by the open rebellion of a Castilian captain named Francisco Roldán, Don Christopheren's earlier choice for mayor of the Isabela town and a thoroughly soured man. While pursuing the truculent Roldán, who confiscated many horses and cattle from the royal ranch, it was the
adelantado
's own idea to place the little friar, Pané, in the village of
cacique
Guarionex to see what he could find out.

Pané had an obvious facility for learning our language and so commanded the ear of the
adelantado
much the same as did I the admiral's ear. He was a real pouter, though, always silently angry and vindictive about something or other. Both Don Christopherens and the
adelantado
gave Pané instructions. The admiral asked him to gather stories of our ancients, and he did write a small book that Las Casas has shown me. However, for the
adelantado
, Pané reported on the movements of warrior groups and the general opinions of the
caciques
, particularly Guarionex, about the Castilians.

As we were just now back from the trip to the southern coast of Cuba, during which the admiral's health deteriorated, I was still close to him. For weeks after the curse of Bayamo and Macaca, as we sailed the many cays and bays of southern Cuba, he caught not a good sleep, reaching points of exhaustion and a clairvoyance truly astounding. At times I saw him stand on deck in bedclothes, slight from lack of food, a constant vomit in his condition, red hair flaming up like fire. More than once, as blackened clouds of the Caribbean came out of nowhere at him, snapping their thunders, I saw the head of our giant reptile mother, Iguanaboina, wide as a storm cloud and as blackish gray, its eyes flashing on Columbus's neck and shoulders, hissing and hissing, and I knew he would never recover from our old men's curses. He did slowly get his health back, but his spirit never returned to him, and he was increasingly a vacant man even as his intellect continued to command him. For five months, while I helped nurse the admiral's bouts of delirium after our return to Isabela, Pané was assigned to live with Guarionex.

Monthly, Pané returned to inform his patrons. Often these sessions occurred at the admiral's bedside. Guarionex had installed the friar in his own
bohío
, where he learned some Taíno language, conversed with elders, both men and women, and wrote down some things he was told about our
areitos
and old stories. When he would come back to report to the Columbus brothers, he complained about having to live in dirt “with Indians,” who were all miserable beings, except for his own servant, who fiercely accepted the Word of God.

I remember Pané's reports, how he mocked everything. Pané particularly vilified the mother of Guarionex, an old clan woman who could see into his eyes and disliked him intensely, as he constantly denigrated the Taíno food (when she fed him iguana soup, he spit it out) and scoffed at her reverence for the
cemis
in her home. I state further here that it was Pané who was responsible, out of his own vindictiveness, for starting the first war on Guarionex.

One hundred thirty-six.
A Castilian army readies for battle.

Truly, Guarionex's subchiefs all wanted war on the Castilians, but the old
cacique
held out for his peace pacting, accommodating Pané and accepting the imposition of the gold tribute, even though its terms were brutal. Caonabó's old villages were fully under tribute at that time. Guacanagari, as principal ally of the admiral, provided food from his villages and more than a thousand healthy men to the
adelantado
, who immediately set them to train for war. Under Hojeda and others, these Indian troops of Guacanagari quickly learned the use of the phalanx as tactic of attack; they learned to wield cutlass and sword and were goaded and trained to attack a body of enemies fiercely, with full anger and intent to kill. “Blood is good,” they were told. “Cut deep and leave no life.” The captains had under them now a well-organized force of four to seven hundred seasoned Castilian troops, including several mobile pieces of field artillery, eighty men with harquebus, eighty mounted cavalry, and about twenty mastiffs commanded by a troupe of eight efficient handlers. The Indian troops were trained to follow Castilian squads in frontal attacks.

Guarionex worked to keep the peace, but Caonabó's three brothers gathered an army, intent on freeing their powerful sibling, who was in chains. The prominent question among Indians that season was: Why do the Castilians continue to stay? Will they ever return to their lands? For long months, no ships entered or departed from the harbor at Isabela, a place of continual pestilence, and the injuries to Indians continued to mount.