The Moor's Account (27 page)

They did not come with me.

Why?

They did not want to.

Are they coming in the spring?

How should I know? I did not ask them.

What have you been eating in your camp?

Oysters.

But the oyster beds are mostly empty now.

We ate fish.

Fish? Where did you get a fishing pole?

We made spears.

We did not know you could fish with spears. Why did you not return earlier?

Why are you asking me so many questions?

We just want to know. We want some fish, too.

Do you think I am lying?

You need not be so prickly. Where are the others?

They have the fever.

But you said they did not want to come. Which is it?

I know not.

Ruíz, where are the others?

I ate them! There, I said it, is this what you wanted to hear?

Gasps of horror greeted this admission. The men stopped their bantering to stare at Ruíz. It seemed hardly possible that the great evil he had just confessed had not resulted in some sort of physical transformation.
His skin looked ruddy and his beard was flecked with mud, but otherwise he looked much the same as before, which is to say like an ordinary member of our expedition.

In a low voice, he continued: After we went away, Palacios became sick with the bowel disease and died. We were going to bury him, but then Lopes said we should just eat his flesh. We had not had anything to eat in five or six days. I said no. I swear to God Almighty, I said no. But Lopes did it anyway. And I was so hungry. So hungry. And then Lopes killed Sierra. And Corral after him.

Ruíz was the last to partake of human flesh and, having no other means to feed himself, he had decided to return to our camp.

We ought to kill this cannibal, said the carpenter.

We cannot kill a man, Father Anselmo said. That would be murder.

He killed the others, the carpenter said. And ate them. He cannot be trusted with the living.

In the end, we could only banish Ruíz from our camp. We told him that if he were to try to rejoin us we would surely kill him before he had a chance to kill one of us. Ruíz was a soldier from Galicia and he had not, to my knowledge, ever given an inclination toward cannibalism, but such was the wretchedness that the Narváez expedition forced upon him. It was after learning of this unforgivable sin that we took to calling the island on which we had landed the Island of Misfortune.

How the Capoques found out about what Ruíz had done, I never knew. It seems to me now that, just as I had learned the Capoque tongue through my exposure to it, the Capoques, too, had learned the Spanish language by listening to it. I seem to remember that Kwachi and Elenson had been with us on the night Ruíz returned and confessed his crime. They must have heard him. So great was their horror at the sacrifice of human flesh that, for weeks afterward, they refused to have anything to do with us and would not let us even enter their village. Diego and I waited for Kwachi by the river, where we begged him to plead with the tribe on our behalf.

Tell them we are not all like Ruíz, Diego said.

We are not cannibals, I said, we do not eat each other. Tell them that.

But Kwachi called to his dog and returned whence he came. We were never able to convince him to bring us back to the village.

The bowel disease combined with constant deprivation to decimate
our ranks. By the end of that cold winter, twenty-three Castilians, one Angolan, and three Portuguese lay buried in the clearing south of the river, their long journey to conquer this terra firma having at last come to an end. Only twelve men survived: Andrés Dorantes, Diego Dorantes, Alonso del Castillo, Pedro de Valdivieso, Ricardo Gutiérrez, the friar Anselmo de Asturias, Álvaro Fernándes, Felipe Benítez, Jorge Chaves, Pedro Estrada, Diego de Huelva, and this servant of God, Mustafa ibn Muhammad. But more than one hundred and twenty Capoques perished during that same interval, and were buried in ceremonies whose terrible noise carried all the way to our camp, reminding us of the evil we had brought with us to the island and which we would yet carry with us when we left.

O
N THE RARE OCCASIONS
when Dorantes or Castillo had gone to visit Cabeza de Vaca in the Han village, I had stayed behind. I was not fond of the treasurer. He displayed an unflagging disregard for men of lower station—not unusual among noblemen, of course, but in his case the disregard was particularly pronounced. And there was, too, his support of every one of Narváez's foolish decisions, which, given our present condition, I could neither overlook nor forget. But now spring was here, and in order to make plans for our joint departure from the Island of Misfortune, I agreed to go with Dorantes and Castillo to the Han village.

The huts were similar to those of the Capoques, but they were much smaller and squarer, which gave them the appearance of little squat boxes. A Han youngster, wearing an officer's boots, had cut the head of a sea turtle and now was hanging it to bleed. A few paces away, a woman was repairing the roof of her home with the help of her children. A brown dog slept in a patch of sunlight, flies hovering above him. I could not hear a river, and wondered briefly where the Han procured their drinking water; the location of their camp did not seem to be as advantageous as that of the Capoques, who had established themselves near several sources of water. The entire camp was quiet, as if its people were away on a hunting expedition. A pestilential smell hung over the place.

We found Cabeza de Vaca at the far end of the square, sitting on his haunches, so occupied with skinning a squirrel that he did not hear us. He held the brown head in his left hand and with his right slowly ran the knife between the meat and the fur, with the careful, deliberate movements
of a man who had not been born to such a task, but enjoyed doing it well. When he finally noticed us, he poured water over his hands and, wiping them on a loincloth cut from his own doublet, stood up to greet us. I could have counted his ribs had I been inclined to, so thin had he become. His eyes sunk inside his face and his thin yellow beard pointed like an arrow down his chest.

Presently Cabeza de Vaca handed the animal to a handsome woman, who smiled when she noticed us. He shook hands with Dorantes and Castillo, but only raised his chin in my direction. Dorantes reported the most recent deaths in our group, and the names of the twelve who were still alive. The bowel disease had spread much faster in Cabeza de Vaca's group, however, and only three of his men remained: the notary Jerónimo de Albaniz, a settler by the name of Lope de Oviedo, and Cabeza de Vaca himself.

Castillo said he would be forced to trade the last of his possessions for dried meat we could take on the journey to Pánuco, but because the Capoques were no longer excited by the novelty of Castilian items, the amount of meat he hoped to receive in exchange for them would likely not last our party more than a day or two. How much food do you think you can bring for the journey? Castillo asked.

I am not going with you, Cabeza de Vaca replied.

What?

I am not going.

I mean—why. Why are you not coming with us?

We have not had any rain in three weeks, Dorantes added. We need not wait any longer.

It is not the weather.

Then what is it?

I have a wife now. I cannot leave her behind.

My gaze drifted to the handsome woman standing behind him. Her hair was glossy in the sunlight and her face had that rare pairing of grit and grace. She wore a necklace made of white seashells interspersed with red doublet buttons, a simple yet appealing jewel. Though Cabeza de Vaca had his back to her, the bond between the two of them was obvious. I thought of what the elders teach us: love is like a camel's hump, for it cannot be disguised.

You already have a wife, Castillo said. In Jerez.

Not like her.

But your wife is a lady! Have you thought of her at all?

Castillo, you know nothing about the lady in Jerez. Leave her out of this.

You would desert your own kind for this Indian? Dorantes asked, casting a disbelieving glance at the woman.

Cabeza de Vaca shot his friends a dark look. I will not leave her.

Then bring her if you must, Dorantes said. But come with us.

I already told you, I am not going. We do not know how far Pánuco is. Do you believe we will survive another long journey through this land? We will die in the wilderness, and no one will ever know what happened to us.

This woman has poisoned your mind.

On the contrary. She has taken the poison out.

I leaned on my walking staff. Beside me, Castillo and Dorantes had fallen into an uncomprehending silence, but I could see that Cabeza de Vaca loved this woman and that his heart was filled with yearning for her. I knew only too well what that felt like, and so I was drawn to him as I might to a fellow sufferer, a sentiment that surprised and befuddled me.

What about Albaniz and Oviedo? Dorantes asked. Do they have Indian wives, too?

There is something wrong with Albaniz, Cabeza de Vaca replied. But you can try talking to him if you like. And Oviedo is still recovering from the bowel disease. If they wish to go, I will not stop them.

We found Albaniz wandering through the village, trailed by two scrawny dogs, faithful in the way of mangy animals. His beard had grown bushy and he was thinner now, but otherwise he looked much the same as before. He wore a blue cotton doublet and black breeches. In his right hand was a short stick, which he used as a cane. Slung across his chest was his leather satchel, filled with the requisitions, contracts, and petitions he had been entrusted with when the armada left Seville, but also with the names the governor had given to the places, people, and animals of the new world—Portillo and Santa María, Pablo and Kamasha, lagartos and castores.

Albaniz, Dorantes called. The notary smiled when his name was called. With a wave of the hand, he invited us to sit with him on Indian benches that had been placed under an oak tree. He leaned forward on his cane
and rested his chin on his hands. We are crossing to the mainland, Dorantes explained. We are going to Pánuco. Come with us.

Albaniz smiled, baring teeth that had turned mossy green. Adios, he said.

No, Mochuelo, Dorantes said. He stabbed his forefinger in Albaniz's chest and then turned it back against himself. You come with us.

Adios.

Are you deaf? Castillo said. We want you to come with us.

Albaniz smiled heartily, as though the words Castillo had spoken were some great joke, to which only he was privy. With his cane, he scribbled something in the dirt—words in a language I could not read, though the Castilians later said that it was no language at all, just gibberish.

Oh, Lord, Dorantes said. The man is mad. He ran his hand on his forehead, as if he were having trouble keeping up with the thoughts inside. Let us find Oviedo.

Oviedo was in the woods behind the village. He sat with an old, toothless woman, weaving what looked like a basket. Although he smelled terrible and his clothes were filthy, something about the way he sat suggested that he was in fine health and would be able to walk. But when Dorantes explained our plan, Oviedo refused to come. He said that our fate on the mainland might not be better than here on this island and could very well be worse, and that in any case he was finished risking life on a journey to someplace we were not certain we could find.

Why was it that Cabeza de Vaca's men agreed so readily with each other, while those of us from the Dorantes group agreed on the opposite? It was as though we belonged to different tribes now and could think no differently than the clan we called our own. In the winter, when the men all around us were dying of the bowel disease, I had heard Dorantes wonder aloud, around the campfire, why it was that this land refused us, why it would not grant us a reprieve. Our sins cannot be washed away so easily here, someone had replied, we have to go back to Castile. I felt much the same. My heart ached with the desire to return home to the country where I belonged, where everything would once again make sense. But maybe Cabeza de Vaca and the others believed the opposite. Maybe they believed that if they became people of this land, living alongside its natives, they could find some semblance of peace.

In the end, Castillo had to give up his beloved game of chess, Dorantes
his marten and ermine cloak, and I my scissors, in exchange for passage to the mainland on a canoe. I sat at the fore of the dugout, so eager was I to begin the journey out of the island. When we reached the other shore, I was the first man to step off, and turned around to help Dorantes; he looked up at me gratefully, his eyes shielded from the sun by my shadow. As the twelve of us gathered on the shore of the mainland, I realized with a start that, although no rope tied our hands and feet together, I was as bound to these Castilians as I had been to the Barbary slaves under the colorful glass windows of a church in Seville, all those years ago.

Across the sky, groups of geese flew north in formation. We walked in twos and threes, with our shadows in front of us made soft and shapeless by the passing clouds. The oak trees all around us were heavy with spring leaves. Bees hummed among the wild flowers. The wilderness that had once seemed so alien to us had grown familiar and the calls of animals in the distance no longer alarmed us. When we came upon a river, none of the Castilians thought to give it a name, I noticed; they had stopped thinking of themselves as unchallenged lords of this world, whose duty it was to put it into words. Later, much later, whenever we spoke of this first river, we called it the Primero Río—not Río Primero, but simply the Primero Río, in order to distinguish it from the other rivers we would yet cross.

Because the Primero Río was too deep to cross on foot, we all agreed to build two small rafts—each one would carry about half of our number. With only one ax, the work was slow, but no one complained. This changed once Fernándes the carpenter started tying the logs together. You are using too much horsehair, we said. What if we come across another river tomorrow?