The Moor's Account (18 page)

M
Y MISERY
,
OR AT LEAST
my solitude, was somewhat alleviated a year after my arrival in Seville, when my master brought Elena home. The price of slaves had fallen so much that spring that Rodriguez had decided to buy his wife her own bondswoman, someone who could help her with the housework and care for the children. He said that all the noblewomen of the city had slaves, whom they liked to dress up in finery and parade like thoroughbreds when they took their evening walks along the promenade. His wife ought to do the same. In this way, he said, she would meet and befriend ladies of the nobler classes.

And so Elena stood where I had once stood, three or four paces away from the lemon tree in the courtyard, submitting herself to the examination of Dorotea Rodriguez. Elena was small and finely built, with braided hair and high cheekbones. The tunic she wore did not disguise the beautiful shape of her hips or her graceful legs. But she seemed quite unaware of the world around her; she stared blankly ahead, lost in her thoughts, as though her entrance into the Rodriguez house were happening to someone else. Heavens, the mistress said, her face tightened into a scowl. Look at the filthy rag she wears.

I will bring you some serge from the store.

Serge? No, two or three varas of plain woolen cloth will do.

Very well.

And her nails are dirty.

She was at auction, Dorotea. What do you expect?

I hope she is not diseased.

She just needs a good scrub.

Good thing she is in Seville, then. Is she baptized?

Why do you ask questions to which you already know the answers?

Because if she is going to care for my children every day, I need to be certain. I will send her to Father Bartolomé for proper instruction this very week. I will not take any chances.

Will you also make sure to teach her how to cook? Or better yet, no. I have had quite enough of that dry roast you make.

Ordinarily, my mistress deposited my bowl of food, when she remembered
it, on the red tiled floor outside the kitchen door, but once Elena joined the household and took over the cooking, my dinner appeared in its usual spot with comforting regularity. I fell into the habit of waiting by the door for it. One day, Elena motioned for me to come inside. We ate together on the sisal mat that served as her bed, under the high, barred windows of the kitchen. As she dipped her spoon into her bowl, I noticed on the back of her right hand a small tattoo in the shape of a comb, its teeth perfectly aligned.

We did not speak much at first, because our native tongues were barely intelligible to one another—she was from the land farther south than Mazghan, farther even than Mugadir, from a small town on the bank of the River of Gold, in Singhana—but eventually she learned enough Spanish to enable us to hold simple conversations, about an order that needed to be carried out or an errand that had to be done. One day, I asked her if Elena was her real name. No, she said. She seemed to hesitate, and then she whispered: It is Ramatullai.

I repeated the name out loud—Ramatullai, Ramatullai, Ramatullai—so surprised was I by the inflection the Arabic word had taken in her native language. What had sounded unfamiliar turned out to be familiar, and this discovery filled me with an unexpected and immense joy. My name is Mustafa, I said.

Like my father, she said. She smiled for the first time, revealing a set of perfectly aligned teeth. Her features moved with a grace I felt privileged to witness. And you work with him at the shop? she asked.

It was always like this when she spoke of our master—she said he or him, but she never said his name. If she happened to be in the patio when he came out in the morning, she would greet him with a proper Señor, but in her mouth the word seemed to suggest anything but deference.

I work for him, I said. Not with him.

Did you ever see a customer—like this? She stood up and walked the length of the kitchen with her shoulders hunched forward, her hand grasping an imaginary cane.

A hunchback?

Yes. With a hole here. She pointed to her chin.

A dimple, you mean. No, I have not seen him. (By then, as I said, I had lost interest in my master's trade and did not pay close attention to what happened in the shop.) Why do you ask?

My daughter Amna—she was sold to a man like that.

You have a daughter?

I have two.

I had been so taken with her that I had not paused to think that she might already belong to someone else, that she had had a life of her own before coming to the Rodriguez house. But, out of pride, I was unwilling to show that the revelation had disappointed me. Instead I asked, What happened to your other daughter?

I was sold and taken away before I could see what happened to her, she said.

For a moment, the vacant look I had seen on the first day returned to her eyes. She stood there, surrounded by pots and pans, with onions and garlic hanging in braids from the rafters, and it was as if she was not with me. Her soul had traveled up and out of the kitchen, flown across Triana, and now hovered somewhere over the marketplace, searching for a trace of her daughters. Was there a greater pain in the world, I wondered, than having your babies taken away from you?

At length, the spirit returned to her. Quietly, I asked: What about your husband?

They killed him, she said. He tried to fight one of the Portuguese.

I let out a breath—I had not realized I had been holding it—and leaned back against the tiled wall. If I see this hunchback at the shop, I said, I will tell you.

She looked at me with such gratitude that I felt as if the entire world were grateful to me. I resolved then and there to keep a close eye on all the merchants, in the hope that I might see her smile again.

I finished my bowl of lentils and was about to stand up when she took it from me. Sit. Sit a while longer.

While she washed our bowls I told her about my family—I felt fortunate that they had been spared the fate that had befallen me. At least I did not have to worry about them and wonder where they were. The next day, for the first time since my arrival in Seville, I did not dread my return to the closet behind the kitchen.

A settler—I never learned his name, I believe he was a butcher or a barber, someone unused to long marches in the damp heat—came down with a fever. A ride, he asked, going from horseman to horseman. Señor, please let me ride with you. But none of the officers allowed it; they were afraid of whatever afflicted him. It was only after he fell to his knees, unable to stop himself from soiling his clothes, that one of the captains ordered that he be carried on a packhorse. At the next river crossing, the settler asked to be lowered into the water, to clean himself or perhaps to cool down, but even so his fever did not break. Blood ran from his nose, trickling down on a shirt that had long ago lost its color to the dirt and the mud. He stared from unseeing eyes at those who came to bring him food, or pray with him, or just look at him, as if to reassure themselves about their good fortunes.

Perhaps those who came to console themselves by looking at the sick man were wrong; at least he, in his delirium, did not fear the Apalaches who had been following our procession ever since we began our march to Aute. The Apalaches were such skilled archers that their bows seemed to us like limbs, parts of their bodies they could use with unconscious ease. They could shoot arrows from a great distance with perfect aim and were familiar with the terrains we were traversing—the green, flat lands strewn with swamps, rivers, and fallen trees, and filled with strange animals.

Whenever we crossed a swamp, burdened by our loads and fearful of the lagartos, the Apalaches struck us, succeeding each time in inflicting some harm on our company. They killed a man in armor by aiming for his
throat and forced a porter to leave behind one case of ammunition and two cases of tools as he ran for cover. They wounded a horse when it was wading through a swamp. They kidnapped one of the Indian captives the governor had brought from Portillo and, seeing the look of terror on the prisoner's face, I was not at all sure that his new jailers meant him well.

Then came the day when Gonzalo Ruíz broke down. Ruíz was a rough soldier, hard to impress and even harder to scare. During the journey across the Ocean of Fog and Darkness, he had been one of two men in charge of securing the lower deck of the Gracia de Dios. I remember that, about a month into our voyage, he accused the stable boy, a shy lad from the Gold Coast, of stealing a barrel of wine. A bitter fight between them had ensued, which Señor Dorantes had been forced to break up. The stable boy was put in irons for three days, a judgment that kindled in me a simmering aversion for Ruíz. But, aside from the usual grumbling of soldiers, Ruíz had not attracted anyone's notice again. Yet now he let out a terrifying howl that startled all of us. From his horse, Señor Dorantes turned to look. Ruíz, he said sharply, contain yourself.

Ruíz's eyes had the glint of madness about them. No, he said. I am not going to wait for the savages to hunt me down like a partridge. With his musket leveled before him, he left the procession and went looking for Indians deep in the bushes.

Ruíz, my master called. Return to the line immediately.

But the only reply was the rustling of leaves. Oak, cedar, and juniper trees stood tall in a sea of wild green grass. The smell of the sick man on the packhorse was all around us. Above us, the sky had lost its color, turning a bluish tinge of white. And the sun was so hot it made our ears ring.

We should send someone after him, Señor Castillo said.

He disobeyed my order, Señor Dorantes replied.

Each captain was responsible for his own contingent—usually, the men who had traveled with him from Seville—so the governor did not intervene. He nudged his horse forward on the trail, and we resumed the march. But only a moment later, a scream of pain cut through the air like a knife, and Ruíz reemerged from the bushes, without his weapon and with his hands covering his bloodied face. The Apalaches had thrown a rock at him with such precision that they had taken out his left eye, turning him into a younger, leaner version of the governor. His fellow soldiers gathered around Ruíz, but Señor Dorantes shook his head slowly, in a way that suggested Ruíz had been too foolish to merit a better fate.

•  •  •

So
WE LIVED IN FEAR
. We feared the fever, the Indians, and our hunger. We feared the swamps, the water lizards, and the berries of unfamiliar bushes. We feared not finding Aute and we feared finding it. At least the sick man no longer had such varied and constant reasons to worry: he could lose himself to the disease and forget everything else. Perhaps it was this desire for the peace of delirium that led so many men in our company to succumb to the fever. By the fifth day of the march to Aute, the governor had to assign horses solely for the transport of the sick—nearly thirty men in all.

Sometimes, I thought of letting go, too. Sitting under the shade of a poplar tree as the company took its midday break, I wondered what would happen to me if I was infected with the fever and perished in this land. Who would wash my body for burial? Who would commend my soul to God? Who would mourn me? I whispered Ayat al-Kursi to myself, over and over, the way I had as a child, whenever I had been scared or troubled or worried, hoping it would grant me the same measure of peace it had back then. With the stick in my hand, I wrote the verse on the ground before me, each word, each stroke taking me back further to my days at the msid in Azemmur, to those days when my life was still my own. His throne doth extend over the heavens and the earth and He feeleth—

You can write? Señor Dorantes asked. He was looking over my shoulder at the line of characters in the dirt, his elbow resting against the trunk of the tree. I was startled by his silent appearance behind me and I rushed to stand up, but he put his hand on my shoulder, urging me to sit down. Where did you learn? he asked.

At home, Señor. In Azemmur.

My father's dearest friend is a converso—a jeweler from Cordoba. He still keeps his ledgers in Arabic, even though my father warned him that it might raise questions with the inquisitor. But I suppose it is hard to break old habits.

I ran my tongue on my lips, not sure what to say next. Experience had taught me that these kinds of conversations, with personal questions, friendly questions even, were dangerous, that they fed the master new ways of tormenting you later on, when you let down your guard. So I remained quiet, hoping the moment would pass. A soft breeze rustled the leaves of the poplar tree, shifting the dappled light on the ground. From
the cluster of men behind us, someone called out for Father Anselmo to come hear a confession.

How did you end up in Seville, then? Señor Dorantes asked.

It is a long story, I said.

He slid against the trunk of the tree and sat down so close to me that I could smell his oily hair. (We had run out of soap a few days earlier.) What did he want from me? Was it not enough that he owned me and could dispose of me as he wished? Now he wanted that which had always been my own—my story.

Tell me, he said. I want to hear it.

Reader, the joy of a story is in its telling. My feet were throbbing with pain and my stomach was growling with hunger, so I could not resist the pleasure that a tale would bring me. I began with the Story of My Birth and continued until the Story of Ramatullai. Señor Dorantes listened to me with such curiosity and patience that I wondered if he would tell this chronicle to other people someday, to his wife, say, or to his children, so that it might continue to be told, even after my death. Telling a story is like sowing a seed—you always hope to see it become a beautiful tree, with firm roots and branches that soar up in the sky. But it is a peculiar sowing, for you will never know whether your seed sprouts or dies.

Later, when we resumed our march, and my exhaustion led me to hold on to his saddle for support, Señor Dorantes did not nudge Abejorro away.