The Moor's Account (29 page)

What about the servant? I asked. Cabeza de Vaca mentioned that a criado had gone with you.

He is dead, too. Fever.

A bitter taste invaded my mouth. I had to sit down against a tree, with
my arms around my knees, and wait for the moment to pass. Above me, a woodpecker drummed on the trunk, pausing and starting, again and again. Meanwhile, Dorantes was telling Martín about our winter on the Island of Misfortune and about the raft we had found on the river the day before.

I know what happened to it, Martín said. I heard the story from the only survivor from that raft. After the storm, the comptroller's raft was marooned not far from this area, at the mouth of the river. The men walked a short distance to the bay, in order to feed on oysters and crabs, but once there they found the Narváez raft. So many men had died during the storm that both crews could have fit on one raft, but the governor refused to take the stranded men aboard. On the contrary, he ordered his own men to disembark and said that, henceforth, both crews would travel by land while he and his page would follow in the water along the coast. If they came upon a river, he promised, he would ferry the land crew across.

The comptroller rebelled, of course. And with an order like that, who could blame him? Once again, he complained, the governor was dividing the men into land and sea contingents. Had he learned nothing from his experience? Narváez immediately relieved the comptroller of his command and put one of his own men in charge of the land crew, a brute by the name of Sotomayor. So everyone was forced to walk along the shore, while Narváez sailed close by. The next night, while they were camped on a beach, Narváez slept on his raft, with his page and helmsman by his side. But the wind picked up in the middle of the night, and the raft was swept to sea. The rest of the survivors walked along the shore for several days, hoping to reach Pánuco on foot. When one of them died of disease, they ate his flesh. Before long, they began to kill and eat one another. The last man alive was Esquivel the welder, who was still feeding on Sotomayor when these Indians you see here found him.

The m-m-men t-t-turned into c-c-cannibals?

Yes, Father.

A-a-all of them?

That is the story Esquivel the welder told me.

No, the friar replied. No, no, no. He must have had the fever and was delirious. Or he made up the story just to frighten you. I knew Esquivel. He could not have done what he told you he did.

Father, who would lie about something like that?

No one, I thought. No one would lie about having become a cannibal. Esquivel must have been telling the truth. What a terrible story. It was the sort of story that would be told and retold, getting worse with each repetition. Between Esquivel and Ruíz, all of the Indians in these parts were probably convinced by now that the white aliens who had come to their territory were flesh-eating monsters. And where did that leave me, a black man among these white men? From my seat under the tree, I asked: How far do you think Pánuco is?

Very far, I would wager, Martín said.

The Indians with whom he lived, he explained, did not know of a Spanish port anywhere near this area. It had to be much farther away and he could not guess whether it was a march of two weeks or twenty. This was why he had made up his mind to live with them for good.

The news he had brought silenced us for a while and we all sat on the riverbank, suddenly weary of the long march that still lay ahead of us. We must have looked quite pitiful, because the two Indians offered to give us some food for the night. Martín and the friar went with them to fetch the baskets, but an hour later only Martín returned with dried meat and nuts.

Where is Father Anselmo? Diego asked, standing up.

He did not want to come back, Martín replied.

What are you saying?

He does not want to look for Pánuco any longer.

Liar, Diego said. Tears had already welled in his eyes, and he blinked them away forcefully. Anselmo would not say that. He would never give up.

He did not want to come back, Martín repeated.

What have you done with him? Where is he? Diego was about to strike Martín when Dorantes held him back.

I am telling you the truth, Martín said with a shrug. The friar said that he wanted to settle with this tribe, just as I have, and that you should not try to go back for him or convince him otherwise.

It was one thing to lose men to the river or disease, and another to have the friar choose to remove himself from us. He always saw the better natures in each one of us. Who would do that now? I mourned his sudden absence the way I would have mourned the absence of any good man with whom I had lived for many months, but for the Castilians, and especially for Diego, his departure felt, I think, like a cruel abandonment.
Diego refused to eat the rabbit meat that Martín had brought for us and retreated into silence for the rest of the evening.

W
ORSE WAS YET TO
come. In the morning, we could not wake either Fernándes or Benítez; they had died in their sleep. It was not in my character to give in to superstition, but now I began to wonder about the prophecy of the Moorish woman from Hornachos. Perhaps she had been right—the armada was cursed and we would all die here in this strange land. I might as well hang myself from a tree now rather than wait for death to come for me in its own cruel time. Such was the depth of my despair that this ungodly thought did not arouse in me the immediate rebellion that it would ordinarily have caused.

Dorantes stood over the bodies of the dead men, his face a pure expression of defeat. Quietly, he said: We have to leave them.

No, Diego replied. We have to give them a proper Christian burial.

How? We have no shovels.

We can dig with our hands.

None of us is strong enough for the task, and even if we did manage it, the graves would be so shallow that wild animals would get to them by nightfall.

But we cannot just leave them here.

We have to. We have our own lives to worry about now.

Diego looked as if he might cry. The death of these two men, the loss of the friar, the realization that we were still very far from Pánuco—all this had added up to an unbearable burden and now he bit his lip and turned his face away from us.

From where I sat under a tree, I noticed that the limbs of the two dead men had swelled and that their faces had turned an unnatural shade of pink. Even in the final slumber, they looked tormented. And yet, I thought, what would these two men not give to be in my place? I was alive. The warmth of the sun was on my face and hands. Heavy against my hip was a flask filled with fresh water. Beside me, a beetle was trying to carry a crumb back to its nest, working slowly and patiently, undaunted by how far it was from its goal. The longer I watched it, the more my despair receded. I had to survive, I told myself, if not for me, then for the sake of all those I had left at home. Diego, I called, standing up. Help me carry them to the river. They can at least have a water burial.

It was late in the morning, I remember, and we were lying in the wild green grass, eating the blueberries we had picked during our march. Our meager meal combined with the damp heat to lull us into a kind of indolence. Dorantes lay on his belly, his head resting on his folded arms, while Castillo curled up on his side and drifted to sleep, his breathing a faint whistle. I heard the soft flutter of insect wings, and a grasshopper landed on my chest. It tilted its head sideways as it gazed upon me, a stranger in its world. Then there was the sudden crunching of twigs underfoot. I barely had time to sit up before the Indians appeared. There were ten of them, hunters all, armed with lances and bows. One of them carried on his back a beautiful doe, its hind legs dragging on the ground and its eyes still fixed, in surprise, on something in the distance. Slung over their shoulders, the others had smaller game, most of it hare. We scrambled to our feet and introduced ourselves to them, enunciating our names slowly.

Mustafa.

Dorantes.

Cas—

I know who you are, one of them said. His body glistened with grease, a common recipe for warding off mosquitoes, though it also had the effect of making him look intimidating. A neat braid, threaded with bright parrot feathers, hung down each side of his face. His gaze was direct, but indifferent. And when he spoke, his voice commanded the attention of every ear. I heard about you from a Capoque shell trader, he said.

But what had he heard? Was it only the surprising news of our shipwreck on the Island of Misfortune a few months earlier? Or was it a bitter
complaint that we had brought with us a disease that had killed most of the Han and the Capoques over the course of one short winter? Perhaps he had heard a tale that combined all of these details, and maybe even exaggerated them. Whatever it was, I hoped it was not an account of the cannibals among us—disease could always be excused, but eating human flesh would never be forgiven. The elders teach us: let my friends remember me; let all others forget about me.

And we have heard of your great people, I blurted in response. My flattery had no effect on the hunter who had spoken, and the others seemed to be taking their cue from him. To fill the silence, I asked: What is your name?

Balsehekona, he said.

He was a Carancahua. Like the other tribes in this area, the Carancahuas were hunters and fishermen who moved their camp with the seasons. In the winter, they picked oysters, fished for trout and perch, or waded into the bays to pull out the edible roots that grew in them. In the summer, they ate nuts and berries, and hunted deer, hare, and other game. Now, the warm months had started; they had just set up their camp not far from where we had been resting in the meadow, unaware of their presence.

Having had nothing to eat but blueberries for the past three days, the sight of the doe awakened our hunger, but we had nothing to trade for it. I had resigned myself to picking more berries when I noticed Dorantes's eyes darting around. After what seemed like a costly inner debate, he reached into the pocket of his breeches—and out came the Yucatán earring that had been given to him by Bernardo Rodriguez in Seville, as an incentive to purchase me. I had not seen the golden earring since that day, almost two years earlier, when I had stood in Luis de Prado's living room and prayed to God that Dorantes would refuse it. That sudden memory—the memory of a nervous Rodriguez standing in an opulent room, with oil portraits watching from the walls—intruded now on the present, on the image of Dorantes standing in the green meadow, pressing the golden bauble into Balsehekona's hands, with all of us silent witnesses. I could not imagine how Dorantes had kept that earring hidden throughout our ordeals and desperate barters.

Balsehekona looked at the gold with mild curiosity, and then returned it.

Take it, Dorantes cried, holding it up. Take it. It is gold. Take it and give us some of that meat. He pointed to the doe.

The earring had been put in Balsehekona's hand, and eventually he stopped resisting. Without further comment, he and the other Carancahuas picked up their weapons and began to walk. We followed them. Their camp consisted of ten movable huts set up against mulberry trees. Tools and utensils were stacked neatly beside each hut. Two young girls worked the mortar and pestle, while their mother painted a deer hide a vivid hue of red. An elderly man was testing a flute he had just made, playing notes and adjusting the holes on the instrument. For some reason our arrival did not arouse as much curiosity as we had grown to expect. Dogs barked, children ran up to us, and women paused whatever they were doing to look, but within moments, the entire camp had returned to its usual tasks. So we gathered firewood, set up a campfire, and waited. At dusk, Balsehekona brought us an entire shank of deer, its meat soft and faintly ribboned with fat. We nearly wept with joy as we took it from him. He looked upon us the way one looks upon a persistent beggar—with indifference or compassion now; later, it would be with irritation.

O
UR PLAN HAD BEEN
to depart early the next day, but the smell of a soup the women had made for the morning meal was so tempting that we all agreed to wait. We would eat some of it and, having rested and regained some of our strength, we would resume our walk along the coast. But the following day, the hare roasting on spits smelled so heavenly that it made us lose our resolve. I do not believe that any of us had intended to stay with the Carancahuas, but the drowning of Estrada and Chaves, the desertion of Father Anselmo, and the deaths of Fernándes and Benítez had rattled us and made us fear venturing into the wilderness. The Carancahuas were intimately familiar with this coastal territory: its waterways; its hunting grounds; which plants you could eat and which could poison you. Relying on them was the surest way to survive.

At the end of our first week with the tribe, we received a visit from the cacique Okmantsul. The sun had risen an hour earlier, but a few among us were still asleep, curled up around the remnants of the evening fire. Others were eating scraps given to them by one of the women. Okmantsul looked at our modest site, taking stock of what we had and what we were doing. Over his shoulders, he wore a cloak of animal skin, decorated with white beads and feathers. Though he was short of stature and thin of build, he was blessed with a natural authority; it would not have crossed anyone's mind to defy him. Now he spoke softly, almost in whispers.
From this day hence, he said, you will work for the meat that is given to you. And you must go on the hunt.

All of us nodded and politely averted our gaze, but once the cacique was out of earshot, Dorantes complained that he could not use the native weapons. The Carancahua bows were about seventy pulgadas long—the length of a grown man—and were strung with tendons. I cannot use a bow like that, Dorantes said.

I can, Diego said.

You, Tigre?

Yes, me.