Taino (17 page)

It was already the next night when Caréy, lying in a hammock on one side of me, sang out loud enough for Cibanakán, on my other side, to hear: “Cibanakán had a dagger. He was brave. But he didn't have to use it. The shark bolted in fright just to see his face!”

Cibanakán was our elder but not by so much that we couldn't tease him. Even so, the teasing was also a way of honoring the deed. Tired as I was, I giggled over Caréy's jokes half the night. Caréy was funny, going on about the hammerhead, how he would report to his spouse about the giant frog that suddenly appeared and what a fright it had given him.

Sixty-four.
A generosity of parrots.

On December 12, 1492, a Wednesday, one of those dates I still remember from my day-keeping duties on the
ampolleta
, a young woman wearing a ball of gold encrusted in her nose was captured. Immediately the admiral was summoned. He ordered her clothed and fed. He gave her many presents and had several of us accompany her inland. “Make friends of her people,” he told me, this time sending Rodrigo along, as he was learning our language faster than any other sailor.

The young woman, whose name I remember was Tinima (though I never saw her again), was the daughter of a village
cacique
. We went with her to a village of a thousand houses, but everyone fled. She went on ahead of us and we got close enough to tell her people that we had come with men of the skyworld, who had presents for all that they met. As they listened and lost their fear, they asked what the spirit men wanted and for lack of an answer I told them parrots. Within a day, two thousand people had come, bringing great quantities of food and hundreds and hundreds of parrots. It was near there, on December 16, that we first saw Guacanagari, the young chief of the Marien, who they said was also fond of gold. Guacanagari was brought to the beach on a large hammock, carried by four of his
naboria
, or assistants, and he was surrounded by more than five hundred other men. At his sides, as always, his four elder uncles constanly whispered in his ear. Among his principal people, many wore gold in their ears and noses, in pendants and arm and calf clips, and in necklaces.

Sixty-five.
Guacanagari, first Taíno sachem to meet Columbus.

The admiral was overjoyed to meet Guacanagari. “But for going naked, he could be a king anywhere in the world,” he declared. In fact, Guacanagari was a rare
cacique
, upon whom several lineages converged. By virtue of his generations, Guacanagari was related to more principal families in the Marien region of Española than any other man. In Taíno ways, this made him a most important person, to whom all would give great care and tenderness, for such a man could be trusted to the greatest impartiality in resolving disputes among his many relatives.

They say much nonsense about Guacanagari these days. Some call him the noble
cacique
, but Las Casas insists he was a coward who sold his own people out. Oviedo praises him for his friendship with the admiral. I will say that he was a man in love with his own person. I talked with him myself many times, during that first trip and later, upon our return from the land of España. Guacanagari had no peer among his own people, even though he had done little to deserve his standing. When he met the admiral, he exuded an immediate love and excitement that touched the admiral, making him very happy, and, I am ashamed to admit, making me very jealous.

Sixty-six.
Columbus's ship
Santa Maria
sinks on Christmas night.

On the night of December 25, 1492, we were set to in a small bay on Guacanagari's coast. Rodrigo and I had fished all afternoon. Schools of yellowtails, mixed in with mullet, sole, salmon, hake, pompano, all feeding on large beds of shrimp and eel. We hung from ropes at the bow, tied by chest and legs, and speared fish as they went by. Seeing the catch, the admiral summoned Juan Ruiz de la Peña, a Biscayan and his best cook on board, who boiled up a large fish soup, complete with rice and lentils and seasoned with salt and chili peppers supplied by Guacanagari's people. All the officers ate together with the admiral, a rare occasion, and many prayers were said and toasts utttered. Twelve bottles of wine, of sixteen the admiral had stored, were drunk that night.

After the Mass for the Eve of Christ, Columbus sat on a folded sail and talked to all the men, arguing some with Captain Pinzón's brother about the fate of the
Pinta
, but mostly declaiming on the pattern of his own life and his devotion to God's master plan for men on earth. I could understand enough Castilian by then to follow the admiral's discussion and remember him using the Latin words
spiritualis intellectus
, by which, I have come to know, he meant the understanding of the world and of the seas, which he believed was his God-given gift, the intellect of the Holy Spirit working through him. “I prayed to the most merciful Lord concerning my desire, and he gave me the spirit and intelligence for it,” he said to his sailing men and particularly to his captains.

Captain Niño had posed the question of divine providence. “How does it come to be that the plan of our Lord, Jesus Christ, now on the 1,492nd year of his divine birth, is fulfilled on earth?” Juan Niño was the admiral's favorite captain, even during that first voyage. Later he traveled with us throughout Spain. For his question about the fates, the admiral praised him. The admiral responded to Juan Niño's question late into the night, drinking much wine. Some of his sentences I have reconstructed from later conversations, but the sense I have of his meanings and topics of that night is more exact thanks to my conversations with Father Las Casas in recent years. It is Las Casas who has given me the Bible to read, as well as many documents from Oviedo, the admiral, and others, all of which have helped me, more and more, understand the thinking of the covered men.

The admiral said to Niño and the other officers that night: “I believe that the Holy Spirit works among the Christians, Jews, and Moslems, and among all men of every faith, not merely among the learned, but also among the uneducated. In my own experience, I have met many times simple villagers who could explain the sky and stars and their movements better than those who paid their money to learn these things.” He pointed to Cibanakán and Caréy, who had guided him expertly through the islands and cays many days already.

I remember being mesmerized by the tone of his words and what I could understand about what he was saying. Among the white men I have known, only the admiral ever spoke this way so movingly about himself.

“The Lord proposed that there should be a miracle in this voyage you have taken with me. I tell you that this too is the fulfillment of prophecy,” he went on. “I tell you that it was the Holy Spirit whose marvelous illumination gave me abundant skill in the mariner's art and whose concern gave me the mental capacity and the manual skill to draft maps and to draw the cities, rivers, mountains, islands, and ports, all in their proper places. For thirty years, I searched out and studied all kinds of texts: geographies, histories, chronologies, philosophies, and other subjects. With a hand that could be felt, the Lord opened my mind to the fact that it would be possible to sail here from Spain and he opened my will to desire to accomplish this project. This is the fire that has burned within me.”

All the men were astounded by Columbus that fateful night. The admiral spoke into the late evening, and most of the officers stayed the whole time. But he drank a great amount and grew weary and slurred his words. “I also believe that the Holy Spirit reveals future events not only in rational beings, but also discloses them to us in signs in the sky, in the atmosphere and in animals, wherever it pleases him, as was the case with the ox that spoke in Rome in the days of Julius Ceasar, and in many other ways too…”

I listened very intently, trying to catch the words about the skyworld. I had a running argument with Caréy about the spiritual nature of the Castilians, for which idea I had become a main spokesman as we traveled. “I have seen them cut themselves,” Caréy argued. “They need water, same as us; they eat like humans, they piss, and they drop their leavings. They need their sleep. They lie with our women…”

“A god can lie with a living woman…”

“Guaikán—you are hard-headed for them!”

Wrapped up in a cotton hammock on the deck next to me, Caréy had turned over to sleep when, suddenly, Columbus stood up, catching himself in his indulgence with the wine. “But I will retire now as it is late,” he said. He shouted an order for Juan de la Cosa to take over the watch then went below. In a few minutes, it was very quiet. As he heard the admiral snore, de la Cosa ordered a young page to take over the wheel and went to sleep himself. I laid down to sleep myself, thinking that the night was deadly quiet as we floated on a thick sea that swelled without waves. About four a.m., all the good officers asleep, the page also asleep, the
Santa Maria
crashed on the reef, tearing a hole in her underside that sank her.

Sixty-seven.
Guacanagari saves the day and provides the first gold.

The admiral was despondent for only a morning. By midday, Guacanagari had more than sixty canoes ferrying cargo, including cannon and anchors, from the wreck, and, as is the custom of our people, everything was kept meticulously. The
cacique
, who wept with Columbus at the sight of the broken
Santa Maria
, assigned several large
bohíos
used for fishing gear and his own canoes to all the cargo and had many men available to transport the posts and planks from the ship to be stacked on the beach. Guacanagari had arrived in full court and soon promised the admiral he would dress him in a suit of gold. Just days before, he had gifted the admiral with a mask made of gold. When he gave it to the admiral, he had asked him to look through the eyes of the mask, to look through the mask of gold. The admiral did so, looking all around. “I wish I would see only gold through these eyes,” he said. Which in Taíno translates as “My eyes see or look only for gold.” This made Guacanagari very happy, as he thought he had a great deal of gold to give the admiral and thus felt power coming into his court from the covered men. On the 28th, he brought the admiral several chest plates made of thin gold, and he restated his promise to build a full gold suit for the Grand Mariner
.

In turn, the admiral looked more positively on the loss of his ship. “The Lord helps in mysterious ways,” he said, “destroying one of my vessels precisely where gold and a natural ally have been found.” He decided a fort must be built there, and a group of men were chosen to remain. Because the
Santa Maria
had crashed on Christmas Eve, he named the fort The Nativity. When we left for Spain, thirty-nine Castilian men stayed behind at the fort, the first colony of the covered men to settle in the Taíno islands. The admiral's final instructions to these men were to search for the source of the gold and to try to get along with the natives. “Everything that has happened was for this purpose,” he told them, “that this beginning may be made.”

Sixty-eight.
The white man's industry is as impressive as his hunger for gold is immense.

Those days, I was impressed with the white men's industry. The way they built the fort, mostly of planks and posts from the stranded vessel, was a new wonder for me. I saw another part of the Castilians—how they worked together, how they hammered with nails, sizing up wood with rulers and serrating the wood with an iron that cut right through the widest posts and trunks. So far, I had seen them on ship, tending to sails and directions, ballast and cleaning of the vessels. This they did well, and they fished and they explored the lands, here and there. But the building was something different. Columbus directed all of it and prayed a great deal, and before our eyes, in days, two large, very strong houses appeared, surrounded by a small stockade.

Those days, the admiral walked the woods with Guacanagari's old men. He took note of everything, listing the types of woods and plants he saw, calculating distances, rivers, and the populations of the many villages. The old men, more than the youngsters like me, had noticed that the Castilians ate a great deal and pursued our women indiscriminately. Through Guacanagari, and using me as interpreter, they offered young women of various
bohíos
in marriage to the young men of Columbus. The Castilian men scoffed at the idea, which for some reason at the moment did not bother me, although I knew it would the old
caciques
, and I did not pass it on to them in my translation.

I cannot now explain it, even to myself, but I felt at the time it might be right that gods or spirit men from heaven would not take wives among our people on earth. The old counselors of Guacanagari were quicker than me. They did not mind the couplings of hospitality but got suspicious when not one offer of marriage was accepted. So, they told the admiral about a great island, three hundred miles southeast, that was totally covered in gold. Near this island was another island named Matininó, they said, full of women only, who mate with men but do not tie them down to marriage. The admiral was very impressed. You should go there, they told him. This part I relayed to him, and he wrote it down. He wrote many things down in his journal and he talked of plans and of places that made little sense to me at the time. “With this gold, I swear our sovereign kings will take back the citadel from the infidel. Jerusalem will belong to Christendom once again.”

Later I will write how in Spain, at banquets in Barcelona and Seville and even in the new siege-camp town of Santa Fe, near Granada, Columbus, with me at his side, would expound on all the wonders of the Indies, this New World. The great
señores
would sit me with them and ask the questions often raised by the “discoverer.” Is there really much gold? they would ask. Yes, I would respond. Some islands are full of it. They liked me and fed me well in Spain, but that was later, after the first trip back and the horrible storms of snow and ice on the Azores, where Cibanakán and so many others were lost.