Tag: procelytism

Arrows

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Excerpt

I managed to push him off and he sauntered away,
seemingly satisfied he had not only taught Tamanoa a lesson, but
me as well.
I looked at Tamanoa’s mutilated face. He was choking on his
blood. turned and threw the nose at my feet, then disappeared into
the night, whistling. I helped Tamanoa up and tried to guide him by
the shoulders, hoping perhaps to take him to see Pedro Montes, but
he shook me off and refused to speak to me as he walked towards
the river. And who could blame him? I was a Spaniard after all. It
was for me to prove that Spaniards were not all the same.
I found where Josefa had been sleeping. Gregorio had found her,
too. They were seated near one another, but not talking. Gregorio
drew shapes in the dirt with a long stick and glanced furtively at her
and me. I wanted to tell them both what Pánfilo had done, but I
knew it would not make any difference if they knew. Nobody cared
about the half-breeds.
It was dusk and pleasantly cool in the mountains. Wesat around a
fire. Josefa’s eyes were puffy and red-rimmed, a sign of the depth of
her weariness. The experienced conquistadors had ignored Josefa,
but now that she was widowed, Losada came by to offer his
sympathy and put himself at her disposal to arrange her return to El
Tocuyo once it was safe to do so, if that was her wish.
Infante followed, bowing deeply and kissing her hands. He
expressed his concern about her delicate situation and asked her
permission to inquire after her welfare, so that he might be at her
service in the future.
Gabriel de Ávila, Camacho and others, although modestly, also
showed interest in her that night. Josefa received them graciously,
while Gregorio watched in sullen annoyance. I hoped she might find
a husband among all these men.

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Arrows

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Excerpt

“Leave me alone, will you?” he scowled.
But I wanted to make peace with him.
“I mean it, Gregorio. You need a bleeding to drain all those bad
humours and grudges. Hombre! I saw you in battle; if I hadn’t been
so busy running, I would have stayed put to watch you. What
shooting and fighting! You are a born conquistador. From now on, it
will be quite comforting to have you around.”
I uncorked a flask of marigold oil. Gregorio chortled at last. He
took a gulp from the mug he was holding.
“I saw you, too,” he said, “running like a hare.”
“Little wonder! I have never been so frightened in my life!”
Gregorio and Benjamin laughed. Perhaps I was more useful to
them as feckless character, someone to jeer at.
“Why, you don’t want to go to heaven, Friar?” Benjamin taunted.
“I know I am but a sinner,” I smiled. “But I could use a bit more
time before God blows out my candle. I’m hoping to find some way
to skip purgatory.”
“Trying to become a saint, are you?” Gregorio said. “Become a
martyr, then. That will do, won’t it?”
“That would be an improvement, no doubt. I’ve been thinking
about it. Perhaps one of these days someone will favour my
aspirations.”
Gregorio swatted at a hornet that came too close. “We’re going to
make it, I think,” Gregorio said. “Losada knows what he is doing.
You can see it in his face. I’m convinced he knows how the bastards
think. He has lots of experience. But, if you ask me, Francisco Infante
is the better of the two.”
Losada struck me as a man of principle whereas Francisco Infante
impressed me as a schemer, someone who would rather run things
for himself, so I decided not to respond to the bait. It was odd for me
to sometimes feel so close to Gregorio and Benjamin, and yet at the
same time I sensed their camaraderie was fickle, transitory. For
them, the New World was strictly a land of opportunity, and the
state of their souls was a distant second.
Were they ever my friends? Or did they even want to be?

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Arrows

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Excerpt

Through the smoke I made out the hem of her dress some distance
away. She was kneeling beside an inert body, which was pierced by
an arrow through the thigh and another in the chest. It was her
husband.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a near-naked man running. The
smoke partially hid him, but I saw he was tall, with strands of black
hair pasted to his chest by sweat and speed and others floating over
his shoulders. Funny, I thought, I have not seen that kind of long
loincloth before.
Then I realized he was charging toward Josefa. He bore a
belligerent expression, and there was blood on his naked chest
under his quiver’s band. A pang of fear hit me like a bucket of cold
water. Surely he wouldn’t kill a woman, would he?
We were both closing in on Josefa and her dead husband but from
different directions. I was closer than he was. Josefa looked up at the
Indian, open-mouthed and white as the ghost she was in danger of
becoming. I sprinted toward her, heart throbbing, and tore the
buckler from her dead husband’s grasp. There was a serviceable
harquebus lying at his side and the sheathed dagger at his belt but I
didn’t want to use any potentially lethal weapon.
I squared my shoulders and braced myself for whatever might
come. It was God’s choice to see us through or not. I raised the small
shield on my forearm as I had seen others do. His bare feet landed
underneath the buckler, and he delivered a savage blow that
shocked its way up my arm, pushing me back, the clang resonating
in my ears.
He held his arm high, ready to deliver another blow. I was
crouching, peering over the buckler. Josefa yelped. I charged and
overthrew him, grunting like a beast. He fell but was on his feet
before I knew it, the hellish macana still in his grasp. His eyes leered
at me from his horribly painted face. I could feel his anger, his pride,
his hate, but there was a fortitude that sent a chill down my spine.
He turned and swung at my belly, but I leapt backwards as the
macana came within inches. “Run!” I shouted.

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Arrows

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Excerpt

Fresh tears filled her downcast eyes and rolled over her cheeks as
she blinked.
“How did you come to be here, Pepa?”
“I was one of five daughters. The last one,” she said softly.
I glanced at her husband, who had stirred in his sleep and
mumbled noisily before resuming his snoring. I knew exactly what
she meant. A daughter could mean the opportunity for a good
alliance or a financial burden on her father. In a household of five
daughters, the father would be happy to find anyone to take them.
Without a dowry, a girl would likely never be able to marry, or to be
choosy about it. Pepa told me her husband had agreed to marry her
without a dowry, despite her knowing how to read.
Gregorio awakened at the sound of her voice. He was listening. I
couldn’t help that. In her town, she said, everyone thought her
strange because she could read. It had been a relief to accompany her
husband in his quest for fortune in the Indies.Her mother had tried to
convince him to leave her in a convent, but he wouldn’t hear of it.
Gregorio kept watching her, sympathetically. He might have
consoled her himself had her husband not awakened at that instant.
Gregorio narrowed his eyes and shot him a loathsome look from
head to toe. “I’ll have something brought for you, señora,” Gregorio
said. “You’ll need your strength.”
“Gregorio is right, you should eat,” I said.
This unexpected attention seemed to perk her spirits. “I can read
something to you all, if you like,” she said, eyes lowered.
“Of course,” I said, breaking the silence. “What do you have
there?”
“It’s the Lazarillo de Tormes,” she said, taking a small book out
from under the folds of her skirt. The corners of her mouth trembled
as she tried to smile. She must have been protecting that book like an
amulet.
“This is a story about a rascal who is a blind man’s guide. Do you
know it? Here, listen: Fainting and dying of hunger, I staggered along the
street, and while passing by the Barley Square I found an old praying
woman with more tooth than a wild boar . . .”

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Arrows

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Sweat broke out on my nape and forehead. The woman watched
me closely, giving me the annoying feeling that she could read my
thoughts. Perhaps she was a witch.
When a gourd filled with a milky beverage of uncertain origin
arrived under my nose, I began to miss my countrymen. Tamanoa
held it while the rest awaited my reaction. The children giggled and
I smiled, raising one eyebrow at them. I took the gourd out of
Tamanoa’s grasp, noticing the quizzical expression in his eyes.
“It’s chicha,” he informed me.
I sat down on the ground and crossed my legs, minding the
Seraphic Rosary so that it rested on the cloth of my cassock stretched
between my knees. I raised my eyes to heaven, as much to bless the
chicha as to ask for help. Well, Salvador, if you want the dog, you’ll
have to accept the fleas, I told myself, and took a gulp.
It wasn’t completely unpalatable. Had I known that its
fermentation was aided by the spittle of the women who concocted
it, I might have been less inclined to drink it. I passed it along,
fighting the urge to retch, eyes watering. Mater Dei, please tell me
that gourd never covered anyone’s genitals, I prayed.
The sight of another male with his foreskin neatly strangled with
a cord that went about his hips, his balls—wrinkled and
saggy—hanging like a cockerel’s wattles, made me regurgitate the
devil-sent chicha. I kept swallowing it back until, able to escape
unnoticed, I hid behind a tree and vomited my guts out.

We neared Nueva Segovia de Barquisimeto, a city founded in 1552,
along a murky river the Caquetíos Indians had called Variquesemeto
long before the Spaniards began renaming everything.
Diego de Losada led the way on his magnificent black
Andalusian horse, which seemed to share its master’s dreams of
greatness. All horses except my Babieca were proud, elegant beasts
with thick necks, strong chests and powerful, arched croups. Bred
from the first horses to arrive from La Española,

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Arrows

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The day of our departure came too soon. Entire families gathered
at the plaza to bid farewell to their most respectable sons. After a
year of preparation, don Diego de Losada had managed to convince
one hundred and fifty men to take their chances with him. No small
achievement, considering their prospects for survival.
Our expedition was bound for the province of Caracas—where
the town of San Francisco had briefly existed—and we were
destined to rebuild it in the name of Our Lord Jesus Christ for our
most gracious king, His Sanctified Catholic Majesty, Don Felipe II.
Less than five men out of each of the previous two expeditions into
the area had been left alive to tell the tale.
I had heard stories about battles, about how I would be lucky to
be killed at once. Cannibals liked to tie a Christian to a tree while
they danced in circles, possessed by the devil, chopping pieces out of
him every time they came about, cooking his parts under his nose or
even eating them raw, shooting arrows at him until his blood had
drained, blood they would collect in little bowls and drink as they
danced, smearing it on their bodies, spitting it on the ground.
One chief in particular, Guacaipuro, who commanded the Indian
forces of the valley of Caracas, put the fear of God into Spanish and
tame Indians alike, for it was said he had no mercy for either. All of
the other chiefs pledged their allegiance to him. On the land of one of
these, the settlement of San Francisco had been established almost a
decade ago, but Guacaipuro had burned it to ashes. It was to that
place we were heading.
Dressed in their feathered morions, coats of mail and cloaks,
twenty men on horseback under don Francisco Ponce’s command
melted stoically like butter in the sun, to be accompanied by fifty
harquebusiers with their pouches heavy with stone munitions,
eighty men on foot, eight hundred servants, two hundred beasts of
burden, several thousand pigs, four thousand sheep—all intended
to secure the beginnings of a new city.

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Arrows

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“We cultivate corn, roots and cacao,” he said. I remembered the
sweet, delicious aroma of a cup of hot chocolate. He must have read
my mind or heard my stomach rumble. “You must be famished!” he
said. “We ought to find you something to eat. Let us pay doña
Perpetua a visit in the kitchen.”
I followed him into the parish house. It looked like one of those
straw lofts we had in Spain. The inside was austere. Brother Carvajal
invited me to take a seat on a chair made of hide that smelled
strongly of its previous owner. A table, two chairs and a cabinet
completed the furnishings. The house was spacious, with a thatched
roof nine or ten feet high. It had a muggy, earthy smell to it. The
interwoven wattles protruding from the mud walls were
disconcerting.
He opened a trunk and produced a bottle of wine and two silver
cups.
“It’s wine from an outstanding harvest,” he said, “a present from
the new governor, don Ponce de León. Do you care for wine?”
I had little knowledge on the subject beyond colour and
sweetness and was going to say so, but he continued.
“It’s my only indulgence,” he said, chuckling at the double
meaning. I smiled, because we both knew an indulgence was a
pardon of sins granted—or sold—by the Church to the faithful. He
sniffed the open bottle. “These hazel-coloured wines are vigorous
enough to survive the crossing of the ocean without detriment to
their quality. The ones from La Mancha are the favorites in court.”
He filled the cups and handed me one. He waved his cup under
his big nostrils, then sunk his nose into it. “But, please, let us toast
the joyful arrival of another labourer to this field and the merits of
our allotted toils. May the Almighty bless them and give us drink
from the abundant flow of the fountain of his sacred heart.”
“How long have you been here?” I asked.
“Ten years, my son! Ten years of unremitting struggle to build
this.” His eyes scanned the wattle and daub walls,

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Arrows

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Excerpt

“My mother always worked in a household.”
“Why is it bad to ask your name?”
“You didn’t ask my name. Say the words again, and I’ll tell you
what they mean.”
The horse had begun to graze, and Tamanoa took hold of the
bridle again.
“Matircom yeunatir ueipano dauquir” I repeated slowly.
“Breasts, nipples, whore . . .” His voice trailed off as he signalled
the meaning of the last word by pointing to his crotch. “And what
was the other thing you said? Ah, yes. Guecenar onque. That means
give me your . . .” Again his voice trailed off, and he turned and
pointed to his rear end.
Heat rushed to my face. I massaged my eyes with the heels of my
hands and heard him giggle.
Torn between anger and laughter, I laughed. Benjamin, Benjamin.
He had taught me words I would never have dreamed of saying,
and I had repeated them like a parrot. No wonder we had gotten so
many looks. I was laughing so hard I removed myself and my horse
from the convoy.
“It was Benjamin,” I said. “So it’s your turn to help me. How do I
ask your name?”
“It depends. There are Indians from far away who have been
brought here to work, and we all speak different languages. But in
mine it would be atiyeseti?”
“What language is yours?”
“Cumanagoto. Carib. It comes from the eastern coast. It’s the
most common. My mother came from the region of Cumaná.”
“Are the families brought here together? As husband and wife?”
He shook his head. I looked at the Indians around me. That could
explain much of their sullenness.
In the year 1511, the Church had proclaimed the equality of men
and denounced the Spanish debauchery in La Española. But in that
same year, King Fernando El Católico had declared the branding of
cannibals. For the Spaniards, natives out of range of missionary
protection were cannibals. They were raided and sold as slaves.

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Savages and Beasts

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Absorbed in their work they faintly heard the recess
bell. Children walked out to the schoolyard again. They were
still timid and quiet like the sun behind the clouds that didn’t
dare show itself, same as the light breeze amid the tree leaves
that didn’t know whether to play and create its rustle or to keep
quiet like these hurt and intimidated kids. The savages, Anton
thought, were outside and the civilized and mighty remained
within the walls of this facility. And these civilized and wise
archons had their goal: to educate and make good law abiding
citizens of these brutes, to make them alike themselves so they
could one day go out there and subjugate others, they could one
day go out there and proselytize others to the good word or else.
Anton’s mind ran amok to things unpleasant and cruel,
things these kids were going through at their tender age and
suddenly he revolted at the cruelty of such a system and tears
started flowing down his eyes. He turned aside so Dylan wouldn’t
see him and wiping his eyes with his hand he took a deep breath
that didn’t go unnoticed by the old Irish man.
“What is it Anton?”
“I’m thinking of these kids and my mind went to the
rumors out there, things people talk about. Even the man who
lived under the same roof with you, old Simon, I often meet him
at the diner.”
“That drunkard? He’s of no good. He’s only good when
he prepares the traditional haggis during the Robby Burn’s day
annual festival. He’s no good for nothing else. He’s just a big
mouth that’s who he is, nothing more.”
“He sounded so convincing each time he spoke about these
kids in this school and the archons over them. He sounded so
convincing and he insisted of the cruel ways the church people go
after these children.

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Arrows

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I helped him up and guided him to a seat on top of the same barrel
he had supposedly broken. His weight caused the wine to pour out
even faster. Without a word, I turned to Benjamin and offered him a
hand.
“The eyes of the Lord are in every place, beholding the evil and the good.”
I smiled, extending my hand further. “I apologize for the push; I
didn’t think I could stop you otherwise.”
His eyes darted from my face to my hand, and he took it with a
grunt. I smiled even more, digging my heels to support his weight as
he stood up. I patted him on the shoulder. I was getting rather good
at applying Bartolomé’s persuasive techniques.
“The barrel must have been damaged already,” I said. “You do
realize it could not have been broken by this little fall alone, don’t
you? Please, don’t hurt him or anyone else again.”
Benjamin put a hand on his dagger and leered at the Indian, who
was already picking up the damaged barrel and loading it onto his
narrow shoulders. He was lean and small, the barrel undeniably big
for him.
I met Bartolomé’s eyes, intense and darkened by the shadow of
his scowl in the dawn’s dim light. The corner of his mouth twitched,
and he gave me an imperceptible nod.
“Back to work!” he bellowed.
I felt ashamed for all of us. It sickened me to realize that every
man among us, even Benjamin, someone who had a tendency to be
jovial, was inclined towards cruelty towards the Indians, as if by
some pre-ordained right.

Soon it was almost time to leave Borburata for the city of El Tocuyo.
We would be a party of ten men on horseback, one hundred Indian
servants, fifty tame Indian warriors and three hundred head of
livestock.
The horse they offered me must have been the oldest quadruped
ever to walk under the sun, and a moody one at that. It glared at me.

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