Cervantes Street (12 page)

A couple of sodomites started to haggle over two blond brothers. “I’ve fallen in love with these puppies!” a man shouted. “Arnaut Mamí, I must have them. I plan to adopt them as my own children when they become Muslims.”

The mother of the boys convulsed as she shrieked and then fainted. There was a commotion among the women who came to her succor and tried to revive her.

Arnaut Mamí made a face of disgust at the women. He said to the merchant, “I can sell the youngest for a hundred and thirty gold escudos, he’s just seven years old. At that age they never offer any resistance. You’ll be able to mold him to your own liking, without too much trouble. As for the oldest”—he took the boy by the hand and paraded him like a dog of the finest breed—“even Ganymede’s beauty would pale in comparison. You may not be able to afford him. This is the most perfect example of earthly beauty you’ll ever see.” Mamí ran his fingers through the boy’s hair.

The boy’s father tried to break away from our group. We restrained him, but he managed to yell, “Take your revolting hands off my boy, you monster!”

Mamí turned toward the man. “If I hear another sound from you, I will behead you and your woman.” And to the buyer, “You’ll never find a fairer catamite than this one. He will fetch easily five hundred gold escudos in any port on the Barbary Coast—and more in Turkey. Cadi, I’ll sell you the oldest if you buy the runt too.”

“By Mohammed, stop your haggling, Mamí,” the man named Cadi replied, becoming extremely agitated. “If that’s how it is, I’ll take both of them. Just name your price. I must have this boy”—he pointed again at the eldest. “I’ve fallen for his beauty, his gentle manner.” He addressed the trembling unfortunate: “What’s your name?

“Felipe, sir.”

“Listen to that honeyed voice,” Cadi said in a swoon to those around him. “And he has the grace of a gazelle.” To Felipe he cooed, “From now on, you will be my son and your name will be Harum.”

The man embraced Felipe tightly. The boy tried to wrestle himself free, and Cadi motioned to two of his slaves to grab the brother. The smaller boy wailed and kicked violently.

Felipe started yelling, “Father, where are they taking us?”

The boys’ father sobbed inconsolably as he shook his head. His mother had been revived and, feebly, she begged the buyer, “Please, please, sir. Let me embrace and kiss my boys for one last brief moment, since I’ll have to live forever with the pain of losing them.”

I feared for her life.

“Hurry up, woman,” Cadi grumbled. “These boys are no longer your children: they belong to me.”

Our women and men wept, some loudly.

Through her sobs, Felipe’s mother said to her sons, “My children, never forget that you’re Christians. Never deny our Lord Jesus Christ, our true Savior. Pray every day to His Holy Mother, who is the only one who can sever the chains that enslave you and who will give you back your freedom someday. Felipe, Jorge, never waver in your faith. Pray to Mary every day. Do not forget your parents, because we will never forget you. You will be in our thoughts and our prayers always.”

She dropped to her knees and pounded the floor with her closed fists, and the boys were led away.

The auction of the women soon began. They held each other and cried as they prayed. The protests of our men rose in volume, and we pulled and rattled our shackles. The beylerbey gestured to his giants to lash us until we quieted down.

Later I learned that many of these buyers were Moriscos expelled from Andalusia; that they bought Spanish slaves as a way of humiliating the crown and as an act of nostalgia for the land from which they had been expelled, and which they still considered theirs.

The auction of the rest of the captives commenced. The orifices and limbs of our men were inspected, and poked, as if they were beasts of burden. Rodrigo was put on the auction block. The face of my beautiful brother had turned the color of snow, and his hands trembled slightly, but he did not show fear, and behaved with the dignity of a true hidalgo. I felt miserable and worthless, fearing that I would never see Rodrigo again. Once more I had failed my family. I thought of the pain of my parents when they found out what had happened to their sons.

“He’s the cripple’s brother.” Mamí pointed at me. “The cripple will fetch a good ransom because he’s a war hero and a protégé of Don John. So this one should fetch a good ransom too. I am not selling him cheap.”

There were many bids for my brother, who was a fine and handsome example of the best of Spanish manhood. When Mamí advertised that Rodrigo played the vihuela
,
and had a beautiful singing voice, a merchant dressed in rich vestments offered two hundred gold escudos. The transaction completed, I overheard the man say to Rodrigo, “I’m buying you to teach music and singing to my children. You look like you will be a good tutor. If you teach my children well, one day you’ll be free.”

I knew that as a tutor in the house of a wealthy man, Rodrigo would be spared harsh labor and the lash, and he thus would have good chance of surviving in captivity. All was not lost.

* * *

The auction over, the beylerbey and merchants gone, those of us who stayed behind—about twenty men—were the property of Arnaut Mamí. He had kept the priests from
El Sol
, as well as the handful of gentlemen whose rich families would pay their ransom. The rest of the men would be put to hard labor, or become oarsmen on his ships.

We were handed our new slave clothing: two pieces of fabric—one to wrap around our waists, the other a coarse blanket to keep us warm—and we were informed the Bagnio Beylic was our destination. In single file, dragging our chains, we were led through the city gates. A throng of people—who had been waiting for the end of the auction—met us with taunts and jeers. Thus I entered the city known as the refuge of every depraved specimen of humanity that Noah had rejected from his ark. We began to climb the steps of Algiers’s ancient casbah, and dragged our shackled feet over steep and ever narrowing streets. Children followed us screaming, “Christian dogs, you will eat desert sand here!” “Your Don John is not coming to rescue you! You will die in Algiers!” The demonic urchins hit us with rotten oranges and balls of still-steaming donkey dung. I would gladly have shoved the dung down the urchins’ throats.

The casbah was a winding labyrinth, penumbrous, cool. Many of the houses looked as if they’d been built in Roman times, or even earlier, when Phoenicians had occupied Algiers. As we shuffled up the hill, the stone steps seemed to multiply. Near the summit of the city the streets were so narrow only one man at a time could traverse them. Sturdy burros carried weighty loads up adjacent alleys. From the roofs of the dwellings men cackled and insulted us as we struggled with the slippery steps. Unveiled, but demure, Moorish women peered at us from the oval-shaped windows of their homes. Christians were considered so lowly, I later learned, that Algerian women did not have to cover their faces in our presence.

It was late afternoon when we arrived at a plaza at the top of the casbah. A rectangular white fort rose before us; its tall corner towers were patrolled by armed guards. We had arrived at Bagnio Beylic, infamous throughout the Mediterranean for its harshness. It had been built almost a hundred years earlier by the brutal Barbarosa brothers as a detention camp for those they had captured at sea and were holding for ransom. We were herded inside, where the long chain linking was removed; but our ankles remained shackled. The prison’s interior walls, lined with rooms on two levels, faced a cobblestone courtyard where hundreds of men milled about.

Despite my exhaustion, I wended my way through the crowd. My ears recognized many languages being spoken. The captives, it seemed, were gathered by nationality: Englishmen, Frenchmen, Greeks, Italians, Portuguese, and Albanians. Others spoke in languages I did not recognize.

A large number of Spaniards squatted on the floor, gambling. My fellow captives began to mingle timidly with our compatriots. I watched the scene, unsure of what to do next. If there were any gentlemen among my captive countrymen, slavery had transformed them into untrustworthy types. As soon as possible, I would have to grow eyes in the back of my head.

A captive playing dice shouted from the circle huddled on the floor, “You standing there! What’s your name? Where were you captured?”

When I satisfied the man’s curiosity, the gamblers went back to their game. My aching legs and blistered feet prompted me to sit down on the cold floor. I threw around my shoulders the blanket we had been given at the quay and drew up my knees to rest my head against them before closing my eyes. I was in that position when a voice addressed me.

“Are you the son of Don Rodrigo Cervantes?”

A short man, with an extended belly and stubby legs, stood before me, his bare feet caked with dirt. He smiled, and instantly his face took on a picaresque air, that of a survivor.

“I knew you when you were a youth,” he said. “My name is Sancho Panza, a son of the noble town of Esquivias, somewhere deep in La Mancha, famous for its fat tasty lentils and the best, most medicinal wine. Which, in case you don’t know, is the only wine our magnificent king drinks.” He crouched across from me.

This was all too incredible, yet the mention of my father cheered me up. “How do you know my father, Señor Sancho?”

“Don Rodrigo treated me when I had no money. After my master, His Worship the late Count of Ordóñez, died, his unnatural children threw me out on the street, even though I had served their father since long before they were born.” Sancho sighed. “What’s past is past,” he said, then rubbed his eyes, as if to make sure I was still there. “You were a student at the Estudio de la Villa at that time; a mere lad. You’ve changed a lot. I would not have recognized you from those days. But when I heard you say your name, I knew you had to be Don Rodrigo’s son. You look like you were made from the same mold.”

Despite my exhaustion, this odd man amused me. Perhaps he could, for a brief moment, make me think of happier times.

“Your father was so proud of you,” he went on. “Did you know he recited your poems to his patients? That sonnet, the one that got the award, I must have heard it a hundred times. After Don Rodrigo finished his recitation he would say,
My friends
,
Ars longa
,
vita brevis
. One day, a patient with a gangrenous leg, who wasn’t getting any better despite all the leechings your father subjected him to, asked what those words meant.

“Those are the words of the great Virgil
, Don Rodrigo said.

“Was Virgil a doctor?
the man wanted to know.

“My friend
, your father explained, as if to a child, puzzled there was
anybody
who didn’t know who Virgil was—I knew a Virgil in Esquivias, Don Miguel, but I don’t think your honorable father meant him, as the Esquivian Virgil was a butcher—
those are the only words we ever need to remember: Art is forever, life is short. Virgil was a poet—a doctor of souls
.

“The patient shouted:
And this is what you, as a doctor, believe, Don Rodrigo—that life is short? No wonder my leg keeps rotting here!
He barely finished speaking when the man rolled over on his cot to the floor and practically crawled out of your father’s infirmary.”

Sancho patted his mountainous stomach to stop his fit of laughter. I laughed too. It had been awhile since I’d heard the sound of my own laughter.

His reminiscing finished, Sancho said, “I don’t mean to pry, my young squire, but what happened to your arm? And pray tell your story including its periods and commas. I like well-rounded tales.”

Not wanting to relive painful moments of the past, I gave him an abbreviated account of how I was wounded at Lepanto.

But Sancho was determined not to leave me alone. “What do you know about the bagnio?”

“Is there anything I should know?”

“You do know this is not a bathhouse, don’t you? Though most men here need to take a bath urgently. This is not a jail like the ones in Spain. The Turkish dogs let us come and go as we please, as long as we are back behind the walls by the first evening call to prayer, when they close the doors. We are allowed to go out, not because they are good-hearted, but because we have to earn the money to feed and clothe ourselves. We are the lucky ones. These asses think we all have families that will pay our ransom. That’s why our backs won’t be broken repairing roads, pushing huge pieces of marble, making pagan monuments, building mosques or tombs for Moors with deep coffers, or, the worst of all possible punishments, becoming oarsmen in their death ships. They think your family has money. Has Don Rodrigo become prosperous since I last saw him? His Worship used to talk about his rich relations.”

I told him about Don John of Austria’s letter.

“What bad luck that a letter from our great prince would bring so much misfortune. As for me, my illustrious friend, I’m as poor as the day I came bawling out of my sainted mother’s belly. But I was damned if I was going to work as an oarsman or a laborer, so I told them I was a member of a rich Galician family. Thank God during my years of service to His Excellency the Count of Ordóñez, all I did was wash the chamber pots of my master and serve his meals. I have the hands of a prince.” He extended them in front of me for my approval. Indeed, despite his general uncouth aspect, his hands looked immaculate. “These are hands that have worn gloves for many years. When the dim-witted Turk asked to inspect them, that son of an infidel whore remarked they were as smooth as polished ivory. Since the Turk was still not convinced, I said:
Adversus solem. Amantes sunt. Donecut est in lectus consequat consequat. Vivamus a tellus.”
Sancho burst in laughter. “An educated hidalgo such as you will know that I was speaking nonsense. These were all words I’d heard my master say over the years.” Again he patted his belly with quick taps to collect himself.

I laughed out loud. Sorrow had been my companion for so long that I hadn’t had a good laugh since before Lepanto.

“Now listen to me, my young and esteemed squire. Try to stay healthy, for he who has health has hope; and he who has hope has everything. Even though some days freedom seems farther than earth from heaven, I pray to God to send with speed Don John’s forces to Algiers to liberate us. I will die an optimist. Yes, sir.”