Cervantes Street (16 page)
At that moment I was at peace. God’s Grace had touched me, and I knew happiness.
The Casbah
1575-1580
No one entered or left Algiers without being reminded of death. Before it is too late to deter once and for all time future historians from picking up their quills and dipping them in the mendacious ink used by those abject scribblers of words to dress up their rachitic tales, I will relate myself what happened—at a time when I was still young and bold and despised cowardice—in that city with a scarcity of mercy and a surfeit of cruelty, in that purgatory of life, that hell on earth, that port of pirates and sodomites called Algiers, and I swear upon the salvation of my eternal soul that the events I’m about to describe are the truth, without any embellishments.
The first ones to leave the Bagnio Beylic in the morning were the captives who worked in the giardini of the rich; they returned at the end of the day, to be counted and to rest for the night. The most unfortunate ones had to walk for hours before they could reach the orchards where they tended the fruit trees, the vegetable and flower gardens, and the irrigation channels. These pitiable men lived in constant terror of the nomad and pagan tribes of the south, who conducted raids in the orchards, capturing and enslaving the workers whether they were Christians, Moors, or Turks.
Ransomable captives like Sancho and me were exempted from hard labor. But we were expected to feed ourselves. Without Sancho I would have starved; nourishment reached my belly thanks to his ingenuity. When he smelled food, Sancho had wheels in his feet, the eyes of a falcon, the nose of a wolf, and the ferocity of a Barbary lion. As soon as the guards opened the doors of the bagnio, we rushed down the deserted casbah. At that hour, the streets teemed with nocturnal criminals who didn’t bother with slave beggars. Sancho and I raced to be the first ones at the shoreline to meet the returning fishermen and scavenge the discards they tossed on the beach. Even when the rough winds prevented the fishermen from going out to sea the night before, there was always a plentiful supply of sea urchins for the taking along the rocky shore. I would slurp their mushy bits of sweet orangey caviar until I appeased my vocal stomach.
At the foot of the casbah, a small gate opened to the strip of beach where fishermen moored their boats and unloaded their daily catch. On both sides of the gate were impaled the men who had incurred Hassan Pasha’s wrath by attempting to cross the Mediterranean in barques and balancelles made of big pumpkins strung together with twine. These desperate escapees would stand in the middle of the floating pumpkins holding in their stretched-out arms a robe, a rag, any large piece of clothing—hoping the wind would make a sail out of it. The lucky ones drowned. The survivors were tortured and left for the African vultures, which plucked out the men’s eyes while they were still alive. After a while, the stench of rotten flesh was just another unpleasant city smell, indistinguishable from the stink of the latrines in the casbah, which expelled revolting fumes. The stench lifted only when strong winds blew in from the Sahara.
As the fishermen approached the shoreline, I would stand for a brief moment gazing at the dark sea; the pain of my incarceration was accentuated by the reminder that such a beautiful body of water—the Mediterranean of the Greek mythic heroes—lay between my freedom and me; between my family in Spain and the lair of criminals where I was trapped, which I was determined to escape from no matter what.
When the boats beached, Sancho and I ran in their direction like hungry hounds to snatch the discarded fish from the air before the belligerent seagulls flew away with them. The fishermen greeted us with taunts of, “Run, Christian dogs, run if you want to eat!” The fear of hunger overruled my shame. Their unwanted catch, seasoned with their insults, was preferable to a strict diet of sea urchins. These meager scraps were sometimes our only meal of the day.
Chewing fast, and spitting out the prickly bones, Sancho would say, “Quick, Miguel, eat the worms before they fill their bellies.”
After we sated ourselves, we searched for mollusks and crustaceans, edible to Christians. Later we would sell them in the souk. Sancho excelled at killing the highly prized crabs with the throw of a stone. He bundled our catch in rags he reserved for that purpose, and we set out for the market.
The souk was the heart of the casbah. I was fascinated by the fabulous bazaar where people admired, purchased, and sold goods from all over the world: pipes of Spanish and Italian wines, butter, wheat, semolina, curried rice, flour, lard, chickpeas, olive oil, fresh and dry salted fish, eggs in many sizes and colors (ivory ostrich eggs the size of a man’s head; speckled quail eggs the size of a fingernail), vegetables, fresh figs and figs preserved in syrup, smoky African honey, almonds, oranges, grapes, and sugared dates. Earthenware, perfumes, incense of many kinds, wool, precious stones, elephant tusks, lion and leopard skins were also displayed, as well as stunningly colored fabrics that shimmered in the hot sunlight.
When luck smiled on us, we sold our bits of fish and made the twenty aspers charged to sleep in the bagnio on the floor of a room crammed with men, the only protection from the chilly and unhealthy night winds that arrived in the autumn.
On my first tours of the labyrinths of the casbah, Sancho served as my Virgil. “Look, Miguel,” he said, pointing toward the roofs of the houses, “I swear these people must be half cats. See how they hang their laundry on the roofs? That’s because the poor houses have no patios. See how the women travel from roof to roof? That’s how they visit each other because their husbands don’t want the Turks and Moors to lay eyes on them.”
I learned how to glimpse the inside of the dwellings with their ancient tiled floors of intricate design and beautiful colors. The interiors of the houses were immaculate, in stark contrast to the mounds of filth on the streets. Algerian women went about barefoot, swathed in billowing fabrics, their gleaming black hair uncovered, as they sailed through the shaded interiors and vanished behind drapes. The gold bracelets around their arms and ankles, and the necklaces of long strands of lustrous pearls, glistened fleetingly inside the homes as the women darted about. Now and then a woman would stand still for a second to stare bracingly at Christian men, her alluring eyes gleaming golden like those of wild cats.
Neither courtly Madrid, nor Córdoba with its rich ancient history, nor magnificent Sevilla where the great treasures and marvels of the world were displayed, and not even immortal and mythic Rome with its glorious ruins and its ghosts of the great still wondering about, could compete with Algiers, where Moors, Jews, Turks—and over twenty thousand Christian captives—made their home. I learned to identify the Algerians right away: their skin was the same shade of color as the desert dunes at sunset, which separated Algeria from dark Africa.
Jews were easily recognizable by the white cloaks they wore, and the black caps that covered their heads. Their white cloaks made them stand apart in the dark of the night. Under their garments they were compelled to wear black. I was grateful that my family had converted to Christianity so long ago that I could not be recognized as a Jew. Christian slaves were lucky compared to the way Jews were treated. Even street cats were held in higher esteem than the Jews. If they felt like it, Algerians spat in their faces when they passed Jews on the street. The slaves of the Moors and Turks ranked higher than them. At the fountains, Jews had to wait until everyone else filled their jars before they could collect water themselves.
Algiers was more Turkish than Arab. The Turkish men were robust and imposing. They wore loose-fitting pants under their short-sleeved jackets: a piece of cloth that hugged their ankles and which they tied with a band around their bellybutton. Their outsized turbans resembled cupolas. Scimitars, daggers, and pistols bulged under the sashes around their waists. Everyone in Algiers deferred to them. One of the first things Sancho told me was: “Rule número uno, never argue with those toads! Run away from them as you would from an elephant’s fart.”
I had no trouble learning to spot the Christian renegades from every known corner of the world. The ones who wore the turban adopted the look and the customs of their Moorish and Turkish masters. They spoke in Spanish among themselves, but not to Christian captives. These renegades were the most unsavory inhabitants of Algiers, for there was no greater criminal in my eyes than a man who abandoned his faith and then turned against the people of his own blood. To prove their allegiance to their new masters, and to be rewarded with riches and privileges, renegades invented lies and accused the captives, who had formerly been their brothers in faith, of unspeakable crimes.
I was spellbound by the Azuaga people, the Berbers, who were as white as the snowy peaks of the mountains where they came from. Tattooed crosses were carved on the palms of their hands. Their women had their entire bodies covered with tattoos, including their faces and their tongues. The women made a living weaving and knitting, or working as domestics in the palaces and houses of rich Moors.
Other foreigners came from as far away as Russia, Portugal, England, Scotland, and Ireland to the north; Syria, Egypt, and India to the south and east; and Brazil to the west. Many of these foreigners were adopted as sons of the Turks if they were circumcised, converted to Islam, and practiced sodomy like their masters.
I heard Spanish spoken everywhere in the souk, not only by my compatriot inmates of the bagnio, but also by the Moriscos and Mudéjares who were now citizens of Algiers, and the Spanish merchants who had licenses to operate their businesses in the port. The sound of Spanish spoken on the streets was an oasis to me. For a moment, I could pretend that Spain was nearer than it was. Sometimes I would stand close to people chattering in Castilian, just to hear the sweet sounds of our mother tongue. The language of Garcilaso and Jorge Manrique never sounded so beautiful to me. I made a practice to approach these people and ask them if they knew where one Rodrigo Cervantes lived. I described the physical appearance of my brother, but no one could help me in my search. Now and then a pícaro hinted that he might know something, but would need a gold coin to unlock his memory.
Each night, before surrendering to the disquieting shadows of my slumbers, my last thought was about discovering Rodrigo’s whereabouts; the first thought that entered my mind when my eyes greeted dawn was about him too; and the one thought that colored the hours of each day was wondering when I would see him again. To find Rodrigo, and escape with him from Algiers, became the sole reason for my existence. I was nearly thirty years old, and I had brought nothing except shame on my family. When I returned to Spain—and it was not a question of
if
but of
when
—it would not be as a hero dressed in glory and wealth, as I had hoped years ago, but as a cripple. My redemption would come in the form of liberating my brother and bringing him back safely to my parents. I would do everything in my power not to let them go to their graves knowing that their two sons were still slaves.
Hoping to garner information about Rodrigo, I roamed the dark passageways of the casbah, accosting anyone who looked Spanish or Morisco, stopping at the stalls in the souk where Spanish or Italian was spoken, to make inquiries about my brother. I cared not that my beard was long, my garments filthy, that I was repelled by my own smell, that my feet were permanently swollen and blistered from tireless walking and were often bleeding by the time I returned to the bagnio at sundown.
I needed to find a way out of my indigent state so I could buy ink and paper to write letters to my family and friends to inform them that Rodrigo and I were still alive. I had no way of knowing whether Rodrigo had been in epistolary contact with our family. It tortured me that the lack of news from us must have made our parents suffer a great deal. Making money became an imperative: that was the only way I might find out something about Rodrigo’s present situation. One night, as I was getting ready to go to sleep, Sancho said, “Miguel, if you haven’t noticed, the nights are getting chilly. In a few weeks your blood will freeze in your veins, and your bones will turn to ice, if you continue to sleep with the sky as your roof. If I may be so disrespectful as to offer my advice to someone so illustrated, to a poet and hidalgo who has seen the world and fought for the glory of Spain, if you don’t take care of yourself today, my young friend, you won’t live to find your brother tomorrow, let alone escape Algiers with him. My old master the Count of Ordóñez used to say,
Carpe diem
. To which I will add—because two proverbs are better than one—all good things come to those who wait.”
I thank God for putting Sancho in my path. Though he couldn’t read or write, he taught me many words and expressions of the lingua franca spoken in that Babel. Soon my confidence in my rudimentary knowledge of Algiers’s main language grew. I began to accost anyone who looked somewhat prosperous to offer my services as a servant. Necessity made me brazen: I knocked on every door I passed asking for work. But fetching water, scrubbing the courtyards, cleaning latrines, hauling sacks of grain, cutting weeds, digging, picking fruits in the giardini, or harvesting vegetables and other produce, were all impossible tasks to perform with only one good arm. I could grind wheat with a mortar, but I could not move the heavy concave stones after the wheat had been ground into flour. I offered myself to teach Spanish to the children of wealthy Algerians, but when parents introduced me to the little fiends, they started to shriek as soon as they saw my deformed hand. Occasionally charitable people handed me a piece of old bread or a few figs. Sancho was luckier, finding work carrying food and water to the homes of the well-to-do. My desperation grew. Even thieves needed both arms.
Had it not been for Sancho’s industriousness, I might not have survived those first few months in Algiers. For the first time, I knew the fear of those who suffered starvation. The rare days when I earned a few extra aspers selling fish, I treated my stomach to the cheap plates of delicious lamb stew and couscous made by the street cooks. These filling dishes were the staple of the poor of the casbah. Having been my father’s reluctant assistant in his barbershop, I thought of offering my services to the local barbers: with my good hand I could empty chamber pots and wash them; I could give medicines to the ill and feed them. But Algerian barbershops were strictly for grooming, shaving, and the procurement of slave boys. The beautiful youths who did not go to sea with the Turkish sailors stayed behind and worked in these places, where they shaved the Turks and satisfied their carnal needs. The loveliest boys were highly valued and sought after, and the Turks wooed them with splendid gifts. It was sad to see Spanish boys become the whores of the sodomites. I could not work in one of those establishments.