Cervantes Street (9 page)

I rejoiced when Spanish forces joined the Catholic states of Genoa, Naples, and Venice to fight back the imminent assault by the Turks. Their forces began to gather off the coast of Italy, near the port of Messina. The imminence of the approaching war saturated the air we breathed; it dominated our conversations, our thoughts, and our dreams. It made all the young men in Rome walk about with their chests puffed out. I had never been so thrilled to be alive.

When Cardinal Acquaviva did not require my services, I was drawn to visiting the Colosseum. I would find myself alone, late at night, sitting high up, looking down at the empty arena until I could imagine it drenched in blood that blazed in the moonlight. Then I could hear the roaring echo of the bloodthirsty Romans. If I closed my eyes I saw the angry populace making signs of life and death with their thumbs; signs that screamed silently,
Life, death, life, death.
Life.

I would kill Turks the way I imagined myself killing lions and slaying gladiators in the Colosseum. My head was filled with patriotic fervor for the Spanish land and our Christian faith. One night, alone, with the shadows of the monument and the stars in the firmament as my only witnesses, I pledged to give my life, if necessary, to defeat the Turks. If I lived, the battlefield, I was convinced, would provide me with experience, and a great subject to write a magnificent poem, something that would rival
The Iliad
or
El Cid
. And if I never became a great poet, I would at least be an active participant in a decisive moment in history.

That was my state of mind when my brother Rodrigo arrived in Rome as a soldier in a Spanish regiment commanded by Don Miguel de Moncada. We drank in the taverns, visited whorehouses, and talked incessantly about the glorious future that awaited us in the service of our king.

All that remained was for me to inform Cardinal Acquaviva of my decision. There was no displeasure in his voice when he said, “Miguel, I will miss you. If my circumstances were different, I, too, would become a soldier. I will pray for your safety. Remember that there will always be a place in my home for you.”

* * *

The last days of that humid August of 1571, the Christian fleets began to gather in the harbor of Messina. I was feverish with my zeal to serve under the command of our noble and magnificent prince, who had promised to bring Spain into another Golden Age. On the days leading to the great battle, Rodrigo and I waited aboard
La Marquesa,
hearing the Masses said by the priests who went from galley to galley reminding us that to die in the defense of the only true God was a worthy enterprise. Along with thousands of other Christian youths we waited for orders from our commanders to ready for battle, hearing changing reports of the strategic movements of the Turkish navy.

That September, which seemed to be the longest thirty days of my young life, we whiled away the time cleaning and oiling our weapons, rehearsing different attack scenarios, and praying under our breath to kill multitudes of Turks in order to preserve our faith and the Christian world.

At last the moment came, that glorious day of October 6, when, hearts inflamed with dreams of immortality, we sailed forth in two hundred galleys—thirty thousand men under the command of Don John with orders to destroy the fearsome Ottoman navy.

* * *

We sailed under clear skies until night fell. A moonless sky favored us. In complete darkness we slipped through the narrow and heavily fortified entrance to the Gulf of Corinth. The Turkish navy awaited us at the eastern end of the gulf.

On October 7 I woke up feverish and vomiting, and was ordered to stay below deck during the battle. “Your Grace,” I said to Captain Murena, “I joined the king’s forces to do my duty, and I would rather die for God and Spain than survive the battle without fighting.”

The captain frowned and said: “As you wish, Cervantes. But you will be stationed by the skiff and not move from there.” He added, “You must be a great fool. Most men in your condition would be happy to be exempted from fighting. God favors fools and madmen. May He be with you.”

On the southeast side of the gulf, where the Peloponnesian Mountains rose, witnesses to many epochal ancient wars, I imagined I saw and heard the great Greek heroes of antiquity cheering us on from the wooded hills. The currents of the gulf steered our fleet toward the Turkish ships, which were stationed in a line across the bay. Dawn revealed the triangular red flags of the enemy decorated with the moon star; they seemed like an airborne wave of brilliant color. In the center of their formation Ali Pasha’s immense galleon stood out; on its mast was hoisted a colossal green flag on which, it was said, Allah’s name was woven in gold twenty-nine thousand times. The Turks’ fearsome chants, and the spectacle of their glowing sails, lent majesty to the occasion. Their battle cries sounded as if they’d erupted from a giant common throat, one that belonged to a dragon whose red eyes stared at us from the clouds.

For hours both navies were frozen on the surface of the sea. The noon sun was blazing above us when the orders came to prepare for battle. Don John’s strategy became evident as the fast currents in the greenish waters thrust us in the direction of the enemy: we would not meet the Ottoman navy head-on. Our armada parted to form two flanks, while leaving behind in the middle a line of ships with our most powerful cannons facing the Turks. Both columns of ships traveled close to the shores of the bay. Rodrigo and I were both in the northern formation, but on different ships. I no longer felt sick.

The Turks fired first, producing a rushing wall of flame, which was followed by a thundering sound, as if the sky had crashed down to earth. I felt my heart stop, until the cannons of our galleons blazed back, aiming at Ali Pasha’s ship. This was the sign for our two columns to aim our prows at the Turkish vessels. We prepared to ram their fleet as our artillery fired. Of all their weapons, we feared most the Greek fire the Turks used. Once it hit a ship, it was impossible to put out: no amount of water or sand could quench its burning, steady fury.

As the two fleets got within striking distance of each other, and the harquebuses and cannons fired salvos on both sides, a hot mass of smoke swallowed up Christians and Turks alike. A force I did not understand seized me: I was no longer myself, no longer just one body, but part of something prodigiously large—a nation, a religion, a way of life, a soldier in the army of the true God. I became thousands of men, invulnerable, as tall and fearsome as a cyclops.

Orders came to board the Ottoman ships, and to engage the enemy in hand-to-hand combat. Battle-axes were wielded. For the next few hours severed fingers, hands, arms, feet, and heads pelted me, and I was drenched by mutilated and headless bodies shooting streams of blood.

Once the fighting started, my fear evaporated. When one man died, he was replaced by another; when that other man fell wounded, a healthy one emerged from behind him, creating an endless reserve of soldiers always venturing forward, a bloodthirsty horde shouting slogans, insults, prayers, curses, in Spanish, in Italian, in Turkish, in Arabic.

I had slain many Turks when a gunshot tore my left hand to pieces, leaving the bones exposed and protruding. At first I felt no pain and kept fighting, striking and killing with my healthy arm until a thump on my chest sent me reeling back: a harquebus blast had dug a hole in my torso. I was trying to block the flow of blood by pressing my fist against the orifice, when another deafening charge hit inches from my fist. My chest was heavy with the gunpowder and iron embedded in my flesh, and I staggered around as if drunk, smelling my charred flesh, trying to hold onto anything to keep my balance, to keep myself from collapsing on the deck of the ship where I knew I would be trampled to death.

As men were wounded and killed all around me, as ships caught fire and sank with loud groans, as choking black smoke enveloped us, I continued to swing my sword at anything that moved, intending—despite my weakened state—to vanquish every heretic in my path until I died.

Where was my brother? I prayed that he had been spared; prayed that if he was mortally wounded, and in excruciating pain, a compassionate soul would put an end to his suffering. I prayed that our parents would not lose both sons in one day.

* * *

I thought I must have been dreaming when I began to hear, in Spanish and Italian, cries of “Victory! Victory!” The fate of the battle had been sealed when the oarsmen of the Turks—Christian and Greek slaves who were unshackled so they could maneuver better during battle—jumped off the ships and swam toward the shores of the bay, disappearing into the thick forests that covered the hills. By sundown it was clear that we had slaughtered a great number of Turks; that our losses had been smaller; that we were the victors; that we had defeated the hitherto invincible Ottoman navy. Our men cheered when what was left of the enemy fleet was spotted fleeing the Gulf of Corinth, carrying their commander.

For what seemed hours, I lay on my back in a corner of
La Marquesa
, semihidden by empty barrels and dead men. My burning desire not to die so far from Spain kept me alive. The orders not to pursue the Turks reached my ears. Our men took a rest from the killing; the world hushed. The glorious battle of Lepanto had ended—I was a part of history.

Our ship, however, caught on fire and started sinking fast. With the last of my strength I crawled on the blood-crusted deck and hoisted myself overboard. The sea was so thick with corpses that soldiers walked over them—as if they were on land—to move from ship to ship. The soldiers who had been hit by Greek fire bobbed in the water like human torches, illuminating the bay. I floated next to a raft heaped with men—Muslim and Christian—dead and dying. In death all of them looked like pitifully broken marionettes made of the same material. With my good hand I grabbed onto a corner of the raft. When a hand aflame emerged from the sea as if to grab me by my throat and pull me to the underworld, I screamed and my entire body shook in the water.

The sea was scarlet with flames that spread in waves over the roiling waters. The stench of burning wood, gunpowder, and above all, of roasting and charred flesh, was the work not of God but of the devil, I told myself. The world around me lost all its edges; everything became a blur.
Heavenly Father, forgive my sins
, I prayed.
Forgive me for the many times I offended You. Have mercy on my soul.
I closed my eyes, certain I would open them again only in the afterlife.

* * *

Weeks later, when I regained consciousness, Rodrigo sat by my side. His eyes filled with tears. “You are in a hospital in Messina. The Blessed Virgin saved you,” he said. The pain in my chest, and in my useless hand, was excruciating. I howled. The Sisters fed me drops of water, but breathing itself was painful, as if the insides of my chest were ablaze. After a few drops of laudanum subdued my agony and I was calmer, my brother explained that he had found me on the beach the night after the battle, buried under a heap of dead soldiers.

For the next two years I languished in Italian hospitals, on bug-infested straw cots, in wards full of the ill, the wounded, the mutilated, the pus-ridden, the insane, the dying, of men who were rotting while still alive. Many nights I woke up screaming, panicked that the Greek fire had turned me into a burning torch, or that I was the only survivor after a gory battle, roaming in a desolate land, a landscape of severed limbs and decomposing corpses that was more frightening than any vision of hell I could ever have imagined.

Rodrigo left the army and found employment so that I could have the proper medications, and eat something besides the watery broth patients were fed in the hospital. When finally I was strong enough to go out into the world, with my scarred, patched-up chest and my limp arm, I was half the man I once had been. And I felt twice my age.

* * *

Three long years crawled by after the glorious days of the Battle of Lepanto, and I was desperate to return to Spain to see my family. I did not want to die on foreign soil. Over five years had passed since I fled Madrid. I was weary of the never-ending bloodshed, weary of being always on the move, engaged in endless campaigns against the Turks; weary, too, of the pestilential hospitals where my fellow soldiers rotted on their cots, eaten alive by maggots.

When I announced to Rodrigo that I was ready to walk back to Spain if necessary, he said to me, “Brother, I’m ready to return home with you. I have satisfied my curiosity about war and heroism. I want to go back home, find work, and help our parents. I would like to get married and have children.”

With the belated, pitiful payment of the wages owed us for our service as soldiers, we booked passage from Naples on the galley
El Sol
, bound for Barcelona. The irony of my return did not escape me: I had fled Spain to save my right hand and I was returning with my left hand hanging by my side like a dead appendage, ending at the wrist in a knobby, swollen stump, a ball of skin filled with blood, ready to burst if scratched. It was the hand of a monster.

Traveling on a lone ship back to Spain would make us easy prey to the corsairs. But the alternative was to wait for weeks to join a fleet of vessels, and our funds were dangerously low. At Lepanto, the Christian navy had made the costly mistake of not finishing off the slaughter of the Ottomans when they were at our mercy. Barely a year later, the Turks had regrouped, rearmed, and regained control of the Mediterranean, where once more they reigned supreme and were the bane of seafarers and people living in coastal towns. I had left some of my flesh and bone at Lepanto for nothing more than a taste of glory; it was as if the battle had been fought for naught. Mediterranean people quickly came to see Lepanto as a defeat; any mention of it was met with scorn.

Considering the circumstances, I wondered whether it was too late to receive from the Spanish crown compensation for my injuries. All my hopes rested in two letters I carried, one signed by Don John of Austria; the other, by the Duke of Sessa. The letters recommended me to his Catholic Majesty for a pension to reward my heroism in battle. Don John’s letter further pleaded with King Philip to grant me a recompense for additional service to the crown in the campaigns of Corfu and Modon, and a full pardon for the wounding of Antonio de Sigura.