God Carlos (12 page)

Carlos abruptly pointed to the sea and indicated to Orocobix that he should get in his canoe and go. The Arawak did not understand at first that the god was sending him away.

“Oh, God,” he said to God Carlos in a supplicating voice, “I long to understand your words and will obey them all if only you would teach me their meaning.”

“I said, get off!” Carlos roared, gesticulating to show what he wanted the Arawak to do.

Orocobix, although he now understood, did not move. Carlos grabbed him by the hair and shoved him brutally off the
Santa Inez
and onto the pier.

“Now you stay there!” God Carlos commanded.

Orocobix clambered to his feet and tried to step back aboard the ship.

“Stay there!” Carlos screamed, pushing the Indian back onto the pier. Orocobix fell to his knees in the prostrated position and seemed to be begging for mercy.

The shouting woke up a few of the hungover men who were strewn asleep all over the deck in curled-up lumps of flesh and clothing. Groggy and drowsy, a few of them propped their heads up on their hands to watch. A couple of them grumbled about the noise but no one made a move to intervene.

Orocobix did not understand. “Why does the god treat me so harshly?” he asked pitifully from the pier, holding out his arms as if he would embrace his god.

“I do not think, Carlos,” the boy Pedro muttered, “that you should do these things to one who worships you.”

“I'm tired of playing with him,” Carlos snarled.

“I'll go for now, but I will return,” said Orocobix sadly after he had been roughly thrown off the ship for the fourth time. Then he shuffled off to his tied-up canoe, looking forlorn and rejected and pausing frequently to turn and see whether Carlos had changed his mind. The god had not; so the Indian rowed away and headed out to open sea.

Orocobix was paddling away when de la Serena appeared on deck, looking around as if he'd lost something.

“Who was shouting?” he asked a drowsy seaman sprawled out on the poop deck.

“It was God Carlos sending the Indian away,” he responded sleepily. But he did not say it too loudly for fear Carlos would hear. And before he settled down again to catch another snatch of sleep, the seaman glanced around to be sure that Carlos was not nearby.

“What a dismal place this colony is,” de la Serena moaned.

Chapter 13

Shortly after the
Santa Inez
made her landfall, de la Serena fell mysteriously sick, leaving the crew fretting that their captain would die and they would be abandoned in the New World. Feverish, he lay abed in a grubby little room in the makeshift inn whose walls were stained with sooty candle smudges and whose single window was smothered under a soiled bedsheet that served as a crude curtain. Here, at the ends of the earth, he lay sprawled out on a narrow homemade bed under a frayed dirty blanket, haunted by his wife's prophecy on the pier that he would die and be buried unmourned among strangers in the New World. That she might be proven right galled him more than the prospect of dying itself.

A physician, who was also the settlement's barber, was summoned to his sickbed where, after prodding and poking him with thick, greasy fingers, he announced gravely that de la Serena had to undergo bleeding or he would die.

Bleeding—opening a vein in the patient's arm and drawing off a quantity of blood to reduce the imbalance of so-called humors—was a standard sixteenth-century medical treatment for virtually every disease. And although de la Serena had no reason to think the practice the quackery that it was, he had bad memories of previous bleedings that had left him breathless and weak.

He refused the treatment, dismissed the physician, and sweated out the fever, which came and went capriciously, gradually abated, and eventually disappeared. One morning he woke up weak but free of fever and was able to eat for the first time in days.

Without knowing it, de la Serena had weathered
the seasoning
—as the initial perilous days of acclimatizing to Jamaica later came to be called. For the first three centuries of the island's occupation, the mortality rate of new arrivals to Jamaica was so ghastly that one writer characterized the island as “a vast graveyard.” A classic example was the arrival in December 1656 of 1,600 colonists who settled near Morant Bay. By March of 1657, a scant three months later, 1,200 were dead, including the leader and his wife. Responsible for this indiscriminate slaughter was yellow fever spread by the mosquito. Later, medical science would find that while whites had no immunity to this disease, blacks often had a natural resistance that enabled them to better adapt to life in the West Indies.

De la Serena thought often during those days of the fever that he, too, would die. But death held no terror for him, for he believed that it would return him to the unknowing void which had spawned him. And, being a logical man, since he believed that after death he would have no more memory of having existed than an adobe brick, he did not find such an end fearful.

But once the fever broke and he was out of bed, de la Serena became nearly overwhelmed by a feeling of absurdity about what he was doing in such a remote and desolate part of the world. He wondered what could have possessed him to make such a long, pointless voyage, and for a day or two he moped like one who had lost his life's purpose. But as he grew stronger, his spirits rebounded and once again he became determined to imprint his name on this new land.

How were geographical features of a newly discovered land named? On the daily walks he took to regain his strength, de la Serena pondered this question as if it were a holy mystery. Obviously there was some protocol at work that he did not know. What he knew was common knowledge: all explorers, including Columbus, felt free to name lands that they encountered. But many explorers named only the most conspicuous features of their discoveries, leaving other geographical scraps unnamed. It did not occur to de la Serena that a land already occupied by an indigenous people was not unknown and therefore could not be discovered—that claim of its discovery was based on an underlying presumption that nothing existed unless known to Europeans.

With his strength flooding back, de la Serena plotted his next move. He made an appointment to see the alcade of Sevilla la Nueva.

 

* * *

 

The alcade, an official roughly equivalent to a governor, was responsible for the maintenance and upkeep of a new colony as well as for ensuring that the Crown received its share of any discovered wealth.

At the time of the arrival of the
Santa Inez
in 1520, the appointed alcade of Sevilla la Nueva was one Juan Caro, a brownnoser from Castile who had lobbied hard for an administrative position in a colony of the New World. He had done so in the mistaken belief that to be an alcade in the Indies would shower him with glory and renown. Wild rumors about the vast wealth of the Indies were then in circulation throughout Spain, and every young man with an adventurous heart hungered for a colonial posting.

A lanky man with a potbelly incongruous for one of his build, Juan Caro had gotten his position in a way commonplace for the times—through his connections to the court of Charles I, grandson of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, the original sponsors of Columbus's explorations.

Juan Caro had said a word about his ambition to an important uncle who was owed a large sum of money by a spendthrift grandee highly placed among the brilliant courtiers who kept the twenty-year-old Charles I amused. The uncle murmured to the indebted courtier, who whispered to his mistress, who breathed the name of Juan Caro to the wife of the official on the board in charge of employing the alcades, and through this capillary seepage of influence, the appointment was secured.

It was an act that Caro bitterly regretted. He had been at the post now for eighteen months and had never detested a country or people more passionately. He was not enchanted by the lush green fields or the rolling hills or the loveliness of the clear blue ocean. The gentleness of the Indians he regarded as laziness and weakness. Nothing about his position interested him, and he had already begun the reverse process of having himself recalled through the same uncle's influence.

De la Serena found the alcade squatting morosely behind a desk made of rough-hewn lumber, his office little more than a dark burrow in a building that seemed to slump against the hillside. Caro knew the name and reputation of de la Serena, for like every brownnoser then or now, he had a keen nose for the smell of money and could tell that the elderly man sitting before him was rich. Trying his best to disguise his hatred of his present life, the alcade struggled to be cordial.

“You mean to tell me, señor, that you sailed all the way from Spain to this godforsaken island for no other reason but sightseeing?” Caro exclaimed with astonishment after listening to de la Serena's jumbled tale about having the desire to see the New World before he died.

De la Serena glanced around the empty room as if he suspected that eavesdroppers lurked nearby.

“No, señor,” he whispered as though he told a shameful secret, “I do have another reason. I am seeking a legacy. I would like some part of this new land to be named after me.”

A foxy gleam shining in his eyes, the alcade stared at the old man. “I do not understand what you mean, señor.”

“You go into the interior and find a river you've never seen before. What name do you give it?”

The alcade thought about the question. “Of course,” he said blandly, “everything in this island already has an Indian name. But we pay no attention to it. They call it one thing, and we call it another.”

“And whose name prevails?”

“The one who has writing, iron, and gunpowder.”

The two Spaniards chuckled.

“I should also warn you to hide your dead from the Indians, señor,” the alcade said softly. “They think we are gods and cannot die. It is to our advantage to encourage them in this belief.”

“Dead? We have no dead.”

“You will. This is a place of death.”

De la Serena lapsed into a pensive silence. Finally, he stirred as if awakening from a sleep. “Then, have all the mountains been named?”

“Señor, all the mountains have not even been explored. This is a big island and it is filled with mountains. We do not even know what kind of animals live on it. We do not know if there are venomous snakes or poisonous insects. We only know what the Indians have told us and what we have learned for ourselves.”

“So there are many physical features still to be named,” sighed de la Serena happily.

“There are countless unnamed promontories, districts, mountains, rivers, and for all we know, there may be nameless inland lakes or volcanoes.”

De la Serena rubbed his hands together with the eager anticipation of a banker about to fondle a stack of newly minted money. “And who gives a new mountain its name?”

Caro thought for a moment. “I suppose the one who first finds it. But,” he added hastily, “that name would have to be approved by the official in charge.”

“Which is you.”

A smile creased the alcade's face. He leaned forward expectantly. “A cartographer in our company is to begin a survey of the island soon and will draw a new map. I will speak to him about your wishes.”

The two men stared at each other with a deep understanding.

“I would be grateful for that favor. And I'm a man who knows how to express gratitude.”

“That is obvious, señor,” Caro the brownnoser said smoothly, a greedy smile oozing over his face.

 

* * *

 

That very afternoon de la Serena was introduced to the cartographer. He was a gloomy Frenchman of a nervous disposition who was always twitching. Everyone called him
Monsieur
, which was the only name by which he was known. He took his responsibilities very seriously and seemed to be overawed by the task of mapping Jamaica.

On the first meeting, Monsieur took de la Serena on a walk up a hill that offered a wide and expansive view of the bay above which the settlement was being built. It was a hard climb for an old man who had just recovered from being so ill, and it took longer to reach the summit than the Frenchman was used to, which made him irritated.

“Can't you go any faster?” he asked de la Serena peevishly when the older man kept falling behind.

“I've just recovered from the fever,” de la Serena panted, leaning against a tree. “Go ahead of me. I will catch up.”

“If you cannot keep up with me, how can you expect to catch up with me?”

De la Serena stared sternly at the man. “Is this the kind of respect you show your alcade's guests?” he asked sharply.

Realizing that he'd gone too far, Monsieur suddenly changed his attitude. He sat down heavily beside de la Serena.

“I'm sorry, señor,” he muttered, wiping his sweaty face. He looked around the thick woodland that surrounded them. “It is this bestial country. It makes a man forget civility. One cannot live among savages without becoming one himself.”

A raucous mob of screeching parrots suddenly swooped into the surrounding trees, rippling the foliage with quivering spasms of iridescence like the ocean crinkling in a breeze.

“Get along with you, you nasty creatures!” shouted Monsieur, shaking his fist at the trees.

With a loud cackling, the flock fluttered off into the woods. Monsieur watched them go.

“I hate birds,” he said bitterly. “They have the perspective that I, a mapmaker, need but can never have. It is up there that your eye clearly sees the topography of the land. What can it be but a flaw in creation to give such a perspective to a useless bird?”

“It is one of the many accidents of life,” de la Serena murmured.

“It is the fault of God,” grumbled the Frenchman.

The two men struggled up the slope until they came to a scenic overlook. Below them spread the vista of inlets and coves as the shoreline furled against the ocean in irregular twists and furrows like a crumpled edge of a hastily shed garment. Where the land met the sea, the coastline was unevenly pleated. Stretched immediately below them was Santa Gloria Bay, above which Sevilla la Nueva rose in a sprinkle of buildings.