The Moor's Account (21 page)

The second boat Narváez put under the command of the comptroller, Alonso Enríquez, and the commissary; they were to be accompanied by fifty-three other men. The third boat was given to Capitán Téllez and his deputy, Peñaloza, with forty-nine others. On the fourth boat, the governor put Cabeza de Vaca and Albaniz the notary, with fifty-one men. On the fifth and last boat, Narváez put Dorantes, Castillo, and the rest of their original company, including this servant of God, Mustafa ibn Muhammad.

We had arrived in La Florida men of different nations and stations, but now the differences between us were not so stark. Many of us were half-naked, having given up our clothes to make the sails. We were all thin and
tired and eager to leave. The prolonged strain of our ordeal had reduced our greed to the simplest one of all: survival. So we carried the rafts into the bay and climbed on.

To the best of my recollection, we sailed out on the first of Muharram in the year 935 of the Hegira. I stood at the fore of our raft, eager to make my way to Pánuco, to Cuba, to a rescue ship, to anywhere but here. As Dorantes gave out the order to unfurl the sail, I turned to look at him and saw my own desires reflected in his eyes: let us leave this land, where we have met nothing but ill luck and misery, and which resembles nothing so much as a great test of our faith and a punishment for our sins.

She looks like you.

Ramatullai kept repeating these words like an incantation that could break any curse. Her comportment was less reserved than usual, I noticed; she touched my arm and leaned in close to me as she told me about her day. And she was distracted, too. The smell of saffron rice rose in the kitchen, but she did not stir the bubbling pot. Wallahi, she said, I heard the laundress clearly. She looks like you.

That morning, our mistress had decided to go to the bathhouse in San Juan de la Palma. It was not in her habit to visit public baths, but after a week of particularly bitter quarreling with her husband, she said she sorely needed it. In the steam of the entrance hall, she shed her gray dress and dour mood, and asked for a treatment with perfumed oil. On one of the wooden benches in the hall, Ramatullai sat waiting for her, with a pitcher of cold water and a bowl of fresh oranges. She passed the time by tracing the stars on the tiled wall with her fingers. That was when the laundress noticed the blue tattoo on the back of Ramatullai's hand; she had seen a little girl who had the same mark.

A tattoo like this? Ramatullai asked her. With seven teeth?

The laundress was a pudgy woman with thick eyebrows and a high bun. Standing with her hip against the counter, she was folding towels, lining up the edges of them quickly and expertly. Seven or eight or nine, how should I know? she said. But it was a comb.

When was she here?

Last week.

With her mistress?

Of course with her mistress. Did you imagine she could come into this bathhouse by herself?

Ramatullai had stayed quiet, but as soon as I came in that night she told me the story, repeating the laundress's words to me again and again: She looks like you.

After that, on every errand Ramatullai was sent, whether to the butcher or the baker, the tailor or the cobbler, she asked the slaves or servants she came across about Amna—she was convinced it was Amna at the bathhouse that day, even though the tattoo could have appeared on any other girl from her tribe. Then, just after the Christian feast of the Nativity, the neighbors' servant said he had seen the tattoo on a girl at the Hospital of Santa Ana; she was carrying a basket of victuals for an old woman. It is her, said Ramatullai. I know it. It is her.

Then send her a message, I said.

I cannot write, Mustafa. Nor can she read.

I can write the letter for you, and she can find someone to read it to her.

Someone who reads Arabic? Here, in Seville?

Yes, I said. Someone like me.

So I wrote the letter in my best penmanship, on a piece of paper stolen from the master, dipping the feather tip in a bowl of indigo dye. Looking over my shoulder, Ramatullai dictated: Dear Amna, this letter is from your mother. I live in a house in the barrio of Triana. The master's name is Bernardo Rodriguez. He is well known and his house is not hard to find if you ask at the market. I am in good health, praise be to God. I pray that you are as well. Write to me and tell me where you are.

Under her direction, I signed the letter: Your loving mother.

Ramatullai blew on the ink until it was dry, then slid the tiny piece of paper inside her corset. She sat close to me on the sisal mat; I could smell lavender on her dress. I allowed myself to put my right hand over her left and she did not withdraw it. We sat like this, hand over hand, for a long time. It had never occurred to me to send a letter to my own brothers. But why? Perhaps, I thought, it was because I was too ashamed to tell them about the life that was now mine: the conversion, the beatings, the kitchen closet. Perhaps I did not want to deepen their sorrow at my absence. Or perhaps it was because this keeping up of familial bonds was something that women, more than men, never forgot how to do.

•  •  •

I
WAS DRIFTING INTO SLEEP
one night when I heard the clattering of the copper pots that hung on a rail in the kitchen. Had a thief slipped inside the house? In that hazy moment between sleep and consciousness, I remained where I was on my pallet until my thoughts drifted to Ramatullai and I bolted upright, suddenly awake. I crept out of my closet, armed with nothing but my blanket twisted into a rope, hoping to surprise the thief in the middle of his crime. I walked out into the darkened patio, all my senses watchful for any accomplices that might lurk behind one of the pillars. From the kitchen came the rattling of metal. The thief seemed to pay no mind to the amount of noise he was making. Gingerly, I pushed the door open with my foot.

The long legs of Ramatullai were thrashing in the darkness, under the weight of Bernardo Rodriguez. I could see the pink soles of her feet as they went up and down, up and down, up and down. Though the pots rattled and the master heaved, Ramatullai heard the door creak open. She turned her face toward me. We stared at one another over the back of our master. The silent gaze between us spoke of our disbelief. Every slave knew this could happen, but no slave believed it would, until it did. Pain, anger, and rebellion bubbled inside us. But in the end fear won out; she turned her face away and I lowered my eyes and returned to my closet.

Ramatullai did not speak of the violations she endured, and I did not bring them up, but the image tortured me that night and many nights to come. When I came into the kitchen, and saw the curve of Ramatullai's hips, I tried not to think of my master's stubby fingers curling around them. I tried not to think of his lips on her neck. And I tried, especially, not to think of his knee parting hers on the same mat upon which we sat every night. Whenever these thoughts came to me, I shuffled them like a deck of cards with less painful memories, hoping, somehow, to lose them forever.

Although we did not speak of the master's violations, we began to look for ways to strike back at him: Ramatullai by tainting his food and drink, or I by dropping a crate of merchandise on my way back from the port. Small, discreet measures of vengeance, as reprisals by the weak tend to be. They managed to irritate him, but they did not always give us the satisfaction we expected from them. Sometimes, they had the reverse effect: he would punish us for the smallest of infractions.

Ramatullai lived up to her name; she was a blessing from God, for she was the only friend I had in that household, the only one I could speak to, the only one who shared the pain of exile and servitude with me. When the master whipped me for breaking a pot, she rubbed butter over my lash marks; when the mistress abruptly cut off all of Ramatullai's hair, I said she looked better without it. Our friendship grew, strengthened not only by our common ordeal, but also by a sense that we had no one else with whom to share it. Increasingly, the words we exchanged after dinner in the kitchen sounded like the conversations of old friends, people who had lived long enough together to have their own, private language.

We talked about the letter often—we thought it had reached Amna, but that she had not found someone to read it for her yet; or that she had found someone to read it, but no one willing to write a response; or that the letter had been intercepted by her mistress before it could be sent out. But all of this was conjecture. Like watching a clear sky and trying to guess when it would rain.

Still, at the store, I kept an eye out for the hunchback.

A
YEAR PASSED
,
THEN ANOTHER
. My master's business thrived. The ships coming in from the Indies brought surprise cargo each time—parrot feathers in flamboyant red and yellow, which Spanish noblewomen found fashionable; an edible root called batata, which had a strange, starchy taste; tapestries of uncommonly fine detail—and all these novelties sold well in Seville. Still, Rodriguez complained incessantly about the taxes that the Casa de Contratación charged on everything he imported. How can a decent and honest man, he asked, his fingers bunched together in a gesture of supplication, run a business under the tangle of all the rules and conditions that the Crown imposed? Upon hearing this question, his friends, most of them involved in one form or another in the same trade, rarely answered him. They did not share his frustrations or, if they did, they did not complain as much about them.

Señor Rodriguez's success at business was a result of his gift of persuasion. And, not unrelatedly, he had an extraordinary ability to adapt. He could speak to a merchant, a sailor, a royal official, or a hidalgo and somehow manage to modulate his manner and his speech to each one of them. They all responded favorably, although the hidalgos were often amused and occasionally irritated at the sight of a simple merchant daring
to speak to them as though he were one of their own. Señor Rodriguez even managed to get invitations to their card games, at which large amounts of money were gambled. One evening, he returned drunk from one of these gatherings to tell his wife that she needed to make herself new dresses from silk or taffeta, or else the woolen mantles she insisted on wearing would always betray her as the daughter of a butcher from Cádiz. They quarreled; she fell on her knees in prayer and he went back out to the tavern.

The next day, my master brought his wife a silver bracelet and, kissing her hand, slipped it over her wrist. He gave her some silk and an oil portrait of a religious figure, in which she seemed to take particular delight. In Seville, Señor Rodriguez was not the only merchant who was finding new ways to spend his new money. Once, as he and I were walking to the public bath, a coach stopped next to us, and the face of his friend Mateo poked out of the window. My master was so surprised he took a step back and had trouble answering his friend's courteous greeting. As we continued on our way, I knew that he was already thinking about how he needed to buy himself a coach, too. The workers Bernardo Rodriguez employed and the slaves he now owned made his continual presence at the shop less necessary, leaving me in charge of opening and closing. He began to spend more time with his friends at the tavern. His gambling turned into a habit.

I
T WAS A HOT
summer night, I remember. From the street came the sound of the syrup seller's cart creaking on the cobblestone. Pink and white roses wilted in the heat of the courtyard, their scent as heavy as the heat. And in my closet the air was still and the walls were damp. I had taken off my shirt and was lying on my pallet in my breeches when Ramatullai appeared at my door. In her hands were bowls of the leftover bean soup that was to be our dinner.

I can come to the kitchen, I said, getting up and quickly slipping on my shirt.

No, the kitchen is even hotter, she replied. Her eyes had what I thought was the special glint they did whenever she wanted to share a particularly scandalous bit of gossip with me.

We sat down together on the pallet. It was made from scraps of fabric I had rescued from my master's store and sewn, one over the other, to
make a sort of bed. Hanging from a nail on the wall were the only other garments I owned, a woolen shirt and dark breeches that the mistress of the house had purchased and insisted I wear on Sundays.

He has quarreled with his wife again, Ramatullai said.

What about? I asked.

His gambling.

Fourth time this week, I said. The more his business prospered, the more my master seemed to find ways to waste his money, a fact that his wife, with the unimpeachable common sense of a butcher's daughter, found profoundly distasteful.

He does not have the money to pay back his debts, Ramatullai said.

Nonsense. He has the money.

No, he needs to pay his creditors by next week, before they sail for the Indies.

I shrugged and took a bite of bread. None of this, I thought, was any of our concern. I did not know why Ramatullai insisted on following the conversation at the masters' dinner table. I myself found it too painful to hear about the drudgery of their daily lives, for it only reminded me of my loved ones and how much I missed them. I had failed to notice the tone in Ramatullai's voice, but now, in the half-light of the closet, I finally saw the sadness in her eyes, the hardness around her mouth. I stopped eating and waited.

Eventually Ramatullai spoke up again, though her voice was merely a whisper: His wife told him he needed to sell one of his slaves to pay back his debt.

Not this, I thought. Not this. For many months now, the mistress had been looking for ways to rid herself of Ramatullai, but it had never occurred to me that the master himself would give her a pretext. Now, to pay for his gambling debt, he would sell the only friend I had in Seville and I would never see her again. The prospect of that pain seemed almost unendurable to me and, sensing this, Ramatullai drew near and put her arm around my shoulders. The light from the candle went out.