The Moor's Account (31 page)

But what did he do? Dorantes asked. He stood beside Diego, his hand on the lad's elbow, as if to free him from Balsehekona's grip, though he did not dare pull him away. What is wrong? he asked again.

Diego had not done anything to the woman or to her baby—his only crime, as far as I could tell, was that he had appeared to her in a vision, in which he had harmed her and her baby. But the Carancahuas gave great meaning to their dreams, believing them to be omens of things to come.

Balsehekona's wife shook her head. With the end of her shirt, she wiped the tears from her eyes. No, she said. It is this one.

Without further ceremony, Balsehekona ran his knife across Diego's throat. The blood sprayed out like a fine mist. Warm speckles hit my arms
and hands, but most of it landed directly on Dorantes and he closed his eyes against it. In an instant, his face turned into a mask of blood. When he opened his eyes again, he looked like a stranger. Then Diego slumped to the ground before us, bleeding like a lamb on the day of Eid. Dorantes fell on his knees and cradled his brother's head in his hands. Diego, he called. Diego, my brother. My brother.

Diego's eyes flickered. He tried to say something, but the bubbling of the blood that had pooled inside his mouth made it impossible to understand him. He brought his trembling hand to his neck.

I tore my loincloth from my waist and bunched it around the wound; the fabric soaked the blood greedily, but the bleeding did not stop. Diego's gentle soul left his body within moments, right before our eyes.

Oh, Lord, Castillo said. He muffled a cry with one hand and put the other on Dorantes's shoulder.

But Dorantes pushed him away. With great tenderness, he lifted his brother up and carried him past the watching crowd to our side of the camp. We buried Diego in the wilderness that night, the only sound the hooting of a watchful owl.

Looking back on these events now, I realize that something changed when Diego was killed. Dorantes became a different man. He rarely spoke anymore and whenever Castillo tried to engage him in conversation, regardless of its subject, Dorantes rebuffed him. It was as if all of the love and friendship he had spent on Castillo haunted him now that his brother was gone for good; he no longer wanted to have anything to do with Castillo. At night, Dorantes tried to muffle his sobs, but I could hear him just the same, even when he turned on his side, with his face buried in his furs.

After Diego's death, the Carancahuas tired of our presence overnight. The tasks that, a few weeks earlier, would have guaranteed us a good meal now seemed to assure us only that we would not be kicked or beaten. We gave them the last things we owned—what remained of our clothes, the ax, León's gloves—in the hope that they would treat us better. We played with their children. We even tried to join in one of their dances. But it did not seem to change their minds about our thieving, our lack of honor, or our uselessness. Not a month later, Gutiérrez, Huelva, and Valdivieso had the misfortune of going into a tent that the Carancahuas had forbidden them to enter. They were put to death that evening. Before the spring
season was over, there remained only three of us—Dorantes, Castillo, and this servant of God, Mustafa ibn Muhammad.

Our life with the Carancahuas was filled with misery—I know that my Castilian companions have testified to the Audiencia at length about this, but my reasons for mentioning this are different—I say, our life with the Carancahuas was filled with misery because what started out as indifference developed into such intense hostility and violence that we did not dare disobey them. We began talking about escaping but, having witnessed so many of us killed for the slightest infraction, we were afraid of being caught. And even if we managed to escape, we did not know if we could survive for very long in the wilderness, without Indians who were familiar with the area, and its sources of food and water. In the evening, when we sat like pariahs on the side of the camp where we were allowed to sleep, I watched the faces of Castillo and Dorantes, lit by the flickering light of the fire, fill with despair. These faces were, I knew, reflections of my own.

I
AWOKE EARLY ONE MORNING
to find the space beside me empty—only the impression of Dorantes's body remained on the bedding. Instantly, I knew something was wrong, because he never left the hut before me. We were both under the same orders to gather firewood at first light, but Dorantes had developed the habit of staying in bed just a moment longer than I, waiting for me to stand up and leave the hut before he did the same. It was his way of maintaining the illusion that, though we both served the Carancahuas, he had once been my master and I his slave. No lies are more seductive than the ones we use to console ourselves.

I reached across the empty space and shook Castillo awake. Quietly, we went around the camp looking for Dorantes, but could not find him. The Carancahua women, early risers like us, took notice of his absence, too. Over the morning meal, they told their menfolk, who immediately turned on us. Where did your brother go? the cacique asked.

It was common for the Carancahuas to refer to us as brothers, a custom I had not minded or paid much attention to, but today the word carried an implication that frightened me.

He did not tell me, I replied. I know nothing of this.

Balsehekona took a long sip from his flask. He ran away, he said.

After all we have done for him, the cacique said.

He must have stolen something.

Like his brother before him.

And he was lazy, Balsehekona said.

In the eyes of a Carancahua, there was no greater shame in the world than idleness. Now, with the wood side of his lance, Balsehekona caned the back of my legs. The next blow was for Castillo; it caught him on the shoulders and he fell on his knees. We ran away to do our tasks before Balsehekona became angrier.

As I gathered firewood that day, and scraped and washed deerskins, I felt a multifarious anger well up within me. Dorantes had brought me to the Land of the Indians, where I had known nothing but misery; he was the reason for the beating I had endured; and he had left just when I had begun to let myself believe that the bond between us had evolved into one of fellowship. In my own attempts at consolation, I had been lying to myself, too.

When we were finally alone in our tent that night, Castillo asked me: Why do you think he left?

He did not want to do the work they wanted him to do.

But why did he not wait for us?

Because, I thought, this was Dorantes—he cared only about himself. But just as I was about to say as much, I wondered if he had left simply because he could no longer bear to be anywhere near the young Castillo, who reminded him of the brother he had lost. So I said nothing.

I cannot believe he left us, Castillo said. Just like that.

I was thirty-three years of age by then and had seen my fair share of misfortune. But Castillo was much younger than me—he looked about twenty years old, more or less—and his shock at being betrayed awoke in me a protective feeling, not unlike what I had felt when I witnessed his grief at being separated from the doctor's daughter. (Have I mentioned her yet? She had been a passenger on the Gracia de Dios. Castillo used to spend hours on the upper deck, pretending to be busy with something or other, until she made her appearance. She looked a little older than him, and rumor had it that she had already been promised to a settler, but Castillo would try to talk to her anyway. In the end, Narváez's decision to split the armada had forced the lady to remain on the ship.)

How did you become friends with Dorantes? I asked Castillo.

He fought alongside my older brother, Miguel, in the Comunero rebellion, Castillo said. They became very close. After my brother died of consumption, Dorantes suggested I come with him to the Indies. He said that I would become very rich or at the very least I could be made a mayor of a new town. But my father did not want me to go. He had already lost a son to disease and he did not want to lose the other to conquest.

But you would not listen, I said, recognizing in his story my own tale of disobedience and stubbornness.

No, Castillo said. I was too eager to follow in Miguel's footsteps, so I sold a piece of land that had come to me from a maternal uncle in Salamanca and joined the expedition. And now …

Now, we are here, I said. In the bushes, the crickets were singing, suddenly interrupted by the wailing of a baby. It was a hungry wail and, after a moment, the baby was cradled to its mother's breast and the crying subsided. We will find a way out of this land, I said. You will see. I think I was trying to reassure him as much as myself.

As it happened, I did not have to wait long. One of the Carancahua boys, for whom I had made a reed flute and to whom I was teaching an old Zamori tune, told me that Dorantes had gone to live with a tribe called the Yguaces, a nomadic band that sometimes traded with the Carancahuas. Castillo wanted to leave right away; he was sure the Carancahuas would kill us, as they had killed the others, and that it was simply a matter of time. I tempered his excitement. Not for another week, I said. In a week's time, the moon would be new—and the wilderness dark enough to conceal us. And a week would give me enough time to find out the best way to reach the Yguaces' camp.

All right, Castillo said. And then: Gracias.

It was a word I had never heard another Castilian say to me.

Along the winding path, drops of dew sat like diamonds on blades of grass. Sparrows watched us with curiosity from the high branches of poplar trees. Under our feet, fallen leaves lay deep. Then the trail dropped toward a river, where a woman was cleaning an animal skin, scraping with such zeal that she did not hear us approach until Castillo and I came near her. She turned—and I saw that she was really a he, a man whose slender body and seashell-trimmed dress had fooled my senses. A streak of white ran from the center of his part through his black hair, though he was still young. From his right ear hung a bone earring, of the kind worn by the Yguaces. He had small, graceful features and a genial look about him that immediately put me at ease. I had not seen anyone like him before: a man who dressed as a woman, did a woman's chores, and took another man to his bed, but was in all other respects an ordinary member of the tribe. I did my best to hide my surprise at his attire. He expressed no astonishment at our appearance either, for he had already heard about us, both from Dorantes and from traders who passed through the encampment of the Yguaces.

His name was Chaubekwan and, in addition to his household duties, he was a healer. As he rinsed a deerskin, he asked us about our winter with the Capoques on the Island of Misfortune. A great many of them died of a bowel disease, he said, but not you. How did you cure it?

I crouched beside him, taking one end of the deerskin and helping him wring out the water. I cannot claim to have cured anything, I said.

But why were you spared when so many others perished?

I thought about this for a moment. I had noticed that those of us
who drank an infusion of oak leaves for the morning meal had not been afflicted, so I told Chaubekwan about it.

Oak leaves for the bowels? Chaubekwan asked. He tilted his head to the side, pondering this for a moment. As a healer, he was naturally curious about diseases and always on the lookout for new remedies. He was so intrigued by the mention of our infusion that he invited us to the Yguaces' camp.

It was a modest site. A dozen tents that could be easily struck were arranged around a larger one that was used for religious ceremonies. Months with the redoubtable Carancahuas had taught me to bow before the cacique, to avert my eyes when maidens passed by, to let children reach for my beard without recoiling in anticipation of the pain, so as I proceeded into the encampment I had a good notion of the behavior that was required of me. But the Yguaces seemed to pay no attention to my overt deference; they went about their tasks and expected me to do the same.

It was our great luck to have met Chaubekwan. We were his guests now, and the cacique Oñase had no objection to our joining his band, provided that we worked for our food and followed their laws and customs. Except for bits of fabric and tattered animal skins, we had no possessions to speak of, but we spread these out in a shaded area of the camp, under the curious gaze of a handful of bright-eyed boys who had stopped their games to come watch us. At sunset, Dorantes finally appeared, bent under a huge load of firewood. A woman came to help him unstrap the bundle from his back and he made his way over to us, unhurriedly and without any display of emotion. You came, he said a little dully.

You forsook us, Castillo began. His voice was high, and its nasal tone made him sound childish, an effect he was aware of but was powerless to stop.

I did nothing of the sort. I ran away from the Carancahuas.

What about us? Did you not care what happened to us?

You were not in any danger. They killed my brother. They would have killed me next if I had not run away.

But they could have killed us because of you. Did you think about us at all?

I left you with Estebanico, who speaks their language and understands their mores. I knew he would find a way out of their camp. And you made it here safely, did you not?

That is not what troubles me, and you know it.

I have heard quite enough of your accusations, Castillo. Besides, this tribe is not much better.

Now Dorantes turned to me and began to list his complaints, counting them on the fingers of his right hand: the Yguaces made him carry enormous quantities of firewood, which left deep cuts on his skin and gave him unendurable pain in his lower back; they had taken him on a deer hunt that had lasted all day, leaving him so exhausted that he fell asleep before the evening meal was even cooked; they drank a mixture that left them intoxicated well into the night, dancing and singing so loudly that he could never get a proper night's rest; they accepted and even celebrated sodomites, when they should have cast them out. This is why I intend to leave the Yguaces as well, he said.