Carmen Boullosa - They're Cows, We're Pigs

Two months. Eight weeks. Sixty days. How many hours? When we stopped at the island of Aruba for the Vice Admiral to arrange the tallying of the booty and L’Olonnais to prepare for the safe return to Tortuga, I tried to reconstruct myself with regard to the attack on Maracaibo. It had begun with the taking of the fort, so quickly, I must confess, that the piragua carrying me to dry land had not touched it yet before we were already the winners and the Spaniards the losers. That was where I exercised my profession as surgeon for the first time. I took out some bullets lodged in a thigh, in an arm, in three shoulders, treated knife and sword wounds … The city itself we entered without a struggle. After a few days there, I removed a finger and entered that fact in my notes, the ones I would have to turn over to the Vice Admiral when the expedition was finished so he could arrange the distribution of the loot. Now in Aruba, before handing over the summary of arms, fingers, eyes, and limbs lost, I went over the count: the first leg was blown off by a cannonball and I only had to tie off the arteries; the second one I had to cut off because it came to me still attached to its pirate, shattered and blackened by a powder explosion.…

My eyes went over the list with which I was able to reconstruct the events of the fighting, but something prevented me from making sense out of them. Time, those sixty days, had held me at bay. I was no longer myself; Le Trépaneur was the master of my actions. In my notes, which I ought to reproduce here, were numbered eighty-four legs, but I did not know how I should keep accounts in my person for the mutilated images in the church, or the Spanish women raped, or the meals I had had in huge mansions, or the tortures witnessed.… How long had it been since I had been indentured, a slave, how long since I had slept in the open air, on the landing of the house where I grew up and was expelled from? I was unable to reconstruct myself on our return from the attack against Maracaibo. I was no longer anyone but the fist that had wielded the sword dripping blood, the eye taking aim, the finger pressing the trigger, although it was not I who had fired the gun and used the sword, I was the bodies that had been killed, often with good reason, when they objected to the fact that we were tearing their works and possessions away from them, and often for no reason at all other than that of watching them die, hearing their bodies fall, splattering us with their Spanish blood; and I was the bodies I had treated, the ones into which I had plunged my scalpel, my chisel, my knife … Is this what I really was? Weren’t my true parents le Nègre Miel and Pineau, who had taught me those noble, grand secrets? Finally, I was a Brother, like them, a member of the secret Society of the Brethren of the Coast. So this was the way I had participated in the best dreams of the two good men, all the while my elbows dripping with the blood running from my hands.… No, I was not able to reconstruct myself. But in my body I felt such satisfaction that it almost blotted out the pleasure of the adventure, that of being a pirate. Had I lost my way? But as I asked myself this, I realized that what I had lost was my body, that I had been only a slave, an engagé , and when I was no longer that, I was merely the slave who had lost his body.…

I was unable to understand anything. I could not understand why, among the pirates, rape was preferred over the whores, especially when it came to the Spanish women, for whom the humiliation provoked them to struggle so violently and suffer the degradation of their downfall so painfully. Those Spanish virgins, above all — how they fought to preserve their honor! Because when we were through with them, they thought they had no chance of making a decent marriage, and, faced with the idea of finding themselves unhappily married to a man from a lower class, an aged man, a widower, or someone with a repulsive defect, sometimes they preferred never to marry and instead to resign themselves to keeping their saints’ images in clean clothing. In Gibraltar there had been a mother, still rather good looking, who with her young daughter remained defenseless in their house when the town fell. The mother feared the well-known excesses of pirates and freebooters and immediately ordered her servant to bring some prostitutes and had her cooks prepare some food, and then she wrote a note saying,

Our strong men have been defeated. This house surrenders, as they did. Since you have conquered, it is all yours, and all the riches it contains. I have even had women brought here for the pleasures which it is said you are so eager for. I am an honorable woman and my daughter is still almost a little girl. We will be the only things that, appealing to your feelings (which I am sure you have), we request be respected .

Cordially yours ,

La Marquesa de la Poza Rica

Since this was one of the two most splendid mansions in the town, it was taken over immediately by the pirates; and we were received in it as if we were gentlemen, welcomed with drinks, food, comforts, and women, with a huge party that had been readied with all the trimmings. When L’Olonnais, seated at the table, asked to whom they owed such a fine welcome, a servant brought him the note written by the good woman. He had not even done reading it when he gave orders to look for them, saying, Do not take anything from this house, freebooters, because what is fit for the cattle should not be of any interest to us if there are two pearls here with which to reward us! The servants and the whores tried to convince us to the contrary, but they only managed, with their persistence and their attempts to thwart the search, to earn their deaths. The house was turned upside down. They tortured a boy horribly so he would tell them where their mistresses were, but it was a futile torment, because he managed to die without saying a word, after being castrated and much of his body flayed, with huge chunks of his skin torn from him. Someone had the notion of setting fire to the house, but the Admiral discarded the idea, saying, These stupid women would prefer to die in the flames rather than surrender in our arms! It was only a coincidence that revealed to us the spot where they were hidden. On the second floor, when three men at once leaped up to pull down the fabric that covered the ceiling, behind which we thought they might be hiding, their boots came down sharply on the floor and stove in a slat by the corner. Looking down, one of them saw the gleam of an eye struck by a beam of sunlight that a fallen mirror had sent there to betray them. On taking up the floor, we discovered the two beauties, and with much scoffing, joking, and fondling that they tried to shake off, we took them down to the Admiral. We all stared at them — they really were a pair of pearls! — the mother in her haughtiness, the daughter in her gleaming freshness. The mother spoke in Spanish to L’Olonnais, and thinking that he did not understand Spanish, since he paid no attention to her, began to address him in French, with poignant words and an impeccable accent:

“Admiral, in accepting you as conqueror, I offered you everything in the house, and I personally prepared for your reception, about which I believe you will find nothing to complain. Since I know that you are a gentleman, I have only one request, that you respect us — me, because I am an honorable mother who has never known any man but my husband, and my daughter, my greatest treasure, who as you see is still almost a little girl. I beg you once more, although this house is no longer in a proper state”—she was looking around at the destruction brought about by our search—“for the reception you have deserved.”