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

I am not the only one who has responded so forcefully to the word. Behind the wave of blood that has clouded my hearing, I do not know how I manage to hear the chairs falling to the floor, the dominoes clattering, the blows … No shouting, no words, no whispers, none of the restrained milling about in the pigpen as there was during the game. The gates are wide open and they are all out of there like a shot.

Against Benazet and his supporters, the ones who help him out, but who now would rather run off than continue to help him out. The Brothers against Benazet.

When they are done, I see Benazet tossed on the earthen floor of the gaming house. Made into mincemeat. The Brothers embrace me, one by one. In absolute silence.

I break into tears while they continue to embrace me. Someone brings me a glass of sweet wine to ease my pain, and tells me, We took care of him. He won’t get you the way he did him. No need to be afraid of them, they are cattle .

Right there, before me, Pineau’s murderer, dead.

With the wine in my blood, I went over to the already abused body, and I kicked it and kicked it, gone all notion of time, until there was nothing left under my feet but a foul mass, something like a pile of vomit, almost a mess of pottage, and the tatters of his clothing floating like chunks of bread in the soup: I was Le Trépaneur, and that thing had been the murderer of the two men who taught me how to be so.

While I was quenching my anger and nourishing my grief with my boots, most of the Brothers had started their games once more, but a small group was searching for the place where Benazet kept his money. When they discovered it, they turned it over to Antoine Du Puis, the Vice Admiral of the Maracaibo expedition, for him to add to the booty and distribute around to us, thus prolonging the fiesta into which had entered this strange ray of light from the revenge we took with the death of Benazet, the Frenchman who had never been anything but that filthy mess to which he was now reduced.

This was my revenge, though I did not understand yet why Pineau and le Nègre Miel had died at the hands of the crafty, unscrupulous Benazet.

This was my revenge, but although it gave vent to my heart, it never managed to rise above the level of my ankles, or at least the ankles of my understanding. In spite of that, even now sometimes, when I recall this story in order to bring le Nègre Miel back to life, I seem to feel once more the greasy mass that shithead Benazet was turned into by the blows of the Brothers and my own incontinent feet. But oddly enough, that slimy mass, while being revived by the memory below my ankles, does not make my equilibrium any the more slippery or insecure; but instead my step is firmer because of it, more certain; and the odor that rises from it causes the blood I can no longer make run through my veins seem to move back toward those elastic days, each of them a night after I signed my name to the Law of the Coast.

The next thing we sold to keep the dissipation alive was a ship loaded with cacao. The fortunate buyer was the governor himself, offering the twentieth part of what the whole lot was worth.

The moment had arrived for those of us of the Coast to open our wallets to each other. We saw this happening not only amongst ourselves, but also in all that was going on around us: the women of The House folding up their pavilions and stealing away to Jamaica, the improvised dining rooms with their succulent banquets disappearing as if they had evaporated into thin air, the merchants robbing us by offering trifles for magnificent articles … Before being completely cleaned out, whoever had a single coin left would share it, because that is the way pirates are, generous with each other: open pockets. Or that is the way they used to be before the coming of the Second Fifty.

The First Fifty was the Spanish one: roving attack groups comprised of fifty men each and divided into squads that continually moved around through the forests of Saint-Domingue to surprise and attack the buccaneers in their burrows. Fifty at a time, they managed to root out the uncouth buccaneers from the northern part of the island.

The Second Fifty descended on Tortuga, and it was a disaster just like the first. Luckily, it was not a case of several fifties but only one, yet it was as harmful to the Brethren of the Coast as the earlier one was for the buccaneers.

But I have to give the reader fair warning: If I were to relate to you right now what this Second Fifty was like, and their devastation of Tortuga, its early end, and the discovery it brought me concerning Pineau and le Nègre Miel, this story would come to a halt here and now. But if I keep returning again and again to my tale, that is simply to fulfill the promise I made to le Nègre Miel on his deathbed: to undertake to make his memory live. And I still wish to describe the well-deserved end of the brutal L’Olonnais, not wanting to leave him alive; nor do I wish to leave myself in those turbulent seas, I want to get myself back to Europe, where today — if I am still any place at all — I am telling these stories.

Going back to where I was, then: When there was no longer a single one of us with a coin left in his pocket to keep the party going, we dogged L’Olonnais to organize another brilliant assault; and while he was working on that, some went out in canoes to raid the turtle fishers, others went to sea to try their luck on their own (with such bad fortune, it is said, that the moment came when they got hungry enough to raid the humble residents of the coasts just to get hold of their cassava flour and dried fish; and it was so bad sometimes that even these impoverished folk would manage to push them out of their homes without yielding them a thing), others went to Hispaniola to procure sufficient supplies, and still others, those with L’Olonnais, careened their ships to get them ready for the next expedition.

When the Caribs prepare for war, they throw ají , a kind of red pepper (somewhat like pimiento) on burning coals, provoking a sharp cough and an irritation in the mucous membranes, which they believe produces the state of mind needed to attack with sufficient fury. We pirates did not resort to ají or pimiento, nor did we go in for the wild dances that finally succeeded in inflaming the Caribs for their battles. We managed to achieve the state of mind needed for our assaults by feeling our empty pockets, our dry throats, the weariness of the fiesta that had been going on for weeks, and the satiety produced in us by the prostitutes, those women who had nothing for us written in their gaze and who took part in and gave support to the explosive outbursts provoked by our moods (if we had any) in order to achieve something that seemed like a calmness of mind based on a foundation of alcohol, gambling, plenty of food, and music; and they were in luck indeed if any of us paid them to actually perform, without some kind of stratagem, the labors characteristic of their office; since when it came to women, as I have already mentioned, the pirates preferred those who needed to be forced, women who resisted them, as they found pleasure in the humiliation and even more pleasure in extreme violence. One pirate (whose name I will preserve in silence so his soul, surely in difficulty even now, does not come after me for revenge) enjoyed killing the woman he was possessing, saying that her flagging flesh squeezed him in such a way that there was no greater delight than to have a woman die while being used; and there were many who tried it out to confirm this, some of them agreeing, others not, and still others who said they found it a pleasure only if the woman was killed by someone else.