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

Who, then, knowing the nature of our pleasures, would be surprised at the character of our assaults and our warfare? And who, with a knowledge of these, could imagine us to require any roasting of ají on burning coals to become galvanized? Yet whoever was aware of these things would still never understand that these men went through a definite alteration of feelings and sensations, depending on whether it was before an attack, during the fighting, or afterward, whether with loot in their pockets, or just after having squandered it, or … Although for the moment, what with the shock of this forceful reminder of Pineau and le Nègre Miel having been imposed on me by Benazet’s threats and his death, and the need to be preparing my surgeon’s supplies for the upcoming expedition because our departure seemed imminent, I kept myself to one side of these emotions, something apart from the body formed by the pirates as one whole being, warm and always ready and willing; yet was I well able to understand that we freebooters were hopeless; what could we do on shore with our pockets empty if we knew not how to slow the descent of someone sliding down a hill, someone without relief or remedy? When we would be awakened in the middle of the night, after too much alcohol, by its racing uncontrollably through our veins, being too much for them, we would wonder: How could people live on dry land, shut in behind four walls, and how could they resist the hopelessness of the red-tinged evenings of the New World, and how, without the breadth of the ocean, the water without borders, without corners, without banks or ports …? Because on the high seas, or in pulling down what others had raised up to shut themselves in behind, our freebooter hearts found the only places where we were able to drain off that abundance of intoxicated blood running through our veins!

Before we were able to put a stop to the feverish turmoil of the taking of a city, before we were able to suspend that delirium and see it as a thing apart from ourselves, even before we learned to tell ourselves the battle was over and that we had become rich because of it, by then we no longer had any money of our own, no longer a new shirt or a length of silk or linen or even a bit of common cloth! Nor did we realize that the end of that story had already caught up with us when we felt the necessity surging up of undertaking yet another assault somewhere.… The afternoons, then, raised the red banner of the attack, every afternoon, and each dawn as well, that huge banner waving before our eyes; and although others might not understand what this impassioned red thing was, all enveloped in the colors of the Caribbean Sea, we knew the red was the signal for a fight, that we pirates would have to keep on fighting, destroying, that our time was not yet done with, not quite … that we had to go on with a musket in each hand and a knife clenched between our teeth, although we were already being phased out, feeling everything as occurring too late, escaped from time, the only certain thing for us being the dark, drowsy wrath of the alcohol, since even though completely submerged in it, the pirate never forgets that, before all things, he is one of the Brethren of the Coast, as Mansfield discovered during the capture of Santiago, an inland city. After he had taken it, when they had already brought in and piled up all its riches, the freebooters launched into celebrating their triumph in Santiago itself, sharing the glory with the defeated inhabitants. They got everyone drunk, young and old, even the children, by making them gulp it down right from the barrels that had been made there to sell. With the conquered city in a state of intoxication, they forced the rich to dance for the amusement of the poor, and made them also parade their daddy’s little darlings around in loose, open dress, an invitation to be stopped and screwed by whoever (drunk and shouting) wished to. They ripped the buttons off the pants of the governor (for whom they had already received ransom money) who yet went around everywhere, fully drunk, shouting orders, trying to impose order with his pants at half-mast and slurring his words, since he could hardly speak for all the alcohol they had forced him to drink .

Still in a fervid state, the pirates undertook their retreat laden with copious loot, making their way toward the beach where they had left their ships; but a party of sober citizens under command of the still-intoxicated governor tried to stop them and would have been able to do so were it not that Mansfield and his Brothers, though enveloped in the cloud of rum that obfuscated their movements, were still living through the moment of the struggle when, making such good use of their wit and their forces, they had figured out how to make Santiago theirs in the first place. They had another exchange with the Spaniards and kidnapped the governor once more, and both sides began shooting until all their guns fell silent: both sides had run out of gunpowder. Then they launched into all sorts of invectives, the pirates demanding a new ransom for the governor; but there came a moment when they no longer heard any reply: the Spaniards, weary of the verbal war, were not answering; they had withdrawn .

Mansfield and his men, not knowing whether they were in the middle of the first assault, the celebration, or the later fighting, with their nerves on the alert like those of every good pirate, went on their way to the beach, boarded their ships, and just as they were about to set sail, received a miserable amount for a second ransom of the governor. Never had a governor brought so little or been so poorly dressed, what with his pants so stubbornly determined to remain on the ground! Thus it was that although Mansfield in his jubilation had celebrated his victory too soon, yet they were unable to get the better of him, not even when inebriated, because he was still able to fight fiercely when in that state; nor was there the slightest trace of intoxication in his judgment, nothing of the lush, the souse, the tosspot, boozer, juicehead. Not like there was in Rackham, an Englishman who lost his ship to an English attack when they encountered him and all his crew totally drunk — even though two women fought to save him: Anne Bonny, capricious and rich, and Mary Read, clever but impoverished before becoming a pirate. Although we Brethren of the Coast ought not to be mentioning this, for it happened long after we had already been dissolved, when Exquemeling had been thirty years dead, when even Port Royal, the port of opulent pleasure, had already been swept away by the waves — yet why should we not bring it up here, since our sluggish pirate’s consciousness is also an instantaneous awareness, which, like our reactions, positions itself outside of time? ….

With our spirits inflamed, then, our lack of gold having turned each of us into passionate, blazing flesh, and in that sense, dried-out and thirsty flesh, we pirates hastened to prepare for the next assault:

During the night it was when they found themselves separated from the other ships. Lack of skill? Winds that forewarned of those to come later on? Better for them if Lord Hurricane had come down upon them before they met us! Better to be devoured by the waves than find themselves alone off the island of Guadeloupe, in a tight bay whose entrance to the sea was surrounded by high reefs, carried there against their will by some current they had hitherto thought provident!

We had gone out aboard a sloop in search of canoes because L’Olonnais had decided on the site of our next assault, and with its being approachable only through shallow waters, the attack would have to be made in canoes, the which were to be taken by those of our party from the turtle fishers, even though these folk were never armed and had no other belongings than their poor canoes. This was not a pleasant task and I do not have the slightest idea why I joined them. The remainder of the freebooters awaited us on Tortuga.