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

“Ship ahoy!”

The Second Mate gave orders for our sloop to draw in close to the Spanish galley, waving the red flag that demanded their surrender. In the blink of an eye we would be ready, on the edge, eager to board their bulky ship with so unusual a crew and passengers: the Archbishop arguing hotly with the Captain without listening to reason; the officers giving orders right and left, most of them contradictory; the Second Mate panicking and gone mute. The Archbishop, not knowing what we were like, was demanding that they fight the pirates instead of merely fleeing inland and abandoning everything but their skins, as the Captain wanted. I am not certain whether he was cowardly or wise because although they were well armed he knew they would be defeated; for the soldiers who had custody of the Archbishop and his riches, instead of carefully and eagerly preparing for the fierce battle that was upon them, were simply complaining at the top of their voices about being separated from the rest of the fleet, while the galley slaves were deaf to the confused orders they were being given and kept rowing slowly and in disjointed fashion, moving the galley in a bizarre pattern, clumsy and pointless.

As soon as we came close enough to examine their deck, the musicians on board broke out in a dissonant racket, everything out of tune, as loud as they could. At the outbreak of that mangled music, we all began dancing on our own deck, the Captain in his tattered doublet with its gold brocade, his threadbare silk hose, and a hat trimmed with crumpled plumes, the rest of us shaking our rings, bracelets, and pendants, kicking out our legs, waving our arms to this side and that, occasionally shooting into the air. There we were, dancing, when the two prows bumped against each other; thus with musket in hand, knife between teeth, and having opened a breach in our sloop’s hull so there would be no way of turning back, we boarded the Spanish galley.

The Archbishop, erect, dressed appropriately as suited His Excellency, interposed his enormous crucifix between his person and us while he prayed in a loud voice and we rushed against the benumbed, cowardly soldiers who cried out for mercy here and there without even putting up a resistance. In a matter of minutes the ship would be ours, ours the gold cross mounted with precious stones, ours the Archbishop’s trappings.

But suddenly we heard a terrifying bellow, something like a scream or a howl that surged up out of the cargo hatches, outdoing the volume of our musicians: the galley slaves, despite being still in their chains, fed up with the rowing officer’s whip and his brutality, and aware of our boarding from the Spaniards’ nervous confusion, took advantage of his bewildered state and seized that officer who had so mistreated them until that moment, and then passed him along from one man to the next, gnawing chunks from his body and devouring them bite by bite, until he was hardly anything but bones, and, in the end, lifeless — which was when that frightful howling came to an end.

The booty was so abundant and the galley so useless for hunting down the turtle fishers that we thought to return to L’Olonnais as soon as possible, yet one of our men prudently urged us to wait because in the strong breezes of the previous night he believed he saw an early warning of other more forceful and hardly tamable winds: a hurricane. And even though we did not believe him in all conviction, such fear did the mere word “hurricane” put into us that we listened to him, though not to the letter, unfortunately. Because he advised us to move with all our booty to dry land, having the island so near, and look for a cave or dig a shelter, leaving the prisoners to sink with the galley but taking with us the two canoes we already had acquired in order to return to Tortuga, and to come back later for the booty. Oh, if we had only obeyed him in every detail!

What fist was it that had cast all these islands on this sea the way one sows seeds: shaking and opening all the fingers at once? The Caribbean is sown with islands great and small, lavishly populated by islands, unpeopled and primitive, subject to the fact that the owner of the fist that sowed the transparent sea might send a fearful wind to turn it into a Massive Ocean, an indomitable wind which, even though everyone knows, of course, that it may be repulsed by a few here and there, appears to have been tamed by no one: the terrifying Huracán, the god of the Indians who once peopled these islands: Huracán, never to be trusted.

When it comes, the sun turns to water and the transparent waters cloud over, torrid and angry, as if the winds of Huracán were stirring them up from the bottom, as if down there the winds were roiling them, as if Huracán were transforming their element, as if the winds were able to make them rise: and they, infused with a wrath like that of young women who know not their own strength, pant after anything they see and devour it, gulp it down, transformed from their normally limpid, translucent clarity into a gluttonous digestive system, into acids that dissolve anything they consume, into brawny muscles, into oily, slippery, mucus-like, corrosive apparitions. Take care, freebooters! Something more fierce than you are has been set loose! It is coming to seek you out; Huracán has no fear, the waters of the sea have a sudden need for flesh, and Huracán knows not who the pirates are: but even so he is coming after you, you who think you have no other master than God nor any other law than force nor any other will but violence! He is coming after you!

We were left without the galley, without the Archbishop, without the Archbishop’s crucifix (the wind took it off as well), without the galley slaves, since in all the turbulence and with every chain welded to the boat they went down with it; and almost without ourselves, because most died. Those of us who went ashore to sleep were safe; we had lashed the canoe to the largest trees, and as soon as the weather calmed down we set out to join the others at Matamaná on the southern coast of Cuba where a great many turtle fishers live and where L’Olonnais would probably be, rounding up canoes. And so he was. It gave us great joy to find ourselves together again with the other Brothers, thinking that here would be the end of our poverty and tribulation.

We set sail for Cape Gracias a Dios, located on the mainland in the same latitude as the Isla de Pinos, but once at sea we were overtaken by a sultry calm: no longer beloved by the Caribbean. Had we been touched by Huracán? Water and wind were now both contrary, and our food supplies running low. By canoe we found an estuary and went in search of food and water, stealing it from the Indians: a store of corn, livestock, and chickens, yet not enough for the enterprise we had planned, thus continuing to cruise along the coast of the Gulf of Honduras seeking more provisions; yet in raid after raid on the impoverished Indians we never got enough together for all of us for long and we would finish off what we had previously collected before we got the next batch. Then we came to Puerto Caballos, a Spanish market center with warehouses where they store all the merchandise that comes down from up-country until the arrival of their ships.

We captured a Spanish ship and, not to arouse suspicion, used it to approach the mainland, taking over the two warehouses and all the buildings in the town, and also taking many of the inhabitants prisoner. L’Olonnais inflicted the most awful tortures on them, so viciously that when I asked permission to heal the body of a poor woman tortured severely, a woman whom he had decided to leave alive, not from compassion but out of cruelty, simply so she would continue to suffer the agony his vindictiveness had brought her, in response I was asked whether I considered myself a surgeon or a veterinarian, since she being Spanish, my intention to treat her was just like a veterinarian would do, because treating her was like treating animals. Yet I could not withhold my compassion, and to avoid a clash with L’Olonnais I gave her some poison during the night so her soul might greet the dawn without that body so sorely abused by his extravagant persecution.