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

The last one to sign the document was Jambe-de-bois, and now he was dead. With the knife I carried at my belt, I punctured the tip of my thumb and signed the document with my blood, trying to keep my name readable, “Le Trépaneur,” shaping the letters with the knifepoint.

I kept it beneath my belt, flush against the skin, and carried it there for years, until I lost it during an assault from which I have never been able to explain how I got out alive.

Thirty more years did I spend in those islands after having signed the Law of the Coast, not among those magnificent men for whom there was no other law than that of God, but among pimps and muggers of the lowest sort who accepted the policy of paying taxes and tribute to d’Ogeron, to his nephew and whoever followed them, puppet governors who represented a king from beyond the sea. If I resisted living together with them, it was because I knew that they were the unworthy heirs of a magnificent dream that allowed men to take what belonged to no one by any legitimate law, and because the wave that formed out of that dream, though drenched in violence or alcohol, one or the other or both, gave me something that no other kind of life was able to. I must confess this to be so, now as I write these pages with the eyes, the ears, and the heart of J. Smeeks, Le Trépaneur, to keep alive the memory of le Nègre Miel, I who have had a run with the good fortune of preserving the remembrance of a place where the earth reaches its perfection.