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

The restless memory of this episode that made me suffer so — because the sickness of love is suffering — is making me lose all sense of order. Better that I take it up again so as to be able to relate how the voyage continued:

First of all, it was necessary to flee from the English ships. Hard by the Isle d’Ornay were four frigates waiting to accost our fleet, and we were afraid not only of their despoiling us of our goods, arms, and supplies, but also of suffering their cruelty. While we were waiting for their attack, many stories were passed around describing the horrors perpetrated by the English pirates, to which in my imagination I added the perils my companion, being a woman, was exposed to, dangers that (in my imagination, again) I confronted valorously, saving her in a thousand ways, all different, all of them heroic, from the lust and violence of the English. Fortunately, some fog arose and prevented us from being seen and perhaps falling into their hands. Who would have said then that J. Smeeks would ever become a member of the crew of a ship of that sort! I would never have believed him, just as now I find it difficult to believe in the veneration I felt then toward my companion, the fidelity I maintained toward her skin.

Throughout the first part of the voyage we remained close to the French shore. The population along the coast, fearful and rather uneasy, saw us sailing by and took us for the English, unmindful that we shared their fear and that the reason we stayed where they could see us was to protect ourselves from the very men they feared. We ran up our flags but they put no trust in them, nor in that the hulls of our ships were painted in bright colors, nor that our sails were decorated with crosses and shields; in their fright they saw us only as the talons of the English marauders, seeking out a good place to show our strength and raid their towns. To find ourselves taken for the assailants laid the fires of ambition for at least some of my companions; holding their reeking bowls in their hands, they would devour the houses of the rich with their eyes and fantasize about sumptuous meals doubtless being prepared beneath those roofs by gorgeous women, singing all the while (women of exuberant breasts and blouses with plunging necklines) — meals that could well be cooking there just for them.…

The wind favoring us as far as Cape Finisterre, a huge storm came up that separated us from the other ships. For eight long days the storm threw the passengers from one side of the ship to the other, and for twenty-four hours a day the crew made enormous efforts to keep the ship under control. The first day, when the storm had not yet reached full force, the Captain, punishing a flagrant lack of discipline, forced a crewman to mount to a yardarm and remain up there without permitting him to be lashed to it, and into the sea he fell, totally exhausted. Throwing out a line, they rescued him from the frenzied waters; yet if his authority had so moved him, the Captain could have punished him with death.

As always when encountering such furious winds, they brought in all the sails, the hull being unable to bear the weight of those enormous masses of canvas standing full out against the wrathful gusts, after which the sailors trusted only to luck as to the ship’s course. The carpenters and the caulkers had not a moment of repose, they were so busy fixing and overhauling things everywhere, bailing water out of the craft several times a day, and not merely in the mornings as in good weather. No one was able to set foot on the plank thrust out over the ship’s sides to give us a place where we could relieve ourselves, the pitching of the ship making it dangerous in the extreme, so the crew members would shit and piss right on the deck, and the passengers did likewise in the cabins we were stuffed into, alongside the messy gobs of vomit left there by those who did not know how to behave like seamen in a storm: for if they began to puke in a corner next to the other filth, they would end up smeared all over with it, so ensuring that whoever had not vomited before this would certainly vomit now. The cow, doubly lashed by each of its four legs, refused to drink water and in the midst of all the furor got so thin it was almost invisible, continually loosing a piteous mooing sound into the air that made it seem more like the ship’s cat than a proper milk cow.

Those who were not throwing up every time they turned around would gnaw on hard biscuits and dried fish when fear did not prevent them from eating or, just as likely, an attack of nausea prompted by the nausea of others nearby. The sand clock had gotten damp and the hours went by unmarked because no one sang them out, nor were the chanteys heard that in good weather the chorus of sailors would bellow out while raising the sails.

Rise — my hearties

God grant us — help

we’re here — to serve

to keep — the faith

the Christian — faith

to flog — the pagans

and spite — the Saracens .

At night, with the storm clouds shutting us in, one could see nothing at all, and in no way did the glow of my love for her shed any light for me. So dark was the darkness that not even our hands were visible. We were even more afraid in that darkness when, with the storm abating somewhat, the rolling and pitching would seem to slacken, as if the ship were beginning a mournful dance of death. Totally blind on those blind nights, lacking both moon and stars, with the ship’s lamp extinguished by the storm and the total darkness permitting our fancies to dwell on lands and beings that, so it was said, peopled the sea, we imagined ourselves approaching the islands of no return, we believed we were about to bump into fish as huge as islands, or phantom ships, all-engulfing waterspouts, enormous octopuses, fantastic amphibious beings whose bizarre tentacles would snatch sailors off the deck and take them down to the deep of the ocean.… Amid those wonders, those monsters, I saw myself rescuing her ! … Those who managed to conquer their dread, despite their fear of navigating without the orientation of the stars, without sails, completely given over to the will of the tempest, would let their imaginations sail away to the marvelous islands of the Antilles, the Seven Cities, Saint Brendan’s Isle, the Amazon, all of them filled with marvels and riches, and there were even those who wondered about the Fountain of Youth, believing it to be on the land closest to hand.… Our voices, never too loud, went back and forth through the hold without our being able to distinguish who brought up and described each marvel, each monster, and there was a moment when we all together (even I, so different from the others by reason of my attachment to her ) formed something like a single body unembarrassed by its own excretions and above which the hours, closing in over it, hovered with a gray tone identical to no and yes , to now and always and never… .

The gale had held on for eight eternal days when the cow died. It seemed as though its death were sufficient to restore good weather. Without its continual moaning, the hours seemed to thaw out, and we returned to a situation in the hold that somewhat resembled the way it was in the beginning, when it had first received us with its greasy planks and the shameless rats jumping about here and there; and the temperature awakened, too, rising so high that it made life in the hold unbearable.… The old sailors in charge of the kitchen butchered the cow, with the help of the barber, the only one of the younger sailors not pressed into checking on the condition of the ship. Part of the animal was boiled in the cauldrons and part they salted down and put out in the sun to dry, but all of it, now silent and milkless, ended up in the bellies of the crew and the hungriest passengers.