Cervantes Street (10 page)

But I knew the sluggish wheels of Spanish justice meant it could be years before my case was heard in court, and additional years before a pension was awarded to me. How would I survive until then? I could not hope to live on the charity of my impoverished family. With my lame arm, I could not be of much help to my father with his patients. What trade did not require the use of both hands? Could the experience I had acquired in Rome, as Cardinal Acquaviva’s Spanish secretary, help me to get work copying documents? I had failed to acquire riches as a soldier, but perhaps it was not too late to make my mark as a poet. My heart harbored a nugget of optimism; I clung to the belief that through poetry I might yet make my family proud. The naïve young man who arrived in Italy with the Gypsies would barely recognize himself in the man who was returning to Spain poor and crippled. But one thing had not changed: my belief that I was meant to achieve greatness.

The first night at sea, as
El Sol
sailed toward the Spanish mainland, after the passengers retired to their berths, the weather was so gentle, the sky so clear and alive with the light of the stars, that I decided to sleep on deck. Lying on the floor of
El Sol
, smoking a pipe, my head resting on a heap of coiled ropes, I wondered about the course my life would have taken if I had sailed to the Indies back then. The closer
El Sol
sailed to the coast of Catalonia, the more I thought of Mercedes. Would I see her again? I had written many letters to her over the years, but never received a reply. It was true that my love for her was tempered by the passage of time, but I still treasured her memory as an oasis in my past, before my life became a chain of misfortunes.

* * *

Four days and three nights later, we caught glimpses of the snowy peaks of the Sierra Nevada de Granada; it began to feel as if we might reach Spanish soil without incident. After a day of sailing turbulent waters the moon rose over a serene sea, and the African breezes were favorable. Captain Arana gave orders to lash the oars and let the winds blow us homeward. The moon’s brightness illuminated the sea in all directions. The passengers aboard
El Sol
were enjoying the balmy breezes and the shimmering stars as the sailors played cards on deck. Rodrigo amused himself and the female passengers by singing Spanish songs accompanied by the vihuela. But adverse luck is never readier to strike than when the world seems affable and inviting.

Suddenly, as if emerging from the bowels of Poseidon’s realm, three large ships approached us at such speed that, before our oarsmen could take their positions, or the remainder of our crew man
El Sol
’s guns, or the captain order the sails raised, the helm of the largest of the ominous ships came so near our vessel that we could hear the questions men shouted at us in a strange language, which I recognized as the lingua franca spoken in North Africa.

Captain Arana yelled, “They are Algerian corsairs! Ignore their questions!”

These were the infamous buccaneers in the service of Hassan Pasha, ruler of Algiers, who hunted for human chattel in the Mediterranean. Even the bravest among us were fearful. Captain Arana shouted from his post: “All the women and children must go immediately to their cabins and bolt their doors! And, for the love of God,” he continued, “I implore you to keep them locked! Do not open the doors until our fate is decided and you receive orders from our men.”

The women grabbed their children and rushed to their compartments in a flurry of rustling dresses and cries of, “Protect us, saintly Mother of God! Holy Virgin Mary, do not abandon us!”

We drew our pistols, prepared the muskets, wielded daggers, and unsheathed our swords to defend ourselves and our women and children. I turned to Rodrigo. “If we have a fight, let’s stay together,” I told him. The prospect of combat excited, rather than frightened, my brother: he was born to be a soldier. His pupils sparkled with the fire I had seen in the eyes of soldiers during battle. The Cervantes were all hot-blooded, impulsive, and easily excitable, but Rodrigo was the most fearless of us all. The prospect of death in battle did not frighten him. He was young, healthy, and strong, and could defend himself better than I could, yet I felt protective.
Even with my lame arm, I
will fight the corsairs to the death
, I told myself.

Below deck, the boatswains shouted at our oarsmen to row faster and faster to put some water between us and the Algerians, and we began to outdistance them. Just when it looked as if we would evade being captured, the corsairs discharged two roaring cannon blasts: the first missed our ship; the second broke the ship’s mast in half. A swell of ocher smoke choked everyone, yet we managed to chant, “For Christ! For the only true religion! For the honor of the king! For Spain!” The bodies of two of our men lay crushed under the severed mast. They looked glued to the floor in a pool of bright blood—their entrails floating next to their bodies. Images of Lepanto flashed in front of my eyes.

The Algerians lowered to the sea a flotilla of boats, filled with hundreds of men who rowed furiously in our direction. The fifty men manning
El Sol
did not stand a chance against the swarm of corsairs approaching us. We were going to be slaughtered.

Captain Arana’s resonant voice rose over the din of our men: “Do not resist. They will kill all of us if we fight them. We are outnumbered. Listen to me, men, do not resist.”

There were cries of, “Rather dead than a slave!”

Captain Arana implored, “For the sake of the women and children, do not resist. For the sake of the innocents, we must surrender. Pray to our Lord Jesus for His great mercy. That’s our only chance.”

Without encountering any resistance, the corsairs came aboard
El Sol
, yelling: “Death to the Christians! You will be our slaves!” Then they cursed Christianity and King Philip. As our men were herded in a circle, a renegade who spoke Spanish barked, “If you want to live, throw down your weapons! This ship is now under the command of Arnaut Mamí. From now on, you are his property.”

Mamí was an Albanian notorious throughout the Mediterranean for his barbarous cruelty. It was easy to spot him among the corsairs: he was a head taller than most of his men, bulky, with long blond hair and large blue eyes that seemed made of ice. His lips were drawn into a smirk. Growling insults in imperfect Spanish, he pulled out of our group two young members of the crew, unsheathed his scimitar, and drove its point through the throat of one of them. As the sailor fell on the deck, blood gushing from his neck, Arnaut Mamí drew his weapon back and, with one fulminant stroke, beheaded the man. The other sailor—so stunned he had not moved—met the same fate. Arnaut Mamí kicked their heads into the sea, then ordered his men: “Bring out all the trunks in the cabins. Blow open the doors if need be.”

Buccaneers carrying large coarse bags demanded all the coins, jewels, and valuables we carried on our bodies. We obeyed in silence. I kept the precious letters from Don John of Austria and the Duke of Sessa in a leather pouch under my shirt. My fate hung on those letters. We were asked to undress. Surreptitiously, I took the letters out of their pouch and balled them in my hand. I was about to place them between my buttocks when a corsair struck me in the head with the handle of his dagger, and shouted, “Give me that or I’ll kill you like a dog!”

The commotion attracted the attention of Arnaut Mamí who asked for the letters and inspected the wrinkled documents. Apparently Mamí could butcher our language but was unable to read it. He said, “Yussif, what’s in these letters?” A corsair, who looked like a Spanish man who might have been captured long ago and then converted to Islam, revealed the contents. As someone who was used to assessing the monetary value of people, Mamí immediately noticed my lame arm. “Show me your other one,” he commanded. I extended my right arm. Mamí’s bejeweled index finger ran vertically over my palm. “You have the hand of a lady,” he sneered, his eyes appraising me up and down with curiosity. “You must be an important person, or a high-ranking nobleman. The letters prove it.” Then he said to his men in Spanish: “If any one of you harms this man,” he held up his right hand, making a V with two long-nailed fingers, “I will pluck out your eyes. Is that understood?”

Corsairs were returning to the deck with heavy trunks. They waited for Mamí’s orders. Wielding a heavy ax he shattered one of the locks, then rifled through the contents of the trunk, chortling with revolting delight at his splendid booty. He selected some coins and rings, which he threw at his men, who fought over them like starving vultures over carrion. He handed the ax to another corsair and made a motion to crush the locks of the rest of the trunks.

We were commanded to remain absolutely quiet, or else our heads would be lopped off. We watched as the loot was inventoried and transferred to Mamí’s ship. Next we were separated into three groups: The women and children were removed to Mamí’s ship. The men who looked like laborers, and therefore did not have prosperous families who could pay to ransom them, were transferred to another ship. These unfortunates would be put to work as oarsmen, which was the same as receiving a death sentence. The rest of the captives—those who were dressed as clergymen or as gentlemen or who had the manners of such—were reassigned to the third boat.

I was greatly relieved when Mamí determined that Rodrigo, as my brother, was valuable too, and included him with me in the third cluster. Once our transfer was finished, the corsairs stripped
El Sol
of everything of value. The last man to abandon it poured tar on the deck and set it on fire. As
El Sol
went down in flames and smoke, my hopes sank as well. Even when it went under, the Greek fire kept burning on the deck, illuminating
El Sol
’s descent to the bottom of the Mediterranean.

We were stuffed into a small crawl space below deck, forward of the midsection where the oarsmen rowed. On each side of the vessel they sat on wooden planks, four rowers to an oar, attached at the wrists and ankles by iron chains that ran through hooks connected to the sides of the galleon. The oarsmen spoke Spanish and other European languages. They were naked except for a swatch of fabric they wore around their midwaist. The backs of many of the men were verdigris and purple slabs of raw flesh, crawling with green maggots. Swarms of flies feasted on the pus that suppurated from their wounds. We learned not to breathe too hard, or to open our mouths unnecessarily, for fear of swallowing the buzzing shiny flies, which fought to enter our bodies as if to devour us from the inside out.

For days and nights, the low ceiling above our heads forced us to remain on our buttocks, pressed against each other like salted fish in a sealed barrel. Rodrigo found a space near me. Being so close to each other was a great consolation. Forward from the front of the crawl space was a globular window through which I caught glimpses of the sea and sky. There was also a hole in the floor, which we used to relieve ourselves. But it was hard to move around: often it was easier to urinate and defecate in place. In this extreme confinement all the class differences were soon erased. After a while aristocrats, prelates, and hidalgos all acted like beasts fighting for a chance at survival.

Fleas, chiggers, and lice feasted on our blood; fat black roaches crawled on the walls, and angry rats scurried between our legs. Now and then a bucket of fresh water with a cup was brought to the front of the crawl space, and each man was allowed to fill half the cup and pass it around until everyone had drunk. If the bucket was emptied before each had his ration, the unlucky thirsty men would have to wait until the bucket was brought again later. When our thirst was extreme we began to drink each other’s urine. The soggy biscuits that were handed to us now and then were fat with worms. We resorted to eating the fleas, and the lice that infested our heads. We began catching the roaches and the rats and mice, pounding them to death with our feet and fists, then tearing them to pieces and devouring their flesh and entrails.

Grown men cried inconsolably over the lack of news about their wives and children. The married men were tormented that their wives and daughters would end up in Turkish harems, and the fathers of male children could not hide their horror that their sons would be sold to Turkish sodomites. One of our men had managed to hide a Rosary and we found solace in saying the Lord’s Prayer and reciting Hail Marys in a whisper. Only through prayer could I escape a voyage that seemed bound for hell. The gentlemen in our midst knew that their families would pay their ransoms promptly; but the rest wondered what the future held for us. My parents would never be able to raise the money to buy the freedom of my brother and me, perhaps not even one of us. What kind of future awaited me with a lame arm? Would I become a servant in Mamí’s house? I refused to accept that either Rodrigo or I would remain in Algiers the rest of our lives. Despite my pitiful state, I developed an unshakable conviction that by whatever means at my reach I would try to escape at the first opportunity to the Spanish town of Oran to the west of Algiers. From there, I would make the crossing on a floating log, if necessary.

Some nights, I would wake up from a nightmare, and it would be so dark and the air so putrid that for a moment I would think I was still on the beach in Greece, that night after the Battle of Lepanto, buried under a heap of dead soldiers, and the little air that reached my nostrils would bring with it the sickening smell of roasting human flesh.

Despair is more contagious than hope. Yet as ephemeral as my hope to survive this ordeal was, I could not give it up—it was all I had. One day, a Spanish hidalgo, who now looked like one of those sick, starving beggars in Spanish cities, asked, “Cervantes, is it true you are a poet?” When I said I was, he said, “Why don’t you recite us one of your poems to relieve our boredom?”

I was not the type of poet who memorized his poetry. In my despondent state, I could barely remember a few scattered verses of my beloved Garcilaso de la Vega, whose poetry in former days I had been able to recite in my sleep.