Hunger's Brides (52 page)

We sit over lunch in a lush garden beneath the blinding whiteness of this volcano, Orizaba, and securely above the inexhaustible source of fresh water it provides. My host is from Andalusía. A simple man of eminently good sense, he confides that this water is more precious to him than all the gold of the Indies. Many of the first
conquistadores
were poor men from his region. In Andalusía and Estramadura it is common knowledge most died paupers. Here, with a few fruit trees a man can feed his entire family, with more than enough left over to barter for necessities. The munificence of one fruit tree, Juana. I'd never really grasped it. With the land so rich, he says, why should there be so many starving on the plantations on the coast?

My belly full at last he offers to show me his Eden. Eden it seems is on everyone's mind. To move through these orchards, through these shoals of blossoms, seems less like walking than swimming through musk. To stop walking for more than an instant is to stand softly plumed in the bright slow wings of butterflies, some as large as my hand. Shuttling by are more kinds of hummingbirds than I ever guessed existed. And weaving among them, honeybees heavy with nectar rumble a short way to the dozens of beehives he has set up among the trees, whose branches droop beneath their burden of flowers. Cherimoyas, other species of anonas, lime and orange, and fruits I've never even seen in the markets. He has me taste something they call
sciochaco:
white fleshed, its flavour like cherry, but with spicy black seeds like peppercorns.

Farther back from the river, he has left wild the surrounding woods that peal and ring with bird calls, and against this carillon, green and blue volleys of parrots screech overhead …

Within a few hours he has invited me to stay as long as I like, and repeats the invitation as I am packing up early the next morning. Instead I find myself riding away up a trail through the healing green of a forest I am only truly seeing for the first time. It is as if the waters of the Flood have just receded and granted me, the last man on earth, the terrible privilege of experiencing this world for all humankind. Never have I seen such flowers. Yet they must have been all around me all along. It seems my eyes are become children, and must be taught all over again.

Would they see even now, were it not for our talks of your life in the country? We are city people, on both sides of my family. I would not even be here had you and I not met. One does mathematics perfectly well in a Jesuit college. Only poets need the land.

How I wish we two could share this. Every bird call, the wind across the valley, the rill and rustle of water on every side. In the late afternoon, I watch a jaguar fishing in a rocky stream below me. It looks up, sees us, and I know a moment of fear. But the slope is steep and the fishing good, so we are safe enough. My horse stands stock still and trembles, nonetheless. White-eyed, the mule looks ready to bolt with all my books and papers.

Books and papers
. Pointless to imagine I could have stayed on at San Nicolás forever, but that is not what flashed through my mind as my host was inviting me to stay. I thought,
No books … there'd be no books here
. We are driven from Eden for the blood on our hands, yet prolong our exile only to plunge them in ink. What makes a man ride alone out of paradise for an insignificant pile of books not yet written? At this moment, Juana, I would give a lot to hear your answer.

I feel this little book growing inside me, an album of verses devoted to this gravid miracle of water … dedicated to the verdant destiny of this new continent, our occidental paradise—

The most extraordinary thing! Just as I am writing this, seated comfortably at my little fire—a violent earthquake. The ground heaves under me with power enough to raze a city. I may well arrive in Veracruz to discover it destroyed. Yet the sick terror of a man in the forest quickly
passes, as he grasps that there stands over his head only a light canopy of leaves and stars.

It must also be so of flood. Out here the forest dweller only moves to higher ground, while the city man loses all his worldly goods.

The thought occurs just now that perhaps the great myths of cataclysm and flood needed in the end to build cities, in order to make themselves understood.

con cariño
, Carlos

1st day of August, 1667

la Nueva Veracruz, New Spain

Juana,

The morning after the earthquake I awake more refreshed and rested than I have felt in months, only to find myself and all my belongings covered in snow. Now at least I know what it will take on this journey to get a good night's sleep….

All day the trail falls steeply into hotter country. After six leagues or so I come upon the
hospedaría de San Campus
, the most abject excuse imaginable for a hostelry. Not a scrap to eat for man nor beast. So many starving dogs and rats skulking about the place you'd have to sleep with your boots on for fear of having them dragged off for food. The innkeeper was another fortune hunter, from Estramadura. One who came for gold but could not settle for water. He goes about the place unkempt and half naked, muttering. A recluse whose penance it has become to serve the passing public. It is my first contact with a breed I will be seeing a lot more of down here, one I should get comfortable among: the failed white man in the tropics.

After another few leagues over flat ground and through a fading light I come on a clean, well-ordered settlement in the sharpest possible contrast to the misery of San Campus. San Lorenzo de los Negros is populated exclusively by runaway slaves.
Cimarrones
—arrows that fly to freedom. Even they call themselves that.

Cimarrón …
You, Juana, will feel all the pain and yearning in that word.

I decide to stay the night, with some trepidation, but find myself well treated and fed. The Governor at Veracruz allows these people to live here without fear of reprisals, as long as they supply the port with the surplus of their well-tended fields. But whatever dignity this should have permitted them has been stripped from these unfortunates by the one condition haunting their existence here: they must refuse to
shelter—worse, must return to their owners—any new runaways who reach San Lorenzo.

The next day, I arrive with no little excitement at the outskirts of Veracruz, but find here little more than an outpost in sandblown squalor. Sand everywhere. Rotting houses half buried in it. Laughable city walls. Here some contractor has brazenly defrauded the Crown, for you could breach these pitiful defences without even getting off your horse. No point whatever in closing the city gates to pirates.

As I already knew, the sailing season for Europe is still months off, but the ship I was hoping to take to Havana, where the waiting is said to be much more comfortable, sailed without me. No room, said the Captain. Unless of course one is in a party of rich Spaniards getting an early start on their triumphal return from the Indies.

Incredibly there are no inns in the New Veracruz. And the Old, where Cortés first set foot on the shores of America, is just a collection of fishing huts. Standing on this infernal shore watching the only ship in port sail to Havana without me, I understand perfectly Cortés's decision to burn his ships to keep his men from deserting.

No other ships for a
month
. I simply have to get on the next one. In this season many fall prey to the fevers. The airs hereabouts, when still, are positively foetid. Or they blow a northerly gale, driving sand deep into every crack and crevice. Just a few weeks ago, Juana, I imagined us taking long walks at the seashore. However, the sea here is not the sparkling blue of our lakes but rather a sullen grey-green. Salt marshes and estuaries everywhere indent this coastline, and the crocodiles, which even on land can be swifter than a man, litter their banks exactly—and treacherously—like logs after a storm. No such thing as a carefree day at the sea, with sharks to one side and crocodiles to the other.

They are mad for dog meat apparently.

The contents of my purse have dwindled alarmingly. I've taken up hunting in order to pay for a cook (a recent widow with six children), who will work in exchange for the lion's share of whatever fresh meat I can bring in. You will probably laugh at the idea of me as a hunter, yet the turkeys stand thick on the ground and make easy targets.

On several of my jungle forays I have come across the overgrown ruins of one ancient temple site or another, but the mosquitoes here are so ferocious I am never able to stop long. Would it surprise you to learn
that the part of America most proximate to Spain is infested with parasites? And not just of the two-legged sort. The jungle (and to a lesser extent the town) crawls with gnats, wood lice and mites. Nightly the remorseless hunter repairs to his lair only to find himself the mottled prey of more resourceful foragers—ticks and leeches grazing implacably on the flesh at my neck, wrists and ankles. Leeches enough for all the physicians of Europe. Certainly there should be no ill humours left in me. So after a week of this (and of eating turkey every day) I am ready to beg the fishermen in Old Veracruz for fishing lessons. At least there'd be just the sharks and the crocodiles.

your most faithful servant, Carlos

14th day of August, 1667

Juana,

I begin this having waited a fortnight to write you, hoping my mood would brighten. Yet how could it, when with each passing day I learn more about the workings of this place? The Inquisition's censors infest the port, crawling all over incoming book shipments in search of works by Las Casas, Erasmus, Descartes, anything on the new sciences. But since the royal seal was issued two years ago, they search also for anything touching on Indian cults and superstitions. Even Cortés's letters to his king may no longer be read here in America. A century and a half after the Conquest—what is it that the Crown fears so much more now than then? Or is it that Madrid now fears everything and everyone from Cuzco to Versailles? Truly I despair of ever seeing my own work in print if I remain on this continent. And yet even if publishing in Spain is not quite impossible, in order to be read in Mexico my texts will have to get past the censors in Seville, then here, only to find my fellow colonists preferring European writers.

For their part, the port authorities care nothing for books. Instead their tariffs and regulations are expressly framed to strike down anything that might impede the Crown as it deflowers this land and squanders our patrimony. Forbidding us to export finished timber, the Spaniards burn down leagues of forest for their cattle to overgraze. Then they tell the American he can do what he will with the meat but not only is he required to export his cow hides for the manufacture of Spanish shoes, the Crown forces us to repurchase those shoes by forbidding us to make our own. For over a century now the
gachupines
have run like wild horses
through the verdant pastures of our America while we the Creoles, who are born here, lurch about under hobbles and trammels—formally denied key posts, and informally, the most lucrative opportunities.

This I have witnessed first-hand since my boyhood. In Spain my father tutored royalty, but born here his children are treated as foreigners in our own land. America is in every way richer, more abundant, more enterprising than Iberia and yet in what does the true scope of our enterprise here consist? This trading system benefits those who already have capital, and benefits most those nations that have already accumulated the most. It bleeds us dry while enriching the few stooges here who do the bidding of the merchants surrounding the court in Madrid. Meanwhile the Royal Treasury has been all but bankrupted by the importation of manufactured goods from northern Europe in exchange for—what else?—gold and silver, the only Spanish products that the northerners do not already produce more efficiently.

Spain has become Europe's laughingstock. And what does this make us? Surely our America deserves better. Castile has been given stewardship over a New World—a second chance for Spain and for Man—only to exhaust and despoil it so much more quickly than the Old. More damage has been done to our America in a hundred years than to Europe in five thousand. I am told it is worse out in the islands. Wherever the land was once the richest and most densely populated, the Indians are now completely gone and the land is worked to death by half-starved negroes. The yield steadily falls, but at the same time the acreage is expanding so rapidly that the price of sugar keeps slipping, such that the merchants are always looking for new ways to use sugar and so maintain its price. They will be building our city walls with it next.