Taino: A Novel

By Jose Barreiro

"JosÉ [Barreiro] writes the true story in TaÍno—the Native view of what Columbus brought. Across the Americas, invasion, and resistance, the TaÍno story repeated many times over." – Chief Oren Lyons (Joagquisho), Turtle Clan, Onondaga Nation The story of what really happened when Columbus arrived in the "New World," as told by the TaÍno people who were impacted In 1532, an elderly TaÍno man named GuaikÁn sits down to write his story—an in-depth account of what happened when Columbus landed on Caribbean shores in 1492. As a boy, GuaikÁn was adopted by Columbus, uniquely positioning him to tell the story of Columbus's "discovery," directing our gaze where it rightfully belongs—on the Indigenous people for whom this land had long been home. Revised and updated by author JosÉ Barreiro (himself a descendant of the TaÍno people) with new information and a new introduction, this richly imagined novel updates GuaikÁn's carefully crafted narrative, chronicling what happened to the TaÍno people when Columbus arrived and how their lives and culture were ruptured. Through GuaikÁn's story, Barreiro penetrates the veil that still clouds the "discovery" of the Americas and in turn gives

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fulcrum Publishing
• Release date: Apr 4, 2023
• ISBN: 9781682754535

Book preview

AUTHOR’S INTRODUCTION

Dreaming for the Voice

Taíno, the novel, was written in 1992. I am credited as author, and although I put the words to paper, I don’t quite claim its full authorship.

That year, 1992, would be the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s fateful landing. As the anniversary year approached, Spain announced a major celebration. Governments and universities in Latin American countries offered congresses, unleashing avalanches of scholarship on Columbus and his enterprise. Academic debates were, initially, a celebration of the discovery. The conquest was mostly seen as a difficult but necessary period of our shared history; colonization was identified as an ultimately beneficent process for the Americas and the beginning of the modern world.

For the Native and mestizo world of the Americas, and particularly for the many of us who had grown up with a wary eye on Spain, its brutal conquest, and its racist colonial regime, the celebratory tone picked at a scab dried over many generations. As the year and the day approached, the topic of Columbus’s assumed discovery of the Americas became a boiling dispute. Voices of dissent grew, producing a wave of critique that demanded its own attention. The debate no longer rested among academics; the challenge this time came from the Native peoples of the Americas.

Indigenous peoples had been reemerging on the international level. I saw it in Geneva, Switzerland, when, in 1977, Native leaders of the Americas were heard at the United Nations as a collective voice for the first time. Across the Native Americas, a movement of proportion emerged that broke travel and communications barriers among Indigenous peoples; a time of mutual learning and support had burst forth.

For Caribbean peoples, sentiments of indigeneity were intensifying, and a movement had been stirring. From the islands to the diaspora of New York and all points north, east, and west, many were actively reconnecting our common indigeneity under aegis of the ancestral term, Taíno. The search for Taíno—in our families, in our stories and our history, in our sustaining natural lifeways—was a declaration of existence in the blood and in the land. From Cuba, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Jamaica came greetings and stories of families. Individuals were gathering in small groups forming and reforming their family extensions and circles as yukayekes, or Taíno clans and tribes.

The events of 1992 can be remembered as a vortex moment, with a spirit and consciousness of unity felt in many Indigenous territories and venues. The story of Columbus, propagated for 500 years by European colonial structures, was rejected, for the first time, across the entire Western Hemisphere.

I was reading on Caribbean origins in those years, inquiring about our indigenous Taíno roots and the first five decades of contact with the Spanish. I thought to follow the fates of the Taíno chiefs and their territories under Spanish domination, navigating through the cultural perspectives of the Spanish chroniclers for what felt true in those interpretations.

The early Spanish witnesses were ethnocentric to the core, yet provide us with a sense of sequence and often share trustworthy details. Columbus himself, Oviedo, las Casas, even Peter Martyr d’Anghiera, who never set foot in the Americas, can partially introduce our consciousness into that era. Important information on Taíno can be obtained directly and gleaned from the chronicles. Friar Ramón Pané, a prime example, gathered notes directly from the family of a major cacique, Guarionex, to produce an ethnological brief for Columbus. It is Pané who actually gifts us with the clearest details of our Taíno Creation and cosmology.

In Caribbean early contact research, historical documents on Taíno (island Arawak) are scarce, while the interpretive work is voluminous. There is much opinion and repetition for a scholar to investigate. In an in-depth review of the literature and the documentary record, I found important information, events, and descriptions that were telling in themselves, and some scholars, such as Arrom and Oliver, whose work occasionally approaches the intuitive level. Still, my own inner compass would not fix, as I kept delving into the written materials. I knew with increasing certainty then that I was seeking knowledge beyond text, that I was asking permission to enter their world, their lives, looking for a voice to help me perceive true views of their ancestor time.

I had traveled to Cuba in 1979, going home for the first time in two decades. A new US administration had finally legalized such trips, and I jumped to visit my guajiro relatives in Camagüey. Herding cattle for an afternoon with my cousins, listening to stories of the güije, or little people, of cagüeiros, the shape-shifters of old Cuban culture, I rejoiced that these old memories of my childhood were still orally alive among my own people of the monte. We talked on herbal medicines, and on the secretive cura del rastro, the old tracking cure ceremony. Varongo Veloz, the curandero (healer) son of my own childhood curandero, don Joseito, worked on me one day, during a long afternoon of reminiscing. It enlivened me to see the strong sense of identity-in-place implied in the term "guajiro," our most traditional way of describing ourselves and our natural lifeways.

Our people had their own Taíno memories, which formed into their guajiro memories and into their Cubano memories. It energized me to reexplore with them my own recollections of our childhood stories from the oral tradition of Camagüey. The rebellion of the legendary Cacique Hatuey in nearby Bayamo presented us with the most heroic figure of our youth. In the part of Cuba where I grew up, and certainly among older members of my family, the story of Taíno rebel chief Cacique Hatuey, his message to our Cuban Indian ancestors, and his resistance to Spanish rule had saliency as a story that belonged to us.

One elder uncle told the story of the conquest in Camagüey: the friendship offered answered with massacre. He finished with the later resistance, when the Taíno at Caonao rebelled and expelled the first Spanish settlement. My aunts Lilina and Gertrudis told the story of Cacique Camagüeybax, his early gesture with the Spanish to marry some of them into his lineage—the origin of nearly all of the founding and early Camagüey families—many stories, just in the region of my childhood, Taíno themes in Camagüey guajiro ways.

With our sense of ethnic blending early with Spanish, then African men, and the history of resistance to Spain, I experienced again how our people not only remember those early episodes but also that they proudly identify with Hatuey and with his message, as heroic ancestor—Hatuey’s exhortation to know your enemy’s real god, gold, and to not sell out your spirituality. They see the teaching of Hatuey as an essential base to our earth-based Cuban nationalist consciousness, precursor even to national heroes such as Antonio Maceo and José Martí. Our history of Hatuey contained spiritual as well as social admonitions. I had heard this many times and from various people during my own childhood. One living tradition of it is represented in the Light of Yara, a spiritual brilliance that originates in the place where Hatuey was burned at the stake. This, I learned particularly at the lap of my tia Lilina, my father’s sister. It was embodied knowledge.

In our guajiro country culture of eastern Cuba, from Camagüey into the mountains of the Sierra Maestra, the ways of the medicinal plants, the most indigenous uses of the yucca, maize, and other endemic plants, and indeed, medicinal healing and protection ceremonies and the planting of endemic root crops by the lunar phases were commonplace in my childhood of the 1950s and early 1960s. In subsequent trips home, I would affirm that these practices are still alive today. Particularly the traditions of the conuco, or small family food plot, with its range of indigenous crops, as well as the use of many indigenous plants for medicine and as spiritual guides, are widespread in all three Spanish-speaking islands among guajiro, jibaro, and indio campesino populations. Our Caribbean Spanish is thickly laden with Taíno language terms, and these are the ones that make you feel most identified with place. In Cuba, at least one continuously inherited cacique lineage, held by Don Panchito Ramirez Rojas (La Rancheria Autochthonous Community, Guantanamo), has represented itself publicly for many decades.

The effort to reconnect within the cultures took me to other islands—Dominica, St. Vincent, Boriquen (Puerto Rico), Quisqueya (Hispaniola)—where embodied experience of places, many greetings, and appreciations among our Taíno, Kwaib, and other Indigenous-identified people continues to be possible.

I wrote on these general topics from Cornell University, where our Indigenous networking and communications project, called Akwe:kon Press, published the special double volume in 1990, View from the Shore: American Indian Perspectives on the Quincentenary, as a Native challenge to the prevailing media views on the Columbus celebration. Many Native writers joined the effort, and even Spain took notice of the publication and negotiated us a partial victory in that the Columbus Quincentenary Commission invited the participation of Indigenous elders into their discussion and their programs.¹

A comprehensive platform emerged for that debate that we engaged closely. Apologies were actually issued. Many communications and some new understandings emerged, even if within the dominant approach, which has remained to praise Columbus and to praise the great, if flawed, Spanish and general European mission to bring Christian civilization to the uncivilized (read, heathen) peoples.

On Taíno, as always, the international story allowed but a blip, a silent doormat to usher in the continent’s history. The story was of the Columbus invasion, its landfalls, and intrusions, first in Quisqueya (DR-Haiti), then Puerto Rico, and over twenty years, Cuba and the Lesser Antilles. This was recorded only through Spanish eyes and discussed only via academic scholarship. The Taino had no writers, one Spanish professor said, by way of explanation. It followed that our story, how our people endured, could have no witness of that time.

On a remote coastal promontory of easternmost Cuba, in a cave called Patana, looking across the Windward Passage toward the island of Quisqueya-Haiti, I had a chance to burn tabaco and put down my prayers. It was in a warm, wet place where an altar of our cemi spiritual family of Iguanaboina, Boinayel, and Marahu—was carved into stalagmites by our medicine people 600, 700 years ago.

In my concentration, I pondered how our Taíno grandparents had endured the brutal enslavement that came to them. I pondered on their personality, their way of life; I prayed to feel deeply into the ones who had seen its destruction and who had lived it; and I found myself wondering how any history I might write could actually please and honor them.

I think that’s how Diego found me.

In the fall of 1990, I visited with my friends, Algonquin elder Larry McDermott and wife, Nancy. They live in a beautiful, deep forest in southern Ontario. One night while there, after walking the woods with Larry most of the day, I had retired early to a pleasant sleep, deep and long.

A sudden flash lit the world; loud booming thunder had hit close in the woods. I was coming from deep sleep—already feeling the impending dawn—and it shook me awake. In the spiral between dream and wakefulness, I heard Diego’s voice; then I visioned a flash of his handsome profile as he faced the ocean, looking out, beyond a red palm tree at a coastal horizon.

The dream lasted but a moment, appearing in the space between the lightning strike outside my window and my coming awake, only a second in real time, yet compressed, slower running, and much longer in dreamtime.

In that elongated moment, resonating in the cavity of my skull, I heard Diego speak in lilting Spanish, his words joining in my throat. I felt come into me and out of me, with ease, those dreamtime words, which are among the first paragraphs of the narrative, the novel.

It was a medicine day that I still feel. The lightning thundered until daybreak, although not as close. Fully awake as the day dawned, I lit a lamp and wrote down the words of the dream. They felt certain, and mine, yet a gift.

The voice in my dream I identified with surprising ease. I knew I had spotted Diego. Here and there in the chronicles, the historical character had surfaced, although I had not focused on him. As it often happens, after that recognition in my dream, the historical character, Diego Colón, appeared in more and more texts.

In 1991, a conference invitation to Spain provided the opportunity for research at the Archive of Indies in Seville. I got lucky with the voluminous archives in that venerable institution. While working to decipher words in 500-year-old documents, I found a couple of direct references to the historical character, the young Taíno boy, Diego Colón, the adopted son of the admiral.

Diego Colón was twelve years old when taken captive by Columbus at the first landfall at Guanahaní. A quick study, Diego became Columbus’s primary Taíno interpreter within weeks of the first contact. He would not only remain at the center of events throughout the first ten years of the Spanish colonization of La Española, but he lived to full maturity in Santo Domingo. Diego Colón was a true Native witness to the first decades of that fateful encounter.

Among the early chroniclers, Las Casas himself mentions the Indian interpreter Diego Colón several times in his History of the Indies.² Dr. Álvarez Chanca, who sailed in the Columbus voyage, mentions the interpreter twice (though not by name) in his famous Letter to the City of Seville. Both Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo,³ the king’s historian, and Columbus’s son Ferdinand⁴ refer to Diego in their books: in Oviedo’s definitive General and Natural History of the Indies (1535) and Columbus’s biography of his famous father, respectively. Diego also turns up in the infamous letter of Michele de Cúneo,⁵ raconteur and friend of Columbus, and in Pedro Mártir de Anglería’s Décadas del nuevo mundo⁶ (1530).

The two references to a Diego Colón at the General Archive of Indies twice place such a person in Española in 1514; he is also mentioned by an encomendero (Spanish grantees who were ceded land holdings of whole Indian communities, who would serve him as his enslaved people). Among twentieth-century historians, Columbus biographer Samuel Morison provides several anecdotal references to Diego in his books Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus. and The European Discovery of America: The Southern Voyages.⁷

That morning of my dream at my Algonquin friend’s house, not far into the woods, we found the tree, standing, that had received the strike; it was a giant elm. The lightning strike had cleanly broken the top, and many branches were burned to darkened knobs. It was browned black, straight and rounded and almost bare. Smoke was coming out the top in puffs as gusts of wind hit the tree, and on the inside, you could see a reddish glow up its center. It resembled a rolled cigar to me, the macuyo of our ceremonial people, blowing smoke.

The fire department came with a long hose and spent much water dousing through it. Finally, it seemed to give out, and yet smoke and steam still came out one end. At dusk, the cigar tree flared up with internal red embers so that once again, we doused it with much water ourselves, in necessary regret and in wonder of it all.

I began to work. Writing in the early mornings, trailing, and then guiding the internal thread of Diego’s voice, I felt a sense of journey and adventure, confident in how Diego had attached and lent his voice, and that it would sustain.

I found Diego at times in my mind’s ear, and his voice grew in me so that I dreamed him twice more. This first dream had come through as I was rounding the corner on historical research; the second dream was the impetus (orientation) to move the narrative directly through the form of a journal, Diego’s journal, set on the island of Santo Domingo of 1532–1533. I saw the convent, and the coastline, in the dream. In the third dream, also that year, I followed Diego silently up and down a trail, through woods and tall manigua grass. He walked fast with an old man’s gait, stumbled twice to a knee but got to his feet quickly and moved on, finally fading ahead of me.

The narrative that grew in me and the voice that I carried that morning of my first dream to the writing table, offered a sequence of storytelling that did not abandon me for nearly two years as, sometimes in the middle of the winter in northern New York, surrounded by deep snows, I would drift in the imaginary to the Caribbean shores of the early 1500s. I savored anew those first encounters from the time when our old people, those deeply Indigenous ancestors of our contemporary families, were whole. I consciously fashioned into Diego’s tapestry the best of my perception on the various lines of research I had undertaken, but the voice was a gift throughout until the narrative came to its natural conclusion.

I have not dreamt with Diego again.

Note: In an earlier edition of the novel, I fashioned an author’s introduction that featured a fictional found manuscript as the connective tissue to Diego’s actual witness of those years of conquest. That historical-like fabulous find was, in fact, a fable, a fiction. The simple truth of it is better. For how Diego’s story came to be told, the dream is the reality.

—José Barreiro

Akwesasne Mohawk Nation

August 2022

NOTES

1.José Barreiro, View from the Shore: Toward an Indian Voice in 1992, Northeast Indian Quarterly (1990).

2.Bartolomé de Las Casas, History of the Indies. Ed. Andree M. Collard. New York: Harper and Row, 1971.

3.Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, Historia general y natural de las Indias. Asunción: Editorial Guaraní, 1956.

4.Ferdinand Colón, The Life of the Admiral Christopher Columbus by his Son Ferdinand. Trans. Benjamin Keen. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1959.

5.Michele de Cúneo, Letter of the Second Voyage, Universidad de la Habana, 1972.

6.Pedro Mártir de Anglería, Décadas del nuevo mundo. Trans. Joaquín Torres Asensio. Buenos Aires: Editorial Bajel, 1944.

7.Samuel Morison, The European Discovery of America: The Southern Voyages. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974.

Folio I

OUR REALITY AND THEIRS

The good friar Las Casas requests my witness of the early years… A reason to remember so much pain… An introduction of myself… The good friar’s argument… The story of Enriquillo… My own truth I pledge… What the friar wants… Starting out… I begin with the return… A route home denied… The trip to Cuba, barbecuing on the beach… Bayamo and Macaca: not a discourse but a curse… The Castilians change everything… The admiral is cursed… Hard to explain our Indian religion, even to a good friar… Enriquillo’s conditions and vigilance… The Bible guides Las Casas…

APRIL 12, 1532

One. The good friar Las Casas requests my witness of the early years.

The Castilians call this the Year of Our Lord 1532, and today they call the twelfth day of the month of April. This is the day I start.

I write from a small square room in the convent of the Dominican Order, in Santo Domingo de la Española, where I have resided for six years. These journal pages, where I will inscribe my memories, are a manifest of the kindness of a great man, a priest of the Catholic faith, Don Bartolomé de Las Casas, of whom I am a grateful servant and to whom I am greatly in debt for my life and my well-being.

I have had a quill pen, acquired many long years ago, and ink, too, I obtained on my own. But paper has been nearly impossible to come by. The great man of robes, just a few days ago, gifted me with a sheet-book of paper, blank pages for me to fill. Now I have it and today I begin to scratch these Castilian symbols on the page, these drawings that talk. For that, and for his unceasing labor on behalf of my people, I am very grateful to His Eminence. I add here, of course, a certainty: that as always in my dealings with the Castilians, the ones my elders called the covered men, I am aware that the friar has a reason for granting me paper. Don Bartolomé writes now the story of Don Christopherens and the taking of the islands. He requests that I put down on paper the stories of my times with the admiral.

Write it now before your mind forgets, the friar told me. However you want, what you remember, note it down. The actual landfall—how the admiral first set foot on the New World. You were there, Dieguillo. And this is true. I am the only one left who remembers the first landing, from the beach on my home island, my bohío of Guanahaní. And I do remember. I remember the ships, their sails like giant gulls; I remember the strange men with coverings like crabs and hairs like frayed rope on their faces. I do, I remember even the clouds, how they formed and what they said to us that day. I remember now, I feel now, a great sadness about that day. It pains me now as I relive it, reminded to remember it by a great man that I love as I come to hate, every day more and more, the twisted ways of his race. I am pleased to do this for Don Bartolomé, though I did warn him he might not like my words.

APRIL 14, 1532

Two. A reason to remember so much pain.

Much too busy with convent duties for two suns, today I rush to continue this work, and I am quickly flushed in the greenery of my memories. In this little room that the monks have allowed me, stiff-legged as I am, soft stomach, aching teeth, I still have my mind. For six years, as we have shared an existence in this convent’s stone buildings, the friar has asked many questions, bringing up old times and writing down my stories. But now I feel the freedom of my hand, I draw my words on this paper, these words that will carry and be read by others.

I put pen to paper, close my eyes and I am there, almost forty years ago, but now fresh in my sudden memory, during those first days when close behind young Rodrigo, my new friend and captain’s servant, I snuck under the poop deck of the Santa Maria (Marie Galante, the admiral always called her), anchored still on the small bay of my home island of Guanahaní, right into his master room. The admiral was bent over a table and quietly Rodrigo and I watched him from behind. He never took notice. That was the first time I saw him scratching the ink marks in his ship’s log, engrossed in his mind, resembling one of our behikes in full ceremonial prayer. That act of the admiral’s I pondered even at my early age. Later, as I learned their different ways, this writing on paper that could be taken over long distances and read directly again and again appealed to me. I think on that: that I, too, now can write, and it warms me.

I confess to the sky and I hope the friar can forgive me when he reads these words. I do intend to tell, to write on paper, what I did see and how I do see it. For the good father and for whomever else might read these pages, I will stall my anger, restrain my hate, retain my cagüayo lizard spirit, my revolving eye, the coolness in my body to see them clearly, and I will write what I have learned of their actions, their speech, during the early years and on to the present. But I confess: I am no longer enchanted by anything Castilian, anything Iberian, Portuguese, anything Genoese, or whatever else they have across the great open waters. Even as I write, and freely, I still ponder: How will these, my own words scratched on paper, how will they free my spirit? Or will they capture my thoughts, my heart? Will they betray me?

I am nervous to write of those times and those places where once flourished my Taíno relatives. The wounds of these forty years cut deep into my heart and so will mostly these pages. So I sit and I cry, and hurriedly before he returns, I sit down to pen these few words of a beginning, on my own. Many things I can say about the admiral that he will not like. And many things I can tell, too, about the great world of my ancestors, the people of the islands that the Castilians call Antilles but which to the eye of my mind I see as our long Cuban lizard (Caymán-Cubanakán), the land of great mountains (Haití-Bohío), the center of dancing (Borikén) and the little Carib turtles, hicoteas, in our language, arching south to the great forest.

And I start with this: What I do for this friar, our great defender, I do because I know what he endures for my people. But it is for my people, too, for that world in which we lived and which we lost, that I want to write what I know of who we were, how we felt and believed, and what has happened. I want to be this friar’s witness, by Yucahuguama Bagua Maórocoti, great spirit of my ancestors, I do, and even by the baby Jesus, I do, but in my witness I will write for you, my Taíno-ni-taíno, natural guaxeri-ti relatives, for those of you who will survive, for those of you in times to come who will remember that your fathers and your mothers, your grandfathers and grandmothers were a people.

APRIL 15, 1532

Three. An introduction of myself.

My Christian name in the Castilian language, from the time of my adoption by the admiral, is Diego or Dieguillo Colón. Fifty-two is the count of my rains. Of origin, I am from Guanahaní, the first land sighted in my world by the covered men of Castile. I am of the Loku Taíno people and in my native language my name is Guaikán—the remora fish. My mother was Nánache, from the canoe-building clan of the yukaieke, or village, called Old Guanahaní. My father had several names but was most prominently called Cohobanax, after his functions and title in the council of the Cohoba. He was from our island’s central village, called Guanahanínakan, but he lived on the coast with my mother’s people, who esteemed him as a fisherman of great skill.

I think now of my father’s death, only weeks before the admiral’s arrival, in a moment of joy, climbing lazily on the overlapping branches of a palm tree, reaching over to the tree of the fruit called mamey, his tight muscular body, like the great mahá snake, with a stick he struck down two, three bundles of ripe mamey. Then, stretching for one more fruit, arm extended, body extended along thick, broad leaves like a brown cagüayo lizard, a sharp crack and how he dropped, long and hard and with no sound, all silent but the snap, the crack when the flat branch broke, as he dropped fast and hit rock.

My first sadness comes back to me now, the worst and best, and I must stop. Thinking of my parents, of their generation and their elders, fills me with longing.

This is all in me. I pull away now, lift the pen. I leave my father be. Slowly, I will approach it. There is so much. Again today my mind swims with colors and faces, turns of words and the many smells of the sea. The friar’s request has filled me with force, my chest is warm and my mind turns. Even the pain of my right side, past injuries I carry from the time of my betrayal, when even his name that I still carry could not protect me, even the old pain that stiffens my arm and leg, even my tired limbs, have warmed so that my heart can almost feel glad.

APRIL 21, 1532

Four. The good friar’s argument.

At lunch today the good friar took his meal, as I usually do, with the Indian servants of our convent. We shared with him our cassabe tort, axiaco soup, and a fresh red snapper caught out in his canoe in the early morning by young Silverio. Don Bartolomé comes to eat with us quite regularly. Today, before taking seat, he was already agitated with our cause. As part of his prayer, he said, "Almighty God, help us condemn the encomienda system, brutal destroyer of our innocent Indian brothers."

The good friar is forceful. Once he intends to go in a certain direction, he will not be dissuaded. Every day, for his ideas about our Indian people, he suffers. Today, I watched him mop around his soup bowl with a piece of cassabe as we heard the first yeller. The shouting came from the stone road that runs down the hill by the convent, and you could hear the culprit hurrying by. Las Casas, the great whoreson! Boogs the she-dogs and their sons! he yelled.

Two or three come by every day. They shout their insults to the friar and run away before the younger monks can have at them. Most are sons or guards of encomenderos. They hate Don Bartolomé. Once, he was in the vegetable garden, picking our Taíno peppers that he loves so much, when several of the criminals pelted him with stones. They truly hate him and I believe would kill him if given a chance.

As usual, today Don Bartolomé sat quietly through the insults, his hawk’s face and nose tilted down over his bowl with only the slightest of furrows lining his ample forehead. Two monks came back from a brief chase, empty-handed, and Don Bartolomé ignored them. He put his plate away and requested I follow him to my little room.

How is the writing? he asked, walking straight to the window as I closed my door.

I am only starting, I said.

I need your memory, he said. I intend to sail to the kingdom soon. I will pretend to go to Puerto Rico. But from there I will go before the court in Castile. The king will hear my case.

Why now, Father? I asked.

These bastards have no backbone. The whole island is terrified.

He spoke the truth. As we stood and talked today in the convent at Santo Domingo, a young countryman of mine, Enriquillo, the warrior chief of the Bahuruku mountains, remains at large. For thirteen years, Enriquillo and his warriors, among them his war captain, Tamayo, have been free in remote camps in the southwest mountains of the island.

Enriquillo’s warriors attacked a farm this side of La Maguana just eight days ago, Father Las Casas continued. The governor is trying to keep it quiet, but four soldiers were killed and their weapons seized.

I asked the good friar if perhaps now the king might not be angrier with the rebel cacique, thus complicating his mission.

"The king will be upset. But with whom? Enriquillo’s case is now well-known. Everyone wants the mountains pacified, including the king. My intent is to remind him that Enriquillo is a baptized Indian, a Christian. And he is at war for very good reasons. Others have argued with the king on that account. It is the brutal abuse of the encomienda that caused Enriquillo to war."

The good father was right and as always I was glad to hear him say it, but what he said pricked me. Indeed, Enriquillo was baptized. But, this I do not see as so great an achievement.

I know the story of Enriquillo. I knew his father and his uncles, including his great aunt, the cacica Anacaona, hereditary tribal mother of the Xaraguá region, sister of the wise old cacique Bohekio and widow of the feared warrior cacique Caonabó. All are now dead, victims of betrayal, victims of slaughter, almost thirty years ago.

At the court they call you idolaters, heathen, barbaric people, he pressed me. I want to argue that your people’s beliefs were actually a form of Christianity, that you worshipped under similar ideas. Do you see? As Christians we are to conquer and war upon heathens at will; but a people who have had a measure of Christianity can command more consideration…

I nodded, though not with the vigor he wanted.

Yes or no? he persisted. Do you agree with what I maintain, that our best argument to the court is on religious grounds?

In truth, Father, I told him. I do not hope so much for that argument as you do.

The good friar meant to press on. I may convince the monarchs by asserting that your own religious beliefs before our coming are not so different from the Christian catechism, he said.

Deeply in my heart of palm I refuse to accept this argument from Don Bartolomé. I like what he tries to do, how tirelessly he argues on our behalf, but it angers something deep in me.

"The closer to Christianity you are, the more the kings must care for you. Among all the abhorrent practices of your old behikes, I know some Christian notions were apparent. The idea of Heaven and Hell, for instance, maybe thoughts about a celestial trinity, things like this, which could lead to a king’s recognition. A royal declaration is what your people need."

We need only to be left alone, I said, in an eruption of words. I must confess that his inquiries and assertions have triggered my memory. I am agitated. I do not mean to be blunt with the good friar, but he speaks sometimes without thinking.

The good father listens to me sometimes, and I feel his acceptance of my truth. But other days he walks as in a waking trance, like a guilty man smitten by the cohoba. Then, he admonishes me: Only through the Lord Jesus Christ can you find salvation. Or he says: Bringing Christ on the cross was our mission to you. Before, it is true, you were lost. When he is like that, when he must own not just my memory but my very own spirit, I shrink from his verbal embrace. Today, at first, it was like that. We couldn’t talk. I withdrew into my silence rather than argue, and my good Castilian friend, this brother of Christ who so much has suffered for my people, he, too, withdrew, mumbling quietly to himself, his gaze roaming the valley beyond my window.

Five. The story of Enriquillo.

A full hour went by before the good friar continued.

Let’s stick to Enriquillo, he said. As I understand it, twice before going to the mountains, Enriquillo filed complaints. He tried to use the lawful means to achieve justice.

I know that story, too. I know exactly who Enriquillo is and how he comes to have hundreds of Indians in the bush mountains of the Bahuruku, how he has changed our lives, and what he means to the Indians and African Negroes of this island.

And he is a Christian, is he not? Las Casas said, to pull my tongue.

I reminded the priest that Enriquillo is a survivor of the Massacre of Anacaona’s Banquet, which in 1503 destroyed the last major Taíno cacicasgo on Española. I myself saved Enriquillo’s father, then took his young boys at my side, though