12
Father and Sons
When Pedro Andújar and Jacinto Benavides left the Buena Esperanza, each with a gold onza sewn inside the seam of a shoe, they decided to part ways. It was easier, they reasoned, for one marrano to pass unnoticed in the chaotic port, than for two. Jacinto Benavides went off into the free Negro quarter to find a woman and drink himself to death. He had time for the first, but not for the second. A month later, he was knifed by his woman’s common-law husband who, in jail for murdering another Negro, was let out unexpectedly because the Spanish alguacil needed room to accommodate some tobacco smugglers who tried to skimp on their bribes. The murderer and the woman—in reality, a fifteen-year-old mulatto girl who, unbeknownst to her, was carrying Jacinto Benavides’ daughter—dumped his body in the bay after removing all his clothes. They knew that Jacinto Benavides had been circumcised and might be a marrano. This, they felt, was none of their business, since it was a squabble among Spaniards, a marrano being just another kind, adept at some witchcraft that worked only in Spain, and not the island. Just in case, they cleansed the mulatto girl’s hut, where the murder had taken place, using herbs and chants that she had learned from her African mother. The clothes and shoes were sold to a street peddler, who may or may not have found the gold onza inside the shoe. Someone at some point must have, because poor people never threw away shoes or clothes, but used them until they disintegrated upon their bodies, at which point the gold onza must have fallen on the ground and made someone very rich and very happy.
Pedro Andújar walked away from the port as soon as he found a quieter street. In San Cristóbal de La Habana, on the first days of the year 1625, a quieter street was one where the sweaty, screaming mass of soldiers, pigs, prostitutes, beggars, half-naked urchins, criminals, dogs, and street vendors with their greasy, smoky braziers frying pork, plantains, and cassava began to thin out, replaced by the tiny shacks of the mulatto cobblers, leather workers, cabinet makers, tailors, mercers. A hurricane had struck two months earlier, opening gaps in the fortified wall built to protect the city against flooding and attacks by the English, French, and Dutch. Most of the artisans’ shacks were now missing something, but their owners continued to work inside them as if the roof, or door, or walls were still there, like the actors in Fuenteovejuna, sitting inside their painted cardboard shops pretending they were real. Pedro had seen the play performed by an itinerant troupe in Cádiz, right before he first sailed for the New World. He had been in San Cristóbal de La Habana three times before, the last time two years earlier, but he had never been separated from Jacinto Benavides, and had never left the port area, where Jacinto said a man could find all he needed to recover from the brutal months at sea: drink, food, and women, in order of importance. On his earlier visits, he had been a glutton for all of these, particularly nísperos and mulatto women, both of which were abundant here and became one in his mind. He had never seen either before. He drank to please Jacinto, who loved drink more than anything else in the world, even if it made him cry and speak in broken Ladino, which could have gotten them both burnt at the stake. Pedro and Jacinto had been inseparable for ten years, from the Canary Islands, where they had both enlisted in the Buena Esperanza at the age of fifteen, to Cádiz; from there to Veracruz; and then back a year later by way of San Cristóbal de La Habana. They were inseparable, but only on land, when no one was watching them. On board the Buena Esperanza, each pretended the other did not exist. If forced to speak to each other in public on the boat, they would do so with distant courtesy. Neither wanted to be a marrano for the rest of his life.
Pedro had never uttered that word, marrano. Growing up in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, he was terrified that if he did, the word would stick to him forever, give him bad luck, make him grow a curly tail and stiff hairs that would stick out of his nose. He no longer checked the base of his spine every morning when he woke up, as he had done ever since a playmate had called him marrano. That was the first time he had heard it. However, he was now doubly repulsed by the word, because he had become thoroughly Christian in culture, while still deeply Hebrew in temperament, neither of which he knew yet, and pigs are loathsome to both from different angles. Jacinto, though, had no allegiance to anything outside his physical appetites, or so he claimed, though Pedro remembered Jacinto’s drunken tears and pseudo-Ladino babble, his ostentatious way of stuffing himself with pork at every opportunity. Jacinto laughed at the word marrano and, when they were alone, to see Pedro squirm, he liked to sing softly in his ear an obscene ditty he had composed, rhyming marrano with ano (anus), and ojo del amo (eye of the master) with ojo del ano (asshole). Sometimes Jacinto would just mouth his rhyme at Pedro, snorting and wiggling his nose like a pig, shaking his big frame and the curly blond locks that San Cristóbal de La Habana’s mulatto girls fought with each other to touch, so that Jacinto never paid for sex.
Perhaps because they were so different, while being alike from birth, the happiest time on board for Pedro was the one night a month that he and Jacinto stood guard together. They were alone for eight hours and could talk without witnesses. Unlike on land, Jacinto was always sober here. Captain de Horta, so lenient in other ways, ruthlessly punished any sailor who got drunk while on night watch: the first time, fifty lashes and ten days in the brig with only stale bread and water. If repeated, the man was left at the first port without a penny, and with a bad word whispered in the ear of the local alguacil, which in their case would be, or include, the troublesome marrano.
On their last watch together, the night before they reached the Biloxi Marsh, which the Spaniards called “Marasmo,” Pedro had gone over the story of how he and Jacinto would jump ship in Veracruz, their last stop. They would bribe a public scrivener to get themselves new Christian identities and blend into the population. Pedro had been planning every detail for over a year, forcing Jacinto to save, so he, too, would have a gold onza when the time came. It gave Pedro great pleasure to tell Jacinto the story of their future together while they stood on lookout at night, half-whispering so he wouldn’t be heard by anyone else (Pedro had noticed, watching Fuenteovejuna on that makeshift stage ten years earlier, that the line prompter hiding under a cardboard half shell did not whisper as much as he half-whispered, so that only whoever was sitting on the first row might catch a word or two. The one time the prompter was forced to whisper a line again because the actor had not heard it the first time, his whisper carried all the way to the back of the courtyard theater and the audience jeered and threw chicken bones. Pedro never whispered after that.)
In Pedro’s story, after getting their new names, he and Jacinto would buy a mule and two horses, and make their way to the northern reaches of the New Spain, where one could get land for free. “You’re standing all crooked,” Jacinto said, when Pedro had them already in their haciendas, married to two Indian princesses in whose father’s land Eldorado was located (at Jacinto’s insistence, this had been added to the story a few months earlier). “You still look crooked to me.” Pedro straightened himself again. “You look like an old man,” Jacinto said, with unexpected bitterness, which he then tried to hide by grunting softly and wiggling his nose, pig-like. Pedro did not say anything else the rest of that night. He was startled by Jacinto’s sourness. He did not understand it then, and he did not understand it forty-seven years later when, on his deathbed, he asked Jacinto, who had died long ago, “But what about Tenerife?” No one around him knew who Jacinto was, and what had happened in Tenerife, or even what or where Tenerife was. It is doubtful that Jacinto himself, had he been sitting next to the seventy-two-year-old Pedro, would have known specifically what it was about Tenerife that Pedro had in mind, although Jacinto, who had an excellent memory, would have remembered all about it, or at least those parts that were important to him, and either way would have been satisfactory for him and the dying man.