I promise to be nice even though she is not her, and that is what I tell her. And that she hardly seems at all like a woman, and that I appreciate this in her very much.
Out on the street, Roc can no longer be heard shouting around and firing his gun without rhyme or reason. A freebooter has purchased a pipe of wine and, setting it up on a busy street corner where everyone can see, he knocks a hole in the end of it, forcing all who pass by to drink and threatening that if they do not he will shoot them with his pistol; I am told that sometimes he has bought a keg of beer and done the same thing; and that on other occasions he would plunge his hands into the spirits and splash it all over anyone passing by, no matter how messed up their clothing got, men or women. A barrier ring now forms before the spurting jet of wine and around anyone who drinks. No one is standing in front of me. I hear the laughter and jokes of the barricaders. They push me to drink. I hear pistol shots rending the air. Have they all gone crazy? They dance around me as the wine reaches my mouth and runs down my throat. Faceup under the spouting wine I drink, gazing at the unusually blue sky, irritatingly blue, painfully blue, and I drink, and drink, and drink. I am aware of my whole body, unusually happy, irritatingly happy, painfully happy and complete: as if all those who had been using it up till now (or those I had used) had wrenched something from it that was now restored. My entry into the dark mystery of the flesh, I feel with the wine coursing down my throat, has put a new body in place of the other body that used to be me, and for the first time in days I am not angry, for the first time since Pineau’s death, and for the first time in my seventeen years I am for the first time drunk and for the first time whole, on my own two feet, reeling along the streets brimming with music, joining in with the celebration where everything is offered so freely, hearing stories here and there that to my inexperienced nostrils smack more of boastfulness than of the bloody business they claim to be so full of, even though they are closer to the truth than my own nostrils on this lovely night just beginning.
TWO
I did keep quiet, but my silence was not enough to protect Adèle, just as the fact that she had indulged me with the secrets of her body was not enough for me to feel tied to her in the way I did to my she.
What makes a body get sick over another body, to absolutely need another? How does the mechanism of magnets work? Not even though she had generously bestowed on me that extravagant arousal and exquisite revelation did I feel sick for her. Sometimes it is just the opposite, the sickness or suffering arising from the fact that there is no yielding, that no surrender comes of it, that their bodies are not permitted to explode with desire. I will have to cite Morgan after all, even though I promised not to speak of him. After the assault on Panama, he remained ashore, sending out patrols of two hundred men to bring in the loot from the surrounding area. On one of those days, a portion of the prize they found was a woman of exceptional beauty and, according to the claims of her own people, great virtue. Morgan felt attracted by her, sick for her, and ordered that she be given special treatment, separating her from the other prisoners; and he devoted himself to seducing her, with fortune both good and bad at once — good because the woman altered the opinion she formerly held concerning pirates and wondered why such men had been described to her as brutes, as savages without feeling, if indeed they were refined human beings, educated and thoughtful; and bad because she still refused to give in to Morgan’s suggestions. The normal thing for Morgan would have been to take her by force, as he did with so many women on those raids, but, his body being touched by that woman, he still persisted; until he understood that it was totally useless, and then he gave orders that her fine clothes be torn off her body and that she be shut up in a filthy prison where she received little food and water, but which was nonetheless comfortable and even luxurious in comparison with the sumptuous bed of that pirate who was burning for her, hungry for her, desperately thirsty for her body, sick because of her, tortured invisibly by his passion for her. What did his she have that drove him so mad, a man who was accustomed to setting the ransom price on women and also to reaping the immediate carnal harvest he and his men wrested, almost without looking at them, from any women who crossed their path? When he abandoned the city — or rather the spot the city had occupied, it being now completely destroyed, the whole place turned into spoils and plunder or else into empty terrain where anything that lay exposed was devastation and ruin: enormous piles of broken things destroyed by the gluttonous high spirits of Morgan and his men (among whom I was one) — he took the woman with him, together with the prisoners for whom he had received no recompense, as well as those his men had rounded up in the wilderness, threatening them with death in two days if their indemnities did not arrive in time.
Messengers went back and forth, but to come forth with the ransom payments for most of them was impossible. Since the surrounding countryside had already been combed over by Morgan’s fierce patrols, where would they get the money, with everything sacked and nothing left standing?
The husband of the woman who had made Morgan sick found himself on business outside Panama and, having learned of the siege, had not returned. He was not one of those who had fled in good time with some of their men while leaving women and children behind when they heard the pirates were approaching, as some were accustomed to doing in the Caribbean; he yet remained at a prudent distance, and with his pockets full. He was located in time by a priest in her trust who returned on the day of the execution of the prisoners with the ransom price Morgan demanded in exchange for her; except that here the priest did a better business, because he freed three that he knew would pay him three times the amount — each one — the moment they were reunited with their families. News of this reached her ears, and she confronted Morgan in order to tell him so (Do you think, she used the familiar pronoun tú with him, that it is right what this man of God, who had my greatest confidence, has done to me?), whereupon he ordered the priest to be seized in exchange for her freedom.
Thus the priest was the only one not already half dead of thirst and hunger whose lot it was to suffer such butchery the night Morgan left that land till then unplanted by man now sown with arrow-pierced bodies. They looked something like mangled toys, those bodies, 185 men and women, unburied, whose stench after a few days must have guided those who arrived too late with the ransom payment, too late with their futile entreaties for Morgan to release their friends or family members.
Yes, I did keep quiet about this one body who sold herself naked and also about her plan to flee, even though she was no magnet to me and perhaps even because she was not. But when she left The House, before, she thought, the word gets around and I’m forced to cough up my purse, she had to wait for the departure of the ship that kept putting it off, waiting for the supplies that should already have arrived from Veracruz: Puebla biscuits and dried fish. Immediately, creditors real and fictitious fell upon her. There was one who claimed to be the owner of the bed she had been using and who charged her for it, he said, because you have rendered it useless, she fighting back with the argument that not only had she not left it useless but she had spent twice its price in trimming and decorating it, and she was leaving it so, trimmed and decorated. And there was another who wanted to collect for the full month’s room and board plus the following two months, because how would they be able to get someone so quickly, just like that, to make up for her? and she, not having announced her departure ahead of time so she could be replaced, was bound to pay this, although it was true that she could leave now, having already fulfilled her three years of service some six months back — yet for those six months she still owed them for the room, the use of the bed, her meals, the washing of sheets, her cosmetics, the new clothes demanded by the elegant atmosphere of The House but which she would have to leave behind upon her departure because they did not belong to her (she discovered this just now, all of a sudden) and she had only been paying for the wear and tear on them. She argued that she would not pay for her meals as she was not going to be eating them and that if she did have to pay for them she would not pay for the bed, to which they responded that the payment for the bed had nothing to do with the payment for the meals because the bed belonged to someone else, the two things having nothing to do with each other. And one night some rogue broke into the room she was renting until the ship left, which should be any day now, it was even said that the supplies from Veracruz had already arrived; and when she cried out for help, more young men arrived, but only to rob her: whoever did not carry off her dress, which she had taken off for sleeping, stole her wig or her hat, and whoever did not make off with her hose or her shoes … In a few days she had no other recourse than to return to work, because with what she had left there was scarcely enough to pay for her passage on the ship, which was carrying slaves and people of the worst sort, and not enough to pay for her food; and to arrive there with empty hands would be a guarantee that she would be sold once more by her poor aunt, and again she would have to leave that poor aunt and go away, who knows where, far away from her beloved brothers, to start all over from scratch.…