Coquibacoa, our Maracaibo, the Bravos … As their only dress, the men wore belts of cotton embroidered with stones, very much like those I had seen on the skeletons of the Grottoes of the Plain, the enormous pit on Tortuga that I went down into with Pineau; and the women wore around their hips a piece of cloth that would be of different lengths depending on their age and rank. The youngest were almost naked, and they never stopped laughing and showing their teeth. As they were our allies, we never touched any of their women, except L’Olonnais, who as a show of friendship was given three women, perfect in every way except for their skin being painted all over with bright colors for the occasion, and their hair being fixed in a strange fashion, as if dampened with mud and then molded into an unnatural, whimsical shape; although to tell the truth, I do not really know if he ever touched them, because in front of us he let be seen the disgust produced by their naked bodies, above all when they were no longer marked with the dye, which happened almost immediately, as the peoples of that land habitually bathed one or more times every single day, something that never ceased to astonish us; and the paint they used on their skin ran with the water, unlike the dyes they used so skillfully for their clothing. Yet even as they disquieted him, he was also moved to laughter (something very unusual in him) to see how we, his men and his boys, stared at them and at the other women, all of them naked. At first I kept quiet, not knowing what to feel, as their nakedness did not look at all like what I had seen on one of the beds in Port Royal; their open nudity in the light of day had something grotesque about it, especially in the shape of their breasts, tipped with such enormous nipples, the way they showed their teeth when they laughed, and their feet, and their black hair, gleaming and loose, most of the time long enough to cover their shoulders and sometimes even their skirts.
Their houses were raised above the trees or on poles jutting up over the surface of the lake, by which they avoided the insidious mosquitos, as well as the flooding when the lake rose — which was quite often, what with the dozens of rivers opening out into the lake (Catatumbo is the most beautiful and the swiftest) — and also cooling down the unbearable heat. They built their piraguas (that is what they called their canoes) out of a single tree trunk, into which they would fit up to eighty crewmen. They used to put poison on the tips of their arrows, really enormous arrows, as long as the men themselves were tall; taking up the shells of various-sized conches, they would break them up and use the pieces (as hard as European glass), after working them over with infinite patience, to give the bows and the arrows their final appearance and firmness.
The men and the women used different languages, one for each group, though for work both alike would use their backs. When at peace, the men had more than enough time to throw themselves into their hammocks. But the women never did: they sowed the seeds, they cared for the yucca plants, they dug out the cassava roots, they replanted the plots, they peeled the roots and grated them and allowed them to expel their poison, they prepared the bread with the flour, they baked it, they hunted small animals for meat, they took care of the children — how could they possibly spend their afternoons in a hammock (which they wove) for the simple pleasure of watching time go by?
It was the Bravos who worked out the strategy for the capture of Maracaibo, making themselves understood to us through an interpreter who spoke beautiful French. They led L’Olonnais and his men into the first reaches of the entrance to the gulf or sea of Maracaibo. They had some men spying here and there, overcoming or enduring the unpleasant swamps that bordered the numberless rivers, and observing the fortifications and their emplacements; through whom we were opportunely able to become aware of many things for our protection or our defense, as when on the assault of the fort (the first place we attacked when our boats had scarcely even dropped anchor before the entrance to the lake, reaching land quickly in the piraguas the Indians lent us, moving them rapidly, skillfully, and in total silence) we vanquished the Spaniards, surprising them and disabling the rear guard they had placed there to entrap us.
In that first assault we killed every Spaniard we could. The ones they had placed behind us to surprise us managed to escape, but being unable to return to the fort they therefore made their way as fast as they could to the city to announce, “Two thousand pirates are coming, well armed and organized!” All the inhabitants left the city, taking their riches with them, their women, their children, their slaves. When we arrived at Maracaibo with our ships and set up a hot fusillade from our position on the water against their fortifications and their forests, we had no reply, everyone having already left. The houses were empty, the streets empty, even the slaves were frightened away by us. In the whole city there beat only one heart: a newborn baby was crying in a crib, abandoned, perhaps, so something of more use or greater value could be carried in someone’s hands.
We disembarked in the city and made ourselves comfortable in the best buildings, storing our weapons and battle supplies in the church. L’Olonnais set up a watch to protect us while we celebrated the not-so-glorious capture of Maracaibo; up till now we had needed to attack only the fort that guarded the entrance to the lake, and that we subdued through the cleverness and the spies of the Bravo Indians, our allies.
All the same, as if our victory had been worthy of it, during those first days we celebrated. Maracaibo had enough and to spare for the dressing of our tables and the warming of our throats, and so we wined and dined sumptuously.
Except for one pirate, Mum (so baptized because not even when asleep did he ever stop talking), who cooed day and night at the newborn child we discovered, giving him cow’s milk to drink, singing to him and washing diapers and sheets, crazy with happiness over this portion of the loot, which he was nonetheless to abandon in his turn when we started the march on Gibraltar.
FIVE
Rafael Marques was wearing a long, velvety cloak, disguised (he said) as Queen Metecona of Blue Island, blue being the color of the long cloak Marques had devised to wear over his own clothing, having appropriated the drapes of one of the splendid houses we had taken. Rafael Marques was not yet a freebooter, he was a matelot being tried out by the Society: one whose bravery was in the balance and upon whom every eye was scrupulously fixed, watching him more carefully than anyone else who wished to enter the Brethren of the Coast, for he was Spanish, to judge from his name, though he called himself Portuguese, and moreover it was said that his life had been spared when the ship he had been serving on was taken by pirates; and there was even more: that instead of having been put off in the first port or marooned on the first little island they touched at, he had been allowed provisional acceptance if he was able to pass the trials as a matelot before entering the Society. Because he it was who had shown Pierre Le Grand where the ship he had just attacked kept its powder stores and enabled him to make that threat, with match lit, of blowing up the ship if they didn’t surrender; and he it was who had then removed his companions’ weapons out of their reach. Afterward he explained to Pierre Le Grand that he had been eagerly hoping for the arrival of some freebooter craft, as he found life with the Spaniards not to his liking and wished to join up with the Brothers. Whether Pierre Le Grand believed him or not, whether his story was true or not, no one knew for a certainty, because after that celebrated assault, Pierre Le Grand had returned to the continent with such riches as enabled him to spend the rest of his life there, never going back to sea. Neither were we able to know if the other things Rafael Marques told about himself were true, for example, that in Portugal he had written and published poetry, that he had left the mainland as secretary to an ambassador, that the Spaniards had brought him into discredit; and as these stories that carried him successively to the ship attacked by Pierre Le Grand and thence to L’Olonnais yet seemed rather odious to us because of something that would disappear once his trials were successfully passed, that is, his Spanish name, we were somehow patient with him and the unpleasant impression he made on us, trusting that when he was accepted into the Society and lost his Spanish name we would be able to see him more sympathetically; which was an assumption that proved false, like the rest of his story, perhaps — because we would need to accept him before allowing him to enter the Society.