The interpreter returned with this reply, and the Indians prepared to attack us.
Fortune was on our side that day; the Spaniards had received reinforcements and followed our progress, we on the water, they on land, having planned a strategy with the aid of Rafael Marques (whom we no longer even remembered), thinking to attack us when we were inside the walls of Maracaibo once more, at the spot which was the weakest point of our position in the city — the very place where the Bravos had been stationed! What must have been the anger of the latter, not only upon hearing L’Olonnais’s rude reply but then seeing the hated Spaniards enter; upon which they fell into furious combat. From our ships we launched cannonballs against both parties, causing terrible casualties, greatly increasing the number of dead, and not a few already that they had already wrought amongst each other.
When we set foot on dry land once more, Rafael Marques, wounded in one leg, was waving a white flag and greeted us with a wild tale shouted out of how the Spaniards had made him prisoner and how pleased he was to see us returning victorious, using words that I will set down here, gesturing so wildly that he seemed more like a drunk than a guilty man, more a buffoon than a traitor, for panic had overtaken him and he was unable even to attempt to tell the truth while his exclamations ran on like this: Brothers! You who obey the Law of the Coast, salve! Long live the pirates and may these corpses die who, because they are Spaniards, deserve to be corpses! To take me as your prisoner, is that not a lack of respect? Because, who am I? I am the vassal of pirate justice! Long live the Society! I raise a toast to you! Upon which one of our men put a bullet into him so he would never again open that cowardly, deceitful, vile, traitorous mouth whose eloquence did not serve to hide his mean spirit. From the top of the mixed pile of bodies Spanish and Indian, Queen Metecona of Blue Island no longer needed his cloak to reign on earth.
L’Olonnais was not satisfied. He demanded a ransom for the city as well as for the prisoners we were dragging around with us, or at least what was left of them. We had been two months in the Bay of Maracaibo, if what now presented so different an appearance could still be called Maracaibo, when we finally received the ransom for the city. We left then, bound for Tortuga. Our booty was much more considerable than anything we could have imagined.
To get through between the two capes that would let us out into the open sea, we sent to Maracaibo for help, where it is said their fear was reborn and only stilled when they discovered we were merely in need of someone knowledgeable to guide us. There were no more Indians any longer who might do this. We had finished them all off. Along with their women. The children in their huts wept, and when they saw us passing by, if we came close to any of their islands, they threw rocks and sticks at us; for good reason were they named “Bravos,” and if they had had any weapons, they would have fought valiantly against us; the poisoned arrows they learned to shoot very young, and shoot well, would have caused many casualties amongst us, were it not that, on the very spot where so many Indians had died, we had made a great bonfire of their weapons.
NINE
Two months. Eight weeks. Sixty days. How many hours? When we stopped at the island of Aruba for the Vice Admiral to arrange the tallying of the booty and L’Olonnais to prepare for the safe return to Tortuga, I tried to reconstruct myself with regard to the attack on Maracaibo. It had begun with the taking of the fort, so quickly, I must confess, that the piragua carrying me to dry land had not touched it yet before we were already the winners and the Spaniards the losers. That was where I exercised my profession as surgeon for the first time. I took out some bullets lodged in a thigh, in an arm, in three shoulders, treated knife and sword wounds … The city itself we entered without a struggle. After a few days there, I removed a finger and entered that fact in my notes, the ones I would have to turn over to the Vice Admiral when the expedition was finished so he could arrange the distribution of the loot. Now in Aruba, before handing over the summary of arms, fingers, eyes, and limbs lost, I went over the count: the first leg was blown off by a cannonball and I only had to tie off the arteries; the second one I had to cut off because it came to me still attached to its pirate, shattered and blackened by a powder explosion.…
My eyes went over the list with which I was able to reconstruct the events of the fighting, but something prevented me from making sense out of them. Time, those sixty days, had held me at bay. I was no longer myself; Le Trépaneur was the master of my actions. In my notes, which I ought to reproduce here, were numbered eighty-four legs, but I did not know how I should keep accounts in my person for the mutilated images in the church, or the Spanish women raped, or the meals I had had in huge mansions, or the tortures witnessed.… How long had it been since I had been indentured, a slave, how long since I had slept in the open air, on the landing of the house where I grew up and was expelled from? I was unable to reconstruct myself on our return from the attack against Maracaibo. I was no longer anyone but the fist that had wielded the sword dripping blood, the eye taking aim, the finger pressing the trigger, although it was not I who had fired the gun and used the sword, I was the bodies that had been killed, often with good reason, when they objected to the fact that we were tearing their works and possessions away from them, and often for no reason at all other than that of watching them die, hearing their bodies fall, splattering us with their Spanish blood; and I was the bodies I had treated, the ones into which I had plunged my scalpel, my chisel, my knife … Is this what I really was? Weren’t my true parents le Nègre Miel and Pineau, who had taught me those noble, grand secrets? Finally, I was a Brother, like them, a member of the secret Society of the Brethren of the Coast. So this was the way I had participated in the best dreams of the two good men, all the while my elbows dripping with the blood running from my hands.… No, I was not able to reconstruct myself. But in my body I felt such satisfaction that it almost blotted out the pleasure of the adventure, that of being a pirate. Had I lost my way? But as I asked myself this, I realized that what I had lost was my body, that I had been only a slave, an engagé, and when I was no longer that, I was merely the slave who had lost his body.…
I was unable to understand anything. I could not understand why, among the pirates, rape was preferred over the whores, especially when it came to the Spanish women, for whom the humiliation provoked them to struggle so violently and suffer the degradation of their downfall so painfully. Those Spanish virgins, above all — how they fought to preserve their honor! Because when we were through with them, they thought they had no chance of making a decent marriage, and, faced with the idea of finding themselves unhappily married to a man from a lower class, an aged man, a widower, or someone with a repulsive defect, sometimes they preferred never to marry and instead to resign themselves to keeping their saints’ images in clean clothing. In Gibraltar there had been a mother, still rather good looking, who with her young daughter remained defenseless in their house when the town fell. The mother feared the well-known excesses of pirates and freebooters and immediately ordered her servant to bring some prostitutes and had her cooks prepare some food, and then she wrote a note saying,