TEN
The banker takes up the cards, three packs together, and shuffles them. He has Braconneur, to his left, cut the deck, and then calls out, Ten pieces of eight. Le Tunisien, to his right, answers with one real, and gradually, one by one, the ten reales Van Wijn has asked for is reached. He turns up a card, his own, a three of clubs, and without pausing, turns over the next one, alongside his card and to the left: the “points,” an ace of diamonds. Immediately he turns another, and everyone begins to shout: it is not a pair with either the banker’s card or the other, that of the points. He turns another. The points start shrieking: Ace of diamonds! Ace of diamonds! They squeal and wave their arms around. The place seems like a pen full of restless animals. Like pigs when pirates come in to get supplies for their voyages, whether or not their owners want them to, and if not at first, they will after being beaten. Pens so full of pigs, so crowded with pigs they cannot even move. They squeal again! A double blow! Three of clubs! Van Wijn wins. The banker.
He shuffles again. Braconneur cuts. Thirty pieces of eight is the call. Le Tunisien responds with three reales, and nine others follow. He turns a card: seven of clubs. Agitation in the pen: a bad-luck card. For the points, the banker turns over a nine of diamonds. The first card after those two is an ace of diamonds. The banker loses.
He leaves the game, but before going he pays his fee to Benazet, a Frenchman, who owns the cards and rents them out and gets richer every moment with his gaming business, at the expense of the freebooters. No one regulates the games on Tortuga, and, there being no taxes, he passes on a fixed amount to the governor and piles up the rest. He does not drink. He has no wife, and women are of no importance to him, at least not if he has to pay to have them or maintain them. He does not care about eating. He does not pay the musicians who play in the gaming house. When he is the banker he always wins. The only luxury in his place is an inscription mounted on one wall adorned with flowers and vases bearing the legend, Gambling provides us with the various pleasures of surprise. An army of slaves cultivates the fields around his gaming house with plantings of tobacco; they dry it and then, down on their knees, they roll it, and he sells it at the price of gold because it is said to be very good tobacco. The fields belong to no one on Tortuga, he simply uses them without even paying for the use.
Benazet calls me aside, to threaten me over something I do not understand. I have not been playing today, nor drinking. In the morning I showed two youths how to make bandages. But I have been watching this good fellow Benazet because everyone who deals with him loses. He makes threats against me, again and again. I do not understand what he is talking about. His voice gets louder and louder. The “points,” the banker, all the domino players look up, removing their attention from their games to watch what is happening. He blusters even more, unaware that everyone is watching. I do not comprehend the course of his harangue because my understanding is focused on what it is they are staring at, on observing the faces of the Brothers and the burgeoning anger of Benazet, a wrath such as I never imagined in his wily person. He threatens me again, letting fall a word that is like a blow to the face: Pineau. My vision clouds over. Blood pounds in my ears. My legs want to move but they refuse to obey even themselves.
I am not the only one who has responded so forcefully to the word. Behind the wave of blood that has clouded my hearing, I do not know how I manage to hear the chairs falling to the floor, the dominoes clattering, the blows … No shouting, no words, no whispers, none of the restrained milling about in the pigpen as there was during the game. The gates are wide open and they are all out of there like a shot.
Against Benazet and his supporters, the ones who help him out, but who now would rather run off than continue to help him out. The Brothers against Benazet.
When they are done, I see Benazet tossed on the earthen floor of the gaming house. Made into mincemeat. The Brothers embrace me, one by one. In absolute silence.
I break into tears while they continue to embrace me. Someone brings me a glass of sweet wine to ease my pain, and tells me, We took care of him. He won’t get you the way he did him. No need to be afraid of them, they are cattle.
Right there, before me, Pineau’s murderer, dead.
With the wine in my blood, I went over to the already abused body, and I kicked it and kicked it, gone all notion of time, until there was nothing left under my feet but a foul mass, something like a pile of vomit, almost a mess of pottage, and the tatters of his clothing floating like chunks of bread in the soup: I was Le Trépaneur, and that thing had been the murderer of the two men who taught me how to be so.
While I was quenching my anger and nourishing my grief with my boots, most of the Brothers had started their games once more, but a small group was searching for the place where Benazet kept his money. When they discovered it, they turned it over to Antoine Du Puis, the Vice Admiral of the Maracaibo expedition, for him to add to the booty and distribute around to us, thus prolonging the fiesta into which had entered this strange ray of light from the revenge we took with the death of Benazet, the Frenchman who had never been anything but that filthy mess to which he was now reduced.
This was my revenge, though I did not understand yet why Pineau and le Nègre Miel had died at the hands of the crafty, unscrupulous Benazet.
This was my revenge, but although it gave vent to my heart, it never managed to rise above the level of my ankles, or at least the ankles of my understanding. In spite of that, even now sometimes, when I recall this story in order to bring le Nègre Miel back to life, I seem to feel once more the greasy mass that shithead Benazet was turned into by the blows of the Brothers and my own incontinent feet. But oddly enough, that slimy mass, while being revived by the memory below my ankles, does not make my equilibrium any the more slippery or insecure; but instead my step is firmer because of it, more certain; and the odor that rises from it causes the blood I can no longer make run through my veins seem to move back toward those elastic days, each of them a night after I signed my name to the Law of the Coast.
ELEVEN
The next thing we sold to keep the dissipation alive was a ship loaded with cacao. The fortunate buyer was the governor himself, offering the twentieth part of what the whole lot was worth.
The moment had arrived for those of us of the Coast to open our wallets to each other. We saw this happening not only amongst ourselves, but also in all that was going on around us: the women of The House folding up their pavilions and stealing away to Jamaica, the improvised dining rooms with their succulent banquets disappearing as if they had evaporated into thin air, the merchants robbing us by offering trifles for magnificent articles … Before being completely cleaned out, whoever had a single coin left would share it, because that is the way pirates are, generous with each other: open pockets. Or that is the way they used to be before the coming of the Second Fifty.
The First Fifty was the Spanish one: roving attack groups comprised of fifty men each and divided into squads that continually moved around through the forests of Saint-Domingue to surprise and attack the buccaneers in their burrows. Fifty at a time, they managed to root out the uncouth buccaneers from the northern part of the island.