On the other hand, I still was not aware of the prohibition against women that she already knew about for certain: women could not live on Tortuga. Though daring enough to travel as a man, she did not appear ready to live forever behind a mask, which she had betrayed at least once during those thirty-five days with the confidence that I know she needed to divulge so that perhaps just one person in the whole immensity of the ocean would be aware that she was a woman; and thus it was impossible to think she would have been able to remain permanently hidden as a woman without needing to betray her intention if she stayed on the island.
At dawn the following day they took us to the fields to work: some of us to harvest coffee, tobacco, or cassava root, others to the packing sheds, to move things about, to work in the houses of the Company dignitaries. What fell to me in the way of harvesting tells me nothing; the assignment must have lasted only a few days, not enough to learn what the foreman tried by force to inflict on my body dulled by melancholy, by the seasickness that had as yet not gone away, and the weariness of spending my nights thinking of her, still enveloped by the veil mentioned a few lines back, the one I called disillusionment, but which the bizarre quality of the climate, always heavy with the sun that exacerbates the cruelty in the hearts of men, would turn into something else; because everything changes on Tortuga, so that it took me days to discover that if I avoided always being under the direct rays of the sun the heat became more bearable, months to learn so wisely to keep my eyelids half closed so the sun would not blind me, and years to discover the appropriate movements of my mind in order that Tortuga would not get away from me in its continual shifting from shape to shape, insistent and imprecise. The very features of the island were bizarre, jagged, like the songs I heard in the nights: rhythms that I never imagined existed, insane, crazy rhythms, black as the skin of those who unleashed them, and that made me feel ashamed in our first encounters, that I never wanted to listen to, and that, were it not the custom among the Brethren of the Coast not to forbid anything that might appeal to others even though their tastes were disagreeable or irritating to us, I would have said it was necessary to prohibit for the general well-being of our spirits and the growth of our minds. Because the sounds they produced with the palms of their hands and other parts of their bodies, and with skins stretched over frames or wooden boxes, forever striking them until producing the feverish image of what is only possible when bodies are rubbing together in the black ceremony of the flesh, cannot join with anything great or noble nor establish the basis of any other world that is not that of an assault or the desperateness that is so eager for an assault, as happened with us who remained walled in by the violence with which we lived.… But let us suppose we were able to prohibit such harmful rhythms. Would we have been able to prohibit the climate and the countenance of Tortuga? Because it was not only the music that fermented our hearts and prepared our bodies, whetting our thirst for raids, for violence and profligacy … We were also influenced by the plentiful trees that, all over the rocky, sheer terrain of the mountainous island, so abundant with crags, sent out their roots over the rocks and entwined themselves together without reentering the earth, bare and twisted together like ivy branches against a wall; and by the steep cliffs pocked with shallow grottoes which, along with the fringes of sand here and there, ring the island.… The natural aspect of the island is so peculiar that the translucent waters of those seas lose their transparency as they approach the island, which makes me think that the harshness of its climate perhaps must set them to boiling, since they add no refreshing quality to the burning air; just as the exposed tree roots do not wish to bury themselves in the rocks, as if it were the harshness of the climate that prevents them from doing so, and therefore, giving the lie to their nature as roots, they prefer to remain out in the open, although the air howls searingly all around them, rather than sink into the even more awful heat of the earth. Boiled, burned, cooked by its climate, Tortuga would make anyone change who comes near it.
In the ship on which I came, there were some soldiers, as I have mentioned before. They too had been engaged by the French West Indies Company, but for the purpose of wresting outstanding payments or the return of merchandise from the colonists on Tortuga who had refused to respect agreements with those they were opposed to because they were not of the same religion. The Company had taken possession of the island in 1662, arrogating the colony for itself, with its own commissaries and its own servants, and ordering the residents of the island to buy all their supplies from the Company, first having ingratiated itself with the colonists by announcing that purchases would be made on credit. But it was one thing for the Company to impose itself, and quite another for it to operate that way.
The farmers were the first ones against whom the soldiers determined to move, they being the easiest victims. It was le Turque who was chosen; they flattened his house and carried off anything of value, they beat him when he tried to stop them, and, letting their horses run loose over his tobacco fields at a time when the plants were scarcely out of the ground, they reduced his plantings to mud and upthrown seedlings, thinking thus to intimidate the others and obtain what was owed them, the only reason for their being on Tortuga; after which they returned to the ship then anchored before Cayonne, following the orders of the governor established by the Company in the foolish belief that he was putting them safe from possible attacks by the colonists. The following morning, they found the night guard murdered, his mouth and ears and belly split open and filled with earth taken from the fields belonging to le Turque and a message written on the deck in the blood from his mutilated limbs, which had been used one after the other as paintbrushes, nearly worn to shreds from having been rubbed over the planks: YOU ARE CATTLE, LIKE CATTLE YOU WILL ALL EAT GRASS. The trail of blood from the body underlined the sentence and ran down to the ship’s railings and scuppers, as if the body were a fountain of blood. The Captain having called everyone on deck, they were abruptly boarded by ferocious Brethren of the Coast who had reached the ship in canoes carrying a good deal of fodder for the soldiers, who, surrendering, were then forced to eat the plantings trampled into le Turque’s fields, mingled with mud, shit, and weeds, an ingestion that killed more than one of them and and put the others into horrible pain for days altogether, after which they abandoned Tortuga, and because of which the commissaries put into effect the order that the Saint Jean had also brought them, which was that if they could not collect what was owed them or enforce the return of goods, they should sell whatever they had under their control, properties, merchandise, and indentured servants alike; a decision, which, as it included the almost absolute retreat of the Company, put jubilation into the hearts of the colonist farmers, who wasted no time in taking over the goods, quibbling over prices that were actually not assessed dearly by the commissaries, some out of a mixture of respect, fear, and admiration, the others simply out of hatred for the Brethren of the Coast, who were by all odds the winners in this business.
Joy was the feeling that went the rounds on Tortuga during those days, but not for me, because I was acquired, for my bad fortune and worse luck, by the most tyrannical and perfidious man ever roasted beneath Tortuga’s sun, the Governor or Lieutenant General of that spot, set up by the Company itself. The words “joy” and “freedom” were circulating on Tortuga because the Brethren of the Coast claimed they owed loyalty only to God and the sea, but there was no freedom for me because I did not have a penny or anyone I could ask to pay off the price my cruel master demanded to give me freedom and my immunity: three hundred pieces of eight. His treatment of me was unbearable and it was impossible to escape.