The sailors laid bets about it, at first laughing boisterously but later sobered by fear: constipation that lasted that long had to be the work of witchcraft. Aside from the constant movement and the crowding, the most notable thing about the ship was the noise. Wood creaked, metal clinked, barrels rolled, ropes moaned, and water lashed the hull.
For Diego and Bernardo, accustomed to the solitude, space, and silence of California, adjusting to life on shipboard was not easy.
Diego liked to sit on the shoulders of the figurehead, a perfect place to gaze at the infinite line of the horizon, be splashed with salt water, and watch the dolphins. He would put an arm around the wooden damsel’s head and grip her nipples with his toes. Considering the boy’s athleticism, the captain limited himself to ordering him to tie a rope around his waist; if he fell from there, the ship would pass right over him. Later, however, when he caught Diego at the tip of the mainmast, more than a hundred feet in the air, he said nothing. He had decided that if the boy was fated to die young, he could not prevent it. There was always activity on the ship, and it went on through the night, though most of the work was done during the day. Bells signaled the first watch at noon, when the sun was at its zenith and the captain took a sighting to fix their location. At that hour the cook handed out a pint of lemonade per man, to prevent scurvy, and then the mate distributed rum and tobacco, the only vices allowed on board, where betting money, fighting, falling in love, or even blaspheming was forbidden. At nautical twilight, that mysterious hour of dawn and evening when stars twinkle in the heavens but the line of the horizon is visible, the captain took new sightings with his sextant and consulted his chronometers and the large book of celestial ephemerides that indicate the position of the stars at every moment. For Diego, that geometric operation was fascinating; all the stars looked alike to him, and in every direction he saw nothing but the same lead-colored sea and the same white sky, but before long he learned to observe with the eyes of a navigator. The captain also constantly consulted the barometer that signaled the changes in air pressure that heralded storms and the days when his leg would be more painful.
At first, milk, meat, and vegetables were served at meals, but before a week had gone by, everyone aboard was limited to beans, rice, dried fruit, and the eternal hard-as-marble biscuits seething with weevils.
There was also salted meat, which the cook soaked a couple of days in water and vinegar before tossing it into the pot, hoping it would be less like saddle leather. What a great business deal his father could make with his smoked meat, Diego thought, but Bernardo pointed out that it was a pipe dream to think they could get sufficient supplies to Portobelo. At the captain’s table, to which Diego, the auditor and his daughter though not Bernardo were always invited there was also pickled cow’s tongue, olives, cheese from La Mancha, and wine. The captain put his chessboard and his cards at the passengers’ disposal, along with a handful of books that only Diego was interested in. Among them he found a couple of essays about possible independence for the colonies. Diego admired the example of the United States, which had freed itself from the English yoke, but it had not occurred to him that similar aspirations on the part of Spanish colonists in America might be praiseworthy until he read the captain’s publications.
Santiago de Leon turned out to be such an entertaining conversationalist that Diego sacrificed hours of happy acrobatics in the rigging in order to talk with him and study his fantastic maps. The captain, a solitary man, discovered the pleasure of sharing his knowledge with a young and inquisitive mind. The man was a tireless reader and always carried boxes of books that he exchanged in every port. He had been around the world several times, and he knew lands as strange as those described on his fabulous maps; he had been near death so many times that he had lost any fear of living. The most revealing thing to Diego, who was accustomed to absolute truths, was that this man with a Renaissance mentality doubted nearly everything that formed the intellectual and moral world of Alejandro de la Vega, Padre Mendoza, and Diego’s schoolmaster. At times Diego had questioned the rigid precepts hammered into his brain since his birth, but he had never dared challenge them aloud. When some rule made him too uncomfortable, he quietly ignored it; he never rebelled openly. With Santiago de Leon he dared for the first time to talk about subjects he had never discussed with his father. He was amazed to discover that there were many ways to think. De Leon opened his eyes to the fact that the Spanish were not the only ones who claimed superiority over the rest of humanity; every nationality suffered from the same delusion. In wars, the Spanish committed exactly the same atrocities as the French, or any other army: they raped, robbed, tortured, and murdered; Christians, Moors, and Jews all maintained that their God was the only true God, and held other religions in contempt. The captain was in favor of abolishing the monarchy and making the colonies independent, two concepts that were revolutionary to Diego, who had been raised with the belief that the king was holy and the obligation of every Spaniard was to conquer and Christianize other lands. Santiago de Leon exalted the equality, liberty, and fraternity of the French revolution, though he had never accepted the French invasion of Spain.
On this subject he showed signs of fierce patriotism: he would rather see his country sunk in the obscurantism of the Middle Ages, he said, than awake to the triumph of modern ideas if they were imposed by foreigners. He could not forgive Napoleon, who had forced the king of Spain to abdicate and then replaced him with his brother, Joseph Bonaparte, whom the people had nicknamed Pepe Botellas after his love of the bottle.
“All tyranny is abominable, my boy,” the captain concluded. “Napoleon is a tyrant. What good was the revolution if an emperor replaced the king? Nations should be governed by a council of learned men who must answer to the people for their actions.”
“The kings’ authority is divine in origin, Captain,” Diego argued weakly, repeating his father’s words without really understanding what he was saying.
“Who has proved that? As far as I know, young de la Vega, God has not spoken to that subject.”
“According to the Holy Scriptures ”
“You have read them?” Santiago de Leon interrupted decisively.
“Nowhere in the Scriptures does it say that the Bourbons are to rule in Spain, or Napoleon in France. Besides, there is nothing holy about Holy Scriptures. They were written by men, not God.”
It was night, and the two were walking back and forth on the bridge.
The sea was calm, and above the eternal creaking of the ship Bernardo’s flute could be heard with hypnotic clarity, seeking his mother and Lightin-the-Night in the stars.
“Do you believe that God exists?” the captain asked Diego.
“Of course, Captain!”
With a sweep of his arm, Santiago de Leon indicated the dark firmament sprinkled with constellations. “If God exists, I am sure He is not interested in designating kings for every star in the heavens,” he said.
Diego de la Vega protested in horror. Doubting God was the last thing on his mind, a thousand times more serious than doubting the divine mandate of the monarchy. The feared Inquisition had burned people at the stake for much less, something that seemed not to worry the captain in the least.
Tired of winning beans and shells from the sailors, Diego turned to frightening them with spine-chilling tales drawn from the captain’s books and fantastic maps, which he embellished by drawing from his inexhaustible imagination, in which there were gigantic octopuses with tentacles capable of destroying a ship as large as the Madre de Dios, carnivorous salamanders the size of whales, and sirens that from a distance looked like seductive maidens but were in fact monsters with snakelike tongues. Never go near them, Diego warned the sailors, because they hold out their smooth arms to embrace an unwary seaman, kiss him, and then slip their lethal tongues down the poor fool’s throat and devour him from the inside out, leaving nothing but a skeleton covered with hide.