Michener, James A. (5 page)

(No part of Cabeza de Vaca's story is more difficult to believe than this. He certainly said, repeatedly, that he was desnudo for seven years, and that word means naked. But was he naked in our sense of the word? Yes, with the qualification that his captors must have allowed him a loincloth and perhaps a deerskin to sleep under during the coldest nights.)

When the pair had become firm walking companions Garcilaco asked how he had acquired such an odd name, Head of a Cow, and he explained: 'In the year 1212 the Spanish Christians were fighting the Moors who had occupied our country for centuries, and as usual, we Spaniards were losing. But my grandfather many times back, a peasant named Alhaja, showed King Sancho how a triumph might be achieved by sneaking along an unguarded path and taking the infidel by surprise. To mark this path for the king, my grandfather crept among the Moors and placed the head of a cow at its secret entrance. Before dawn our men ran to the skull, sped along the unknown path, and won a great victory, which freed our part of Spain. That afternoon the king summoned my grandfather and said: "Kneel, peasant Alhaja. Rise, Cabeza de Vaca, gentleman of my realm." '

He then returned to the tale of his own incredible adventures: 'We few Spaniards who survived the shipwreck and the cold were divided into two groups by the Indians who captured us. Most were moved south, but I was left at the north end of the island with an aggravating man named Oviedo. In our previous travels he had shown himself to be the strongest and in many ways the ablest of our group, but in captivity his will power dissolved. Suddenly he was afraid of everything, and although I begged him each year, from 1529 to 1532, to escape with me, he refused,

preferring slavery with the Indians we knew to the risk of worse treatment from others we did not. It became apparent that he was prepared to end his days as a slave, but I was not.'

'You kept hoping?'

'You must always hope. It keeps you alive.'

One part of Cabeza's story the boy found almost unbelievable: 'We lived like this, lad. During the terrible months of winter when useless old men were encouraged to die, we ate only oysters, which were plentiful in the backwaters. During the summer months we ate only blackberries. Best of the year came when we moved inland and gorged on tunas.'

'I love tunas,' Garcilaco interrupted. 'I've eaten them many times when I was hungry. Were yours the same as ours?' Garcilaco asked, and Cabeza said: 'Yes, a cactus flat and round like a dish. And along its edges yellow flowers appear in spring. Then a man's heart leaps with joy, because each flower becomes a prickly fruit, a tuna. When it ripens to a dark red, you peel off the skins, best fruit you ever tasted. We lived on it for months.'

'That's the same,' said Garcilaco, and for a moment he felt that he had been with Cabeza 'up there.'

in the autumn,' Cabeza continued, 'we ate only nuts of a kind not known in Spain [pecans], a wonderful food. But as the year ended, there was a gap between the end of nuts and the beginning of the oysters.'

'What did you do then?'

'Caught a few fish. Mostly we starved.'

'What did you eat with the oysters and the blackberries?'

'Lad, when I say we ate only, I mean just that. While I was a slave, no meat, no fowl, no vegetables, no overlapping the seasons. We ate ourselves sick on whatever we had, maybe a hundred oysters a day . . .' He paused in the middle of the road, recalling those fearful days, then said something which clarified things: i would eat nuts until I vomited, and if you placed a bowl before me now, I would once more feel compelled to eat them till I got sick. Because storing their rich oil in our bellies kept us alive through the weeks when there was no food.'

'Which food did you like best?' Garcilaco asked, and he was surprised at the answer: 'The oysters, but not because they were fine eating. When they came, I knew a new year had begun. Stars and oysters, they were my calendar.' Remembering his friend's joy at having his dates confirmed, Garcilaco asked: 'Why was the calendar so important?'

Now Cabeza de Vaca stepped back in amazement: 'Lad, you must always know where you are, in time and space.'

'Why?'

'If your body becomes lost, your soul is lost, and you wither. If we had not fought to keep our calendar and our distances, we would have surrendered, and died.'

'How did you know where you were? You had no maps.'

'Each night as I checked our latitude I would imagine where we would have been on the map of Africa: "Tonight we're the same as Marrakech" or "This night we sleep in Cairo." Lad, I went clear across the continent, Florida to the Pacific, nearly seven hundred and seventy leagues, and always I knew how far we'd come.' (Florida to Culiacan, straight line east to west, about 1,750 miles; their route, about 2,000.)

'How did you tell, what you call it, latitude?'

'The stars told me how far north we were.'

When they reached Guadalajara, Garcilaco turned his mules toward the capital, and one afternoon the boy said: The stars seem to have told you everything,' and Cabeza de Vaca replied: 'They did.'

'Would they tell me their secrets? So that I could keep my calendar if the Indians made me their slave?'

'They come out at night, ready to serve anyone. God brings them up in regular order so that we can know when to plant our crops or when, up there, to move inland for the ripening cactus.' It was during those lovely evenings as they rested that the Spanish explorer taught the little mestizo muleteer lessons he would never forget: how the constellations could be identified, the ways a farmer could use them to determine when to plant his seeds, and how a traveler could verify his location.

With each new concept mastered, Garcilaco found his horizons expanding; he had been eager to see the Pacific, but once he saw it, he knew instinctively that discoveries equally great must wait on its western shore, and he began to dream of China. Now as the Spaniard told him about the wonders lying to the north—within his reach if he walked vigorously in that direction—he wanted to explore those regions too. But most of all he felt a burning desire just to know, to experience, to be a heroic man like Cabeza de Vaca. Garcilaco had stumbled upon one of the greatest treasures a boy can find: a man of dignity whom he would like to emulate.

They had reached a point well east of Guadalajara, in the month of June, when Cabeza de Vaca surprised him by speaking of years when he traveled alone as a trader for a different tribe of Indians. 'But, Senor Cabeza,' the boy said, and the proud Spaniard corrected him: 'My name is Cabeza de Vaca, three words, and I prefer to be so addressed.'

'I am sorry, Senor Cabeza. I meant no offense,' and the great traveler smiled: 'Since you have just turned eleven, as you inform me, you may call me Cabeza. Now, what was your question?'

'Well, if you were a slave, how could you also be free to wander about?' and Cabeza said: 'I left Oviedo, escaped from the dreadful Indians on the island and sought refuge with other kinder souls who live inland.'

'But you were still a slave?' Garcilaco asked, and in reply Cabeza de Vaca related an improbable story.

'After I had shown that I was skilled at trading the seashells my tribe collected in exchange for arrowheads made by other tribes, my Indians encouraged me to travel in search of things they needed, and in this way I went far to the north [Oklahoma], where I saw the remarkable cattle of the Indians, much larger than ours, hairy, with a big hump forward. Sometimes I would see a thousand or ten thousand, so numerous were they, and they provided those Indians with robes to wear.

'I also had a chance to taste their meat which surpassed any roasted in Spain. But you know, lad, men are often imprisoned by chains of their own forging. Living with my kind Indians, I was happy with my freedom, but I could not forget that Oviedo was still a captive. I had to go back.'

'Why?'

'Honor.' He strode ahead in silence, then waited for the boy to overtake him. 'Pitiful though Oviedo was, he remained my only link with civilization.'

Two days later, as they neared the capital, Cabeza's spirits brightened and he spoke with animation: 'In 1532, I finally persuaded Oviedo to escape with me from the island, no mean feat, since the big, hulking man could not swim and I had to coax him through the waves. Once ashore, we learned from passing Indians that three other strangers lived with a tribe to the south, and we were overjoyed, but when these Indians turned ugly, tormenting us with sticks, poor Oviedo grew utterly frightened and begged some women to help him swim back to that horrible island. We never heard of him again, the biggest and strongest of our group. He was afraid of his own destiny.'

This mournful memory silenced Cabeza for the rest of that day, but next morning he was eager to talk again: 'You can imagine how excited I was when I found that those three men were my shipmates. We exchanged stories, learning that of the ninety-three who had landed, only we four and poor Oviedo had survived. Urgently we made plans to escape and walk to Mexico, but our Indian masters became engaged in a great fight over a woman, so

we Spaniards were separated for the rest of that year, with never a chance of breaking for freedom.'

'You must have been miserable,' Garcilaco said, and Cabeza replied: 'Yes, miserable, but at tuna-time in 1534 we met again among the cactus plants, and everything was now perfect for our escape, so we four set out ... no clothes, no food, no maps, no shoes.'

'Senor Cabeza, how could you be so brave?'

He did not answer that day, but on the next he sought the boy, as if he were hungry to share his wild experiences. 'In the first days of our escape we encountered disaster. I, always eager to explore, searched widely for anything edible and became hopelessly lost. And because this was the time of year when the great north winds began to blow, the others had to think of protecting themselves. They left me, and since I was now totally alone, it seemed that I must perish.'

'How did you meet the others again?' Garcilaco asked, and Cabeza allowed pride to creep into his voice. Standing taller, his slim body etched against the sky, he said: i determined not to die. Moving in great circles, I quartered the barren land until at last I came upon their tracks, and when I overtook them, they said: "We thought that perhaps you'd been bitten by a snake." I said nothing, but I would never have abandoned one of them had they become lost.'

Dorantes and the other two survivors seldom joined in Cabeza de Vaca's discussions with Garcilaco; they were from one group, Cabeza from another, and by habit they maintained that division. So Garcilaco did not see much of Esteban, but when they did talk, he liked him, for the man's dark face glowed when he spoke of his adventures. Once Garcilaco asked: 'Are you a slave like we get from Africa, or are you a Moor, whatever that is?' and he replied: 'I am many things.'

'You seem to have many names, too.'

The slave laughed: 'You noticed? Dorantes calls me Estevan. Castillo calls me Estevanico. Others called me Estebanico. Cabeza calls me Esteban.'

'What do you call yourself?'

'Doctor of medicine.'

When Garcilaco asked Cabeza about this, the latter chuckled: 'Esteban kept us alive not with his medicine but with his humor. He was a slave, bought and paid for by Dorantes, but on our travels he was free—free to laugh and to be our ambassador to the Indians.'

The amazing thing Cabeza said next explained how these four

defenseless men had been able to traverse the vast area later to be called Texas. Indeed, they traveled so widely that they even came into contact with the Teyas, or Tejas, Indians (the Friendly Ones) for whom the entire region would one day be named: 'When we were in the country of hills Alonzo del Castillo, who is a cultured gentleman from the university town of Salamanca, discovered that he had magical or religious power. Whatever it was, he could cure sick Indians by touching them and assuring them that God in His mercy would make them well. His first patients must have had simple illnesses, for his gentle care cured them, and his fame quickly spread across this desolate land, inspiring Indians to come to him from far distances.'

Cabeza said that many villagers began to travel with the wonder-workers, sometimes wandering sixty or seventy miles and wailing piteously when they could no longer keep up with the Spaniards. 'Such misguided faith made Castillo afraid that he was trespassing on powers reserved for God, and he refused to treat patients who were obviously dying and for whom he could do no good. Not me, for I realized that our power to heal could prove our passport to freedom.

'One morning as we approached a new village, weeping women took me to a man obviously near death. His eyes were upturned. He had no heartbeat. All signs of life were gone. Thinking to make his last moments as easy as possible, I placed him upon a clean mat and prayed to our Lord to give him peace.

'Late that afternoon the Indian women ran to us, weeping and laughing and cheering, for the dead man had risen from his mat, had walked about and called for food. This caused enormous surprise, and all across the land nothing else was spoken of. In following days Indians came to us from many places, dancing and singing and praising us as true children of the sun.'

Cabeza then said a revealing thing, which at the time Garcilaco could not comprehend: 'When the Indians made a god of me, I behaved like Castillo. I did not want such idolatry, because I knew I was not worthy of it. Any cures I had effected were due to God's intervention, not mine, and I refused to mislead pagan Indians into thinking otherwise. But as captain of our expedition, I needed the assistance our miracles provided, and it was in this cast of mind that we three white men decided that Esteban should be the doctor, since he had no such religious reservations. No man ever accepted promotion with more delight or followed it with finer accomplishment.'

He called for Esteban, who confirmed all that Cabeza had said: 'I started life as a slave in Morocco. I was sold to Dorantes in Spain,

and in Cuba and Florida and among the Indians, I was still a slave. I was unhappy, because I knew that with my tricks, I could be a fine doctor.' He smiled at Cabeza as he said this. 'So from the Indians I got myself a pair of rattling gourds, some turkey feathers, woven hair from one of the big humped hides, and announced myself as a healer.'