Yiddish for Pirates(74)
The Spanish were heavy with arquebuses and swords. They would surprise the unsuspecting pirates with a pre-emptive strike guided by the shmendrik son Pedro. For, nu, it was his father who bunged the cannon.
They began to row in dark water to the distant side of our ship.
“Don Miguel Sánchez Villalobos de Levante of Navarre,” Fray Juan said, interrupting Moishe’s flailing diversion as soon as the Spanish had disappeared into the murk.
“Years ago, you were a boy and ‘Miguel Levante’ was enough to hide you. I know who you are.”
Moishe’s hand went to his sword.
“Don Miguel, you need not joust with my ribs. I, too, have another name. Once I was a ghost named Padre Luis Dos Almos. You and this bird crept into the residence of the Archbishop of Seville. In the dark of the library, you dirked the inside of a Jew named Abraham.”
“When one must, one can,” Moishe said. “And may one tooth travel with his immortal soul always, only so it should ache forever.” He released the hilt of his sword and bowed.
“So, Father, this new world, come here often?” he asked. Sangfroid was Moishe’s middle name. At least when it wasn’t Sánchez Villalobos.
“I travelled for many years,” Fray Juan said. “I knew no solid ground. I was lost. Finally, I sought to evade the iniquity of Europe here in Orbe Novo, the New World, but it festers here, like the rot and slobber of a flax dam, with the ravenous putrefaction of greed, a negligent savagery toward natives. A new and more murderous Inquisition, we exile their blood from their very bodies. Indeed, I now return from the court at Castille where I have pleaded with both King and Queen, seeking to end the destruction of the people of these Indies. I have found myself in my own voice, speaking for those who have none.”
Fray Juan was a man seized by both wine and conviction. His face, already red with drink, flushed still further as he adopted the manner of a preacher, fulminating with great volume to his man and bird congregation.
“I speak of those who collapse from hunger and toil. And we who kick and beat them to rise. We who knock out their teeth with the pommel of our swords. We who, for amusement, wager a single stroke of the sword can split them in two, slice head from neck, or spill entrails with but one plunge of the pike. We who toss infants into rivers, roaring with laughter and saying, ‘Boil there, you offspring of the devil!’ We who attack towns and spare neither children nor the aged, the pregnant nor women in childbed, stabbing and dismembering and cutting them to pieces as if they were sheep in the slaughterhouse. We cut off hands and hang them round the necks of our victims, saying, ‘Go now, carry the message,’ meaning, ‘Take the news to the Indians who have fled to the mountains.’ We tie our victims over smouldering fires so that, little by little, as those captives scream in despair and torment, their souls leave them. Oh, that I could describe even one-hundredth part of the afflictions and calamities that we have wrought among these innocent people! There once were many of these Indians; now there are few. May God grant enlightenment to priest and king, governor and general that they may act with justice and with wisdom. This is what I said to our Ferdinand and Isabella.”
Moishe and I shuddered under such intensity, not to mention the spray of spume from Fray Juan’s ardent mouth, but we knew that such things of which he spoke had truly occurred. We had seen such horrors. He was ranting to ranters.
Moishe turned to me and said, sotto voce, “He speaks of these things in court? In the shtetl, it is believed that when a wise man converses with a fool, two fools are speaking.”
“Unless, like us,” I said, “he speaks with sword.”
“Fray Juan,” Moishe asked, “what did you suggest Their Catastrophic Majesties do?”
“Transport slaves from Africa,” he said.
There was a shout from our ship in the distance. They had seen the Spanish skiffs rowing toward them. Moishe went to the bell and signalled an urgent beat to quarters. Five peals repeated.
Then he grabbed Fray Juan. “A little business,” he said, lowering him onto deck and binding him to the shrouds. The three other Spanish crew were soon roped like rodeo calves.
Then night flash and sky-cleaving thunder.
From our ship, the brain-severing tumult of cannons.
And it’s true what is said: someone else’s tuches is easy to smack. Especially when it sits in a rowboat sculling toward your cannonballs. The Spanish: we’d pissed on their backs and told them it was rain. Then we’d codswalloped them to search for umbrellas.
Now the ocean filled the holes in their bodies as they sank into the sea.
Except for Pedro and the Capitan: their kishkas remained unminced. Hostages are best when intact. Yahíma, Jacome and Shlomo paddled to the first skiff where each of their blades greeted the hostages’ gullets with a silver grin.
Jacome: “Be lambs or have your apple sauced.”
Yahíma laughed and shook her naked bristen in their frightened faces. And though they were fulsome fruit of Platonically perfect form, the source of many a non-Platonic thought to those who beheld them, here they were weaponry, a bitter ironic power wielded to humiliate.
Soon we had secured our captives, brought our ships broadside, thrown heaving lines over gunwales, and bound the two together.
“Have Christian mercy—release the boy’s father, my brother,” the Capitan said.