* * *
Yesterday I was approached by the first men I’d ever seen from these new lands. I was sleeping on the sand, exhausted by the last days of my voyage in the ship’s boat, alone, guided only by my excellent knowledge of the stars. In my dream, actually a nightmare, appeared the terrible scenes of storms on the high seas, the despair of the sailors, scurvy, death, the mutiny, and finally the vile decision of the Pinzón brothers to return to Spain and abandon me in a boat with three casks of water, two bottles of spirits, a sack of seeds, and my trunk filled with curiosities: trumpery, red caps, and a secret compartment with paper, quill pens, and ink. They left me in dire straits: yesterday I dreamed their toothless corpses passed by on a raft made of snakes.
I awaken, my lips covered with sand, like a second skin granted by the deepness of my sleep. First I see the sky and the fugitive procession of ravens and ducks, instantly blocked out by the circle of faces the color of the natives of the Canary Islands. They speak like birds, in a singsong, high-pitched language, and when they rise to take me by the armpits and stand me up, they reveal themselves totally naked before me.
They gave me water and led me to tentlike buildings where they gave me food I didn’t recognize and let me rest.
Over the course of the following days, cared for and protected by these people, I regained my strength. I was amazed by these men and women unsullied by the evil of war, naked, very gentle, and without weapons. Their lands were extremely fertile and very well watered. They led peaceful, happy lives. They slept in beds that swayed back and forth like cotton nets. They strolled through their villages carrying smoking coals they sucked with as great satisfaction as I had sucked breasts. They made very beautiful dugouts ninety-five palms long out of a single trunk that carried as many as one hundred and fifty people, and thus they communicated with other islands and the mainland, which they soon brought me to see.
Yes, I had reached Paradise, and I had only one problem: Should I communicate this discovery to my illustrious European patrons or not? Should I remain silent or announce my feat?
* * *
I wrote the appropriate letters so the astonished world would honor me and the monarchs of Europe would bow at my great deed. What lies didn’t I tell? I knew the mercantile ambition and the boundless greed of my continent and the rest of the world, so I described lands full of gold and spices and mastic and rhubarb. After all, these discovery companies, whether English, Dutch, Spanish, or Portuguese, were paid to put salt and pepper on the tables of Europe. So I wrote that gold nuggets may be gathered like grains of wheat. King Solomon’s mountains of gold are to be found here, safe from the waters of the flood, tall and resplendent, as if they were the breasts of creation.
Also, I was not ignorant of my contemporaries’ need for fable, the metallic wrapping that would disguise and make palatable their lust for gold. Gold, yes, but hidden in deep mines by cannibals and fierce beasts. Pearls as well, but revealed by the song of sirens, sirens with three breasts — three. Transparent seas, but plied by sharks with two phalluses — folding phalluses. Prodigious islands, defended by amazons who receive men only once a year, who allow themselves to be made pregnant and each nine months send their male children back to their fathers, keeping only the girl children. Implacable with themselves, they cut off one breast, the better to shoot their arrows.
* * *
Now, I must admit that both my mythical outlandishness and my very solid appreciation of the nobility of these savages masked the most painful experience of my life. Twenty years ago, I joined a Portuguese expedition to Africa, which turned out to be an infamous business of capturing blacks and then selling them. No one had ever seen greater cynicism. The black kings of the ivory coasts would hunt down and capture their own subjects, accusing them of rebellion and desertion. They would hand them over to Christian clergymen who would convert them and save their souls. The clergymen, in turn, would entrust them to the kind care of the Portuguese slavers, who were to teach them trades and transport them to Europe.
I saw them sail from the ports of the Gulf of Guinea, where the Portuguese traders would arrive with shiploads of merchandise for the African kings, to exchange for their enslaved population — redeemed, of course, by religion. The ships would empty of silks, percales, thrones, dishes, mirrors, views of the Ile de France, missals, and chamber pots; they would fill up with husbands separated from their wives — the women sent one place, the men elsewhere, their children similarly divided, and all thrown into crowded cargo holds with no place to move around, forced to shit and piss on top of one another, to touch only what was near them and to speak to others, mortally embracing them, who understood nothing. Has there ever been a race more humiliated, despised, subjected to the pure whim of cruelty than they?
* * *
I saw the ships sail out of the Gulf of Guinea, and now, here in my New World, I swore it would never happen again.
This was like the Golden Age the ancients evoke, which is how I recited it to my new friends from Antilia, who listened to me without understanding. After all, I was describing them and their time: first came the Golden Age, when man governed himself with uncorrupted reason and constantly sought the good. Not forced by punishment, not spurred on by fear, man used simple words and possessed a sincere soul. There was no need for law where there was no oppressor, no need for judges or courts. Or battlements, or trumpets, or swords to be forged, because everyone was ignorant of these two words: yours and mine.
Was it inevitable that the Iron Age come? Could I put it off? For how long?
I had reached the Golden Age. I embraced the noble savage. Was I going to reveal his existence to Europeans? Was I going to deliver these sweet, naked people, devoid of malice, to slavery and death?
I decided to be silent and to stay among them for several reasons, using several strategies. I don’t want the reader to think he’s dealing with a fooclass="underline" we Genoese may be liars but we aren’t idiots.
I opened my trunk and found the hats and beads. It gave me pleasure to give them to my hosts, who enjoyed themselves immensely with the trinkets. But I asked myself: If my intention was to reach the court of the grand khan in Peking and the fabulous empire of Japan, whom did I think I was going to impress with this junk I picked up in the Puerto de Santa María market? The Chinese and the Japanese would have laughed at me. So, within my mammary, unconscious zone, I knew the truth: I would never reach Cathay because I didn’t really want to reach Cathay; I wanted to get to Paradise, and in Eden the only wealth is nakedness and unawareness. Perhaps that was my real dream. I carried it through. Now I would have to protect it.
I was helped by the most ironclad law of Portuguese navigation, the law of secrecy. The sailors who left Lisbon and Sagres had imposed a policy of secrecy at all costs, ordered by their Sebastianist, utopian monarchs. Any Portuguese captain (to say nothing of common sailors) who revealed the routes or the places they’d discovered would be hunted to the ends of the earth and, when found (which they would be, don’t doubt it for a second), would be drawn and quartered. The heads, feet, and hands of traitors had been seen all along Portuguese routes, from Cape Verde to the Cape of Good Hope, from Mozambique to Macao. The Portuguese were implacable: if they encountered ships intruding in their sea-lanes, they had standing orders to sink them immediately.