We Are Green and Trembling
About this book
Antonio de Erauso addresses the aunt whose Basque convent he escaped when he was still living as a girl. Since then he has crossed the Americas as sailor, merchant, soldier, and conquistador, accumulating identities alongside the violence of empire.
Now deserted from the army and caring for two Guaraní girls rescued from enslavement, Antonio enters a forest alive with language and forces that colonial record-keeping cannot contain. Survival requires another transformation rather than a final, stable name.
Gabriela Cabezón Cámara draws on the historical figure often called the Lieutenant Nun, but refuses the tidy arc of imperial adventure. Baroque humour, ecological imagination, and satire expose conquest as both material cruelty and a system for deciding whose account becomes history.
We Are Green and Trembling is translated by Robin Myers. It is a surreal picaresque about gender, colonial power, and the liberating possibility of becoming illegible to an empire.
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From the opening
1
My beloved aunt,
I am as innocent and forged in the image and likeness of God as any other, as every other, though I have been a cabin boy, shopkeeper, and soldier, and before then, long before, a small girl at your skirts. “Daughter,” “little daughter,” so did you call me, and not even now, not even with my martial shoulders and my mustache and my calloused sword-wielding hands, would you think to describe me otherwise. Dear aunt, I would ask you if I could, are you still alive? For I believe you are, and I believe you are waiting to bestow upon me what is yours, what was ours; the convent of Saint Sebastián el Antiguo, whose construction was commanded by your grandfather, the father of the father of my father, the Marquis Don Sebastián Erauso y Pérez Errázuriz de Donostia. Give it to some other girl, and, I beg of you, pray do keep reading these words.
You must know that I’ve become a teller of tales, and that I carry things to and fro, for I am a muleteer, which I suspect will surprise you. And I sing, and, should the need arise along the way, I hunt, and I arrive and deliver my cargo, which is not my own, as the cargo of a muleteer is never his own, and I collect my coins and return to doing what I wish; I behold the trees and vines, the long and flexible roots of the air; they become a net, like the nets cast by fishermen, or no, like webs spun by spiders, rather, throngs of spiders engrossed in their weaving, some above and some below and some within the others, oh, green and vast and aquiver, aquiver like all living things, my beloved, like you and I and all the plants, like the lizards and the entire jungle, which, as I must tell you again and again until you understand, is an animal made of many others. It cannot be traversed on foot as people do; there are no paths or straight lines, the jungle makes its clay of you, it shapes you with its own shape, and now you fly, an insect, you clamber, a monkey, you slither, a snake. As you can see, it is not so strange that I, once your beloved little girl, should be today your firstborn American son; no longer the prioress you dreamed of, nor the noble fruit of the noble seed of our lineage, your little girl is now a respected muleteer, a man of peace. And in the jungle, a creature of two, three, or four legs alongside the others, who are mine as I am theirs, a creature, after all, that darts up and down and scales and encloses and leaps and swings on vines and tipples the poisonous venom of the voracious tendrils and the tiny flowers with petals so fragile that they can scarcely weather the faintest breeze, buckling under the weight of mere droplets, for all things are always dripping here, and the butterflies—how you would love the sight of them!—as large as the fist of a large man, larger than my own hands, larger than my soldier hands, beloved aunt; for did you know I have been named a second lieutenant and strung with medals? Yet that was not in the jungle …
“Hey, che, who do you speak to, stranger, Yvypo Amboae?”
“Antonio. My name is Antonio. I come from distant lands, not strange ones. These lands are strange. And I wasn’t speaking but writing, Mitãkuña.”
“You are strange, che. All day talking and talking, reñe’ẽ, reñe’ẽ, reñe’ẽ, talking to yourself.”
“Mba’érepa?”
“What was that, Michī?”
“She asks you why, why do you talk to yourself.”
“I am writing a letter to my aunt. Look, you two, this is a quill, this is ink, and these are words. Would you like to hear them?”
“I hear you for hours. Lies you speak, Yvypo Amboae, lies to your aunt. Where is your aunt?”
“Far away, in Spain. Be still a while, Mitãkuña, and let me keep writing. Yet that was not in the jungle …”
… that is a story I will tell you in time, dear aunt. Let me tell you now about the fragrances of the forest, which are strong as the spirits soldiers drink, as village rotgut, and about the other flowers, mammoth and fleshy and carnivorous, nearly beasts, for here in the jungle the animals bloom and the plants bite, and I believe I have even seen them walking, I swear this to you, and leaping, for vines do leap; all things seethe here, whereas the forest rustles, as well you know; I remember your attention to the presence of the fox, with its faint rustle of leaves in your forest, and to the bear, with its heavy rustle of trunks and branches; the forest rustles, but not the jungle, the jungle seethes, full of eyes; life surges inside it as lava surges in volcanoes, as if the lava were trees and birds and mushrooms and monkeys and coatis and coconuts and snakes and ferns and caimans and tigers and trumpet trees and fish and vipers and palms and rivers and fronds, and all other things within it were amalgams of these primary ones.
The jungle is a volcano, beloved aunt, a volcano in eternal eruption, slow, very slow, an eruption that does not kill, that brings forth green and pulses green water welling from the soil of my forest that in no way belongs to me, but I to it, and is nothing like the forest, nothing at all, dear aunt; jungle, wild jungle, this jungle of mine, much like the distant jungles of your stories, yes, but you should see it, you should smell it, and you would make it yours and take of it as I have done, and oh, if you could touch the stalks and petals and enormous leaves and furred vermin and colors, for here colors can be touched, how pale your Donostian rainbow by comparison, verily spectral in the chill mists, but not here; here colors are flesh, because all things are flesh in this jungle, where I dwell in the company of my animals and my servants, they belong to me, just as I, first girl, then boy, was yours, and the forest was ours in our Donostia when I was but a maiden, my most beloved aunt.
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“Yvy mombyry, far away. She will not hear you. What is aunt?”
“Of course she cannot hear me now. She’ll hear me when my letter arrives, Mitãkuña.”
“Mba’érepa?”
“Look, Michī: these drawings are words. They will travel on a ship and on a horse and then reach her hands someday. An aunt is the sister of your father or of your mother.”
“Mba’érepa?”
“Now what did she ask?”
“Why, she says.”
“Why what.”
“Why is your aunt the sister of my father or my mother.”
“No, no, she is the sister of a father or a mother.”
“Mba’érepa?”
“Because they are siblings. Would you like some oranges?”
“What are oranges, Yvypo Amboae?”
“Sweet, acidic fruits, orange as the wings of that butterfly.”
“Pindó fruits, che.”
“No, Mitãkuña. Oranges are the size of my fist.”
“Mba’érepa?”
“Because they are, Michī, because that is how they are. Just as you are small and have two eyes, little one. Time for us to go.”
“Nahániri.”
“She says no, che.”
“And why is that?”
“Why what.”
“Why not.”
“Because she does not want.”
“Look, the monkeys will ride on my back and the little horse must walk. Would you like to ride on the big horse, Michī?”
“Nahániri.”
“Then you must ride on my back. Since you are only strong enough to breathe and speak two words.”
“Mba’érepa oranges?”
“So you have learned a new word, Michī! Because I made a promise to the Virgin. You must wonder who and what a virgin is. All right, all right. We’re not going anywhere. Stay here, you two, and you take care of her, Mitãkuña. You are the eldest. The mare and the colt will stay and protect you, worry not. I must go with the monkeys and your dog in search of oranges, and later, as we eat, I will tell you all about the Lady. About the Virgin, I mean.”
They walk: the monkeys clutching Antonio’s back with what’s left of their strength. The dog, Red, springing about, her little reddish body sometimes swallowed into the bright green ferns, sometimes flying brown on brown over the enormous roots or among the taut weave of the vines. The horses, stalled by thickets every two strides. Antonio slowly making his way, clearing a path with his sword, afraid of blunting its edge. He blunts it.
They find no orange groves, only palms and more palms, long and pliable, towering palo santo trees, and animals whose only detectable sound is the foliage parting or reuniting with their steps. The occasional song, the occasional growl. They retrace their steps. Red panting with her tongue out and Antonio carrying the monkeys in his arms: they can’t grip his back any longer. The mosquitoes bite and bite until they’re numb. The girls fall asleep on the cape he spread out on the ground. The mare and the colt stand guard, heads bowed toward them. He sets down the monkeys by the girls. The girls are so small, their ribs protruding, their tiny arms like sticks. Their small faces angular with hunger. Their eyes enormous, sockets honed and ghostly. They’re two tiny skeletons covered in skin, straining to breathe. The older girl barely comes up to Antonio’s thigh. The younger, to his knee. A great yellow-streaking star protects them all with blue and orange light. Antonio takes it as a good omen: maybe it heralds a rebirth. They need one. So does he. He’s spent. His body subject to the rhythm of the others. He can no longer remember why he’s protecting them. They have their charms, but he’d be better off alone: he could write uninterrupted. Leave at whim. Eat when he was hungry. Sleep the whole night through. As soon as he comes across an Indian, he’ll hand them over. Why should he risk his neck for a pair of urchins, monkeys, horses, and a dog? And a sword, but this he has forgotten. As he has forgotten that his neck was already at risk. Protecting the Indian girls was a promise he made to his Virgin of the Orange Grove. Not long ago, she’d saved his life on a wing and a prayer: the breadth of a hair. It was the Lady. Maybe. He’s not sure he believes this anymore. Or that he doesn’t. Much less that he no longer needs his Virgin. So he’d better keep his promises; he got off on the wrong foot, after all. He failed her twice. Two days in a row. He only needs to keep giving water to the girls. And writing to his aunt. It isn’t much. He wonders if the mosquitoes have been joined by barigüí flies, which gnaw more than bite. He’d better build a fire. And a shelter. He takes the captain’s sword and cuts some fronds and right away he weaves them through the vines and the palo santo trunk. It’s the tallest tree in sight. That’s why he chose it. Besides, it’s ringed by palms. One can walk a bit. And see what’s around. It isn’t bad, this little palm hut. He builds the fire inside it. Maybe then the biting will stop. He arranges the girls and monkeys close to the heat. The dog joins them. The horses stand, nibbling ferns and swishing their tails, too short to swat the mosquitoes and the barigüís. Nothing is enough. The palo santo boughs fill the air with sweet perfume. It’s beautiful. He coughs at once: too much smoke. Better find dry wood. First he rereads what he’s written to his aunt. He sees that it is good. He gets up singing.
… craved all of them in sight …
He hadn’t known that he was so keen on the jungle or that he still harbored any fondness for his aunt. Or even that he was a muleteer.
Oh blind man, tell me, blind man …
But he feels a stone in his throat: maybe there’s some truth in what he’s written. For the jungle has its marvels, the prioress her happy memories, and he has cargo to deliver.
Would you an orange give …
He’s content. Two days ago, however, he’d been brooding, tucked into a fold of himself. He was terrified. That he would drown in the shit of the dungeon before the rope choked off his breath. That he would be buried in filth and rags. That he would thus be resurrected as a beggar, in body and soul.
2
From the vulture’s perspective, the barracks are a banquet. Built on the highest point of the cliffs by the river. Flanked by constructions in two parallel lines. The army chapel, the bishop’s house, the captain general’s house, and the soldiers’ quarters. On the other side, the arsenal, the shop, the dungeons, and the shacks where the Indians live divided by sex. The best part, deliciously fragrant, is the middle: the large bare plaza, two hundred paces wide, the only treeless spot in sight from up above. The barracks are a patch of cleared earth cracking in the sun. The scene, a laden platter. The vulture, indifferent to the ash and bones, is most attentive to the bonfire, and the gallows. The man—face lined with scars, fine lips, nearly neckless, back strong if slightly buckled, stout callused hands, short legs, sharp nose—hadn’t sensed the bird gliding over the barracks as easily as he himself would amble toward a tavern. If he could amble. Only the plaza was visible from the cell, the bonfire dwindling on that rainy afternoon. And the gallows as his only exit. Antonio was suffering. A Spanish gentleman couldn’t die this way, like some wretched beggar. No fine sword, no silk doublet. What fate awaits a person who enters the beyond in such a way? Because apart from being, one must seem. Both on earth and in heaven. And what would become of him, unfit as he was for a servant’s latrine? He would only leave this cell on his way to the noose after confession. Everything hurt. The shackles on his wrists and ankles. His fellow prisoners. Rough peasants, revolting rustics one and all. The threads of the coarse cloth that clad them. The tremors of mangled prayers. The insults they shouted. And the weeping of the little girls. The humiliation of dying on the same roster as such beasts. The cacophony. Each and every noise: the farts, the snores, the sobs, and farther off, the military shouts, the bustle of the soldiers. In the distance, birds cawing. The jaguars roaring. The insects shrilling. The rhythm of the toads. And the faint furrow in the air, sliced by the vulture overhead. The river’s ebb. It was all folded together, and it was, the whole of it, a lacerating wound. Injured even by the air, even by the softest voice, he plumbed each instant for a door. A silence wrested him from himself, flung him out into the world. Hope numbed the pain: what was that muffled shriek? Searing ice! And he threw himself against the bars.
Then he saw them. The Indians. Bound. Surrounded by sabers, harquebuses, and torches. They feared the fire. And the bishop, who blessed the rotten flesh that would be stuffed into their mouths. Flesh from the cows that those same Indians had killed the week before. The prelate didn’t clarify that the cows could’ve been killed by other Indians: they were all the same. Perhaps it was those who sat fettered there. Perhaps not. Nothing about their skeletal frames suggested a recent roast. But the terror was theirs. If they opened their mouths, they’d die of indigestion. Or disgust. And if they didn’t, they’d be whisked off to the colossal pyre, rekindled now. Just in case. And because the fire was dying. Torrential, the rain. The bonfire too, forever gobbling down trees and people. It is the fire of God, everyone says, and they must be right, for such are the wages of heretics, Indians, and Jews. Not long ago, they found a Jewish man around these parts. He was at home, surrounded by candelabra, singing Lord knows what in his devilish Christ-murdering tongue. They burned him, his ten children, and his wife. The whole village went to watch the blaze. They don’t watch the Indians, though. Who are legion and burn every day.
They were melting, the Indians. What a spectacle! Antonio had forgotten about the cell, the gallows, and his pungent companions: he was too afraid of dying like a villain. The bishop and the captain deliberated gravely by the bonfire. At last, unable to agree, they resigned themselves. They concluded that it would not be possible to kindle one Indian at a time, or even two or three at a time, in compliance with custom and procedure. After all, they simply melted down in the heat. They were all stuck together. They’d have to lift the molten Indians by the edges and set them directly onto the fire. It was urgent:
“They are escaping, monsignor. One cannot ever know with certainty that he has finished slaying. Lord forgive me, your illustriousness, yet I cannot deny that there is always something left alive in them. Strike and strike and some Indian remnant nonetheless rises up once more. Curses!”
A hundred soldiers began to haul the wood. Some of their hands caught fire, and instead of snuffing these resolute embers, they leapt into the pink, waxy lagoon of white skeletons, like stiff trees in a saltpeter bed. Until there was nothing left. It was the Spaniards who burned. Their bodies gave fire to the fire, and their movement kept the blaze from going out. They crackled. They burned far better than the Indians. The captain made a mental note of his soldiers’ combustion: he might run out of firewood before he ran out of men.
“Valiant warriors of Christ,” the bishop remarked to the captain, which brightened the mood.
The prelate sang last rites, his right hand fluttering pyre-ward, smiling like a piranha, his left foot sliding in graceful little steps, his flesh undulating beneath his garments, which were embroidered with precious stones and gold. Rippling in the eddies of the hot breeze yielded by the flames, he opted for an extreme unction of broad address:
“Ut a peccatis liberatum te salvet atque propitius allevet. Amen, amen, amen, amen to each and every one of you, my children.”
The captain, short and straight and sturdy as a peg, flung silver medallions with red and white and yellow ribbons and howled postmortem promotions:
“Go with God, Second Lieutenant Diéguez! May God keep you in his glory, Sergeant Rivero! May your resurrection be swift, Captain Bermúdez! My dear fellows, my valorous soldiers.”
He crooned to them in death, his chest aflame. The captain general was moved. Slowly, he went quiet. He wasn’t sure how many postmortem promotions he was allowed to grant per year or how many he’d already granted or how many were still available, if any. Let’s see: there was a total of one thousand per year and he had already granted eight hundred. Or it was one thousand per lustrum. Or per decade. Something to do with a thousand. He had squandered hundreds, he was certain, on the occasions of the Cimarron uprising and the Inca scions’ revolt. Hundreds: he couldn’t remember how many, but he thought of poor Fernández, losing his leanness and his soldier’s bearing, hunched for years over a desk, soliciting pensions from the governor, the viceroy, and the king. Poor Fernández. And poor widows and orphans who must still be petitioning for what they were owed. So it was a thousand and he’d granted eight hundred. Or it was eight hundred and he had granted a thousand. What did it matter? They wouldn’t see so much as a doubloon in the end. But it did matter: a soldier must be just and measured. So, eight hundred and a thousand. Or seven hundred and nine hundred thirty-one. He got his numbers and his thoughts all muddled. And he couldn’t ask anyone because his secretary had been set ablaze as well. He didn’t understand why Fernández had flung himself into the flames. He wasn’t a man of faith. The captain had always suspected he was neither really a Catholic nor named Fernández. But he was a fine secretary, so he didn’t wring his hands over the details. God loves those who labor tirelessly for the proclamation across the realm of the Good News, the Birth, the Death, and the Resurrection of His Son, he told himself, and relaxed. What had come over Fernández, throwing himself into the conflagration? The lukewarm sweetness that the ember soldiers had kindled in his heart was suddenly doused: who had authorized Fernández to immolate himself? He didn’t know how else to make his will be done. Nor was he so sure what his will really was, but his gaze remained steady and strong. Vexed and silent, he clattered in place like a spinning top of silver-plated armor. Fernández on the pyre, that imbecile. A fried egg, an idiotic moth clinging to the flame, a pine cone without a scent of pine, a nothing, Fernández, incinerating in a blaze that didn’t need him as fodder. By contrast, he, his superior, his captain general, needed a secretary to tell him what to do with his own words, which, as they well knew, he and Fernández and all the rest, plunge into the world with the full weight of law and force. Not to be forgotten as easily as the words of all that good-for-nothing riffraff, burned or hanged each day, blubbering nonsense, because—well, in any case, who cared. He could always grant plots of land, it’s true, but what good land remained unconquered, and what had become of his zeal for conquering? He was weary of land and gold, and all he wanted was to leave this savage world behind. But where would he go, and with whose permission. And why all the fuss, when all was said and done, just for a few famished degenerates, nursing the hunger of many lives, of fathers and grandfathers, of great-great-grandfathers and great-great-great-grandsons. A bunch of breadless, toothless fools, his men. Some were already accustomed to going hungry. He was astonished yet again by the Conquest of the New World. A feat performed by a handful of malnourished wretches who couldn’t obey, couldn’t even await an order, and leapt into the flames without one such as himself, who had descended from generations upon generations of well-fed, decent folk, granting his permission. Martyrdom and disobedience, the captain thought. His eyes reddened. He stilled his top and stopped listening, smelling, and nearly seeing altogether.
The bishop, a hulking cherub, sought the captain’s eyes and leaned in with his blond curls halo-ringing his pink face. He didn’t want to lose, he thought, the only other gentleman in the entire barracks who was capable of singing Biscayne lullabies late at night, after the wine, mired in melancholy at finding himself so far from home. This extraordinary toast—in broad daylight, facing the bonfire—rescued the captain from his lethargy. Relieved by the invitation that extracted him from his impossible accounts—how many promotions had he granted, for the love of Christ?—the soldier reacted with elation, practically soaring, plucked by Bacchus from the swampy labyrinth of imperial bureaucracy, which was so twisted that it could’ve been invented by pederast scribes for the sole purpose of weakening the virile administration of the force and justice befitting a soldier, a captain, a nobleman. He decided to set aside all bureaucratic affairs for later. He’d have to find a new secretary. Some effeminate sort who would take pleasure in fussing over laws and norms and articles and exceptions and prebends so that the numbers would add up properly. Or, even better, he’d have a long chat with the bishop and ask which held more weight in the judgment of God—and of men, his only real interest, and with respect to the ember soldiers—martyrdom or disobedience? And if it would be His will that a captain general should honor words uttered to insubordinate men-at-arms, even if they were martyrs. If it was possible to be both martyred and insubordinate at once. Or didn’t God, Lord of Armies, wish there to be captains and soldiers; did He not want some to give orders and have others obey? Later, better wait till later. He smiled, swilled a little wine, then a little more, and felt reborn, the conquering force of his body, and with it he brought chalice against chalice once more. Gold clinked, stones clanked. Wine sloshed onto the face of the bishop, who laughed purply. An Indian girl appeared out of thin air with a length of white linen in one hand and a bowl of water in the other. Ten small skeletal forms rushed to serve them some more, pouring meticulously to spare their lordly robes from spatter. One tripped and stained his military doublet. The bishop perked up: in a single gesture—red, his angelic face; swift, his slap—he hurled the man into the fire with his own two hands. The man screamed and burned.
“Hurrah! A new Christian, good fellow!”
“Praise be to God, dear bishop.”
3
I remember you, beloved aunt; your splendid white locks, when nightly you freed them from their black veil to illume your cell like the luster of a mountain spring as it tumbles into the forest. Your eyes like a Biscay winter sky, stern blue, your strong nose, your skin pale as northern light. So you see that of course I remember you, my dear, I remember you often. You must be timeworn now, your creases graceful and majestic, your prioress shoulders as sturdy as my mule-driving back. I can see you reading this, bundled up by your corner window in the refectory, near the fire, as when I was a little girl at your skirts, but attended now by your new novices; have a pintxo with a cup of wine, have some peppers, Mother; fetch the breviary and hie yourselves to matins, daughters.
One more cup, dear aunt, come drink with me and I shall tell you the rest. May this letter serve as a confession. As an act of contrition; though I am innocent, my crimes are many, so many that they will impart great suffering upon you, of this I am certain. Yet I trust as well that it will gladden your heart to have news of me, and to know that I have not forgotten you. And you must know that I repent …
“Hey, che, your oranges, how are they?”
“They are about this big, Mitãkuña. Thick skin. Made of wedges. Every wedge has little transparent sacks filled with delicious water. And some seeds.”
“Mba’érepa?”
“Seeds because they are fruits, and fruits bear seeds. Wedges because that is what they have. Some fruits have wedges and others do not, just as some trees grow straight and others crooked. Do you understand, Michī?”
“You want to look for your oranges, che?”
“Well, that is a fine idea. We’ll go soon. Let me write a little longer.”
… I repent, aunt, I am changed. Of all my crimes, there is one, abandoning you, that you alone may forgive. Of the rest, perhaps the Lord Our God in his infinite mercy may grant me absolution. The jungle already has done so, I am sure of it. This letter will be long.
Memory deceives, and defies swiftness; it is miserly to one who flees, and relishes withholding from he who lies and changes his name, his people, his nation. I wonder how it is for you who have always lived on the selfsame ground, with the selfsame folk, the selfsame slow ceremonies one day after the next, and the selfsame trees that grow in the same unhurried way. Your memories, are they knotted to the boughs of the walnut tree we planted together? They must have grown, both memories and boughs, and fruits and leaves, slow and pretty as the rounded treetop toward the sky, and the trunk rooted who knows how far down, dear aunt …
“Hey, che.”
“No.”
… and thus, slow and grave and fragile and strong as a tree must your hours remain, my dearest, more or less alike among themselves, as the walnuts born in springtime and harvested in the autumn; yet I know they are not completely equal; they each reveal small differences that must also be vertiginous and large, a storm on the open sea for those who live their lives attentive to the subtlest signs of constant cycles, the negligible infinity of identical shapes; perhaps all of life has been apportioned a share of vertigo and each life is called to employ it in its own fashion. Or perhaps not, as indeed we are not dealt the same share of crimes. Oh, my hand trembles, beloved aunt, I have upset my inkwell in attempting to set down the first word in the long line of my offenses; they were not attributed to me, I committed them. Perhaps it will torment you to hear of me, and menace you with mortal troubles in your hours of prayer. You will pray for me, will you not? Do so: I beg of you, take pity on me.