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TWO

WANDERERS AND WONDERERS IN THE NEW WORLD

Voices of the Dispossessed

Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there,

To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,

You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.

In order to arrive at what you do not know

You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.

In order to possess what you do not possess

You must go by the way of dispossession. . . .

And what you do not know is the only thing you know

And what you own is what you do not own

And where you are is where you are not.

—T. S. Eliot, The Four Quartets

The travel narrative is a text of observation haunted by its Other, the imaginary.

—Michel de Certeau, “Travel Narratives of the French to Brazil”

The European encounter with the New World remains one of the decisive events of modern world history. The shocking discovery of this continent would soon make only death the final undiscovered country. And neither Europe nor this uncharted world would remain the same. The introduction of this territory into European consciousness would lead to a dramatic expansion and revolution in geographical, cultural, and theological worldviews. For Western observers, this event would come to represent the quintessential encounter with otherness. Travel to this newly discovered territory was like sailing away into unreality, into unimaginable and uncharted regions, into a world where truth was mixed with fantasy, and dreams with reality. And when the chroniclers of this strange new world sat down to articulate their experiences, facts and fictions were difficult to disentangle. Indeed, the accounts are a curious blend of the two, which is why so many writers have seen the colonial-era chronicles as the first attempts at magical realism. The explorers’ accounts give us fantastic and wild portraits of the New World, as if fantasy and dreams alone had been adequate in preparing the West for an event of this sort. In direct proportion to the degree and extent of the mystery, the accounts multiply the number of adjectives and metaphors to describe the wonder of these lands. As the mystery deepens, the language of wonder escalates and thickens. In finding ourselves on the shores of the New World, then, and in meditating on the significance and import of these historical events, we must notice this language of astonishment and amazement on the tongues of the first Europeans. It will be an important clue for us in assessing this encounter with radical otherness.

This chapter will consider the language of wonder in the New World and its relationship with wandering and exile. As suggested earlier, my concern in this book is with languages of dispossession: wonder as dispossession in the order of knowledge and exile, forced or voluntary, in history or location. Though they do not look alike, wonder and exile share this fate of dispossession and displacement, when both mind and body are threatened by an encounter with unknown and uncertain phenomena, when familiar and stable truths are suddenly interrupted by an appearance of something so peculiar and new that it introduces doubt and equivocation, when all confidences are quickly undone. When we speak of wonder, we are trying to name something that happens prior to or beyond the boundaries of knowledge, and this experience is fraught with the same baffling, disorienting, and bewildering feelings that accompany an exile in his new home away from home. In both cases, the homeland of belonging and truth is badly desired, but forever lost. No wonder, then, that wonder—like moments of awe or stupefaction—shares with exile the experience of loss: the loss of words, loss of clear and familiar truths, loss of absolute certainties. Wonder is closer to absence than presence, dispossession than possession. Wonder inhabits the gaps and dark corners of knowledge. It appears in stories of the impossible and among those who dream impossible dreams . . . like mystics. Mystics will always prefer the language of wonder to any other because it names so well their tireless attempts to reach the other side of words, somewhere beyond the boundaries of our familiar truths.

As we explore the sympathies between wonder and mystical language in this study, and their affiliation with dispossession and exile, we would do well to follow the lead of Michel de Certeau. In his reading of mystical literature, he found the resemblances between mystics and travelers particularly intriguing, seeing mystics as travelers of the human soul, travelers of the unfathomable and unknown. Regardless of whether they would ever leave the confines of their homeland, Certeau considered mystical language to be stirred by nomadic and restless desires, infinite and insatiable, and filled with an imagination that carried them on journeys to remote lands. In entering territories without a map or chart, mystics were a lot like explorers of new worlds, only now the purpose was an impossible theological one, like seeing the face of God, or naming the unnamable. The language of wonder came to mystics as frequently as travelers because it was the precise word to name this journey into foreign territories, an experience that can be freeing and exhilarating, or else terrifying and dreadful. Capable of these wild extremes, the one who wonders resembles a heavenly body that has suddenly been loosed from its fixed orbit. No longer tied and constrained by the familiar, one is suddenly unfettered and emancipated, now free to imagine the unimaginable, to consider new possibilities, to live differently. How terrifying yet thrilling this can be—and terrifying not only to one’s own psyche, but to all the defenders of sameness, to those who draw uncompromising borders and warn against trespassing beyond what we already know and trust.

For this exact reason, wonder is the verbal equivalent of trespassing borders and surpassing limits, and always moving deeper and deeper into the dark. Wonder is a common word in the vocabulary of mystics and wanderers because they are navigating territory that is cloaked in darkness. The travel route of wonder is like entering the cloud of darkness and finding one’s way through it with the stick of a blind man, trusting it to lead you with instinct and intuition through unfamiliar regions of knowledge. In this way, the via negativa of the mystics—the deconstructive strategy of dispossession and detachment from concepts and worldly desires—prepares one for travel into the unknown, and this journey is always wondrous. The mystical journey takes the route of ignorance and dispossession in order to arrive at what you do not know, at where you are not (“You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance. . . . You must go by the way of dispossession”). And wonder is a key indicator and marker of this journey.

The figures that I will be considering in this chapter—especially Cabeza de Vaca and Bartolomé de Las Casas—were such travelers and wanderers, courageous men who ventured deep into unknown lands and who became voices of the dispossessed in the New World. In some ways, they adopted the via negativa of the mystics—especially the demand for detachment—but their own version of this strategy resembles closer the desert experiences of the biblical prophets. Their via negativa summons the negations and denunciations of the biblical prophets because only this kind of explosive language is relevant to them in a history that knew so many trials and tribulations, so much distress and agony. Only this kind of language—hostile, dissenting, anguished—proved adequate to the negations and catastrophes that they witnessed in their age.

In both cases, moreover, surprising insights and realizations came to them through their long sojourns—particularly tolerance, even affection, for the great variety of cultures that they encountered in the New World. Their passionate advocacy for tolerance and compassion seems to have arisen from the calamities of their lives, as if they were able to suck the marrow out of the dry bones of their travails and learn something in the process. They would achieve a wisdom born of suffering, that rare quality that sees the world through the eyes of other peoples and cultures, especially through the eyes of the downtrodden and brokenhearted. The discovery of the New World was for them a discovery of painful truths and beauties, a discovery that enabled them to see the strangers of the Americas as brothers and sisters to themselves. And, more than that, it allowed them to recognize the strangeness of their own selves. Their discovery of the New World, thus, also included their own agonizing discovery of a new, inscrutable world deep within their own soul, a discovery that revealed to them how alien and wondrous their own being actually was. They would come to notice the shadow of exile as the dark, ghostly creature residing within their own soul and, subsequently, embrace it in the dark-skinned peoples of the New World.

In this sense, the experiences of wonder and exile are fundamental to the discoveries of Cabeza de Vaca and Las Casas. They would not have become voices of the dispossessed if they did not see the foreignness and strangeness in their own histories and cultures. With their capacity to wonder at themselves, the alien nature of other cultures and peoples suddenly appeared to them far less threatening and dangerous.

While the focus on exile in the present study has a particular kinship with wonder, we should not overstate the resemblances and end up overlooking their singularities. If wonder interrupts our drive to comprehend and explain, exile disorients us with greater force and violence, casting us into the tides and maelstroms of history. In assessing the features of exile in the New World we are suddenly faced with realities that a strictly aesthetical approach to wonder is reluctant to acknowledge: the rupture of violence and colonialism in the New World. No consideration of wonder in the New World is worth our attention if the history of exile is left off the pages. There has been too much suffering and too many disasters in the history of the Americas for us to cover our faces from the historical record. As much as some portraits of wonder in the New World would try to elide and disregard exile, it is always there, haunting Latin American narratives like a disturbing, repressed memory buried within the unconscious. The tragic histories of Latin American cultures must be narrated if the patient desires the truth, if he is to face memories both menacing and unsettling, therapeutic and wondrous.

So in this passion for the truth, we must look carefully at the histories of displacement and uprooting in the New World: the slave trade, the genocide and abuse of native peoples, the gross inequalities. European possession of the Americas led to the brutal dislocation and resettlement of the Amerindians to where their labor would be needed, and it led, as Las Casas puts it, to a desert of exile.

Our attention, then, will be drawn by the “desertification” of new lands and the part played by wonder in all of this. This should remind us that wonder is not innocent and certainly not free of impurity. For many New World explorers and conquistadors, wonder was often invoked in the service of control and ownership; when wonder appeared on their lips, it furthered a strategy of possession in which the exotic realities of the New World were to be used and enjoyed for European advantage. The wonders and marvels of the New World became enticing objects to own—or else, signs and proof of their inferiority and barbarism.

In a way, the colonial powers in the New World failed to heed the mystical warnings about idolatry, namely, that the “God beyond God” dwells in silence and darkness, in the cloud of unknowing. Contact with the true God, as Simone Weil once suggested, is given to us by absence.¹ The rush of European powers to “discover” the New World was a race in being present before anyone else (native excluding). By the act of presence—catching sight of the land by one’s vision, placing one’s foot and body on the land, by a legal record and pronouncement of ownership—Europeans would claim possession. The conquistadors worshipped a god entirely present, one that could be manipulated and controlled, one that would justify and legitimize the possession of the New World. As Las Casas would make clear, this was a god of their own making, an idol that would fill their empty coffers with gold and slaves.

In tracing the different routes of wonder, the title of Emmanuel Levinas’s book Totality and Infinity is suggestive for this study. In the New World, the theme of wonder is used, for one, as a lure and enticement to possession and totality, as it surely was for Columbus, and as a fragment of infinity for Cabeza de Vaca and Las Casas. When seen through the eyes of the latter, it can be a valuable image of dispossession. This chapter will follow these different routes of wonder and see what it has to teach us about first encounters and the discovery of new things.

Columbus: Almirans, the One Who Wonders

When the figure of Columbus turns to the language of wonder—and he does so with great frequency and devotion—it reminds us that we are faced with a medieval man. As much as his tenacious and adventurous spirit suggests something modern, his discoveries and dreams, like his language of wonder, are articulated and named with the only vocabulary that he knows and has inherited from his medieval predecessors. We do not need to look much further than the name he ascribes to the New World (the Indies) for evidence of this. When he comes upon the great river in South America, the Orinoco, he imagines that he is stepping on Indian soil and even approaching the Ganges, where many medieval travelers—Marco Polo, William of Rubruck, Sir John Mandeville—had placed Earthly Paradise.

Columbus, in other words, saw the world with the starry eyes of medieval travelers and was amazed by what he saw and heard in their accounts. Provoked by them, he became a magi of sorts and soon followed the heavenly stars and wonders that enticed his predecessors. And there was plenty to entice him. These travelers, in fact, swam in rivers of wonder and looked to the East as a site where the marvelous was commonplace and the fantastic ordinary. If medieval mystics desired to drown in the sea of God’s love, these figures drowned in a vast sea of marvels and imaginary worlds. For classic and medieval travelers, the border between the West and the East might as well have been the border between the living and the dead because the differences between the two were equally vast—and equally frightening. To venture there would mean facing the dangers and anxieties of the unknown, not to mention the dragons, man-eaters, and other terrifying creatures that made the unknown their home. If one was brave enough to go there, however, the rewards could be immeasurable, like discovering the Fountain of Youth, Earthly Paradise, cities of gold. In medieval representations, the East resembled the “Orient” of later centuries, “a site of dreams, images, fantasies, myths, obsessions and requirements,” to quote Homi Bhabha.² Never an empirical reality, the East represented what is totally other: the barbaric and strange, the mysterious and irrational. For the men of this age, as in the time of Columbus, the border between fact and fiction is a curious and ambiguous line, permeable and unclear. Passage between the two occurs with regularity to these explorers of the impossible, which is why their discoveries look like the matter of dreams and fantasies.

It is quite clear that the explorers and travelers to the New World breathed this medieval air, and they certainly craved the stuff of legend and fantasy as much as they dreamed of wealth and glory. When first learning of this discovery, the message to the Old World must have felt like chocolate to a tongue that had only known bland foods, like spices to a palate accustomed to insipid foods. They must have been ravished and thrilled by the news.

Columbus and his men traveled across the great ocean aroused by rumors of this sort, rumors of fabulous truths, cities like Atlantis and Cibao, women like Amazons and mermaids, one-eyed men, cannibals, men with snouts of dogs, people with tails—and as they returned to Europe, no matter what their experience, they were loose with their reports and extravagant with their pens. One might say that they gathered the ocean winds for themselves and infused their language with it, creating accounts that were tempestuous and bloated like hot air balloons. Call it creative license if you will, but one thing is clear: they drew from a deep well of fantasy and gave their readers a wild sea of stories. Like their medieval predecessors, travel accounts of the New World describe experiences with strange and bizarre peoples, with customs entirely new and unfamiliar, and with a curious and wild diversity of religious beliefs. In tales of this kind, they thoroughly astonished and won over their readers the way Othello would win over Desdemona with the stories of his fantastic adventures.³

Like Othello, Columbus was a master of wonder’s seductions. He knew how to evoke, stimulate, and nurture it. And stimulate it he certainly did, becoming a powerful spinner of tales and maker of myths. His letters stimulated delight and wonder. If not for gold and silver, pearls and land, Columbus entices Europeans to the New World for a wild adventure, for a romantic experience of an exotic and strange world. The letters are not satisfied with informing, instead seeking to transform their readers and to evoke in them a sense of the marvelous and wondrous. There is something like intrigue involved in Columbus’s letters. They connive more than educate; they tantalize, charm, beguile. Columbus’s designs are to cast a spell over Europeans and to convince them that the colonization of these new lands and peoples is a holy and worthy cause. As Stephen Greenblatt mentions in Marvelous Possessions, in the absence of gold, Columbus offers the marvelous: “The marvelous stands for the missing gold.”⁴ The appeal to wonder here becomes an instrument in colonial possession. Wonder is colonized and turned into an exotic object that Columbus and other explorers would exploit in the service of conquest.

Inga Clendinnen explains well the many instances in which wonder and fantasy served colonial purposes, and makes this point in reference to Cortes: “His essential genius lay in the depth of his conviction, and in his capacity to bring others to share it: to coax, bully, and bribe his men, dream-led, dream-fed them. . . . He also lured them to acknowledge their most extreme fantasies; then he persuaded them, by his own enactment of them, that the fantasies were realizable.”⁵ Or listen to Carlos Fuentes on this same theme: “The two foundations of Buenos Aires clearly dramatizes two impulses of Spanish colonization in the New World. One is based on fantasy, illusion, imagination. The conquistadors were driven not only by the lust for gold . . . but by fantasy and imagination, which at times were an even stronger elixir. As they entered the willful world of the Renaissance, these men still carried with them the fantasies of the Middle Ages.”⁶

We might see the play on the names of Columbus as illustrating these two themes. Because of the frequency of Columbus’s appeal to the wonder and marvel of the New World, the King of Spain said that Columbus should be known not as Almirante, the admiral, but as Almirans, the one who wonders. And yet, at the same time, Las Casas once noted that the name he had been born with, Cristóbal Colón, sealed him with the mark of a “colon-izer.”⁷ Columbus’s capacity for wonder coexisted with his dreams of colonization and possession. He is a wonderer and colonizer at once. We might see this duality as the beginning of a history that will endure for centuries in Latin America and claim the lives of millions: the mixture of dreams of paradise with the history of colonization and violence.⁸

How quickly, then, does wonder assume its part in the history of colonization. We should always remain alert to this possibility, especially as we listen to Columbus’s wonder-intoxicated language. Columbus never tires of the word maravilla. The trees, fish, animal life, the varieties of nature’s loveliness, everything is marvelous:

The fish here are surprisingly unlike ours. There are some the shape of dories and of the finest colors in the world. . . . The colors are so marvelous that everybody wondered and took pleasure in the sight. . . . Flocks of parrots darken the sun and there is a marvelous variety of large and small birds very different from our own; the trees are of many kinds, each with its own fruit, and all have a marvelous scent. . . . Hispaniola is a wonder. . . . This country, Most Serene Highnesses, is so enchantingly beautiful that it surpasses all others in charm and beauty as much as the light of day surpasses the night. Very often I would say to my crew that however hard I tried to give your Highnesses a complete account of these lands my tongue could not convey the whole truth about them nor my hand write it down. I was so astonished at the sight of so much beauty that I can find no words to describe it. . . . But now I am silent, only wishing that some other may see this land and write about it. (C, 65, 70, 83–84)

It is easy to be seduced by Columbus’s portrait of Hispaniola. He can be dazzling when speaking of its wonders and idyllic beauty. And he sounds like a mystic in suggesting how little these wonders can be described, how much they require personal experience. He says that the New World brings him to silence, that nothing comparable has ever been seen. The beauty is so intense and surprising that it brings his mind and tongue to a pause. His language falters. “My tongue is broken,” as Sappho once remarked.⁹ Columbus tells us what it must feel like to be filled with such awe and delight. He gives us signs, but then warns us, like so many mystics, that it is ineffable. In moments like this, Columbus tastes beauty in all its splendor and expresses himself in ways that any mystic would understand. For many Christian mystics—perhaps the lesson learned from paganism—beauty is a sign of grace, a kind of icon in which the One discloses itself. And for those with a trained eye for this beauty, revelation comes to them in these sensual forms with a force that can leave the soul breathless and ecstatic, undone by so much beauty.

Here Columbus is as close as his shadow to this kind of rapture, to the aesthetical intuitions of the mystics. His invocation of the language of inexpressibility is a key feature of his portrait of wonder, and it appears with regularity when he is at pains to articulate his discoveries. Columbus locates wonder in the gaps and silences of language, beyond the boundaries of what can be said in clear and certain terms. And yet, since the naming of islands is fundamental to taking possession, Columbus—in his guise as Cristóbal Colón—wants to name what is unnamable and, thus, betrays his initial intuition about Hispaniola, that it is wonder that cannot be possessed; or else, is it his other identity that he betrays, his beneficent shadow as the Almirans? Regardless, it is clear that Columbus is a knight of possession and conquest: “Generally it was my wish to pass no island without taking possession of it” (C, 60). With this frank admission, we realize that Columbus’s approach to the beauty of Hispaniola is nothing like reverence—demanding, it seems to me, respect and awe for the integrity of the other—but, instead, voracity, an insatiable desire to consume and own.

His betrayals have many different facets, but consider one incident that Columbus notes on his fourth voyage (1502–4). He writes of an encounter with magicians on an island he calls Cariay. He expects to find confirmation of the people Pope Pius II wrote of in his Cosmographia (a description of the Far East). Columbus writes, “In Cariay and in the adjoining districts there are great and very terrifying magicians who would have done anything to prevent my remaining there an hour. On my arrival they sent me two magnificently attired girls, the elder of whom could not have been more than eleven and the other seven. Both were so shameless that they might have been whores, and had magic powders concealed about them. On their arrival I ordered that they should be given some of our trinkets and sent them back to land immediately” (C, 297). The wonder that Columbus describes here is mixed up with terror and suddenly his tone is noticeably different from when speaking of natural beauty. When speaking of the natives, Columbus begins to tremble and expresses apprehension and foreboding, fear and antipathy. In his perception, these native women are nothing but demons in female form, succubi.

It’s almost as if he had landed on the same island that is the setting for Shakespeare’s The Tempest, a parallel noted by the classic work of José Enrique Rodó, Ariel (1900).¹⁰ Remember that this great work of Shakespeare is situated on a mysterious island in the West. Prospero and his daughter find themselves exiled there along with a creature of the earth, Caliban, and his mother, the Algerian witch Sycorax (Caliban is a near anagram of the term cannibal, and in the New World related to the term “Carib”). In this distant and alien world, the characters are at pains to anchor themselves to solid footing. The language of wonder captures the depths of their disorientation in this strange world (the name of Prospero’s daughter, Miranda, suggests the wondrous atmosphere of the island and derives from the Latin mirari, to wonder, admire, or revere). Strange things happen here, none stranger than the occult powers of Prospero, a great and powerful magician who has nature, even death, at his command: “I have bedimmed the noontide sun, called forth the mutinous winds, and ’twixt the green sea and the azured vault set roaring war . . . graves at my command, have waked their sleepers, oped, and let ’em forth by my so potent art” (Tempest, 5.1.41–50). The location of this island somewhere beyond the boundaries of the known world seems to have opened doors to other dimensions of reality and to have invited in the powers of sorcery and wizardry. The uncanny is abundant in this new world.

With Prospero’s potent art in mind, we know that the wonders of this island are wild to an extreme, making for a bewildering experience, engendering fear and anxiety. Caliban is the prime instance and embodiment of these fearful wonders. He represents the wonder of the New World, but in a grotesque form: misshapen, bizarre, strange, ugly, unpleasant, and, above all, monstrous. Everything about this island resembles this grotesque creature and it causes some to want nothing more than to flee. Gonzalo’s response is a case in point: “All torment, trouble, wonder, and amazement inhabits here. Some heavenly power guide us out of this fearful country” (5.1.104–6).

Like Gonzalo in The Tempest, Columbus finds himself in a strange land, and the wonder in his eyes at the sight of these “magicians” is an expression of fear and anxiety. Columbus would not tolerate native magic anymore than Prospero would tolerate an independent and free Caliban. “Magic” is the name of the demonic for Columbus. He attributes “magic” to what he does not understand, to native attire or dress, native ceremonies or rituals. By describing natives in these terms, he transforms the other into a grotesque form, and it becomes a dangerous threat in the process. In the mind of Columbus, there is plenty reason to fear the “magic” of the natives: it is demonic and evil, strange and dreadful. And the best way to handle this threat is to subdue it by violence, to enslave it. Columbus would propose doing to the “Caribs” what Prospero does to Caliban: force him into servitude.

In Columbus’s description of “magic” and “whores,” furthermore, he links together images of idolatry, sorcery, and sexual deviance in ways that echo throughout the ages. This association between idolatry and sexual danger has an ancient history. For centuries Western perceptions of the East included descriptions of sexual license and carnality (if not earlier, beginning with biblical perceptions of the Canaanites and Philistines). What is surprising, at least in this instance, is that Columbus lets them be, does not abduct them. In most other cases, Columbus would make up the absence of gold by abducting natives for slaves. In one instance, a lieutenant of Columbus, Michele de Cuneo, tells of a native woman that was given to him by Columbus: “While I was in the boat, I captured a very beautiful Carib woman, whom the said Lord Admiral gave to me. When I had taken her to my cabin she was naked—as was their custom. I was filled with a desire to take my pleasure with her and attempted to satisfy my desire. She was unwilling. . . . But . . . I then took a piece of rope and whipped her soundly. . . . Eventually we came to such terms, I assure you, that you would have thought she had been brought up in a school for whores” (C, 139).

Whores and objects to be used and given away: these two passages are representative of how Columbus perceived native peoples in general. When Columbus expresses fear, it is most commonly negotiated away by his acts of conquest and possession. The experience of wonder at this point in Columbus is loaded with fear and ignorance, and, like an animal that is afraid and threatened, becomes hostile and violent in response. If Aristotle sought to remove wonder by philosophizing, Columbus responds to wonder by a desire to colonize it. There is a combustible mixture of fear and ignorance throughout all of this, and if we have learned anything from the Conquest, we should know that the result is often explosive violence.

What makes the case of Columbus particularly interesting, if not sacrilegious, is his assurance that God is behind it all, that God is, in fact, the wind beneath his sails, sustaining and succoring him, even speaking directly to him when the tsunamis of his life threaten to unmake him. When failure and disaster seem to gain the upper hand, he fights off disillusionment with the resilient and stubborn conviction that he is acting under the mandate of God and Spain in support of the Reconquista of Andalusia and of the crusade to reconquer the Holy Land. He quickly turns to the divine for such consolations, as in this case when he speaks of Mary’s presence in his life: “When I was much afflicted and on the point of abandoning everything and escaping, Our Lady miraculously consoled me and said to me, ‘take courage, and do not faint nor fear, for I will provide in all things’” (C, 293). And in another instance, on the verge of despair, he falls asleep and hears “a compassionate voice saying, ‘O fool, slow to believe and serve thy God, the God of all! What more did he do for Moses or David his servant than he has done for thee? . . . He gave thee the Indies’” (C, 122).

The religious experiences of Columbus are a strange rendition of mystical themes. Traditional mystical discourse of detachment and abnegation are altogether absent. Instead, mysticism here is a tool of conquest and a confirmation of possession—“He gave thee the Indies!” Instead of demolishing and dispossessing the idols of thought and desire, Columbus’s mystical revelations seem to act as the servants of covetousness and appetite. Of course, his cupidity is never more obvious than in his devotion to gold, but when Columbus’s dearest idol could not be found, he would devise an alternative plan, one that would substitute Indian bodies for missing gold. In 1494, he captured more than a thousand natives and sent some five hundred of them to be sold in the slave markets of Seville. In his letter on his first journey, he assures the Sovereigns that he will procure as much gold and spices as they desire—something which at this point he could not deliver—and also as many slaves as possible: “I will also bring them as much aloes as they ask and as many slaves, who will be taken from the idolaters” (C, 122). While the Sovereigns initially approved the sale of Columbus’s slaves, they soon withdrew their consent pending a study by a commission of theologians and legal experts on the ethical and legal implications.

Columbus’s version of mysticism, thus, resembles fantasy more than Christian mysticism. His confessions of faith echo mystical themes and desires, but they are often profane and idolatrous perversions of mysticism. Columbus substitutes fantasy for mysticism the way he had substituted native bodies for gold and hoped that no one would be the wiser for it. Instead of mysticism, the fantasies of Columbus capture with precision the meaning and aim of idolatry, the ignoble consecration of profane images and desires. In fantasy, as in idolatry, the human gaze settles in “arrested, fixated forms of representation” and, thus, proscribes ahead of time the discovery of something different (Bhabha).¹¹ Columbus perfectly embodies this kind of look, ego-centered, narcissistic, self-important. He would not discover the Americans any more than he would discover God for one obvious reason: his perception of both was frozen and fixed, already determined by what he expected and anticipated to find. He would never capture the truth of native lives and cultures because his vision was blocked by a cataract that produced tunnel vision. He would see only what the mirror reflected back to him, his own image and the projection of his own desires, wants, and beliefs.

It is also true, however, that the desires of Columbus cannot always be reduced to base motives. There are sublime and transcendent emotions swimming in his soul that fuel his relentless drive for exploring the unknown. Even when he doesn’t explicitly name these desires, it seems clear that he wants to play the part of the biblical patriarchs and become the new Adam or Abraham of his age (to give names to creation when it is still fresh and young like Adam; to migrate from the known to the unknown in search of promised lands like Abraham). In this regard, his journeys are not only into undiscovered regions of the world but back in time, to the place and time of human origins when Adam and Eve wandered the earth. Recall that in his third voyage, Columbus claims to have come upon the end of the East, where Paradise can be found: “For I believe that the earthly Paradise lies here, which no one can enter except by God’s leave. . . . It lies at the summit of what I have described as the stalk of a pear, and that by gradually approaching it one begins, while still at a great distance, to climb towards it” (C, 221). Columbus craves contact with the place of human origins, the womb of the earth, the sacred place where God dwells. His mind is filled with an erotic and religious longing for something that always escaped him, “for the kingdom or the paradise or the Jerusalem that he could not reach.”¹² Like a troubadour who can never possess his beloved except in his dreams and fantasies, the desires of Columbus are always unrequited and unfulfilled. In this sense, his capacity for wonder is a manifestation of what he does not possess, of the undefined and elusive goal for which he is passionately searching. And, for Greenblatt, insofar as this dimension of wonder in Columbus carries with it the sense of absence and lack, it continues the medieval sense “that wonder and temporal possession are mutually exclusive.”¹³

We know well, however, how Columbus eventually betrays this intuition and conflates wonder and temporal possession. He could not be a troubadour, or even less a Christian mystic, if only because he does not respect the distance and inaccessibility of the other. If Columbus fails the mystical heritage, it is in his devotion to divine immanence without transcendence, to aesthetics without ethics, and, ultimately, to his love for idols. Wonder and temporal possession go hand in hand for Columbus because he knows only a god that he can name, control, possess, and make his own. In place of YHWH, the golden calf has assumed its throne in the life of Columbus, and it is in his honor, not for God, nor for the natives of the New World, that he would devote himself. In this desire for a tangible, material deity, entirely present and determinate, Columbus would seemingly take no notice of a fundamental dimension of mystical thought, namely, divine absence and, thereby, the need for dispossession and emptiness in the life of one seeking to mirror this divine emptiness. Columbus couldn’t appreciate the meaning of divine emptiness or nothingness among Pseudo-Dionysius, John the Scot Eriugena, or Eckhart because he was so eager for fullness, for what would fill the emptiness of his heart and pockets.

If we are to attribute any mystical or Adamic qualities to Columbus, therefore, we know that these also include the great catastrophic sin of Adam as well. Columbus brought original sin from the Old World like a plague that would infect everything and everyone. True to his biblical ancestor, Columbus’s descendants would suffer long and hard for his inability to resist taking and eating the fruits of paradise, fruits that included human bodies alongside apples and such. The heritage of this serpentine American patriarch will always include this original and decisive sin that stained the American soul and cast a pall over this beautiful, troubled continent. In Billie Holiday’s haunting rendition of “strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees,” I recognize the history of Columbus’s effect, the history of exile and slavery he left in his wake:

Southern trees bear strange fruit,

Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,

Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,

Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.¹⁴

Billie Holiday sounds out an elegy on behalf of all the strange fruit of the Americas that has been violently plucked from its branches, never allowed to ripen. These American trees stained with blood share the malediction and curse brought on by Adam’s primal deed and that of Columbus. The result has been a long history of people hanging from trees, crucified peoples.

Long before Billie Holiday’s lament for crucified peoples, however, other American voices cried out in favor of the dispossessed.¹⁵ The second route of wonder that I want to map in this chapter shows us how wonder can be a force that explodes ethnocentric, European assumptions of superiority and that can reveal to us a glimpse not only of diversity and pluralism, but of infinity, the iconic face of the other. I am suggesting that an articulation of the wondrous and marvelous, as readily as they can become assimilated and exoticized by the colonial enterprise, can also be thought of as fragments of infinity, as metaphors of the unknown and unknowable, as gestures of silence that leave us stunned, uncertain, tolerant. In the figures we will now be analyzing, wonder is chastened by a sense of exile. These remarkable figures recognize the marvelous and alien nature of native cultures as also residing deep within the depths of their own soul. As Stephen Greenblatt wrote, “The movement is from radical alterity—you have nothing in common with the other—to a self-recognition that is also a mode of self-estrangement: you are the other and the other is you.”¹⁶ We are the aliens and exiles.

Voices of the Dispossessed: Cabeza de Vaca and Bartolomé de Las Casas

In Marvelous Possessions, Sir John Mandeville appears as Stephen Greenblatt’s great hero, a “knight of dispossession” he calls him. Although I want to focus on figures of the New World, beginning with Mandeville and Greenblatt’s approach on “wonder” will help us better understand the contributions of Cabeza de Vaca and Las Casas.

Up to this point in my study, I have been suggesting that the evocation of wonder in the Middle Ages and Renaissance was a common strategy by which something new and unfamiliar, alien and foreign, or even terrible and hateful was assessed. We have already explored the way that wonder can operate in the service of possession and colonialism, but too little has been said thus far about the liberating impulse of wonder. The enriching possibility of wonder lies, for Greenblatt, in its indeterminacy. It is a metaphor of the absence rather than fullness of knowledge, the partiality and deficiency of human reason more than its wholeness.

It is not enough to call to mind the intellectual indeterminacy of wonder, however. There is also something sensual about wonder, something that strikes at the core of the human person, that thumps the chest and attacks the heart. No wonder, then, that Aquinas’s famous teacher Albert the Great described wonder with affective metaphors. It is “a constriction and suspension of the heart caused by amazement at the sensible appearance of something so portentous, great, and unusual that the heart suffers a systole.”¹⁷ The systole here is the affective response to something that appears incomprehensible to the mind. Wonder is the body and soul’s gasp at the unexpected and surprising, the extraordinary and strange. It is an electric current and feeling that suffuses the body with an untamed mixture of curiosity, desire, and fear. For Greenblatt, then, wonder incites human desire as much as it reminds us of human ignorance.¹⁸

While different approaches to wonder are evident throughout the Middle Ages—from philosophy’s search to remove ignorance to the enhancement or intensification of wonder in art or mysticism—wonder is especially abundant in travel narratives, and Mandeville’s text, The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, is a great example of wide-eyed wonder. Around every corner of his journey he encounters people, places, and things startlingly new and different, and he never ceases to be amazed by it all. In entering foreign territory, wonder comes as naturally to him as fear comes to a child suddenly lost and alone. While there are manifestations of this primal fear in Mandeville’s travels, the stronger impulse is actually courage—there is a lot of nerve and audacity in Mandeville’s willingness to take leave of his home and wander through unknown lands. And he is clearly changed as a result: Mandeville’s journey from the West to the Holy Land and then into regions further east resulted in this remarkable knight’s suspension of all he had known prior to the journey and, subsequently, in a new vision—more catholic, more liberal, magnanimous. Mandeville is a border crosser, an illegal alien, trespassing across walled cities and across the boundaries of European preconceptions and prejudices, and it took heavy doses of courage for him to scale walls of this sort.

Mandeville’s experiences in the East (Turkey, India, China), for instance, instill in him a remarkable sympathy and appreciation for human diversity (I leave aside the question of whether Mandeville ever actually traveled to these regions in person or whether they are the journeys of a remarkably imaginative reader). Not only does he withhold condemnation and judgment of different cultures and religions, he speaks admiringly of Orthodox Christians, Muslims, and Hindu Brahmins. In a memorable passage about Brahmins—who “always go about naked”—Mandeville writes:

Even if they are not Christians, nevertheless by natural instinct or law they live a commendable life, are folk of great virtue. . . . And even if these people do not have the articles of our faith, nevertheless, I believe that because of their good faith that they have by nature, and their good intent, God loves them well and is well pleased by their manner of life, as He was with Job, who was a pagan, yet nevertheless his deeds were as acceptable to God as those of His loyal servants. And even if there are many different religions and different beliefs in the world, still I believe God will always love those who love Him in truth and serve Him meekly and truly. . . . For we know not whom God loves nor whom He hates. (SJM, 178–80)

We learn a lot about Mandeville from this passage. He reveals to us a man who is charitable and benevolent toward all of God’s creatures and who contends on their behalf, speaking of their goodness and natural faith, their ability to love God however different and idiosyncratic their religions may appear to the Christian mind. But he also tells us about his theology, how little we know the mind of God, how little we can presume about anything about God’s ways. Although there are many precedents for this Christian approval of pagan traditions—medieval theology’s practice of baptizing the Greek philosophers—Mandeville is a path breaker both for his emphasis on travel and for his almost anthropological interest in non-Christian religions. He is not, after all, speaking of Greek philosophy as in most Christian theology, but of the various religions and beliefs of the world. Quite unlike a sequestered theologian—say, Thomas Aquinas—Mandeville’s narrative is the tale of a man who achieves wisdom through all he experienced about the other, through the people he came to know, the friendships created, the relationships developed. If the hero of the narrative realizes that God loves everyone “even if they are not Christian,” it comes at the end of a long journey and through experiences that are closer to the writing of history than to philosophy, closer to Herodotus than to Thomas Aquinas (in fact, a lot like the traveler of Thomas More’s Utopia).¹⁹

The protagonist of the narrative, in short, finds his classroom in the wide world of human experience. Like a peripatetic philosopher or naked Brahmin wandering the world, he is not confined to a cell or university. His pedagogy is tied up with his wandering outside the walls of universities, cities, cultures, civilizations. He is a champion of what the medieval Latin tradition referred to as sapentia, an experiential wisdom distinct from a scientific, theoretical approach to knowledge (scientia). Mandeville is a medieval pilgrim driven by curiosity and wonder at the strange and peculiar creations that God has put on the earth. His path is remarkably inventive and original.

To take another example, Mandeville tells a fantastic story about the first approach of Alexander the Great into the lands of the East. As Alexander approaches the land of the Brahmins, one daring sage confronts Alexander and challenges his conquering impulse: “Wherefore then do you gather the riches of this world? . . . Out of this world you will take nothing with you, but naked as you came hither shall you pass hence, and your flesh shall turn back into the earth from which it was made. And yet, not having any regard to this, you are so presumptuous and proud that, just as if you were God, you would make all the world subject to yourself; yet you do not know how long your life will be, nor the hour of your going” (SJM, 179–80).

The lesson is a clear censure of all dreams of invincible wealth and power. Alexander’s conquering drive is a subtle subterfuge hiding his essential nakedness and mortality, says the Brahmin. If Alexander has come to the East to conquer, wearing his pride and presumption like a coat of arms, Mandeville has come for the wisdom of the East. He has come for understanding, to enlarge and expand the horizons of his being and, even more, his culture’s own self-understanding. His exploration of foreign lands teaches him, as Greenblatt remarks, that no one is ever quite at home. His travel narrative is a sketch of homelessness, a disruption of any secure sense of belonging. It is a journal of permanent displacement and alienation, of wandering without possessing. The end of Mandeville’s wandering amounts to an uprooting in his origins.²⁰

All of that is to say that Mandeville has a large, capacious soul, and only by the route of dispossession does he make room for the largesse that he demonstrates in his writings. By dispossessing himself of his ego’s darkest impulses, he suddenly notices manifestations of this drive in his culture at large and does not hide his disapproval and displeasure. European and Christian triumphalism now appears to him just as shameful and disgraceful as any other deadly sin. As Mandeville crosses borders in his wandering, he is interrupting and dislocating his entire culture’s haughty and vain feeling of centeredness (ethnocentrism, Eurocentrism, Christocentrism, etc.). As unsettling and disquieting as this experience can be, Mandeville finds virtue in this cultural derailment the way he finds wisdom in his nomadic ways. He finds value in dispersion.

As much of this ethic of dispersion demonstrates his intellectual magnanimity, it surely also includes an ethics of barrenness and poverty. He tells us numerous stories in the book, but many of them return to the theme of renunciation and abnegation. In his travels to the Middle East he tells us that he lived and served the great Sultan for a long time and even fought on his behalf in wars against the Bedouin. Consequently, the Sultan sought to reward him for his loyalty: “And he would have arranged a rich marriage for me with a great prince’s daughter, and given me many great lordships if I had forsaken my faith and embraced theirs; but I did not want to” (SJM, 59). “I did not want to”: this concise comment typifies his renunciation. He turns away from the lure of wealth and power as Jesus had when facing similar temptations in the desert. His ethic is desertlike, sparse and meager, a Quaker-esque spirituality.

The wisdom Mandeville gains from his encounters with other cultures returns him to his homeland a changed man. He now sees his Western church and culture as an outsider might and the portrait is unflattering. He appeals to the wisdom of the East in hopes that it might help Christianity recover what has been lost, a spirit of humility and simplicity and an appreciation for the rich diversity of God’s creatures. While Columbus carried with him the tales of Mandeville’s journeys to the East, he provides us with a good case of the prophetic warning “they have eyes but they do not see.” Because whatever Columbus saw in these tales, he did not tend to the narratives of dispossession—and they might have been redemptive to his soul.

At the very least, Columbus might have walked away with a richer understanding of wonder, one that is a “disclaimer of dogmatic certainty, a self-estrangement in the face of the strangeness, diversity, and opacity of the world.”²¹ Wonder might have been rescued from Columbus’s profane version, his execrable conflation of wonder and dogmatic certainty. And it would have also been far more faithful to other more ancient, venerable wanderers, like Herodotus. For Herodotus and Mandeville both, dogmatic certainty is denied by wonder if only because there is so much of the world to see and so much variety and difference under the sun. Dogmatic certainty is surrendered the moment these travelers enter foreign lands and confront the bewildering uncertainties of various cultures, the dizzying variety of truths, the plurality of conceptions of the good, the different faces of beauty. Their narratives are thick with wonder because they are at pains to explain phenomena that are like nothing encountered before, like nothing imagined or dreamed. Short of remaining speechless and stupefied—short of remaining silent, that is—they indulge in the language of wonder as a way of remaining silent while speaking, as a way of communicating what is incommunicable.

In reference to the travels of Herodotus, Greenblatt highlights the epistemological significance of his nomadic method: “Herodotus had raised to an epistemological principle and a crucial rhetorical device the refusal to be bound within the walls of a city. Knowledge depends upon travel, upon a refusal to respect boundaries, upon a restless drive toward the margins. . . . Scythian nomadism is an anamorphic representation of . . . the historian’s apparently aimless wandering.”²² If Herodotus’s historical method follows the example of Scythian nomadism, Mandeville follows in the footsteps of the desert nomads of the Bible, including the descendants of Ishmael, Muslim Saracens (the word Saracen derives from the Greek generic term Sarakenoi, for “nomadic peoples,” and was eventually attributed to Arabs in the seventh century as Islam conquered al-Andalus). Herodotus and Mandeville might have never approached these insights if not for their refusal to remain put. These prophets without a home found wisdom in wandering the earth.

In the age of the Conquest of the New World, there were numerous prophets of Mandeville’s breed. They would come to record with their feet as much as the pen the catastrophes of the age. Cabeza de Vaca was one of the most fascinating of them.

Cabeza de Vaca

With Cabeza de Vaca we get another kind of wanderer, even more striking than Sir John Mandeville since Cabeza de Vaca plays a key role in the exploration of the New World, and the account of his adventures and captivity (covering the 1527–36 period) is the first narrative of the land and cultures of North American territory. Cabeza de Vaca’s experience in the New World is the stuff of which fiction is made. The events and circumstances of Cabeza de Vaca’s life seem to have rolled off the pages of some great novel—and a fantastic one at that.²³ For nine long years, Cabeza de Vaca fights to stay alive after being shipwrecked off the coast of Florida with three hundred other Spaniards sent to conquer more New World territory. Only four of them survive.

After being separated from the leader of the expedition, Pánfilo de Narváez (a seasoned colonizer who had achieved wealth and fame in the conquest of Cuba and Jamaica), Cabeza de Vaca eventually wanders from Florida to the territories of Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and finally into northern Mexico. He survives against all odds after being enslaved, enduring cold winters, fighting various sicknesses, and, most of all, battling against the relentless and cruel effects of hunger and thirst. His extraordinary ability to survive would have made him a star of the recent genre of “reality television.” How he survives is, perhaps, what is most curious and fascinating about his story: he becomes a trader among North American Indian tribes as well as a renowned healer. In that dramatic process, he somehow empties himself of his former identity as conquistador to become, in his nakedness, part Indian, the first mestizo of the Americas.

Like so many of the chroniclers of the New World, Cabeza de Vaca wrestles with naming the unknown. He is another Adam searching for nomenclature for places without names. Everything is strange and new to him, and he reels, body and mind, to assign it meaning, to orient himself in an environment that is profoundly disorienting. In the first pages of the account, he warns (and entices) the reader to prepare for an account of so many new things that many will choose not to believe (CV, 4). His subject matter will be the surprising and unbelievable, the fantastic richness and diversity of human beings. If nothing else, he tells us, his travel account will satisfy the curiosity that human beings have for one another. When he describes a particular manner of Indian cooking, for instance, it serves as a general metaphor of the great diversity and strangeness of human cultures: “Their way of cooking them [beans and squash] is so new and strange that I want to describe it here in order to show how different and queer the devices and industries of human beings are” (CV, 85).

Something so ordinary—the preparing of vegetables—becomes for Cabeza de Vaca an example of how extraordinary and marvelous human behavior is to someone with the eyes of a foreigner. What is banal and commonplace to natives is fantastic and idiosyncratic to Cabeza de Vaca, like reality in the eyes of a child, or ice in the eyes of a Buendía. Perhaps most remarkable, however, Cabeza de Vaca knows that he is seen this way by other peoples, that he and his strange brood of European explorers are just as unusual as the most eccentric of barbarians. And he certainly knows that all the foreknowledge he has brought with him is inadequate in this New World, null and void, empty like the desert. As Cabeza de Vaca travels through these mysterious territories with his small, dwindling band of Spaniards, he is navigating through vast, labyrinthine deserts, and he confesses to us that his knowledge about these lands and cultures is equally desertlike, barren, desolate, and devoid of familiar truths and certainties: “Neither did we know what to expect from the land we were entering, having no knowledge of what it was, what it might contain, and by what kind of people it was inhabited” (CV, 11). Fear is a natural response to this, but he survives by his ability, in Rolena Adorno’s words, to negotiate this fear.²⁴

His most remarkable achievement in this regard is his uncanny ability to alter and transform his identity as a Spanish conquistador and to somehow reinvent himself as an Indian trader and shaman. He is now brother to New World Calibans. In this guise, at times naked and starving, Cabeza de Vaca proves himself valuable to various Indian groups by bringing them hides and red ocher (with which they would smear their faces and hair) as well as flint and canes for arrows, and possibly tobacco and peyote. The service that he provides various native communities gives him brief tastes of freedom during a time when he was otherwise enslaved by various groups (the Malhado Indians, as well as the Quevenes and Marianes Indians).

But now comes the strangest part of the story. Cabeza de Vaca somehow becomes what the Indians of these regions most needed and most revered, a shaman and healer, now resembling Prospero in the ways of magic—and, of course, the figure of Jesus. As physician of the body and soul, Cabeza de Vaca begins to minister to a wide variety of native groups, performing acts of healing for individuals desperate for a touch of the miraculous. By making the sign of the cross, breathing on them, and praying in earnest to God, he is able to heal. His reputation as a wonder-worker soon blossoms and spreads among native groups, so that when he is able to escape from his captivity under the Marianes, he flees to a group called the Avavares and is treated with respect, even reverence, “because they had heard of us and of how we cured people and of the marvels our Lord worked through us” (CV, 55). And he travels to other communities to attend to the sick and dying. In the most dramatic case, Cabeza de Vaca is summoned to heal a very sick man only to arrive and find that he is already dead. He follows the pattern that he has established, making the sign of the cross, breathing on him, and praying to the Lord. Later that night, the Indians rush to him, “saying that the dead man whom I attended to in their presence had resuscitated, risen from his bed, walked about, eaten and talked to them. . . . This caused great surprise and wonder, all over the land nothing else was spoken of” (CV, 60).

Cabeza de Vaca now has an uncanny power at his command. He himself has become a wonder-worker with awesome powers like Shakespeare’s Prospero (“graves at my command”). When Cabeza de Vaca is rescued and returns to the Old World, evidence of his healing power ends. Beyond the borders of the New World, Cabeza de Vaca’s shamanistic power is canceled and invalidated. It’s as if it could happen only there, in the margins of the world, where normal laws of reason are suspended, a world teeming with the extraordinary and marvelous.

Whatever one thinks of these wondrous stories of healing, the most marvelous and extraordinary fact of these events is the metamorphosis that occurs to Cabeza de Vaca. He is the one that undergoes a magical and wondrous change. He is a soldier after all. All of a sudden, naked as the day he came from his mother’s womb, he is a New World wanderer, an Indian trader and shaman. He sheds his previous identity as a snake changes his skin: “We went in that land naked, and not being accustomed to it, we shed our skin twice a year, like snakes” (CV, 63).

Like this shedding of skin, the numerous references to nakedness in Cabeza de Vaca’s account is a major hermeneutical key to his writing. His account opens up with a sense of the strangeness of the land and, above all, the strange, naked being that he has become in the New World: “No service is left to me but to bring an account to Your Majesty of the nine years I wandered through many very strange lands, lost and naked” (CV, 3). This sentence is key. Cabeza de Vaca multiplies the references to his nakedness, never wanting the reader to forget his lowly and debased condition. His nakedness is a picture of the most extreme and complete dispossession possible. It is a symbol of the misery and disaster that had befallen this group of proud and noble citizens of the Spanish Empire. And it is a symbol of the fragility and impermanence of imperial dreams, which in the fate of these explorers had turned to dust. Or, perhaps, Hamlet gives us yet another interpretation equally valid: Cabeza de Vaca’s dispossession is his confrontation with death, with the final undiscovered country; his dispossession, thus, is the shuffling off of his mortal coil (Hamlet, 3.1.67). Ecclesiastes says the same thing: “You are dust and unto dust you shall return” (12:7).

Even before their enslavement by Indian groups in Texas, to continue our story, Cabeza de Vaca and his group had journeyed inland from Florida seduced by rumors about gold and abundant food supplies in the land of Apalachee. What they found there instead were hostile Indians as well as very limited and scarce amounts of food—surely, no gold. At times, the desperation of the Spanish was so intense that some resorted to cannibalism: “And the last one to die was Sotomayor, and Esquivel made jerky of him, and eating of him, he maintained himself until the first of March.”²⁵ Almost as desperate, when Cabeza de Vaca and his group made it in their makeshift rafts to an island off the coast of Texas (which they named “Malhado,” bad fortune), they are a company of emaciated and lifeless bodies. Their boat gets stuck in the sand, which requires them to take off their clothes: “Because the shore was very rough, the sea took the others and thrust them, half dead, back onto the beach on the same island. . . . The rest of us, as naked as we had been born, had lost everything. . . . It was November, and bitterly cold. We were in such a state that our bones could easily be counted and we looked like death itself” (CV, 33).

The winter setting only aggravates his naked condition. Exposed to the inclement and merciless winter, his skin (and life) is all the more vulnerable. He is as naked as a deciduous tree in the winter. The winter has done to him what it does to these trees, left him bare and unprotected, completely undressed. In this condition, with his life ebbing away, a group of Indians comes upon them and saves them from certain death: “Upon seeing the disaster we had suffered, our misery and misfortune, the Indians sat down with us and began to weep out of compassion for our misfortune. For more than a half an hour they wept so loudly and so sincerely that it could be heard far away” (CV, 32).

This act of compassion saves Cabeza de Vaca’s life in more ways than one, spiritually as much as physically. His old life and person dies and something else is born in its place like a renascent tree in the spring. Through this display of Indian kindness and affection, Cabeza de Vaca gradually comes to recognize what escaped him as a Spanish soldier, the shared humanity of native and Spaniard alike. In this naked, totally vulnerable condition, Cabeza de Vaca was stripped bare of his Spanish code of honor, of any titles and past achievements, and, above all, of his feeling of European cultural superiority. Only in this wasteland experience of Cabeza de Vaca, in this abject and wretched setting, does he recognize his solidarity with native peoples: “I spent six years in this country, alone with them and as naked as they were” (CV, 43).

Clothes were surely an important mark of status and class throughout European history, and for the Spanish they would have represented certain levels of civilization. To be naked, then, represented a fall of sorts, a diminishment and debasement of civilization that brought one to the level of the uncivilized and barbaric. Nakedness, in the words of Paul Schneider, “was a symbolic turning point, after which the Spaniards could no longer differentiate themselves from those whom they had come to conqueror.”²⁶ Or take Ilan Stavans’s thoughtful assessment of the issue: “[The word] naked . . . signifies bewilderment, even embarrassment on the part of the voyager, and is also used to indicate an uncontaminated, natural disposition toward the environment by the natives.”²⁷

The metaphor of nakedness appears in many New World chronicles, but one of the most intriguing cases is the account of another shipwrecked Spaniard, Gonzalo Guerrero, who “went native” after being shipwrecked off the coast of the Yucatan in 1511. Though the historical record on Gonzalo is scarce and contradictory, the narratives told about him (by Andrés de Cereceda, Francisco López de Gómara, Bernal Díaz del Castillo, and others) emphasize his renunciation of European civilization and his embrace of native ways. Like Cabeza de Vaca, this renunciation leaves him indistinguishable from the natives. In the words of Cereceda, “This Gonzalo has gone about naked, his body tattooed and in the garb of an Indian.”²⁸ And for Bernal Díaz, in taking on this new denuded identity and in marrying an Indian woman, Gonzalo, “the Warrior,” is the father of the mestizo.²⁹

Whether Gonzalo was a flesh and blood person is unclear, but we do know how many chroniclers perceived and interpreted his intimate relationship with native peoples. For some, he is an apostate and traitor, for others he represents the beginning of American miscegenation. As the legends about Gonzalo were developing (Gómara published his version in 1552), there must have been a renewed interest in the reports of Cabeza de Vaca (published in 1542 and then republished in 1555, with the title of Naufragios). How fascinating these tales of wandering, lost, naked Spaniards must have appeared to Europeans. Especially to those disturbed by the reports of violence and abuse in the New World, the cases of these men were refreshingly different. Instead of triumphal narratives of war and plunder, these legends gave us examples like Cabeza de Vaca, men who adopted nakedness and dispossession above the will to power. They gave us individuals far less certain and self-assured, but infinitely more capable of tenderness and compassion than their conquistador counterparts. William Pilkington thinks it was the suffering and debasement that Cabeza de Vaca endured that made him the extraordinary person he was: “The knowledge of human suffering and its psychological, if not physical, alleviation seemed to expand and alter his vision of life; it chastened him, taught him humility, and encouraged his spiritual growth—growth which paralleled . . . his geographic progress.”³⁰

His life, then, comes to mirror his geographic wandering, and his spirituality adopts the look of desert ecologies—barren, arid, empty, unadorned. Even his skin color must have changed hues to resemble the brownness of desert dwellers, of people burned by the sun and darkened by suffering. He must have begun to look a lot like so many migrants and refugees of our own age, wandering through the deserts of the modern U.S.-Mexico border in search of water and promised lands, like the biblical Hagar and her son, Ishmael—themselves exiles—frantically searching for springs of life.

If there wasn’t enough drama and suspense in the narrative thus far, when Cabeza de Vaca and his three companions (a North African slave, Estevanico; Andres Dorantes; and Alonso de Castillo Maldonado) finally are reunited with their countrymen, it is with a group of Spaniards hunting for slaves. Though we would expect a moment of elation at this point—like a child being reunited with his mother—Cabeza de Vaca is suddenly tentative and he is not at all clear where he belongs, whether he is one of the hunters or the hunted. He has a hard time recognizing himself in the rapacious acts of his countrymen and tells us in no uncertain terms how much sorrow it caused him to witness the devastation the slave raids were having on the Indian communities (led by Nuño de Guzmán and Diego de Alcaraz). He comes across villages once full of life and now deserted, the people in exile and hiding in the mountains. He saw with his own naked eye villages that were depopulated and set on fire by these slavers, a “scorched earth” campaign:

We traveled through much land and we found all of it deserted, because the inhabitants of it went fleeing through the sierras without daring to keep houses or work the land for fear of the Christians. It was a thing that gave us great sorrow, seeing the land very fertile and very beautiful and very full of waterways and rivers, and seeing the places deserted and burned and the people so emaciated and sick, all of them having fled and in hiding. And since they did not sow, with so much hunger they maintained themselves on the bark of trees and roots. We had a share of this hunger along the road, because only poorly could they provide for us, being so displaced from their natural homeland that it seemed that they wished to die. . . . They brought us blankets, which they had been concealing from the Christians, and gave them to us, and told us how the Christians had come into the country before and had destroyed and burned the villages, taking with them half the men and all the women and children. (CV, 90)

“We had a share of this hunger along the road”: Cabeza de Vaca’s comment here again represents the new direction his life had taken. His own experience of desperation and hunger was the condition that made possible this expression of sorrow that he feels for the fate of these communities. This passage is filled with pathos and it is an exact, vivid, poignant, and moving description of native dislocation and destitution. In the face of the threat of “the Christians,” Cabeza de Vaca swears to the Indians that he will not allow them to kill any of them or abduct them as slaves. Eventually, when Cabeza de Vaca and his companions reach the Spaniards a standoff ensues between Cabeza de Vaca and the leaders. One of the slavers, Diego de Alcaraz, was insistent that Cabeza de Vaca use his influence with the Indians to get them to come down from the mountains, out of hiding. Cabeza de Vaca relents and proceeds to call for the Indians, expecting peaceful cooperation. It soon becomes clear, however, that the Spanish have no intentions of letting the Indians be: “Thereupon we had many and bitter quarrels with the Christians, for they wanted to make slaves of our Indians, and we grew so angry at it that at our departure we forgot to take along many bows, pouches, and arrows, as well as the five emeralds, so they were left and lost to us” (CV, 95).

Cabeza de Vaca tells us, at this point, that Alcaraz had also attempted to discredit Cabeza de Vaca and his companions by saying to the Indians that they were disloyal renegades and people of little heart. The Indian response to Alcaraz demonstrates how far Cabeza de Vaca had gone in becoming American: “The Indians paid little attention to this talk. They talked among themselves, saying that the Christians lied, for we had come from sunrise, while they had come from where the sun sets; that we cured the sick, while they had killed those who were healthy; that we went naked and barefoot, whereas they wore clothes and went on horseback and carried lances. Also, we asked for nothing, but gave away all we were presented with, while they seemed to have no other aim than to steal what they could, and never gave anything to anybody” (CV, 96).³¹ In his role as a wandering beggar, Cabeza de Vaca has become one with the natives in dress and disposition. His complete dispossession—as I’ve been saying, his nakedness—is a visible indication of his faithfulness to native peoples. His body wears the signs of a wanderer on the earth, a desert pilgrim. His nakedness is an icon of his newfound American identity. This is particularly evident in the episode where the Spanish slave raiders first catch sight of Cabeza de Vaca. Their response to him is one of pure wonder: “The next morning I came upon four Christians on horseback who, seeing me in such strange attire and in the company of Indians, were greatly surprised. They stared at me for quite a while, speechless. Their surprise was so great that they could not find words to ask me anything” (CV, 93).

To these Spaniards, Cabeza de Vaca had become the greatest wonder of all, surpassing anything they imagined about the New World. In his exile in the Americas, Cabeza de Vaca had succeeded in becoming a strange and wondrous being, not only a voice of the dispossessed but one of them. I repeat, he has become brown like them, a savage and impure mixture of European and American cultures, brown as Richard Rodriguez sees it: “I write of a color that is not a singular color, not a strict recipe, not an expected result, but a color produced by careless desire, even by accident; by two or several. I write of blood that is blended. I write of brown as complete freedom of substance and narrative. I extol impurity.”³²

Cabeza de Vaca is brown like this, an impure product of an accident—a shipwreck to be precise—that was both his ruin and his salvation. And in response to this sudden brownness, the “Christians” respond with stupefaction and incomprehensibility. His person causes them to marvel because he himself has become something strange and fantastic, as wild as anything they would encounter in this New World. In speaking of the New World Baroque, Octavio Paz describes well the fascination that this new creature would cause: “In the seventeenth century the aesthetics of the strange expressed with rapture the strangeness of the criollo. . . . The criollo breathed naturally in a world of strangeness because he was, and knew himself to be, a strange being” (OP, 58–59). Cabeza de Vaca is this kind of strange creation, a criollo or mestizo avant la lettre.

Cabeza de Vaca’s real and direct knowledge of native peoples is nothing like the romantic and prejudicial versions of Columbus. He knew the Indians to be people of great compassion and tenderness as well as cruelty and violence. They were, in short, very much like him. And yet, through his wandering and living among them, he learned that there is a great diversity of human beings and that he himself is as strange and wondrous to his fellow Indians as they are to him. It is Cabeza de Vaca’s experience of abject failure and disaster that allowed him to see himself on the same human plane as the Indians: as a vulnerable, mortal, and wondrous being. The great Dominican friar Las Casas, a reader of Cabeza de Vaca, would be undeniably impressed with this message and would himself come to a similar conclusion about the Indians and about himself.

Bartolomé de Las Casas

When Columbus first returns to Seville from the New World, he carries with him a group of Indians in chains. As a young man in Seville, Las Casas was said to have been there for the epic event. This young man would later build a theological defense of the Indians around this principle of “being there,” of witnessing firsthand the events and circumstances of the Conquest of the Indies. Las Casas would eventually take his place in a long line of historians and prophets—the two blend into each other for Las Casas—who were chroniclers of the victims and oppressed of history. Las Casas arrives at this point, however, with more than his own personal experience of the New World. It took a revelation of a classical biblical nature to jolt him from his slumber. And it was the biblical prophets that brought him the message that would be crucial to his life: that God is on the side of the poor and dispossessed.

It is unquestionable that autobiography and personal testimony are cornerstones of Las Casas’s intellectual life. Any consideration of dispossession in Las Casas should begin with his own story, at the moment when he renounces his life as a slaveholder and encomendero after witnessing a massacre of Taíno Indians in Cuba (1514).

Las Casas went to the Antilles as early as 1502 (at eighteen years of age), where he helped manage his father’s encomienda on the island of Hispaniola (granted to Las Casas’s father for traveling with Columbus on his second voyage in 1493). Later, for taking part in the conquest of Cuba under Diego Velásquez and Pánfilo de Narváez, Las Casas had been granted a large encomienda. Privileges like this come at a heavy price, gained at the expense of innumerable individuals and communities. This fact would not be lost on all Europeans in the New World. Already at this early stage in the Conquest there were friars and priests in Cuba and Hispaniola who were protesting the bloodshed and atrocities. Several Dominicans, in particular, would heavily influence Las Casas. In one case, a Dominican friar—possibly Pedro de Cordoba, the leader of the Dominican community in Hispaniola—refused Las Casas absolution for being an encomendero and possessing Indians. Las Casas once remarked that his attitude toward this Dominican at the time was one of respect, “but as to giving up his Indians, he was not healed of his opinion.”³³

Pedro de Cordoba was the superior of a group of Dominicans from the Convent of St. Stephen in Salamanca intent on reforming the Order and recovering the original spirit of contemplation and poverty.³⁴ The Dominicans are mendicants, after all, a word from the Latin verb suggesting “to beg.” When faithful to St. Dominic, they would wander like rolling stones forever on the move, seeking stillness in and through movement, contemplation through action. This itinerant lifestyle was a parable of exile and perpetual displacement on this earth. The betrayal of this nomadic virtue—for these Dominicans, the impulse to settle down and take possession—represented the victory of the “City of Man” over the “City of God.” For the reform-minded Dominicans of the age of Conquest, this victory was almost total and absolute in the New World, so much, in fact, that the “City of Man” had achieved totalitarian authority. Those homesick pilgrims that belonged to the “City of God” were, by contrast, few and far between, like revolutionaries on the verge of defeat, disunited and routed. The Dominicans, however, would try to rally them.

Las Casas would never forget one mendicant preacher in particular, the Dominican friar Antonio Montesinos. Las Casas sat calmly in the church pews as Montesinos mounted the pulpit and began his tirade. In opening his mouth, a dam broke and a flood of accusations and denunciations accosted the congregation like volcanic lava burning up everything in its path. The biblical text for the sermon was the passage relating the ministry of John the Baptist, the voice crying out in the desert. Montesinos went on to describe himself as a “voice of Christ in the desert of this island”:

You are all in mortal sin! You live in it and you die in it! Why? Because of the cruelty and tyranny you use with these innocent people. Tell me, with what right, with what justice, do you hold these Indians in such cruel and horrible servitude? On what authority have you waged such detestable wars on these people? . . . Are they not human beings? Have they no rational souls? Are you not obligated to love them as you love yourselves? Do you not understand this? Do you not grasp this? How is it that you sleep so soundly, so lethargically? (LC, HI, 141)

Montesinos’s thunderous words rained on the audience with fury. On that day, Montesinos channeled the best of the Hebrew prophets.

Needless to say, Montesinos caused an uproar. His congregation wanted sweet and sentimental sermons, not this fury that thickened like the dark clouds of a hurricane. Montesinos’s superior in Hispaniola, Pedro de Cordoba, supported his sermon, and himself turns to the king to tell him what is happening in the New World. The colonists are “depopulating” rather than populating the lands. The Indians have the appearance of “painted corpses” rather than living human beings. The cruelties and servitude in the New World are worse than those committed by the Pharaoh and the Egyptians.³⁵