Read Online The Moor's Account by Laila Lalami - Free Book Online Page B

commissary gave Father Anselmo a deeply censuring look, and the red-haired friar bit his lower lip, as if to force himself to say no more. His face, already burned by the sun, turned a dangerous shade of pink. Now he cast his eyes down on his sandaled feet, like a reprimanded child. From somewhere near the village came the call of a strange animal—I could not tell if it was beast or fowl—but otherwise it was quiet, all the officers waiting for the governor to say something in return.
    Señor Narváez stood up slowly and, rubbing the soreness from his knees, handed the hammer to his page. Take the prisoner away, he said.
    B UT THE INTERROGATIONS DID not stop—they continued for several days, in the privacy of a special hut. Señor Narváez was nothing if not a patient and thorough man. In the presence of at least one of his officers, he spoke to each prisoner and then compared the prisoner’s answers to the ones that had been given by the others. After he had questioned all of them, he did it again, perhaps to see if they had changed their minds. Whenever the guards walked a prisoner back to the holding cell,the commissary and one of his friars would appear. The first would go to the governor to inquire about the progress of the investigation; the other would wash the Indians’ wounds and dress them in strips of cloth.
    So for a few days, I was spared the sight of pain. I heard the howling, but I did not have to see it. Still, as I swept the hut that had been requisitioned for Señor Dorantes, as I picked corn for his meals or washed his clothes with the last scrap of Castile soap I still had—women’s tasks, tasks my bondage had reduced me to and from which I longed to be freed—I had ample time to imagine the prisoners’ pain. I knew what it was like to be whipped, to protest, to proclaim one’s innocence only to be whipped with greater fury, and to find that the beatings subside only in the face of complete and unquestioning surrender. On my neck, I still had a scar made by the heel of my first owner, a man everyone in Seville regarded as kind and devout and generous. Señor Dorantes had not beaten me, but that did not mean that he would not start—all it meant was that I had managed to avoid his ire thus far.
    It took me a day and a half to gather the courage to smuggle some food to the Indians. I could not give them nuts or fruit, because I feared that the guards would find an errant nut or a fallen seed, and would question the prisoners about its provenance. Using an Indian pestle and mortar, I ground some corn and made flatbreads, which I hid until the prison guard had to go to the necessary.
    The night was warm and dark. The only light came from the torches that had been placed along the path that led to the river. When I slipped inside the cell, I heard the movements of the prisoners and smelled their presence before my eyes adjusted to the darkness. Two of them lay on blankets in the corner, asleep or pretending to sleep. The others were huddled together, with their knees against their chests. The man whose nails had been hammered in the village square recognized me and recoiled when he saw me reach into my pocket. I brought out the flatbread and pressed it into his bandaged hands. Seeing this, the others reached out for the bread, too. I wanted to speak their language, but I would have needed to spend time with them in order to learn the cadences of their native tongue. For now, silence was our only idiom.
    How strange I must have seemed to them: not a conqueror, but the slave of a conqueror, who had brought them the small comfort of a littlefood. Perhaps this led them to think of me as a good man, a decent man. But these prisoners did not know, and I could not explain to them, that I had once traded in slaves. I had sent three men into a life of bondage, without pausing to consider my role in this evil. Now that I had become a slave myself, it shamed me that,