parents would never be able to raise the money to buy the freedom of my brother and me, perhaps not even one of us. What kind of future awaited me with a lame arm? Would I become a servant in Mamí’s house? I refused to accept that either Rodrigo or I would remain in Algiers the rest of our lives. Despite my pitiful state, I developed an unshakable conviction that by whatever means at my reach I would try to escape at the first opportunity to the Spanish town of Oran to the west of Algiers. From there, I would make the crossing on a floating log, if necessary.
Some nights, I would wake up from a nightmare, and it would be so dark and the air so putrid that for a moment I would think I was still on the beach in Greece, that night after the Battle of Lepanto, buried under a heap of dead soldiers, and the little air that reached my nostrils would bring with it the sickening smell of roasting human flesh.
Despair is more contagious than hope. Yet as ephemeral as my hope to survive this ordeal was, I could not give it up—it was all I had. One day, a Spanish hidalgo, who now looked like one of those sick, starving beggars in Spanish cities, asked, “Cervantes, is it true you are a poet?” When I said I was, he said, “Why don’t you recite us one of your poems to relieve our boredom?”
I was not the type of poet who memorized his poetry. In my despondent state, I could barely remember a few scattered verses of my beloved Garcilaso de la Vega, whose poetry in former days I had been able to recite in my sleep.
One of our men caught a virulent fever, and he urinated and defecated blood. I remembered Father saying: “Song and play will chase sorrows away.” To make his last hours more pleasing, Rodrigo and I chanted patriotic songs we had sung before going to battle against the Turks. The man had been moaning in agony, but as we sang to him he became quiet and listened attentively, and the grimace of pain on his face became a faint smile. Our singing was not enough to snatch him from the claws of death, but for a moment made him forget he was dying.
Our captors made no effort to remove the rotting man. His belly kept distending, until one night his stomach burst, making a deafening explosion, and those close to the corpse were covered with decomposing organs. Then the body caught aflame. The great commotion awoke the oarsmen who started to scream and rattle their chains. By the time the pirates came down, the man’s body resembled a twisted branch that had burned until it turned to coal.
In the aftermath, many of us woke up from nightmares screaming and shaking; some men began to choke their neighbors, mistaking them for pirates; others started to talk like children and called out to their mothers. Another man screamed that we were in hell paying for our sins. Another one cried, “Strike me dead, Lord! If You have any compassion for this sinner, kill me now! Don’t let me live another day!”
Rodrigo proposed: “Why don’t we write a song? Just think of some words and I’ll compose the melody.” Though the buccaneers had confiscated his vihuela, we passed hours composing it. One night, as our ship was tossed in a tempest so violent that we began thinking in anguish that we would sink in chains to the bottom of the Mediterranean, Rodrigo and I began to sing our song:
In the middle of the sea
the hungry, water-heavy sea
with the eyes of desire
we captives gaze
in the direction of Spain.
The waves rock
the ship’s human cargo.
We cry as we sing:
How dear you are, sweet Spain.
Luck has abandoned us;
our bodies are in chains;
our souls are in grave danger.
Cascades of tears fall from the sky
As we are taken to a land
of warlocks and black magic.
How dear you are, sweet Spain.
A few men requested an encore. By the third time, some had memorized the words and we sang together forgetting about the angry sea. Singing our song whose words we had strung together as if to prove we were alive, I
Some nights, I would wake up from a nightmare, and it would be so dark and the air so putrid that for a moment I would think I was still on the beach in Greece, that night after the Battle of Lepanto, buried under a heap of dead soldiers, and the little air that reached my nostrils would bring with it the sickening smell of roasting human flesh.
Despair is more contagious than hope. Yet as ephemeral as my hope to survive this ordeal was, I could not give it up—it was all I had. One day, a Spanish hidalgo, who now looked like one of those sick, starving beggars in Spanish cities, asked, “Cervantes, is it true you are a poet?” When I said I was, he said, “Why don’t you recite us one of your poems to relieve our boredom?”
I was not the type of poet who memorized his poetry. In my despondent state, I could barely remember a few scattered verses of my beloved Garcilaso de la Vega, whose poetry in former days I had been able to recite in my sleep.
One of our men caught a virulent fever, and he urinated and defecated blood. I remembered Father saying: “Song and play will chase sorrows away.” To make his last hours more pleasing, Rodrigo and I chanted patriotic songs we had sung before going to battle against the Turks. The man had been moaning in agony, but as we sang to him he became quiet and listened attentively, and the grimace of pain on his face became a faint smile. Our singing was not enough to snatch him from the claws of death, but for a moment made him forget he was dying.
Our captors made no effort to remove the rotting man. His belly kept distending, until one night his stomach burst, making a deafening explosion, and those close to the corpse were covered with decomposing organs. Then the body caught aflame. The great commotion awoke the oarsmen who started to scream and rattle their chains. By the time the pirates came down, the man’s body resembled a twisted branch that had burned until it turned to coal.
In the aftermath, many of us woke up from nightmares screaming and shaking; some men began to choke their neighbors, mistaking them for pirates; others started to talk like children and called out to their mothers. Another man screamed that we were in hell paying for our sins. Another one cried, “Strike me dead, Lord! If You have any compassion for this sinner, kill me now! Don’t let me live another day!”
Rodrigo proposed: “Why don’t we write a song? Just think of some words and I’ll compose the melody.” Though the buccaneers had confiscated his vihuela, we passed hours composing it. One night, as our ship was tossed in a tempest so violent that we began thinking in anguish that we would sink in chains to the bottom of the Mediterranean, Rodrigo and I began to sing our song:
In the middle of the sea
the hungry, water-heavy sea
with the eyes of desire
we captives gaze
in the direction of Spain.
The waves rock
the ship’s human cargo.
We cry as we sing:
How dear you are, sweet Spain.
Luck has abandoned us;
our bodies are in chains;
our souls are in grave danger.
Cascades of tears fall from the sky
As we are taken to a land
of warlocks and black magic.
How dear you are, sweet Spain.
A few men requested an encore. By the third time, some had memorized the words and we sang together forgetting about the angry sea. Singing our song whose words we had strung together as if to prove we were alive, I
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