Chapter XL. In which the story of the captive is continued

Sonnet

O happy souls, who from the mortal veil
set free and quit, for all the good you wrought,
rose up from the low regions of the earth
into the highest, best estate of heaven,
and, burning both with wrath and honored zeal,
put forth in action all your bodies’ strength,
and with your own and others’ blood you stained
the neighboring sea and all the sandy ground:
your life gave out before your valor did
in your exhausted arms, which, as they died,
conquered although they were, bore off the victory.
And this your mortal and lamented fall
between the wall and steel is winning you
fame that the world bestows, and heaven glory.

“That is just the way I know it,” said the captive.

“Then the one on the fort, if I remember rightly,” said the gentleman, “goes like this:”

Sonnet

From out of this barren, battered-down earth,
out of these clods that lie strewn on the ground,
the holy souls of three thousand soldiers
went up alive to a better dwelling place,
but first, in vain, they had put forth and spent
the strength that lay within their sturdy arms,
until at last, grown few and worn with toil,
they gave their lives up to the sword’s sharp edge.
And this is the ground that has always been
filled with a thousand memories of grief
in ages that are past and ages now.
But from its hard bosom no juster souls
than these will ever rise to the clear heaven,
nor did it ever bear such valiant bodies.

The sonnets were well liked, and the captive was glad at the news they gave him of his comrade; and, going on with his tale, he said:

“La Goleta and the fort having surrendered, then, the Turks gave orders to dismantle La Goleta, for the fort was left in such a state that there was nothing in it to pull down; and, to do it more quickly and with less labor, they mined it in three places; but with none of the mines could they blow up what seemed least strong, which was the old walls, while everything left standing of the new fortifications that el Fratín had built came down very easily. In short, the fleet returned to Constantinople triumphant and victorious; and a few months later my master Uchalí died, whom they called Uchalí Fartax, which means, in the Turkish tongue, the scabby renegade, for that is what he was; and it is the custom among the Turks to take names from some defect they have or some virtue that is in them. And this is because among them there are only four family surnames, which descend from the house of Osman, and the rest, as I have said, take their names and surnames now from the blemishes of the body and now from the virtues of the mind. And this Scabby One pulled an oar as a slave of the Grand Lord for fourteen years, and when he was over thirty-four years of age he turned renegade, out of spite because a Turk struck him a blow in the face while he was at the oar, and he gave up his faith to be able to take his revenge; and such was his valor that, without rising by the base means and roads by which most of the Grand Turk’s favorites rise, he came to be king of Algiers, and later general of the sea, which is the third office in that empire. He was a Calabrian by birth, and morally he was a good man, and he treated his captives very humanely, of whom he came to have three thousand; and after his death these were divided, as he had left it in his will, between the Grand Lord (who is also the son and heir of all who die, and takes his share along with the other sons the dead man leaves) and his renegades; and I fell to a Venetian renegade whom Uchalí had captured when he was a cabin boy on a ship, and whom he loved so much that he was one of the most pampered of his boys; and he came to be the cruelest renegade that was ever seen. His name was Azán Agá, and he grew very rich and became king of Algiers; and with him I came from Constantinople, rather pleased at being so near Spain, not because I meant to write to anyone of my unhappy fortune, but to see whether luck would be kinder to me in Algiers than in Constantinople, where I had already tried a thousand ways of escaping and none had found its moment or its luck; and in Algiers I meant to look for other means of gaining what I so much desired, for the hope of freedom never forsook me; and whenever, in what I contrived and planned and put into action, the outcome did not answer to the intention, I at once, without giving up, would invent and seek out some other hope to sustain me, however weak and slender it might be.

“With this I kept my life going, shut up in a prison or house that the Turks call a baño, where they shut up the Christian captives, both those who belong to the king and those of some private persons, as well as those they call ‘of the almacén,’ which is as much as to say captives of the town council, who serve the city in its public works and other tasks; and these captives find their freedom very hard to come by, for, since they belong to the community and have no private master, there is no one with whom to treat for their ransom, even if they have it. To these baños, as I have said, some private persons of the town are accustomed to bring their captives, especially when they are held for ransom, because there they keep them at ease and in safety until their ransom comes. The king’s captives who are held for ransom do not go out to work with the rest of the rabble either, except when their ransom is slow in coming; for then, to make them write for it more urgently, they make them work and go for firewood with the others, which is no small labor.

“I, then, was one of those held for ransom; for, when it became known that I was a captain, although I spoke of my small means and lack of property, it did nothing to keep them from putting me among the gentlemen and people held for ransom. They put a chain on me, more as a mark of ransom than to keep me secure with it; and so I passed my life in that baño, with many other gentlemen and persons of rank who were marked out and held for ransom. And, although hunger and nakedness might trouble us at times, and indeed almost always, nothing troubled us so much as hearing and seeing at every turn the never-seen, never-heard-of cruelties my master used on the Christians. Every day he hanged one, impaled another, cut off the ears of a third; and this with so little cause, or so entirely without it, that the Turks knew he did it only for the sake of doing it, and because it was his natural disposition to be the murderer of the whole human race. The only one who fared well with him was a Spanish soldier named something de Saavedra,¹ who, though he did things that will remain in the memory of those people for many years, and all of them to gain his freedom, was never struck by him, nor ordered struck, nor ever given a harsh word; and for the least of the many things he did, we all feared he would be impaled, and he feared it himself more than once; and, were it not that time does not allow, I would tell now something of what this soldier did, which would go a long way toward entertaining and astonishing you, far more than the telling of my own story.

“I say, then, that overlooking the courtyard of our prison were the windows of the house of a rich and prominent Moor; and these, as Moorish windows usually are, were more holes than windows, and even they were covered with very thick, close lattices. It happened, then, that one day, as I was on a flat roof of our prison with three other companions, trying how far we could jump in our chains, to pass the time, and we were alone, because all the other Christians had gone out to work, I happened to raise my eyes, and saw a cane appear through those closed little windows I have spoken of, with a cloth tied to the end of it; and the cane was waving and moving, almost as if it were making signs for us to come and take it. We kept watching, and one of those who were with me went and stood under the cane, to see whether they would let it go, or what they would do; but, as soon as he got there, they raised the cane and moved it from side to side, as if they were shaking their head to say no. The Christian came back, and they lowered it again and made the same movements as before. Another of my companions went, and the same thing happened to him as to the first. Finally the third went, and he fared as the first and the second had. When I saw this, I did not want to miss trying my luck, and, as soon as I came and stood under the cane, they let it drop, and it fell at my feet inside the baño. I hurried to untie the cloth, in which I saw a knot, and inside it were ten cianíis, which are coins of base gold the Moors use, each of them worth ten of our reales. There is no need to say whether I was glad of the find, for my joy was as great as my wonder at thinking where that bounty could have come to us from, and to me especially, since their unwillingness to let the cane go to anyone but me said plainly that the favor was meant for me. I took my good money, broke the cane, went back to the little roof, looked at the window, and saw a very white hand come out of it, opening and closing very quickly. From this we understood, or imagined, that some woman who lived in that house must have done us that kindness; and, as a sign that we were grateful for it, we made zalemas in the Moorish fashion, bowing our heads, bending our bodies, and crossing our arms upon our breasts. A little after, they put out of the same window a small cross made of canes, and then drew it in again. This sign confirmed us in thinking that some Christian woman must be held captive in that house, and that she was the one who was doing us good; but the whiteness of the hand, and the bracelets we saw on it, undid this thought, though we imagined that she must be a Christian woman turned renegade, the kind that their own masters very often take as lawful wives, and even count themselves lucky to do so, for they value them above the women of their own nation.

“In all our reasoning we came nowhere near the truth of the matter; and so all our pastime from then on was to gaze at the window where the star of the cane had appeared to us, and to steer by it as by the north star; but a good fifteen days went by in which we did not see it, nor the hand either, nor any other sign. And, though in this time we tried with all diligence to find out who lived in that house, and whether there was any Christian renegade woman in it, we never found anyone to tell us anything except that a prominent and rich Moor lived there named Agi Morato, who had once been warden of La Pata, which among them is an office of great standing. But when we least expected any more cianíis to rain down on us from there, we suddenly saw the cane appear, and another cloth on it, with another knot, a fatter one; and this was at a time when the baño, as on the earlier occasion, was empty and deserted. We made the usual trial, each of the same three of us going before me, but the cane surrendered to none of them but me, for, as I came up, they let it drop. I untied the knot, and found forty Spanish gold escudos and a sheet of paper with Arabic writing on it, and a large cross drawn below the writing. I kissed the cross, picked up the escudos, went back to the roof, we all made our zalemas, the hand appeared again, I made signs that I would read the paper, and they closed the window. We were all left bewildered and glad at what had happened; and, as not one of us understood Arabic, great was our desire to understand what the paper contained, and greater the difficulty of finding someone to read it.

“At last I resolved to trust a renegade, a native of Murcia, who had professed himself a great friend of mine, and who had given pledges between us that obliged him to keep any secret I entrusted to him; for some renegades, when they intend to go back to Christian lands, are in the habit of carrying with them signed statements from captives of rank, in which they testify, as best they can, that such and such a renegade is a good man, that he has always done good to Christians, and that he is eager to escape at the first chance that offers. There are some who procure these testimonials with a good intention; others make use of them by chance and by design: for, when they come raiding Christian lands, if they happen to be cast away or taken captive, they bring out their signed papers and say that those papers will show the purpose they came with, which was to stay in Christian lands, and that this was why they had come raiding with the other Turks. In this way they escape that first fury and are reconciled with the Church without any harm being done them; and, when they see their chance, they go back to Barbary to be what they were before. There are others who use these papers, and procure them, with a good intent, and stay in Christian lands.

“Well, this friend of mine was one of the renegades I have described, and he had signed statements from all our comrades, in which we vouched for him as much as was possible; and had the Moors found these papers on him, they would have burned him alive. I found out that he knew Arabic very well, and not only to speak it, but to write it; but, before I opened my mind to him fully, I asked him to read me that paper, which I said I had found by chance in a hole in my quarters. He opened it, and spent a good while looking at it and construing it, muttering under his breath. I asked him whether he understood it; he told me he did, very well, and that, if I wanted him to give it to me word for word, I should give him pen and ink, so that he could do it better. We gave him at once what he asked for, and little by little he put it into Spanish; and, when he had finished, he said: ‘All that is set down here in Spanish, without missing a letter, is what this Moorish paper contains; and you must know that where it says Lela Marién it means Our Lady the Virgin Mary.’

“We read the paper, and it went like this:

“‘When I was a little girl, my father had a slave woman, who taught me the Christian zalá in my own language, and told me many things about Lela Marién. The Christian woman died, and I know that she did not go to the fire, but to Allah, because afterward I saw her twice, and she told me to go to Christian country and see Lela Marién, who loved me very much. I do not know how to go: I have seen many Christians from this window, and none of them has seemed to me a gentleman but you. I am very beautiful and young, and I have a great deal of money to take with me: see if you can find a way for us to go, and you will be my husband there, if you want; and if you do not want, I shall not mind, for Lela Marién will give me someone to marry. I wrote this; be careful whom you give it to read: do not trust any Moor, for they are all marfuces, all traitors. This worries me very much: I would rather you did not tell anyone, because if my father knows of it, he will throw me down a well at once and cover me with stones. I shall put a thread on the cane: tie the answer there; and if you have no one to write Arabic for you, tell me by signs, for Lela Marién will make me understand you. May she and Allah keep you, and that cross, which I kiss many times; for so the captive woman told me to do.’

“Consider, gentlemen, whether we had reason to be amazed and delighted at what this paper said. And indeed we were both, so much so that the renegade understood that the paper had not been found by chance, but had really been written to one of us; and so he begged us, if what he suspected was true, to trust him and tell him, for he would risk his life for our freedom. And, saying this, he drew a metal crucifix from his breast, and with many tears swore by the God that image represented, in whom he, sinner and wicked man though he was, truly and faithfully believed, to keep faith with us and keep secret everything we might choose to reveal to him; for it seemed to him, and he almost divined, that by means of the woman who had written that paper he and all of us were to have our freedom, and he was to see himself where he so much desired to be, which was restored to the bosom of the Holy Church, his mother, from whom, like a rotten limb, he was cut off and separated by his ignorance and sin.

“So many were the renegade’s tears as he said this, and such the signs of his repentance, that all of us, of one mind, agreed to tell him the truth of the matter; and so we gave him an account of everything, hiding nothing from him. We showed him the little window where the cane appeared, and from there he marked the house and undertook to take special and great care to find out who lived in it. We also agreed that it would be well to answer the Moorish woman’s note; and, since we now had someone who knew how to do it, the renegade at once wrote down the words I dictated to him, which were exactly those I shall tell you; for of all the essential points that happened to me in this affair, not one has slipped from my memory, nor will slip from it as long as I live.

“In effect, the answer given to the Moorish woman was this:

“‘May the true Allah keep you, my lady, and that blessed Marién, who is the true mother of God, and who is the one who has put it into your heart to go to Christian country, because she loves you. Pray to her that she may be pleased to show you how you can carry out what she commands you, for she is so good that she will do it. On my part, and on the part of all these Christians who are with me, I offer to do for you everything we can, even to death. Do not fail to write to me and let me know what you think to do, for I will always answer you; for great Allah has sent us a Christian captive who speaks and writes your language as well as this paper will show you. So, without being afraid, you can let us know anything you wish. As for what you say, that if you go to the land of the Christians you are to be my wife, I promise it to you as a good Christian; and know that Christians keep their promises better than Moors. May Allah and Marién, his mother, have you in their keeping, my lady.’

“When this paper was written and closed, I waited two days for the baño to be empty, as it usually was, and then went out to the usual spot on the little roof to see whether the cane would appear, and it was not long in showing itself. As soon as I saw it, though I could not see who was putting it out, I showed the paper, as if to let them know they should put on the thread; but it was already on the cane, and I tied the paper to it; and a little while later our star appeared again, with the little bundle’s white flag of peace. They let it drop, and I picked it up, and found in the cloth, in every kind of silver and gold coin, more than fifty escudos, which doubled our joy fifty times over and confirmed our hope of gaining our freedom.

“That same night our renegade came back and told us he had learned that in that house lived the very Moor we had been told was named Agi Morato, rich beyond all measure, who had one only daughter, heiress to all his wealth, and that it was the common opinion in the whole city that there was no more beautiful woman in all Barbary; and that many of the viceroys who came there had asked for her hand, and she had never been willing to marry; and that he had also learned that the Moor had had a Christian woman captive, who was now dead; all of which agreed with what was in the paper. We took counsel at once with the renegade on what plan to follow to get the Moorish woman out and all of us away to the land of the Christians; and in the end it was agreed for the time being that we should wait for the second message from Zoraida, for that was the name of the one who now wishes to be called María; because we saw clearly that she, and no one else, was the one who must find the means to overcome all those difficulties. When we had settled this, the renegade told us not to be troubled, for he would lose his life or set us free.

“For four days the baño was full of people, which was the reason the cane was four days in appearing; at the end of which, when the baño was deserted as usual, it appeared with the cloth so big with child that it promised a most happy birth. The cane and the cloth bent down toward me; I found in it another paper and a hundred gold escudos, with no other coin at all. The renegade was there; we gave him the paper to read inside our quarters, and he said that this is what it said:

“‘I do not know, my lord, how to arrange for us to go to Spain, nor has Lela Marién told me, though I have asked her. What can be done is that I will give you a great deal of gold money through this window: ransom yourself with it, and your friends, and let one of you cross over to Christian country and buy a boat there and come back for the others; and they will find me in my father’s garden, which is by the gate of Babazón, near the shore, where I am to stay all this summer with my father and my servants. From there, at night, you can take me away without fear and carry me to the boat; and remember that you are to be my husband, for if not, I will ask Marién to punish you. If you do not trust anyone to go for the boat, ransom yourself and go, for I know you will come back more surely than anyone else, since you are a gentleman and a Christian. Try to find out where the garden is, and when you walk about over there I shall know that the baño is empty, and I will give you a great deal of money. May Allah keep you, my lord.’

“This is what the second paper said and contained. When everyone had seen it, each of us offered to be the one ransomed, and promised to go and come back with all punctuality, and I too offered the same; all of which the renegade opposed, saying that on no account would he consent to any one of us going free until we all went together, because experience had shown him how badly free men keep the promises they made in captivity; for many times some captives of rank had tried that remedy, ransoming one man to go to Valencia or Majorca with money to fit out a boat and come back for those who had ransomed him, and he had never come back; because freedom won, and the fear of losing it again, wiped from their memories every obligation in the world. And, in confirmation of the truth he was telling us, he related briefly a case that had happened almost at that very time to some Christian gentlemen, the strangest that ever happened in those parts, where at every step things happen that cause great fear and wonder.

“In effect, what he came to say was that what could and should be done was that the money that was to be given to ransom the Christian should be given to him, to buy a boat there in Algiers, under the pretext of becoming a merchant and trader in Tetuán and along that coast; and that, once he was master of the boat, a way would easily be found to get them out of the baño and put them all aboard. All the more so since, if the Moorish woman, as she said, gave money to ransom them all, it would be the easiest thing in the world, once they were free, to go aboard even at midday; and that the chief difficulty lay in this, that the Moors will not let a renegade buy a boat or keep one, unless it is a large vessel for going raiding, because they fear that whoever buys a boat, especially if he is a Spaniard, wants it for nothing but to go off to the land of the Christians; but that he would get round this difficulty by making a Tagarino Moor his partner in the ownership of the boat and in the profit of the goods, and under this cover he would come to be master of the boat, with which he took all the rest as done.

“And, though I and my comrades had thought it better to send to Majorca for the boat, as the Moorish woman said, we dared not contradict him, fearing that, if we did not do what he said, he would betray us and put us in danger of losing our lives, if he revealed Zoraida’s dealings, for whose life we would all have given our own. And so we resolved to put ourselves in the hands of God and in those of the renegade, and at that same moment an answer was sent to Zoraida, telling her that we would do everything she advised, for she had seen it as clearly as if Lela Marién had told her, and that it rested with her alone to put the business off or carry it out at once. I offered myself again to be her husband; and, with this, on another day when the baño happened to be empty, at different times, by means of the cane and the cloth, she gave us two thousand gold escudos, and a paper in which she said that on the first jumá, which is Friday, she was going to her father’s garden, and that before she went she would give us more money, and that, if that was not enough, we should let her know, for she would give us as much as we asked her for: her father had so much that he would not miss it, and what is more, she had the keys to everything.

“We at once gave the renegade five hundred escudos to buy the boat; eight hundred went to ransom me, the money being handed to a merchant from Valencia who was in Algiers at the time, who ransomed me from the king, taking me on his word, and pledging it that with the first ship that came from Valencia he would pay my ransom; for, had he paid the money at once, it would have made the king suspect that my ransom had been in Algiers for many days and that the merchant, for the sake of his own dealings, had kept quiet about it. In short, my master was so suspicious that on no account did I dare to have the money paid out at once. On the Thursday before the Friday when the beautiful Zoraida was to go to the garden, she gave us another thousand escudos and let us know of her departure, begging me, if I ransomed myself, to find out at once where her father’s garden was, and in any case to look for an opportunity to go there and see her. I answered in a few words that I would do so, and that she should take care to commend us to Lela Marién with all those prayers the captive woman had taught her.

“This done, they arranged for our three companions to be ransomed, to make it easier to get out of the baño, and so that, seeing me ransomed and themselves not, when there was money for it, they would not grow restless and the devil persuade them to do something to Zoraida’s harm; for, though their being who they were could have relieved me of this fear, still I did not want to put the business at risk; and so I had them ransomed in the same way I had ransomed myself, handing over all the money to the merchant so that he could stand surety with certainty and safety; but we never revealed our plan and secret to him, because of the danger there was.

Notes

1. 1. Cervantes’s own second surname. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra was himself a captive in Algiers from 1575 to 1580 and made four attempts to escape.