Being the dictated record of Don Rodrigo Cervantes de la Noche, notary, of Panama, León, Sevilla, Olinda, and Goa, and of his grandson Pedro Diego Ortiz Cervantes
M. A. Aybar
Recovered from the diocesan packet at León, in the shipment of 1604. An account kept as it was left: open.
In the spring of 1604 a packet reaches the diocesan archive at León: the life of Don Rodrigo Cervantes de la Noche, notary, taken down by his fourteen-year-old grandson across eighty-six Wednesday afternoons. It runs from the surf of Nombre de Dios to a sugar mill on the coast of Brazil to the emptied temples of Goa: comedy, love, and a guilt written in a fair round hand. Rodrigo wrote everything down, and stopped, on purpose, one word before the end. This is the account he left open; whoever reads it, keeps it.
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My grandfather sailed for the Indies in the spring of 1525, twenty-five and about to be twenty-six, with a notary's license still smelling of the examiner's ink and a head full of the wrong ideas about what a man crosses an ocean to become; and because I have only ever known him as an old man, I have had to build the young one backward from him, the way you reconstruct a fire from the shape of its ash, and I will tell you honestly, as I go, where I am guessing. Of this much he was certain, and said plainly: that he arrived believing the law to be a kind of lamp a man carried into the dark places of the world, and that the Indies cured him of the belief by stages, gently at the start, and that the first stage was a mule.
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