The Confusion by Neal Stephenson Read Free Book Online Page B

ocean in the hold of one of a fleet of treasure-galleons, and about eight months later I had my answer: Mama told me that, at the time of my birth, God had blessed me with a gift given only to a few, which was that I fearlessly spoke the truth that was in my heart, and said what everyone else was secretly thinking, but too cowardly to voice. She told me that it was a gift normally given only to the angels, but that I had been granted it in a sort of miracle; but that in this fallen and corrupt world, many were the benighted, who hated and feared aught that was of the angels, and who would surely abuse and oppress me. Hence my dear Mama had broken her own heart by sending me away to be raised by women who were nearer to God than any in Spain, and who, in any case, could not hear me.
    “Satisfied, though never happy, with this explanation, I applied myself to the improvement of my mind and spirit: my mind by reading the ancient books that Mama shipped over from the library of our castle in Estremaduras, which told the tales of my ancestors’ wars against the Saracens during the Crusades and the Reconquista, and my spirit by studying catechism and—at the behest of the nuns—praying, an hour a day, for the intercession of a particular Saint who was depicted in a stained-glass window in a side-chapel of the church. This was Saint Étienne de la Tourette, and his emblems were as follows: in his right hand, the sailmaker’s needle and thong with which his lips had been sewn shut by a certain Baron, and in his left, the iron tongs with which his tongue, on a later occasion, had been ripped out by the Bishop of Metz, who was later canonized as St. Absalom the Serene. Though at the time the significance of these tokens did not really penetrate my thoughts.
    “But my body was never developed until one day, around the time my voice changed, when a new visitor came to lodge with us: a tall and handsome Caballero with a hole in the center of his forehead, something like a third eye. This was Carlos Olancho Macho y Macho: a great sea-captain renowned throughout New Spain for his magnificent exploits against the boca-neers who infest the Caribbean (which—never mind what the English think of it—is, to us, a pit of vipers lying astride the route from our treasure-ports to Spain; a gantlet of fire, flying lead, and bloody cutlasses that must be run by every one of our galleons). Many were the pirates who had been slain by Carlos Olancho Macho y Macho, or El Torbellino as he was called in less formal settings, and a score of galleons would not carry all the silver he had kept out of the clutches of the Protestants. Butin a struggle against the pirate-armada of Captain Morgan, off the Archipiélago de los Colorados, he had taken this pistol-ball between his eyes. Ever since he had been moody to an extent that put all around him—especially his superior officers—in fear of their lives, and he had been unable to put ideas into words, unless he wrote those words backwards, with his left hand, while looking into a mirror—which had proved to be fatally impractical in the heat of battle. And so with great reluctance El Torbellino had agreed to be pensioned off to this nunnery. Every day he knelt beside me in the side-chapel and prayed for the intercession of St. Nicolaas of Frisia, whose emblem was a Viking broad-axe embedded in the exact centerline of his tonsure: a wound that had given him the miraculous gift of understanding the speech of terns.
    “Now I will encompass the entirety of several years in one sentence: El Torbellino taught me, of the arts of war, everything he knew; as well as some things I suspect he made up on the spur of the moment. In this way he brought the phant’sies and romance of those musty old books within my reach. But not within my grasp; for never mind my skill with the cutlass, the rapier, the dagger, pistol, and musket. I still lived in a nunnery in Darién. As I grew into the fullness of manhood, I