subsequently, embrace it in the dark-skinned peoples of the New World.
In this sense, the experiences of wonder and exile are fundamental to the discoveries of Cabeza de Vaca and Las Casas. They would not have become voices of the dispossessed if they did not see the foreignness and strangeness in their own histories and cultures. With their capacity to wonder at themselves, the alien nature of other cultures and peoples suddenly appeared to them far less threatening and dangerous.
While the focus on exile in the present study has a particular kinship with wonder, we should not overstate the resemblances and end up overlooking their singularities. If wonder interrupts our drive to comprehend and explain, exile disorients us with greater force and violence, casting us into the tides and maelstroms of history. In assessing the features of exile in the New World we are suddenly faced with realities that a strictly aesthetical approach to wonder is reluctant to acknowledge: the rupture of violence and colonialism in the New World. No consideration of wonder in the New World is worth our attention if the history of exile is left off the pages. There has been too much suffering and too many disasters in the history of the Americas for us to cover our faces from the historical record. As much as some portraits of wonder in the New World would try to elide and disregard exile, it is always there, haunting Latin American narratives like a disturbing, repressed memory buried within the unconscious. The tragic histories of Latin American cultures must be narrated if the patient desires the truth, if he is to face memories both menacing and unsettling, therapeutic and wondrous.
So in this passion for the truth, we must look carefully at the histories of displacement and uprooting in the New World: the slave trade, the genocide and abuse of native peoples, the gross inequalities. European possession of the Americas led to the brutal dislocation and resettlement of the Amerindians to where their labor would be needed, and it led, as Las Casas puts it, to a desert of exile.
Our attention, then, will be drawn by the “desertification” of new lands and the part played by wonder in all of this. This should remind us that wonder is not innocent and certainly not free of impurity. For many New World explorers and conquistadors, wonder was often invoked in the service of control and ownership; when wonder appeared on their lips, it furthered a strategy of possession in which the exotic realities of the New World were to be used and enjoyed for European advantage. The wonders and marvels of the New World became enticing objects to own—or else, signs and proof of their inferiority and barbarism.
In a way, the colonial powers in the New World failed to heed the mystical warnings about idolatry, namely, that the “God beyond God” dwells in silence and darkness, in the cloud of unknowing. Contact with the true God, as Simone Weil once suggested, is given to us by absence.1 The rush of European powers to “discover” the New World was a race in being present before anyone else (native excluding). By the act of presence—catching sight of the land by one’s vision, placing one’s foot and body on the land, by a legal record and pronouncement of ownership—Europeans would claim possession. The conquistadors worshipped a god entirely present, one that could be manipulated and controlled, one that would justify and legitimize the possession of the New World. As Las Casas would make clear, this was a god of their own making, an idol that would fill their empty coffers with gold and slaves.
In tracing the different routes of wonder, the title of Emmanuel Levinas’s book Totality and Infinity is suggestive for this study. In the New World, the theme of wonder is used, for one, as a lure and enticement to possession and totality, as it surely was for Columbus, and as a fragment of infinity for Cabeza de Vaca and Las Casas. When seen through the eyes of the latter, it can be a valuable image of dispossession. This chapter will follow these different routes of wonder and see what it has to teach us about first encounters and the discovery of new things.
Columbus: Almirans, the One Who Wonders
When the figure of Columbus turns to the language of wonder—and he does so with great frequency and devotion—it reminds us that we are faced with a medieval man. As much as his tenacious and adventurous spirit suggests something modern, his discoveries and dreams, like his language of wonder, are articulated and named with the only vocabulary that he knows and has inherited from his medieval predecessors. We do not need to look much further than the name he ascribes to the New World (the Indies) for evidence of this. When he comes upon the great river in South America, the Orinoco, he imagines that he is stepping on Indian soil and even approaching the Ganges, where many medieval travelers—Marco Polo, William of Rubruck, Sir John Mandeville—had placed Earthly Paradise.
Columbus, in other words, saw the world with the starry eyes of medieval travelers and was amazed by what he saw and heard in their accounts. Provoked by them, he became a magi of sorts and soon followed the heavenly stars and wonders that enticed his predecessors. And there was plenty to entice him. These travelers, in fact, swam in rivers of wonder and looked to the East as a site where the marvelous was commonplace and the fantastic ordinary. If medieval mystics desired to drown in the sea of God’s love, these figures drowned in a vast sea of marvels and imaginary worlds. For classic and medieval travelers, the border between the West and the East might as well have been the border between the living and the dead because the differences between the two were equally vast—and equally frightening. To venture there would mean facing the dangers and anxieties of the unknown, not to mention the dragons, man-eaters, and other terrifying creatures that made the unknown their home. If one was brave enough to go there, however, the rewards could be immeasurable, like discovering the Fountain of Youth, Earthly Paradise, cities of gold. In medieval representations, the East resembled the “Orient” of later centuries, “a site of dreams, images, fantasies, myths, obsessions and requirements,” to quote Homi Bhabha.2 Never an empirical reality, the East represented what is totally other: the barbaric and strange, the mysterious and irrational. For the men of this age, as in the time of Columbus, the border between fact and fiction is a curious and ambiguous line, permeable and unclear. Passage between the two occurs with regularity to these explorers of the impossible, which is why their discoveries look like the matter of dreams and fantasies.
It is quite clear that the explorers and travelers to the New World breathed this medieval air, and they certainly craved the stuff of legend and fantasy as much as they dreamed of wealth and glory. When first learning of this discovery, the message to the Old World must have felt like chocolate to a tongue that had only known bland foods, like spices to a palate accustomed to insipid foods. They must have been ravished and thrilled by the news.
Columbus and his men traveled across the great ocean aroused by rumors of this sort, rumors of fabulous truths, cities like Atlantis and Cibao, women like Amazons and mermaids, one-eyed men, cannibals, men with snouts of dogs, people with tails—and as they returned to Europe, no matter what their experience, they were loose with their reports and extravagant with their pens. One might say that they gathered the ocean winds for themselves and infused their language with it, creating accounts that were tempestuous and bloated like hot air balloons. Call it creative license if you will, but one thing is clear: they drew from a deep well of fantasy and gave their readers a wild sea of stories. Like their medieval predecessors, travel accounts of the New World describe experiences with strange and bizarre peoples, with customs entirely new and unfamiliar, and with a curious and wild diversity of religious beliefs. In tales of this kind, they thoroughly astonished and won over their readers the way Othello would win over Desdemona with the stories of his fantastic adventures.3
Like Othello, Columbus was a master of wonder’s seductions. He knew how to evoke, stimulate, and nurture it. And stimulate it he certainly did, becoming a powerful spinner of tales and maker of myths. His letters stimulated delight and wonder. If not for gold and silver, pearls and land, Columbus entices Europeans to the New World for a wild adventure, for a romantic experience of an exotic and strange world. The letters are not satisfied with informing, instead seeking to transform their readers and to evoke in them a sense of the marvelous and wondrous. There is something like intrigue involved in Columbus’s letters. They connive more than educate; they tantalize, charm, beguile. Columbus’s
