from Florida to the territories of Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and finally into northern Mexico. He survives against all odds after being enslaved, enduring cold winters, fighting various sicknesses, and, most of all, battling against the relentless and cruel effects of hunger and thirst. His extraordinary ability to survive would have made him a star of the recent genre of “reality television.” How he survives is, perhaps, what is most curious and fascinating about his story: he becomes a trader among North American Indian tribes as well as a renowned healer. In that dramatic process, he somehow empties himself of his former identity as conquistador to become, in his nakedness, part Indian, the first mestizo of the Americas.
Like so many of the chroniclers of the New World, Cabeza de Vaca wrestles with naming the unknown. He is another Adam searching for nomenclature for places without names. Everything is strange and new to him, and he reels, body and mind, to assign it meaning, to orient himself in an environment that is profoundly disorienting. In the first pages of the account, he warns (and entices) the reader to prepare for an account of so many new things that many will choose not to believe (CV, 4). His subject matter will be the surprising and unbelievable, the fantastic richness and diversity of human beings. If nothing else, he tells us, his travel account will satisfy the curiosity that human beings have for one another. When he describes a particular manner of Indian cooking, for instance, it serves as a general metaphor of the great diversity and strangeness of human cultures: “Their way of cooking them [beans and squash] is so new and strange that I want to describe it here in order to show how different and queer the devices and industries of human beings are” (CV, 85).
Something so ordinary—the preparing of vegetables—becomes for Cabeza de Vaca an example of how extraordinary and marvelous human behavior is to someone with the eyes of a foreigner. What is banal and commonplace to natives is fantastic and idiosyncratic to Cabeza de Vaca, like reality in the eyes of a child, or ice in the eyes of a Buendía. Perhaps most remarkable, however, Cabeza de Vaca knows that he is seen this way by other peoples, that he and his strange brood of European explorers are just as unusual as the most eccentric of barbarians. And he certainly knows that all the foreknowledge he has brought with him is inadequate in this New World, null and void, empty like the desert. As Cabeza de Vaca travels through these mysterious territories with his small, dwindling band of Spaniards, he is navigating through vast, labyrinthine deserts, and he confesses to us that his knowledge about these lands and cultures is equally desertlike, barren, desolate, and devoid of familiar truths and certainties: “Neither did we know what to expect from the land we were entering, having no knowledge of what it was, what it might contain, and by what kind of people it was inhabited” (CV, 11). Fear is a natural response to this, but he survives by his ability, in Rolena Adorno’s words, to negotiate this fear.24
His most remarkable achievement in this regard is his uncanny ability to alter and transform his identity as a Spanish conquistador and to somehow reinvent himself as an Indian trader and shaman. He is now brother to New World Calibans. In this guise, at times naked and starving, Cabeza de Vaca proves himself valuable to various Indian groups by bringing them hides and red ocher (with which they would smear their faces and hair) as well as flint and canes for arrows, and possibly tobacco and peyote. The service that he provides various native communities gives him brief tastes of freedom during a time when he was otherwise enslaved by various groups (the Malhado Indians, as well as the Quevenes and Marianes Indians).
But now comes the strangest part of the story. Cabeza de Vaca somehow becomes what the Indians of these regions most needed and most revered, a shaman and healer, now resembling Prospero in the ways of magic—and, of course, the figure of Jesus. As physician of the body and soul, Cabeza de Vaca begins to minister to a wide variety of native groups, performing acts of healing for individuals desperate for a touch of the miraculous. By making the sign of the cross, breathing on them, and praying in earnest to God, he is able to heal. His reputation as a wonder-worker soon blossoms and spreads among native groups, so that when he is able to escape from his captivity under the Marianes, he flees to a group called the Avavares and is treated with respect, even reverence, “because they had heard of us and of how we cured people and of the marvels our Lord worked through us” (CV, 55). And he travels to other communities to attend to the sick and dying. In the most dramatic case, Cabeza de Vaca is summoned to heal a very sick man only to arrive and find that he is already dead. He follows the pattern that he has established, making the sign of the cross, breathing on him, and praying to the Lord. Later that night, the Indians rush to him, “saying that the dead man whom I attended to in their presence had resuscitated, risen from his bed, walked about, eaten and talked to them. . . . This caused great surprise and wonder, all over the land nothing else was spoken of” (CV, 60).
Cabeza de Vaca now has an uncanny power at his command. He himself has become a wonder-worker with awesome powers like Shakespeare’s Prospero (“graves at my command”). When Cabeza de Vaca is rescued and returns to the Old World, evidence of his healing power ends. Beyond the borders of the New World, Cabeza de Vaca’s shamanistic power is canceled and invalidated. It’s as if it could happen only there, in the margins of the world, where normal laws of reason are suspended, a world teeming with the extraordinary and marvelous.
Whatever one thinks of these wondrous stories of healing, the most marvelous and extraordinary fact of these events is the metamorphosis that occurs to Cabeza de Vaca. He is the one that undergoes a magical and wondrous change. He is a soldier after all. All of a sudden, naked as the day he came from his mother’s womb, he is a New World wanderer, an Indian trader and shaman. He sheds his previous identity as a snake changes his skin: “We went in that land naked, and not being accustomed to it, we shed our skin twice a year, like snakes” (CV, 63).
Like this shedding of skin, the numerous references to nakedness in Cabeza de Vaca’s account is a major hermeneutical key to his writing. His account opens up with a sense of the strangeness of the land and, above all, the strange, naked being that he has become in the New World: “No service is left to me but to bring an account to Your Majesty of the nine years I wandered through many very strange lands, lost and naked” (CV, 3). This sentence is key. Cabeza de Vaca multiplies the references to his nakedness, never wanting the reader to forget his lowly and debased condition. His nakedness is a picture of the most extreme and complete dispossession possible. It is a symbol of the misery and disaster that had befallen this group of proud and noble citizens of the Spanish Empire. And it is a symbol of the fragility and impermanence of imperial dreams, which in the fate of these explorers had turned to dust. Or, perhaps, Hamlet gives us yet another interpretation equally valid: Cabeza de Vaca’s dispossession is his confrontation with death, with the final undiscovered country; his dispossession, thus, is the shuffling off of his mortal coil (Hamlet, 3.1.67). Ecclesiastes says the same thing: “You are dust and unto dust you shall return” (12:7).
Even before their enslavement by Indian groups in Texas, to continue our story, Cabeza de Vaca and his group had journeyed inland from Florida seduced by rumors about gold and abundant food supplies in the land of Apalachee. What they found there instead were hostile Indians as well as very limited and scarce amounts of food—surely, no gold. At times, the desperation of the Spanish was so intense that some resorted to cannibalism: “And the last one to die was Sotomayor, and Esquivel made jerky of him, and eating of him, he maintained himself until the first of March.”25 Almost as desperate, when Cabeza de Vaca and his group made it in their makeshift rafts to an island off the coast of Texas (which they named “Malhado,” bad fortune), they are a company of emaciated and lifeless bodies. Their boat gets stuck in the sand, which requires them to take off their clothes: “Because the shore was very rough, the sea took the others and thrust them, half dead, back onto the beach on the same island. . . . The rest of us, as naked as we had been born, had lost everything. . . . It was November, and bitterly cold. We were in such a state that our bones could easily be counted and we looked like death itself” (CV, 33).
The winter setting only aggravates his naked condition. Exposed to the inclement and merciless winter, his skin (and life) is all the more vulnerable. He is as naked as a deciduous tree in the winter. The winter has done to him what it does to these trees,
