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, left him bare and unprotected, completely undressed. In this condition, with his life ebbing away, a group of Indians comes upon them and saves them from certain death: “Upon seeing the disaster we had suffered, our misery and misfortune, the Indians sat down with us and began to weep out of compassion for our misfortune. For more than a half an hour they wept so loudly and so sincerely that it could be heard far away” (CV, 32).
This act of compassion saves Cabeza de Vaca’s life in more ways than one, spiritually as much as physically. His old life and person dies and something else is born in its place like a renascent tree in the spring. Through this display of Indian kindness and affection, Cabeza de Vaca gradually comes to recognize what escaped him as a Spanish soldier, the shared humanity of native and Spaniard alike. In this naked, totally vulnerable condition, Cabeza de Vaca was stripped bare of his Spanish code of honor, of any titles and past achievements, and, above all, of his feeling of European cultural superiority. Only in this wasteland experience of Cabeza de Vaca, in this abject and wretched setting, does he recognize his solidarity with native peoples: “I spent six years in this country, alone with them and as naked as they were” (CV, 43).
Clothes were surely an important mark of status and class throughout European history, and for the Spanish they would have represented certain levels of civilization. To be naked, then, represented a fall of sorts, a diminishment and debasement of civilization that brought one to the level of the uncivilized and barbaric. Nakedness, in the words of Paul Schneider, “was a symbolic turning point, after which the Spaniards could no longer differentiate themselves from those whom they had come to conqueror.”26 Or take Ilan Stavans’s thoughtful assessment of the issue: “[The word] naked . . . signifies bewilderment, even embarrassment on the part of the voyager, and is also used to indicate an uncontaminated, natural disposition toward the environment by the natives.”27
The metaphor of nakedness appears in many New World chronicles, but one of the most intriguing cases is the account of another shipwrecked Spaniard, Gonzalo Guerrero, who “went native” after being shipwrecked off the coast of the Yucatan in 1511. Though the historical record on Gonzalo is scarce and contradictory, the narratives told about him (by Andrés de Cereceda, Francisco López de Gómara, Bernal Díaz del Castillo, and others) emphasize his renunciation of European civilization and his embrace of native ways. Like Cabeza de Vaca, this renunciation leaves him indistinguishable from the natives. In the words of Cereceda, “This Gonzalo has gone about naked, his body tattooed and in the garb of an Indian.”28 And for Bernal Díaz, in taking on this new denuded identity and in marrying an Indian woman, Gonzalo, “the Warrior,” is the father of the mestizo.29
Whether Gonzalo was a flesh and blood person is unclear, but we do know how many chroniclers perceived and interpreted his intimate relationship with native peoples. For some, he is an apostate and traitor, for others he represents the beginning of American miscegenation. As the legends about Gonzalo were developing (Gómara published his version in 1552), there must have been a renewed interest in the reports of Cabeza de Vaca (published in 1542 and then republished in 1555, with the title of Naufragios). How fascinating these tales of wandering, lost, naked Spaniards must have appeared to Europeans. Especially to those disturbed by the reports of violence and abuse in the New World, the cases of these men were refreshingly different. Instead of triumphal narratives of war and plunder, these legends gave us examples like Cabeza de Vaca, men who adopted nakedness and dispossession above the will to power. They gave us individuals far less certain and self-assured, but infinitely more capable of tenderness and compassion than their conquistador counterparts. William Pilkington thinks it was the suffering and debasement that Cabeza de Vaca endured that made him the extraordinary person he was: “The knowledge of human suffering and its psychological, if not physical, alleviation seemed to expand and alter his vision of life; it chastened him, taught him humility, and encouraged his spiritual growth—growth which paralleled . . . his geographic progress.”30
His life, then, comes to mirror his geographic wandering, and his spirituality adopts the look of desert ecologies—barren, arid, empty, unadorned. Even his skin color must have changed hues to resemble the brownness of desert dwellers, of people burned by the sun and darkened by suffering. He must have begun to look a lot like so many migrants and refugees of our own age, wandering through the deserts of the modern U.S.-Mexico border in search of water and promised lands, like the biblical Hagar and her son, Ishmael—themselves exiles—frantically searching for springs of life.
If there wasn’t enough drama and suspense in the narrative thus far, when Cabeza de Vaca and his three companions (a North African slave, Estevanico; Andres Dorantes; and Alonso de Castillo Maldonado) finally are reunited with their countrymen, it is with a group of Spaniards hunting for slaves. Though we would expect a moment of elation at this point—like a child being reunited with his mother—Cabeza de Vaca is suddenly tentative and he is not at all clear where he belongs, whether he is one of the hunters or the hunted. He has a hard time recognizing himself in the rapacious acts of his countrymen and tells us in no uncertain terms how much sorrow it caused him to witness the devastation the slave raids were having on the Indian communities (led by Nuño de Guzmán and Diego de Alcaraz). He comes across villages once full of life and now deserted, the people in