"Tongues of the Matagorda" (1979/1982)

Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca

But the high pageant would never be over for the four travelers. And as for reality, who is to say that the high road is less real than the low one? — Esteban

I added a tool for reading Esteban that might be helpful if you want to think about this story. Many Lafferty readers know about the existence of Esteban. Lafferty mentioned it. Readers wanted it and didn’t get it. Diehards also know the short story connected to the novel, “Tongues of the Matagorda,” included in Golden Gate and Other Stories (1982). The novel is now over sixty-five years old. It gathers dust at Tulsa; the short story is roughly forty-five. If you haven’t encountered the Esteban corner of Lafferty’s world before, it is an early historical novel, centering on Esteban de Dorantes, often called Estevanico. At one point, Lafferty envisioned a collective project to be called chapters in the American novel, a project that went mostly unrealized. This is part of that. He first heard of Esteban as a child from his uncle, and the idea of the explorer stuck. The first white man in parts of America was black.

The historical Esteban was a sixteenth-century North African who became one of the first explorers of the American Southwest. Enslaved by the Spanish, he survived the nightmarishly disastrous Narváez expedition of 1527–1536, the subject of Lafferty’s novel, and, alongside three other survivors, traveled thousands of miles across what are now the Gulf Coast, Texas, northern Mexico, and the American Southwest. The survivor everyone knows is Cabeza de Vaca, but Esteban was the special one. He had intellectual gifts and learned languages easily. He also had a knack for getting along with Indigenous Americans. Without Esteban, his companions would almost certainly have died. He makes for a good Lafferty protagonist. “Tongues of the Mategorda” takes place at a moment when Cabeza de Vaca has been split off from the others, so we get those three.

After summarizing the short story, I’ll say something about how the it fits into the larger historical story the novel tells about Lafferty as a writer. Written decades after the novel, it introduces themes that had matured in Lafferty’s work, making the story both inside the novel by its narrative or sequential placement within Esteban’s travels in the Southwest, and outside it by virtue of Lafferty’s development as a writer. The story does not feel like Esteban, at least not to me. What Lafferty does is interesting. More on that soon.

The story opens in the early 1530s. Two Spaniards and Esteban and two Indians are starving on the mud-sands of Matagorda Bay. vultures circling overhead wonder if they are going to eat well tonight. To pass the time, the men begin telling one another heroic adventure “tongues,” personal epics from their imagined pasts. Each in its way is about hope and survival, but each is also a boast.

Esteban begins. He claims he was originally the fair-skinned son of Emperor Maximilian. In a desperate battle in Africa, facing defeat by a superior foe, he drew on his patrimony, a Jinn’s promise, the ability to exchange places with one’s opponent in every respect. As a result, he killed the “sand-colored man who had been myself” and assumed the form of the black warrior prince Esteban. He has lived inside that “spectacular flesh” ever since.

Next, Glaukos, a Quevenes Indian who has captured Esteban and Captain Dorantes, tells his story. He recalls a gambling match against Jube the devil, who cheated by using a die with one-more-than-six sides. To settle the debt, Glaukos agreed to marry the devil’s sister, “the ugliest woman in the world.” This, he says, is how he came to hold the Matagorda territory on behalf of his people.

Captain Dorantes tells the final tale, reaching back to the 1520s. He claims to have pawned Esteban to a broker in Florence, who kept the enslaved man sealed in a clay jar for ninety-nine days. With the money, Dorantes traveled to Spain, bribed a dragon in the Alcazar Fortress, and returned with what he describes as the greatest treasure in the world—retrieving Esteban only afterward.

Next, the Indian Melas, explains his method of hunting. He says he runs with such intensity that he transforms into a wolf and mountain lion. He even buried a deer three days ago, but he warns the group that local deer are often humans caught in "summer moon-madness." Captain Castillo, a former doctor who believes "water is the same as grace," declares he has the power to open a "clogged sky." As a tribe of armadillos approaches and "rattled their armor" begging for water, the men join Castillo to "command, exhort, pray, and cajole the cloud" until the weather shifts and rain begins to pour.

While the armadillos “howled with delight” in the fresh water, the men unearth Melas’s buried kill. Instead of a human corpse, they find a doe with an “incomparably gentle expression,” and they roast the “mildly rotten” meat to stave off starvation. Glaukos and Melas argue over whose story brought about the miracle, but the mood shifts toward hope as the buzzards vanish from the sky. Captain Castillo declares, “The tide has turned in our favor,” and predicts that after five hundred leagues of travel, they will finally reach their “crystal day in the sun.”

But how does this short story fit into the original novel? Is it a fragment chipped off the larger narrative, perhaps rewritten? A supplement? Or a parallel episode set in the same story-world? In a sense, it is all three. It is a supplement in the most direct way: it fits seamlessly into the chronology of Chapter Seven. Lafferty is writing to his own novel's pattern. Decades before writing the story, Lafferty had already created a deliberate lacuna in the novel. He wrote, “There is a break here which we cannot fill in. The three survivors were as dead men. Then they lived again . . . The life fountain in them had run dry. Then they tapped another fountain.” Years later, Lafferty returned to that gap and filled it in with this short story, which functions as a missing primary document for that moment in the narrative. It is a supplement, too, in a deeper sense: it dramatizes the psychological and metaphysical inflection point where the starving men move from the despair of what the novel calls the low road to the spiritual authority of the high road.

In Chapters Six and Seven of the novel, the four survivors of the expedition are split up. Cabeza de Vaca remains with the Capoques, while Andrés Dorantes, Alonso del Castillo, and Esteban are captured by the Quevenes Indians. “Tongues of the Matagorda” aligns with this historical division, omitting Cabeza de Vaca entirely. It also introduces two Indigenous characters, Glaukos and Melas, and explicitly identifies them as Quevenes, anchoring the story within the ethnographic and geographic context of Matagorda Bay (Holy Ghost Bay), sometime between 1529 and 1530.

One of the pleasures of the story is the way it brings to life something Lafferty had only alluded to in the novel: the storytelling powers of Dorantes and Esteban. He describes them as “royal liars” and charter members of the Club Mentiros. Early in the novel, the narrator tells us that the two men survived by entertaining their captors and companions with extravagant tales of dragons, Jinns, and magical events. Decades later, after having written hundreds of short stories, Lafferty returned to write some of those tales in full.

Dorantes’s story of the Florentine dragon guarding treasure in the Alcázar fulfills the novel’s description of their Arabian wonder stories and Malayan dramas. And Esteban’s tale of body-swapping with a Jinn supplies the mythic foundation for the larger-than-life persona he will inhabit in the novel’s second half.

The novel only hinted at this. Very early in its sequence, Esteban says he is the son of Abu Bakr, the King of Sonrai. In the short story, Esteban, this lie (one assumes) becomes mythicized, a fable about magic and Jinns, how he, both the son of Abu Bakr and the son of the Holy Roman Emperor, became Esteban of Azamor.

A brief word about Captain Alonso del Castillo. In both the novel and the short story, he bridges the physical and the mystical. In the novel, Lafferty portrays Castillo as a mystic and a saint—the one who leads the group in healing and miracles. In “Tongues of the Matagorda,” while Dorantes and Esteban use their tongues to brag, Castillo’s contribution is an act of spiritual authority. He prays for rain, and he gets it. In writing this scene long after completing the novel, Lafferty returns to his original. It foreshadows the Grand Cure and other miracles described in Chapter Ten of Esteban, grounding Castillo’s power in an early act of divine mediation, a precedent for what the novel memorably calls the “bright blue light inside him.” Estaban does not know it in “Tongues of the Matagorda,” but just outside its frame, in the novel, he and his companions are going to experience what Lafferty calls a resurrection.

There are further connections in the story to the book, to devils, to cultural exchange, to the aforementioned theme of resurrection, but I’ll close by saying something about the “tongues” of the title. If the short story is a fragment, something that can be inserted into the novel as a paratext written in a different key, it is also a metafictional supplement. It isn’t like Tolkien’s Third Age Unfinished Tales material, which fills out something like the five wizards; it’s the introduction of a new note; not continuity but break. In it, we see the early Esteban world being picked up and observed through Lafferty’s later and fully mature oceanic techniques. In Esteban, Lafferty builds slowly to the continuum of effects at the end of the novel that the mature Lafferty has mastered and learned to exploit in short form.

One of the big historical questions in Esteban is how the four survivors of the Narváez expedition made it. The novel returns repeatedly to this mystery: how could a starving, naked man outrun deer, survive in hostile landscapes, and persist when nothing rational suggested he could?

In “Tongues of the Matagorda,” Lafferty finally resolves a problem he had posed decades earlier. There, he did something startling and unnovelistic. He he cheated. He basically said, “The architecture of my novel cannot account for what has happened. Elsewhere I have called this the prenucleation problem of low mimetic, unresolved until he became a master of fantasy. He solves it in Coscuin. This is what the whole passage looks like in Esteban:

There is a break here which we cannot fill in. The three survivors were as dead men. Then they lived again; and that is a resurrection. The life fountain in them had run dry. Then they tapped another fountain below it, the existence of which they had never guessed. The men of the expedition had all been hardy men; and the three survivors out of six hundred had been the hardiest (not in every way, but in the aggregate of all qualities). Now they were called upon to transcend ordinary men in their powers. They responded to it, after being broken and driven all the way down to the edge of death. On the day of their resurrection, Castillo came to the other two and said that he had feasted in the wilderness and that thereafter he would be invincible. Dorantes began to laugh as he had not for a year, and he declared that he had a whole life left such as nobody had ever lived before. Esteban broke into loud and jagged singing and was like a happy drunken man. The Indians of the Bay had never heard singing, having nothing in themselves or their ancestry to sing about. They believed that Esteban was experiencing a death agony, but it was no such thing. It was a resurrection song.”

Filling that break is what "Tongues of the Matagorda” does. It is souls of the men at the edge of death, behind what Lafferty originally wrote. Story and hope keep the men alive. Melas remembers the deer into existence, as it were. It is a principle that runs through much of Lafferty’s later work, in which characters reshape the world through vision, will, word, and demiurgic audacity.

If Esteban is ever published, it will become clear that “Tongues of the Matagorda” builds a few more miles of the High Road into the earlier book. The belated short story lives inside the novel—its location as a moment that must take place in chapter 7—yet it is also outside it, because the book says that what Lafferty easily does in “Tongues of the Matagorda” cannot be filled in. That was an artistic fib. Lafferty grew and he called his own bluff. He goes back to correct himself. He fills it in.

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