Students of Reinaldo Arenas will perhaps not recognize the depth to which Arenas has responded to Moby-Dick in the section describing Servando's voyage to Spain at the end of the first part of The Ill-fated Peregrinations of Fray Servando. Arenas picks up Melville's compelling discussion of persecution in the form of Nature. He sets Servando's experiences and frustration with person-to-person persecution throughout the world against the world-roaming anguish of Ahab's encounter with persecution by Nature. Though Arenas focuses on what we would expect to be the interpersonal tension of Servando's persecution while Melville focuses on the inscrutablility of Nature in Ahab's persecution, their conclusions about persecution in the world have the common sense that there is no true distinction between Nature as persecutor and man as persecutor. Rather, man participates in the persecutiveness that is universal in the world.
It may at first seem that Moby-Dick and The Ill-fated Peregrinations of Fray Servando should be the last two books for one to consider together. Yet they are not so dissimilar. Both purport to have some bearing on the history of an American enterprise ‹ whaling (adventurous commerce) in the first, and revolution in the second. These histories collide within the texts themselves when Ishmael claims, "[whaling is responsible for the democratization of the Americas]." This study will demonstrate some of the specific thematic similarities, focusing on the opposition of persecution as a human tendency as against persecution as a natural or universal tendency.
Chapter Nine, On the Friar's Journey, is explicit in its invocation of Moby-Dick. Aside from participating in the discourse of the poetic sea-adventure to which Melville also resorted frequently (and helped create?), Arenas describes the sinking of Servando's ship much as the Pequod sinks:

And just before I sank I saw the boat's stern pullingaway over the still waters of that latitude, the sailors aboard waving and crying their good-byes amidst great howls of vicious laughter. And then a moment later I saw the ship tremble, or shiver, from some great blow and sink like a stone, just at the horizon. [FS, p. 48]

This could easily be a description of the climactic ending of Moby-DIck , only from a different perspective than Ishmael's:

From the ship's bows, nearly all the seamen now hung inactive; hammers, bits of plank, lances, and harpoons, mechanically retained in their hands, just as they had darted from their various employments; all their enchanted eyes intent upon th whale, which from side to side strangely vibrating his predestinating head, sent a broad band of overspreading semicircular foam before him as he rushed. Retribution, swift vengeance, eternal malice were in his whole aspect, and spite of all that mortal man could do, the solid white buttress of his forehead smote the ship's starboard bow, till men and timbers reeled. Some fell flat upon their faces. Like dislodged trucks, the heads of the harpooneers aloft shook on their bull-like necks. Through the breach, they heard the waters pour as mountain torrents down a flume. [MD, p. 635]

And this sense is of course intensified with what follows for Servando:

...I thought that it was a miracle that had brought me to the fell pass I was in), but finally I heard the sound of a great snorting and bellowing over the waters and I saw a giant beast rolling in the waves and shooting a great vaporous column into the air...The whale, maddened perhaps by the stifling heat, had crashed into the boat, sinking it at a stroke. I watched it now resting on the surface of the water, as though taking a moment's rest from its easy labor. It was of the whitest color imaginable, and as ai swam toward it and climbed up on its hump, cursing at every step, but very softly, it paid me not the slightest heed. [FS, p. 49]

The next action in Servando's adventure finds him tapping into Biblical mythology with Melville's help.

...And so it was that I awoke as I was washed ashore by a great wave on the rocky coast of the port of Cádiz. [FS, p. 49]

An early chapter of Moby-Dick finds Ishmael at the sermon of Father Mapple, who makes it possible for Arenas to make Servando a kind of Jonah while still ending up in Spain to undergo more persecutions. Mapple says,

[Jonah] skulks about the wharves of Joppa, and seeks a ship that's bound for Tarshish. There lurks, perhaps, a hitherto unheeded meaning here. By all accounts Tarshish could have been no other city than the modern Cadiz. That's the opinion of learned men. And where is Cadiz, shipmates? Cadiz is in Spain; as far by water, from Joppa, as Jonah could possibly have sailed in those ancient days, when the Atlantic was an almost unknown sea. [MD, p. 69]

In chapter nine there is much to suggest that Arenas has decided that the questions in Moby-Dick are important for his own project.
And indeed, below the layer of language, the themes of this same section have many parallels with themes in Moby-Dick. One can see already with the above exerpt from Mapple's sermon that Servando's experiences find a rich context in passages of Moby-Dick. Servando's life is largely an attempt to escape situation after situation, and the futility of it is similar in magnitude to the futility of Jonah who seeks to flee God by going as far as contemporary sails can take him. The experience of persecution or subjection to evil power, however, is the common thread that interests me. In "The Advocate," Ishmael expresses one version of this experience:

And if the idea of peril so much enhances the popular conceit of the soldier's professionn; let me assure ye that many a veteran who has freely marched up to a battery, would quickly recoil at the apparition of the sperm whale's vast tail, fanning into eddies the air over his head. For what are the comprehensible terrors of man compared with the interlinked terrors and wonders of God! [MD, pp. 138-9]

For the sake of his whale, Melville here makes much of the distinction between humanity and nature. He sets the "comprehensible terrors of man" against the "interlinked...wonders of God" as if man is not included among the things interlinked. As we will see, Melville complicates the assertion in a number of subsequent passages. Indeed, there is more to suggest that Melville wanted precisely to efface this distinction between man and Nature.
Having been badgered by Stubb for some time, Fleece the cook mutters a telling sentiment:

"Wish, by gor! whale eat him, 'stead of him eat whale. I'm bressed if he ain't more of a shark dan Massa Shark hisself," muttered the old man, limping away; with which sage ejaculation he went to his hammock. [MD, p. 341]

Stubb, a petty and benign dictator next to Ahab, becomes "more of a shark dan Massa Shark hisself." Stubb is more of Nature than Nature, in the form of the shark, is of itself. And, from the other direction, the shark takes on the apellation of a man, "Massa Shark." The shark is both raised to the level of one who can be master to an ex-slave, and given an official, human title, capitalized letters and all. While there is no questioning the humor that Melville gives the scene, it is also impossible to dismiss this "sage ejaculation" as the foolish gripe of an ignorant slave.
Fleece's complaint plays into a larger system of mis-directed voracity and meanness. In the heat of their attack on the captured whale-carcass, the sharks "viciously snapped, not only at each other's disembowelments, but like flexible bows, bent round, and bit their own; till those entrails seemed swallowed over and over again by the same mouth, to be oppositely voided by the gaping wound"(MD, p. 346).
Beyond these figurative contradictions of the man-Nature distinction in maliciousness or persecutiveness, Ishmael contradicts himself in almost the same terms of his original statement. The experience of Nature as being far more overpowering and awe-inspiring than humanity is contradicted already within twenty pages, in "Knights and Squires":

...let me assure ye that many a veteran who has freely marched up to a battery, would quickly recoil at the apparition of the sperm whale's vast tail, fanning into eddies the air over his head. For what are the comprehensible terrors of man compared with the interlinked terrors and wonders of God! [MD, pp. 138-9]

And brave as he might be, it was that sort of bravery, chiefly visible in some intrepid men, which, while generally abiding firm in the conflict with seas, or winds, or whales, or any of the ordinary irrational horrors of the world, yet cannot withstand those more terrific because more spiritual terrors, which sometimes menace you from the concentrating brow of an enraged and mighty man. [MD. pp. 145-6]

In both passages, the difference between man and Nature is created in terms of man's brave or courageous response to each. In the first case, Nature is more terrible because it is not "comprehensible" as men and their creations are. In the second, men can be more awful than Nature because they are not so "irrational" but have something "spiritual" to their aspect. The essentially opposite statements are not provided in the hopes of either of them winning out over the other; the contradiction only anticipates the later project of eliminating the distinction between Nature-persecutor and man-persecutor, which I have already outlined.
It is here that Arenas follows Melville's discussion of persecution. Arenas incorporates the same sort of contradictory responses to Nature-persecutor and man-persecutor that Melville did, and like Melville, he goes on to develop real-world events that call the opposition into question on its own terms. Servando confronts just the sort of "wonders of God" that Ishmael was speaking of:

You watched as the waves swelled and the sails were swept away. And you were calm in the face of that danger which because it was common to all men had nothing to do with you. Nothing to do with you personally.
The waters at midocean grew wilder and higher, as though the winds would raise the very deep, and the ship at times, lifted by an incredible wave, would scrape against the clouds.
And you in the keel practically single-handedly holding the mast erect.
And you hearing the crack and roar of the cordage
And you calmly contemplating the impotence of man before the power of the elements. [FS, p. 49; itallics are Arenas']

Servando, too, has an ambiguous relation to Nature-persecutor as opposed to man-persecutor; like Ishmael's, his self-contradiction is bounded by less than twenty pages:

He looked down into the prison yard too and what he saw there were great rocks, awaiting him below in fits of malicious laughter. [61]

Arenas re-creates Melville's contradiction in near-perfect parallel. However, the terms in which he does so are personal and direct, unlike Melville/Ishmael's. Where Melville described Nature as more awful in the experience of very general phrase "many a veteran," Arenas uses the pronoun "you," and the experiences of his protagonist. Where Melville described the "more terrific...terrors" as belonging to men, and used the general pronouns, noting that "some intrepid men" were yet incapable of facing "an enraged and mighty man"; where Melville was impersonal, Arenas described the very particular experience of Fray Servando with regard to some very particular rocks.
As Arenas develops his erasure of the distinction between Nature-persecutor and man-persecutor, he generalizes where Melville particularized. The Ill-Fated Peregrinations is filled with the sense that there is persecution everywhere, and that, often as not, the persecutor directs its malice at the wrong person or group. Power, whether in the hands of Nature or humans, is arbitrary and unjust in The Peregrinations. We discover this as much in spite of as because of the biography of Servando.
The first instance of misdirected malice is from Servando's youth. Out of jealousy, his fellow-students are persecuting him, attacking him with lit candles:

The Latin master, who saw His Grace enter, tried to calm the combatants, but with most disappointing results. And so as Servando kept doggedly spinning out the threads of his now greatly extended speech while he fended off the flaming candles, one of the projectiles sailed directly into the prelate's most high and serene forehead and left there a great dent. [FS, p. 22]

Later, in Spain, Servando has left his prison-cell vacant, and in his hurry to recover the escaped prisoner, León unwittingly persecutes a pair of innocent nunns.

Two nuns (whose presence in that place is to this day unexplained) ...disappeared off down the rocky path into the desert. "There he goes!" cried León. "There he goes, dressed lik a woman, and a henchman with him!" And followed by all his friars, León struck out after the two nuns, who by now were tiring greatly. "Jesus!" cried the nuns. "Jesus!" And León had them shut up in a cell... [FS, p. 62]

As Servando leads his prodigal acquaintance into Paris, he is confronted by the spectacle of persecution carried to absurdity:

So at last we went on with our travels. Or would have, for of a sudden we were surprised and stopped still in our tracks by a troop of soldiers angrily running across our path, like hunting dogs, after Lord knows what prey or fierce enemy. [T]hey were only chasing a pigeon that had so little respect for other men's property that it had dared to alight among the Bishop's fields. And so the Bishop's soldiers were leaving every field in their wake trampled, so keenly were they pursuing the little fowl. [FS, p. 126]

The chase begins for the purpose of preventing others (including pigeons) from defiling property who's ownership is clearly defined and protected for the first time in its history. Yet, as Melville's sharks that devour their own intestines, the effect of the persecution defeats its reason for being: the madly-rushing soldiers trample whole fields where the bird might have taken only a few seeds. It is the frequency of such events within The Peregrinations that emphasizes the impersonal nature of persecution, even when initiated by men.
This realization is an important lesson of Servando's life. His experiences lead him from his early outlook ("And you were calm in the face of that danger which because it was common to all men had nothing to do with you. Nothing to do with you personally" [FS, p. 49]) to this later understanding of the world as being totally persecutive. That Melville informs such a conclusion is clear from the vigor with which Arenas latches on to Moby-Dick imagery at the end of the first part ("Mexico"), as well as from the close parallels between the thematic systems of persecution in the two works.