Waiting For Columbus (17 page)

In his dream about shooting the projector, there are glass windows all around—nothing made of glass ever makes it through his dream intact. In one version of the dream, the presenter gets shot. Just shot, not killed. His therapist had a field day with that particular wrinkle.

He’s been to most of the bars and cafés around the main roads that skirt the edge of Córdoba. He’s tried to stay away from the A-4, but he
now finds himself in a small nook of a bar called El Gatito, just off the Autovia del Sur—the highway that runs mostly uninterrupted from Madrid to Cádiz.

Emile sticks his nose into the opening of the glass, inhales the peaty, sweet aroma of the whiskey, then looks up to meet Carmen’s eyes. “I have no doubt in my mind, addled as it is by this brilliant whiskey, that God is a human invention. We invented God, and now he’s got to go. It’s time we grew up.”

“I have no doubt in my mind that you are too much with the Scottish beverage,” she says.

The day he’d arrived in Córdoba, Emile had done a circuit of bars and cafés closest to the train station, asking his open-ended questions, gently prodding. “He probably has better Spanish than I do,” Emile would say, a line that always got them smiling, and added an immediate layer of trust. Emile used this self-deprecatory statement about his ability to speak Spanish when, actually, his Spanish is very good. As is his English. His Italian? Not so good. Spanish was a cradle language for Emile. His mother was Spanish; his father, French. There was a nanny for a few years, a woman who spoke English—loved American films. His limited Italian can be credited to a lover—long before his wife.

Emile had started to doubt this approach. Four days in Córdoba and nothing. He would be hard-pressed to say what it was exactly that caused him to strike up a conversation with an elderly man feeding the birds in the park just off Avenida de Cervantes. It was just after noon. He’d been on his way to visit Carmen at El Gatito. Maybe it was a hunch. It was more likely dumb luck. Perhaps it was the fact that this park was only a stone’s throw from the train station. Regardless of the motivation, the conversation paid off. The old man, who was wearing baggy gray flannel trousers, a pressed white shirt, and a black sports jacket, had seen a man wandering the street with a stick stuck into his belt like a
sword. “It was a couple of months ago, maybe a little less than two months. He was talking to himself. Fighting demons, you know? He was dirty. Dirty hair and clothing. I thought he might be on something or drunk. But he was just strange.”

“What did he say, exactly?”

“Nonsense. Half sentences about sailing. Something about navigation. But there was something warm about him. He didn’t seem dangerous.”

The old man tosses a handful of crumbs onto the ground and immediately the pigeons are there at his feet. “This man said the North Star was not always true. He kept repeating this. He said he wanted me to remember that the North Star was not always true.”

“What do you think that means?” Emile says.

The old man looks over the top of his glasses at Emile. “He’s crazy. That’s what it means. He’s crazy, but nice. I gave him directions to Jaén. I told him about my brother-in-law’s place in Castro del Rio. It’s on the way to Jaén. But then you know this because you’re from Interpol. My brother-in-law rents a few rooms out. I don’t like my brother-in-law too much.”

“The North Star is not true?”

“Yes, he said it just like that. I felt sorry for him. I gave him a few euros.”

In the morning, Emile will follow the trail east. If this is my man, he’s certainly not traveling in a straight line toward Morocco. But this feels right. Emile can feel it in his gut.

Emile takes a gulp of his whiskey. “I’m drunk only on your beauty,” he says to Carmen. He stops. Finds her eyes again. “Tired lines like that do you a disservice, Carmen. I apologize. Perhaps I am too much with the Scottish beverage.”

Truth be told, Emile is worried about his liver. He thinks he drinks
too much and is concerned his liver is not able to keep up with its detoxification function. He worries but he does not curb his drinking. He’ll wake up in the middle of the night and know for certain he has cirrhosis because of his drinking, or that he’s dying of hepatitis because he drank something bad somewhere in his travels.

His ex-wife used to lean over and check the time, and then try to calm him down. She’d go through all the symptoms she could remember, some of which he had. He gets headaches sometimes. He gets fatigued occasionally.

“Calm down, Em. Breathe. We all get headaches,” she’d say. “We all get tired. Come to bed before one or two in the morning and you won’t be so tired.”

He still stays up too late. He still gets the headaches occasionally. And he is still worried that his liver is ruined. He will not allow his drinking to interfere with his work, but there are times when he is not certain where the line between work and life is drawn—and he drinks in this gray area.

It’s the kindness in Carmen’s face that has kept him coming back to this café for the past two days. There seems to be a built-in compassion—an acceptance of anything he might have to say. Her eyes are hazel. Her eyes seem to listen—as if they can follow the words in the air. Emile shakes his head, watches her pour beer at the end of the bar. Her hair is cropped blond, thick, and seemingly ruled only by its brevity. She has a gray sweater under her white apron. The sweater is unraveling a bit at the back, along the bottom. It must be a favorite sweater, he thinks. He has no idea what the landscape under that sweater might look like and this is part of Carmen’s beauty. The sweater makes a mystery. Or in the heat of noon, a baggy T-shirt makes a mystery. Yesterday he’d heard a table of customers comment on how crowded her balcony is, referring to Carmen’s breasts. But he does not really care how crowded it is there. And Emile does not know if, in fact, she is kind. Any appearance of kindness is untested. She has been a good listener, though, and there is kindness in this.

If only I had a euro for every proposition, proclamation of beauty, or pass, Carmen thinks. But this guy … has a damaged charm she finds interesting. And he’s tall. He’s taller than she is, which makes him rare and attractive in her eyes. She’s six feet. He must be six two. It’s not much but she will not be with a man shorter than herself. This is one of her rules. He is not wearing a wedding ring, but for Carmen it would not matter if he was. In fact, he would be more attractive if he was. She does not acknowledge it, but she is attracted to unavailable men. There is safety in this condition. He has never mentioned a woman. On his first night at the bar he spoke about love. The next day he asked pointedly what it was women wanted, to which Carmen had no answer. Half the time she has no idea why she moves toward a particular man. In her thirty-five years, she’s not kept anyone around for longer than ten months.

She does know a little about her likes and dislikes. For instance, Carmen does not care about hair. Men who attempt to cover it up, disguise it, or solve it she finds annoying. Men who lose their hair with grace—this, she finds very sexy. Emile is such a man. He’s thinning but seems not to care. His hair at the front is wistful. He wears glasses that seem a throwback to the thirties or forties, gold-colored wire-rimmed glasses that hook around his ears. She recalls seeing them sitting on a pile of papers, him rubbing his eyes. She remembers thinking the guy must work hard. She has no idea what he does. She knows he is looking for someone. She thought she saw a gun behind his hip on the left but dismissed this as her imagination—it was probably a cell phone.

“We’re alone,” Emile says. He sighs. “We look up into the sky at night, and we feel terribly alone. This is the reason we invented God. At least, it’s the reason our gods are still around. In the beginning, I’m sure we were trying to explain the weather, or why volcanoes erupted, or why hunting expeditions failed. But now? Now religion only holds us back. If we are to evolve as a species, religion must be punted to the wayside. It explains nothing—is based in nothing but fear and loneliness.”

“But what about faith?” she says. “What about ritual and holiness?”
She deftly removes his glass and slides a clean one into place—then half fills the new glass with whiskey.

“We do not need religion to have rituals. We can be holy about all the things that place us in a state of awe or wonder. Things like beauty. Art. Poetry. Music. A child’s laughter. Love. These are the things we should find holy. This is where holiness lives.”

“And faith?”

“We should have faith in each other.”

“Not always an easy thing.”

“Well, I have faith in your kindness, in your compassion, in the way you listen with your eyes.”

“Faith?”

“Yes, though I have never witnessed an overt act of kindness or compassion, I have faith that you possess these qualities, based on nothing but my observations of you.”

“Sometimes faith is misplaced, misguided, wrong—is it not?”

“Oh, now you’re turning me on.”

Oh my. There’s the line, she thinks. It’s dangerous because she’s fascinated, amused, and enjoying herself. They have danced toward the line, and now it’s there, in plain view—easy enough to cross. She’s very interested in pushing across this line with Emile, but she hesitates. He must recognize this because he pulls back from it. He stands up, places too much money on the bar, and gathers his bag.

“Until next time, Carmen. I will continue to hold my faith in you. Tomorrow I must continue my search.” And then he’s on the street; Emile, thick with whiskey, part of the human landscape of Córdoba at night. Tomorrow I will be a bit closer to finding this man who inspires loyalty in strangers, Emile thinks. Tomorrow we will unravel a bit more of this puzzle.

“Buenas noches
, Emile,” Carmen whispers to the empty room.

Emile wakes up with a dull ache in the back of his head. He does not question what it was that caused this stunning ache but, rather, vows to not let it happen again. He searches his bag for the pain medication. What was it that Hemingway used to call it? The medicine. He looks for the medicine. He finds the small plastic bottle and pops two pills in his mouth, grabs a bottle of water from the minibar, and gulps them down. In the Hemingway book, the pills were dropped and rolled under the bed, and a cat helped find them. Emile can’t remember the name of the book and chalks up this lapse to the hangover. He downs two espressos in the café on the ground floor of his hotel, and is on the road to Castro del Rio in under an hour. He stops for gas, and in addition to the gas he buys two CDs: Miles Davis’s
Kind of Blue
, a remastered, slowed-down version, and a CD of five tangos performed by Astor Piazzolla and the Kronos Quartet. He gets into the car and slips Miles into the CD player. The first strains of “So What” come alive in the car as he pulls away from Córdoba.

“Islands in the Stream,”
he says to the windshield after half an hour of driving. “It’s in the book called
Islands in the Stream
.”