Waiting For Columbus (41 page)

“What’s wrong?” he says.

Consuela, three steps ahead, turns toward him. She’s so tired. The man from Interpol weighs on her. She can’t imagine living with the ramifications of inadvertently causing the death of an innocent.

“I couldn’t sleep,” she says.

“Why?”

“God, Columbus, why do you have to be so goddamned intense all the time! Let’s just go swimming, all right?”

“Something has shifted in you. Your eyes have changed.”

“Yes, I’m tired.”

“It’s more than fatigue.”

“Trust me. It’s lack of sleep. Why don’t we switch today? I’ll swim and you can watch. Or if you like, you can tell stories.”

“Ah, you want a story. You want to know what happens, don’t you? Well, let me warn you, it’s not the ending you might expect.”

They arrive at the pool. Consuela slips out of her uniform. In her bra and panties, she slides into the water.

“Begin,” she says, a little more demanding than she’d intended.

Columbus watches as she starts to quietly glide through the water. “Okay,” he says. “Imagine two women squatting to relieve themselves in a forest, only a few feet apart. The air is as smooth as silk. The sky a pristine blue. These two women both love the same man.”

“So, you are Beatriz,” Isabella says.

“What?” Beatriz looks around and then finds a splash of color through the leaves not ten feet away.

It’s midday. It’s stifling hot—more than a little uncomfortable, even to people who are used to such heat. They are peeing at the edge
of a small orange grove near the town of Palos. It is the day before Columbus is to set off.

Isabella has minimal security. Nothing close. Her men watch from the perimeter. She’s thinking she’d like to see Columbus one last time, but she knows a quick meeting, an official good-bye, is all she can probably safely arrange. Something, anything, would be better than smiling like an idiot and waving from some balcony with Ferdinand by her side.

“I said, you’re Beatriz.”

“Yes. Who wants to know?” Beatriz wipes herself with a handful of long grass and then drops it.

“Queen Isabella.”

“Right. The queen.”

“That’s right.”

“The queen, squatting in the woods to pee. Right.”

“Could happen, couldn’t it? Do you think the queen never pees?”

“Do I think the queen is human? Yes, of course. But you are not the queen. The queen would not squat in the woods. Isn’t there some golden toilet somewhere?”

Isabella chuckles. “You’re wrong about the queen. She would most certainly squat in the woods.”

“Why would the queen be here, in Palos?”

“Do you not think the queen is interested in the voyage that will be embarking tomorrow?”

This gets Beatriz thinking. Of course, the queen will want to be here. Word on the street has it that she was instrumental in arranging for the ships. She and Columbus had a relationship of some kind. Why wouldn’t she want to be here?

Isabella pulls her panties up and walks out from her station. She extends a thin hand with heavy rings adorning every finger, save one.

Beatriz looks at the rings. There’s no guarantee these rings are real. How would she know? They could be fakes.

“Nice rings. I’ve got some nice rings, too.” Beatriz holds her hand, with only two modest rings, for this alleged queen to see.

“Guards!”

Four men with earplugs appear in less than five seconds. Three of them have handguns drawn and pointed at Beatriz. The fourth is planted firmly in front of Isabella. “It’s fine,” Isabella says. “Give us some room.” One of the guards frisks Beatriz. Finds a small knife tucked between her breasts. They all pull back silently.

“Your Majesty,” Beatriz says. “How could I have known?” She bows deeply.

“Oh get up. We’re alone. I wanted to have a chat with you.”

“Yes, Your Majesty.”

How to begin? she thinks. “So, he’s going. Columbus is off to prove he is right. How do you feel about that?”

“Well, I will miss him.”

“Yes, our Columbus is a most amusing and entertaining man.”

Beatriz speaks slowly, clearly. “We have children together. We all love him. He is my man. He is a father to his sons.”

“You are not a wife, are you?”

“I wear this ring.”

“But you are not his wife.”

“We are bonded, committed, devoted, dedicated—”

“But not married.”

“No,” she says softly, slowly. “Not married.”

“Well, we love Columbus, too,” the queen says. “We love his enthusiasm, and drive, and pigheadedness. Let’s walk, shall we?” She motions with her hand for Beatriz to precede her.

The two women begin to move through the grove. Sparse undergrowth makes the walking easy. And there is good shade.

“I am curious,” Beatriz says.

“Yes, I bet you are.”

“A couple of things, really. First, the ships. How did it happen that the ships appeared so suddenly? Everything was lost, hopeless. And then in a matter of days, it was done.”

“And the second?”

“The second is difficult for me.”

“Perhaps I can answer your second question before you pose it. I love your Columbus and I believe this love goes both ways. Unfortunately, I am queen. I have a husband and a country. If a liaison were discovered, it would not go well for me, nor would it be good for Columbus. It would be death all around, I’m afraid.”

Beatriz reaches down to her ankle and draws a knife—a squat stabbing blade.

Isabella looks at the knife and then at Beatriz. “Are you mad? They’ll kill you. They don’t take this security thing lightly.” She nods almost imperceptibly toward the perimeters of the forest.

“I could kill you first,” Beatriz says. And in scant seconds, Beatriz is on the ground, her hand twisted up and across her face. The agent pulls the knife out of her hand and looks at her face. A deep gash from the corner of her mouth to just below her eye. The cut is deep and it bleeds instantly. Beatriz moves her hand across the side of her face. “Fuck,” she grunts, her face in a mask of disbelief as she looks up at the guard.

Isabella, tackled by two guards for her safety, pulls herself up off the ground. She looks at her men, who have drawn their weapons. “Oh, put your guns away, you idiots. Pick her up and see that her wound is attended to,” she says. “Whoever it was that searched her did a piss-poor job by the way. Two knives. She had two knives. Now get her out of here and keep her out of the way until Columbus is gone.” Isabella walks over and picks up Beatriz’s knife, weighs it in her hand.

“Lose her in one of your institutions. Just keep her out of the way.”

“You arranged the ships, didn’t you?” Beatriz says.

When Isabella turns and faces Beatriz, her face is flat, devoid of
emotion. Making herself appear to feel nothing is second nature to her. Her eyes, though, her eyes betray the anger rising in her. Her eyes become two sharp sticks.

“You did it because you love him!” Blood is seeping through Beatriz’s fingers, dripping in rivulets down her neck and into the crevasse between her breasts.

Isabella thinks about her time with Columbus—a few meetings, a cup of coffee. Memories occur in spasmodic jerks. A yearning rises up in her and takes the place of her anger. “I need …” She breathes and then sighs. “I needed to put an ocean between this queen and that foolish navigator. I needed to stop this lust in me. It was the only way.” She looks at Beatriz, who is held firmly by two guards. “It was the only way,” Isabella whispers.

“So you do not believe he can do this?”

“Take her away,” Isabella says.

“That’s the difference between you and me. I believe in the man and his dreams. You believe in nothing!
Nothing!”

“Stop! I’m the queen. I’m your queen. It would be best for you if you remembered that.”

“Why don’t you kill me, then? You have all the power. You are the queen but you’ll never be my queen.”

Isabella squeezes the knife in her hand. She notices her hand is sweating. She nods toward one of her guards and they continue to carry Beatriz, none too gently, through the woods.

You didn’t want to kill me. You still don’t, Isabella thinks. You and I love the same man. For whatever reason, we love Columbus. We share that.

Then there is only Isabella, and around her the orange trees rising up like the bars of a cage, and at the edge of the grove there are palm trees, and beyond that the ocean, and beyond that the sky. She can see one guard hovering at the periphery. Columbus can love Beatriz openly,
Isabella thinks. Without constraint. No hiding. No lying. “He needs that,” she says to the trees. “We all need that.”

Consuela stops swimming. A sudden absence of water sound. Columbus stops walking. It’s a cool day with clouds that seems thicker than the Basque sheep’s wool at the market. Yesterday, Columbus moved the stones away from the pipe in front of the hot spring flow—to make it warmer for the coming days. The warm edge to the pool is welcomed today.

“Do you need that, Columbus?” she says.

“We all need love—to love and be loved.”

“Not what I asked, Columbus.”

“Do not fault the pious ones, because they, also, like us, are seeking love and grace, in their own way, at their own pace.”

“Hafiz?”

“Yes, Hafiz.”

“You’re not Hafiz.”

“I am not a lot of things.”

“You are certainly evasive, and vague.”

He sighs. “Of course, I need love. To love and be loved.”

“Who loves you?” She holds his eyes. Looks up into his face from the lip of the pool. She’s not going to let go.

“I don’t want to talk about this.”

“You don’t want to talk about it because Beatriz, Isabella, Selena, and even Juan are fictions. There is no love there, Columbus. They’re not real like this water.” She splashes water up onto the deck, and it fans into Columbus, smacks into him. “Even your kids are fictions. They don’t exist. They don’t love you.”

His voice diminishes. “I … I love. There is love in my life. I love my girls.” He gazes down the distance of the pool toward the far end, where
the spring comes in. But there is no focus—his eyes are simply facing a direction.

Did he say girls? He looks utterly lost. Consuela stops pushing. She hadn’t planned to confront him. Did she go too far? She remembers Dr. Balderas’s assertion that Columbus must finish his story.

I love you, Columbus, she thinks. More than I should. More than you know. I want you well and out of here. I want you to be happy.

It takes three days before he unlocks another chapter of his story. He
arrives for breakfast in shorts and a gray T-shirt, sits down like nothing is amiss. Consuela does a double take.

“Is that—”

“Yes. It’s Columbus,” Benito says.

“He’s wearing clothes.”

“Yes.”

“I’m not sure if it’s a good thing or a bad thing,” Consuela says.