Waiting For Columbus (9 page)

They had televisions, she thinks, in the fifteenth century? Consuela leans forward, quizzical. She does not want to appear confrontational, so keeps her voice uplifted. “So, Columbus was … you were flipping channels?”

“And there were many, many channels. But not much of it was interesting.”

“You’re saying there was television in the fifteenth century. Does that make sense to you, Columbus?”

“Everybody knows this, Consuela. Have you not read Zimmerman? Zimmerman references this repeatedly in his dissertation on fifteenth-century domestic commonalities. What’s your point?”

He’s left her nowhere to go. She has no idea who Zimmerman is. And really, what does it matter that he imports televisions into a story that is set five hundred years in the past? But if she were trusting the
tale
and not the
teller
, like the saying suggests, she’d have some serious problems, because this tale is a crazy, mish-mashed, time-crossed slip down a rabbit hole. And the teller is, of course, institutionalized.

“Was it color or black-and-white?” she says hesitantly.

“Was what color or black-and-white?”

“Nothing.”

He has finished his morning swim and is taking coffee outside, in the shade of a massive holm oak. Consuela slept in. She was not there for his early-morning swim. She arrived at work in a panic of apology and moved quickly into high gear. This quick coffee and check on Columbus was her first pause. Columbus clears his throat, something he does whenever he’s going to tell another story. Consuela isn’t sure how to take these rambling tales. For her, the details of his stories are remarkable. The clarity with which he paints these word pictures is sometimes quite marvelous. She sometimes finds herself caught beyond redemption, so enthralled that she
wants
to believe him. Something denied inside her yearns to believe him.

She came onto the patio deck and saw him hopping up and down on one foot, tilting his head back and forth. Sunlight slices through the high branches of the holm in the center of the courtyard, and the upper branches move in the breeze. The sunlight speckles the ground where Columbus continues to hop. What now? What gimmick or scheme is this? What’s he up to? He stops hopping when he sees her and smiles. He is genuinely pleased to see her. Is she reading something that isn’t there? “Got water in my ear. Won’t come out,” he says.

He clears his throat again. “He, Cristóbal Colón, realizes he has always been a bit insecure with women, and at the same time he loves the fleshy union. He adores this woman, Beatriz. He loves her. But he does
not marry her. Columbus will not make the promises of marriage. Not when there is a chance that he may in fact sail across the Western Sea. It would be unfair to her. While he is a brilliant navigator, sailing is dangerous. And there is much fleshy union to be made.”

“Fleshy union?”

“Yes, the lovemaking.”

“Are you aware that you are talking about yourself in the third person again?”

“Am I?”

“It’s as if you are standing outside yourself, observing. Why do you do that?”

“I don’t know. It just comes out of me. It’s easier to pretend I am a character inside a story.”

“So, Columbus … you, are a lover.”

“Of women, and the bullfights.”

“And Beatriz was all right with the other women in your life?”

“Beatriz had the most wonderful scent.” Columbus closes his eyes inside a memory.

“She smelled?”

“Yes. Down there.”

Consuela looks down quickly. And then up at him again. “What do you mean, she smelled?”

“It was spicy and sweet. Cinnamon and rain. Completely distinctive. I have never experienced anything like it. It was heavenly. It must have been associated with her diet. It was extraordinary.”

Nurse Consuela hasn’t blushed since … well, she can’t recall the last time she blushed.

On the morning of the liturgical feast of Saint Pammachius, Columbus
is in a lawn chair, overlooking the garden. He’s wearing his standard, institute-issue maroon robe and gray socks. He looks like any number of other patients wandering around in the courtyards and gardens surrounding the institute. He’s speaking to Consuela over his left shoulder. “I have to tell you, people used to roll up on the beach on a regular basis—well, chewed-up bodies anyway. When I lived in Palos we’d find them all the time—stinking and rotten. Even the foulest of birds or animals wouldn’t touch them.”

“I’m sorry?” She really was not in the mood for a story. She was unfocused—half watching the ducks in a pond, half keeping an eye on him. She’d rather be curled up in bed reading.

“Dead people. On the beach. The result of shipwrecks.” Consuela feels out of sorts this morning. She couldn’t sleep—flipped from side to side throughout the night. She had been searching the Internet until 1 A.M., looking for information on Christopher Columbus, staggering through the maze of information. She wanted to know if there really was a Beatriz. And she found Beatriz in the fifteenth century—a woman Columbus never married. This got her wondering
about a doppelganger Beatriz in the twenty-first century. If there is one, why doesn’t she visit? Wouldn’t she be worried? Wouldn’t she file a missing person report at some point? And why doesn’t Columbus talk about his kids? Wouldn’t a father wonder where his children were? Then it was 3:30 A.M.—time to get up, get ready for work. The bread was moldy but the bagels in the fridge were fine. She sliced and toasted a bagel—ate it with Nocilla. Her tea was excellent, but she was alone. She woke up alone, made breakfast alone, showered alone, and ate alone.

“Why are you here, Columbus?” she says slowly, carefully. Apart from telling ridiculous stories about Vikings with maps and bloody charts, she thinks.

“I beg your pardon?” Columbus looks back over his shoulder at her.

“Why are you here? You show up here looking like you’ve had a bath in blood and claiming you’re Christopher Columbus. Now I’m not saying you’re not. But do me a favor. Look at your hands.”

Columbus looks down into his palms.

“No, the other way. Good. What do you see?”

He wants to say
hands
but he has the good sense to know she’s after something else. “A ring,” he says. “A silver or white-gold band with a rope design.”

“And what finger is it on?”

“On my ring finger. It’s a symbol of commitment.” As if he’s almost surprised.

“And you are committed to …?”

“Beatriz. Columbus is—I am, committed to Beatriz.”

“You’re telling me that’s not a wedding ring? Goddamnit! Who are
you
married to? You! Who’s your wife?”

Clearly he does not know what to say. He looks at her, lost. Genuinely bewildered. She recognizes this and feels forced to retreat—to honor his reality.

“I don’t believe you’re crazy,” she says. “Why are you here?”

“Because you suggested a stroll in the garden and I asked if it might be too hot today, and you said, no, it’s comfortable, and I said …”

Consuela sighs. Enough, she thinks. I can’t take this today. “I’m going to have an orderly take you back,” she says.

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to feed the ducks. Read a book. Maybe take my shoes off and walk on the grass. Anything but put up with this bullshit. I’m just not in the mood.”

He sits up and turns around in the chair—looks over his shoulder at her. Silence presses in on them.

A squirrel chatters in a tree behind Consuela. The wind brushes through the high branches. Something splashes in the pond.

“I’m lucky to be here.”

“Lucky how?” she says. She’ll be damned if she’s going to let him off the hook.

“Lucky to be alive.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“But it’s the truest thing I know, since we’re navigating around bullshit today.”

“You’re lucky to be alive?” She raises an eyebrow, gives him a look that says: Oh for Christ’s sake, get on with it then.

Usually they’re dead. They wash onto the shore in the darkness, bloated and stinking and ugly. Half naked and chewed up. Unidentifiable. Usually they’re long-gone dead. But this man rolls up on the beach near Palos, in the south of Spain, after a vicious storm pounds the coast for five days, and he’s only half dead. His ship is either destroyed by the storm or pushed out to sea. This sailor somehow managed to tie himself to a plank. He drifted onto the beach still attached to his makeshift life preserver.

Once the man is discovered, the people of the town rush to the
beach and carry him to the monastery. They had to cut the ropes in order to extract the man from the board. Believing the man would not live, Father Paulo’s church seems the logical choice. They pass him through the arched doorway into the hands of the monks who live there. Father Paulo knows several languages. The sailor, they find out later, has limited Portuguese, good Italian and English, passable French, and excellent Spanish. Father Paulo chooses Spanish as the language in which they will conduct their discussions of navigation and the ocean. He chooses English to talk about the everyday nonsense of eating and cooking and going to the bathroom. He chooses French to speak of women and love. He chooses Portuguese to speak of poetry. For the first three or four days, the sailor says very little—he moans and sometimes talks in his sleep. It is Father Paulo who sets the parameters of language and subject matter. He is quick, loves to hear his own voice, and is seriously opinionated. He asks many questions but barely breathes before answering these questions himself, and he is definitely verbose. If he has a captive audience—and with the sailor this was certainly the case—Father Paulo carries both sides of the conversation. The sailor is too weak to do much more than eat the thin broths, sleep, and listen to the ranting of this Franciscan father.