Waiting for Columbus Page 12

  We do not know what is there. But if I sail far enough, I will be there. And if I sail far enough I will get to where I am. That is the way it is with spheres. And whatever is in between will be discovered. All I have to do is survive the obstacles of starvation, thirst, and storms-and hopelessness. It would be easier to sail across the ocean if I had ships. The ships will come, though. The king and queen cannot afford to pass up an opportunity like this.

  He looks at her darkening body. I am sailing off this body, which I know well. I am moving beyond that blank paper, at the edge of the world, beyond the rain. That is where I exist.

  “Where are you going?”

  He turns at the door, looks back at Beatriz on the bed, sitting up, the sheets pooled around her. He’d like to memorize this picture. This image of Beatriz in bed, asking him with her silky voice where he’s going. Where are you going? she says. And the big answer is: I have no idea, except west. But he’d love to memorize this image of Beatriz in bed, doing a great favor to the light of the room. “To get another bottle of wine,” he says.

  ***

  In the morning Columbus is sitting in his favorite wooden chair, dressed in the housecoat the boys gave him last Christmas. As the sun rises, he pulls out another cigar. He slices the end along the blade of his sword. He lights it with three small puffs, two more small puffs. Then a slight roll so the end is evenly lit. He leans back into his chair and looks out to sea. He observes the wisps of pink cloud stranded at the horizon. Red sky in the morning, sailor’s warning, he thinks. Red sky at night, sailor’s delight; red sky at morning, sailor’s warning. He knows the nursery rhyme but has no idea how or when he learned it. He takes another puff of his cigar.

  Before coming down to the veranda, he’d picked up his razor in the bathroom and looked in the mirror. The color of his hair still sometimes surprises him because he does not feel old enough to have white hair. Despite his seemingly endless struggles to get his ships, he does not feel as old as he looks. True, there are days when he is so tired he teeters at the edge of giving up.

  Sometimes he does not understand what Beatriz sees in him-what any woman sees in him.

  “What is that awful stench?” Beatriz has come up from behind him but now backs away. She’s wearing a corset, nothing else. “Has something died? Have you an illness?”

  “It’s a cigar. A Montecristo number 4.” He smiles, but there is fatigue in his eyes-something resigned. “There’s a box of them in the big room, on the table. I honestly do not know how they got there. I must have had them in my bag. But I’ve brought some down here with me. Do you want one?”

  Beatriz leans forward suspiciously. Watches him suck on the brown thing that burns and smells like death.

  “Why? Why do you do this?”

  “Well, after I smoke, I feel I am not quite walking on the Earth. I am, but I am not. I feel strangely at peace. Calm yet focused. When I awoke this morning I found I had this knowledge. I knew how to smoke them. I’ve had two already.”

  “What do you mean you had the knowledge? Is this some sort of sorcery? Have you been taken by demons?”

  “Beatriz. It is merely the knowing of something that cannot be explained. Perhaps I dreamed of this knowledge long ago and now I recall a dream.”

  “But where did they come from? Shall I pray for you, Cristóbal?”

  “I’m afraid praying wouldn’t do any good.”

  “You mean there are demons in you?”

  “Demons! I mean it is merely something that cannot be explained.”

  “But-”

  “Look, you have given birth.”

  “Yes.”

  “How did you know what to do?”

  “I… I just knew,” she says.

  “And when the baby arrives, what is the first thing it does?”

  “It cries.”

  “Yes, and then?”

  “Then it seeks its mother’s breast.”

  “And how does the baby know to do this? How does it know there is nourishment there? How could it possibly know?”

  “I-”

  “It is unexplainable, is it not?”

  “I suppose,” she says quietly. “But this is different. You’re forty years old! You are not a baby!”

  “True, but this does not make me immune to mystery.”

  ***

  “Only idiots and the very superstitious believe the world is flat. The curve of the Earth is easily proved. I could explain such things to a child, a cat, or a dog. It’s determining the actual size that is a problem. And it will always be speculation until someone sails out there and actually has a look-see.”

  Dr. Fuentes leans forward, places his elbows on his knees, and cups his chin in his hands. “So what happened? How come you’re here and not at sea? Doesn’t that tell you something?”

  “I am not here of my own accord, Doctor. And anyway, why would you want to jump to the end of a story?”

  “You have a story?”

  “Everybody has a story, Fuentes.”

  “You’re telling a story right now?”

  “You’re not reading Nurse Consuela’s reports, are you?”

  Dr. Fuentes pauses. Makes a few notes in his notebook. “What if I told you I believed the world was flat?” he says without looking up.

  “You would confirm my theory about your lack of intelligence. I believe hundreds would concur.”

  “I think we’re done for today.”

  “Why don’t you read me what you’ve been writing in that little notebook of yours. It must be very insightful and important.”

  Dr. Fuentes slaps his notebook shut. Slips his pen into his shirt pocket. Smiles a cool, professional smile in Columbus ’s general direction.

  “You don’t want to share your shopping list? Maybe you’re writing a novel. Were you composing a poem? A ghazal perhaps?”

  “A ghazal?”

  “Yes, an ancient Persian style of poetry. Five, or more, two-line stanzas. Each stanza is a complete thought and unrelated to its neighboring stanzas except by a thin emotional thread. Surely you’ve heard the term before?”

  “Sounds fascinating.”

  “Except that you are the type of person who demands neatness and logic and a chronological order. You could never write a ghazal except by accident. It was wrong of me to accuse you of writing a ghazal. You’re much too stupid for that. Limericks are more your style.”

  “We’re done here.” Dr. Fuentes stands up. “Have a good day, Bolivar.”

  “Yes, that’s perfect. Dismiss me with a phony wish, a platitude, and an incorrect moniker. Well done, Fuentes. You must have a lot of friends.”

  “We’ll try again next week.”

  Columbus ignores him. Focuses on his cuticles. Observes his fingernails. Lets the doctor stand for a long minute. Then he stands up. “I can let myself out,” he says. “Thanks for a lovely chat.”

  ***

  The dayroom is crowded. It’s been raining for days. The whole institute has a gloomy and claustrophobic feel. Tempers are short. There have been five fights in the last two days, which is unusual. These fights were serious enough for the nurses to call the orderlies to break them up. Pope Cecelia is in isolation for smashing a plate on an orderly’s head. Yesterday Dr. Fuentes slipped and fell, broke his tailbone, is going to be off work for a month, maybe more. He’s managed to reconcile with his wife. A miracle of sorts.

  Columbus stays away from these confrontations. He lurks at the edge of things. Consuela finds him in the game room, watching a chess match between Mercedes and Arturo. Mercedes washes her hands after every move on the chessboard. As a result, they are red, chapped, and sore looking. Mercifully, Arturo needs a lot of time to contemplate his moves. Arturo thinks and thinks and ponders, and eventually Mercedes complains. He moves, she moves, and then she gets up and goes off to wash her hands. Arturo damaged his head in a fall. Before he fell, he was a brilliant lawyer-a Crown prosecutor with a reputation for being a pit bull. There are still glimpses of
brilliance but these are veiled behind a plodding, lethargic man.

  Consuela moves quietly, comes up behind Columbus. “It’s a slow form of insanity,” he says, without looking up.

  She’s impressed. But she wonders. Did he see her reflection in a window?

  “I can smell you,” he says.

  Arturo looks up from the game. Smiles. Consuela blushes. She clears her throat. “Are they any good?”

  “Arturo is better than you. But he has much practicing to do before he will give me a game. He would do well to study the Greco Counter Gambit.”

  Consuela thinks hard about this. Greco Counter Gambit? She has never lost a game with Columbus. What the hell is he talking about? This doesn’t make any sense. Is this a clue to another life? Did she just get a glimpse?

  “Though I doubt Mercedes is smart enough to know it, she has been playing the Italian Quiet Game: E4, E5, then Nf3, Nc6, and finally Bc4, Bc5. You see how white prevents black from advancing in the center?”

  “Gambit?”

  “Yes, a risky attacking style of opening. It avoids the calculated buildup of classic games.”

  Columbus looks up at Consuela’s confused face.

  “A gambit is an opening in which something is sacrificed, usually a single pawn, in order to achieve some sort of advantage. Gambits are not normally successful in the highest-ranked games. By the way, thank you for taking such good care of me,” he says, “and good-bye.”

  “You’re welcome. I-” She stops. “What do you mean good-bye?”

  “You never know. I could die in my sleep. A tree could fall on me. I could choke on my dinner.” He half smiles.

  “You’re not planning anything stupid, are you?”

  “Define stupid.”

  “Suicide is stupid.”

  “Suicide is a sin.” Columbus seems appalled at the suggestion.

  Consuela takes a deep breath. She looks him over through squinted eyes. “Then you’re going to try and escape again, which for you is only mildly stupid.”

  Arturo stands up. “I have to… please excuse me.”

  “I’ll watch the board. Not to worry.”

  “What are you planning?” Consuela is hissing.

  Mercedes arrives back at the table, looks over the board, and makes her move. She gets up and disappears again down the hallway toward the washrooms. She passes Arturo in the entranceway.

  Columbus smiles as Arturo sits down. “Six moves, Arturo. It’s over in six moves. Your knight, yes. You’ve got her. If she makes the right moves, it’s checkmate in six. If she’s careless, it may take fewer, but the result will be the same.”

  “I see I’m going to have to do some practicing,” Consuela says.

  “Aren’t all our games practice games?”

  ***

  Later that day, she walks along the edge of the pool. He’s swimming, a seemingly effortless sidestroke through the water almost silently. The evolution of his initially rather noisy swimming to this almost-silent-in-the-water stroke has been a slow but steady journey. It’s not something he was trying to achieve but something he noticed happening as he tried to make his movements more efficient. She is reading out loud from a small book of ghazals. Reading a stanza, then walking a few steps, reading another-keeping up with him as he swims and listens. She reads, walks, reads, walks. After a while it is difficult to determine if she is matching his pace, or he, hers.

  “Into the mirror of my cup the reflection of your glorious face fell. And from the gentle laughter of love, into a drunken state of longing I fell.”

  She walks a few steps, and then: “Struck with wonder by the beauty of the picture that within my cup I beheld. The picture of this world of illusion from the reflection of my mind fell.”

  He pulls himself out of the pool after just under an hour, sits on the rough stone edge, and looks up at her. “Why did you choose this particular style of poetry?”

  “You don’t like these? These are in translation. They were written by a poet named-”

  “Hafiz. I know who wrote the poems. That’s not what I asked.”

  The edge to his voice, the clipped tone, takes her off guard. She cannot, will not say that this book of poems is one of her favorites-that it is a book her father gave to her mother. This book is one of her few treasures. These poems move through her as an old lover would; they know where to touch, and when, and sometimes they surprise. “I found the book in a used-book shop,” she says. “Ghazals are Persian. They-”

  “I know what a ghazal is. Why did you choose Hafiz?”

  “I don’t know. I thought you might enjoy it. They’re odd poems. At first glance, they don’t make sense.”

  “These are poems of longing! Of love. Of illicit, impossible love.”

  “You seem agitated.” Oh God, that’s jargon, she thinks. It’s stupid and lazy of me. He’s angry. He’s really angry. But this may be a weak spot in Columbus ’s defenses, a way in. She can’t remember him this angry, this quickly. The question is why. Why is he so angry about some poetry by a dead Persian poet named Hafiz?

  He is angry, he realizes. To hear this poetry reminds him, in a new way, that he is trapped in this place. The truth of this poetry, the power, is too much.

  He swallows. Breathes. “No, no, I enjoyed your reading of Hafiz.”

  “I just thought they were beautiful. That’s why I picked this book. Perhaps I should have chosen something else… a novel-”

  “Hafiz was a good choice.” He stops in the narrow hallway that leads up to ground level from the pool. I never did find the steam room, he thinks. He motions with his hand that she should go first through the doorway. As she passes, he whispers, “You ought to hear them in Persian.”

  ***

  Columbus looks around the cafeteria but this is not what he sees. He is no longer at the institute. His pen begins to move on a new page in his notebook.

  (iii)

  This picture could be in any café in any city in the world. There’s a thirty-something brunette sitting in front of a chessboard across from an empty chair, and he begins to imagine a story for her. She’s been studying the board, her narrow chin in her hand, her head leaned slightly to the side. The gray, even light in this café softens the contours of her face. It gives a kind, tender feel to this place. But she’s not interested in the facets of light. She’s looking at the chessboard. Perhaps she’s waiting for an opponent to come back from the washroom. Perhaps she’s just interested in the final positioning of an abandoned game-divining the stories of kings and queens, knights and soldiers. This is a woman who wears scarves, winter, spring, and fall-and quite often in the summer. She is a woman who appears to take great care when it comes to her shoes. They are always high-heeled, and they consistently straddle the line between elegant and fashionable. This is the same woman who wears amazing leather boots that hug her calves with such perfect clarity-boots that persuade her legs to become beautiful and curvaceous.

  He knows this woman but does not recognize her.

  These imagined stories always start with questions and more questions, which eventually lead to suppositions. Abstractions. Oblique theories. Why does she come to this café alone on a Saturday morning? Does she have a family at home? Is this negotiated alone time? There is an “away-ness” about her that speaks of an older place of origin. Was she born in a small town in France? Or Nebraska? A village in Ireland? To be able to say you are from the Basque region of Spain would be very romantic. Perhaps her name is Mary Francis and she was born in Trois-Rivières, halfway between Montreal and Quebec City, in Canada. Maybe her name is Mary and she comes from Hope, British Columbia. Of course, there’s no way to know anything about her origins because nothing ever moves in these images.

  It’s easy to imagine she has no immediate family, not here anyway. Her narrative is there in her eyes, which flash with a hazel rawness and lust for life. Maybe she loved someone she was not supposed to love, and this chasm, this crack in her life, is her best story. Does she choos
e to be alone now? Is she alone? Does she tell her story? Does she whisper this narrative to a lover in a burgundy bedroom at 3 A.M.?

  If this picture could move, there might be a younger woman sitting across from the first woman now. When she arrives, the first woman stands; they hug and kiss each other’s cheeks. This kissing of cheeks is not obligatory; it is a loving ritual between them. The young woman has short but careless blond hair and wears the tortoiseshell, thick-rimmed glasses that represent the trend of the day. She is tapping her foot with nervous energy. She wears runners with red laces.

  There are more questions now, about the first woman, who today is wearing a chestnut-colored scarf… and additional questions about this new blond woman with reckless hair. This “away” woman and the younger woman seem genuinely pleased, comfortable in each other’s company. It is as if they are mother and daughter. But they cannot be related by blood. The color of their eyes, the line of their jaws, their hair-all these things speak to the lack of blood between them. These women are not playing chess. They are only talking and having coffee.

  He would bet that they are more than friends. But all of this is a fabrication-everything but the clear and vivid picture of the first woman sitting silently, motionless, in front of a chessboard across from an empty chair. Everything else is a lie.

  CHAPTER TEN

  At 3:30 A.M., Columbus and two others break a window and manage to bash out a section of wire mesh with a chair. Five security guards arrive moments later, before any of them have jumped into the courtyard, and the guards quietly take them back to their rooms. In the morning, Consuela and all the other staff are asked to produce their keys. The three somehow got out of their rooms without breaking anything. All keys are accounted for. So how did they get out? Dr. Balderas, the acting director, is put in charge of the investigation. Security is tightened on the three would-be escapees. Meds are upped. Rooms are searched. Nothing is found. A thong is found in Columbus ’s room-tucked in the bottom of a drawer. Consuela has no idea how Columbus would have wound up with a pair of women’s underwear. She tells the orderly to just put them back where he found them. Three weeks pass before Consuela is able to have a chat with Columbus. For two weeks, he’s an isolated, drooling idiot-doped up on sertraline and kept away from the other patients. It takes another week for the drugs to clear his system.