Waiting for Columbus Read online

  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.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  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 t
hin broths, sleep, and listen to the ranting of this Franciscan father.

  “It is perhaps an odd notion but it is my experience, from the days before I was a monk of course, that women like to pursue as much as they like to be pursued. To have them chase you, you must show yourself to be charming and then retreat. This takes understanding and creativity. Make a study of women. Learn what makes a man attractive. It is not just the eye. There is more to attractiveness than being pleasant to the eye. There is great pleasure in the chase, my friend-no matter who is doing the chasing. Take it from me, the journey is everything. Once you arrive, one must devise new goals, new challenges.” He leans back in his chair, the wood creaks under his shifting weight. He closes his eyes. “I remember the curves of a woman in Paris, her skin, her green eyes. And she had the most peculiar but pleasant scent. Oranges and cinnamon. The smell of rain and dirt. Moist earth. Don’t get me wrong, my friend. Just a hint of this scent and you would need more. Desire would blossom in you as it did in me. Ah, she would have been the one who kept me from God had she not already been married. Her name was Maria, and she was not only beautiful but she was intelligent.” Father Paulo opens his eyes. “I wonder if you are intelligent.”

  He thinks I can’t hear or understand him, the sailor is thinking.

  Father Paulo nurses this man back to health. It’s a slow process as he passes through fever after fever. It takes two weeks for him to speak his first words. The monk has been sitting quietly waiting for him to wake up. When the sailor opens his eyes he sees the balding pillar of a man sitting against a white stone wall, his eyes closed in a meditation. The father has a warm, open face.

  He’s asleep, the sailor thinks. It is the first peace I’ve had since I got here. This man never shuts up. He is the most opinionated, pigheaded, domineering, and often-very-wrong man I’ve ever encountered. He never stops talking. Thank God and all the heavens he’s asleep.

  “I am not asleep, my friend,” says the monk. “I was meditating-something I learned from a friend, a Chinese monk who came through here a few years back. It’s a completely conscious, focused prayer.”

  He reads my mind, the man thinks. He smiles cautiously. “Thank you,” he says, finally.

  “I was worried about you, my friend,” Father Paulo says. “You are very welcome. You’re going to be all right.”

  “No, thank you for stopping your talking.”

  The monk tightens the rope that secures his robe-clears his throat. “What are you called by?”

  “Cristóbal. I am Cristóbal, a navigator. I was a navigator.”

  “Where were you sailing to?”

  “To Portugal, and then Spain with the Barto out of Venice. From Britain and the North Sea.” He pauses. “You said I was the only survivor? Nobody else came ashore? Nothing else? No other wreckage?”

  “A few planks, and you attached to one of them. That’s it, I’m afraid.”

  “I am grateful.”

  “Listen, do you know the sextant, my friend?”

  “Yes, I understand the sextant. I understand how it works.”

  “And you understand the stars?”

  He’s testing me, Columbus thinks. He wants to test the limits of my knowledge. The sextant is new. Dead reckoning and a compass is the standard for navigation. “I have guided ships by the stars. But I do not understand the stars.”

  This stops Father Paulo.

  “You guide your ship by the stars yet you do not understand the stars? Is this a riddle? Are you any good as a navigator?”

  Columbus laughs. “I do not understand the beauty of the stars. It is simply that. I do not understand their beauty.”

  The monk smiles. This is something he can sink his teeth into. There is a built-in dichotomy in this man who plays with language and apparently loves the stars. He arrives on the beach tied neatly to a plank and barely survives this ordeal. Nothing else comes ashore. He knows the sextant and knows about navigating by the stars. In his delirium he called out at least three different names-all women. So perhaps he is also a lover.

  “I should let you know, I was not the navigator of the ship that went down-I was a passenger only.”

  “It was a hell of a storm. Yours was not the only ship lost.”

  “How long have I been-?”

  “Two weeks. You were brought here two weeks ago. I will bring you more soup.”

  ***

  “You’re trying to tell me that you washed up on shore the sole survivor of a shipwreck?”

  “Not the most auspicious of beginnings, I admit. But it could have happened.”

  Consuela is thinking she should have fed the ducks in the pond-sent him back to his room and enjoyed the peace of this courtyard.

  “And where is Father Paulo now? I’ve noticed he does not visit.”

  “I’m not sure he knows I’m here. And that was many years ago,” he says. “Father Paulo could have passed away by now.”

  ***

  Consuela goes out with a group of nurses from work. They meet at the Cerveceria Giralda, which is a former Islamic bathhouse. With its vaulted ceilings, marble floors, and beautiful azulejos, the place screams Arabian Nights… romantic and whimsical. The restaurant has incredible tapas. They sit outside, under the orange trees, with a fine view of the cathedral. Much of the conversation centers on Dr. Fuentes. He’s not focused, forgetful. His head is not in his work. So they sit around and drink pitchers of tinto con limón-red wine with lemonade-and speculate on what could be the matter. His marriage is floundering, somebody suggests. He never talks about his wife. Once married, Gloria Fuentes stopped nursing. She stayed at home. She lunched with other women who did not work. She did not stay in touch with her former workmates. The nurses pool all they know of the doctor’s personal life, and it is a very shallow basin of information.

  Consuela doesn’t want to talk about Columbus, but he is one of the most interesting patients in the hospital. Interesting in a good way. He’s not a self-abuser or an obsessive masturbator. Well, he is almost naked most of the time but this is a minor sin.

  “And he’s hot,” one of the night-shift nurses, Sarah, says. “It’s a shame he’s delusional because-” She stops, blushes, and picks up her glass. “I should drink more wine and shut up.”

  “He tells stories,” Consuela says. “He told a story about an orange.”

  Tammy looks at her like she’s lost her mind.

  “No, really,” Consuela says. “It was a story about how someone might have figured out the Earth was round. But you have to imagine it’s five hundred years ago and we don’t know anything about North America. Columbus is standing on a beach. He holds up an orange, then sticks his finger behind it and slowly begins to lower his finger, following the curve of the orange. He’s trying to explain the curvature of the Earth-he’s trying to show it to Beatriz.”

  Consuela studies Tammy’s face. She’s giving longing looks to her drink, which is nearly empty.

  “ Columbus ’s mistress. Beatriz is his concubine. His lover. Columbus keeps saying, ‘Do you see? Do you see?’ But she doesn’t see. She needs time to think. She’s feeling stupid about not getting it. Later on, they’re walking on the beach. The gulls are lifting and descending in the air currents above the water. The clouds are a stretched-out afterthought. The waves are of little consequence. A small fishing boat is sailing out of the cove. It moves slowly and Columbus stops to watch. Can you see him? He puts his journal on the sand and stands there in the bright sun, hands in trouser pockets, squinting out into the ocean.

  “Beatriz walks a few paces ahead, notices Columbus has stopped, and then turns around. She sees Columbus is absorbed in thought and so she sits on the beach and joins her own gaze to his. The boat moves out of the sheltered water toward the open sea. Its mast begins to sink.

  “And then Beatriz is jumping up and down, shouting, ‘It’s the orange! It’s the orange!’ She runs over to Columbus, who is beaming with pride. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out the orange-tosses it
to her and says, ‘I knew you’d figure it out. You just needed a little time. You just proved the Earth is round.’ Columbus laughs, but then adds: ‘Do you have any idea how big it is?’”

  “So he still believes he’s Christopher Columbus?” Sarah says. “Is he giving history lessons?”

  “No, it seems to be personal. It’s his story- Columbus ’s story. I looked it up. The real Columbus had no idea of how big the Earth was. If he had known, he’d never have tried to sail to Japan. A while back, my Columbus told a story about arriving-washing up on shore somewhere near Palos. The thing is, nobody knows how Columbus got to Spain. We just don’t know how he arrived. He could have been in a shipwreck and washed ashore. He could have been on the run from Portugal. They don’t know for sure.”

  She’s been trying not to sound too enthusiastic about these stories but fears her excitement is seeping out.

  “What does Fuentes think the stories mean?”

  “I don’t think he has time to care. I’m honestly not sure he reads my reports.”

  “What do you think, Connie?” Tammy reaches over and fills Consuela’s glass.

  “Well, for one thing, he knows a lot about Christopher Columbus. It’s not just incoherent muttering. Somewhere in there is a man who has knowledge about the fifteenth century.”

  “But he believes he’s Columbus?”

  “Yes. As far as he’s concerned, he’s being prevented from sailing across the Western Sea to China, or Japan.”