Waiting for Columbus Page 7

  “It’s romantic in a sort of twisted way.”

  “I think something may have happened to him,” Consuela says. “Something that is very likely not romantic at all.”

  ***

  He wishes this ballpoint pen was a fountain pen. Even a pencil would be more elegant than this plastic throwaway thing. But he was lucky to have it. He’d signed it out and then turned it back in after two hours, without having written a word. He sat at the writing desk in good light and watched the bees work the lemon blossoms on the tree just outside the window. In the afternoon, Columbus tried again.

  (i)

  He has this image of a sleeping woman, her still form on a bed, lying on her side. The sheets are a mess of gray around her. A thick, regal-purple quilt is scrambled at the end of the bed. Her hip is thrust up, exposed-the line of her body is a sculpted, curvaceous desert landscape, supple and long. There is nothing hard about this body-it holds no tension. Three candles on the dresser across the room, two of which are still lit, make a pale-yellow light. Dark wooden venetian blinds are pulled down but allow slivers of light to section the darkness. A bottle of champagne is upside down in a silver bucket on the bedside table. Books are piled on this table and also fill a narrow shelf that runs the length of the headboard. Piles of sideways books at either end hold the upright books in place. There’s a painting of a narrow, long-necked nude woman on the wall beside the bed. This picture is enclosed by a thick, dark frame. This is not a hotel room.

  The scent of vanilla hovers in the room. Her face is not visible, but it’s easy to imagine this woman is satiated, happy. He wishes this for her. He cannot say why. The picture-taker is standing in the hallway looking into the room. Did this person take this picture on their way back with another bottle of champagne? In the doorway, sees her body on the bed. Thinks: Jesus, she’s beautiful. Wonders: Where’s my camera? Places the bottle of champagne on the floor. Gets the camera, frames the picture, takes the picture. He wonders if she will hear the shutter, lean up in the bed and say, “Hey… what?” And perhaps the picture-taker captures her question as well. But there is no hint to suggest that she sat up in the room. Nor are there any hints to suggest pictures prior to or after this one. There will be a perfect circle of condensation on the hardwood when he lifts the sweating champagne bottle off the floor.

  This is a vulnerable position, he thinks. To expose one’s back and buttocks like this speaks about trust and faith, and comfort. She trusts the picture-taker. Perhaps this speaks of love. Does love follow trust, faith, and this level of comfort? Are these dependent on each other?

  He thinks he ought to know this horizontal woman. There is some nuance he cannot put his finger on that resonates with familiarity. But what? He looks closer. If only this mental image would move. If only she would sit up and turn toward the picture-taker and smile. Then his heart would break with a yearning tenderness. But at least he would know.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Sitting up in one of the cheap seats on the night train from Paris to Madrid would have been a painful experience, but Emile had a new company credit card, so he booked a berth on the Elipsos hotel train. He slept for most of the trip-let the clicking of the tracks soothe away all the rough edges. In Madrid, Emile reinterviewed two of the witnesses. A student at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid remembers yelling at a man on the stairs. “He was going the wrong way,” she said. “His eyes were steely, hard. He ignored me. I just remember his eyes and that he was going the wrong way.” Another witness, a lawyer, said he was pushed by a man carrying a bag under his arm-a leather bag. “This man, he said nothing-just pushed his way through the crowd-he seemed desperate, agitated.” The confounding thing is that these witnesses seem to have a different idea of what this man looked like. Emile was intrigued. Either these people who claim to have seen the guy each saw somebody different, or this man was some sort of chameleon.

  ***

  He’s driving south from Madrid. The day before, the woman at the rental-car agency at first did not believe Emile’s new credit card was real. This woman, who teased with her smile-a sort of titillating playfulness was her default-was flummoxed by the black card and embarrassed when her boss took over. He saw the card and began fawning-upgrading, double-checking the readiness of the car, offering a free map, offering to get coffee, and waiving fees. Emile was grateful for the muffled silence of the car when he finally drove away. This credit card, he decided, was a pain in the ass.

  There are many roads that lead south from Madrid. If this mystery man, this person of intense interest, went south, he had his pick. South was a guess, based on the flimsy newspaper story about a man in Valdepeñas. And if south was a guess, well Valdepeñas was a leap of faith. Emile didn’t have much to go on. He had the usual checks in place, and a junior agent in Lyon was monitoring newspapers for anything about a lone, disoriented, or suspicious man-anything out of the ordinary.

  It’s a bit of a drive to Valdepeñas. Perhaps it was this man of interest wandering around town asking for directions, Emile thinks. He could certainly have found a ride. This is Emile’s only clue right now. He thinks back to the rental-car woman, the one who’d questioned his credit card. This was the sort of woman he would have felt comfortable asking out. There was nothing severe about her. In fact, there was a natural playfulness, which was shunted aside when the sycophant manager stepped in. He’d have enjoyed looking across the table into those eyes and seeing that smile. Emile presses the button on the door panel and the window opens. He lets the car-rental woman slip out the window into the hot day.

  Emile enjoys being on the road, driving long distances and thinking. For him, it’s a good place for those bits of subconscious-the renegades-to float to the surface. It’s a good place to figure things out. One sits still behind the wheel, motionless, while at the same time engaged in movement. The Paris shooting is suddenly there demanding attention, but Emile pushes Paris away-he elbows aside the reason he’s been off work. He has been turned inward long enough. His wounds are only scars now. He’d rather think about the rental-car woman and her teasing smile.

  ***

  In Valdepeñas, Emile decides to check bars and cafés near the train station and around main thoroughfares. He asks his questions in four bars and two cafés the day he arrives. This morning, he had an espresso in the café in his hotel and made inquiries. Just before noon, he visits his fifth Valdepeñas bar. He sits down at the bar and asks the same questions regarding any strangers making an impression or acting oddly.

  “Ya, there was a guy here a few months back. Thought he was noble or something. Went after a group of our regulars with a pool cue.”

  Emile sits up straight. He nods his encouragement at the bartender who had put down a copy of Don Quixote when Emile came in. If that’s not a sign from God that this is some sort of idealistic, absurd adventure, Emile thinks, I don’t know what is.

  “He pulled it out of the rack on the wall and snapped it on the table,” the bartender says. “Held it like a goddamned sword. Pushed Pablo up against the wall, made him apologize.”

  “What had this Pablo done?”

  “He was a little rough with his wife. Verbally. Not physical or anything. Pablo is a mean drunk, that’s all.”

  “And?”

  “The guy looked crazy-like he might actually push the pool cue through Pablo’s neck. Pablo apologized.”

  “What did this swordsman look like?”

  “Scraggly. Greasy hair. Dirty clothes. Definitely not from around here. He was fairly tall. Obviously he was crazy. I had to toss him. He was very polite about it. Understood completely.”

  “Did he say anything else? Anything to indicate where he was going? Anything? Even the most insignificant bit of conversation.”

  “Look, I told him that what he’d done was something a lot of us in the bar had wished we’d done ages ago. Pablo is a big fucking mean bastard of a drunk but his father employs most of the men who drink here.” He picks up a cloth from inside t
he sink and begins to wipe down the bar, adrift in this automatic action. “Why are you looking for this guy?”

  I wish I knew for sure, Emile thinks. “He’s missing,” he says, thinking, well, it could be true-this man might be missing. “I’m just trying to get him back home,” he adds.

  The bartender weighs this. It seems to Emile that he is being protective. He’s protecting a man he barely knows, a man he’d tossed out of his bar, a man who had attacked-or at least threatened-one of his customers.

  “Let me see your identification again,” he says.

  Emile hands him his badge. The bartender looks it over carefully and hands it back.

  “He asked me which way it was to Morocco. When I told him to go south, he looked confused. I told him to head for Córdoba. I had to point. He had no idea about directions. Clueless. I think he was going to try and hitchhike.”

  ***

  Emile is more confounded now than he was when he first read the alerts. As the details of this man’s journey pile up, clarity is not forthcoming. The newspaper story about the mysterious stranger in Valdepeñas who asked for directions to almost every city and town on a map of Spain could be his man. But one of the witnesses in Valdepeñas said the man spoke Russian, or at least had a Russian accent. Another witness, who provided a nice meal and a bottle of wine for the stranger, said the man was short, no more than 170 centimeters. And now add this man in the bar and a bartender who is protective of a patron who threatened to kill a favored customer.

  Emile gets out of bed. He finds the bottle of cask-strength Laphroaig on the desk across the room. He pulls the cork out and pours a hefty portion. In the quasi-darkness, Emile fumbles with the minibar key and locates a bottle of spring water in the back. He spills a couple of spoonfuls of the water into his glass and takes a sip of the smoky whiskey.

  Somewhere in this hotel, there is a whirlpool and steam room. He’d love to soak for a while but there is always the risk of running into a stranger who wants to talk. Emile does not feel like talking. Nor does he feel like being friendly. He tries to open the window but it sticks. He has to lean into it to get it to open. The air is surprisingly cool. He looks up into gray and remembers when he was a child, stepping out in front of the house and looking up into the sky at stars. He remembers the blackness of the sky and what seemed like layers of stars behind swirling layers-and some parts of that night sky seemed alive with movement, a blurred gossamer net of starlight.

  The clouds over Valdepeñas are socked in, thick and gray. The stars are up there somewhere, Emile thinks, and perhaps the moon as well, but tonight these heavenly bodies are not for me. A dog barks in the distance. A car drives by on the street below. A light comes on in a fifth-floor window in the building across the road. He leans on the iron balustrade and fights the impulse to fall back into the loop of the accident. It was an accident. Not his fault. It was not him who started shooting in Paris.

  Emile is driving south, away from Valdepeñas. The swordsman in the bar was given directions to Córdoba, so that’s where Emile will attempt to pick up the trail. He can’t seem to get the radio to work, and he has no disks in his bag. There’s music inside his laptop but no way to get that music to play on the car’s music system. He’d kill for anything by Keith Jarrett right now. The first few notes of the Köln Concert or any of the solo piano recordings. Funny how his musical cravings go. Last month he absolutely had to hear Heinrich Schiff’s Bach cello suites. He found a CD of the recording but it was the vinyl he wanted. So he drove an hour out of Paris and found himself, at three in the morning, in his father’s garage going through boxes of vinyl records.

  He’s driving inside a muffled silence. The hum of the tires on the road and the sound of the air-conditioning become white noise. Emile considers turning on the GPS system to see if there’s a friendly voice to keep him company. A female voice would be lovely.

  ***

  They are sitting in the common room. There’s a haze across the city today, making everything appear softer. Consuela likes this diffusion. They’re alone in the room, which is rare-there are 480 patients at this institution, give or take about a dozen due to the constant stream of discharges and admittances. It’s a sunny, warm day, and many of the patients are in the courtyard or wandering through the lemon orchard. A wall of windows allows light to splash across conglomerations of chairs and couches, clustered around tables. There is a sturdy wire mesh covering the windows, but most who spend their days here do not notice this. After the first week they become just windows, not barred windows.

  “How long did you stay with Father Paulo?”

  “We had a couple of months of discussions. He proved to be a most fascinating man. He was no normal monk.”

  Consuela sits up-presses her back into the chair. “Well, the question I have is about understanding beauty. Did you find an answer? Can you define beauty, Mr. Columbus?”

  “Not without poetry or art.”

  “So you’re defining beauty with beauty?”

  “Beauty is nothing without the language of beauty.”

  This stops her. When he says things like this she leans heavily to the port side-the side of her that believes he’s more sane than not. For most of the time he’s been at the institute she has been starboard, but he was also heavily drugged for much of that time. She carries the weight of this. It was convenient for him to be sedated for this time. It made her life, everybody’s life at the institute, easier. “So we need words-”

  “Not just words… language.”

  He leans forward, reaches slowly across the table, and takes her hand. Her first impulse is to pull away. This is her patient. But she leaves her hand in his-she’s curious. Where’s he going with this?

  “I want to breathe the piquant fragrances of a mature woman-to rest my head atop her thighs and breathe her in, make her scent such an essential part of my being that I will never be able to forget. So living without her would be like living without lungs, heart, legs, arms. And I want to write words for her, capture my frailest feelings and the smallest details of loving, find the words that resonate with life, love, sex, desire. And I want to write the words: I cannot hear your voice, not now, because your voice is my desire, a knife that cuts both ways…”

  Consuela looks into his eyes. Are they gray? Or is that blue? There’s certainly a hint of green, but as for the rest, she’s not sure. Columbus seems to be on the verge of tears. His eyes do not waver from hers. She is suddenly, irrevocably connected to his sadness. It takes her breath away.

  She pulls her hand out of his. Breaks eye contact. She tries to shake him off. This is far too close. She thinks for a moment that Columbus is talking about her. But that can’t be. She takes a deep breath. Beauty. We were talking about the idea of beauty. “Um, what about a combination of qualities that make something pleasing to the eye,” she says, “or ear, or touch? Does that not define beauty?”

  He smiles, seemingly unaffected by her pulling away. “What about metaphor? Or, here, let me define beauty for you… It was 1485, March, and she was most decidedly beautiful. But it was a sad beauty.”

  “Who?”

  “Cassandra. Aren’t you listening?”

  ***

  “It’s like this,” she says, and then Cassandra drops the towel-she’s picked a white towel. Her first impulse was to choose one of the burgundy towels-red is lust and desire-but for her, white is the perfect color for seduction. It does not speak directly of innocence, but it’s there. Uncharted territory. Virginal ground. “I have feelings for you, Mr. Columbus. Very strong feelings. Feelings so strong that if I let them out you would perhaps be frightened.”

  “Nothing much scares me,” he says. Columbus is staying in a borrowed villa-he’s traveling, trying to muster up some interest and, of course, money.

  I love you with all my heart, Columbus, she thinks. “I have never felt like this,” she says.

  “What?”

  “This connection.”

  “Connection?�
��

  She sighs and looks into his eyes. Could this man be so incredibly dense that he cannot see my love, my need?

  Cassandra loved him the second she saw him in the bar. He’d come in to ask for directions and wound up sitting down for a drink. He was trying to find an apartment that was, as it turned out, just around the corner. He’d been invited to a dinner party. The bartender free-poured the Scottish beverage, the Uisge Beatha, into a small, squat glass. She knew instantly she wanted him. She’d heard him introduce himself to the bartender: Christopher Columbus-the man who wanted to sail beyond what is known. Sitting in a darkened booth, she dabbed perfume under her armpits and then approached the bar. It’s crowded at the bar and she trips on a foot, or the leg of a stool, or her own feet, and falls to the floor. “Goddamnit,” she says, pulling herself up. “It’s these fucking shoes. I can’t get used to them.”

  “Are you all right?” Columbus says. “I think you might need a cloth. Your chin is bleeding. I think you’ve cut yourself.” There is a gash along her jawline, close to her chin. The bartender passes Columbus a cloth, which he holds to her face.

  “This is not what I’d envisioned. I just wanted to meet you, introduce myself. I’m so embarrassed.”

  “Oh, don’t be. I see falling women all the time.”

  The first thing that struck her was that Columbus had almost white hair, yet he was not so old. He hunched a bit, like he carried a great weight across his shoulders. She loved him instantly when he spoke. That dark-blue voice could have convinced her to do anything. Just the intonations of his voice charmed her.

  ***

  Columbus looks at her. There’s some sort of Celtic symbol tattooed on her thigh. One of the lines of this tattooed design has come loose and wrapped itself around her entire thigh. “Connected?” he says. We just met, he’s thinking.