Waiting for Columbus Page 8

  “Yes, there seems to be something, um, old-between us.”

  “What?”

  He sees her as a dream, an entire tapestry-a woman with an aura in the dim light of the room. Her eyes are dark green and continually searching. They look for signs in other humans like a good navigator reads the sea. But tonight they project determined lust. Her eyes want.

  He’d taken her to the dinner party, where he held court on all things oceanic-kept the other well-heeled guests enthralled-and at the end of the night collected support in the form of three hefty checks. The dreams he wove of faraway lands. The romance of sailing into uncharted territory. The lure of gold and silver and spices at the end of the day. He performed and Cassandra bought it all, without question.

  When the towel slips and she is as beautiful as he thought she would be, he lives that moment. Breathes deeply. Recognizes vanilla scent. Can smell something spicy above the vanilla. He tries to hold this image of her: the full curve of the bottom of her breast, and the way the light touches her face; the loose strands of her hair at her shoulder, and the shadow between her legs-he wants all of this fixed in his memory. A phone rings somewhere in the villa, in another room. She offers to drag the loud thing down the hall so he can do something with it-stop the ringing sound. “No,” he says, “don’t worry about it. If it’s the queen, I can always call her back tomorrow.” “How will you know?” “She’ll leave a message,” he says. Cassandra wants to ask how the queen will leave a message but she feels she’s exposed enough of her ignorance. If Cassandra loved him before, this dismissal of a queen on her behalf caused a rising up of love in her that was not measurable. This was it. This was the man of her dreams.

  The phone has prolonged the juxtaposition of skin against the stone texture of the wall for a few seconds longer. Columbus quietly blesses whoever it is that called. This is the conclusion they’ve been slipping toward.

  They are both old enough to highly value restraint. They luxuriate in not touching, the almost-nibble, the withheld kiss, the pulled-back caress. They almost surrender to loving for three blissful hours. Tempt from room to room. Share stories. Slowly unfurl feelings meant to capture the other. Taunt each other. They do these things in the context of their conversation. When they finally give in to desire it is the result of consuming three bottles of thick wine. The wine, and the question. The unspoken question. Do we surrender to this? The question itself is something to love-it becomes a tangible thing. The sound of the leaves rustling beyond the courtyard. The unexpected moon barely above the horizon, big and golden and damaged.

  She stands up, naked except for her black pumps. They entwine each other in a dream state of drunkenness and lust. White silk floats above them. Flickering candlelight against a rough stone wall. Mozart’s Requiem plays from the stereo. They smooth and caress and become gentle with each other. They…

  “What did you just call me,” Cassandra says carefully. Columbus stops. Her voice is a cold wire that cuts the room.

  “I… I was remembering something.”

  “I think you called me Selena.”

  “Why would I call you Selena, when clearly your name is, and always shall be, the beautiful combination of consonants and vowels that make the name Cassandra?”

  “You’ve confused me with someone else! Goddamnit, Columbus, at the very least you could get my name right.”

  Columbus remembers what Juan said about sticky situations with women. When you feel backed into a corner, always tell the truth enthusiastically and they’ll likely not believe you.

  “I saw Selena two days ago.”

  “And did you share this with her?”

  He pulls away from her in the bed. Seeks her face in the darkness. Breaks from the dream.

  “Several times. She is an incredible lover. Such enthusiasm and she’s so young. Touching her was like touching a flower that begins to bloom in spring rain.”

  Cassandra peers at him. Reckons him. She weighs what she knows is true and what she wishes were true. She thinks she can see what he’s doing.

  “Several times?” she says.

  “Many, many times.”

  “Well then this shouldn’t be a problem.” She leans toward him and kisses hard. Her loving pushes into recklessness, becomes violent. She is determined to make him pay. She’s not certain he slept with this Selena, but she will punish him for calling out Selena’s name while he was with her. And now? Now he will never go back to Selena, of course. Columbus is hers. Hers in love. She rakes her fingernails down his back, digging into his skin, bites and sucks at his neck, marks her property.

  ***

  “So this Cassandra is the one you… but then how does Selena fit into all of this?” Consuela sips at her coffee. It’s too hot, so her sip is more a peck at the surface. She’s confused. “Is Cassandra the one you cheated on Beatriz with?”

  “I never married Beatriz. I should have. But I did not.”

  “And that’s an excuse for cheating on her?”

  Columbus takes a gulp of his coffee, which has been cooled by copious amounts of cream and four big spoonfuls of sugar. He looks evenly at her face.

  “And what about Mozart?”

  “Mozart? I don’t know.”

  “Because his music was playing in your story.”

  Columbus shrugs. “What difference does it make? I don’t remember saying it. Don’t know anything about it. This is a story about obsession and discovery, discovery and obsession.”

  “And a lot of making the fleshy union, I’ve noticed.”

  Columbus shrugs again. “I’m frail. I get lonely. I love women. I love all women.”

  “I see,” she says.

  “And I love wine. There is nothing like a good bottle of wine.”

  “I see.”

  “And being at sea. I love being on the ocean.”

  She nods.

  “And I love the Moorish influence on the architecture in this place. Oh, and I love fishing.”

  “Moorish influence?”

  “Like you didn’t know. It’s everywhere. The horseshoe-shaped arches, the courtyards-how many are there? four? five?-and the ornate ceilings, and the repetition of geometric and nature-based designs.”

  Why do you know this, Columbus? she thinks.

  Columbus finds a table in a corner of the cafeteria, as far away as possible from the chaos of the institute-the crazies with vocal agendas, the wall knockers, the head bangers, the nonstop talkers-the TV constantly droning, never loud enough for anyone, and other rooms with banal, calming music that Columbus finds infuriating. He places his pen at an angle on the notebook, corner to corner. He looks up and across the room to an arched doorway that leads to another room with an arched doorway, and eventually to a small courtyard with a fountain. This fountain is broken. The plumbing is gone and it is a big job to fix it. So it is a dry fountain. Columbus looks down at the pen and paper, then watches with fascination as his hand moves to pick up the pen and begins to write.

  (ii)

  But he does know about Mozart. He remembers listening to music in a dark room and the name Mozart is connected to this music. There was someone else in the room. He thinks he remembers feeling safe, loved. The sound of the oboe and of French horns building to a powerful chorus, but all within the scope of sadness-the low male voices first, then the female voices joining. A lone female voice extends into the melody. He leans back into a soft couch. The music washes over, through him. Is that a woman over there at the desk in the window, across the room, writing in a journal? Maybe she is writing with a fountain pen because it is what she has always done. The ink is sepia-colored. Perhaps later on, during the same piece of music, she will push the cap onto her pen, join him on the couch, and lean into his shoulder-float with him for a few minutes.

  But who is this memory woman? Is this someone he loves? What does he feel? Why does nothing ever move in these images? No names come. Nothing moves.

  He can see the side of her face as she writes but can mu
ster no name for this face, no relationship. The music has a name but not this woman stranded at her desk, suspended in time inside his memory. He knows this beautiful music is Mozart.

  There are framed certificates above the desk. Someone in this house has earned degrees from universities. Someone volunteers. There’s a certificate of appreciation. He cannot see the names on these certificates. Her chair is leather. It looks comfortable but not so comfortable that it would lull its occupant to sleep.

  It’s snowing. Snow floats by the window, is caught-made to stand still in the window frame. He remembers feeling something about this snow. Sorrow? It is natural for men and women to sit still occasionally, to ponder, consider, or reflect. But snow, snow in the air has falling as its sole purpose. Movement! This snow needs to move and it’s not. This snapshot has stopped the snow.

  He’s grasping. He knows he’s grasping. He’d like to think he’s not alone in the world-that somewhere, somebody misses him. He’d like to believe that he’s loved, that he loved. But nothing in this picture suggests this. This is just a woman sitting at a desk in what appears to be a study, with snow falling past the window. The music is Mozart, big and sad. That’s all the evidence he’s got. There is no verisimilitude about his relationship to any of this. It just is. He can see the books, the degrees on the wall, and the woman writing in her journal. He can see her leather chair and the snow. She may be writing with a fountain pen that has sepia ink. Perhaps he only wants her to come and snuggle with him on the couch. He cannot distinguish what is real from what he desires to be real.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  They are walking in the lemon orchard on the day of the feast of Saint Cornelius and Saint Cyprian. Clouds are pillowed above the city, as if they were pushed up against an invisible wall. Walking among these yellow globes is a cheerful thing-an antidote to the gray oppression of the clouds.

  Consuela plucks a lemon, buffs the dust from its skin, and bites into it. She is prepared, does not make a face in reaction to the sourness. The juice runs down her chin, and she wipes her face with her sleeve.

  “Why did you do that?”

  “Because I’ve never done it before,” Consuela says.

  “And?”

  “It was a good lemon. It was a delicious lemon.”

  They walk in silence for a few minutes. Then Columbus clears his throat.

  “I’m not the only one who knew,” he says. “In fact, there were many who knew.”

  Consuela laughs. “You’re going to have to brief me a bit better for these conversations where you start halfway through and I’m expected to know what you’re talking about.”

  “Look, all I’m saying is that you could go into a bar, and if it was the right bar and you were a good listener, you found out things about the world. I was in Jaén. I just wanted a glass of wine. In the booth behind me, there was a man named Manuel, who sold Bibles. Apparently he was buying them from a guy who was producing them by the hundreds. He called them Gutenberg Bibles. A couple of sailors came in and sat with him. I listened. After much wine, they mentioned they had been driven far out into the Western Sea by a storm. This is something that happens all the time. The important thing is, nothing happened. As far as they could tell, there was just more and more ocean. But while they were out there in the unknown, they saw gulls. It took them twenty-one days to sail home.”

  “So they saw birds.”

  “Yes, they saw the kind of birds that indicate land is nearby. They were twenty-one days out. Then one of the sailors said the most extraordinary thing. I almost choked on my wine. This sailor started to talk about a small, dark-skinned corpse in a narrow boat made from a single tree, adrift in the ocean. The other sailor tells him to shut up about it.”

  Consuela purses her lips.

  Columbus looks at her with furrowed brows and such sincerity that she almost feels like giggling.

  “What’s out there, Consuela? If that’s not a clear indication that these men were close to Marco Polo’s Japan, then I don’t know what is.”

  ***

  Apparently somebody other than Dr. Fuentes’s wife has been scraping chairs across his office floor in the last few months. And because the current Mrs. Fuentes started off scraping chairs, she knew when and where to look. She discovers that what she’d suspected was true, and Dr. Fuentes has his back against the wall. Consuela doesn’t care. But one hears things. So Dr. Fuentes is distracted, off balance. Perhaps even a little unfocused. His wife is threatening divorce and promising to take the house, the Jaguar, and a holiday home on the coast that’s been in the Fuentes family for three hundred years. It appears he’s lost interest in, among other things, the Columbus case.

  Consuela looks in on Columbus when she arrives for her shift. He’s sleeping. His room is more or less unchanged from the day he arrived. There are no pictures of family. No packages of letters. It’s austere. He lives like a monk, an ascetic. He has made requests for writing paper and wine-each week he asks for wine from a particular vineyard just outside of La Rábida. Of course, the wine is denied. The writing paper is fine, but not a pen. Pens are not allowed because they are potential thrusting weapons. If he wants to write, he has to go to the common room and sign out a pen.

  ***

  At breakfast, Columbus is quieter than normal. Pope Cecelia is louder than usual. She stands at the doorway to the dining room. Holds out one skinny, shaky arm. “I want to remind you of God’s word,” she commands. “Remember the Lord your God. You shall have no other gods before Him. You shall not make for yourself any image and nor shall you bow down to them or worship them. You shall not make wrongful use of the name of the Lord. Remember the Sabbath day-” She stops.

  Mercedes, a short, forty-year-old blonde who is always hitting on the women in the institute and washes her hands every ten minutes, stops and listens. “Could happen,” she says, nodding enthusiastically. “Could happen.”

  Cecelia is lost. She’s looking around the room like she recognizes nothing. Consuela’s compassion rises up and she moves to her side.

  “I can’t remember when the Sabbath is. Which day? How can I be pope if I can’t remember the Sabbath? How can I keep it holy when I don’t know…” Tears squeak from her eyes, flow down her wrinkled cheeks.

  “You remember the Sabbath is Sunday, Your Holiness. I know you do. Six days of work, and then the seventh, Sunday, you rest.”

  “Keep the Sabbath holy-Sunday’s a holy day, that’s right. The Sabbath is Sunday. And you must honor your mother and your father,” she says. “Thou shalt not murder, nor commit adultery. Nor steal-”

  “Nothing wrong with stealing,” Mercedes says. “I steal all the time.”

  “Nor shall you bear false witness, or covet your neighbor’s wife, or ox, or donkey-” She stops, looks at Consuela with an expression that is almost an offer to add something. “And that’s it, then. You may eat!” She makes the sign of the cross in the air in front of her.

  Almost everybody is eating already. They’re so used to these premeal holy rants, most don’t even hear them anymore. Consuela fills her coffee mug and sits beside Columbus. “Good morning,” she says quietly, evenly.

  He ignores her, shovels more scrambled eggs into his mouth, slurps at his orange juice.

  “Good morning, my ass,” he mumbles.

  Elena, a tall blond woman with slender fingers, who does not speak, is sitting across from Columbus. She smiles. Columbus has never seen, or heard, Elena speak a single word. Nothing in all his time at the institute. He heard from one of the orderlies that there is no physical reason for her muteness. She just stopped speaking. There are days when he can relate.

  “Did you just call me an ass?”

  Elena smiles again. She places her mug of coffee carefully on the table.

  “What in particular is good about this morning? Perhaps it’s good for you because you get to leave. This is your job. You come, you go. This”-he looks around the dining hall and gestures, points with open hands-“this, is m
y life. No leaving. You get to go out into the world and have a glass of wine, make love, sleep until noon if you want. I am not free. I am completely surrounded by crazy people.” He looks across the table at Elena. “I don’t think you’re crazy, by the way.”

  Elena nods her understanding and appreciation.

  “It is not a good morning, Nurse Consuela. It won’t be a good morning until I am waking up with a beautiful woman. A woman with curves like waves. A woman whom I love. A woman who will drink wine with me and drift inside a dream about the other side of the ocean. So fuck off with your cheery greetings.”

  Consuela stands up. The thing is, she was trying not to be too cheery. She is aware that this is an institution.

  “Sit,” he says. “I’m grumpy. I’m sorry.”

  Consuela sits down but she’s bristling, hesitant.

  “There was a morning-in my memory-when I was very happy.”

  “Oh really. What was her name?” She takes a sip of coffee.

  He looks at her with a pitying, downward glance. “I was with my son.”

  Well, she thinks, at least my feet are getting clean from sticking them in my mouth so often this morning.

  ***

  Morning does not come quickly when one is looking for it. It becomes a lugubrious, lumbering animal that moves only when it wishes. Yet mornings are inevitable. This one had sifted in through thick clouds on a blanket of fear. Columbus only hopes that they have successfully crossed the border from Portugal into Spain. He and his son, Diego, have been alternating between walking and running all night, and now they arrive inside a thick fog.

  I think we’re safe now, Columbus is thinking. I think we’re across the border. We should stop at an inn and ask just to make sure. If I were at sea, I would know exactly where I was. If I could have seen the stars last night, I would have been able to tell when we crossed over.