Mr. Eternity (13 page)

“I may be getting my dates wrong.”

Later that evening, Azar and I walked down to the beach. There were fucked-up kids all over the place. They were only a few years younger than we were, but it felt like a lifetime.

“When I was trying to be a graduate student,” I said, “we used to go to this place called Tim and Terry’s. They had a little courtyard out back and you got your beer and sat at those wire mesh patio tables. Spanish moss and the big southern moon. We’d go there together at night when we got out of the lab, and even though we wouldn’t have been friends in real life, we were all part of the same enterprise. There was a real feeling of community.”

“I was never sure what you were actually studying,” Azar said. “It was like you were keeping that from me.”

We were standing out on the pier at the end of Duval Street. Hilarity and consumption all around us. It was warm and breezy and the sky was the color of watermelon hard candy. I felt like an expatriate in my own country.

“It was in ecology and evolutionary biology,” I said. “But of course I just thought about extinction all the time. I couldn’t stand it.”

“Sure.”

“My point is that it wasn’t really as convivial as I remember it. I was lonely and sad and I didn’t know any of those people. I have these fond memories, but they’re false memories. They’re like memories of someone else’s life. They’re a story I’ve told myself about my own life.”

“False memories again,” Azar said. “What does it mean to have memories that aren’t your own, but they mean so much to you?”

“But it’s so sad! It’s the brain trying to console itself. It’s the smallness and sadness of life. It’s the sadness of birthdays. Everything is so sad.”

“It’s true,” he said. “Or anyway, I understand.”

“Everything got away from me. Graduate school. And then living in New York. I hate cities! It did a kind of violence to my spirit.”

We were out there on the pier with everyone else. Americans, Germans, Spaniards, a Chinese tour group, college kids, three stunned Irish girls. I said to myself, Don’t be gloomy don’t be gloomy don’t be gloomy. I looked out over the pink tossing sea toward what I felt was a zone of radiance and gloomlessness beyond the horizon.

“I’ve been joking about cynicism,” said Azar, “but at the same time I’m not joking. Right? I actually do think it’s possible to live another way.”

“Maybe.”

“Okay, then what about this: What about Daniel Defoe? What’s the thing about Daniel Defoe?”

“He says he’s five-hundred and sixty years old. He says he’s Daniel Defoe.”

“Is it true?”

“If you say so.”

“Of course it’s not true! And is it a metaphor?”

“Maybe.”

“But who cares? What’s a metaphor? Resonances and symbols. Do we remember our literary-theoretical definition of the word? We use it colloquially. We’re not accountable to anyone. So what is really the thing about Daniel Defoe?”

“He’s a madman who lives in a boat?”

“Maybe, but all of that aside, the real thing about him is that he’s a nice guy.”

“He’s a nice guy,” I repeated.

“Correct. He’s a nice guy. If we could make the documentary, people would like it, because it’s so good to hang around with him.”

It was true. It was an amazing thought. So simple!

“You’ll be okay,” he said. “I think you just have to heal. It’s like an ankle sprain.”

“I know. I get it.”

He tightened his belt and clasped his hands behind his back. I closed my eyes and enjoyed the breeze.

“Let’s also just pause here and reflect on his little story,” he said. “Because in a nonmetaphorical sense, understood purely as testimonial, it was about making love to an arctic sea mammal of some kind.”

Daniel de Fo has persuaded the alcalde to organize a new expedition to the land of cinnamon. Diego Paez de Sotelo feels the tide turn against him and vanishes in the night.

The alcalde has been preserved until this time by his own misery, as vinegar and salt preserve vegetables, but the prospect of riches excites him, and the prospect of converting the Indians excites him even more, and he grows more spirited as he begins to put the expedition together. Surely he will be admitted to heaven for this great service to God? Surely he will be able to buy a papal dispensation as well, should he still desire to commit suicide?

“It is knowing the time and seizing the opportunity that makes men prosperous,” he says.

I encourage him to come with us, but he refuses. I say it will get him away from the pigpen, but he says there are pigs in the jungle as well. He is not wrong. A Pirahao pig is baaí or baahóísi. In Spanish it is called a peccary.

So the alcalde looks forward to his salvation, and Daniel de Fo looks forward to his reunion with Anna Gloria, whom he will send for when he has made himself rich, and I do not know what I look forward to. Now that I know the expedition will become a reality, my sense of grievance has become rarefied. My desire for vengeance has become a story I tell myself.

For now there is nothing to do. We sit by the crashing muddy sea and chew pieces of sugarcane, which the Christians have just begun to plant. We eat coconut candy. We eat the eternal cashew fruits and peanuts and guavas. We look forward to a time when the world will be a different place, and we ourselves different in it, and this is the Christian way of living.

The alcalde arranges for the ships that will take us west to Panama, the first leg of our journey, and he writes letters to the officials there. He hires a pirate named Gonzalo de Castellana to captain the enterprise because Daniel de Fo has insisted that he is too old to command troops himself. He recruits soldiers and sailors from elsewhere in New Granada and from the islands as well. Some of these men expect to make their fortunes on the expedition, but most of them are poor and their greatest ambitions fit into an oilskin bag. They hope for a handful of golden ornaments that they can exchange for a piece of land, a few sheep, fewer cows. One man tells me that his only desire is to own a pair of French shoes.

Some of these men have the yellow faces of men persecuted by God. Some of them worry that they have the devil inside them. One man tells me that the devil showed him a book written in blood and explained that he had only to sign his name and he would never again have to labor as he had always done. The devil would chop his firewood for him. The devil would help him make a house with plaster walls. He has not signed the devil’s book, but if the expedition is a failure he will have no choice.

Some of these men are persecuted by other Christians because of the way they choose to worship God. Some are conversos like Daniel de Fo, exiled from Spain and doomed to wander the earth. I am like a converso also. When I speak Spanish I feel that I know God, but when I’m asleep God is only a monkey with the face of a young woman. He is a Pirahao man with no teeth and he has stolen the keys to the sky. He has a son named Hiso. He has no power over the things of the forest.

We meet a Christian heretic named Miguel Oreja. He too has been exiled from Spain, though he has never been a Jew. He is a large and impressive man with a head like a cube of limestone. He cares nothing for riches. All he wants is to convert the Indians. He is well liked and well respected, but he is an unstable character and sometimes he vanishes into a world of gods and ghosts. He tells us that it is a sin to cross the street because crossing the street is so uncompromising an expression of individual will that it constitutes an affront to God. At the
same time he believes that man is capable of perfection. He says that man is capable of looking upon God and contemplating his glory in this life and not only in the life to come.

“This appeals to me,” says Daniel de Fo. “I’ve started to worry that my days in this world are going to be innumerable.”

Daniel de Fo says that he visits Anaquitos in his sleep. Sometimes, high above the vast plazas, he sees a hanging swinging basket suspended beneath a wineskin full of hot air. I don’t remember this floating wineskin. Sometimes he sees enormous men in sleeveless doublets and short baggy hose. They play a game with a rubber ball. They run and jump and toss the ball through a loop of iron high up on the wall. I cannot remember this game either. Sometimes he sees Anaquitos as it will be many years in the future. It is a devastated city at the edge of a desert. There are camels in the streets. There is a Christian king named Roletto, and he has a daughter named Yasmina, and the people are starving.

I also visit the city when I’m asleep, but I always return to the same house and I always say the same things. I try to apologize but I can only apologize in Spanish, and no one understands me. On other nights I visit different cities. Sometimes, because I have become sick with the Christian disease of looking into the future, I visit cities that don’t exist yet. They are gray and endless and they glow with lights of all colors. They are bright and dark all at once. The noise is unbearable. The people have forgotten how to see. The only animals are purple doves.

I have more and more trouble moving between night and day. I have more and more trouble deciding what I am and what I want. Sometimes I don’t know if I’m speaking Pirahao or Spanish.

We tell the soldiers stories about Anaquitos, which we call El Dorado. Daniel de Fo says that in El Dorado they will be able to eat as much rat meat as they like. They will be able to wear clothing dyed every color imaginable and some colors that cannot be imagined. They will be able to go to the zoo and see the karawa bird, which is ten feet tall and appreciative of fine singing. They will be able to dance with the big bird and sing the tapir song.

I tell them stories too, but only because this is what I have always done. I have no reason for saying what I say. I tell them that in El Dorado the people bury their dead idolatrously, with many golden objects and with dead animals too, so that the dead person will have food in the life to come. I say that they always void themselves in full view of their children, so that the children will have no illusions about life. I say that they make sacrifices to the mountain peaks. I say that their most important ceremony is the ceremony of a boy’s first haircut. I say that the men have to bind their balls up with snakeskin and rub them with a special ointment or else they hang down to their knees and eventually fall off. Daniel de Fo nods and laughs, haha.

“This trouble with balls is an effect of the heat,” he says. “It comes from living under the climate of Venus and not under the climate of the moon.”

The Pirahao have no golden objects, though I must never say so, and no one would believe me if I did. Nor do they perform sacrifices. The idea of sacrifice is not imaginable to them. It is only the Christians who perform sacrifices.

Meanwhile we wait. We do nothing. The macaws and the monkeys talk to each other in the trees. The plants are the color of the earth, and the earth has no color. The soldiers wander around town and rub their heads. They drink wine and chase the whores. Some sleep at the brothel and some sleep in provisional huts and rude shelters. Some sleep where they fall in the street, so stupid with wine that for them night is only a black void during which they can accomplish nothing. In the morning they rise, blinking and terrified.

One morning we sit in the street with a calabash of cashew wine. We expose our heads to the sun so that the great heat and light will stupefy us. We are to embark in three weeks.

“It used to be that when you crossed the equator all the lice on your body would die instantly,” says Daniel de Fo. “Amazing. It isn’t true anymore. It used to be that the universe was very small, arranged neatly as a sequence of nested spheres, one inside the other, the stars above and
heaven above that. I don’t remember if this is true any longer or not. It used to be that there was no America, and now here we are, and here you are, and where did you come from? We have galleons now that cross the ocean as easily as a person crossing the street, Miguel Oreja’s difficulty notwithstanding. The arquebus is a terrible weapon that will only become more terrible as it’s perfected. We have clocks so small they fit in your pocket, and water-operated latrines, and all kinds of cranks and wheels that can do in one hour the work a hundred men can only do in a week.”

We sit with the sweat running down our faces. We are nearly blind in the noonday sun.

“And someday we’ll have a sailing ship powered with gunpowder,” says Daniel de Fo, “and one in which the very heat of the sun works a series of cranks and shafts and drives the vessel through the waves. We’ll have a ship that will flap through the air, through infinite space even, on wings larger than those of any bird except the roc. It will be possible to cook meat in an instant, in a single explosive pulse.”

He envisions a new kind of siege warfare. The attackers will leap from a tower and bounce off large rubber balls and fly over the ramparts of the besieged city. They will carry sails in their arms, which they’ll toss into the air, and the sails will arrest their fall and they will simply float down, sails fluttering above their heads, firing crossbows and arquebuses onto the heads of the enemy. I ask him whether the enemy could not simply charge his cannon with gravel and rip these sails to shreds, but Daniel de Fo says that he has a solution. He says that you could give each man a great charge of powder so that if the enemy did cut him down and set him falling to earth, he would become a bomb. He would blow the city apart even as he met his own fiery death. But it wouldn’t happen like that because the very knowledge that each man was a bomb would dissuade the enemy from firing.

“This is a tremendous idea,” says Daniel de Fo. “It is almost like a philosophy bomb in its own right. A weapon so terrible that its existence would eliminate the necessity of its use.”

I tell him that he’s thought of everything. He is the great strategist of the age. But does he have a strategy for dressing himself? His tunic is on backwards. It is a nearly impossible error because the tunic is laced in front.

“Aha,” he says. “I see what you mean. This just goes to show that you can’t neglect the strategy of the smallest things either. The strategy of daily life. But let’s imagine a time when there will be shirts of so supple a construction and so simple a design that you could slip them on backwards or forwards with the same success.”