Waiting For Columbus (12 page)

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.

“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.”