Waiting For Columbus (13 page)

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.

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 muster 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
.

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 my 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.”