Waiting For Columbus (45 page)

In the morning, Consuela looks in the mirror and notices, for the first time, a series of subtle changes in her posture and in the way she looks. Her skin seems smoother than she remembers and her eyes sharper. She has to adjust the small makeup mirror in her bedroom. It’s too low. Either it’s been moved or she’s sitting taller on the stool. But the mirror can’t have been moved because she leans into it every morning without touching it. Something has changed in her.

In the car Consuela realizes she needs to know about Isabella. She has to know what, if anything, happens between Columbus and the queen. But she does not know how to move him in that direction. There are days when she wishes she could be blunt, or even violent. She’d like to shake him—get the remaining stories to fall onto the ground. Then
they could stand around and look at the bones of his stories, all haphazard and abstruse on the pebbles. In the clear light of day, they could perhaps make sense of these bones, put them in order, find the end, and more important, find the beginning before the beginning.

At breakfast, Columbus is focused on the contents of his coffee mug and nodding to himself. He seems on the edge of something. Consuela knows better than to make small talk when he’s like this. She’s got a pile of paperwork. It’s the end of the month. So she grabs a mug of coffee and retreats to her office. There is a small gaggle of puzzlers across the room, patiently placing puzzle pieces, rotating, trying again and again to make the picture complete. One patient is standing at the window staring out. Columbus approaches the two-way mirror, drags a chair over, and sits down. This movement in front of her desk catches her attention. He looks directly into the mirror and Consuela feels a prickle at the base of her neck. She inhales. Holds her breath. This was how it began.

Columbus leans forward, elbows on knees, hands clasped.

It’s dangerous to walk on the docks after sundown, but that is what Isabella feels she must do. She closes her bedroom door—moves quickly and silently through the connected room, out the door, into the hallway, and down the back stairs. Her security team is diluted. Some are with Ferdinand and her most trusted security team is watching Columbus. Only a small detail is sitting outside her door, two men and a woman, having a late dinner. On the street, she wraps her cape tightly around her body, pulls the hood up, and heads for the dock.

Perhaps Columbus would never come back from this venture, and this worry motivated Isabella to travel to Palos. He should know that I care about him and wish him success and a safe return, she thinks. I have to try to let him know how I feel. Perhaps he could take this small love of mine with him. This love is nearly weightless, would fit in a
pocket, could be carried in a breath. This love could rest, inaudible, on the surface of the skin until it was needed. How does she give him this small thing without saying it out loud? What can she say that he will understand as:
I love you!

In the harbor are the three ships. She paces. She walks the dock until she begins to know the intimacies of it—the way it creaks, where it groans. At the far end of her route, she hears somebody coming and ducks out of sight behind a pallet of crates. A woman draws a man down the street away from a bar, toward the harbor. They stop perhaps ten meters from Isabella’s hiding spot. The man leans back against the wall, and the woman kneels, moves forward toward his groin. Begins to move in a steady cadence. Isabella watches, fascinated. The man is moaning. This coupling goes on for ten minutes, and then fifteen, then twenty.

“It’s no good,” the man says finally, pulling away and starting to fasten up his pants. “I’ve had too much wine.”

“This way, then,” the woman says. She pulls up her skirts and backs into him—bends forward, hands flat on the wall. They begin to move again. This time the woman’s moans are louder than the man’s. Isabella wishes they’d just hurry up and finish. She is not disgusted but, rather, irritated. This takes her away from her watch. She’s worried she might be at the wrong end of the dock. The woman grunts rhythmically, breathy sounds.

Christ, Isabella thinks. If this goes on much longer I’m going to go down there and help out. They need to be done. For God’s sake!

After another ten minutes, the man again pulls away.

“It’s no good. It’s terrific—you … you are terrific. But I’ve had too much wine … mush too mush wine. I have to sleep. I’m on the
Santa Marina
, I mean the
Santa Maria
, at dawn. I must sleep, woman.”

She moves in close and whispers in his ear. The woman smiles. She hikes up her skirts, leans back with her shoulders touching the wall, hips and pubis thrust out. He kneels in front of her and begins to give her
pleasure. The woman does not moan right away. She hums. She bites her lips and hums.

Isabella is stuck. She’s embarrassed and doesn’t want to see or hear any more. She does not want this public reminder of what she could have had with Columbus, of what she used to have with Ferdinand. She’s claustrophobic in her tiny space beside the stacked crates. Regardless of the black, star-riddled sky above her, and the expanse of the harbor beyond, and the verisimilitude of wide-open ocean beyond the harbor, Isabella feels encased. She has no idea what time it is. The queen has no need of a watch. It’s got to be getting close to ten o’clock.

I should just walk out into the street, excuse myself, and offer an apology, she thinks. Wish her luck with her orgasm, wish him luck with his voyage, and be on my way. But she’s been here too long, watching. They’ll think she’s twisted. It’s too late. She’s committed for the whole show.

Then the woman begins to really moan and move. Like she’s riding a wave.

“Oh, yes. Yes, yes … Ohhh,
estoy por acabar!”
And then there is the sound of water dripping. The man coughs. The woman slides down the wall to the ground and the man moves beside her, slips his arm around her.

Thank God. Isabella almost applauds. The woman helps the man to his feet and they briefly discuss her apartment, which is only a couple of blocks away. Then they trundle up the street. The queen is relieved. She can go back to the Plaza Hotel. If she’s late, Columbus will wait. He’ll be in the bar just off the lobby having one of his bloody Scottish beverages.

The phone is ringing. Consuela is in the bathtub. She doesn’t care. This is the third call she’s smiled at and then ignored. Of course, it’s a
cordless phone. She could have brought it with her to the bathroom. Her coffee mug is on the tub’s edge and the press is sitting on the toilet seat. The water is steaming. It’s midafternoon and raining. Sevillians always seemed shocked at the rain—like it’s a freak of nature, not part of nature. She sinks into the water so her knees and breasts and nose become islands. She imagines she is Columbus floating naked in the Strait of Gibraltar, with sharks, whales, and jellyfish all around. It would be substantially cooler than this bath. Consuela has no inclination to reenact Columbus’s journey to that degree. She’s happy in her hot water. She closes her eyes. Drifts, tries to float. Thinks about being naked and adrift in so much water. She imagines the night sky, the stars, the waves, and the ocean current pushing her toward the Mediterranean. The vulnerability of being naked in so much water is frightening. A shiver strikes up her spine—a shiver in a hot bath. Consuela sits up in the tub. The hollow water sound echoes around the tiled bathroom. “He’s out of his fucking mind,” she says.

She shakes away the Strait of Gibraltar and takes a sip of her coffee. Outside, a car honks. She can hear the
shhh
sound of tires on wet pavement. She wonders about the sex show Isabella witnessed and has a sudden craving for a cigarette. She is always surprised by these cravings. In order to quell this craving she tiptoes out of the tub and makes footprints on the hardwood floor to the kitchen. She opens a bottle of wine, a German Goldtröpfchen, starts to look for a wineglass but quickly decides against it—the bottle is fine. Consuela slips back into the silky water. Her skin has cooled enough that there is pleasure in this reentry. Consuela takes a mouthful of the wine, gulps it down. Its cold sweetness is a nice change. She places the bottle on the toilet seat beside the coffee press, then leans back.

It’s not a bad thing to drink alone. Oh, Faith would disapprove. Rob would smile, pull her aside later, and ask if it’s a regular thing or an exception. Her mother would pretend not to hear. Her father would raise his left eyebrow, a gesture Consuela has never been able to comprehend.
And Columbus? He would approve wholeheartedly. He might say something stupid like:
In water one sees one’s own face, but in wine one beholds the heart of another
or
With wine and hope, anything is possible
. Or he’ll start to tell another story, another puzzle piece to the whole picture. Consuela fears the end. She fears that last piece. What if he stays Columbus? What if he goes deeper into himself? What if they lose him completely to this story? At the same time, Consuela does not want him to stop when he is so close to the end. But there is a date stamp on this man now.

She has been trying to be with Columbus as much as possible, and trying to make it appear as if she could care less. She has been lurking, hanging around at the periphery, waiting for the end.

Consuela wishes someone would slip in behind her and attempt to describe her beauty by reading Hafiz ghazals aloud. She drifts in this small fantasy for a while. The phone rings again, and for some reason, Consuela gets out of the tub, drips her way to the kitchen, and picks it up.

“Meet me for a glass of wine,” Emile says. “I’d like to listen to you for a while.”

“Okay,” Consuela says. Christ, she thinks. I’ve had a snootful of wine already.

Two days later, Columbus again pulls a chair in front of the mirror, and trusting that Consuela is there, begins to spin out another piece of the puzzle.

After Columbus leaves for his appointments, Juan begins to doubt. He begins to ruminate and fret. The reality of what they’re going to do begins to sink in. It’s well after three in the morning when he boards the
Niña
and meets with the second-in-command, Niccolò de Strabo, for a drink. Juan produces a bottle of the Uisge Beatha Scottish drink. They
sit together on deck in the dim light and share what they know of what they’re about to do.