Waiting For Columbus (48 page)

Dr. Balderas quick-glances his chessboard. He’d dearly love to play a game. Clear away the fluff. Refocus. But he knows Nurse Consuela would not respond favorably to an offer of a game right now.

Consuela knows she needs to calm down. She’d love a game of chess—to be lost inside that world of thinking ahead, speculating about what your opponent is thinking, and so on, and so on. But she knows Dr. Balderas would probably think she had lost her mind if she offered a game, so she is silent.

“It’s just a matter of time now,” Dr. Balderas says. “Columbus doesn’t exist anymore. He’s given himself nowhere to go.”

“That’s what worries me,” Consuela says.

“That’s why we’ve got a watch on him.”

Dr. Balderas, Emile, and Consuela are in the small boardroom connected to Dr. Balderas’s office. From the window, they can see Columbus, sitting by himself in the far corner of the upper patio. Emile is leaning on the edge of the table.

“Have I missed something?” Emile says.

“His last story. Columbus dies in his last story. It’s there in the report you’re holding.” Consuela turns away from the courtyard. “He’s telling these stories about himself. So he basically killed himself off. There is no more Columbus. So who is he now? That’s the question.”

“What’s the next step?” Emile leans forward.

“If we assume Columbus is Julian Nusret, we know a lot about him. We’ve got a good selection of buttons we can push. It’s just a matter of pushing the right one.”

“Buttons?”

“A daughter’s name. His wife’s name. A city. A gentle reminder of
his life. Some snippet of information that will get him to move out of the fifteenth century.”

Both Emile and Dr. Balderas turn and look at Consuela. Emile looks worried, concerned. The doctor, intense. She gets up and pushes her way through the door into the hallway. Around the corner, Consuela stops and leans against the wall, closes her eyes, and breathes.

Consuela is out for dinner with Faith and Rob. Emile finds them at Enrique Becerrita, one of Consuela’s favorite restaurants. She loves the roast lamb, the pork in crab sauce. But her absolute favorite is the specialty: oxtail croquettes and baked white prawns from Isla Cristina. Consuela picks Becerrita because she knows Rob appreciates the wine cellar, which is outstanding, and there’s actually a cigar menu. Rob smokes the occasional cigar. Faith disapproves.

Consuela drank almost an entire bottle of Cava before hopping in a taxi for the restaurant. This conspicuous consumption is a purposed buffer against her sister’s good intentions. She’s surprised when their dinner isn’t a setup. Faith and Rob arrive without a surprise date for Consuela. There is no tag-along friend. Instead, they have news. Faith is going to have another baby. Consuela is going to be an auntie, again. Faith’s tone is subdued and delicate. She tiptoes toward the word
baby
—pads the word with cotton batting. Consuela takes her hesitation as an underscoring of the fact that Consuela has no man in her life, no immediate prospect of family. It’s as if she has to be delicate about it because it might upset Consuela, the sister who is so far from having a baby of her own.

“Faith,” she says, “that is the best news I’ve heard in months. Congratulations, you two.” She glances toward the entrance and sees a face she knows—and he’s coming her way. Consuela was about to stand and offer a toast to baby number three. Instead, she stands up to greet him.
“Mr. Germain. Emile. What a nice surprise. This is my sister, Faith, and her husband, Rob.”

“I’m so sorry to intrude. Dr. Balderas said I might find you here. Well, he suggested a few places. I left a message at the institute but I thought … well, I have some paperwork I need you to look at with regard to Mr. Columbus.”

“Con? I thought you dropped the Columbus patient.”

“Not now, Faith.” Consuela sits down and picks up her wineglass, takes a big gulp.

“There’s a spot at our table—Emile, is it? You’re welcome to join us.” Rob stands up, motions with his hand.

“I don’t want to intrude.”

“It’s no trouble, no intrusion,” Faith says. “We’d love it if you joined us.”

Consuela looks at Faith, rolls her eyes, then looks up at Emile’s face. “Sit,” she says.

After their meal, Faith and Rob say their good-byes. Faith gets one last embarrassing stab at the spinster Consuela by mentioning what a wonderful auntie Consuela is, and what a great mother she’ll make someday.

“Oh God, that’s embarrassing,” Consuela says after they’ve disappeared into the throng of pedestrians walking past the restaurant. “I’m sorry.”

“She means well. I can see she means well.”

“Yes, what’s that saying about the road to hell being paved with good intentions?”

Eventually they move to the bar section at the back of the restaurant, where they order another bottle of wine. They start to go over everything they know about Columbus and Julian Nusret. They share information back and forth over good thick wine. They talk about the fact
he was found swimming in the Strait of Gibraltar. Consuela does a distilled retelling of the adventures of Columbus. She talks about his escape and his swim across the strait. Emile tells her everything he can remember about Julian Nusret.

“He was a professor who specialized in fourteenth-and fifteenth-century European history. Last spring, while on vacation in Spain with his family—he had a wife and two daughters—they wound up at the wrong place, at the wrong time. Madrid train station on the morning of the bombings. For some reason, he was separated from his family on a train platform the morning of March 11. His wife and two daughters were killed. There were reports of people seeing this Julian Nusret after the explosions but he disappeared … vanished.”

He tells her about the eyewitnesses, about the chaos, the screaming and blood everywhere. Witnesses say they remember the strangest things. A bird singing. An airplane. The temperature of the pavement. The curve of a twisted bit of train track. A hovering silence. Then the sirens started. “One of my witnesses said the missing man was crying. One woman only noticed somebody holding a leather bag, looking through the rubble. Apparently he stopped to help several people get out of the wreckage.”

Emile reaches across the table, gently slides his fingers inside hers. “My guys say just a few more days for the DNA results, but I’m convinced.”

Consuela feels like she’s going to cry and she doesn’t want to do that. She’s so tired.

Consuela joins Columbus on the upper dining-room patio where he is taking his coffee. She does not know how Columbus has managed to get Frederica to make him espresso every day. She’s almost afraid to ask. It’s midmorning. He’s got one of the sturdy wooden chairs from the dining room leaned back against the stucco wall. Thick clouds obscure the sun and extend to the horizon. The air is humid and sweet.

“I want to tell you a story,” she says. “Now that you have delivered the ships to Columbus and he’s out of the picture, I thought it might be a good time for me to tell you a story.”

“How fortuitous,” he says, smiling. “It seems I’ve temporarily run out, and here you are. Thank you.”

“Oh, don’t thank me yet. You might not like this one.”

“I love all stories. Don’t worry about me.”

“Okay,” she says slowly. “This story is about this professor. He worked in Canada, at McGill University, in Montreal. His wife and two daughters were killed—”

“I don’t want to hear this story.”

“Not all stories are happy,” she says. “Not all stories can be happy.”

Columbus stands up. His chair folds onto the ground with a bang. The espresso demitasse shatters. “Stories can be whatever you want them to be,” he says.

Consuela fights the impulse to reach out and touch his hand. “Life is not a story, Columbus.”

“Of course life is a story. Life is only a story.”

“Sometimes bad things happen in our lives, and eventually we have to face them. We can’t hide … not forever.”

“This is not a good story,” he says. “I don’t like this. I can’t …”

Columbus is rocking back and forth, stalled between sitting again and leaving. His back is to her—his gaze is across the courtyard, toward a gathering of orange trees. Consuela pulls the folding chair off the ground, sets it back up, sits back down in her chair, and waits. He keeps rocking.

“I want to go,” he says, finally. He doesn’t move.

“Go then,” she says. “But can I say something before you go?”

Another long pause and then in a whisper: “Okay, but not that story.”

“It’s just … you were someone before you came here … I think you know this.”

“I’m not that guy. That’s not me.”

“Look, if you ever want to tell me your story, I can listen with an open heart. Telling someone what happened is important. It’s the same as you letting me know the story of how Columbus got his ships.”

He starts to mutter. She can barely hear him. “There’s no rule. There is no rule. There is no rule. There is no rule.”

“No rule?”

“Grieving. No rules about grieving. No rules about how to be sad.”

“I’m here when … if you’re ready. You know I can listen, and—”

“I’m not that guy. I have to go.” He starts off across the courtyard—small, quick steps. “That’s not me.”

Five days later, Consuela gets a call from Emile, excited and babbling
like an idiot. It’s three in the morning. Consuela had just drifted off, after a night with the girls at a flamenco bar. She definitely had too much sangria, talked too much, had a puff of someone’s cigarette, drank some more, and got up and danced. She doesn’t dance. She most certainly does not dance flamenco. She did tonight.