It takes three days before he unlocks another chapter of his story. He arrives for breakfast in shorts and a gray T-shirt, sits down like nothing is amiss. Consuela does a double take.
“Is that-”
“Yes. It’s Columbus,” Benito says.
“He’s wearing clothes.”
“Yes.”
“I’m not sure if it’s a good thing or a bad thing,” Consuela says.
“Well, of course, it’s a good thing,” Dr. Balderas says. “Mother of God! He’s wearing clothes for the first time in months! He’s going to come out of this, Consuela.”
They’re in his office, and Consuela has just lost a second game of chess. They have an agreement between them about talking shop. They don’t-not for the first half hour of their games anyway. They leave it alone, talk about life, their lives, anything. Dr. Balderas has been telling the story of how he met his wife. They’d been at a poetry reading in Madrid. And the poet, a woman whose name he used to know but has now forgotten, was terrible-dreadful.
“She read a long, long poem about some deceased pet. It went on and on and on. In the end, we started laughing. Rude, actually, but my God, it had to be done.”
“A dead pet?”
“Yes, and a very long, sentimental poem. My wife and I were the only ones giggling. Everybody else either thought it was brilliant or they were too horrified to react. I don’t see a way for you to avoid checkmate, by the way. Five moves, if you’re careful.”
She sighs. “Okay, enough chess. Let’s talk about Columbus.”
“Well, I recommend not making a fuss about his clothes. It’s a good thing. Pretend this is how it’s always been.”
“That’s it?”
“That, and he must finish. He has to finish the story.”
They take their espressos out onto the upper deck. Columbus removes his shirt, a wild red Hawaiian-style massacre of flowers and swirls, but keeps on a ridiculous straw hat with a short, rolled-up rim. She rather enjoys this new, clothed Columbus. It’s a welcome change. God only knows where he got the clothes, the hat.
“It all goes wrong at the end,” Columbus says.
“What does?” She immediately knows what a stupid question this is and smiles at him knowingly.
“It’s the night before they leave. Columbus and Juan are sitting in some café in Palos pounding the wine. Columbus gets a note. I get a note. I was always getting notes from women. They just loved that lost-navigator routine. The romance of a navigator without a ship. Worked like a charm.”
The note reads only: “Meet me at Starbucks behind St. George Street at midnight.”
It’s unsigned. Columbus thinks he knows who it’s from but he’s not quite sure. He tips the messenger and then refills his glass with wine. It’s likely Beatriz. They already said their good-byes weeks ago when he came here to start outfitting the ships, but it is like her to come to Palos for the final night. He can’t even comprehend how much he will miss her. She is his rock. The one steady, unflinching thing in his life. Beatriz and the ocean. Regardless of any of the other dalliances, he loves her.
“We’re set,” Juan says sitting down. “We sail tomorrow morning.”
“All my gear is aboard? You loaded the wine into my cabin?”
“Yes to both.”
“Good. A toast, then.” He pauses. Smiles. “To whatever’s out there.” They raise their glasses and touch them together ever so lightly. Columbus looks at Juan and half smiles. “And may we please God, not cause some sort of catastrophe, some sort of horrible disaster, some sort of hellish nightmare in which everything dies but I am unaffected-”
“Cristóbal. Breathe. Just take big breaths. It’ll be all right. You’ll be fine.” Juan refills Columbus ’s glass.
“I just have this feeling”- Columbus interrupts himself to gulp half the glass down-“that we are going to go against God’s will. We are going to find something beautiful and utterly destroy it, not because we mean to but, rather, because we are just too bloody fucking stupid.”
Juan refills his glass.
“We are too stupid to understand beauty.” Columbus is muttering now. “I do not understand beauty. I do not understand Beatriz. I did not understand my wife. I do not understand Isabella. Selena is a mystery. That pine tree over there. I do not understand that pine tree. This wine. I do not understand the color of this wine-”
“Cristóbal,” Juan says. “Big breaths and you’ll be okay.”
He’s coming unglued, Juan thinks. On the night before he is to leave, his sanity has already set sail for parts unknown. I can only hope he’ll be all right in the morning. This has got to be the wine speaking, muttering.
The waitress, whose name is Lucero, comes over and leans into Columbus, giving him a good, long look. “The phone is for you,” she says, smiling.
“What? Where?”
Lucero points at the bar. “You’re the navigator who’s going to sea, aren’t you? You’re the one. You’re the leader.” She’s flushed with excitement, fawning.
“Yes, yes, we set sail tomorrow.”
“I just love sailors,” she breathes.
Columbus closes his eyes. For Christ’s sake. It’s raining women.
“The phone?”
“Oh, yes. At the bar.”
He leans on the bar, braces himself to hear her voice, and then picks up the phone.
“Chris, it’s me, Isabella. I can’t talk long because I don’t trust the line. And too many people around. Meet me tonight-”
“Yes, I got your-” He stops.
“What? Listen, meet me tonight at the Plaza Hotel, at ten.”
“Plaza Hotel, ten,” he says. “I’ll be there, my queen… Hello?” But she is gone. Columbus hangs up and gazes into space. The bartender brings him another glass of wine, and slides a note into place beside the glass. He softly taps the paper so Columbus is sure to notice it.
Oh, good God, he thinks. Now what? He opens the note and reads it. Then he reads it again and slides it into his pocket. Someone else wants to meet him at the Café Bordeaux at nine o’clock. Selena, he thinks. The Bordeaux is Selena’s kind of café. Selena has come to say good-bye. Selena the safe and silent harbor, he thinks. She has always been like the moon, a distant and giving lover. He remembers feeling very safe with Selena. Always.
Consuela dreams about Beatriz. Beatriz is sitting across from her and they are sharing a bottle of wine as old friends would. The air is pristine. They’re on a patio near the ocean. Consuela can hear seagulls. They’re drinking chardonnay from fishbowls. It’s so pleasant Consuela starts to feel apprehensive; she starts to not be able to breathe. She looks across the table at this olive-skinned, voluptuous, dark-haired beauty. Her eyes are only kind, and there is gentleness in everything she does. Even the meticulous way she drinks wine is an exercise in gentleness. Her movements are so fluid-it seems she is almost dancing with her wine instead of just drinking it. Her face is soft and her eyes, understanding. She’s telling Consuela about her love for Columbus. And once she begins to speak her love, Consuela can say nothing. She becomes paralyzed with fear. She’s afraid she’ll say something stupid, like: “I know.” And then Beatriz would say, “What the fuck do you mean, you know?” Everything would be ruined. So Consuela is silent. She listens to Beatriz and the seagulls. She breathes the wonderful ocean air. She wakes up cold and shivering with her blankets on the floor.
Consuela grinds her coffee beans, boils her water, and gets ready for work. She needs Columbus to finish. She can’t take much more of this. She wants to put him behind her, get on with her life, and live in the present.
It’s drizzling. The light is sublime. Fog mixed with cloud swirls in the high branches of the trees, giving everything an even, kind light. They hustle across the dayroom courtyard. Just before they reach the arched entrance to the south wing and the forgotten swimming pool, she says, “And?”
“And what?” he says, stopping.
“And what happens next?”
“Of course, you want to know what happens next, but great stories should never be rushed. This is a story about obsession and love, and lust and imminent discovery. It is a story that marks a leap in knowledge and understanding for all of humanity. It changes the world into a far bigger entity.”
“It is a good story. Do you think I’m rushing you?”
“I’m happy to keep going. Whenever you want, I am happy to tell you my story. Should we get out of the rain?”
But he doesn’t continue. He swims and she waits and nothing comes. When he finishes his swim for the day, he looks at her with confusion in his eyes.
“I… I don’t know what happened. I wanted to go on, to unravel more of this story. It just wouldn’t come out. I couldn’t find a way to begin.”
“It’s all right, Columbus. Stories can wait.”
In fact, it’s Consuela and Dr. Balderas, anxious in the wings, who wait. They wait for more than a week for him to continue.
“I know I started this,” Columbus says at breakfast. “I know. But it’s getting harder to keep going. I start to lose my breath when I think about coming to the end.”
“All in good time, Columbus,” Consuela says. “I’m not going anywhere.”
He holds his fingertip on the top of his queen, but Dr. Balderas is suspended in something other than chess. His mind is not on the game. Even Consuela can see that any move involving the queen would be disastrous. But still, he holds his finger there, as if he is considering the possibilities of such a move. He is looking at the board but he does not see it. He moves his forefinger to his pursed lips.
“The women,” he says, finally. “The women are his wife.”
“The women are his wife?” Consuela is confused.
“ Columbus. Columbus ’s women. Think about it. The queen, Isabella, represents strength, fortitude, and courage-and most important, she is sexual restraint. Selena is unconditional love. She asks no questions. She asks for nothing. Beatriz is the archetypal mother. Cassandra-was that her name?-she represents lust, desire, wild abandonment. All these women are representations of Columbus ’s wife. His real-life wife.”
Consuela can feel the blood drain from her face.
“What?” she says halfheartedly.
“It’s just one piece of the puzzle. I couldn’t get my head around all these women Columbus sleeps with, or in the case of Isabella, doesn’t sleep with. This parsing of personality traits makes sense. He’s not a philanderer in his real life. He probably loves his wife very much. What I don’t understand is why Columbus never beds Isabella. If I’m reading your reports correctly, they’re crazy about each other.” He’s about to go on but glances up at Consuela and stops. “Are you all right, Consuela?”
“Bathroom,” she says quickly. In a flash she’s in the hallway. In scant seconds she’s standing in the bathroom with the door locked. The lock click echoes in the small room. A strip of fluorescent lighting sparks to life, hesitant and yellow.
Breathe, Consuela, she tells herself. She slides down the wall so her buttocks rest on the floor, her feet still flat on the tile. Her forearms rest on her knees. This can’t be, she thinks. How could I be so stupid?
Even with the air-conditioning and the cool tile on her back, Consuela is sweating. She can feel the wetness on her back, and under her arms.
Why hasn’t Columbus slept with Isabella? It’s a story. There must be a thousand ways to tell a story in which this lust is consummated. There was plenty of opportunity. Just make up some motel room in Barcelona, or Madrid, or Marbella. Find some clever way to shake off her bodyguards. Wear disguises. But Columbus has not told this story. Their relationship is taut with sexual tension. It’s restrained, withheld, and ultimately forbidden. Just like…
It’s me. I’m Isabella. Oh, fuck.
“Does he know who he is?” Emile sips his coffee. Dr. Balderas had been pleased to show off his new Italian espresso machine. When Emile had asked for a café cortado, the doctor jumped up and made one for himself, too.
“Not yet,” Dr. Balderas says, “but we believe he’s close.”
“How close?”
Dr. Balderas hesitates.
“Look, it’ll take us a few days, perhaps as long as a week, to confirm who he is. But if he is this missing Canadian, I’ll have to let the Canadian embassy know we’ve found him. They’ll want to notify his family. And eventually, sooner rather than later, they’re going to want to take him home.”
“How much can you delay that process?”
Emile smiles. “Depends on how convincing an argument you can make.”
“Nurse Consuela is supposed to be here.” He looks at his watch. It’s not quite eight thirty.
Consuela is guarded when she arrives at Dr. Balderas’s office. She hesitates at the door. She does not know how to feel about this Interpol agent. It’s possible he holds the key to Columbus, and she’s not sure she wants the key.
Emile stands when she comes into the office.
Well, that’s old-school Cary Grant, she thinks. Nice. So far, her mother would approve.
He reaches out his hand. “I’m Emile Germain. I’m with Interpol. I’ve been chasing your Columbus patient for a few months.” He smiles. “I’ve had other cases along the way but he kept pulling me back to Spain.”
His handshake is firm, not overpowering and not lame. His eye-glasses are folded flat in his shirt pocket-they look like they might be wire-rimmed reading glasses. Consuela looks at his shoes. Her father always harped about how you could tell a lot about a man by the way he took care of his shoes-or didn’t. He’s wearing stylish, brown dress shoes, slip-ons-more pointed than any pair of conservative wing-tipped oxfords. The shoes are not polished. But they’re not in rough shape, either.
“Do you know what happened to him?” Consuela sits across the room from the two men-she wants space.
“My office identified four files out of our database-all of these men are possibilities. We need time to confirm his identity, but judging from these pictures, I’d say we’ve got a pretty good idea. We think he was in Madrid on March 11.”
Dr. Balderas breaks in. “Everything fits, Consuela. They think he might be a Canadian.” He hands her four pictures inside a red-and-white Interpol folder, which she flips through quickly. The pictures are fairly conclusive, though not 100 percent. The man in the pictures has short hair, or his hair is covered by various hats. He wears glasses in a couple of the photos. The eyes seem to be right. Consuela returns to the first one. Yes, this one certainly looks like him.
“I thought…” Consuela says. She inhales sharply. “He’s not Spanish? He’s Canadian?”
“Yes, and this creates a bit of a problem,” Dr. Balderas says.
“You mean beyond the fact that he still believes he’s Columbus,” she says.
“Well, that and the fact Mr. Germain is going to have to report in. He’ll have to let the Canadian embassy know we’ve got one of their people. I’ve let Mr. Germain-”
“Emile, please,” Emile says.
“I’ve briefed Emile on our progress. I’ve given him my opinion. I’ve told him that based on your reports over the past couple of weeks, and the changes I’ve witnessed in Mr. Columbus, that he’s close. And we’d like a little time.”
“Nurse Consuela?” Emile says. “You seem to be crying.”
“Oh shit,” she says, wiping away her tears. “It’s nothing. I’ve been weepy for days. I’m a little overwhelmed. This is great news.”
Emile crosses the gulf between them and hands her a handkerchief. It seems to be an honest gesture, not ostentatious. It’s just something he does when women around him cry. Consuela looks at it, then up at him. He shrugs. “My mother insisted her boys always carry a handkerchief. Old habits, you know?”
Consuela takes the handkerchief and dabs the corners of her eyes. “Thanks.”
“I’d be interested in your opinion, Nurse Consuela. How close do you think he is to coming out of this?”
She stands up and crosses the office, looks down into the courtyard. These windows need cleaning, she thinks. A fly skitters along the glass. I’ve no idea, she thinks. “I’m not a doctor,” she says.
“You see him every day-have seen him almost every day. Right now, I’d value your opinion more than any doctor’s-no offense intended.” He nods at Dr. Balderas.
“He’s close to finishing his story. It’s almost done. But I don’t know if he’s ready to face whatever it is that happened to him.”
“I think,” Dr. Balderas says, “what Consuela is worried about is the reality. We could pressure him to face his reality and push him even further away-lose him completely.”
“How much time do you think you’ll need? I can be exceedingly slow when it comes to my paperwork.”
Consuela smiles.
“We need a week, maybe two,” Dr. Balderas says.
“Okay. That’s not a problem. I’ll need at least that long to run the DNA. There are no fingerprints on file for this alleged Mr. Nusret. I’m having a file on him forwarded to your e-mail account, Dr. Balderas, but let me tell you what I know…”