“Well, you could tell him it’s a standard test-that the same test is being done on every patient in the institute.”
Consuela smiles. “He’s delusional, not stupid. What do I tell him when he asks what the test is for?”
“Tell him the test is looking for influenza antibodies,” Emile says, “that this test will help with the development of a flu shot.”
“Is this in any way close to ethical?”
“You’re responsible for his well-being. This test will help us be sure that he is who we think he is.” Emile is surprised to find himself feeling envy. He’s envious of Columbus because he gets to be with Consuela every day-well, every day she works. He looks over at Consuela. Clearly she is weighing the ethics of this test. Emile finds himself liking her more for her hesitation.
“Okay,” she says. “Okay. I’ll get you a DNA sample.”
“One more thing,” Emile says. “What time does your shift end?”
“Are you asking me out on a date?” She shakes her head as if this would be entirely out of the question.
“Well, we could call it business, but it’s been a long time since I’ve had a glass of wine with a woman who pushes me on the ethics of my job.”
“No,” Consuela says. “I couldn’t possibly go out and talk about business. But I’d love to see what an ethical glass of wine looks like.”
“I have a home in Paris,” Emile says. He catches the waiter’s eyes and holds up his thumb and forefinger for two more glasses of wine.
Not a house, or a flat, or an apartment, Consuela thinks. “That sounds like code for a woman is waiting for me in Paris,” Consuela says. She stops. “I’m sorry, that’s none of my business.”
“It’s all right. It is actually a pretty homey apartment. There used to be a woman there, but she took her leave two years ago. And I’m outside the realm of relationship right now.”
“That’s a very odd way to say you’re single, Mr. Germain.”
“I’d be willing to step back into that realm for someone like you, Ms. Lopez. You did say Lopez?” Shut up, you idiot, Emile tells himself.
“I didn’t say.”
“Oh? I’m sure Dr. Balderas introduced you as Consuela Emma Lopez.”
Consuela shakes her head.
“Well, it must have been on your name tag.”
Consuela smiles and shakes her head again.
“Okay, I asked around. I dug around a bit,” Emile says. “I know about that stop sign in Barcelona -the one you ran in 1997.”
I looked you up, too, she thinks. Consuela can’t help wondering where Emile was shot. She finds his eyes. Is there hurt there? Is he still damaged there? Gray eyes, with shards of hazel. The same confidence she sees in Columbus ’s eyes. An even self-knowledge. A groundedness. Yes, Columbus is deluded. But still, he has these same eyes. This Interpol man has not shaved in three days. She wonders if this is by choice. He has a strong, narrow nose. Brown hair with an undercurrent of gray. Even when he places the small wire-rimmed reading glasses on his face, he’s attractive.
“I think I’m flattered,” Consuela says.
“Well, I’d like to know about you, beyond your work, beyond Columbus. Where were you born? Have you lived in Sevilla all your life? I want to know your story.”
Consuela sips her wine. “Well, I like to read.”
In the dining hall, Consuela sits across from Columbus and looks into his eyes. She wants to tell him she’s tired. Tired of the stories and tired of being in love with someone she can’t touch, hold, or really, understand. He’s a man without substance. She has been in love with a five-hundred-year-old ghost. She’s afraid of the end.
“Beatriz winds up in a place much like this,” Columbus says. “In a mental institution with wire screens over windows and locks on doors, security guards, orderlies, and drugs.”
“She’s sleeping soundly,” someone says.
Beatriz hears this and does not move. She listens to the people moving around the room. She listens to their conversations and judges their numbers and where they are in the room.
“What happened to her? How did this happen?” A woman’s voice.
“Some sort of knife fight.” A man. It could be one of the security agents. One of the queen’s men.
“It’s going to leave a scar. It was a deep cut.” The woman again.
“A shame. She’s really quite pretty.”
A gentle touch on her forehead.
“She’ll be out for quite a while.”
And then the sound of a door closing. The hinges creak. Two sets of creaking and then silence.
Is she alone? There’s no window in the door. Beatriz knows this for a fact. She remembers checking it on the way in. But did they both leave? She waits. And waits. But how long to wait? If she waits too long there is a chance she could actually nod off. She managed to palm most of the pills they gave her but she could not avoid ingesting some pain medication.
Finally, she decides to risk one eye. Through a sliver she sees the lights have been dimmed. There are only three candles on a table across the room. Slowly, Beatriz moves her vision entirely around the small room. She realizes she’s been holding her breath. Breathe, she thinks. Breathe.
She sits up and flips her legs to the floor. That motion doesn’t feel quite right but it’s not as bad as it could be. The door handle begins to turn. And the door is opening. The nurse comes in. Beatriz is just as she left her. The hinges squeak again and Beatriz is up and out of bed in a flash. Her clothes are not in this room. She finds and dresses in a set of green cotton pants and a simple smock. She’s a little wobbly on her feet but the wobbliness is not debilitating. She takes three bottles of pills. Then she’s at the window, pulling the latch and swinging the windows outward into the night. The heat hits her like a small fist. She had taken the air-conditioned hospital for granted.
Eventually, after convincing herself that this was the only way, Beatriz jumps out the window into a hedge. It seems to her that she’s flying, in slow motion, through the air. The drugs help her landing. She’s still medicated enough to not really feel that her arm is broken.
Finding the harbor is not easy. She has no idea where she is, but once she gets beyond the grounds, there are prostitutes on every corner. She figures she’s got to be close to the dock.
She has no idea what time it is. From the shadows she watches the yawning guard on the dock for half an hour. She’s starting to feel her arm. Eventually, he steps out of the light and behind a few boxes to relieve himself, and Beatriz steals quietly up the plank. She cocoons herself in Columbus ’s cabin, under his bed.
She has no plan and she is equipped with only her love for Columbus. Her sons are in good hands at the monastery. They’re safe and well cared for. She and Columbus will discover the new route together. Well, no, that won’t work. Not with that ego of his. Even though he plays at being the selfless navigator without ships, Beatriz knows there’s an ego in there. Now that he’s got his ships and he’s off, he’ll need her to keep that swollen self-worth in check. It’s a good thing she’s there. Well, she’s going to be there for everything.
The gash in her face was painful at first but the pills from the hospital, which she choked down dry, keep her mostly numb. There’s a physician on board, she remembers. He’ll take care of my arm in the morning, after they sail. Maybe he can look at this gash in my face, too. Her arm only feels a little funny as she slides under his bed and drifts into a dead sleep.
All the signs are there, but he denies them. Most of the time he stops his love and desire at the door. To love this woman is not a hard thing. He chooses to love Consuela. But these other emotions are tied to the idea of love. The symptoms of being in love, when she is around, are unmistakable. Sometimes he finds it difficult to breathe. His heartbeat quickens when she is around. He can’t eat if he thinks about her, does not want to eat, does not care about food. He wants to make love with her-to be lost, as Columbus is lost with so many of his lovers. To drink wine with her. To drink her body with his fingertips, his lips… to kiss. Ah, to kiss Consuela would be to die sweetly. But he denies entrance to these emotions. He will not let them exist where he lives. They have to wait outside. Why? What is it in him that denies Consuela?
“You win again,” he says. “That’s checkmate. I’m never going to understand the nuances of this game.”
“ Columbus, you’re not fucking with me, are you? You’re not letting me win?”
“Why would I do that? I care about you.”
“Well, you just avoided the question by asking a question, and I suspect you are so much more than you appear to be.”
“This was a long game, and the lead vacillated between us the entire match. You won it by making better moves.”
“Oh, Columbus, I’m not sure if that’s an answer.”
He looks at her as she sets the chessmen in their starting positions. Her astounding blue eyes-a cross between periwinkle and navy. Shoulder-length black hair and a smile that ruins him. It’s as if her smiles do not come from a shallow place but, rather, come from the holy place in her, where prayers, and faith, and love exist. It is not that she rarely smiles. Consuela smiles often. It is just that he has noticed her smiles are not frivolous. They are, indeed, like prayers, like colorful flags with prayers printed on them.
“ Columbus?”
I must be tired, he thinks. The in-love Columbus normally does not lean this far toward Consuela. And he’s not done yet. He considers what it would be like making love with her. The sounds she might make. The feel of her skin. Her scents. The feel of the back of her leg, just beneath her buttocks. Her ankles. Her armpits. Her mouth on his. Her mouth kissing him. Surrender. Surrendered…
“ Columbus!” Consuela is smiling. He’s lost. He’s off dreaming about himself, she thinks. Dreaming about sailing. “Hello, Columbus? This is Nurse Consuela to Columbus. Are you there?”
“Yes, I’m here. Where else would I be? A new game, then. A game in which I shall endeavor to humble you with my chess skills.” He rubs his hands together and studies the board. Columbus stills his breathing. He stops thinking about Consuela. He looks at the board as if it is the first time he’s ever played chess.
Consuela smiles. “That’s what I want to hear.” You are a liar, she thinks. But such a lovely liar.
Columbus looks at the board. It is not in his character to make sure all the pieces face the front, or even the same way for that matter. When it comes to chess, the symbol of the piece-even a haphazard representation-is enough. Once each piece is in place, he will pause and look over the terrain. He will think through every beginning sequence he can remember. He will try and match the beginning of a game to the time of day, the weather, or the color of the sky. Sometimes he’ll play something stupid just to see the result.
Consuela pushes a pawn two squares into the center of the board. Columbus thinks about pawns-the quiet, underestimated foot soldiers-the soul of chess.
He smiles at Consuela, but she can see it is forced. “Selena,” he says, “came to say good-bye. She came to Palos, to say good-bye.”
Selena has never asked anything of Columbus. Not a promise. Not a conversation. Not even a word about when he might be back. Nothing. They communicated with loving gentleness and soft pleasure. She did not need words, or promises, or pronouncements of love or devotion. Their couplings became candlelit rituals. They moved toward holiness. This holiness was all Selena required of him. She took the sporadic love-making as a small gift to herself whenever he happened to visit the estate where she worked. She took the half-dozen or so postcoital conversations as glimpses-not as a summation of a man. Only the moments mattered. The moments were beautiful. Perhaps this is stupid, she thinks. But I just want to speak my love.
The night before Columbus sails, she waits. She arrives at 8 P.M. and waits. She waits at Starbucks, nursing a coffee for as long as it will go, and then ordering another. Part of her wants to run. Columbus intimidates her-his desire, this dream of his, consumes or pushes everything in its path out of the way. But she is also in awe of his drive and his intelligence. With each hour that passes, she faces her flight instinct. And each time, her need to communicate her feelings wins out. She just wants to ask this one thing of Columbus -she wants him to listen to her love. That’s all. She does not need a return declaration. She only needs him to smile and nod his understanding. She tells herself that if this fails, she will have at least tried. She will at least have tried to tell him what she feels.
At 12:10 A.M., she considers the possibility that he didn’t get her message. She thinks about the last time Columbus visited the estate outside Córdoba. They walked in the fields behind the barns, each step releasing swirls of heady, thick lavender scent around them. He’d passed her a bottle of wine with a cork pushed in just far enough for easy access. She drank and remembers the sweet hint of apple in the wine, the pervading scent of lavender, the clusters of stars and galaxies swirling in the sky, the small jangling sound of bells from a flock of sheep across the road. They sat for a long time in silence. It seemed something was on his mind and he’d turned inward-he seemed to be dancing with a problem or a decision, and Selena honored his silence. She would not ask what was wrong, nor would she ask what he was thinking about.
Perhaps she has no right to ask more than a memory of moments.
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.
“ Columbus, he’s a bright man,” Strabo says. “He knows things he has not shared with anyone.”
“Like what?” Juan lights another beedi.
Strabo smiles like this is an incredibly stupid question. “Well, he has not shared it with anyone.”
“So how do you know it exists?”
“Because it must. There must be evidence from beyond the limits of our travels across the Western Sea. He’s not suicidal.”
“Yes, but is he sane?”
“You think he’s crazy?”
“I just asked the question.”
“It is, I think, too late for such questions, my friend. You’ve signed up. We sail west in a few hours.”
“To Columbus, then,” Juan says, raising his cup.
“To us, my friend.” And Strabo touches his cup to Juan’s.
They continue to drink. They drink the Scottish beverage neat, and as the light offers long strands of orange and pink in the eastern sky, the bottle is nearly empty. Juan has smoked nearly a whole pack of his beedies. It is not a solid line of smoking but, rather, a dotted line through the night.
Juan is not sure why he joined the crew. Friendship? He doesn’t wholly believe. He does not believe in what they’re about to try to do, but for some reason, he feels obliged to take Columbus up on his offer. Perhaps it’s as simple as having enough faith to do something he doesn’t understand.
Juan hesitated over Columbus’s offer, and then said yes to himself and got on board. What if this dreamer is right? He’s not right, but what if he is? What if? What if they sail right into history by finding the Indies, China, Japan? The implications of being the first to discover such a route are beyond what he can imagine.
The garden is a fragrant treat-an olfactory gift. They walk along the stone pathway and cannot help but step on a variety of thyme, and the smell is delightful. It fills Consuela with hope. It feels to her as if she is breathing green sunlight.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “Help me understand this. You put Juan on a ship? The guy knows nothing about sailing. Doesn’t that seem a bit absurd?”
“Yes. It was a matter of friendship. And Juan is somebody who is not afraid to tell the truth, even if the truth is not what I want to hear.”
“You invited a one-handed ex-soldier who likes to paint on a voyage that’s going to require sailing expertise.” She sits on a stone bench and Columbus sits next to her. He looks smaller today. His hair is pulled back as usual, but his face is narrower, his eyes sunken, his skin sallow. Has this been an evolution she didn’t notice because she’s too close, or is this sudden? Regardless, Columbus has become diminutive.
“He’ll be fine. I trust he’ll find a way to contribute.” He sighs heavily. “ Columbus needed someone who would see things with new eyes and speak the truth.”
“By Columbus, you mean you.”
“I mean Columbus. Something happens, Consuela. Something happened.”
“What happened?”
“It goes bad. First, a woman is found floating in the harbor. The morning before the voyage. She’s floating naked and dead. Only her face, torso, and legs are visible above water. People gathered in Palos for the launch looked down and saw this armless woman. The water is black and thick around her. It is as if her arms have been cut off. It was in the papers. They thought she was a prostitute.”
“That’s what happened?”
“No. It’s one thing that happened. Not a good omen, this dead woman floating faceup in the harbor. I should know who she is. I can see her face and I know it, but I cannot give her a name. Not a good sign for Columbus.”
Consuela takes his hand in hers. She looks at him. He’s unshaven, frail, lost. “Do you know who you are?” she says.
“Today, right now?”
“Yes, right now.”
“I have no clue.”