Waiting For Columbus (22 page)

“That’s not such a bad dream,” Consuela says. “A tad embarrassing, I suppose, but it’s just a story, yes?” Consuela smiles.

Columbus sighs heavily. “I am a navigator, a pretty good navigator … and in this nightmare, I am useless. How is this a good story?”

“Does it matter how you get there?”

“Yes, of course it does. Do you not know me by now? The journey is everything! The way one does something is everything.”

“By the way, your last escapade through the window, your journey toward freedom, your attempted escape—how in the hell did you get out of your room?”

“Can’t say.”

“Can’t or won’t?”

“The end result is the same.”

“But the journey is the thing. The beauty is in the way a thing is done.”

“That, Nurse Consuela, is a beautiful thought.”

“But you’re still not going to tell me, are you?”

“Nope.”

“What were you thinking, anyway? You know how tight security is around here.”

“There’s nothing for me here. I’m not sick. I’m not delusional. I’m Columbus. I’m happy being Columbus.”

“I don’t think you’re sick. But as long as you insist you are Columbus, I’m afraid they’re not going to entertain the idea of letting you out.” This is the first time she can remember that Consuela puts herself on Columbus’s side and “them” on the other. It’s a small shift but she notices it.

“How can I not be Columbus when he is exactly who I am?”

“I don’t have an answer to that question. Someone smarter than I am once said we are what we do. I can’t tell if you are doing what Columbus would do.”

“Take a look over there at those two muscle-bound idiots.” Columbus waves and smiles. The orderly who was reading, continues to read; the other one smiles and waves back. “I can’t do what Columbus should be doing. If your axiom is true then I’m spending time in a mental institute, most of the time doped up on pharmaceuticals. What I do is put up with being treated as if I am insane. What does that make me?”

“It’s not like you don’t try to get out. This was your third failed attempt in what—six months? It’s no wonder they have two orderlies watching you. Listen, seriously, just between the two of us, how did you get out of your room?”

“No. I may need it. And those orderlies have nothing to do with my escape attempts.”

“Attempting to escape is futile. There’s too much security.”

“It would only be futile if escape was the goal.”

“You’re telling me that escaping was not the goal?”

“This sun feels good on my face,” he says.

“Yes, yes, it’s a nice day, Mr. Columbus.” She closes her eyes and focuses on the warmth on her face.

Consuela drifts into silence. If escape was not the goal, then what? And what about their chess games? Is he losing on purpose? She’d not considered this. Is he
playing
her?

She opens her eyes and looks at him. He’s got a wild, half-undone look about him that she has always found attractive. It is as if some part of his psyche does not care about how he appears to the world. There are more important things than appearances. The result is style. Consuela has been trying to maintain a professional demeanor toward Columbus—ever since her luncheon with Faith. But her imagination skips a beat when it comes to Columbus, her fantasies; her longing grows each time she rubs up against him. She’d like to do some serious physical rubbing up against this hopeless cause. She’d like to do a lot of things. She wonders if he knows how she feels.

“One can only truly learn from failure,” Columbus says. “The valuable lessons come from failures, not from a continual stream of successes.”

“There are three candles in her room,” he says at breakfast the next morning. It is the morning of the day of the feast of Saint Bertilla. “Always three,” he adds. “Not two. Not four or five. Why would she choose three?”

“Who?” Consuela is tired. It was a late night, and her air-conditioning was not working. While temperatures were hitting only the midtwenties in the day, her apartment was uncomfortably hot. Sleep came late. She’s grumpy—holds her third cup of coffee protectively.

“Selena.”

Oh good Christ. Another story about a lover. Another woman. Another tall tale of lovemaking. When was the last time she made love?

“If you had a choice, how many candles would you choose?” he says.

“I wouldn’t, Columbus. I’d turn on the light. You’ve noticed the light switch in your room, haven’t you? And its clever relationship to the light in your ceiling?”

He ignores her. “If you were choosing to light your bedroom with candlelight, how many would you choose?”

Consuela sighs. “Fifty. I don’t know.”

“Selena always had three. There was only giving and tenderness that first time with Selena, and it set the pattern for all the rest.”

“End of the hall, on the left,” she’d said. Columbus enters her room hesitantly, pushes the door shut with his back. He is moderately thick with wine.

Selena is naked as she moves gracefully across the dusky room—through the shuddering candlelight—hands him a glass of wine, and disappears into the bathroom. There are no bubbles in the tub. The water is steaming hot and clear. Three more candles in a high windowsill dance the light and shadow through the water and across the walls.

“What’s that scent?” he says. “It’s nice.”

“Lavender.”

Columbus sits on the toilet seat and looks at Selena. Blond strands scattered across half her face, which she does not bother to push aside. He notices the scar along the top of her cheekbone, traces the pale line of it with his finger.

“The bar?” he says.

“Yes.”

Everything is softened by the candlelight. She makes a harbor of her legs—at one end, her feet, and at the other, the sandy-brown triangle
of her pubis. Her arms ride the edges of the tub. “Do you have any idea how beautiful you are?”

She looks directly at him—finds his eyes. “Tell me,” she says, serious and intense.

He had not expected her to want him to clarify his question. It is one thing to be romantic, to say romantic things, but quite another to be called into account for what you say. He thought the question explained itself. Her response knocks him slightly off balance. “I’ll be right back,” he says. When he reappears, Columbus moves the candelabra to a chair beside the tub, drops his clothing, and slips in behind her, so she is between his legs. Her hair smells like vanilla.

“You, my dear woman, are like these poems of love, and desire, and longing, and wine. These are the poems of Hafiz. They dare to speak to unspeakable beauty or desire.” And so he begins to read her Hafiz’s ghazals, his voice softly filling the small bathroom. Selena sips her wine and listens. Sometimes she is lost in the words; other times, the words lose her. When she leans out of the tub to retrieve the wine bottle, Columbus stops reading. She fills her glass, leans back, and takes a sip. “Proceed,” she says, and he does.

Eventually they are tired. The wine is gone. The hot water has worked its magic. They make love by spooning. She draws his hand around her body to the soft nest between her breasts and he kisses the back of her neck. Then the wine and the country air, the hot bath, the cool sheets, and the down quilt work together to lull them to sleep.

Columbus is playing with his thumbs. He’s sitting on the patio in a
chair experimenting—attempting an illusion in which it seems that he is pulling his thumb apart. He twists his head sideways, tries to see the trick from the viewpoint of where his audience might see it. Consuela finds him before the end of her shift. “You have to see this,” he says. “It’s a parlor trick. Something my dad used to do.”

“The senior Columbus?”

“He used to scare us kids. Watch,” he says. He grasps his thumb in his fist and then appears to pull it in two.

“Impressive.”

“Was that sarcasm?”

“What do you think?”

“I think a parlor trick as stupid as this can be a useful metaphor.”

“Metaphor?”

“Yes. The girl is a gazelle when she runs, instead of, she runs like a gazelle.”

“I know what a metaphor is. Why are you telling me—”

“Because failure is never easy,” he says.

These failures, in particular, sit ugly in Columbus’s stomach. He walks away from his second audience at the commission’s chamber at the university knowing that even if he’d told them all he knew they still would have said no. Columbus knew it was a tough sell. He never expected them to jump up and down with excitement, shouting their approval at the prospect of his adventure. His goal was not to win his ships, not right away. It was to move some of them from a hard position to a more moderate one. This is the failure Columbus has a difficult time swallowing; he’s not sure he moved anyone.

If he’d told them about Iceland and the Norseman, and what those sailors said they saw twenty-one days out into the ocean, they might have considered his journey. That might have moved a few. The problem was withholding what needed to be withheld while revealing the right amount. Reveal the one wrong thing and he could become just another dead heretic, a potential
special
guest of the Inquisition. It seemed that offending behavior could come and go out of fashion with this holy tribunal. One week, converting to Christianity was fine; the next, it wasn’t good enough. One week, the official map of the known world was sacrosanct, not to be tinkered with, church doctrine. The next week, new ideas about the unknown world were entertained. It was difficult to stand on this shifting sand dune.