Read Waiting For Columbus Online
Authors: Thomas Trofimuk
Waiting For Columbus (50 page)
Emile sticks out his hand and Julian takes it. Emile can see an open bag on the bed behind Julian.
“The embassy wanted to buy a whole new set of luggage. Our luggage in Madrid, after a while, was shipped back to Canada. But I have nothing to put into a set of luggage.”
“I am sorry for your loss, Professor Nusret.”
“I … I don’t know who you are. I’m sorry. Are you from the embassy?”
“I’m Emile. Emile Germain. I’m with Interpol. I’ve been following you across southern Spain. I’m sorry it took me so long.”
“Oh, so you’re the Emile that Consuela talks about. She’s told me a little about you. You’ve made an impression on her. Something about dedication and doggedness, and listening. You’re a good listener.” Consuela could do worse than this man, he thinks.
“Look, I know you’re getting ready to go home, to go back to Canada. I wanted to meet you. I wanted to let you know that I’ve been lost. I’ve been at the bottom of sadness. And … and it’s possible to find your way back.”
“Something happened to you,” Julian whispers. It’s more a statement than a question.
“I got shot. And a girl was killed. They say it wasn’t my fault.” Emile stops. He can’t seem to catch his breath, but he pushes through. “After, I couldn’t find my way. I lost meaning, misplaced the purpose to any of this.” He raises his hands, palms up, half pointing to anything and everything. He looks around the room, at Julian, past the window, into the oak tree, across the wall, and back to Julian.
Emile pulls his reading glasses out of his shirt pocket and loops the stems around his ears, pushes the bridge up on his nose. He does not know why he put his glasses on. He’s not going to read anything. Christ, he thinks. This man lost his wife and daughters, his whole family. My problems are bits of fluff. “Nothing I say right now will be of any comfort. I know this. But I hope at the right time, you’ll remember me—that I’m all right. I made it through.”
Julian sits on the edge of his bed, looks out the window, lets silence move into the space between them.
Before the shooting Emile would have been uncomfortable with this sort of damaged lull. But not now.
Julian looks over at Emile. “Thank you,” he says.
“God, I hope I didn’t just sound like some sort of affirmative, positive-thinking, self-help asshole. I only wanted to let you know the pain doesn’t have to be permanent.”
“That’s what I heard,” Julian says, nodding. More silence interjects itself.
After a couple of minutes, Emile clears his throat. “Look, I have to go but I wanted to—”
“Thank you for not giving up on me,” Julian says. “Without your determination I might still be five hundred years ago … It’s better to know, to be now. To be
now …”
Julian drifts out of the room and into a replay of what he knows about his now. Emile fades into the background. He does not hear Emile say,
Take care, my friend
. Nor does he notice Emile as he places the brown envelope containing Rashmi’s notebook into the bag on the bed.
Consuela meets him in the dining room, where Julian sits staring at the lemon grove across the courtyard. Behind the lemon trees there are palm trees—green splashes in the sky like fireworks. He is sitting in his chair, the one in which he’s spent many days and weeks—months, in fact. Now he seems lost in this chair. “Come with me,” she says. “Let’s get you out of here.” She takes his hand.
Julian follows her down through the mezzanine, through the front garden area, and past the parking lot. He looks around like a newborn baby—as if everything he’s seeing is new and fascinating. She nods to the guards and they walk together through the main gate. Julian stands at the edge of the street. The air is silky, the light diluted and kind. Across the narrow cobbled street is a small sidewalk café. There is a woman sitting, reading a newspaper, and taking her coffee. The balconies above the café all have cast-iron balustrades, most have plants. At the end of the street there is a pale-colored building that looks like it
may be a cathedral. A man on a moped putters by. A red Volvo is parked down the block.
“I’m still in Spain,” he says, half surprised, but adds: “Of course, I’m in Spain.” He takes a big breath.
“I’d love to buy you a drink,” Consuela says. This idea, blurted out, makes her blush.
“That would give me much pleasure. But I insist that I pay. Dr. Balderas was kind enough to loan me his credit card. He expects me to use it. I don’t want to disappoint him.”
They walk across the street to the café and sit at one of the sidewalk tables. A waitress places menus on the table, announces she’ll be right back to get their order. There are four blue cornflowers in a narrow vase in the middle of the table. A white tablecloth. The music is a single cello playing inside its own echo. There is no direct sunlight.
When Julian looks at her, Consuela knows. She sees the truth of him. This man is not Columbus. Each wrinkle and stray hair speaks of a different man. There’s an efficiency in his movements that was not there three days ago. There is no omnipresent hope, no abstruse pigheadedness, and no hysterical obsession with sailing away. There is no passion for acquiring ships. And yet, he will fly away tomorrow to the continent Columbus never stepped upon but is credited with discovering. She gets it. She knows he has to grieve. He has to be alone. He needs time to gather what remains of his life into the present tense. Part of Consuela is screaming that she should cling to this man no matter what—that she ought to hold on to him for dear life. But not now. They cannot converse at length, not in the present. They met more than five hundred years ago, when Columbus was desperate and obsessed—when he would do almost anything to get his caravels and go to sea. When the Inquisition was running around poking its narrow bone of a finger at all that was different. When a powerful queen single-handedly ran the country. They met inside the Columbus story—factual or not. That’s where Consuela is and, for now, that is where she must stay.
It was Columbus she fell in love with. She has no idea who Julian is, except a missing, presumed-dead Canadian professor who had a wife and daughters. Surely Columbus was a meshing of Julian and everything he knew or thought or understood about Columbus. But Columbus is not looking back at her.
“I—” He stops, looks away, then comes back to her face.
To Consuela, he looks torn in two, like a man with one foot in the present and one hesitant foot in the past. He’s off balance, dizzy, muddled by reality. It’s an appropriate disposition for a man who spent most of the last year insisting he was Columbus—a man with one foot in the Middle Ages and one foot firmly in the Renaissance.
“I know,” she says. “It’s all right.”
He half smiles, an awkward, painful gesture, then finds almost firm ground. He shakes his head and looks down at the flowers on the table, then back up at Consuela. “No, you don’t know, Consuela. The feelings … Columbus’s feelings. They’re
my
feelings. He’s still here, in my heart.”
Consuela can’t remember the last time she cried. There’s no stopping these tears and she doesn’t care. She can barely breathe. “Mine, too,” she says.
He takes a deep breath. It seems he’s alone at the Cape Race lighthouse
on the southeastern shore of Newfoundland. Alone with the dusk. Alone with the rain. Alone with the shushing sound of the ocean. In between the waves, he thinks he can hear his own heart beating.
Julian arrived in St. John’s, Newfoundland, yesterday morning. By noon, he’d stowed his gear on board the tall ship the
Dolly Varden
, he’d met the captain, a few of his fellow crewmen, signed some papers, and then had a couple of days before the ship embarked.
He had persevered for two months in the house in Montreal. He’d tried. But he couldn’t go into his daughters’ rooms. He could not sleep in his own bed—instead, he slept on the couch in the den. He was eating every two days. He was drinking before noon every single day out of a green coffee mug. He hurt his back moving all three cases of the chardonnay, a gift from a co-worker, from the basement to the bottom half of the fridge. Julian added painkillers, for his back, to the mix. He ignored the telephone with a passion and was abruptly hostile when
friends attempted to visit. There was no movement. No healing. He felt like a ghost, an apparition who imbibed—never quite drunk but never truly sober, never truly there. Julian felt like he was starting to disappear—soundless, swallowed. There was no evidence of a life. There was only scant evidence of consumption.
One night, at around 2:30 A.M., while playing Scrabble against the computer the word
thole
came up. He ignored it, trusted the computer, but then no, he opened his dictionary:
thole
1: v. tr. to undergo or suffer (pain, grief, etc.). Oh, that’s just perfect, he thought. He wouldn’t know where to begin to use it in a sentence. But he tholed. He was tholing the weight of loss. At 6 A.M., surfing around the Net after losing eleven games to the computer, Julian stumbles across a reference to a tall ship sailing out of St. John’s. On a whim, he picks up the telephone and lets them know he’s interested. They asked questions for thirty minutes. The next morning, Julian received an e-mail telling him he’s been signed on as part of the crew.
In his last night in the Montreal house, he dreams the girls are making him pinkie swear his love—“Pinkie swear that you love us,” they giggle, holding their pinkie fingers in the air. “Do I have to?” he says, playing with them, teasing them. He turns away for a second, and when he turns back, they’re gone. They vanish. There’s nobody there to hear and he so yearns to say he pinkie swears his love. He wakes up empty and silent, in a cold sweat. He crawls into the shower without turning on the bathroom light, and cries until the water runs cold.
Twenty minutes before his taxi arrived to take him to the airport, Julian placed Rashmi’s journal on the bed, their bed, and closed the door. He had not opened the book. He does not know how it got into his bag. He opened the doors to each of the girls’ bedrooms—stood silently for a few minutes in each entranceway.
A friend from the university was coming next week to pack up these rooms and put the house up for rent.
The road to the Cape Race lighthouse goes bad fairly quickly. It crosses twenty kilometers of barren land, virtually treeless and gloriously inhospitable. It feels windswept. It is desperately beautiful. Puddles dot the road like shallow bowls filled with silver.
At the lighthouse, he parks the car, pulls a sweater out of his bag in the trunk, and walks toward the ocean. He doesn’t bother locking the car. He bypasses the lighthouse and moves toward the shoreline where huge slabs of scarred rock drop into the water—a gray, sharp-angled descent. It’s not raining now but it must have been earlier—the ground is wet, the grass is wet.
Out to sea, clouds obscure the horizon into an estimation of where it might be. The sky is a gray-white sheet, unremarkable and dull, pathetically hung out to dry. There are no sandy beaches here. There is nothing soft about this meeting of land and water. These rocks razor into the ocean and the water looks frigid.
Julian lets down his walls. He finds a patch of grass, sits down, and lets his walls dissolve. It feels okay to be unguarded here. It does not take long for Rashmi to come and sit beside him on the grass. He keeps his eyes on the ocean, thinks he can smell vanilla.
He slips back in time twenty years. He had never expected to travel all the way to Pamplona. He was in Paris, on vacation before going back to university, and found himself with an extra week. He’d had to phone his parents to get them to deposit some money on his credit card—told them it was a good opportunity to practice his Spanish. Really, he wanted to go to the bullfights in Pamplona. He wasn’t into the running-with-the-bulls macho thing—it was the bullfights that appealed to him.
He was in a bar near the Plaza de Toros, on his third bottle of beer,
when she came in. She stumbled in the doorway, and as she fell, hit her face on the edge of his table. This memory has always been slowed down. It took an eternity for her to fall. Her expression was not so much shocked as bemused and surprised that she was, in fact, falling. She managed to get one arm out but only enough to partially break her fall. Her head glances off the edge of the table. Julian can’t move. It’s as if he is in some sort of nightmare in which he can’t move his legs or his arms. Normal time comes back only after she hits the floor with a thump.
Julian helps her up. He offers his hand, and she takes it. Her eyes are sparkling, azure, and kind. They’re the kindest eyes he’s ever seen. There is a deep cut underneath her left eye. Blood drips onto her dress, the droplets disappearing into the black fabric. He gets a cloth from the bartender, folds it neatly, and puts it on her face—tells her to hold it there, put pressure on it.
He picks up her shoe and a book. He hadn’t noticed she was carrying a book.
“I’m afraid the heel of your shoe is broken,” he says. “Your book is fine, though. I’m Julian.”
“I’m embarrassed,” Rashmi says. “Embarrassed and clumsy. I’m pleased to meet you.” She pulls the cloth away. The blood seems to have slowed but she places it back over her wound anyway. Then she smiles at Julian for the first time. Even as a young woman, lines formed at the edge of her mouth when she smiled—more pronounced on the left than the right. It made her smile a bit uneven, almost unsure. It was an old-soul smile in a young woman. Julian was young enough to be in love almost instantly. The next day he found a bookstore and bought everything by Hafiz. She was reading Hafiz, so he would read Hafiz. It was his first exposure to ghazals. He found these nonlinear stepping-stone poems much to his liking. He and Rashmi, in the months and years that followed, explored Hafiz together. Hafiz was an inspiration for Rashmi’s own poetry.
Julian used to tell the girls that their mother fell into his life. He
would grin and lean back in his chair: She saw me and immediately felt woozy with love. Then she stole my heart with one smile—one beautifully awkward and crooked smile.
Rashmi would say her smile was crooked that day because she was applying pressure to the cut under her eye. She was following his instructions. She thought Julian knew what he was talking about. She put pressure. She probably should have had stitches.
Eventually Julian mentions he’s going to the bullfights tomorrow and would she like to join him. It takes him a while to meander around to this. He wants to know about her first. Where does she work? Where does she live? Does she like the bullfights? Is it all right that he’s asking so many questions? And what is her name—beyond embarrassed and clumsy?
She works in a café called Café Biscay, not far from where they are. She lives in Pamplona—she was born there. Her father took her to her first bullfight when she was six years old—to her mother’s chagrin. She is an avid fan. Of course, any question is welcome, so long as she gets to ask some, too.
“My name is Rashmi.”
“So will you be my guest at the bullfights tomorrow? The seats are perhaps not what you’re used to, but—”
“I can’t,” she says. “I have to work tomorrow.” She offers this statement of fact with one of her smiles. In Julian’s mind, there is no way that smile could lie.
“The next day, then?”
“You’ll pick me up at the café?”
Years later, the faint line of a scar that marked their meeting was still there. It was there when they honeymooned in Morocco—when Rashmi bought the candelabra at the market and the man kept trying to sell her a five-candle version of the one she wanted, but three is perfect, she’d said. Near this shop, Rashmi bought a pale-green scarf the size of a sari. Rashmi was wearing that scarf on the way to the hospital for the birth of each of the girls. It became a sort of holy garment for her.
The night Chloe was born, they were halfway to the hospital and Rashmi made Julian turn the car around, to go back home and get the green scarf. It was her touchstone. “I wore it when Jane was born. I had it all through Morocco and in Paris on our honeymoon. We have to go home and get it.”
“Do we have time?” He looks at his wife, who is breathing slowly through her mouth.
“Of course we have time,” she says in a strained and borrowed voice that Julian barely recognizes.
He remembers watching her contemplate a move, leaning forward over a chessboard. They were in a café in Montreal, a block off the Main. It was fall and she was wearing the green scarf. The girls were at a movie. Rashmi would tilt her head as she extrapolated the possible ramifications of a particular move. Sometimes when she tilted her head, the scar under her eye became a fine silver line.
The night before the train station in Madrid, the girls are finally asleep and he is opening a bottle of wine as Rashmi moves around their room in bra and panties—laying out clothes for the next day. He puts the cork and the corkscrew on the side table, and leans back against the pillows and the headboard. For Julian, this is one of the most profound benefits of being married. He gets to watch the woman he loves move around the room in her bra and panties. She could be doing anything. Washing her face. Putting on her makeup. Finding a book. Ironing. It was the familiarity of it that made it so lovely for Julian. It was one common moment in a long line of similar cherished moments. It was both comfortable and erotic. Perhaps it was erotic because it was so nonchalant—there was no pretense. It was what it was. Julian always felt lucky to be able to stop what he was doing and watch. They drank the wine, a very nice bordeaux, propped up in bed, watching an old movie on TV. They’d both seen
Casablanca
more than once, but the movie was still able to capture them. He remembers moving tight to her in bed, and at
some point before sleep, whispering his finger along the scar under her eye.